Link – Page 86 – Wisdom And Wonder

How to Design Worlds

Via PLT:

As some of you know, we have been working on a new way of writing interactive applications, such as games, using just pure functional programming. We call this the World style, and it is embodied in the world.ss Teachpack included in the DrScheme distribution.
In response to demand, we are creating extended materials on this style of programming:
http://world.cs.brown.edu/

Addendum: 26 October 2008
Some folks might find HTDW a little more interesting in that it is purely functional programming.

Teaching Programming Languages in a Post-Linnaean Age

Programming language “paradigms” are a moribund and tedious legacy of a bygone age. Modern language designers pay them no respect, so why do our courses slavishly adhere to them? This paper argues that we should abandon this method of teaching languages, offers an alternative, reconciles an important split in programming language education, and describes a textbook that explores these matters.

This is a nice paper explaining the author’s rationale for his approach.
(via PLT)

Face Swapping: Automatically Replacing Faces in Photographs

Here is a system that replaces faces in photographs. It actually has a few useful applications.
(I forgot where I got this link)

Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness

Here is an article about training a system about what makes a person look more pretty such that given a picture, the system can make the person in it “prettier”.
(I forgot where I saw this)

Proceedings of the 2008 LLVM Developers' Meeting

Here is a post at LtU about the proceedings of the 2008 LLVM Developers’ Meeting

Shelves in Subversion

This blog post looks like it might be a good introduction to the idea of “Code Shelves” and how one might use them in Subversion.

Buddhabrot

Buddhabrot is an alternate rendering of the Mandelbrot set. Have a look here.

A System to Understand Incorrect Programs

An ancient paper (July 1978: 30 years ago) from the long gone Lisp Bulletin by Harald Wertz.
The system describes attempts to improve incompletely specified Lisp programs, without however resorting to more information, in the form of specifications, test cases or the like.

Found here.

Managing Gigabytes

Managing Gigabytes helps you to meet this challenge by showing how to capitalize on new methods of compressing and accessing data, enabling you to store information more efficiently and locate specific items more quickly and cost-effectively than ever before. It uniquely covers fully-tested techniques for both text and image compression and shows how to construct a tailor-made electronic index for accessing text, scanned documents, and images. This book largely avoids extensive theoretical and mathematical discussions, making it accessible to curious laypersons who seek a clear, uncomplicated understanding of this new technology. Real, large-scale problems are illustrated, and the technical material is sprinkled with anecdotes and background information.

(via PLT)

Netflix Prize

The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) prizes.

Anyone looking for programming fodder might have fun applying their current language of study to Netflix’s problem and massive data set!
(via PLT)