Monday, November 13, 2017

There are two types of tiny homes:  a tiny house on wheels, legally considered a recreational vehicle (RV), and a tiny house on a foundation, legally considered an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU.  If you’re building a tiny house on wheels, you’ll need to register it as an RV with your state; in most states, a self-built RV will be inspected before it gets a license plate.  Building an accessory dwelling unit, however, is more complicated.  If you’ve registered your tiny house on wheels as an RV and plan to travel with it, you aren’t dealing with zoning or building code concerns—you just need to find a place to park it.  You could stay in a friend’s backyard or park on their driveway (with permission, of course), or pay to stay at a camping or RV site.  The latter will dictate how long you’re allowed to stay there.  Most states prohibit RVs as full-time residences in zones other than RV parks—but the rule is really only enforced if your tiny house on wheels is reported or complained about.  Emily Nonko  Read much more at https://www.curbed.com/2016/9/22/13002832/tiny-house-zoning-laws-regulations  See also https://lelandscabins.com/leland-times-story/5-reasons-permanent-tiny-house-vs-tiny-house-wheels/ and https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/050515/financial-considerations-buying-tiny-house.asp

Artificial intelligence and the library of the future, revisited by Catherine Nicole Coleman   There are two breakthrough technologies catching fire on campus these days.  One of them, CRISPR-Cas9, is changing our relationship to the physical world through gene editing.  The other, Artificial Intelligence (AI), is changing how we generate, process and analyze information.  AI already touches many of our daily computing activities, from searching the web to managing spam in email applications.  It underlies the speech recognition that makes Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and the Google Assistant able to process and respond—with some success—to our queries.  It is the computer vision that helps self-driving cars and food delivery robots navigate our streets and sidewalks.  The fundamental activity driving these varied applications of AI is search within a large space of possibilities.  It is not deep cognition but perceptual recognition.  The power lies in the fact that machines can recognize patterns efficiently and routinely, at a scale and speed that humans cannot approach.  Though the underlying AI technologies that make all these applications possible have existed since the 1970s and 80s, AI has really taken off in the last decade, applied to search within images, sound, and text.   Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Linguistics is a system for understanding language that has opened entirely new avenues of research across the university, making it possible to mine large corpora, identify topics, recognize named entities (people, places, and things), and perform sentiment analysis.  Computer Vision is an interdisciplinary branch of AI that incorporates knowledge from several domains including physics, signal processing, and neurobiology to understand images and video.  Machine learning  dramatically accelerates statistical pattern recognition by learning from examples.  Research to predict crop yield from remote sensing data, diagnose heart arrhythmias, and read 2,000-year-old papyri carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius use machine learning in combination with other AI technologies.  The term machine learning suggests that the machine is teaching itself.  But the most common learning techniques are supervised, requiring a tremendous amount of human work and the careful curation of training data.  The combination of massive amounts of data, accelerated computing power, and a deeper understanding of how we learn have created the conditions for successful applications of multi-layered machine learning known as deep learning that uses Artificial Neural Network architectures. Inspired by the way neurons function within the brain, neural networks can learn features over time and begin to characterize them.  This approach has made unsupervised learning possible.  A great deal of data is needed, but it need not be human-cultivated training sets.  At Stanford Libraries we are considering the profound change AI can bring as power tools for scholarship, making our vast library collections discoverable, searchable, and analyzable in new ways.  Read more and see graphics at http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/digital-library-blog/2017/11/artificial-intelligence-and-library-future-revisited

Twitter to introduce expanded 280-character tweets for all its users by Mattha Busby  November 7, 2017   Twitter’s trial of a 280-character tweet limit is to be universally expanded, the social media network has announced.  The move comes after a limited experiment which began in September, 2017 to see if a larger character count reduced “cramming” and led to users better expressing themselves.  Twitter has limited its users to 140 characters per tweet since its launch in 2006.  It had been feared that licence for an expanded character limit would negatively effect the brevity of the social media site experience.  The expanded limit will be rolled out to users in all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean--where cramming is not an issue because those scripts can convey more information in a single character.  The expanded character limit is part of plans to make the social media platform more accessible and appealing.  Twitter is looking to increase revenue and entice new users amid the ongoing battles with Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.  Historically, 9% of tweets in English hit the 140-character limit but only 1% of tweets with the extended character count hit the limit during the trial, according to data published by Twitter.  “During the first few days of the test, many people tweeted the full 280 limit because it was new and novel, but soon after behaviour normalised.”  Some users, however, are not satisfied and would much rather see other changes to the social media site.  These include a crackdown on hate crime and bots, and the introduction of a chronological timeline and edit function.  Twitter has about 330 million monthly active users around the world.   https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/twitter-to-roll-out-280-character-tweets-to-everyone


The Supreme Court’s new electronic filing system will begin operation on November 13, 2017.   A quick link on the Court’s website homepage will provide access to the new system, developed in-house to provide prompt and easy access to case documents.  Once the system is in place, virtually all new filings will be accessible without cost to the public and legal community.  Initially the official filing of documents will continue to be on paper in all cases, but parties who are represented by counsel will also be required to submit electronic versions of documents through the electronic filing system.  The filings will then be posted to the Court’s docket and made available to the public through the Court’s website.  Filings from parties appearing pro se will not be submitted through the electronic filing system, but will be scanned by Court personnel and made available for public access on the electronic docket.  Attorneys who expect to file documents at the Court will register in advance to obtain access to the electronic filing system.  Registration will open 4-8 weeks before the system begins operation.   https://www.supremecourt.gov/electronicfiling/

Remembrance Day (sometimes known informally as Poppy Day) is a memorial day observed in Commonwealth of Nations member states since the end of the First World War to remember the members of their armed forces who have died in the line of duty.  Following a tradition inaugurated by King George V in 1919, the day is also marked by war remembrances in many non-Commonwealth countries.  Remembrance Day is observed on 11 November in most countries to recall the end of hostilities of World War I on that date in 1918.  Hostilities formally ended "at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month", in accordance with the armistice signed by representatives of Germany and the Entente between 5:12 and 5:20 that morning.  ("At the 11th hour" refers to the passing of the 11th hour, or 11:00 am.)  The First World War officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919.  The memorial evolved out of Armistice Day, which continues to be marked on the same date.  The initial Armistice Day was observed at Buckingham Palace, commencing with King George V hosting a "Banquet in Honour of the President of the French Republic"  during the evening hours of 10 November 1919.  The first official Armistice Day was subsequently held on the grounds of Buckingham Palace the following morning.  The red remembrance poppy has become a familiar emblem of Remembrance Day due to the poem "In Flanders Fields" written by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae.  After reading the poem, Moina Michael, a professor at the University of Georgia, wrote the poem, "We Shall Keep the Faith," and swore to wear a red poppy on the anniversary.  The custom spread to Europe and the countries of the British Empire and Commonwealth within three years.  Madame Anne E. Guerin tirelessly promoted the practice in Europe and the British Empire.  In the UK Major George Howson fostered the cause with the support of General Haig.  Poppies were worn for the first time at the 1921 anniversary ceremony.  At first real poppies were worn.  These poppies bloomed across some of the worst battlefields of Flanders in World War I; their brilliant red colour became a symbol for the blood spilled in the war.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day

Armistice Day is also called Remembrance Day and they both refer to November 11.   November 11 is also marked around the world.  After the Second World War, many countries changed the name of the day from Armistice Day to Remembrance Day, while the US chose to call it Veterans Day and made the day a federal holiday.  Mark Molloy  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/what-is-armistice-day-why-do-we-wear-poppies-and-when-is-remembr/

The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu had written around 300 works before he started on his first symphony in 1942.  At heart, Martinu was a cosmopolitan European composer, but with a deep link to the specifically Czech musical legacy of Smetana, Dvorak, and Janacek.  Martinu was experiencing a cultural mid-life crisis:  both his native land of Czechslovakia and his adopted home of Paris had been overrun by the Nazis.  Martinu was living as an exile in America when his first symphony had its premiere by the Boston Symphony on November 13, 1942.  Composers Datebook


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1798  November 13, 2017  On this date in 1927, the Holland Tunnel opened to traffic as the first Hudson River vehicle tunnel linking New Jersey to New York City.  On this date in 1940Walt Disney's animated musical film Fantasia was first released, on the first night of a roadshow at New York's Broadway Theatrehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_13

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