I got a Kobo Glo eBook reader some time ago. I find it quite awesome: With numerous public libraries in Paris and this device (together with sources of free books like FeedBooks, Baen Free Library or less authoritative sources), it is hard to think I will ever buy another physical book again.

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The photo above was taken on New Year’s eve inside the Madeleine Church. I had walked by the building a few times but I had never realized it was a church (since it looks like a Greek temple) so I entered to check it out. Inside, there was this modern-style nativity scene depicting Mary and Joseph watching a picture of baby Jesus on a flat screen TV. The faces of the white mannequins (an army of angels apparently) also change from time to time. Very strange and slightly creepy… It was designed by Gaëtan Duthu, a young French designer.

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I was in Istanbul, Turkey for a few days earlier this week. I had great weather and the city looked gorgeous! Here are some photos I took. Above, Hagia Sophia at twilight.

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Last weekend, I went on a trip to the south of France: Avignon, known as the “City of Popes”, on Saturday and Marseille, France’s 2nd largest city, on Sunday.

Above, the Papal Palace in Avignon.

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Dave Brubeck died yesterday. Here are a few songs in his memory:

The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Koto Song (from “Jazz Impressions of Japan”)

Dave Brubeck & Paul Desmond - These foolish things (from “1975: The duets”)

The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Take Five (from “Concord on a Summer Night”)

Definitely seizure inducing but pretty awesome. I can’t stop watching…

More of those at the Reanimator Lab.

 

The SPA Unified Network (Spaun) model demonstrates how a wide variety of cognitive and non-cognitive tasks can be integrated in a single large-scale, spiking neuron model. Spaun switches tasks and provides all responses without any manual change in parameters from a programmer. Essentially, it is a fixed model that integrates perception, cognition, and action across several different tasks.

Impressive work! The singularity must be near…  although it is not quite as fast as the brain yet: According to the website of the project, it takes about 2.5h of computer time for one second of simulation. Nengo, the software used to implement the brain model, is open source and is available here.

HAZUS-MASAS is not a magic incantation used by GIS wizards, just the name of an interesting project I was involved with (on the data engineering side of things) when I worked at Galdos Systems, back in Vancouver. I just saw CEO Ron Lake has written an article about it on the company’s blog. In short, the goal of the project was to enable the distribution of HAZUS files (created with a FEMA-provided ArcGIS plugin for the estimation of potential losses from natural disasters, like earthquakes or floods) through the Canadian Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System (MASAS), used by emergency managers. Some of the UI was done with the ArcGIS Viewer for Flex (screenshot above): In the backend, it connected with INdicio (a CSW-ebRIM implementation), which provided metadata about indicators extracted from HAZUS files, as well as the contents of the indicators themselves, stored as KML documents.