The Economist Podcast

It's quite interesting to hear the voices of the authors of The Economist's articles and fortunately their podcast seems to be updated now more regularly.

C G Jung Documentary

I found a wonderful documentary exploring C G Jung's work on the meaning of dreams: 1, 2, 3.

Enjoy!

Dario Nardi on Socialbot

When I met Dario Nardi earlier this year he told me he prepared a video for Frontiers of Interaction II on socialbot as he couldn't be there in person.

Now some kind soul has uploaded his talk on youtube (Part 1, Part 2).

AFAIU socialbot is a little like Eliza but not aiming at being a therapist, rather than that it imitates cognitive behavior by showing aspects of memory, inference and animated gestures; and it uses speech recognition as well. When used in a seminar with students interaction sessions get logged and are used as a harness to further development of socialbot's behavior.

JavaScript Memoization and Dependencies

I've extended Oliver Steele's appealing implementation of memoization in JavaScript to use a different dependency mechanism which also works with complex variables such as arrays or hashes by introducing a dependencies callback that returns a string or other simple datatype.

Function.prototype.memoize = function(options) {
var fn = this
var cache = []
return function() {
var dependencyFlags = options.dependencies.apply(this, arguments)
var cacheHit = cache && cache[0] == dependencyFlags
if (cacheHit) {
return cache[1]
}
cache = [dependencyFlags, fn.apply(this, arguments)]
return cache[1]
}
}

Here is some code that shows how memoize() can be used to specify dependencies both on function arguments and global variables.

var sortOrder = 0;
getSortedModel = function(user) {
// ... some lenghty calculation
alert("Performing Lengthy Calculation for " + user)
return [1, 2, 3, 4]
}.memoize({ dependencies: function(user) { return user + ":" + sortOrder }})

Take a look here if you're not familiar with the concept of Memoization.

(Thanks to Stephan for mentioning Oliver's post.)

A Dedication to "King Lear"

O bridal world of sunshine dreams
colour me brutish
wicked eyes
violently in lust
trifle life
God's horror hath a place
in the bluntness of
a serpent-like man

Cordelia,
our mildness
once, strong
is thy prison
of eyeless love