Via Ivan Pierre
Originally shared by Manfred Berndtgen
My first attempt at deep dreaming using Google Research’s inceptionism tool. Default image, default parameters. Sequence of 100 jpegs. #deepdream
Month: July 2015
Title
Originally shared by Mike Crews
The failure mode of capitalism is everyone with their knives out and pointed at one other.
The failure mode of capitalism is everyone with their knives out and pointed at one other.
Originally shared by Andreas Schou
Everywhere else in the world, money laundering works like this: you have an illegal source of money. You need to make it into legal money. You take your illegal money and disguise it as the profits of a legal enterprise.
In Russia, the need for off-the-books money is so intense that companies need to create false losses in order to create slush funds with which to pay illegal costs.
Rapping to the beat in 1981.
The Eurozone would work a lot better without Germany destabilising it.
The Eurozone would work a lot better without Germany destabilising it. The German economy would work a lot better without the Euro destabilising it.
Via Andres Soolo
Via Andres Soolo
Originally shared by Jordan Peacock
Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister, told a group of investors in London that a five-man team under his control had been working for months on a contingency plan to create euro liquidity if the European Central Bank cut off emergency funding to the Greek financial system, as it in fact did after talks broke down and Syriza called a referendum.
The transcripts were leaked to the Greek newspaper Kathimerini. The telephone call took place a week after he stepped down as finance minister.
“The prime minister, before we won the election in January, had given me the green light to come up with a Plan B. And I assembled a very able team, a small team as it had to be because that had to be kept completely under wraps for obvious reasons,” he said.
Mr Varoufakis recruited a technology specialist from Columbia University to help handle the logistics. Faced with a wall of obstacles, the expert broke into the software systems of the tax office – then under the control of the EU-IMF ‘Troika’ – in order to obtain the reserve accounts and file numbers of every taxpayer. “We decided to hack into my ministry’s own software programme,” he said.
[…]
Mr Varoufakis claimed the cloak and dagger methods were necessary since the Troika had taken charge of the public revenue office within the finance ministry. “It’s like the Inland Revenue in the UK being controlled by Brussels. I am sure as you are hearing these words your hair is standing on end,” he said in the leaked transcripts.
Mr Varoufakis said any request for permission would have tipped off the Troika immediately that he was planning a counter-attack. He was ready to activate the mechanism the moment he received a “green light” from the prime minister, but the permission never came.
“I always told Tsipras that it will not be plain sailing but this is the price you have to pay for liberty,” he told the Telegraph.
“But when the time came he realised that it was just too difficult. I don’t know when he reached that decision. I only learned explicitly on the night of the referendum, and that is why I offered to resign,” he said. Mr Varoufakis wanted to seize on the momentum of a landslide victory in the vote but was overruled.
[…]
“[German finance minister Wolfgang] Schauble believes that the eurozone is not sustainable as it is. He believes there has to be some fiscal transfers, some degree of political union. He believes that for that political union to work without federation, without the legitimacy that a properly elected federal parliament can render, can bestow upon an executive, it will have to be done in a very disciplinary way.
[…]
“And he said explicitly to me that a Grexit is going to equip him with sufficient terrorising power in order to impose upon the French that which Paris has been resisting: a degree of transfer of budget-making powers from Paris to Brussels.”
Mr Varoufakis told the Telegraph that Mr Schauble had made up his mind that Greece must be ejected from the euro, and is merely biding his time, knowing that the latest bail-out plan is doomed to failure.
They Live!
They Live!
On the consequences of making books freely available online
Originally shared by Michael Nielsen
On the consequences of making books freely available online
Earlier today I posted the final beta chapter of my book about neural networks at http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com.
The book is online and freely available.
One pleasing consequence of this availability is that many people get to see the book – the book will pass 400,000 readers later today or tomorrow, according to Google Analytics. Of course, that number is not a true representation of impact, since many of those people no doubt glanced briefly at the book, and decided to move on to other things.
But there is a closely related number that gives me particular pleasure: according to Google Analytics the book has been downloaded in 208 countries. That list includes places such as Djibouti, Comoros, Burkina Faso, and many others.
As in other countries, no doubt some of the readers in those countries only looked briefly at the book. But I’m truly delighted that putting the book freely online gives people all over the world the opportunity to look at the book, and decide if it might be useful to them.
If I’d gone the conventional publishing route, my book would just now be entering production, and would have been seen by perhaps a few dozen people, probably in 2 or 3 countries. Online availability really makes a big difference!
Emlyn O’Regan
Emlyn O’Regan
How Google Finally Got Design
Originally shared by Glenn Reilly
Never Stop Posting 