In this course, author Adam Crespi takes you through the full production pipeline for lighting, rendering, and compositing the exterior of a house in 3ds Max. First he'll show you how to create mental ray materials like wood, metal, and glass; customize the Daylight system for realistic daytime lighting; and adjust the lighting for dusk and nighttime shots with photometric lights. Then he'll render the scenes, optimizing and styling the bounced light with Global Illumination and Final Gather. Finally, Adam takes the image into post, adding the final polish required at the end of the pipeline with Nuke and After Effects.

设定期限还剩下一小时半时，希腊ZF的一项新财政紧缩及改革建议方案送达了欧元区主席戴塞尔布洛姆（Jeroen Dijsselbloem）。他的一名发言人在推特上作了相关通报。这样，希腊债务危机很快找到解决办法的希望暂时得以继续。如果改革方案令人满意，国际出资方就有可能确保向希腊提供新的拯救计划，并给予过渡性融资。仅本月内，雅典就需向债权人偿还42亿欧元，若无新鲜资金，该国将极有可能沦入国家财政崩溃，并退出欧元区。

新浪财经讯 北京时间7月10日下午消息 据俄罗斯卫星网报道，美国财政部亚洲事务副助理部长罗伯特-多纳(Robert Dohner)当地时间周四(7月9日)否认了美国投资者做空中国股市的指控。

中国成肥胖超级大国 火锅是罪魁祸首

人大常委呼吁取消嫖宿幼女罪司法实践中已基本不再使用 刑法征意见未撤嫖宿幼女罪 法制晚报讯(记者李洪鹏温如军)日前，全国人大常委会公布了刑法修正案(九)(草案)(二次审议稿)，向社会征求意见。截至8月5日，可登录全国人大官网查看二审稿全文并在线提交意见。

Driver Reviver is an industry leading PC driver update utility that will help you update your computer drivers in a few easy clicks! Driver Reviver uses one of the largest and most comprehensive Driver Database available. It ensures that it will always find the most recent drivers for your PC and other hardware devices. This program will scan your PC to identify out of date and obsolete drivers. Driver Reviver can quickly and easily update the out-of-date drivers using original manufacturer drivers to restore optimum performance to your PC and its hardware. It will maximize the functionality and life of your PC and its devices. Driver Reviver is unbelievably easy and quick to use and includes safety features like automatic backups, restore wizard, exclusions, scheduler and more to keep your computer in good shape.

Oreilly - Python Epiphanies : Exploring Fundamental Concepts
English | Duration: 2h 30m | .FLV | h264, yuv420p, 1920x1080, 29.97 fps(r) | aac, 44100 Hz, stereo | 2.11 GB

Oreilly - Python Epiphanies : Exploring Fundamental Concepts
English | Duration: 2h 30m | .FLV | h264, yuv420p, 1920x1080, 29.97 fps(r) | aac, 44100 Hz, stereo | 2.11 GB

FlipCreator is a professional e-publishing software that allows you to create your own interactive e-publications from PDF and image files with a few mouse clicks. With our easy to use interface, you can make a digital publication in a few mouse clicks Even a new user, you can use FlipCreator within a couple of minutes without any special learning. FlipCreator also supports right click operation, this feature allows you to create a digital publication with only TWO clicks. Links can be inserted into any pages.

本周是值得载入中国资本市场史册的一周。在经历了连续三个交易日前所未有的暴跌、逾千只股票主动停牌之后，周四，市场终于出现强势逆转，个股普涨，千余只股票涨停，而这种态势也延续至周五早市。救市成功的欢呼声不绝于耳。如果仅凭一两个反弹就可以断定救市成功，恐怕这也将是全球资本市场最高效的一次救市了。但是事实上，救市没那么简单。

Word clouds have become a bit cliché, but I still think that they have a place in giving a high level overview of the content of a corpus. Here are the steps I took in putting together the word cloud for the International Conference on Machine Learning (2015).

We're looking for researchers with a passion for open source and data sharing, already working to shift research practice to be more collaborative, iterative and open. Fellows will spend 10 months starting September 2015 as community catalysts at their institutions, mentoring the next generation of open data practitioners and researchers and building lasting change in the global open science community.

Throughout their fellowship year, chosen fellows will receive training and support from Mozilla to hone their skills around open source and data sharing. They will also craft code, curriculum and other learning resources that help their local communities learn open data practices, and teach forward to their peers.

　一天在学校。

　老师说：“同学们今天的作文题目是《致老师》。”

　话音刚落，一位学生站起来说到：“老师你去医院吧，我们治不了你。”

女儿今年7岁，刚上完一年级，放暑假接她回家的路上。我问她：“其他的小朋友都领到奖状了，怎么你没有呢？”

　女儿老神气的说，那奖状都是老师哄小孩子的，我不稀罕！

窗外，雨淅淅沥沥的下。

　她望着我：见家长吧。

　我不禁心头一震，这么久了，她第一次跟我讲这样的话。

　我眼泛泪花，有点硬咽，试探问她：是不是有点早？

　她情绪有点激动：还敢讨价还价！你已经几天没有交作业了！叫家长！

(This article was first published on rud.is » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

It’s not on CRAN yet, but there’s a devtools-installable R package for getting data from theOMDB API.

It covers all of the public API endpoints:

• find_by_id: Retrieve OMDB info by IMDB ID search
• find_by_title: Retrieve OMDB info by title search
• get_actors: Get actors from an omdb object as a vector
• get_countries: Get countries from an omdb object as a vector
• get_directors: Get directors from an omdb object as a vector
• get_genres: Get genres from an omdb object as a vector
• get_writers: Get writers from an omdb object as a vector
• print.omdb: Print an omdb result
• search_by_title: Lightweight omdb title search
  

Here’s a bit of it in action:

devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/omdbapi")library(dplyr)library(pbapply) search_by_title("Captain America") # Source: local data frame [10 x 4]# # Title Year imdbID Type# 1 Captain America: The First Avenger 2011 tt0458339 movie# 2 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 2014 tt1843866 movie# 3 Captain America 1990 tt0103923 movie# 4 Captain America 1979 tt0078937 movie# 5 Iron Man and Captain America: Heroes United 2014 tt3911200 movie# 6 Captain America II: Death Too Soon 1979 tt0078938 movie# 7 Captain America 1944 tt0036697 movie# 8 Captain America 1966– tt0206474 series# 9 Captain America: Super Soldier 2011 tt1740721 game# 10 Comic Book Origins: Captain America - Winter Soldier 2014 tt3618126 movie search_by_title("Captain America", year_of_release=2013) # Source: local data frame [1 x 4]# # Title Year imdbID Type# 1 A Look Back at 'Captain America' 2013 tt3307378 movie games <- search_by_title("Captain America", type="game") glimpse(games) # Observations: 2# Variables:# $ Title (chr) "Captain America: Super Soldier", "Captain America and the A...# $ Year (chr) "2011", "1991"# $ imdbID (chr) "tt1740721", "tt0421939"# $ Type (chr) "game", "game" find_by_title(games$Title[1]) # Title: Captain America: Super Soldier# Year: 2011# Rated: N/A# Released: 2011-07-19# Runtime: N/A# Genre: Action# Director: Michael McCormick, Robert Taylor# Writer: Christos N. Gage# Actors: Hayley Atwell, Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Neal McDonough# Plot: You play the Sentinel of Liberty as you raid the Red Skull's scientist# minion, Armin Zola's, lair.# Language: English# Country: USA# Awards: N/A# Poster: http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/# MV5BMTUwMzQ0NjE5N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODI3MzQxMTE@._V1_SX300.jpg# Metascore: N/A# imdbRating: 7.2# imdbVotes: 271# imdbID: tt1740721# Type: game find_by_title("Game of Thrones", type="series", season=1, episode=1) # Title: Winter Is Coming# Year: 2011# Rated: TV-MA# Released: 2011-04-17# Runtime: 62 min# Genre: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy# Director: Timothy Van Patten# Writer: David Benioff (created by), D.B. Weiss (created by), George R.R.# Martin ("A Song of Ice and Fire" by), David Benioff, D.B.# Weiss# Actors: Sean Bean, Mark Addy, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Michelle Fairley# Plot: Jon Arryn, the Hand of the King, is dead. King Robert Baratheon plans# to ask his oldest friend, Eddard Stark, to take Jon's# place. Across the sea, Viserys Targaryen plans to wed his# sister to a nomadic warlord in exchange for an army.# Language: English# Country: USA# Awards: N/A# Poster: http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/# MV5BMTk5MDU3OTkzMF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwOTc0ODg5NA@@._V1_SX300.jpg# Metascore: N/A# imdbRating: 8.5# imdbVotes: 12584# imdbID: tt1480055# Type: episode get_genres(find_by_title("Star Trek: Deep Space Nine", season=5, episode=7)) # [1] "Action" "Adventure" "Drama" get_writers(find_by_title("Star Trek: Deep Space Nine", season=4, episode=6)) # [1] "Gene Roddenberry (based upon "Star Trek" created by)"# [2] "Rick Berman (created by)" # [3] "Michael Piller (created by)" # [4] "David Mack" # [5] "John J. Ordover" get_directors(find_by_id("tt1371111")) # [1] "Tom Tykwer" "Andy Wachowski" "Lana Wachowski" get_countries(find_by_title("The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi")) # [1] "Japan" ichi <- search_by_title("Zatoichi")bind_rows(lapply(ichi$imdbID, function(x) {  find_by_id(x, include_tomatoes = TRUE)})) -> zato par(mfrow=c(3,1)) boxplot(zato$tomatoUserMeter, horizontal=TRUE, main="Tomato User Meter", ylim=c(0, 100))boxplot(zato$imdbRating, horizontal=TRUE, main="IMDB Rating", ylim=c(0, 10))boxplot(zato$tomatoUserRating, horizontal=TRUE, main="Tomato User Rating", ylim=c(0, 5))

You can find out more at it’s github repo

Poynter did a nice interactive piece on world population by income (i.e. “How Many Live on How Much, and Where”). I’m always on the lookout for optimized shapefiles and clean data (I’m teaching a data science certificate program starting this Fall) and the speed of the site load and the easy availability of the data set made this one a “must acquire”. Rather than just repeat Poynter’s D3-goodness, here’s a way to look at the income data in series of small multiple choropleths—using R & ggplot2—that involves:

• downloading data & shapefiles from a web site
• using dplyr & tidyr for data munging
• applying custom fill color scale mapping in ggplot
• ordering plots with a custom facet order (using factors)
• tweaking the theme and aesthetics for a nicely finished result
  

By using D3, Poynter inherently made the data available. Pop open the “Developer Tools” in any browser, reload the page and look at the “Network” tab and you’ll see a list of files (you can sometimes see things in the source code, but this technique is often faster). The income data is a well-formed CSV file http://www.pewglobal.org/wp-content/themes/pew-global/interactive-global-class.csv and their highly optimized world map was also easy to discern http://www.pewglobal.org/wp-content/lib/js/world-geo.json. We’ll start by grabbing the map and using the same map projection that Poynter did (Robinson). Don’t be put off by all the library calls since one of the best parts of R is the ever-increasing repository of great packages to help you get things done.

library(httr)     # getting datalibrary(rgdal)    # working with shapefilelibrary(dplyr)    # awesome data manipulationlibrary(readr)    # faster reading of CSV datalibrary(stringi)  # string manipulationlibrary(stringr)  # string manipulationlibrary(tidyr)    # reshaping datalibrary(grid)     # for 'unit'library(scales)   # for 'percent'library(ggplot2)  # plottinglibrary(ggthemes) # theme_map # this ensures you only download the shapefile once and hides# errors and warnings. remove `try` and `invisible` to see messagestry(invisible(GET("http://www.pewglobal.org/wp-content/lib/js/world-geo.json",                  write_disk("world-geo.json"))), silent=TRUE) # use ogrListLayers("world-geo.json") to see file type & # layer info to use in the call to readOGR world <- readOGR("world-geo.json", "OGRGeoJSON")world_wt <- spTransform(world, CRS("+proj=robin"))world_map <- fortify(world_wt)

I would have liked to do fortify(world_wt, region="name") (since that makes working with filling in countries by name much easier in the choropleth part of the code) but that generated TopologyException errors (I’ve seen this happen quite a bit with simplified/optimized shapefiles and some non-D3 geo-packages). One can sometimes fix those with a strategic rgeos::gBuffer call, but that didn’t work well in this case. We can still use country names with a slight rejiggering of the fortified data frame using dplyr:

world_map %>%  left_join(data_frame(id=rownames(world@data), name=world@data$name)) %>%  select(-id) %>%  rename(id=name) -> world_map

Now it’s time to get the data. The CSV file has annoying spaces in it that causes R to interpret all the columns as strings, so we can use dplyr again to get them into the format we want them in. Note that I’m also making the percentages decimals so we can usepercent later on to easily format them.

# a good exercise would be to repeat the download code above # rather and make repeated calls to an external resourceread_csv("http://www.pewglobal.org/wp-content/themes/pew-global/interactive-global-class.csv") %>%  mutate_each(funs(str_trim)) %>%  filter(id != "None") %>%  mutate_each(funs(as.numeric(.)/100), -name, -id) -> dat

For this post, we’ll only be working with the actual share percentages, so let’s:

• ignore the “change” columns
• convert the data frame from wide to long
• extract out the income levels (e.g. “Poor”, “Low Income”…)
• set a factor order for them so our plots will be in the correct sequence
  

dat %>%  gather(share, value, starts_with("Share"), -name, -id) %>%  select(-starts_with("Change")) %>%  mutate(label=factor(stri_trans_totitle(str_match(share, "Share ([[:alpha:]- ]+),")[,2]),                      c("Poor", "Low Income", "Middle Income", "Upper-Middle Income", "High Income"),                      ordered=TRUE)) -> share_dat

In comparative effectiveness studies of multicomponent, sequential interventions like blood product transfusion (plasma, platelets, red blood cells) for trauma and critical care patients, the timing and dynamics of treatment relative to the fragility of a patient’s condition is often overlooked and underappreciated. While many hospitals have established massive transfusion protocols to ensure that physiologically optimal combinations of blood products are rapidly available, the period of time required to achieve a specified massive transfusion standard (e.g. a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio of plasma or platelets:red blood cells) has been ignored. To account for the time-varying characteristics of transfusions, we use semiparametric rate models for multivariate recurrent events to estimate blood product ratios. We use latent variables to account for multiple sources of informative censoring (early surgical or endovascular hemorrhage control procedures or death). The major advantage is that the distributions of latent variables and the dependence structure between the multivariate recurrent events and informative censoring need not be specified. Thus, our approach is robust to complex model assumptions. We establish asymptotic properties and evaluate finite sample performance through simulations, and apply the method to data from the PRospective Observational Multicenter Major Trauma Transfusion study.

AirPlay 和 Google Cast 类的功能越来越受欢迎，难怪 Amazon 也要弄一个 Fling 来抗衡呢。这个 Fling 功能跟上述两项对手的服务一样，都是让用户把手机上的多媒体转播到电视上，而 Fling 则支持把 Android 和 iOS 装置上的视频、音讯和静态图片类的档案，转播到 Fire TV 或是 Fire TV Stick 上。目前 Amazon 已把其 SDK 发放，Karaoke Party 和 Rivet Radio 就是 Amazon App Store ...

去年在 Photokina 大展上那令人惊讶的松下最强随身机 LX100，一直都是小编跃跃欲试的相机产品（可惜一直拖到现在才试到啊！）它拥有旗舰级的 4K 录影实力，搭载具备良好对焦实力与拍摄画质的 MFT 大感光元件、超越大多可换镜式相机规格的等效 24-75mm f/1.7-2.8 大光圈镜头等，所以尽管机身比起前代的 LX7 尺寸要大上一点，光圈与焦段却小了一点，但其实带来了更棒的整体性能表现。加上 LX100 在机身上还新增了独立的 EV 与快门转盘；光圈与功能（对焦）环则是变成了独立的...

有很多人说 2015 年上映的《侏罗纪世界》不及以往的《侏罗纪公园》系列作品，只因前者用上大量的电脑特效去生成电影画面，而《星球大战 VII：原力觉醒》的制作团队则很明白影迷的心态，而采用了一个「变中无变」，变的当然是电影的内容，不过不变的则是制作时依然采用大量真实场景和真实效果。

掐指一算，距离小米发布初代红米 Note，已经过去了有快一年半的时间。那作为贡献销量的主力军之一，也差不多是时候更新第二代产品了。果然，今天早些时候两款造型相同，型号分别为「2015051」和「2015052」的小米新机便出现在了工信部网站上。以外观来说，它们基本上沿袭了红米系列的设计语言（比如说正面三颗红色按键），比较明显的改变，就是微微凸起的主相机变成了圆形，然后喇叭条也被放到了背盖下方中间的位置。 至于规格部分，两款设备均搭载八核心 2GHz 处理器，同时有 5.5 吋 1080p 屏幕..

Adaptive clinical trial design methods have garnered growing attention in the recent years, in large part due to their greater flexibility over their traditional counterparts. One such design is the so-called covariate-adjusted, response-adaptive (CARA) randomized controlled trial (RCT). In a CARA RCT, the treatment randomization schemes are allowed to depend on the patient’s pre-treatment covariates, and the investigators have the opportunity to adjust these schemes during the course of the trial based on accruing information (including previous responses), in order to meet a pre-specified optimality criterion, while preserving the validity of the trial in learning its primary study parameter.

In this article, we propose a new group-sequential CARA RCT design and corresponding analytical procedure that admits the use of flexible data-adaptive techniques. The proposed design framework can target general adaption optimality criteria that may not have a closed-form solution, thanks to a loss- based approach in defining and estimating the unknown optimal randomization scheme. Both in predicting the conditional response and in constructing the treatment randomization schemes, this framework uses loss-based data-adaptive estimation over general classes of functions (which may change with sample size). Since the randomization adaptation is response-adaptive, this innovative flexibility potentially translates into more effective adaptation towards the optimality criterion. To target the primary study parameter, the proposed analytical method provides robust inference of the parameter, despite arbitrarily mis-specified response models, under the most general settings.

Specifically, we establish that, under appropriate entropy conditions on the classes of functions, the resulting sequence of randomization schemes converges to a fixed scheme, and the proposed treatment effect estimator is consistent (even under a mis-specified response model), asymptotically Gaussian, and gives rise to valid confidence intervals of given asymptotic levels. Moreover, the limiting randomization scheme coincides with the unknown optimal randomization scheme when, simultaneously, the response model is correctly specified and the optimal scheme belongs to the limit of the user-supplied classes of randomization schemes. We illustrate the applicability of these general theoretical results with a LASSO- based CARA RCT. In this example, both the response model and the optimal treatment randomization are estimated using a sequence of LASSO logistic models that may increase with sample size. It follows immediately from our general theorems that this LASSO-based CARA RCT converges to a fixed design and yields consistent and asymptotically Gaussian effect estimates, under minimal conditions on the smoothness of the basis functions in the LASSO logistic models. We exemplify the proposed methods with a simulation study.

• Pair beat Alexander Peya and Timea Babos 6-1, 6-1 in 41 minutes
• Hingis’ mixed success follows up victory in the women’s doubles
Such was Martina Hingis’s excitement at winning her first Wimbledon title in 17 years in the ladies’ doubles on Saturday night that she could not get to sleep until 3am – but if anything she was even more dazzling less than 24 hours later as she and the Indian maestro Leander Paes took the mixed doubles crown.

Between them Hingis and Paes have a combined age of 76 but they were far too clever for the crash-bang tennis of the fifth seeds Alexander Peya and Timea Babos as they galloped to a 6-1, 6-1 victory in just 41 minutes.

Continue reading...

The living wage is a triumph for modernising Conservatives. But these new hunting proposals would be a crass step backwards

It nearly happened in 2013. Two years ago, George Osborne and his circle came close to recommending the introduction by the coalition of a national living wage – a pay floor that was decent rather than merely survivable. But, on that occasion, the chancellor stayed his hand for two reasons.

First, the Liberal Democrats would not have tolerated the welfare cuts that Osborne’s Tory team considered an essential corollary of a compulsory living wage. Second, he knew that the Lib Dems would claim credit for the measure, a “compassionate” sweetener for Tory austerity, and spin the line that Nick Clegg had argued for a higher rate per hour than David Cameron and Osborne would allow. According to one ministerial ally of the chancellor: “We knew we’d be reading in the press the weekend after the budget that Nick had pressed for ￡10.”

Continue reading...