Home sales across Central Ohio reached a record high in August, even as the stock of houses for sale plummeted.
There were 3,116 homes and condos sold during the month, a 4.8 percent increase from August 2015, according to a report released Thursday by the Columbus Realtors. The month’s total was the highest ever for August and marked the year’s second-highest tally, trailing the 3,250 sold in June.
Columbus Realtors said 6,270 homes were listed for sale in August, down 21 percent from a year…
YouTuber NighthawkInLight made a machine that generates a small and safe vortex of air. The mini-tornado comes from a modified inline ventilation fan, while its visibility is enhanced by ultrasonic foggers and an LED lamp. It also serves as a humidifier.
E-mail marketing is, perhaps, the essential marketing strategy for small businesses. It’s personal, customizable and low cost. All you need to do is build a list of your customer’s e-mail addresses and then use a piece of e-mail marketing software to generate professional e-mails easily… Read More
Starting a new business means considering a multitude of things and one of them is how you will structure the business legally. It’s a much more important decision than it might sound like – the way you run your business and indeed taxes and liability… Read More
Vectr is a brand-new graphic software from Taipeh. The founders have been secretly working on the ambitious project for almost two years. Two days ago, they ended the beta stage and released the software into the wild.
Vectr: Platform Independent, Free, Powerful
Vectr does not aim to be less than the Google Docs of vector processing, and a superior rival to Inkscape. In fact, the feature set is impressive. Vectr can be used as a web app, or as a downloadable app for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. The functionality is identical. Under Chrome, the web app is capable of working offline.
The team is currently working on the creation of integrations with Slack and WordPress. Then, Slack can be used for visual communication. Via plugin, you’ll be able to edit graphics directly within WordPress.
Generally, Vectr is suitable for any 2D graphic, making it a rival to Canva, which we introduced you to here. Similar to Canva, you’ll find predefined layouts of the large social networks in Vectr, and all that’s left to do is fill them with content. However, Vectr is far more capable than Canva, which is impressive, especially considering that it’s free.
In contrast to Canva, Vectr does not only aim for the group of presenters, bloggers, and social media users. Vectr is even powerful enough to solve complex tasks.
Vectr’s UI Seems Familiar. (Illustration: Vectr)
For web design, the ability to directly implement Vectr graphics into your designs is fascinating. When you then edit it with Vectr, changes made are automatically updated on the website that uses the graphic. Handy, right?
As you probably already thought, the name lets you draw a conclusion regarding the used technology. Vectr works based on vectors, and not on pixels, putting it on the same line as Inkscape or Illustrator.
One of the nearly finished core features is the option to work on the graphics in teams. This is supposed to work in real time, just like Google Docs.
Vectr: Where is the Business Model?
Vectr wants to stay free forever. There is no way to know if there will be charged extras in the future. Vectr already successfully completed the first round of seed funding. This brings up the question about the business model sooner rather than later.
Thoughts on this are already coming up. Shortly, there will be a marketplace in which you get to share, sell, or buy designs. The marketplace will be fully integrated into the editing interface so that the buying process can run smoothly while editing a project.
Overall, the team behind Vectr is very ambitious, as you can tell from the massive roadmap, which lists 55 very demanding features, that will supposedly get taken care of anytime soon.
Ioanni Mitsakis is front-end developer at a major European automotive supplier and responsible for the look & feel of their internal cloud-based apps. As his employer works internationally with distributed teams world-wide, a rock-solid development foundation is what Ioanni aims for. He better should 😉
This blog post highlights a video on how to use regular expressions.
It’s been a while since I did the MySQL QA and Bash Training Series. The 13 episodes were quite enjoyable to make, and a lot of people watched the video’s and provided great feedback.
In today’s new video, I’d like to briefly go over regular expressions. The session will cover the basics of regular expressions, and then some. I’ll follow up later with a more advanced regex session too.
Regular expressions are very versatile, and once you know how to use them – especially as a script developer or software coder – you will return to them again and again. Enjoy!
Presented by Roel Van de Paar. Full-screen viewing @ 720p resolution recommended
This blog post highlights a video on how to use regular expressions.
It’s been a while since I did the MySQL QA and Bash Training Series. The 13 episodes were quite enjoyable to make, and a lot of people watched the video’s and provided great feedback.
In today’s new video, I’d like to briefly go over regular expressions. The session will cover the basics of regular expressions, and then some. I’ll follow up later with a more advanced regex session too.
Regular expressions are very versatile, and once you know how to use them – especially as a script developer or software coder – you will return to them again and again. Enjoy!
Presented by Roel Van de Paar. Full-screen viewing @ 720p resolution recommended
“Virtual unwrapping” has revealed text from the book of Leviticus inside an ancient scroll.. (Image: Seales et al./Science Advances)
For over forty years, archaeologists have longed to peek inside a badly damaged ancient scroll found on the western shore of the Dead Sea. Now an international team of scientists has managed to do so by virtually unrolling the scroll, revealing the text hidden deep within: the first few verses from the book of Leviticus.
It’s a striking example of using advanced technologies to shed light on ancient secrets. The details are described in a new paper in Science Advances.“The En-Gedi scroll is proof positive that we can potentially recover the whole text from damaged material, not just a few letters or a speculative word,” lead author Brent Seales, of the University of Kentucky, said during a press conference yesterday.
The virtual unwrapping software package is called Volume Cartography, and it should be available sometime next year as open-source software. Because it is completely non-invasive, this new multi-stage approach could be a game changer in the analysis of fragile archaeological objects.
First, the team scanned the scroll using micro-computed tomography—a commercially available machine often used for cancer imaging. Then they used a process called segmentation to digitally create pages, followed by texturing and flattening techniques. Finally, they virtually “unrolled” the scroll to reveal the writing inside.
“We’re losing precious information about our history every day, not because we cannot decipher it, but because we can’t access it in the first place,” Phillipa Benson, managing editor of Science Advances, said. That’s because most analytic methods would damage or destroy these precious artifacts. “So many researchers have to choose between preserving the integrity of a physical artifact or extracting the knowledge it contains.”
First excavated in the 1970s, the scrolls were recovered from the ark of an ancient synagogue at En-Gedi (“spring of the goat”), the site of an ancient Jewish community that was destroyed by fire around 600 CE. The scrolls were far too badly damaged to permit any significant analysis. Honestly, although technically they are made of animal skin parchment, they’re pretty much just small lumps of charcoal to the naked eye, like this one:
This lump of charcoal is actually one of the oldest known fragments of a biblical text, second only to the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Image: Shay Halevi/Israel Antiquities Authority)
The lumps are so fragile that merely touching them caused them to deteriorate even more. According to co-author Pnina Shor, director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem, when the scrolls were first excavated, a team member brought in the box of charcoal chunks and asked her to scan them. “I said, ‘You must be joking,’” she recalled.
But decades later, when she was selecting various unwrapped Dead Sea scrolls for scanning, Shor plucked one of the lumps out of the box to include in the scanning, just in case. And that was the only scroll that turned out to be significant in the batch, most likely because of the presence of metal in the ink.
But it still wasn’t possible to see what might be inside. That’s when Shor contacted Seales, an expert in advanced digitization techniques for examining damaged materials. “The magic—or secret sauce, if you will—is not in the scanning alone,” said Seales. His analysis combined digital scanning of a rolled-up object (like the En-Gedi scroll) with a series of imaging processing techniques that ultimately produce a flattened-out unrolled image of the interior layers.
They weren’t expecting to find actual, readable text, but they did. “Of course, we were elated,” said Seales when he first realized the markings were textual in nature. “But I think the real joy came when Pnina send me back the [analysis] results. Because then I knew that not only were we seeing writing, but it was readable, and she and her team were able to identify it as a known text. At that point we were absolutely jubilant.”
Appropriately enough, given that the scrolls were damaged by fire, the passage deals with burnt offerings.
“Never in our wildest dreams did we think that anything would come out of it,” Shor said. “The discovery of the text in the En-Gedi scroll absolutely astonished us. It was certainly a shot in the dark.”
The image quality is good enough that it was possible for Hebrew scholars to perform textual criticism.
“I think we can safely say that since the completion of the publication of the Corpus of Dead Sea Scrolls about a decade ago… the En-Gedi Leviticus Scroll is the most extensive and significant biblical text from antiquity that has come to light,” said co-author Michael Segal of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who analyzed the text from the resulting digital images. “We were amazed at the quality of the images. Much of the text is as close to readable as actual unharmed Dead Sea Scrolls.”
This text survived, Segal said, because the scroll was rolled in such a way that the opening verses were on the inner layers, protecting from being completely destroyed by that sixth century fire. The hope is that more of the text could be recovered over the next few months.
According to the textual analysis published by Segal and his colleague, Emmanuel Tov, today in the journal Textus, there are 18 lines of text in each column, containing all consonants and no vowels. For instance, “Kentucky” would have been written as “K-N-T-C-K” and the reader would fill in the vowels. “This means that the scroll was written before the ninth century, when the vowel signs were invented,” said Tov.
And the passages are identical, right down to paragraph breaks, to the so-called Masoeretic text—the most authoritative Jewish text, according to Segal and Tov, dating from the medieval period. Carbon dating further refines the time period as being from the second, third, or fourth centuries.
Seales and his colleagues are still working to virtually unwrap the outermost ayers of the En-Gedi scroll, although they are not optimistic since they are so badly damaged. In the future, Seales hopes to further refine his approach to image scrolls with other kinds of ink chemistries, as well as applications in forensic and intelligence gathering. “Damage and decay is the natural order of things, but you can see that sometimes you can absolutely pull a text back from the brink of loss,” he said.
When the En-Gedi scrolls were excavated from an ancient synagogue’s Holy Ark in the 1970s, it was a bittersweet discovery for archaeologists. Though the texts provided further evidence for an ancient Jewish community in this oasis near the Dead Sea, the scrolls had been reduced to charred lumps by fire. Even the act of moving them to a research facility caused more damage. But decades later, archaeologists have read parts of one scroll for the first time. A team of scientists in Israel and the US used a sophisticated medical scanning technique, coupled with algorithmic analysis, to "unwrap" a parchment that’s more than 1,700 years old.
(credit: Science Advances)
Found in roughly the same area as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the En-Gedi scrolls were used by a Jewish community in the region between the 8th century BCE and 6th century CE. In the year 600 CE, the community and its temple were destroyed by fire. Archaeologists disagree on the exact historical provenance of the En-Gedi scrolls—carbon dating suggests fourth century, but stratigraphic evidence points to a date closer to the second. Either way, these scrolls could provide a kind of missing link between the biblical texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the traditional biblical text of the Tanakh found in the Masoretic Text from roughly the 9th century. As the researchers put it in a paper published in Science Advances:
Dating the En-Gedi scroll to the third or fourth century CE falls near the end of the period of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls (third century BCE to second century CE) and several centuries before the medieval biblical fragments found in the Cairo Genizah, which date from the ninth century CE onward. Hence, the En-Gedi scroll provides an important extension to the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls and offers a glimpse into the earliest stages of almost 800 years of near silence in the history of the biblical text.
How to read a burned scroll with computers
But it wasn’t until University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales developed a technique he calls volume cartography that archaeologists actually got that "glimpse." Seales had previously worked on a project to read fire-damaged scrolls from the library of a wealthy Roman whose home in Herculaneum was destroyed in the Pompeii eruption. He suggested that Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Pnina Shor scan the scrolls using X-ray micro-CT, which is essentially a very high-resolution CT scan of exactly the same type you might get in a hospital. Indeed, Shor explained in a press conference that her team used a medical imaging facility to produce digital scans that she sent to Seales to analyze in Kentucky.