Sunday, June 21, 2015

Summer Solstice, API

First Day of Summer 2015 Solstice Dates Times Photos

"The summer solstice heralds the beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. The timing of the summer solstice depends on when the Sun reaches its northernmost point of the equator.

This summer solstice is the day with the most hours of sunlight during the whole year. 

...Sunrise and sunset calculator  for how many hours of sunlight you get in your location."

Summer solstice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

mourner/suncalc @ GitHub

"SunCalc is a tiny BSD-licensed JavaScript library for calculating sun position, sunlight phases (times for sunrise, sunset, dusk, etc.), moon position and lunar phase for the given location and time, created by Vladimir Agafonkin (@mourner) as a part of the SunCalc.net project.

Most calculations are based on the formulas given in the excellent Astronomy Answers articles aboutposition of the sun and the planets. You can read about different twilight phases calculated by SunCalc in the Twilight article on Wikipedia."


ESRL Global Monitoring Division - GRAD Group @NOAA

ML: Amazon Machine Learning, Reviews

As usual, Amazon is both using and selling its new service, "Machine Learning"

Amazon looks to improve customer-reviews system with machine learning - CNET
"Amazon is rolling out a big change to its customer reviews system in the US, introducing a new machine-learning platform it developed in-house to surface newer and more helpful reviews."
Amazon dumbs down machine learning for the rest of us | InfoWorld
"It was only a matter of time. What with Google, IBM, and Microsoft now offering cloud-based machine learning services of various kinds, Amazon's been obliged to step up with its own such product.

Amazon's just-unveiled service, Amazon Machine Learning (or AML for short), offers simplified ways to make both batch- and real-time predictions from data stored in Amazon."


Click to Enlarge



It would be interesting to compare results of multiple ML platforms now available online... 


Visualization: Time-Series Data

mozilla/metrics-graphics @ GitHub
"MetricsGraphics.js is a library optimized for visualizing and laying out time-series data. At under 60KB (minified), it provides a simple way to produce common types of graphics in a principled and consistent way. The library currently supports line charts, scatterplots, histograms, bar charts and data tables, as well as features like rug plots and basic linear regression."