Dean Batchelor Awards Banquet - 2015 MPG AWARDS WINNERS

2015 MPG AWARDS WINNERS

16 DEC 2015 MPG AWARDS WINNERS

Posted at 09:09h in Dean Batchelor Award, Events, News by MPG 0 Comments 

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The 2015 MPG Awards were held at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, CA last night and winners were recognized in each category for Excellence in Automotive Journalism. Top honors were awarded to Micah Muzio & COTU Productions, winners of the 2015 Dean Batchelor Award, for their "2015 Polaris Slingshot Review" on KBB.com.

2015 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD - DOUG STOKES

Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Doug Stokes with Harold Osmer

Doug Stokes was recognized for his exceptional behind-the-scenes public relations contributions to motor sports and the racing industry. A member of the Motor Press Guild since it was renamed from IMPA-West in the mid-1980's, Doug has supported motor sports for more than 25 years, representing such notable and iconic clients as Mickey and Trudy Thompson, Gale Banks, Stuart Rowlands, and Steve Ford, and supporting racing efforts for Honda, Suzuki, the Kazarian Brothers, and Lucas Oil. Doug has served as Vice President of Communications at Irwindale Event Center since 2013, and has previously been honored with the Chapman Award for PR by the American Auto Racing Writers & Broadcasters Association.

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THE WINNERS OF THE 2015 MPG AWARDS ARE:

ARTICLES

2015 Best Feature Article of the Year: Larry P. Vellequette and Luca Ciferri
"The Coming Squeeze" [view pdf] - Automotive News

2015 Best News Article of the Year: Hans Greimel
"Confessions of a Price Fixer" - Automotive News

2015 Best Vehicle Review of the Year: Basem Wasef
"Review: The Ferocious New Corvette Z06 is an $80K Ferrari-Killer" - Wired

Basem Wasef & wife, Anna

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AUDIO

2015 Best Audio Program of the Year: Charlie Vogelheim and Shawn Meyers
"#35: The Best and Worst 'Cars and Coffee' Ever" [click to find podcast on iTunes] - Motor Trend Audio
L-R: John Clinard, Charlie Vogelheim, Ed Kim (head judge - audio)

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BOOKS

2015 Best Book of the Year: Sam Posey
Where the Writer Meets the Road - David Bull Publishing
Sam Posey and Eric Dahlquist, Sr. (head judge - books)

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VIDEOS

2015 Best Feature Video of the Year: Adam Carolla (Director/Producer), Nate Adams (Producer/Additional Direction), Mike August (Producer), Matt D'Andria (Executive Producer), Norm Pattiz (Executive Producer)Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman - Sontalia, Mollette

L-R: Nate Adams, Peter Starr (head judge - video), Matt D'Andria

2015 Best Video Vehicle Review of the Year: Micah Muzio and COTU Productions

"2015 Polaris Slingshot Review" - KBB.com

Micah Muzio

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BOB D'OLIVO AWARD FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

2015 Best Photo of the Year: Dale Kistemaker
"24+30" - Porsche Panorama [view pdf]
 [ht: Motor Press Guild]



TAGS: Motor Press Guild, Dean Batchelor Award, 2015 MPG Awards, Doug Stokes, Adam Carolla, Nate Adams, Mike August, Matt D'Andria, Norm Pattiz, Sam Posey, Charlie Vogelheim, Shawn Meyers, Micah Muzio, COTU Productions, Hans Greimel, Larry P. Vellequette, Luca Ciferri, Basem Wasef, Bob D'Olivo Award, Dale Kistemaker, The EDJE, Porsche Panomara, Wired, Automotive News, Sontalia, Molette, David Bull Publishing, KBB.com, Motor Trend Audio, 

Symbols And AI Yield Answers To 4K Old Mystery

In 1877, British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham hypothesized that the Indus script was a forerunner of modern-day Brahmic scripts, used from Central to Southeast Asia. Other researchers disagreed. Fueled by scores of competing and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to decipher the script, that contentious state of affairs has persisted to the present. Image Credit: WIRED

Symbols And AI Yield Answers To 4K Old Mystery

Archaeologists, and other scientific minds since the beginning of the discovery and study of ancient societies, and the methods of their evidence of communication, have struggled with the structure, meaning, and definition of script symbols.

One script found in the ruins of the Indus Valley (eastern Pakistan/northwest India) is believed to be the graphic root and link of other languages that include Chinese Lolo, Sumerian, Egyptian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and Old Slavic. Indus script , however has never been deciphered and defined, that is until now.

What is being hailed as a breakthrough in the beginning of an understanding of the structure of the symbols uncovered from this 4,000 year old society, a program that draws from many sources and aided by computerized artifical intelligence discovered that the structure of the Indus Script followed the rules of a spoken language.

Examples of the Indus script. Three elongated seals that have no iconography, as well as three miniature tablets (one twisted). The tablets measure about 1.25 inches long by 0.5 inches wide. Image Credit: University of Washington

This excerpted and edited from WIRED -

Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery
By Brandon Keim WIRED - April 23, 2009

An ancient script that’s defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.

Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures.

"The underlying grammatical structure seems similar to what’s found in many languages," said University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao.

Comparison of symbols found in Indus Valley and, of all places, Easter Island. Image Credit: SodaHead/SweetLoveGifts (posted with comment)

The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long.

In 1877, British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham hypothesized that the Indus script was a forerunner of modern-day Brahmic scripts, used from Central to Southeast Asia.
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In 2004, linguist Steve Farmer published a paper asserting that the Indus script was nothing more than political and religious symbols. It was a controversial notion, but not an unpopular one.

Rao, a machine learning specialist who read about the Indus script in high school and decided to apply his expertise to the script while on sabbatical in Inda, may have solved the language-versus-symbol question, if not the script itself.
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Rao’s team used pattern-analyzing software running what’s known as a Markov model, a computational tool used to map system dynamics.

They fed the program sequences of four spoken languages: ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English. Then they gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language.

The program calculated the level of order present in each language. Non-spoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in unvarying ways, or utterly chaotic. Spoken languages fell in the middle.

When they seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement. These proved to be moderately ordered, just like spoken languages.

As for the meaning of the script, the program remained silent.
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Parpola said the primary obstacle confronting decipherers of fragmentary Indus scripts — the difficulty of testing their hypotheses — remains unchanged.

But according to Rao, this early analysis provides a foundation for a more comprehensive understanding of Indus script grammar, and ultimately its meaning.

"The next step is to create a grammar from the data that we have," he said. "Then we can ask, is this grammar similar to those of the Sanskrit or Indo-European or Dravidian languages? This will give us a language to compare it to."
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"One of the main questions in machine learning is how to generalize rules from a limited amount of data," said Rao. "Even though we can’t read it, we can look at the patterns and get the underlying grammatical structure."
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"It’s only recently that archaeologists have started to apply computational approaches in a rigid manner," said Rao. "The time is ripe."
Reference Here>>

It strikes us here at Symblogogy, that if we humans can create something as complicated as a 3D camera readable automatic identification code (a 2D QR code with color), we should be able to reverse engineer 4,000 year old languages like Indus Script.

This artificial intelligence approach gets us one step closer to understanding and decode the meaning of what was communicated.

“REPLY ALL” Named Economic Impact Problem Of The Year

The Horrible Truth About The "Reply All" Button - This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, bookmark the Permalink in your Browser, leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Image Credit: SPACE MONKEYS

“REPLY ALL” Named Economic Impact Problem Of The Year

Information and the ease at which information is created and moved is blossoming into a great problem. So much so that it has caught the attention of a noted consultancy firm as 2008’s Problem-Of-The-Year!

The problem and its growth is “Information Overload”. It costs our economy in productivity and time some serious money. In 2006 the estimated cost came in at $650,000,000,000 … that’s six-hundred and fifty BILLION. A figure that is roughly equal to the Gross Domestic Product of the 16th largest economy in the world, The Netherlands.

Buildings along canal in Amsterdam’s consulate row area. The Netherlands is often called Holland. This is formally incorrect as North and South Holland in the western Netherlands are only two of the country's twelve provinces. Image Credit: Edmund Jenks (6-15-2002)

Economic costs are run up when we are distracted and interrupted from our core duties and have to take the time to get re-engaged after responding to needless or repetitive communications.

This from the Associated Press via WIRED TECH BIZ News -

Researcher: Info Overload Costs Economy
By ANICK JESDANUN - AP Internet Writer - Dec 26, 12:04 PM EST

Think twice before you copy someone on an e-mail or hit "reply all." Such practices have made today's workers less productive, a research firm concludes.

After years of naming a product or person of the year, Basex Inc. decided to forecast "information overload" as problem of the year for 2008.

"It's too much information. It's too many interruptions. It's too much lost time," Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira declared. "It's always too much of a good thing."
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Workers get disoriented every time they stop what they are doing to reply to an e-mail or answer a follow-up phone call because they didn't reply within minutes. Spira said workers can spend 10 to 20 times the length of the original interruption trying to get back on track.
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Spira has a number of recommendations: Resist the urge to immediately follow up an e-mail with an instant message or phone call. Make sure the subject line clearly reflects the topic and urgency of an e-mail. And use "reply all" sparingly.
Reference Here>>

At Symblogogy, sometimes the best way to use systems to automate our lives is to NOT use all that is available to us at our fingertips!

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