26 karma · joined February 27, 2012
a) a heuristic for optimal routing of repositioning trucks based on anticipated (uncertain) future demand.
b) dynamic pricing using a model predictive control approach (receding horizon optimization on a model of customer reaction to (price) incentives).
Insanely cool stuff. And its working. A paper should come out soon..
@ComputerGuru, SoftwareMaven, dankin I will contact you via mail in a bit.
Do you have experience in managing the level of discussion needed to get this right? What would be best? A public mailing list?
https://github.com/felix-faber/project-alexandria
Feedback very welcome.
That is _hard_ to do really good. Text is the easy part. What about tables? What about image captions and footnotes?
What such a project would need is one master file format from which other formats are derived. But not the other way around.
Having disjoint repositories for books/software is a good idea though.
It took them years of discussion and they haven't yet chosen a master file format for their books.[1] As a consequence, they are hosting thousands of books in many different file-formats provided by distributed proofreaders[2] and some other sources. But since no master-format exists and conversion is .. well .. buggy, they have no leverage on their quality problems. The textual content may be fine, but the reading experience for the casual user shows how big the iceberg is under the surface.
Having seen endless flamewars[3] and several unsuccessful approaches to their formatting and complexity problems, I propose clear reset.
What about a nice fork with only a few important books that get proper treatment in regard to
- master file format
- conversion (mainly html, pdf and ereader formats)
- design and page layout (e.g. for pdf versions)
From then on, one could build a growing git repository of _nice_ books and build an infrastructure around that. Tackling their current mess directly (and taking on the burden of their internal politics and historical toolchain) will be completely in vain, as the past has shown.
I don't have much time to spare. But for a really good cause (and the future of bookreading is a really good cause), I am willing to invest.
Who is in?
[1] This one is the latest candidate: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:RST Before that, there was one guy working on a simplified TEI format. But that never took off.
[3] The home of many-a-flamewar: http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.culture.literature.e-books.guten...