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+[[!meta title="Org-mode and FoilTeX - an unlikely (but useful) combination for teaching - Tom Faulkenberry"]]
+
+- Hi my name is Tom Faulkenberry and I am a mathematical psychologist
+ and professor at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas.
+ My talk is about using something that's kind of old, a lot of people
+ don't think about it any more, with something new, like Emacs
+ Org-mode. Particularly I'm going to talk about using FoilTeX in
+ Emacs Org-mode. So first I want to give you a little bit of
+ background about what this is and why you would want to do it. As
+ you can see I have some things available for you on a GitHub repo.
+ The address you can see up here, is
+ <https://github.com/tomfaulkenberry/orgFoils> with the F
+ capitalized. So if you go there you'll see this README and it kind
+ of tells the story, I've been using Emacs for a long time and even
+ before that I was using LaTex in my graduate studies in mathematics.
+
+- Now with the advent of Org-mode many of us know that we are able to
+ combine the efficiency of using an Emacs workflow, and particularly
+ the markdown language that's provided by Org-mode, with the
+ mathematical type setting power of LaTeX, and so there are standard
+ ways to export Org-mode into LaTeX-type documents. Particularly
+ this works for presentations, and of course I'm a professor so I
+ make a lot of presentations, both at conferences as well as for
+ classes that I teach. Now I found that Org-mode did this very
+ nicely, as long as you were willing to use the ?Beamer? class, so if
+ I wanted to make things that were horizontally oriented and use the
+ standard color schemes in ?Beamer? then Org-mode export works fine
+ for that. But I have to admit I longed for simplicity of old days
+ of using LaTeX, where we made slides for - okay I'm going to date
+ myself here - but we made slides for overhead projectors that were
+ in a portrait orientation, and they just didn't have a lot of
+ decoration on them.
+
+- They kind of got to the point, they showed some mathematics, they
+ showed some things, and that was about it.
+
+- Well those were made back in those days using something called the
+ FoilTeX package, I've provided a link here on this README. You can
+ see if we go to the package for FoilTeX it hasn't been updated since
+ 2008, and even before that it went six years between updates. This
+ is not by any means an active development package. Rather it is
+ something that is old, it is archival but it is still distributed
+ with the full installation of LaTeX. So back to the point, why do
+ we care about this? Well, it's a pretty simple way of making
+ presentations, but Org-mode won't do it without a little bit of
+ hacking. So the point of this presentation is to show you that it
+ can be done, to show you that you can actually make very nice
+ presentations for both conferences as well as teaching notes, and
+ teaching slides, with just a little bit of work on your .emacs file.
+ So before I show you how that works, and it's all documented here on
+ the GitHub repo, I want to just demonstrate it in action, so I'm
+ going to flop over to Emacs real quick. Here is a document, there
+ is a copy of this document in the GitHub repository that I mentioned
+ about, so as you can see it does seem to follow the structure of a
+ standard Org-mode document.
+
+- At the top we have some header matter that I will explain in just a
+ second, and then we have these lists that begin with asterisks, and
+ if we tab them you can see that there's text underneath these.
+ These sections, if you will, will each turn into separate pages on
+ my lectures notes. So I've got several, this is for about a two
+ hour long course, so how does it turn into a pretty document that I
+ can then take to my course with me?
+
+- Well it works just like any standard Org-mode to LaTeX export. We
+ type C-c C-e which then provides us with this export menu, and as we
+ can see here to export to LaTeX and then a resulting PDF file I can
+ type l and then o and I do that and it will generate my LaTeX file
+ as well as open it for me and we'll see that pop up. Okay. And let
+ me go to the very beginning. This is what it looks like. Let me
+ scroll or zoomout a little bit so you can see the full page. So
+ these are in portrait orientation, I use my lecture like this
+ because usually I'm giving a lecture on an, not an overhead, but a
+ document camera where I'll take the paper with me and I'll have some
+ things written but I'll also have some space to write additional
+ things throughout the class. So sort of a hybrid between a chalk
+ talk if you will and a formal presentation.
+
+- And so as you can see this is nicely done with some readable fonts,
+ using LaTeX type type-setting, so it's really good for mathematical
+ content, and I found it's just a really clean way of doing things.
+ So that's what it looks like. So the question is how do you do
+ this, how do you generate this and get your Org-mode and Emacs set
+ up to work this way. Well I detail this in the GitHub repository.
+ There are two things you need to do to make this work. First is you
+ need to edit your .emacs file to include this codeblock. So this
+ codeblock is, I'll show you on my .emacs file, it doens't really
+ matter where it goes, I usually put it somewhere in the middle. Let
+ me open that just real quick for you.
+
+- My .emacs file's got some stuff in it and if we go down to about
+ right here you can see that code chunk is right here. So that code
+ chunk is what it takes to make that exporting that I demonstrated
+ work. You can see it here it basically does two things. First is
+ it defines a Foils class, that you can call in the Org document, and
+ then it maps your section header, that asterisk, to the FoilTeX
+ command which is Foil head. So if you type all of this in your
+ .emacs and then reload that you will be able to then turn the
+ example Org mode document into a nice set of lecture notes. The
+ other thing that you need to include, is you need to include a
+ document header.
+
+- Now this is kind of a barebones header, I will say that strictly
+ speaking, not everyone of these things is required, for example, you
+ do not need this `\usepackage{amsmath}`, unless you are using some
+ fonts or things that are in that package.
+
+- Another thing is this little bit of LaTeX command, this makes it to
+ where my paragraphs don't indent, which for presentations and
+ lecture slides I prefer. There are also some class options, I do
+ mine portrait, but if I'm giving a presentation at a conference
+ those are usually done via computer projector, so I would turn that
+ into landscape. And also this 17-point font you see, that's the
+ size that works nicely for me, but there are other font sizes
+ available in FoilTeX that you can use. All of those are detailed in
+ the FoilTeX manual which I've provided a link to for you here.
+
+- Finally, in this repository I do give you the Org-mode file itself,
+ it doesn't render nicely in the browser but you can clone this
+ repository and pull it up in your Emacs just fine, and then finally
+ the resulting PDF I showed you is also living in this GitHub repo.
+ So, it's a little bit slow right now, but it's there. I'm moving it
+ around too much as you can see. But anyway there is, so if you
+ think this is interesting and something you might like to do I
+ certainly welcome you to contact me by or by Twitter, there's my
+ email address and my Twitter handle. This I think is a really cool
+ thing and I hope that you do too. If you want old-school type LaTeX
+ ability with new-school Emacs Org-mode this is the way to do it. So
+ hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to talking with you further.
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+[[!meta title="A.I. that Helps Play the Game of Your Life - Andrew J. Dougherty"]]
+
+- What if you collect thousands of A.I. tools and apply them towards
+ planning your life? That's exactly what FRDCSA has been working on
+ for the last twenty years. Only soon, you can download a VM
+ containing the core systems. In today's increasingly complex world,
+ sometimes we can be blindsided by rules we didn't know existed. If
+ you're living on the edge, this can be a disaster. What if all the
+ rules that applied to us, from legal, to financial, to just basic
+ common sense, were collected into a system that was capable of
+ reasoning with them and planning with them. You could put your
+ objectives into the system and it would factor in all these things
+ and spit out a plan. Well that's just one of the many things that
+ FRDCSA's Free Life Planner A.I. seeks to do.
+
+- A.I. is problem-solving, and software that can do this has to grow
+ larger as problems and their complexity multiply. Over the last 20
+ years the FRDCSA project has collected thousands of codebases, and
+ written hundreds of codebases, gluing everything together and making
+ it available from within Emacs, Perl and Prolog. The Free Life
+ Planner, FLP, takes this and applies it directly towards assisting
+ users in their minute-to-minute, day-to-day, year-to-year lives.
+
+- Think of a massive collection like V'ger had in Star Trek: The
+ Motion Picture, of things like strong game-playing systems like
+ AlphaZero, but tailored to the specific problems people most often
+ encounter with finances, meal-planning, transportation, health care,
+ etc.
+
+- If you're interested in a personal A.I. assistant, stay tuned as we
+ cover the Free Life Planner. But it is after all only one of over
+ 600 custom codebases developed for FRDCSA. Soon, Panoply, the
+ virtual machine distribution of FRDCSA, will be released for you to
+ explore. So, let's have a look at some of what FRDCSA can do for
+ you.
+
+- FRDCSA wants to help you solve as many problems as it can, treating
+ the world as a game which it tries to win, by proofs that bad things
+ don't happen. We know that if a set of problems constitutes t bits
+ of information, and a set of programs contains less than t bits of
+ information, then it is impossible to solve these problem from these
+ programs. When it comes to AI, bigger is better. In 2002 this led
+ me to Emacs, Perl, Debian and Cyc, and a growing list of over
+ 100,000 external codebases. In fact, FRDCSA excels at finding and
+ packaging software, and exposing APIs for reuse.
+
+- Someone once asked me, what does FRDCSA do? I couldn't give them an
+ answer. I didn't know where to begin. There aren't any silver
+ bullets to demonstrate. So where does Emacs fit in? It is the
+ develop console, mission control, where most development and usage
+ occurs. There are dozens of modes, thousands of key-bound
+ functions. Let's look at some representative Emacs systems written
+ because we couldn't find anything with similar capabilities.
+
+- This is UniLang, a multi-agent system facilitator, and a core FRDCSA
+ system. UniLang let's all the systems talk to each other. For the
+ Free Life Planner we want to spider the internet, to find, retrieve
+ and index rules and software, to apply them towards improving the
+ way we live on a daily basis. But to intelligently spider you need
+ to be able to understand the text. Because lots of useful
+ information on the internet is in text form, FRDCSA is heavily
+ focused on natural language understanding.
+
+- This is NLU, it's a system based on semantically annotating text.
+
+- Okay, so our spider is helping us to locate rules. But what about
+ software, we still need more software. New software is being
+ written all the time, how do we gather it? IES is an information
+ extraction system, it allows you to label text like software
+ metadata using text properties, and then train a model and use it to
+ label other text. This way we can extract information about
+ software systems we want to acquire and package.
+
+- Okay great, we're getting more software, now what do we do? Let's
+ go back to rules for a minute. We have a lot of text, but how do we
+ translate it into a machine-readable format? That's where NLU-MF
+ comes in. Okay we have rules in a machine readable format, but how
+ do we know when they're applicable? We have to store the
+ world-state somehow. Enter FreeKBS2, our free knowledge-based
+ system, with persistent storage of rules and facts. It is a useful
+ Emacs front-end for rapidly manipulating symbolic rules and facts
+ and editing the knowledge-base.
+
+- So now we have some refined executable rules. How do we reason with
+ these common sense rules? Enter the Cyc system, undoubtedly the
+ world's largest, most sophisticated, common sense A.I.. But Cyc is
+ proprietary. Well, thanks to Douglas Miles, the author of the free
+ (libre) LogicMOO system, that's not a problem anymore. LogicMOO
+ aims to be backward compatible with Cyc itself. Let's demonstrate
+ our cyc-mode-2, which aims to create a deep channel between Emacs
+ and LogicMOO.
+
+- Today's software is fantastic, but there's not a lot in the way of
+ integrated approaches to planning one's life to improve the way we
+ live on a daily basis. The version of Free Life Planner on the
+ Panoply VM distribution currently does calendaring, recurrences,
+ reminders, planning, scheduling and execution. But the good news
+ is, we can make it a lot better. The potential for a rule-based
+ crowd-sourced life planner is tremendous.
+
+- People finally started understanding better what FLP, and to some
+ extent, FRDCSA, does when I wrote the following use case story.
+ It's the homeless-story.html, I'll provide the link later. It's the
+ story of a person facing homelessness who uses FLP to escape
+ homelessness. I highly suggest you read it to familiarize yourself
+ with the FLP. Some people think it is science-fiction, but I assure
+ you this story is doable with the tools we've collected.
+
+- Okay, where are we? We have a rule-based system, but our software
+ cannot do everything, no piece of software can. We have lists of
+ software that the spider and IES got us. Retrieving it is easy,
+ packaging it is hard. How do we package this software? Why not
+ record ourselves packaging software to add data to the A.I. so it
+ can learn how to make packages.
+
+- So we have lots of data about how to package, but now the system has
+ to figure out how to make packages on its own. It needs to be able
+ to think and plan. What's more, once the software is packaged, FLP
+ has to figure out how to use that software. Enter the software
+ robot called Prolog-Agent. Prolog-Agent is an intelligent agent
+ under development that can control Emacs in order to achieve
+ objectives, and will eventually be able to make use of recorded
+ traces.
+
+- So now we have all these rules and software, but wouldn't it be nice
+ if we could help teach the users some of the rules, and how to use
+ the software. That's what CLEAR does. CLEAR is a great way to have
+ books, manuals, websites, etc, read to you, allowing you to pause,
+ quit, resume and filter out nonsense.
+
+- If you'd like to get a copy of Panoply when the public alpha is
+ hopefully released in a few months, please email me. I will add
+ your name to the mailinglist. But also, please join us at `#frdcsa`
+ and/or `#freelifeplanner` on freenode. I would like you to try out
+ the FRDCSA, familiarize yourself with it, and test it. Thank you so
+ much for listening. Have a great day.