colored blocks in Beamer

Update: see here for better ways.

The beauty of LaTeX is that you get the best possible typography while focusing on the content, without having to spend any cycles on the looks. For example, when you prepare a presentation, you just pick a theme and do your slides. If you do not like how they look, you change the theme. Consequently, the Beamer class manual just teaches you how to create the flow (overlays, etc.) of a presentation.

In the second part the Beamer manual gives in detail all the information on how to create a new template, but this is too much when you just need a small feature like colored blocks. This is something that usually does not occur in technical presentations, where there already is a specialized block machinery for theorems, examples, etc.

When you do presentations more related to technical marketing, you may want to use colored blocks, for example to clearly discriminate between pros and cons by using green respectively red boxes. Since it is not in the manual, here is how you do colored boxes. Essentially, you declare new block environments in the document preamble:

---

\newenvironment<>{problock}[1]{

\begin{actionenv}#2

\def\insertblocktitle{#1}

\par

\mode<presentation>{

\setbeamercolor{block title}{fg=white,bg=green!50!black}

\setbeamercolor{block body}{fg=black,bg=green!10}

\setbeamercolor{itemize item}{fg=red!20!black}

\setbeamertemplate{itemize item}[triangle]

}

\usebeamertemplate{block begin}}

{\par\usebeamertemplate{block end}\end{actionenv}}

\newenvironment<>{conblock}[1]{

\begin{actionenv}#2

\def\insertblocktitle{#1}

\par

\mode<presentation>{

\setbeamercolor{block title}{fg=white,bg=red!50!black}

\setbeamercolor{block body}{fg=black,bg=red!10}

\setbeamercolor{itemize item}{fg=green!20!black}

\setbeamertemplate{itemize item}[triangle]

}

\usebeamertemplate{block begin}}

{\par\usebeamertemplate{block end}\end{actionenv}}

---

The notation for banged color shades is as follows: 10% red is specified as red!10, while green!20!black means 20% green with 80% black.

In the document part, a SWOT matrix slide would then be specified as follows:

---

\begin{frame}{SWOT Matrix}

\begin{columns}[t]

\begin{column}{.5\textwidth}

\begin{problock}{\textsc{strengths}}

\begin{itemize}

\item Business

\begin{itemize}

\item revenue: \$10 B

\item market share: 70\%

\end{itemize}

\item Product

\begin{itemize}

\item 32-bit color

\item written in OpenCL

\end{itemize}

\end{itemize}

\end{conblock}

\end{column}

\begin{column}{.5\textwidth}

\begin{conblock}{\textsc{weaknesses}}

\begin{itemize}

\item Business

\begin{itemize}

\item very expensive

\item gold plating issues

\end{itemize}

\item Product

\begin{itemize}

\item requires at least 128 cores

\item no gamut mapping

\end{itemize}

\end{itemize}

\end{problock}

\end{column}

\end{columns}

\begin{columns}[t]

\begin{column}{.5\textwidth}

\begin{problock}{\textsc{opportunities}}

\begin{itemize}

\item Business

\begin{itemize}

\item everybody wants color

\item clouds love rainbows

\end{itemize}

\item Product

\begin{itemize}

\item cameras deliver 14 bits per pixel

\item big data is pervasive

\end{itemize}

\end{itemize}

\end{conblock}

\end{column}

\begin{column}{.5\textwidth}

\begin{conblock}{\textsc{threats}}

\begin{itemize}

\item Business

\begin{itemize}

\item pursue low hanging fruit

\item people do not care about color quality

\end{itemize}

\item Product

\begin{itemize}

\item competitors use CIELAB

\item spectral is a new trend

\end{itemize}

\end{itemize}

\end{problock}

\end{column}

\end{columns}

\end{frame}

now you can go paperless

In 1945 Vannevar Bush proposed the Memex desk to store and hyperlink all our documents. In 1969 Jack Goldman from Xerox approached George Pake to set up PARC with the task of inventing the paperless office of the future. By the late 1980s, with Mark Weiser's System 33 project all pieces were available and integrated to realize the paperless office of the future, including mobile computing under the name of ubiquitous computing or ubicomp.

The problem was that the computer hardware was still to far behind. A Dorado ran only at 1 MIPS and typically had 4 MB of RAM and an 80 MB disk, but its ECL technology sucked up 3 KW of power and the material cost $112K in today's dollars.

By the mid-1990s the hardware had become sufficiently powerful and cheap that people like Gary Starkweather and Bill Hewlett were able to digitize all their documents and live a paperless life, but not people like us.

For the rest of us the year to go completely digital is 2013. The current Xeon E5 chip-set offers up to 12 cores and 40 GB/s PCI express bandwidth to which you can add a terabyte of fast PCI Express flash storage for the operating system, the applications, and your indices. This is sufficient horsepower to manage, index, and transcode all your digital items.

For the digital items I had hinted at using green disks in the my previous post, but then I made a calculation and showed a picture indicating this might not be a good solution after all. Here is the solution.

In System 33 the documents were stored on file servers, which is still done today in commercial applications. But in the SOHO setting this quickly leads to the monstrosity shown in the last post's picture. Where is the sweet spot for storing our digital items?

An external disk is easy and cheap, because it relies on the PC to manage the disk. In the real world of ubicomp we have many different computing devices, so we need the flexibility of a server. The solution is to use a disk with a minimalistic server, a contraption called a NAS, for network attached storage.

Because the various ubicomp devices have different file systems and file protocols, a NAS will have its own system and then provide the various native interfaces. Typically, the NAS operating system is a bare-bones Linux with an ext4 file system. It will support the main file protocols NFS, CIFS, AFP, FTP, SSH, WebDAV, TLS, etc.

Since your digital items are valuable, you do not want to use a single disk, also because with a large amount of data, backups of shared disks no longer make sense (you still need to backup your own devices). The minimal configuration is to use two identical disk drives in RAID-1 configuration. You also want to have a second NAS on a different continent to which you trickle-charge your digital items.

The box in the picture above is a Synology DS212j, which uses a Marvell 6281 ARM core running at 1.2 GHz. The SoC also includes hardware encryption (yes, you should always encrypt all your data) and a floating point unit. The latter is important because many digital items these days are photographs and an FPU is absolutely necessary to create the thumbnails (for video, you want to do any transcoding on your desktop and store the bits so that they can be streamed directly).

The assembly in the picture comprises the NAS box with the mini-server in the enclosed bottom, a large fan, and the two red disks. On the right side (front) are the status lights and on the left side (back) are the Ethernet port, the power port, a USB port to back up the NAS' own software and data on a stick, and a USB port for a printer to share.

The box in the picture has 512 MB of x16 DDR3 DRAM, which is plenty to run a bare-bones Linux, including such things like a MySQL database to manage the NAS data and a web server to administer the system. You want to attach it to a 1 gbps Ethernet using Cat-6 cabling (but Cat-5e is sufficient for a small home like mine).

When being accessed, the NAS will consume 17.6W + 9W = 26.6W, but when there is no network activity, the disks will go in hibernation mode and the power consumption will drop to 5.5W + 0.8W = 6.3W (the first number is the mini-server, the second is for the disks). In other words, a capable SOHO NAS capable of storing and serving all your digital items uses power comparable to a light bulb. You do not need any special electric service to your garage.

As we have seen regarding the disk colors, you absolutely want a pair of red disks, i.e., two Western Digital WD40EFRX or two Seagate ST4000VN000-1H4168.

disk service time

In the last post we saw how hard disk drives (HDD) are color coded. I hinted on how to choose the color of a HDD, suggesting that for the main disk a solid state drive (SSD) is actually a better choice, but I left things fuzzy. The reason is that there is no single metric, you have to determine what your work day looks like. Fortunately there is one thing that no longer is an issue: capacity.

a red disk never comes alone

The disk industry has undergone an incredible consolidation: there are only three companies left. Toshiba is focused on laptop disks, while Seagate and Western Digital manufacture the whole range. In this battle to the last tooth, the color of disks has become an important survival tool.

maintaining glossaries

It used to be that scientists in the average took seven years to enter in a field and make a contribution, after which they would hit a ceiling. Their institution would then offer them a sabbatical that would allow them to either get to the next level through osmosis and synergy, or change the field.

A new class of bipolar cells

It took 225 undergraduates more than 20,000 hours of work to map the wiring diagram of a 117 µm by 80 µm patch of a mouse retina. They did discover a new class of bipolar cells, however the patch was too small to determine its exact function: a larger patch is necessary. They will try to achieve this through a crowd-sourcing project known as EyeWire.

News article: Making connections in the eye

Is veal white, pink, or red?

This is the big question of the week in Switzerland, as on the first of September the new law for the humane treatment of calves enters into effect.

When I was in the third school year, our teacher Egidio Bernasconi took us to visit the stable of our classmate Rita Spizzi. Her father was in charge of food at the private clinic Moncucco in Coremmo, just behind our school building. Besides the large vegetable garden, he also had half a dozen cows, and that was the topic of the lesson.

We learned about agribusiness. In the self-sustenance times, a farmer in the Prealps would have one or two cows to provide the proteins for his family. Spizzi's operation was larger, because it had to sustain a clinic instead of just a family.

A cow's main product was its milk, which had a shelf life of only a couple of days. The cream would be skimmed off and cultured for a few days to make butter, which had about a week of shelf life. The excess milk would be used to make yogurt, which had a longer shelf life. When there was a lot of excess milk, it would be used to make cheese, which depending on the type could last for a whole season.

When a cow would no longer produce milk due to her age, Mr. Spizzi would sell her to the slaughterhouse. This explains why the typical beef dish of the region is brasato: the meat had to be stewed for hours in a red wine sauce because it was very tough, coming from old cows.

Mr. Spizzi always needed enough cows to feed the patients and staff. Every spring he would walk his cows to the outskirts of town to visit a bull. Half of the off-spring would be female, and that was good, because Mr. Spizzi could select one to raise to replace the next old cow; the other cows would be raised to be sold at the fair. This is why Mr. Spizzi spend a little more money to use a select bull, as its offspring would fetch a higher price at the market.

For the male offspring there was not much use, because only few bulls are required. Mr. Spizzi would keep them as long as they can live on their mother's milk, then sell them to the slaughterhouse. Because these calves were young and milk-fed, their meat was whitish. By the way, this is why in the Insubrian culture the fancy meat is veal scaloppine.

This was a long time ago and in modern agribusiness a farmer has an order of magnitude more cows. Also, much progress has been made in cattle feed, so the farmer can make more money by feeding his calves for a longer time, yielding more meat.

This is where the animal protection groups come in and the new law for veal comes into play. When the calves are kept alive for a longer time, they would naturally eat hay and grass, roaming on the Alps. Their meat would become reddish. Although taste and nutritional value are the same, for centuries people have known that the whiter the veal, the more it was tender. Before the new law, a farmer would have been paid less per kilo if the veal was redder.

To keep the veal whiter, the contemporary farmer would keep his animals on milk and indoors, but this means that the calves are anemic and therefore tortured.

The current debate is on whether veal should be red, pink, or white. This is where color science comes into play. Instead of using color terms, the experts want to sound more authoritative by using numbers rather than words. Instead of red, pink, white, they use 38, 42, 48. They never mention a unit, so what are these numbers? Is there a new redness scale?

It turns out that the new law also introduces a new standardized method to determine the color of veal. The carcass is measured at a specified location near the shoulder with a Minolta colorimeter. The first number on the colorimeter is the color number for the carcass.

Zooming in on the pictures reveals that the colorimeter is displaying CIELAB data, so the first number is L*. Therefore, what the gastronome takes for red, pink, white, a color scientist would take for dark, medium, light.

Newspaper article on the debate (in German): Kalbfleisch-Knatsch in der Fleischbranche.

Generating your publication list

It is often necessary to compile one's bibliography. For example to apply for a grant or a job. One approach is to keep a text file and update it as you publish. However, unstructured data is a pain to update when you fall behind, and you anyway already have your publications in your bibliography database. Is there a quick and simple way to generate a publication list?

For those using BibDesk to manage their bibliography, the answer is Jürgen Spitzmüller's biblatex-publist package. It generates correct citations leaving out your name, sorts them by date, and allows grouping by publication type.

In the preamble you just add three items:

• \usepackage[bibstyle=publist]{biblatex}
• \omitname[your first name]{your last name}
• \addbibresource{biblio.bib}

In the document part you just add a block like below for each publication type:

• \section{Patents}
• \begin{refsection}[biblio]
• \nocite{*}
• \printbibliography[heading=none, filter=mine, type=patent]
• \end{refsection}

The citation result will look like this when set into type:

Aug. 2006 (with Audrius J. Budrys). “Multi-component iconic representation of file characteristics”. 7,086,011. Hewlett-Packard Development Company.

If you are still using BibTeX, this is a good time to update your engine. BibTeX has been obsolete for many years and is no longer used these days. People now use biblatex, and publist is just a style file for biblatex. Actually, biblatex still uses BibTeX, so you want to switch your engine to Biber.

The make the switch, in the TexShop preferences go in the Engine tab and replace the BibTeX engine bibtex with biber. It may be necessary to run the TeX Live utility to update all the packages, as there has been a bug fix in the last week.

Extra tip: Option-Go to the folder ∼/Library/TeXShop/Engines/Inactive/Latexmk/ where you find the file Latexmk For TeXShop.pdf with the instructions on how to typeset your documents with a single mouse click.

Energy footprint of the digital economy

Back in 2009 we looked at the carbon footprint of ripping color documents for digital presses and published the result in the EI 2010 paper "Font rendering on a GPU-based raster image processor." Assuming the raster image processor is run at maximum capacity, the state of the art system at the time consumed 38,723 KWh and generated 23,234 Kg of CO₂. By using GPUs, we were able to rip the same data with 10,804 KWh respectively 6,483 Kg of CO₂. At the time we thought saving 16,751 Kg of CO₂ per year per RIP was a pretty cool result, but at the end the product never shipped, despite — or maybe because — it was much lower cost. (See the paper for the details of the calculations.)

This month the Digital Power Group published the white-paper "The cloud begins with coal: big data, big networks, big infrastructure, and big power." The work was sponsored by the National Mining Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which explains why some of the numbers appear a little optimistic in terms of the coal needed to keep the smart phones running and serving contents, but even if we divide the numbers by 5 to make them a little more realistic, the numbers are quite staggering when we add everything up. It turns out, that a smart phone requires as much coal as a small refrigerator. Cloud computing will consume an ever increasing fraction of our total energy consumption. This is a good reason to work on more efficient and greener storage systems.

Data Privacy

During the ascent of Nazism in Europe in the decade before world war II, the Swiss banks introduced secret bank accounts to hide the identity of persecuted customers from infiltrated spies working at the banks or loitering in their lobbies. After the war, this mechanism was abused by the banks to assist tax evaders and consequently has been largely dismantled.

Apparently, the Swiss have been able to maintain their reputation as a discreet country. An echo effect of the leak of an American agency's penchant for snooping everybody's data, is that more entities are now storing their data in Switzerland, although data storage in Switzerland is about 25% more expensive than in the neighboring EU countries. "Our customers know that money can be replaced — but sensitive data can not," says Mateo Meier of Artmotion, a data center in Zürich. Switzerland's know-how, political stability and adequate infrastructure are ideal conditions to store data securely, he says.

History does not repeat itself, and the Swiss have learned from the mistakes related to bank secrecy: there are no privacy rights for suspected felons and their data.

Newspaper article: Schweizer Datentresore sind nicht sicher