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This is an area with lots of crackpots, but also lots of really interesting stuff.

How do you tell the good stuff from the crackpot?

The good ones are published in top machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and AI conferences and journal. The crackpot stuff doesn't survive peer review.

Here are a few good examples:
- Geff Hinton (U. Toronto): http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/
- Yoshua Bengio (U. Montreal: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/
- Yann LeCun (NYU): http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/index.html
- Andrew Ng (Stanford): http://ai.stanford.edu/~ang/
- Sebastian Seung (MIT): http://hebb.mit.edu/people/seung/
- David Lowe (U British Columbia): http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/

Are you referring to McBlare?

A little motory gadget thingy. In the meantime, get yourself some Autostitch.

Or, instead of paying $700 for the latest version of photoshop, use Autostich
It's free and not half bad (ILM even uses it)

Autostitch "is the world's first fully automatic 2D image stitcher." The order in which you take the photos in not important, just that you cover everything and that there is plenty of overlap. You don't have to worry about keeping the camera horizontal -- it will rotate individual shots as needed. And you can ZOOM in on certain shots for more detail. I've used it to merge 154 shots into one panorama. Free.

This may be a start to the explanation you are looking for: http://www.scq.ubc.ca/the-beginning-of-life-and-amphiphilic-molecules/ The early precursors for life were not made by chance, but as a part of the chemical development of Earth. It was not a matter or if, but when. The pieces were all here.

A "Girlie Man" Supposedly Lacks Not Only Physical Strength, But Nerve and Guts Putting Schwarzenegger's "girlie men" remarks in context helps to illuminate the stereotypes they further. First, consider his attack on the California legislators. Schwarzenegger argued, "They cannot have the guts to come out there in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you. I want to represent those special interests: the unions, the trial lawyers'. . . I call them girlie men. They should get back to the table, and they should finish this budget."

A "girlie man," in this view, lacks "guts" because he is beholden to special interests. His "girlieness" is a kind of "wimpiness" -- a lack of guts, a lack of strength, and an inability to speak with an independent mind, and get things accomplished. Conversely - the phrase implies -- "real" men have guts, courage, strength, and the capacity for strong leadership that serves the People directly. So given the choice, the phrase implies, we should prefer "real men" over "girlie men" as our political leaders. .

As we drove our 2008 model across first the Tobin Bridge to the Zakim Bridge and into the Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. Tunnel, the driver of the older WRX took perverse delight in passing on the right, then letting me pass, before repeatedly dropping in behind me and zooming by on one side or the other. The invitation was clear. "Let's play in traffic and see what you've got." The unspoken slur was: "Your new WRX is a cop-out."

The Arctic was a place where Henson could contribute his full potential. Not because Peary or his white companions were civil rights crusaders, but because the environment of the north simply demanded too much to afford the luxury of limiting any person's contributions on arbitrary racial grounds. By contrast, Henson's life outside the Arctic was a struggle against diminished expectations and unspoken slurs at best and outright racial hatred at worst. But in telling the story, Henson focuses on the exception, the kindness of the sea captain who tutored him and taught him to read, as the defining influence in his life.

I guess FreeLoader answers your call. Freeloader is a distributed storage system designed to harness the unused storage space of LAN-connected commodity desktops. A dedicated space manager maintains metadata such as node status, chunk distribution, and files attributes. The FreeLoader project is under active development. And can be found through the following link http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~samera/projects/freeloader/

That strikes me as somewhat disingenuous. The Yen has always been more closely equated with the cent than the dollar, Looking at the history of the Euro, it's pretty clear the value of your dollar is not as strong as it was, at least in comparison to the Euro (ie, you're not as rich as you were). Actually, that site is kind of interesting. The behaviour of your dollar compared to the Japanese's is very strange compared to a fairly consistent trend in the currencies of Canada, Britain, Australia, Malaysia, South Korea, China, Russia, the EU, or India. All of whom are major trade partners and/or highly competitive with the US. It's cherry picking a bit, I'd agree, because there are some counter-examples like Mexico, but with such a similar devaluation of your dollar happening throughout all these other markets, I wonder what's up with Japan.

That strikes me as somewhat disingenuous. The Yen has always been more closely equated with the cent than the dollar, Looking at the history of the Euro, it's pretty clear the value of your dollar is not as strong as it was, at least in comparison to the Euro (ie, you're not as rich as you were). Actually, that site is kind of interesting. The behaviour of your dollar compared to the Japanese's is very strange compared to a fairly consistent trend in the currencies of Canada, Britain, Australia, Malaysia, South Korea, China, Russia, the EU, or India. All of whom are major trade partners and/or highly competitive with the US. It's cherry picking a bit, I'd agree, because there are some counter-examples like Mexico, but with such a similar devaluation of your dollar happening throughout all these other markets, I wonder what's up with Japan.

It doesn't need to be very big. Even ground-based amateur astronomers are able to detect transiting exoplanets using consumer-grade imaging equipment. You basically need a CMOS camera that's sensitive enough, and know when and where to look. If you record the star's brightness over the expected period of time, you can see the difference in your own measurements.

The drawback of using Hubble to do this is that astronomers the world over are competing for time on it, so it's booked solid. The University of British Columbia has a satellite of its own, with a 150mm telescope (much smaller than Hubble's 2m) in orbit specifically to look for transiting extrasolar planets. They basically observe one star for months at a time, hoping to catch the dip in the star's brightness that would mean a planet is transiting. The telescope on this probe is probably about the same size, and since it's not going to be doing anything for the next year or so, why not point it at some candidate stars for that period? You might just get lucky. The fact that there's no atmospheric interference is really what makes the difference between discovering a jupiter-sized planet and an earth-sized planet with this method.

What happens when that script thread gets hung up and the firefox thread is waiting on it to complete to finish rendering the page? What's you've described is basically what is going on in browsers right now. Multithreading in the script level would allow for more greater stability and more efficient processing. Check out this demo for a great visual demonstration of the capabilities of multithreading on the problem of sorting.

UBC Electrical & Computer Engineering 474 used to have student robot competitions back in the 1998-2000 timeframe. They had autonomous maze mapping robot and treasure hunt competitions with a Motorola HC11 brain. The current project is at http://courses.ece.ubc.ca/474/index.html. Previous ones at http://courses.ece.ubc.ca/474/previous_termreports.html.

UBC Electrical & Computer Engineering 474 used to have student robot competitions back in the 1998-2000 timeframe. They had autonomous maze mapping robot and treasure hunt competitions with a Motorola HC11 brain. The current project is at http://courses.ece.ubc.ca/474/index.html. Previous ones at http://courses.ece.ubc.ca/474/previous_termreports.html.

The Toilet Seat Issue a la Game Theory

Using these words, search engine style indices and techniques can be used to make searching -- by supplying an example image area which can have its words computed -- quite fast.

The key bottle neck here is the clustering stage: reducing the original input of typically hundreds of features per frame -- multiplied by 25 frames per second by minutes, or hours, of video -- to a much smaller set of clusters. It looks like the work in the linked article is using a modified clustering algorithm which does not require all of the data to be in memory at once.

The TRECVID project is a challenge style exercise where groups compete to provide the best search results for a given set of queries where the search material is hours of video.

UBC has a telescope whose primary reflector is a spinning liquid mercury mirror http://www.astro.ubc.ca/LMT. It forms a paraboloidal reflective surface, which is one of the optimal reflector shapes, but can only be aimed at the zenith. A larger (6m diameter) version is being constructed for installation at the same facility near Vancouver.

Smaller liquid-mirror telescopes were designed in the late 19th century, and a 51cm diameter example was built in the early 20th century (by Robert Wood) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Wood. Wood's design suffered from intermittent ripples on the surface, but performed well at other times.

At least Canada is closer than the Moon, and easier to get to (not necessarily less inhospitable, of course).

Sounds like an application of autostitch. The downloadable demo version is pretty neat and fun to play with, if you have overlapping scenery photos, for example.

No, the demo is not rigged (and it's about 11 months old).

The whole thing is based on SIFT keypoints http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/keypoints/ . These are very powerful and work indeed as shown in the video/demo. Check autopano-sift http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sift / for a real application using them.

There is only a little problem, M$ cannot use SIFT commercially. The licence says "for research purposes only" and the US Patent 6,711,293, Asignee: The University of British Columbia protects SIFT.

Actually there's no need for a camera's "panoramic" mode any more. Check out Autostitch , a free for personal use program created by researchers at UBC. Essentially you take as many pictures as you want with varying amount of overlap. Each picture can be rotated differently and even vary somewhat in exposure, and this program automatically figures out which ones go where, even throwing out ones that are not part of the scene. It takes a ton of ram and some CPU speed but the result is better than any other method I've seen. Some examples here at the bottom of this page: AZ Snow Pictures.

In 2001, it was $1.42 to the pound. Now it's $2. It's not as bad as Carter, but it's not much better ($.70 for Carter, $.58 for Bush, Clinton was -$.43!). Throw in the fact that currency markets are starting to leave the dollar and switch to Euro or other currency and it doesn't really help Bush all that much.

I think it's importaint to point out that according to the 2000 census there were slightly more women living in the US then men. Also in general men are slightly more likely to enlist in the US army, and since the country is at war then that would leave even more women outnumber men in internet use.

Once you've thought about that, think of all the initiatives trying to get women interested in computers and computer sciences:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wics/
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/wccce/program04/Papers/mark.h tml
http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/club/girls.html
http://www.awc-hq.org/

We're defiantly not doing those things for young men.

Then due to a natural progression, if you're going to use a computer at all you might as well be online. So of course there's more women using the internet than men.

And don't forget that population of young women addicted to those "women run alt-pornography sites" like the suicide girls and gods girls etc.

The other salient questions are: What was their sample size? Did they test only one bottle of each flavour? What analytical method did they use? Were the samples protected from elevated temperatures? The standard iodometric titration for ascorbic acid is not so easy, usually classes of second year university analytical chemistry students only have about a 60% success rate in the determination of ascorbic acid in solution, at levels considerably higher than 70 ppm.

Here's the press release from UBC, and a SCIAM article.

2. Eric
3/28/2007 6:44:30 PM MST

Hello,

It seems that curingdeath.com are a bunch of thieving asshats.

http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/media/releases/200 7/mr-07-030.html?src=ubcca

I hope you get sued, you bunch of spamming jackoffs.

Felt the same way. UBC's has put a press release out. Here's the link.

http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/media/releases/200 7/mr-07-030.html?src=ubcca

The article is a link to a spam blog. The original content is in this press release, which was copied without attribution. The original source and contact information were removed, six ads were added, and a false claim of copyright was made.

The people behind this are Web Doodle LLC of Missoula, MT, run (as of 2002) by Branden Long. They have other similar spam blogs.

Actually Anonymous Scientist is right: almost every single object recognition system these days uses learning, and several are inspired by biology. For example, look at http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/research/norb/index.ht ml, or
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/papers/06mutch.pdf, or http://web.mit.edu/serre/www/Research.htm.

Hmm, I haven't kept up with the research but about 12 years ago I ran a simulation out to 200000x200000. I used a linked list data structure rather than an array to store the data since the typical density of live sites in GL is pretty low (~3%). If you're interested check out Fig 3.27 (page 69) of my MSc thesis.</blatant self-promotion> As I recall it took around 3 months to run on one of the latest Sparcstations at the time.

Animated demos for 15 different sorts, including radix sort, plus one broken sort: Sorting Algorithms Demo

And how would they work out how much to pay? Income taxes are subject to so many variations that they would also need to pay for an accountant. Then they should add the value of a professional tax consultation to the prize, which would increase the tax owed, etc... I don't think this series will converge

According to http://eh.net/hmit/exchangerates/pound.php, the last time you could buy more than two dollars for a pound was 1975. Maybe try waiting until the viagra has worn out before spouting off drivel.

Actually, the person you're replying to is correct. Try daily exchange rates rather than yearly averages.

The dollar traded for more than two pounds for a few days in September 1992.

This was a very famous economic event. I'm disappointed that you don't know about it, and chose to insult and harangue instead.

For a graph, see here:

http://fx.sauder.ubc.ca/cgi/fxplot?b=GBP&c=USD&rd= *&fd=1&fm=1&fy=1971&ld=31&lm=12&ly=2006&y=monthly& q=volume&f=png&a=lin&m=0&x=

On Tuesday it was over $1.99 for a short time.

14 years ago it was also over $1.99.

It has not been over $2 in my lifetime. (Yes, I'm over 13.)

There's a good analysis here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6195198.stm

From http://www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/transit.html:

The card requires firmware to be downloaded to the card first for it to work as a soundcard. While it appears on the usb bus with Vendor/ProductID of 0763/2806 this is a very primative usb device that does nothing except wait for firmware.

A firmware loader for M-Audio audio devices is available at http://usb-midi-fw.sourceforge.net/. Interestingly enough, the set-up procedure involves copying the firmware bin file from the Windows driver installation, which is subsequently used by the firmware loader.

Anyways, TFA makes some interesting points:

The firmware, although its being loaded to the device, is still firmware. Do distributions that demand an entirely free sofware environment ship drivers for devices with proprietary firmware? Of course they do. I'm not convinced that this should be any different.

I think that Theo de Raadt, of OpenBSD, has it right:

-azzurro

You could at least back up some arguments with further information.

http://www.scq.ubc.ca/?p=221

I think this link will explain what you were trying to say.

Job 9:8: "Who alone (A)stretches out the heavens
                  And (B)tramples down the waves of the sea;"
Isiah 40:22: "It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in."
Isiah 42:5: "Thus says God the LORD, Who created the heavens and stretched them out, Who spread out the earth and its offspring, Who gives breath to the people on it And spirit to those who walk in it,"

Dude. That is such a "stretch" of interpretation, I'm just going to laugh and say: "I hope you're kidding." You believe in what Nostradamus said too, right?

And, just as there is physical evidence of of Biblical authenticity, there is physical evidence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster:

http://www.scq.ubc.ca/?p=225

I worked for Pacific Press Service in Tokyo developing photo copyright and library tech until 94. I first saw a photograph search engine developed by Fujitsu around 92-93 I believe. It required the user to draw the type of image composition very roughly with a mouse and paintbox. So you would draw a horizon line, fill the bottom with blue and draw a yellow circle above if you wanted photos of the sea and sun. No wavelets at that time.

I then corresponded briefly with Ingrid Daubechies of AT&T who brought wavelets to the U.S., and was kind enough to send some of her papers. Wavelets are neat because it is like getting a paintbox full of different waveforms, localized as another poster mentions not just a fourier of the entire image. Anyway they are much better known now, so you can find it on the net.

This is not really the same as Barnsley's fractal compression one startup worked on around that time IIRC. They basically had a library of fractals which would be matched to image features, and once you had covered the entire image with them you would be able to zoom into it infinitely, since fractals are self-similar. You wouldn't necessarily get new detail but it would fool you into thinking you were. (I wonder if they liscensed it to anyone). They claimed 400:1 compression, etc. I don't know if they were the basis of LivePicture or if that was wavelet based.

These technologies all have two things in common, which is selecting an algorithmic strategy for talking about images, and storing it so efficiently that the data can be found quickly. The old Fujitsu system ran on a NEWS workstation IIRC, and it was blisteringly fast compared to any system I have ever seen. Only problem is doodles all look pretty much the same unless you are talented and patient.

It seems PNI (Picture Network Interactive)'s natural language recognition text searching for photos was the best, it was just text but used software supposedly developed for the White House. Only thing was they wanted to take over the entire industry with online contracts (this was around 1993) so everyone hated them. Nice tech though.

Anyway, wavelets may not be the entire solution but certainly they are a very useful way to describe data (not just a photo) and undoubtedly have lots of potential applications that just haven't materialized yet. Here's some tidbits Lancaster's links ImgSeek
  Perl Haar decomposition and seeking
  Blitzwave lib
  wvlt
  wvlt #2
  Wavelet.org
  WSQ used for FBI fingerprinting

Another nice visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping) page is Robert Sim's http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~simra/index.html , where he uses multi-camera vision to produce a much denser map.

Auto stitch

These folks had some problems (they mentioned that a picture was taken every 23 seconds and in that time clouds moved enough to make stitching a pain) but for general shots, wow, great app. Takes bloody forever (and you will notice a system slow down, even if you drop the process priority to idle), even on a 4400+ system, but it's certainly faster than doing it by hand in photoshop.

Installer is tiny too, it's not bloated like most software apps these days...

Theres a project like this in Iceland called DeCODE. They've been given a lot of power over the data collected, enough to make some people wary. It's a fair assumption that this project will face similar problems, although the measures governing DeCODE seem to protect the company much more than the individual. It will be interesting to see how Biobank handles this.

p.s. - for more detailed information that is slightly less product-based, you could look at this SIGGRAPH 2004 publication.

AutoStitch is a research project from the U of BC, but the demo app is advanced enough that you can just drop a dozen images into the thing and it figures out the rest. Much easier than any other tool I've used.

I know you asked about an Open source stitcher, but there's also Autostitch to have a look at. It's Windows-only, but from what I can tell, their demo version has no time limit, and it does an impressive job with braindead simplicity : select pictures, click go.

The Big Dig's not on here, yet. ;-) http://www.library.ubc.ca/scieng/engineeringfailur e/EngFailures.htm

What do you mean "long ago"? If the light hasn't reached us yet then it's not in our past light cone and therefore it's not in our past.

Suppose we send a signal towards the supernova as soon as we see it explode. Suppose that there is an observer, a really though one, staying close to the supernova as it goes off, who measures the time difference between the supernova explosion and our signal. Suppose that, as soon as he receives our signal, he sends another signal, with this data encoded, towards us. Suppose also, for simplicity, that all observers are at rest relative to each other and the supernova (they aren't really - stars move relative to each other - but that movement is too slow to cause much problems for our experiment).

Now, since light travels at a constant speed, the observer got our signal halfway between us sending it and us receiving the reply. Since both we and him are at rest relative to each other and supernova, we don't get any time dilation, and can use simple math to calculate when the nova exploded. Simply substract the time difference told to us by the other observer from the midpoint between us sending him the signal and receiving a reply. We'll arrive at a point in time somewhere before we observed the nova; whether that point is in the "distant" past or "near" past is a value judgement.

Another way of looking at this is simply understanding that light moves at a finite speed; so, if we observe the light from a distant event, that light was emitted at the moment of the event and took a nonzero time to reach us, and so the event must have happened at a nonzero time in the past.

Haven't you ever heard: the further you look in space, the further back you look in time ?

Or just read the page you linked to. It talks about causal past and future. It doesn't claim that events that we cannot yet observe due to the limited speed of light haven't yet happened, only that we can't be affected by them yet - which is pretty self-obvious, if you think about it a bit.

The Sun could have blown up 4 minutes ago, but we wouldn't know for another 4. It still blew up 4 minutes ago, it simply takes another 4 until this can be observed by us. Of course it's unlikely that the Sun would blow up suddenly, but - hey, what's that ligNO CARRIER.

What do they teach in relativity class these days?

Not enough, apparently. Which is a great pity, since relativity deals with the basic structure of time and space and the very nature of reality itself. It's utterly fascinating stuff, completely different from endlessly memorizing formulas and using them to calculate how much tension some wire has - that's fine for engineers, but relativity is the "actually, you can build a time machine and warp drive" theory and quantum mechanics are the dreams stuff is made of; that is where physics education should start, to give the student the motivation to go through the grind, knowing where the basics will lead.

I'm not sure what source he was using, but I can give at least one example:

http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2005/ARWU2005TOP500list .htm places UBC at 37th world-wide (30th in North America, 2nd in Canada) - http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2005/ARWU2005_Top100.ht m.

That study was published by the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, and compiled by researchers at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Institute of Higher Education http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/media/releases/200 4/mr-04-08.html.

This means that in Europe, this guys would be really 1337 hax0rs :)

Or, maybe in, say Canada, where we use metric and where UBC happens to be.

I read TFA, and it made no mention of speed, distance or any other aspect of the contest. The driver lies down, but how? On the stomache, or the back (with a periscope?). Were they inside to avoid being blown about (aboot?) by the wind?

Try reading harder next time -- TFA contains a link to the official website for those ambitious clickers who want to find out more than just a summary. From the home page, you can click to read the official 2006 rules and also look to the right for a link to the team websites. The UBC site contains many pictures including a nice one of how the driver lies down and also tech specs on the vehicle.

Any other questions?

I read TFA, and it made no mention of speed, distance or any other aspect of the contest. The driver lies down, but how? On the stomache, or the back (with a periscope?). Were they inside to avoid being blown about (aboot?) by the wind?

Try reading harder next time -- TFA contains a link to the official website for those ambitious clickers who want to find out more than just a summary. From the home page, you can click to read the official 2006 rules and also look to the right for a link to the team websites. The UBC site contains many pictures including a nice one of how the driver lies down and also tech specs on the vehicle.

Any other questions?

I read TFA, and it made no mention of speed, distance or any other aspect of the contest. The driver lies down, but how? On the stomache, or the back (with a periscope?). Were they inside to avoid being blown about (aboot?) by the wind?

Try reading harder next time -- TFA contains a link to the official website for those ambitious clickers who want to find out more than just a summary. From the home page, you can click to read the official 2006 rules and also look to the right for a link to the team websites. The UBC site contains many pictures including a nice one of how the driver lies down and also tech specs on the vehicle.

Any other questions?