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User: npuzzle

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  1. Re:But on Montreal Union Wants a Camera On Every Policeman's Uniform · · Score: 1

    Since when does fresh water not count as a natural resource? Quebec has the largest fresh water reserves in Canada (Statistics Canada) and largely contributes to Canada containing 3 of the world's renewable freshwater reserves (Environment Canada).

    (FYI: there are more senators in Quebec than Alberta for historical reasons. This was adopted to ensure that both French- and English-speakers from Quebec were represented appropriately in the Senate Senate of Canada)

  2. The Walking Dead? on Ask Slashdot: How Do I Get My Spouse To Start Gaming With Me? · · Score: 1

    Try the like of "The Walking Dead" by Telltale Games... It's an adventure game in which your decisions (mainly conversational) affect the course of the story. Put that in a post-apocalyptic world where zombies outnumber us and it'll keep you both on edge. I got my girlfriend who is the most anti-gaming person on the planet to play and she demands for more!

  3. This webpage has a redirect loop on Student Publishes Extensive Statistics On the Population of Middle-Earth · · Score: 1

    1...2...3... and...Slashdotted

  4. Re:Does anyone know a good app.. on Video Captchas are Hard for Computers to Understand but Easy for Humans (Video) · · Score: 1

    Most Captchas that we encounter rely on some form of pattern recognition (whether it's static or dynamic) to work. The computer vision community has been studying (and solving!) related problems for decades and for much more complex tasks. It's sad to see how researchers tend to forget about the past.

    I do my PhD research in applying computer vision algorithms to the medical field. You would be amazed to see how trivial these Captcha pattern recognition puzzles are compared to problems like brain template mapping, automatic tumor segmentation, vasculature extraction and others. These all involve some kind of pattern recognition but for which there isn't even a true answer or "gold standard" as we say.

    In other words, it's no surprise that the answer to these "new" Captchas can be found by digging in the existing scientific literature. Until someone comes up with a paradigm shift...

  5. What about those 500,000 apps? on Why America Doesn't Need More Tech Giants Like Apple · · Score: 1

    It's arguable that Apple as a business might not directly create as many jobs as a traditional manufacturing business; however, Apple certainly fosters the creation of "collateral" jobs with myriads of developers working night and day to produce iOS apps. As of today, Apple has approved more than 500,000 of them (source).

  6. Re:Iran is led by an engineer.... on Libya Elects Engineer To Acting Prime Minister Post · · Score: 1

    He may indeed be spouting plenty of nonsense; however, I wouldn't be so sure about the legitimacy of his PhD. His PhD was in transportation engineering and planning (could it get even more nebulous?), while he was the mayor of a province (source).

    Set aside all the controversy regarding the abundance and legitimacy of PhD graduates in his entourage (source), as a PhD student myself, I find it hard to believe that he could complete a PhD degree in a reasonable amount of time while working full-time as the mayor of a large province (Ardabil).

  7. Re:Managing Perceptions on Amazon Says Hardware, Not Hackers, Caused Outage · · Score: 1

    Actually, I think it would be worse for Amazon to admit that they did suffer a DDoS. I can easily imagine the more "technically challenged" people confusing an attack with an actual break-in. A break-in would imply that their accounts are exposed, including personal data, and could potentially cause a threat to them (impersonation, blackmailing, etc).

  8. It is being done for the heart on The Future of the Most Important Human Brain · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The same applies to the dissection of other organs as well. For instance, any dissection of the heart is inherently biased towards the cutting planes defined by the dissector (source). The true arrangement of muscle fibers in the left ventricle of the heart (more precisely the existence of sheet structure) is still a subject of hot debate because of this. Obviously, one might think that by now, we should be able to just pick an organ and throw it into the best relevant imaging scanner (CT, MRI, PET, etc.). The truth is, there is still anatomical information that even state-of-the-art medical imaging modalities cannot reliably reveal.

    As an example, consider DT-MRI that measures the diffusion of water molecules along the tissue fibers in an organ. The discretization in the data is such that only the local average orientation of the diffusion of water is known at any given location. To obtain more useful anatomical information, the full fiber pathway in a region needs to be reconstructed, a task called fiber tractography. Different computational methods based on different anatomical assumptions lead to results that are often contradictory (as is the case in the heart models described in the article cited above) and since there is no ground truth (remember that the dissection is biased), we currently hit a dead-end.

    Hopefully, as more dissections (like this one) are performed and the data is made available publicly, we will eventually be able to faithfully reconcile pieces of what we observe in medical conditions, in medical scanners, and on the dissection table.

  9. Re:Meanwhile on Neurosurgeons Use MRI-Guided Lasers To Destroy Tumors · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Many heart problems can be solved through prevention; sadly, the same cannot be said for many neurological conditions.