I built a primitive single-camera scanner using a cardboard box, a piece of glass, and a point-and-shoot camera and tripod I had handy, after reading that site. It was a pain lifting the glass to turn the page, and I spent a lot of time trying different lights (and locations of lights), but It worked well enough that I decided to pursue it seriously.
I started looking at building one of the better scanners using plans on that site. But after a lot of time thinking about it, and reading about the many decisions that went into the Archivist scanner kits, I finally decided to just buy one of their kits. Yes, it was $1200, but in the end I decided that just getting good quality wood, glass, and lights wouldn't be all that cheap, and I don't have a lot of free time, so it was worth it to me.
I got a couple of refurbished cameras from Canon, and a raspberry pi to drive the cameras. I use the SpreadPi software, and connect to it via a web browser on my laptop (I don't have room for a monitor/keyboard near the scanner, but can lay my laptop on a nearby bed), and a super-cheap foot pedal that I use to trigger the cameras.
I can scan about 1300 pages/hour (about twice as fast as when I started several months ago). Spreadpi then lets me download a tar file containing the JPG images (from the web browser). I then spend about 2 minutes per book opening a few pages in Gimp (the front cover, back cover, one even page, and one odd page) to determine cropping regions, then use a Perl script that calls ImageMagick to crop and rescale everything and stitch into a PDF. I reduce the image size a bit to reduce file size without compromising readability much. I also convert to a grayscale colormap for B&W books to further reduce file size.
I save all the original JPGs because I expect later I may re-do the post-processing in a better way. E.g. for now I am not doing OCR. I'm mostly scanning children's books and math books, in preparation for an extended international trip. I didn't want to haul a bunch of my kids' books with me, nor the part of my library I need for my work. But for now, the 2 minutes or so of attention per book I need to devote (after physical scanning) makes this not feel like a chore.
Lately, occasionally when I go to buy something on amazon, it won't let me add it to my cart. I then notice it says "this item reserved ecxlusively for Prime members" or something like that. OK, my money is not good enough for amazon, I will buy it elsewhere. I don't know why they think I'm going to shell out a pile of extra money because of this tactic.
Unless kid #2 in fact had tried very hard but still failed, and says to himself, "Even my best attempt was not good enough. Next time I won't try so hard; that way, if I fail, I can just claim/believe it's because I didn't try my best." There are many ways to try and protect one's confidence in the face of failure.
Not that I disagree with the basic premise here, that it's better to praise kids for effort (something they can control) than intrinsic talents.
I also started on X11 at RPI around 1987, first in the CS Dept Sun Lab and later the PAWL. The CS Dept had some cool stuff back then -- Sequent Balance 21000 16-node shared-memory machine, Intel 32-node hypercube with message-passing, an SGI workstation, and the CAM-6 (Cellular Automata Machine). And their main workhorse VAX running some flavor of BSD if I remember correctly. They also had some other machine running AT&T System V, but I didn't like it as much because of the differences from BSD.
I wrote some low-level X11 code to display raster images very quickly for lattice animation, and still use the code to this day (for a while I used it under Linux, now I use it under Mac OS-X). It's so low-level, the first version I wrote for 1-bit displays depended on the order of bits within bytes and bytes within words, and when I ran it on a DEC workstation one time I found that that architecture had things packed together in the opposite order, and I needed to tweak the code to make it work there. Later I eventually updated the code to use 8-bit colormaps. I got pretty spoiled, being able to write some code and then still use it 20+ years later.
I wish I had mod points, as that was a very nice summary of the US system. The only slight edit may be to also point out that even when you get to the Associate Professor level, you're so used to working full bore that it's hard to step back and enjoy/appreciate the sudden release of pressure due to job security (that you've fought so hard for for so many years). That is, what you said about that at the Full Prof level also can apply at Assoc Prof level.
Also, as someone who grew up programming an Apple ][+, I love your username. I entered that command so many times, I guess I'll never forget it.
Private telecomm company GWI has already announced plans with the University of Maine (also part of Gig.U) to do this in the nearby Orono and Old Town communities.
I'm curious to see the outcome a few years down the road, how it really affects anything.
When that happens, you revise the paper to make it more clear how the material differs from the earlier, smaller paper, and submit to another journal (if that journal won't consider a re-submission), and also in the cover letter to the editor/reviewers emphasize why this new paper is worthy of being published even with the existence of the prior one.
At least with journal articles you have the opportunity to provide these extra out-of-band communications, and there is room for back-and-forth exchanges between the authors and the reviewers/editors. With grant proposals, if you get rejected, that's it, there's no chance to respond to the reviewers and resubmit for them to re-evaluate. You wait another year (depending on the agency/program; the program I use at NSF accepts proposals once per year) and submit a revised proposal, and get a completely different review panel, which wants to see completely different things (and may even criticize things which were added to the proposal to address comments from the previous year's reviewers).
I have reviewed more than 50 journal articles over the past ten years, and have not been paid a penny for it. No money was paid to my institution/department, either. It's voluntary service to the profession.
Pretty much the same story here -- I have a TracFone Motorola V170 -- I think it's about 5 years old, and I paid about $30 for the phone back then. I buy a $100 card once a year, which has more minutes than I need (I still need to buy the card to extend the service for another year). My battery was dying on me a couple years ago, but a friend had the same phone and switched to T-Mobile, so I cannibalized his battery. I'd actually love to have a smartphone, but don't want to pay $80/month for one.
I'm not sure if the above works on the latest (4th-gen) iPod Touch with camera, or only iPhone.
I'm not affiliated with Pleco, other than as a very happy customer of theirs for about 8 years. I first got their electronic Chinese dictionary software for a Palm Pilot back then, and then more recently migrated (for free) to their iOS version for my iPod Touch. The dictionaries they license aren't cheap, but they're very good, and their software and support is great; I highly recommend them.
I used to think R was very specific for stats as well, but eventually a colleague told me he was pretty sure it could do most of what I used Matlab for (spatial stochastic models, basically continuous-time stochastic cellular automata). See my comment and link to Matlab/R reference over at: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1084091&cid=26371723
I used to use Matlab quite a lot (mostly for prototyping simulations and for visualization; I use C for my "real" simulations which take a lot of CPU time, since they run so much faster in C). I learned R about 2 years ago, and found that it can do pretty much everything Matlab can that I need for my own research.
Anyway, I wrote up a "Matlab / R Reference" that translates the basics between the two packages. It doesn't have highly specialized stuff, but many people have found it handy. I use my own reference quite a bit myself, since these days I mix up commands between the two packages quite a bit. It's available at: http://www.math.umaine.edu/faculty/hiebeler/comp/matlabR.html
If you want to get the rows of an array (x) with 0 on column 1, you do x[x[,1]==0]. basically, x[,1] gives you a one column table with the appropriate column, x[,1]==0 gives you a vector of true,false values, which you can use to index into the array again.
While that does pull out the rows which have 0 in column 1, it packs those return values into a vector (the first element of each of the selected rows, followed by the second element of the selected rows, etc.). If you want to extract those rows of the matrix, and keep them in matrix form, then this will do it (note the extra comma): x[x[,1]==0,]
Yes, R is pretty nice in that sense. Matlab can do many of the same tricks, e.g. the Matlab equivalent of my command above is x(x(:,1)==0,:) Matlab doesn't have a simple way to do your version that I know of, since Matlab doesn't automatically recycle a vector index to a matrix. You'd have to do something like x(repmat(x(:,1)==0,n,1)) where n is the number of columns in x -- or to avoid hardcoding the n, you could do x(repmat(x(:,1)==0,size(x,2),1)) which is starting to get ugly isn't it?
I am relatively new to the OS-X world myself (been using it for about 7 months now; I was a Linux user for 10 years, and a SunOS Unix user for about 10 years before that). At first I was annoyed about not being able to do some of the key remapping under OS-X that I used to do under Linux (e.g. I didn't see any easy way to turn the backquote/tilde key into an escape/tilde key, and the escape key into a backquote/tilde key).
Despite the name, it's not only for MacBooks; I use it on my iMacs as well. The author is very receptive to suggestions, plus you can download the source and add stuff yourself if you like. I'm not saying this will necessarily solve the original poster's problems, but I've found this thing handy enough that I thought it was worth mentioning here.
I've got many Chinese dictionaries. Most of them are sorted by pronunciation (i.e. alphabetized by the pinyin), but also include a small index which lets you look up characters based on the components of the written characters (the radicals). One difficulty is that it takes a fair bit of experience to know which part of a character is the primary radical. E.g. the character xiang3 (to want / to miss / to think) has 3 components: mu4 (wood), mu4 (eye), and xin1 (heart), which all look roughly equally "prominent". For some characters, it takes a few tries to find it. And not just for foreigners; I've occasionally found characters which even native Chinese people have trouble looking up in dictionaries (though granted, they usually don't need to look up characters, so they sometimes don't have a lot of actual experience using the radical-index part of dictionaries).
Anyway, I've got other dictionaries which include other methods for looking up written characters. One of the ones I found easier to use when I first started was a dictionary from mainland China, where the index table is first broken down by the total number of strokes in the entire character, and then within each value, broken down by the first two strokes used when writing the character. Even if I don't know which radical is the "primary" one, I learned the proper stroke order for writing characters pretty well from the beginning, so I generally didn't have trouble using this dictionary. (I don't think the primary radical is always the first one when writing the character?)
It seems perhaps it's this latter method that was used to order the countries marching at the Olympics, but I didn't bother looking at the details closely enough (i.e. try to determine what ordering was used for countries whose first characters had the same number of strokes).
Oh, and just a random bit of info, another interesting dictionary I have is called a "reverse" dictionary. E.g. normally to look up "zhi1 dao4" ("to know"), you'd look under "zhi1". But in the reverse dictionary, you look under "dao4", the second character. That's a handy one for those times you remember the second character in a word but not the first. That one's also from mainland China.
Go talk to a professor about doing research. They would be the ones to know. Even as an undergrad, you might be able to draw a salary working on a grant project.
Definitely. I'm a prof. in a math dept, my work is in mathematical biology (population ecology and epidemiology, a combination of mathematical models and computer simulation models), and I've had about 10 undergrads working with me this past year. It'll probably be going up to about 15 students, thanks to another grant I just got.
If you are a motivated undergrad, you should seek out such opportunities. When I was a student, I knocked on a lot of prof's doors looking for work. One project led to the next. Once you get a good reputation, faculty will look for ways to support you.
...one of my absolute favorites, the switch-document shortcut (Command-backtick/tilde). Some people actually seem to enjoy Alt-tabbing through a dozen visually identical document icons like Windows does it, but one of my absolute favorite features of the OS X interface is that Command-Tab shortcut switches between applications, not windows. So you switch to the application you want, then if you want to stay within that application and switch between its open windows/documents you just use Cmd-backtick.
Is there a way to just switch between windows though? I've been using Linux since 1998, and do most of my navigating by keyboard rather than mouse. I'm thinking of finally switching to a Mac, but as far as I can tell, the interface can't quite do what I want.
Here's an example which demonstrates my situation -- say I've got 3 Firefox windows open, and 4 terminal windows. I see something in one of the Firefox windows, and want to type something into my terminal window while still looking at that Firefox window. Under the various versions of Linux I use, I have an easy way to just warp to a single terminal window, and do what I want. But on Macs, if I command-tab to my terminal window, ALL of the terminal windows pop up, which obscures my view of the Firefox window I still want to see. From my several times playing around with other people's Macs (and asking them how to do what I want), I haven't been able to find a way to just zip back to one particular terminal window, bringing only that one to the foreground and making it active, without changing the arrangement of other windows, unless I use the mouse. And I really don't like using the mouse if it's at all possible to avoid it.
I've also been playing Excite Truck about 20-40 minutes per night since around late-December. Just a couple of nights ago, I finally got S rank on all of the Mirror tracks (which get unlocked after you get S on the Super Excite level). Now I'm just finishing up all of the achievements (still need a few more S ranks, super airs, and super rings I think). Then I need to do the Challenge levels, and I'll have beaten the whole thing. The various Super Mario Karts have been mostly my favorite games so far, but I'm really enjoying Excite Truck, and the whole turning/flailing the controller interface.
I run RedHat 8.0 (with a window manager from RedHat 5.0) on a 4-year-old machine in my office; I use LaTeX to prepare all my grant proposals, and produce PDF output. I can get through most of my proposal submissions to the National Science Foundation via their FastLane system, although my university requires me to fill out an Excel spreadsheet. I suppose I could do it under OpenOffice, although the spreadsheet doesn't really work right in the old version of OO I'm running.
So I have a copy of VMWare with Windows XP in it, which I use mostly just for doing my grant budget spreadsheets.
FastLane lets me upload my PDF files which make up the bulk of a proposal, and fill out some forms in the web browser (mozilla, since I couldn't get FireFox running on this old version of Linux, it needed some newer C libraries or something). FastLane is really quite platform-independent, it works great for me. Our university built an in-house system for doing the internal side of grant proposals (getting approvals from one's chair, dean, etc. and having the university Sponsored Programs office approve the budget); they basically copied FastLane's style, so it can also be done from a web browser under pretty much any OS people are using around here.
I did submit a proposal to the National Institutes of Health last year, and had to use the stupid PureEdge software. It was a pain, but it did work under VMWare. I still wrote the actual project description in LaTeX under Linux, and just imported the PDF output into PureEdge.
I'll be unhappy if, as some people here have hinted, FastLane goes away and we're all required to go through grants.gov.
As other people have mentioned, yeah it shouldn't be "too easy" to ask for a pile of money from the government. But like other things I deal with (such as fighting for tenure), you expect a certain amount of difficulty, but sometimes people go above and beyond to make sure things are really more difficult than they need to be. I know I do that on many occasions too.:-)
(As for why I run such an old version of Linux, I've customized this old window manager in some ways that I haven't been able to find out how to do under a modern version of Gnome/KDE; when I finally find a way to, I'll likely upgrade. But that's another story.)
I often use space bar to page down in my web browser. I like the way, if you hit space bar while already at the bottom of the page, it adds another 10 results to the list, so you can continue hitting space bar to keep looking at more matches. It works for both web search and image search. I hate having to reach for the mouse to get to the next page of results (or using the mouse in general -- it's too slow, compared to keyboarding).
Maybe that's why it uses javascript, which others have been complaining about.
Even if you're copying your text for part of this paper from your older paper - it shouldn't need a reference. You can't plagerize yourself, just like you can't violate your own copyright.
When you publish an article in most journals, you sign paperwork assigning copyright of the work to the journal. If you want to e.g. include a figure from that paper in a book you later write, you need to get permission from the publisher of the journal, just as you would if you wanted to include a figure from someone else's article.
Also, a related example -- different faculty have different opinions on this, but in my experience, most would agree -- if you turn in a project for one course, you can't simply turn in that same project for another course. If you do so, without telling anyone, it's a kind of academic dishonesty, since it's somewhat implied that the project was new work you did for this class. (When I teach, I make it clear to the students that they can't do that. But I tell them if they want to expand upon a project they did before, that's fine, they just need to let me know in advance that's what they're doing, and I'll evaluate them based on the new parts.) There are gray areas and differing opinions with respect to plagiarism.
Actually, you can. You can ask a question, maybe as simple as "could you repeat that?" That's one virtue of attending a live lecture. You can not only rewind, but you can rewind and have the same thing said in a different way which may be more helpful, just by asking an appropriate question.
You make plenty of other good points, e.g. you can't fast-forward the speaker. And I know some people hate to ask "could you repeat that?" because they're afraid everyone else already understood it and would consider it a waste of time to hear it again. Although in my experience, as cliched as it may sound, if one person asks a question, there are usually several other people in the room with the same or similar questions in mind.
So I'm not picking on you in particular; I actually agree with much of your post. There are just plenty of benefits to having students actually attend the lectures. One, if I make a mistake during lecture (I don't make a lot, but it still happens occasionally), if enough people are in the room paying attention, someone is likely to catch it and say something. If I'm just making podcasts in an empty room, or a sparsely-populated room, the mistake may not be caught, and then a whole bunch of people will download and listen to incorrect material.
On some occasions I will deliberately say something "wrong" to get a reaction out of the students, and have them correct me. Usually I do this with things which at first seem like they could be right, i.e. I do it with subtle points, to show them how it's easy to go off in the wrong direction.
On many occasions I will work through some ideas interactively with the class. I don't just want to recite concepts to them like a textbook, I want them to play with the ideas in their mind as we go, and see how things fit together.
If the teaching happens interactively, when I ask questions in class, I can get an assessment of how well people are understanding the concepts. Two-way interactions are necessary in that sense. If I wait until the students have done homeworks and those homeworks are graded, we've already moved on to other things before I realize that most people didn't understand a previous topic.
When the heck are they going to apply this technology to the stupid PDA!?!?! I just love having to reload and reinstall every single !#%$@ thing ever time I happen to leave the thing in a drawer for a few weeks. Totally useless as a occasional reference device unless you're using and charging it every single !#@$@% day!
I don't know if you'll see this since the thread is 12 days old, but I just got a Palm Tungsten E2 which uses flash memory, so if the battery runs down it doesn't lose its contents. That's quite nice, since with my previous PDA (Handspring Visor), I had the same worry as you.
Slashdot Mirror
I built a primitive single-camera scanner using a cardboard box, a piece of glass, and a point-and-shoot camera and tripod I had handy, after reading that site. It was a pain lifting the glass to turn the page, and I spent a lot of time trying different lights (and locations of lights), but It worked well enough that I decided to pursue it seriously.
I started looking at building one of the better scanners using plans on that site. But after a lot of time thinking about it, and reading about the many decisions that went into the Archivist scanner kits, I finally decided to just buy one of their kits. Yes, it was $1200, but in the end I decided that just getting good quality wood, glass, and lights wouldn't be all that cheap, and I don't have a lot of free time, so it was worth it to me.
I got a couple of refurbished cameras from Canon, and a raspberry pi to drive the cameras. I use the SpreadPi software, and connect to it via a web browser on my laptop (I don't have room for a monitor/keyboard near the scanner, but can lay my laptop on a nearby bed), and a super-cheap foot pedal that I use to trigger the cameras.
I can scan about 1300 pages/hour (about twice as fast as when I started several months ago). Spreadpi then lets me download a tar file containing the JPG images (from the web browser). I then spend about 2 minutes per book opening a few pages in Gimp (the front cover, back cover, one even page, and one odd page) to determine cropping regions, then use a Perl script that calls ImageMagick to crop and rescale everything and stitch into a PDF. I reduce the image size a bit to reduce file size without compromising readability much. I also convert to a grayscale colormap for B&W books to further reduce file size.
I save all the original JPGs because I expect later I may re-do the post-processing in a better way. E.g. for now I am not doing OCR. I'm mostly scanning children's books and math books, in preparation for an extended international trip. I didn't want to haul a bunch of my kids' books with me, nor the part of my library I need for my work. But for now, the 2 minutes or so of attention per book I need to devote (after physical scanning) makes this not feel like a chore.
Lately, occasionally when I go to buy something on amazon, it won't let me add it to my cart. I then notice it says "this item reserved ecxlusively for Prime members" or something like that. OK, my money is not good enough for amazon, I will buy it elsewhere. I don't know why they think I'm going to shell out a pile of extra money because of this tactic.
Unless kid #2 in fact had tried very hard but still failed, and says to himself, "Even my best attempt was not good enough. Next time I won't try so hard; that way, if I fail, I can just claim/believe it's because I didn't try my best." There are many ways to try and protect one's confidence in the face of failure.
Not that I disagree with the basic premise here, that it's better to praise kids for effort (something they can control) than intrinsic talents.
I also started on X11 at RPI around 1987, first in the CS Dept Sun Lab and later the PAWL. The CS Dept had some cool stuff back then -- Sequent Balance 21000 16-node shared-memory machine, Intel 32-node hypercube with message-passing, an SGI workstation, and the CAM-6 (Cellular Automata Machine). And their main workhorse VAX running some flavor of BSD if I remember correctly. They also had some other machine running AT&T System V, but I didn't like it as much because of the differences from BSD.
I wrote some low-level X11 code to display raster images very quickly for lattice animation, and still use the code to this day (for a while I used it under Linux, now I use it under Mac OS-X). It's so low-level, the first version I wrote for 1-bit displays depended on the order of bits within bytes and bytes within words, and when I ran it on a DEC workstation one time I found that that architecture had things packed together in the opposite order, and I needed to tweak the code to make it work there. Later I eventually updated the code to use 8-bit colormaps. I got pretty spoiled, being able to write some code and then still use it 20+ years later.
I wish I had mod points, as that was a very nice summary of the US system. The only slight edit may be to also point out that even when you get to the Associate Professor level, you're so used to working full bore that it's hard to step back and enjoy/appreciate the sudden release of pressure due to job security (that you've fought so hard for for so many years). That is, what you said about that at the Full Prof level also can apply at Assoc Prof level.
Also, as someone who grew up programming an Apple ][+, I love your username. I entered that command so many times, I guess I'll never forget it.
Private telecomm company GWI has already announced plans with the University of Maine (also part of Gig.U) to do this in the nearby Orono and Old Town communities.
I'm curious to see the outcome a few years down the road, how it really affects anything.
When that happens, you revise the paper to make it more clear how the material differs from the earlier, smaller paper, and submit to another journal (if that journal won't consider a re-submission), and also in the cover letter to the editor/reviewers emphasize why this new paper is worthy of being published even with the existence of the prior one.
At least with journal articles you have the opportunity to provide these extra out-of-band communications, and there is room for back-and-forth exchanges between the authors and the reviewers/editors. With grant proposals, if you get rejected, that's it, there's no chance to respond to the reviewers and resubmit for them to re-evaluate. You wait another year (depending on the agency/program; the program I use at NSF accepts proposals once per year) and submit a revised proposal, and get a completely different review panel, which wants to see completely different things (and may even criticize things which were added to the proposal to address comments from the previous year's reviewers).
I have reviewed more than 50 journal articles over the past ten years, and have not been paid a penny for it. No money was paid to my institution/department, either. It's voluntary service to the profession.
Pretty much the same story here -- I have a TracFone Motorola V170 -- I think it's about 5 years old, and I paid about $30 for the phone back then. I buy a $100 card once a year, which has more minutes than I need (I still need to buy the card to extend the service for another year). My battery was dying on me a couple years ago, but a friend had the same phone and switched to T-Mobile, so I cannibalized his battery. I'd actually love to have a smartphone, but don't want to pay $80/month for one.
http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ is what you are describing, for Yahoo/Bing/Google.
Pleco Software ( http://www.pleco.com/ ) has a version of this for their excellent Chinese dictionary software. There's a video of the prototype at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc
I'm not sure if the above works on the latest (4th-gen) iPod Touch with camera, or only iPhone.
I'm not affiliated with Pleco, other than as a very happy customer of theirs for about 8 years. I first got their electronic Chinese dictionary software for a Palm Pilot back then, and then more recently migrated (for free) to their iOS version for my iPod Touch. The dictionaries they license aren't cheap, but they're very good, and their software and support is great; I highly recommend them.
I used to think R was very specific for stats as well, but eventually a colleague told me he was pretty sure it could do most of what I used Matlab for (spatial stochastic models, basically continuous-time stochastic cellular automata). See my comment and link to Matlab/R reference over at:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1084091&cid=26371723
I used to use Matlab quite a lot (mostly for prototyping simulations and for visualization; I use C for my "real" simulations which take a lot of CPU time, since they run so much faster in C). I learned R about 2 years ago, and found that it can do pretty much everything Matlab can that I need for my own research.
Anyway, I wrote up a "Matlab / R Reference" that translates the basics between the two packages. It doesn't have highly specialized stuff, but many people have found it handy. I use my own reference quite a bit myself, since these days I mix up commands between the two packages quite a bit. It's available at:
http://www.math.umaine.edu/faculty/hiebeler/comp/matlabR.html
While that does pull out the rows which have 0 in column 1, it packs those return values into a vector (the first element of each of the selected rows, followed by the second element of the selected rows, etc.). If you want to extract those rows of the matrix, and keep them in matrix form, then this will do it (note the extra comma):
x[x[,1]==0,]
Yes, R is pretty nice in that sense. Matlab can do many of the same tricks, e.g. the Matlab equivalent of my command above is
x(x(:,1)==0,:)
Matlab doesn't have a simple way to do your version that I know of, since Matlab doesn't automatically recycle a vector index to a matrix. You'd have to do something like x(repmat(x(:,1)==0,n,1)) where n is the number of columns in x -- or to avoid hardcoding the n, you could do x(repmat(x(:,1)==0,size(x,2),1)) which is starting to get ugly isn't it?
I am relatively new to the OS-X world myself (been using it for about 7 months now; I was a Linux user for 10 years, and a SunOS Unix user for about 10 years before that). At first I was annoyed about not being able to do some of the key remapping under OS-X that I used to do under Linux (e.g. I didn't see any easy way to turn the backquote/tilde key into an escape/tilde key, and the escape key into a backquote/tilde key).
I then came across the following little program:
http://www.pqrs.org/tekezo/macosx/keyremap4macbook/
Despite the name, it's not only for MacBooks; I use it on my iMacs as well. The author is very receptive to suggestions, plus you can download the source and add stuff yourself if you like. I'm not saying this will necessarily solve the original poster's problems, but I've found this thing handy enough that I thought it was worth mentioning here.
I've got many Chinese dictionaries. Most of them are sorted by pronunciation (i.e. alphabetized by the pinyin), but also include a small index which lets you look up characters based on the components of the written characters (the radicals). One difficulty is that it takes a fair bit of experience to know which part of a character is the primary radical. E.g. the character xiang3 (to want / to miss / to think) has 3 components: mu4 (wood), mu4 (eye), and xin1 (heart), which all look roughly equally "prominent". For some characters, it takes a few tries to find it. And not just for foreigners; I've occasionally found characters which even native Chinese people have trouble looking up in dictionaries (though granted, they usually don't need to look up characters, so they sometimes don't have a lot of actual experience using the radical-index part of dictionaries).
Anyway, I've got other dictionaries which include other methods for looking up written characters. One of the ones I found easier to use when I first started was a dictionary from mainland China, where the index table is first broken down by the total number of strokes in the entire character, and then within each value, broken down by the first two strokes used when writing the character. Even if I don't know which radical is the "primary" one, I learned the proper stroke order for writing characters pretty well from the beginning, so I generally didn't have trouble using this dictionary. (I don't think the primary radical is always the first one when writing the character?)
It seems perhaps it's this latter method that was used to order the countries marching at the Olympics, but I didn't bother looking at the details closely enough (i.e. try to determine what ordering was used for countries whose first characters had the same number of strokes).
Oh, and just a random bit of info, another interesting dictionary I have is called a "reverse" dictionary. E.g. normally to look up "zhi1 dao4" ("to know"), you'd look under "zhi1". But in the reverse dictionary, you look under "dao4", the second character. That's a handy one for those times you remember the second character in a word but not the first. That one's also from mainland China.
Go talk to a professor about doing research. They would be the ones to know. Even as an undergrad, you might be able to draw a salary working on a grant project.
Definitely. I'm a prof. in a math dept, my work is in mathematical biology (population ecology and epidemiology, a combination of mathematical models and computer simulation models), and I've had about 10 undergrads working with me this past year. It'll probably be going up to about 15 students, thanks to another grant I just got.
If you are a motivated undergrad, you should seek out such opportunities. When I was a student, I knocked on a lot of prof's doors looking for work. One project led to the next. Once you get a good reputation, faculty will look for ways to support you.
...one of my absolute favorites, the switch-document shortcut (Command-backtick/tilde). Some people actually seem to enjoy Alt-tabbing through a dozen visually identical document icons like Windows does it, but one of my absolute favorite features of the OS X interface is that Command-Tab shortcut switches between applications, not windows. So you switch to the application you want, then if you want to stay within that application and switch between its open windows/documents you just use Cmd-backtick.
Is there a way to just switch between windows though? I've been using Linux since 1998, and do most of my navigating by keyboard rather than mouse. I'm thinking of finally switching to a Mac, but as far as I can tell, the interface can't quite do what I want.
Here's an example which demonstrates my situation -- say I've got 3 Firefox windows open, and 4 terminal windows. I see something in one of the Firefox windows, and want to type something into my terminal window while still looking at that Firefox window. Under the various versions of Linux I use, I have an easy way to just warp to a single terminal window, and do what I want. But on Macs, if I command-tab to my terminal window, ALL of the terminal windows pop up, which obscures my view of the Firefox window I still want to see. From my several times playing around with other people's Macs (and asking them how to do what I want), I haven't been able to find a way to just zip back to one particular terminal window, bringing only that one to the foreground and making it active, without changing the arrangement of other windows, unless I use the mouse. And I really don't like using the mouse if it's at all possible to avoid it.
I've also been playing Excite Truck about 20-40 minutes per night since around late-December. Just a couple of nights ago, I finally got S rank on all of the Mirror tracks (which get unlocked after you get S on the Super Excite level). Now I'm just finishing up all of the achievements (still need a few more S ranks, super airs, and super rings I think). Then I need to do the Challenge levels, and I'll have beaten the whole thing. The various Super Mario Karts have been mostly my favorite games so far, but I'm really enjoying Excite Truck, and the whole turning/flailing the controller interface.
I run RedHat 8.0 (with a window manager from RedHat 5.0) on a 4-year-old machine in my office; I use LaTeX to prepare all my grant proposals, and produce PDF output. I can get through most of my proposal submissions to the National Science Foundation via their FastLane system, although my university requires me to fill out an Excel spreadsheet. I suppose I could do it under OpenOffice, although the spreadsheet doesn't really work right in the old version of OO I'm running.
:-)
So I have a copy of VMWare with Windows XP in it, which I use mostly just for doing my grant budget spreadsheets.
FastLane lets me upload my PDF files which make up the bulk of a proposal, and fill out some forms in the web browser (mozilla, since I couldn't get FireFox running on this old version of Linux, it needed some newer C libraries or something). FastLane is really quite platform-independent, it works great for me. Our university built an in-house system for doing the internal side of grant proposals (getting approvals from one's chair, dean, etc. and having the university Sponsored Programs office approve the budget); they basically copied FastLane's style, so it can also be done from a web browser under pretty much any OS people are using around here.
I did submit a proposal to the National Institutes of Health last year, and had to use the stupid PureEdge software. It was a pain, but it did work under VMWare. I still wrote the actual project description in LaTeX under Linux, and just imported the PDF output into PureEdge.
I'll be unhappy if, as some people here have hinted, FastLane goes away and we're all required to go through grants.gov.
As other people have mentioned, yeah it shouldn't be "too easy" to ask for a pile of money from the government. But like other things I deal with (such as fighting for tenure), you expect a certain amount of difficulty, but sometimes people go above and beyond to make sure things are really more difficult than they need to be. I know I do that on many occasions too.
(As for why I run such an old version of Linux, I've customized this old window manager in some ways that I haven't been able to find out how to do under a modern version of Gnome/KDE; when I finally find a way to, I'll likely upgrade. But that's another story.)
I often use space bar to page down in my web browser. I like the way, if you hit space bar while already at the bottom of the page, it adds another 10 results to the list, so you can continue hitting space bar to keep looking at more matches. It works for both web search and image search. I hate having to reach for the mouse to get to the next page of results (or using the mouse in general -- it's too slow, compared to keyboarding).
Maybe that's why it uses javascript, which others have been complaining about.
Even if you're copying your text for part of this paper from your older paper - it shouldn't need a reference. You can't plagerize yourself, just like you can't violate your own copyright.
When you publish an article in most journals, you sign paperwork assigning copyright of the work to the journal. If you want to e.g. include a figure from that paper in a book you later write, you need to get permission from the publisher of the journal, just as you would if you wanted to include a figure from someone else's article.
Also, a related example -- different faculty have different opinions on this, but in my experience, most would agree -- if you turn in a project for one course, you can't simply turn in that same project for another course. If you do so, without telling anyone, it's a kind of academic dishonesty, since it's somewhat implied that the project was new work you did for this class. (When I teach, I make it clear to the students that they can't do that. But I tell them if they want to expand upon a project they did before, that's fine, they just need to let me know in advance that's what they're doing, and I'll evaluate them based on the new parts.) There are gray areas and differing opinions with respect to plagiarism.
It is worse 'live' since I can't rewind you.
Actually, you can. You can ask a question, maybe as simple as "could you repeat that?" That's one virtue of attending a live lecture. You can not only rewind, but you can rewind and have the same thing said in a different way which may be more helpful, just by asking an appropriate question.
You make plenty of other good points, e.g. you can't fast-forward the speaker. And I know some people hate to ask "could you repeat that?" because they're afraid everyone else already understood it and would consider it a waste of time to hear it again. Although in my experience, as cliched as it may sound, if one person asks a question, there are usually several other people in the room with the same or similar questions in mind.
So I'm not picking on you in particular; I actually agree with much of your post.
There are just plenty of benefits to having students actually attend the lectures. One, if I make a mistake during lecture (I don't make a lot, but it still happens occasionally), if enough people are in the room paying attention, someone is likely to catch it and say something. If I'm just making podcasts in an empty room, or a sparsely-populated room, the mistake may not be caught, and then a whole bunch of people will download and listen to incorrect material.
On some occasions I will deliberately say something "wrong" to get a reaction out of the students, and have them correct me. Usually I do this with things which at first seem like they could be right, i.e. I do it with subtle points, to show them how it's easy to go off in the wrong direction.
On many occasions I will work through some ideas interactively with the class. I don't just want to recite concepts to them like a textbook, I want them to play with the ideas in their mind as we go, and see how things fit together.
If the teaching happens interactively, when I ask questions in class, I can get an assessment of how well people are understanding the concepts. Two-way interactions are necessary in that sense. If I wait until the students have done homeworks and those homeworks are graded, we've already moved on to other things before I realize that most people didn't understand a previous topic.
In case it matters, I am a math professor BTW.
Surely someone will have a good description of this photo of Anousheh Ansari.
When the heck are they going to apply this technology to the stupid PDA!?!?! I just love having to reload and reinstall every single !#%$@ thing ever time I happen to leave the thing in a drawer for a few weeks. Totally useless as a occasional reference device unless you're using and charging it every single !#@$@% day!
I don't know if you'll see this since the thread is 12 days old, but I just got a Palm Tungsten E2 which uses flash memory, so if the battery runs down it doesn't lose its contents. That's quite nice, since with my previous PDA (Handspring Visor), I had the same worry as you.