How would something like this make money for Microsoft? I'm serious. It's a cool research project, but it has few concrete applications, in the near future, at least, and a very high chance of failure.
There are an enormous number of applications for this type of functionality, especially once they stop running NEURON (http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/) on supercomputing clusters and start developing smaller, more computationally efficient hardware-based solutions.
In machine vision and learning, for example, there would be an enormous potential for a simulated brain that could accurately mimic most, if not all, of the same visual and low-level thought capabilities as humans. As an overview, such a system could be deployed in nursing homes, independent living facilities, and homes to detect falls, monitor residents for early warning signs of various critical events/conditions and alert the appropriate staff, remind those with early Alzheimer's disease how to perform certain activities of daily living, and so on. In robotics, the same system would allow for the development of fully-autonomous platforms that would be aware of their environment, complete verbally-supplied instructions, work together to complete complex tasks, and much more. Both of these applications, let alone many others, would be multi-billion dollar industries for Microsoft, the former due to the sheer number of elderly people that would spring for such a system, especially if it was reasonably priced, so that they could "age in place", and the latter for basically revolutionizing the automated manufacturing industry.
Lactase persistence into adulthood is a relatively recent, as you speculated, and is thought to have been introduced approximately 10,000 years ago. For a nice overview, you can peruse:
D. M. Swallow, "Genetics of lactase persistence and lactose intolerance", Ann. Rev. Genet., 37: 197-219, 2003 E. J. Hollox, M. Poulter, M. Zvarik, V. Ferak, A. Krause, et al., "Lactase haplotype diversity in the Old World", Am. J. Hum. Genet., 68: 160-172, 2001 M. Slatkin and G. Bertorelle, "The use of intraallelic variability for testing neutrality and estimating population growth rate", Genetics, 158: 865-874, 2001 M. Slatkin, "Balancing selection at closely linked, overdominant loci in a finite population", Genetics, 154: 1367-1378, 2000 J. Metneki, A. Czeizel, S. Flatz, and G. Flatz, "A study of lactose absorption capacity in twins", Hum. Genet., 67: 296-300, 1984 G. Flatz, "Gene dosage effect on intestinal lactase activity demonstrated in vivo", Am. J. Hum. Genet., 36: 306-310, 1984 T. Sahi, "The inheritance of selective adult-type lactose malabsorption", Scand. J. Gastroentrerol., 9: 1-73, 1974 G. Flatz and H. W. Rotthauwe, "Evidence against nutritional adaption to tolerance to lactase", Humangenetik, 13" 118-125, 1971
Most, if not all authors, will be more than happy to send you the final copy of the manuscript if you email them, even if you aren't affiliated with a university or a researcher yet want still to learn about their work. In the case of old papers that can't be found on the Internet, which is common for some math journals that are no longer in print, I've found authors to be especially accommodating in sending hard copies.
But I do agree most of the graduating "computer engineers" I've interviewed barely knew how to code and had a few canned routines like bubble-sorting memorized. The ones claiming to be Microsoft certified were even more embarrassing.
I'm not sure you're aware, but, depending upon the school, an S.B. in computer engineering can be much more akin to an S.B. in electrical engineering than one in computer science. To elaborate, some computer engineering programs are part a joint department that focus almost entirely on circuit analysis and design, solid-state theory, (non-)linear/stochastic control, architecture design, electromagnetics, and much more, with very little, if any, emphasis on programming.
Like how in the 70s scientists all over the world proved and knew nuclear energy was causing an ice age but of course we all know how good their factual evidence turned out to be.
Or like how you're wrong about that, since there was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that Earth was headed into an ice age:
T. C. Peterson, W. M. Connolley, and J. Feck, "The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 89: 1325-1337, 2008.
Stuff looks promising indeed, it's just sad that so many people refuse to even consider the possibilities.
I will admit that there are plenty of possibilities, as there are with every embedded platform/microcontroller that I have either designed or utilized in my research over the years. However, the Raspberry Pi, while nice for some, is nothing about which people should be constantly harping week after week, especially on Slashdot.
Including a processor on the backside of the PaperTab wouldn't likely be a huge problem, as there are multiple research groups investigating ultralow-power, flexible, organic electronics, e.g.,
G. H. Gelinck, et al., "Flexible active matrix displays and shift registers based on solution-processed organic transistors", Nature Mater., 3: 106, 2004 K. Nomura, et al., "Room-temperature fabrication of transparent flexible thin-film transistors using amorphous oxide semiconductors", Nature, 432: 488-492, 2004 B. Yoo, et al., "High-performance solution-deposited n-channel organic transistors and their complementary circuits", Adv. Mater., 19: 4028, 2007 H. Klauk, et al., "Ultralow-power organic complementary circuits", Nature, 445: 745, 2007 W. Xiong, et al., "A 3-V, 6-bit C-2C digital-to-analog converter using complementary organic thin-film transistors on glass", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 45: 1380-1388, 2010 H. Marien, et al., "A fully integrated delta sigma ADC in organic thin-film transistor technology on flexible plastic foil", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 46: 276-284, 2011 K. Myny, et al., "Unipolar organic transistor circuits made robust by dual-gate technology", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 46: 1223-1230, 2011 K. Myny, et al., "An 8-bit, 40-instructions-per-second organic microprocessor on plastic foil", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 47: 284-291, 2012
Beyond that, there are already flexible batteries on the market.
I would have loved this when I was growing up, considering that programmable robots at that time were limited to industry and research labs at universities.
In any event, the asking price seems a bit too high for what LEGO are offering and with what's now available today; touching on just one facet, after a cursory glance on Mouser/DigiKey, PCB manufacturing companies, and 3D printing shops, the so-called intelligent brick, along with its circuitry innards, could easily be fabricated on a one-off basis for under $75-100 USD. For $350 USD, they should have at least thrown in a decent CMOS camera and more servos.
Oh it's not just you: although, I can agree with some of what holophrastic is imparting, his behavior makes him out to be an incredibly picayune individual.
I think my professional millionaire job will be safe for the foreseeable future, except in those countries with high inflation rate or with a currency with an exchange rate that is not on near-equal footing with either the US dollar, British pound sterling, or the Euro.
Speaking as an academic at one of the schools you listed, it's not worth my time to edit Wikipedia entries, as I get no credit for my contributions that go toward advancing my career, let alone the state of the art, unless I spend an inordinate amount of time to make a noticeable impact. Instead, I'm better off sharing my knowledge in a less volatile yet still easily-accessible medium, such as a freely available e-book that also offers a printed version through a publisher, e.g., one akin to Jon Dattorro's excellent treatise on convex optimization and Euclidean distance geometry (https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~dattorro/mybook.html); in this instance, I not only have something tangible that I can list when it comes time for a tenure review, but can also be assured that key concepts won't be wiped away by some ignorant, but perhaps well-meaning, editor.
[...] This is a full scan of the original pages, including illustrations. It's looking pretty good.
Some of the pages are garbled, or, at the very least, a tad difficult to parse, due to the ensuing or previous page(s) bleeding through to the others during the scanning process. (Granted, this phenomena gave me an excellent idea for an IEEE CVPR/TPAMI paper about a variational, non-local image inpainting scheme for fixing such things in scanned, double-sided documents.)
I find it incredibly humorous that you have the gall to refer to us as "drones" yet can't even manage to establish the veracity of the very list you mindlessly parrot.
For starters, First Solar has neither filed for bankruptcy nor is failing; granted, they did have a rather nasty Q1 2012, as they lost $449.4M (USD), which they made up for in Q2 2012, by posting a profit of $111M (USD), and likely will do the same in Q3, given their current stock price. To find out more about their history, you can peruse their official quarterly financial results that are made available to investors:
Some individuals may not understand the intermediate steps if they aren't intimately familiar with the field, e.g., someone new to probabilistic models may not know why you can rewrite Sethuraman's sum-based, stick-breaking construction of the two-parameter Poisson-Dirichlet/Pitman-Yor process or the one-parameter Dirichlet processes in a multinomial-based, stick-breaking form. Nevertheless, that does not necessarily mean that the context or contributions of your work won't be unknown to others.
To elaborate, I recently wrote a paper wherein I used copious amounts of differential geometry to recast a high-level machine-vision methodology in a more general, conducive fashion, then proceeded to extend and use the tools of the field to massage that scheme so that its algorithmic implementation would have a much lower computational complexity. Although the paper was sent to the top-tier computer vision/pattern analysis journal, which has been host to a few articles that make use of differential geometry, I doubt that most of the readers will care about the pages of theorems and derivations, as most are not mathematicians, and, instead, just home in on the two important, end-product equations I list, either code them up or download my code, and find that they produce the same outputs but with the new version requiring fewer calculations; further, In this case, while they may not fully grasp how I moved from one representation to the other, they can at least see that the end result is bonafide and incorporate my scheme in their work.
You're correct that it would be quite expensive, considering that just a 28nm mask alone runs around $2.8M to $3M (USD) these days. However, with around $6M (USD) in hand, I'd be able to get some investors on board to match or even triple that amount, which would give me a better amount of wiggle room.
MIMT (multiple instructions, multiple threads) is a term that I coined in one of my recent journal papers, which I just sent out for review, for a ray tracing architecture. While there were, arguably, better terms that I could have employed, e.g., coherent multi-threading, I preferred MIMT, since it immediately lets readers know that the work is different from the current SIMT (single instruction, multiple threads) paradigm in commodity graphics hardware.
And for the GPUs: yes, I know that a modern GPU (or even a core i7) is more powerful. But, I unfortunately cannot plug a modern GPU into my mobile robot/drone/quadrocopter in order to do things like real-time vision processing/neural networks/machine learning/AI. The epiphany consumes something between 2-5 Watts (in words: TWO watts for 64-cores). I am currently not aware of anything coming close to the performance of the parallella for the mobile vision processing applications mentioned above.
If you have around $3-6M (USD) to spare, I could have a 25mm x 25mm chip fabricated, using 28nm CMOS technology at either TSMC or GlobalFoundaries, with a 2-core ARM Cortex-A9 and a custom 384-core MIMT architecture, the latter of which would hit above 500 GFLOPS in single-precision peak performance.
It's pretty easy to refute your "facts", considering that you didn't bother checking most of your links. Going only partway through your list, I found a good chunk of the schools you listed didn't run Windows:
1. Covering people? He likes putting people in his debt AND he probably doesn't have a life because he's has issues.
2. Most articles published: again no life.
3. New training to share? Nice but more than likely it's because he likes being a know-it-all expert...
Did it never cross your mind that maybe this particular individual just enjoys his work?
As an aside, I've known plenty of people, myself included, who have pursued careers, e.g., as researchers, engineers, or physicians, despite having complete financial security from birth, simply because they relish working and have the talent for their particular job, wanted to make a difference, wanted to better themselves, etc.
In the (incomplete) hypothetical situation you proposed, there would be a myriad number of paths that I'd take depending on various circumstances.
To elaborate on just one, if I was reviewing candidates for tenure-track junior faculty and research positions in an area that I was familiar with, I'd sit down and read through all of their publications. (Since I am a prolific reader, I can easily go through 300 full-length journal papers, in my spare time, every 2-3 weeks; considering prospective faculty reviews take months, I'd have plenty of time.) Once I had a handle on what each person had done, along with asking about their contribution to each paper, assuming multiple co-authors, I'd then start to weed through applicants based upon factors like venue prestige, publication count, publication rate, topic relevancy (some universities currently have general hiring freezes, due to budget cuts, but will open up positions for those focused on a particular subject area), etc. (To me, the prestige of a journal, or, in some disciplines, a conference, is important, as it shows that a person is willing to put in more effort to succeed. At the same time, however, I would not be hesitant to favor someone who was an industrious scholar and produced a great deal of papers in a mixture of mid- and high-tier venues.)
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad the FTC just can't apply for an overly broad patent and sue all of the automated callers in the Eastern District of Texas.
How would something like this make money for Microsoft? I'm serious. It's a cool research project, but it has few concrete applications, in the near future, at least, and a very high chance of failure.
There are an enormous number of applications for this type of functionality, especially once they stop running NEURON (http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/) on supercomputing clusters and start developing smaller, more computationally efficient hardware-based solutions.
In machine vision and learning, for example, there would be an enormous potential for a simulated brain that could accurately mimic most, if not all, of the same visual and low-level thought capabilities as humans. As an overview, such a system could be deployed in nursing homes, independent living facilities, and homes to detect falls, monitor residents for early warning signs of various critical events/conditions and alert the appropriate staff, remind those with early Alzheimer's disease how to perform certain activities of daily living, and so on. In robotics, the same system would allow for the development of fully-autonomous platforms that would be aware of their environment, complete verbally-supplied instructions, work together to complete complex tasks, and much more. Both of these applications, let alone many others, would be multi-billion dollar industries for Microsoft, the former due to the sheer number of elderly people that would spring for such a system, especially if it was reasonably priced, so that they could "age in place", and the latter for basically revolutionizing the automated manufacturing industry.
Lactase persistence into adulthood is a relatively recent, as you speculated, and is thought to have been introduced approximately 10,000 years ago. For a nice overview, you can peruse:
D. M. Swallow, "Genetics of lactase persistence and lactose intolerance", Ann. Rev. Genet., 37: 197-219, 2003
E. J. Hollox, M. Poulter, M. Zvarik, V. Ferak, A. Krause, et al., "Lactase haplotype diversity in the Old World", Am. J. Hum. Genet., 68: 160-172, 2001
M. Slatkin and G. Bertorelle, "The use of intraallelic variability for testing neutrality and estimating population growth rate", Genetics, 158: 865-874, 2001
M. Slatkin, "Balancing selection at closely linked, overdominant loci in a finite population", Genetics, 154: 1367-1378, 2000
J. Metneki, A. Czeizel, S. Flatz, and G. Flatz, "A study of lactose absorption capacity in twins", Hum. Genet., 67: 296-300, 1984
G. Flatz, "Gene dosage effect on intestinal lactase activity demonstrated in vivo", Am. J. Hum. Genet., 36: 306-310, 1984
T. Sahi, "The inheritance of selective adult-type lactose malabsorption", Scand. J. Gastroentrerol., 9: 1-73, 1974
G. Flatz and H. W. Rotthauwe, "Evidence against nutritional adaption to tolerance to lactase", Humangenetik, 13" 118-125, 1971
If that's the case, you can grab the paper by Dacke, et al. from: https://mega.co.nz/#!ytIz2bpL!S2P0Nk4NigHmr4Y0keSURlNzNElroFnUzx23nqKG0js and that of Wu and Dickman from: https://mega.co.nz/#!z5ohjYza!HZafDHCHTh8r1XcxKqOS6CuT4epGwK6PUh6ARCJbwd0
Most, if not all authors, will be more than happy to send you the final copy of the manuscript if you email them, even if you aren't affiliated with a university or a researcher yet want still to learn about their work. In the case of old papers that can't be found on the Internet, which is common for some math journals that are no longer in print, I've found authors to be especially accommodating in sending hard copies.
Here's to Opportunity and, hopefully, another ten years!
S.B. is the acronym for a Bachelor of Science, or, rather, Science Bachelor, at institutions like MIT and Harvard.
But I do agree most of the graduating "computer engineers" I've interviewed barely knew how to code and had a few canned routines like bubble-sorting memorized. The ones claiming to be Microsoft certified were even more embarrassing.
I'm not sure you're aware, but, depending upon the school, an S.B. in computer engineering can be much more akin to an S.B. in electrical engineering than one in computer science. To elaborate, some computer engineering programs are part a joint department that focus almost entirely on circuit analysis and design, solid-state theory, (non-)linear/stochastic control, architecture design, electromagnetics, and much more, with very little, if any, emphasis on programming.
Like how in the 70s scientists all over the world proved and knew nuclear energy was causing an ice age but of course we all know how good their factual evidence turned out to be.
Or like how you're wrong about that, since there was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that Earth was headed into an ice age:
T. C. Peterson, W. M. Connolley, and J. Feck, "The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 89: 1325-1337, 2008.
Stuff looks promising indeed, it's just sad that so many people refuse to even consider the possibilities.
I will admit that there are plenty of possibilities, as there are with every embedded platform/microcontroller that I have either designed or utilized in my research over the years. However, the Raspberry Pi, while nice for some, is nothing about which people should be constantly harping week after week, especially on Slashdot.
Including a processor on the backside of the PaperTab wouldn't likely be a huge problem, as there are multiple research groups investigating ultralow-power, flexible, organic electronics, e.g.,
G. H. Gelinck, et al., "Flexible active matrix displays and shift registers based on solution-processed organic transistors", Nature Mater., 3: 106, 2004
K. Nomura, et al., "Room-temperature fabrication of transparent flexible thin-film transistors using amorphous oxide semiconductors", Nature, 432: 488-492, 2004
B. Yoo, et al., "High-performance solution-deposited n-channel organic transistors and their complementary circuits", Adv. Mater., 19: 4028, 2007
H. Klauk, et al., "Ultralow-power organic complementary circuits", Nature, 445: 745, 2007
W. Xiong, et al., "A 3-V, 6-bit C-2C digital-to-analog converter using complementary organic thin-film transistors on glass", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 45: 1380-1388, 2010
H. Marien, et al., "A fully integrated delta sigma ADC in organic thin-film transistor technology on flexible plastic foil", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 46: 276-284, 2011
K. Myny, et al., "Unipolar organic transistor circuits made robust by dual-gate technology", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 46: 1223-1230, 2011
K. Myny, et al., "An 8-bit, 40-instructions-per-second organic microprocessor on plastic foil", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 47: 284-291, 2012
Beyond that, there are already flexible batteries on the market.
I would have loved this when I was growing up, considering that programmable robots at that time were limited to industry and research labs at universities.
In any event, the asking price seems a bit too high for what LEGO are offering and with what's now available today; touching on just one facet, after a cursory glance on Mouser/DigiKey, PCB manufacturing companies, and 3D printing shops, the so-called intelligent brick, along with its circuitry innards, could easily be fabricated on a one-off basis for under $75-100 USD. For $350 USD, they should have at least thrown in a decent CMOS camera and more servos.
Oh it's not just you: although, I can agree with some of what holophrastic is imparting, his behavior makes him out to be an incredibly picayune individual.
Fucking apologist. Don't you get it? I wouldn't touch an iPad with a fucking barge pole. I don't want to be part of your fucking ecosystem.
By the same token, you are also an apologist. However, unlike the poster you berate, who came off as pragmatic, you sound like a petulant child.
I think my professional millionaire job will be safe for the foreseeable future, except in those countries with high inflation rate or with a currency with an exchange rate that is not on near-equal footing with either the US dollar, British pound sterling, or the Euro.
Speaking as an academic at one of the schools you listed, it's not worth my time to edit Wikipedia entries, as I get no credit for my contributions that go toward advancing my career, let alone the state of the art, unless I spend an inordinate amount of time to make a noticeable impact. Instead, I'm better off sharing my knowledge in a less volatile yet still easily-accessible medium, such as a freely available e-book that also offers a printed version through a publisher, e.g., one akin to Jon Dattorro's excellent treatise on convex optimization and Euclidean distance geometry (https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~dattorro/mybook.html); in this instance, I not only have something tangible that I can list when it comes time for a tenure review, but can also be assured that key concepts won't be wiped away by some ignorant, but perhaps well-meaning, editor.
[...] This is a full scan of the original pages, including illustrations. It's looking pretty good.
Some of the pages are garbled, or, at the very least, a tad difficult to parse, due to the ensuing or previous page(s) bleeding through to the others during the scanning process. (Granted, this phenomena gave me an excellent idea for an IEEE CVPR/TPAMI paper about a variational, non-local image inpainting scheme for fixing such things in scanned, double-sided documents.)
I find it incredibly humorous that you have the gall to refer to us as "drones" yet can't even manage to establish the veracity of the very list you mindlessly parrot.
For starters, First Solar has neither filed for bankruptcy nor is failing; granted, they did have a rather nasty Q1 2012, as they lost $449.4M (USD), which they made up for in Q2 2012, by posting a profit of $111M (USD), and likely will do the same in Q3, given their current stock price. To find out more about their history, you can peruse their official quarterly financial results that are made available to investors:
(Q2 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=587754&filekey=43642762-a08b-47d3-bc57-62ee73d6b300&filename=Q2_2012_Web_Schedule_final.pdf
(Q1 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=566130&filekey=eb2e729f-983d-466b-bf42-d09461c40ddd&filename=Q1_2012_Web_Schedule_Final_IR.pdf
(Q4 2011) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=546601&filekey=6975fcbc-0591-43f3-8d96-89e3e3ed2a14&filename=Q4_2011_Web_Schedule_Final.pdf
(Q3 2011) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=514964&filekey=d9532d11-f0d6-43b8-8aec-2af1d4f57991&filename=Q3_2011_Web_Schedule_Template_FINAL.pdf
(Q2 2011) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=489149&filekey=7d51e913-c933-40b8-8cf1-57cf28583eba&filename=Key_Quarterly_Financial_Data.pdf
and the 2012 reports that they sent to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC):
(August 1, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-33&cik=1274494
(Jun 29, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-38&cik=1274494
(May 24, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-27&cik=1274494
(April 17, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1193125-12-165498&cik=1274494
(March 19, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-19&cik=1274494
(February 28, 2012)
Some individuals may not understand the intermediate steps if they aren't intimately familiar with the field, e.g., someone new to probabilistic models may not know why you can rewrite Sethuraman's sum-based, stick-breaking construction of the two-parameter Poisson-Dirichlet/Pitman-Yor process or the one-parameter Dirichlet processes in a multinomial-based, stick-breaking form. Nevertheless, that does not necessarily mean that the context or contributions of your work won't be unknown to others.
To elaborate, I recently wrote a paper wherein I used copious amounts of differential geometry to recast a high-level machine-vision methodology in a more general, conducive fashion, then proceeded to extend and use the tools of the field to massage that scheme so that its algorithmic implementation would have a much lower computational complexity. Although the paper was sent to the top-tier computer vision/pattern analysis journal, which has been host to a few articles that make use of differential geometry, I doubt that most of the readers will care about the pages of theorems and derivations, as most are not mathematicians, and, instead, just home in on the two important, end-product equations I list, either code them up or download my code, and find that they produce the same outputs but with the new version requiring fewer calculations; further, In this case, while they may not fully grasp how I moved from one representation to the other, they can at least see that the end result is bonafide and incorporate my scheme in their work.
You're correct that it would be quite expensive, considering that just a 28nm mask alone runs around $2.8M to $3M (USD) these days. However, with around $6M (USD) in hand, I'd be able to get some investors on board to match or even triple that amount, which would give me a better amount of wiggle room.
MIMT (multiple instructions, multiple threads) is a term that I coined in one of my recent journal papers, which I just sent out for review, for a ray tracing architecture. While there were, arguably, better terms that I could have employed, e.g., coherent multi-threading, I preferred MIMT, since it immediately lets readers know that the work is different from the current SIMT (single instruction, multiple threads) paradigm in commodity graphics hardware.
And for the GPUs: yes, I know that a modern GPU (or even a core i7) is more powerful. But, I unfortunately cannot plug a modern GPU into my mobile robot/drone/quadrocopter in order to do things like real-time vision processing/neural networks/machine learning/AI. The epiphany consumes something between 2-5 Watts (in words: TWO watts for 64-cores). I am currently not aware of anything coming close to the performance of the parallella for the mobile vision processing applications mentioned above.
If you have around $3-6M (USD) to spare, I could have a 25mm x 25mm chip fabricated, using 28nm CMOS technology at either TSMC or GlobalFoundaries, with a 2-core ARM Cortex-A9 and a custom 384-core MIMT architecture, the latter of which would hit above 500 GFLOPS in single-precision peak performance.
It's pretty easy to refute your "facts", considering that you didn't bother checking most of your links. Going only partway through your list, I found a good chunk of the schools you listed didn't run Windows:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.pace.edu
F5 BIG-IP Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) 28-Sep-2012 198.105.44.27 Pace University
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.ucsc.edu
Linux Apache 28-Sep-2012 128.114.109.5 University of California, Santa Cruz
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.mbc.edu
Linux Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) 28-Sep-2012 72.32.6.118 Rackspace Hosting
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.lynchburg.edu
Linux nginx/1.0.15 28-Sep-2012 50.56.4.21 Cloud Loadbalancing as a Service-LBaaS (DFW)
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.uncc.edu
Linux Apache 28-Sep-2012 152.15.219.131 University of North Carolina at Charlotte
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.umt.edu
Linux Apache 28-Sep-2012 150.131.194.46 University of Montana
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=spalding.edu
Linux Apache 13-Sep-2012 216.135.72.163 BLUEGRASS.NET
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.biola.edu
Linux nginx 28-Sep-2012 199.19.144.31 Biola University, Inc.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.immaculata.edu
Linux Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) 28-Sep-2012 98.129.134.83 Immaculata University
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.tiu.edu
Linux Apache-Coyote/1.1 28-Sep-2012 38.126.15.210 PSINet, Inc.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.trevecca.edu
Linux Apache 28-Sep-2012 174.129.33.200 Amazon.com, Inc.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.trident.edu
Linux Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) 14-Jan-2012 216.23.173.234 Jazel, LLC
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.canisius.edu
Linux Apache-Coyote/1.1 28-Sep-2012 138.92.8.121 Canisius College
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.bentley.edu
Linux nginx 28-Sep-2012 184.73.245.212 Amazon.com, Inc.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.scranton.edu
Linux Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) 28-Sep-2012 134.198.4.83 University of Scranton
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.emerson.edu
unknown Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny8 with Suhosin-Patch 28-Sep-2012 199.94.80.103 Level 3 Communications, Inc.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.newpaltz.edu
F5 BIG-IP Apache 28-Sep-2012 137.140.1.48 SUNY College at New Paltz
http://
1. Covering people? He likes putting people in his debt AND he probably doesn't have a life because he's has issues.
2. Most articles published: again no life.
3. New training to share? Nice but more than likely it's because he likes being a know-it-all expert...
Did it never cross your mind that maybe this particular individual just enjoys his work?
As an aside, I've known plenty of people, myself included, who have pursued careers, e.g., as researchers, engineers, or physicians, despite having complete financial security from birth, simply because they relish working and have the talent for their particular job, wanted to make a difference, wanted to better themselves, etc.
In the (incomplete) hypothetical situation you proposed, there would be a myriad number of paths that I'd take depending on various circumstances.
To elaborate on just one, if I was reviewing candidates for tenure-track junior faculty and research positions in an area that I was familiar with, I'd sit down and read through all of their publications. (Since I am a prolific reader, I can easily go through 300 full-length journal papers, in my spare time, every 2-3 weeks; considering prospective faculty reviews take months, I'd have plenty of time.) Once I had a handle on what each person had done, along with asking about their contribution to each paper, assuming multiple co-authors, I'd then start to weed through applicants based upon factors like venue prestige, publication count, publication rate, topic relevancy (some universities currently have general hiring freezes, due to budget cuts, but will open up positions for those focused on a particular subject area), etc. (To me, the prestige of a journal, or, in some disciplines, a conference, is important, as it shows that a person is willing to put in more effort to succeed. At the same time, however, I would not be hesitant to favor someone who was an industrious scholar and produced a great deal of papers in a mixture of mid- and high-tier venues.)