According to the Times Higher, a single postgraduate research student brings in around 90K pounds in funding per year to the relevant department. So a roomful of postgrad's is going to bring in a good million a year. Some foreign students in the UK are even lucky enough to get to manage their own funding budget.
That sounds just like the UK as well. On an university open day visit, all the students in my high-school had to register with the careers office as to their area of interest (different departments were coming in at different times). Out of a year of 200 students, 100 expressed interest in gaining a degree with around 90 of those interested in accountancy. Simply because it was the one career path that had the highest earning potential and the least contact hours at university, and the professional body strictly regulated the number of people entering university. Ironically, such a course required 5 Highers with A's, while a Computer Science degree only required around two Highers at B in Mathematics and Physics.
I would guess that 'laughingcoder' is talking about desktop hardware systems for professional CAD engineering in the mid 1980's to late 1990's. In these cases, the application developer would actually certify workstations (both UNIX workstations and PC's with $1000 graphics (de)accelerators), and you could only buy such a system from a licensed dealer. At this time, the UNIX vendors would charge thousands of $$$$ just to get a basic compiler, and even more for the optimised libraries and GUI API's.
Needless to say, many users chose to use open source compilers such as 'gcc' instead, along with OSF/Motif.
Although I definitely agree with what the home computer users talked about - my undergraduate years were in the mid 1980's. The IBM PC was introduced at this time, but with only a four colour CGA graphics card. Compared to other systems such as the Atari's, Amiga's, etc... all of which could display 16 colours (or even 256), this was really a step backward. It wasn't until VGA or even SVGA that the PC caught up with the basic home computers (and an audio card was still an option feature, let alone one or more analog controller ports).
There was a tactic developed by James Maskelyne towards the end of World War II, that allowed the Suez Canal to be defended against German fighter pilots. He basically took a searchlight and placed a set of tin reflectors on top of the search light, which were then made to rotate rapidly. This had the effect of creating rotating cartwheels of dark and bright patches of light in the area around the searchlight. Any pilot who flew above this area would become disorientated due to the mismatch between the perceived motion from the brains centres of balance and the visual cues seen through the aircraft windscreen (optic flow).
I would guess that this portable system creates enough glare in the eye to make moving bands of light appear on the retina. With a wide enough beam, this will disorientate an entire crowd.
Same here... I always set my xterm windows to white text over dark navy blue. Whenever I get a new install of Microsoft Visual Studio, I usually end up spending an afternoon trying to get the colour scheme "back to normal".
The human eye has 100 million neurons per per eye of five types, but there are only around 1 million neurons per optic nerve (arranged in bundles of 1000).
To implement a visual search engine you need to be able to perform the following:
texture segmentation - splitting up a picture into segments of distinct objects. In a panoramic scene, you want to split the picture up into objects such as sky, ocean, waves, beach, boats, pier, wall, people, animals. As a psychological experiment, you can show someone a picture , point to a particular point and ask them what the first word that the associate with that point is. Then you will see how every scene becomes segmented by our own vision systems.
Basic image segmentation is implemented using edge detection by Fourier Transforms (FFT, IFFT, DFT). This is a very computation intensive stage that is typically implemented using DSP's, GPU's or even dedicated ASIC's. Data used by the FFT can be in any dimension 1D (audio/radar), 2D (images) and 3D (volume visualisation). But to match the resolution of a human eye, you would need a 100 Megapixel floating point framebuffer.
texture classification - having identified the silhouette of an object, now attempt to match the contents to a particular object. Simple ways include colour histograms and silhouette matching. More advanced methods attempt to simulate the first few layers of the human retina using Gabor filters, Ring filters and Wedge filters. But just to model a single type of retinal cell requires one or more FFT operations for an entire image. And there are at least twelve different types of such cells. For efficiency precalculated results of sample images are generated (these are referred to as feature vectors) and then compared against the results of any new image. For a really technical explanation of how human vision works have a look at The organisation of the retina and visual system
texture retrieval - the actual design of the search engine to retrieve images through content rather than just keyword:
Thanks for the link. Interesting system with the touch pad. After trying the webpage demos, it definitely seems to be the simplest and most efficient method for entering text given the constraint of a small screen.
I was really thinking more of a circular menu system (all the letters/options/menus arranged in a circle) with a motion sensitive thumb controller (like on a laptop keyboard).
According to this article, European countries have the highest defence budgets World arms industry, and are also major suppliers of weapons. Miliary expenditures. But maybe all of that goes on pension funds.
How about if all the options of the menu were arranged in a circle around a central point, and the input device was one of those directional sensitive controllers. Then choosing a menu option would just be a matter of choosing the correct direction.
Sounds like an end of year prank at a college that was reported some time ago. Some students took three pigs from the local farm, painted numbers one, two and four on their sides and let them loose in the college grounds. The administration put the entire college into a state of lockdown until pig No.3 was (never) found.
The Iranians only caught 14 squirrels - what happened to the other 86?
Caltrain is short distance not long distance. It can replace a car not a plane.
Very true. They talked about creating a 3 hour high speed train between San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles. It got past the state approval but came to a halt when a good many other cities/counties in the proposed path also wanted stations.
It's been pointed out many times that business travellers would never be happy to travel three days and back again just to make a business trip.
Caltrain in the Bay Area was fairly good - although the hole in the top deck of the doubledecker carriages that allowed the conductor to check two levels at the same time made the train seem a bit like a cattle train. Before 2000 it was more or less a quiet rural train service, but with the dot com boom, trying to get on a train at rush hour was like a being in the New Year sales every day. Maybe it's a bit quieter now.
The worst I saw was when Caltrain leassed some trains from Virginia. Those trains had staircases with a trapdoor at the top that led up into the carriage. The conductor pulled up a rope which opened a trapdoor which was just above the steps at each stop. The first time the engine arrived in the station, belching black smoke like a ironsmiths furnace, there was a collective groan of shock from the passengers.
Only because at the time (20 years ago) she was annoyed that students who had studied pure science subjects (mainly the sciences) were claiming to be unable to find employment. Although they had not considered teaching as a career.
She closed down one of the local institutions in my home city - the idea was that by closing it down, that would save the taxpayer money. All the researchers who had families to feed and kids at school, could only find employment as teachers and lecturers. At least they got a pay rise and a state pension.
CCTV cameras are designed to be moved around by a controller (pan, tilt and zoom). Traffic cameras are designed to take zoom shots of the front of the vehicle from the number plate to an image of the driver. Both will be timestamped,
Garage owners have been instructed to ask for the ID of anyone wanting to buy gasoline in cans, and also to question them as to what they want to use it for...
My folks have one of these phones. It's a compact mini phone capable of handling SMS texts, a phonebook, speed dialing, voice mail, alarms and ring tones.
The commands are no less complex than any other phone. The manual is still around 14 pages long (8 pages to one A4 sheet of paper). The only difference is the price/maintenance . Maybe this is due to the display. Also over here, it's a pay-as-you-go card with a top up card.
I think this phone would benefit with a colour display - being able to choose black on white rather than orange on grey would be an improvement on readability.
Sure, but most desktops don't run more than one or two apps at a time.
For software house applications development work including documentation, it wouldn't be uncommon for somebody to be using at least four application simulataneously. Visual Studio for editing code, Microsoft Word for writing up the documentation, Mozilla Mail for reading/writing E-mail and viewing online documentation, and Adobe PDF reader for viewing additional documentation, not forgetting running virus scanners in the background.
The storage hardware wouldn't need to be stored onsite - all they would need is a high-speed data connection through a fibre-optic link wired up to the optical scanner. For redundancy, you would want the digital backup stored somewhere else as well as onsite.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the Times Higher, a single postgraduate research student brings in around 90K pounds in funding per year to the relevant department. So a roomful of postgrad's is going to bring in a good million a year. Some foreign students in the UK are even lucky enough to get to manage their own funding budget.
That sounds just like the UK as well. On an university open day visit, all the students in my high-school had to register with the careers office as to their area of interest (different departments were coming in at different times). Out of a year of 200 students, 100 expressed interest in gaining a degree with around 90 of those interested in accountancy. Simply because it was the one career path that had the highest earning potential and the least contact hours at university, and the professional body strictly regulated the number of people entering university. Ironically, such a course required 5 Highers with A's, while a Computer Science degree only required around two Highers at B in Mathematics and Physics.
I would guess that 'laughingcoder' is talking about desktop hardware systems for professional CAD engineering in the mid 1980's to late 1990's. In these cases, the application developer would actually certify workstations (both UNIX workstations and PC's with $1000 graphics (de)accelerators), and you could only buy such a system from a licensed dealer. At this time, the UNIX vendors would charge thousands of $$$$ just to get a basic compiler, and even more for the optimised libraries and GUI API's.
Needless to say, many users chose to use open source compilers such as 'gcc' instead, along with OSF/Motif.
Although I definitely agree with what the home computer users talked about - my undergraduate years were in the mid 1980's. The IBM PC was introduced at this time, but with only a four colour CGA graphics card. Compared to other systems such as the Atari's, Amiga's, etc... all of which could display 16 colours (or even 256), this was really a step backward. It wasn't until VGA or even SVGA that the PC caught up with the basic home computers (and an audio card was still an option feature, let alone one or more analog controller ports).
There was a tactic developed by James Maskelyne towards the end of World War II, that allowed the Suez Canal to be defended against German fighter pilots. He basically took a searchlight and placed a set of tin reflectors on top of the search light, which were then made to rotate rapidly. This had the effect of creating rotating cartwheels of dark and bright patches of light in the area around the searchlight. Any pilot who flew above this area would become disorientated due to the mismatch between the perceived motion from the brains centres of balance and the visual cues seen through the aircraft windscreen (optic flow).
I would guess that this portable system creates enough glare in the eye to make moving bands of light appear on the retina. With a wide enough beam, this will disorientate an entire crowd.
Same here... I always set my xterm windows to white text over dark navy blue. Whenever I get a new install of Microsoft Visual Studio, I usually end up spending an afternoon trying to get the colour scheme "back to normal".
Here's a couple of articles I read:
Facts about the brain
Rods and Cones
There are around 125 millions rods and 6 million cones in each eye, with the percentages of each color/wavelength (red = 64%, green=32%, blue=2%)
No Sense
The human eye has 100 million neurons per per eye of five types, but there are only around 1 million neurons per optic nerve (arranged in bundles of 1000).
That's Balmedia up on the NE Coast?
Picture #1
Picture #2
The register reported on an experiment by Belgian scientists to implant RFID tags in teeth.
Belgian implants RFID chip in tooth
At least you will know where your dentures are, if you lose them.
To implement a visual search engine you need to be able to perform the following:
texture segmentation - splitting up a picture into segments of distinct objects. In a panoramic scene, you want to split the picture up into objects such as sky, ocean, waves, beach, boats, pier, wall, people, animals. As a psychological experiment, you can show someone a picture , point to a particular point and ask them what the first word that the associate with that point is. Then you will see how every scene becomes segmented by our own vision systems.
Basic image segmentation is implemented using edge detection by Fourier Transforms (FFT, IFFT, DFT). This is a very computation intensive stage that is typically implemented using DSP's, GPU's or even dedicated ASIC's. Data used by the FFT can be in any dimension 1D (audio/radar), 2D (images) and 3D (volume visualisation). But to match the resolution of a human eye, you would need a 100 Megapixel floating point framebuffer.
texture classification - having identified the silhouette of an object, now attempt to match the contents to a particular object. Simple ways include colour histograms and silhouette matching. More advanced methods attempt to simulate the first few layers of the human retina using Gabor filters, Ring filters and Wedge filters.
But just to model a single type of retinal cell requires one or more FFT operations for an entire image. And
there are at least twelve different types of such cells. For efficiency precalculated results of sample images are generated (these are referred to as feature vectors) and then compared against the results of any new image.
For a really technical explanation of how human vision works have a look at The organisation of the retina and visual system
texture retrieval - the actual design of the search engine to retrieve images through content rather than just keyword:
QBIC - Query By Image Content. IBM's image retrieval database system
All of this has to performed for a single image. For an entire movie requires the processing of hundreds of thousands of images.
Thanks for the link. Interesting system with the touch pad. After trying the webpage demos, it definitely seems to be the simplest and most efficient method for entering text given the constraint of a small screen.
I was really thinking more of a circular menu system (all the letters/options/menus arranged in a circle) with a motion sensitive thumb controller (like on a laptop keyboard).
According to this article, European countries have the highest defence budgets World arms industry, and are also major suppliers of weapons.
Miliary expenditures.
But maybe all of that goes on pension funds.
How about if all the options of the menu were arranged in a circle around a central point, and the input device was one of those directional sensitive controllers. Then choosing a menu option would just be a matter of choosing the correct direction.
why, what will they think of next? using pidgeons or something equally as stupid.
They've already tried rocks....
British used 'rock' to spy
Maybe the next thing will be planting cameras and GPS receivers in desert tumbleweed.
Sounds like an end of year prank at a college that was reported some time ago. Some students took three pigs from the local farm, painted numbers one, two and four on their sides and let them loose in the college grounds. The administration put the entire college into a state of lockdown until pig No.3 was (never) found.
The Iranians only caught 14 squirrels - what happened to the other 86?
if we are dependent on their food, they need to be dependent on something we produce... Otherwise the "peace producing foreign trade" doesn't work.
Military supplies and training?
Caltrain is short distance not long distance. It can replace a car not a plane.
Very true. They talked about creating a 3 hour high speed train between San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles. It got past the state approval but came to a halt when a good many other cities/counties in the proposed path also wanted stations.
It's been pointed out many times that business travellers would never be happy to travel three days and back again just to make a business trip.
Caltrain in the Bay Area was fairly good - although the hole in the top deck of the doubledecker carriages that allowed the conductor to check two levels at the same time made the train seem a bit like a cattle train. Before 2000 it was more or less a quiet rural train service, but with the dot com boom, trying to get on a train at rush hour was like a being in the New Year sales every day. Maybe it's a bit quieter now.
The worst I saw was when Caltrain leassed some trains from Virginia. Those trains had staircases with a trapdoor at the top that led up into the carriage. The conductor pulled up a rope which opened a trapdoor which was just above the steps at each stop. The first time the engine arrived in the station, belching black smoke like a ironsmiths furnace, there was a collective groan of shock from the passengers.
Only because at the time (20 years ago) she was annoyed that students who had studied pure science subjects (mainly the sciences) were claiming to be unable to find employment. Although they had not considered teaching as a career.
She closed down one of the local institutions in my home city - the idea was that by closing it down, that would save the taxpayer money. All the researchers who had families to feed and kids at school, could only find employment as teachers and lecturers. At least they got a pay rise and a state pension.
CCTV cameras are designed to be moved around by a controller (pan, tilt and zoom). Traffic cameras are designed to take zoom shots of the front of the vehicle from the number plate to an image of the driver.
Both will be timestamped,
Garage owners have been instructed to ask for the ID of anyone wanting to buy gasoline in cans, and also to question them as to what they want to use it for...
r d=news_government&Number=295612397&view=collapsed& sb=5&o=21&part=
http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Boa
My folks have one of these phones. It's a compact mini phone capable of handling SMS texts, a phonebook,
speed dialing, voice mail, alarms and ring tones.
The commands are no less complex than any other phone. The manual is still around 14 pages long
(8 pages to one A4 sheet of paper). The only difference is the price/maintenance . Maybe this is due to
the display. Also over here, it's a pay-as-you-go card with a top up card.
I think this phone would benefit with a colour display - being able to choose black on white rather than orange on grey
would be an improvement on readability.
Sure, but most desktops don't run more than one or two apps at a time.
For software house applications development work including documentation, it wouldn't be uncommon for somebody to be using at least four application simulataneously.
Visual Studio for editing code, Microsoft Word for writing up the documentation, Mozilla Mail for reading/writing E-mail and viewing online documentation, and Adobe PDF reader for viewing additional documentation, not forgetting running virus scanners in the background.
There's a detail story at CREATURES FROM PRIMORDIAL SILICON, which describes the work of Adrian Thompson and others.
I am guessing you mean 24 as in the Los Angeles CTU fictional series, rather than BBC News 24?
The storage hardware wouldn't need to be stored onsite - all they would need is a high-speed data connection through a fibre-optic link wired up to the optical scanner. For redundancy, you would want the digital backup stored somewhere else
as well as onsite.