I'd argue that for for drugs at least, that the R&D argument rings a bit hollow. The majority of major medical breakthroughs are made at universities where the research is publicly funded. Regulations state that these products have to have a corporate partner, which is where biig pharma steps in. Basically their "R&D" is paying for clinical and "stage 4" clinical trials, which is basically just figuring out ways to extend or get new patents on drugs for what would normally be off-label usage.
Plus, ethanol has a higher octane rating than normal gas (petroleum), meaning they can use ethanol to improve the octane rating of otherwise sub-standard product. Of course, if you blend it with normal gas you get a product with a higher octane rating. Depends on the seller. In Canada, you're allowed up to a 10% blend, but low-end gas is still 87 octane, even if it is blended. In some places, though, they have pumps with guaranteed 10%, and they sell the blend at the same price as regular gas, but with an 89 octane rating.
I had the complete opposite experience at my university. Our instructor was fantastic and INCREDIBLY knowledgeable - he actually wrote part of the original BSD kernel back in the day. We were lucky because they did set up computers for us to play with - dual boot windows and freeBSD. Students were given the root password for the freeBSD, with the full knowledge that the installs WOULD be messed up and and have to be repaired pretty frequently. We didn't have individual accounts on freeBSD (used linux in CS and hpux on central), so we were warned about leaving files around etc. It worked out well actually. Assignments were fairly simple, usually only a few lines of code, stuff like replacing the missing parts of drivers, setting up simple things etc. They'd take maybe 30 mins if you knew what you were doing, much MUCH longer if you didn't quite get it. Overall very informative.
Anyway, there are a lot of universities that DO offer this kind of thing - that might be a good place to go. A lot of times they will let you take courses on their own if you jump through some hoops.
A while ago, I did some research for a small fuel company that was looking to switch their delivery trucks over to a bio-blend diesel and sell blended farm fuel and home heating oil. The company we used was called Biox (http://www.bioxcorp.com/), and they were doing some really neat stuff with using rendered fats from animal waste processing for fuel. At the time we were testing it, it was appallingly disgusting and not really suitable as a fuel, so we did testing and eventually released products using soybean (also likely because they were a farm fuel co. and were backed by the soybean growers for the project). Anyway, although the idea is a little off-putting, I think this is a great idea - we have loads of the stuff coming from these plants and really not a lot to do with it. Might be the next algae.
Actually used this once because my condo corp. is absolutely insane (long story), so I decided to pay them in change one time. They were not pleased. On the other hand, they do have the right to refuse to take cash in Canada anyway (http://www.bank-banque-canada.ca/en/banknotes/law .html - on the right).
Jumped in the lake with my phone just the other day. The phone itself seems to be working fine now that it's dry, but the backlight is spotty at best (sometimes it works, other times I can't see a thing), and the camera appears to be shot. I'll probably need a new phone.
On the other hand, my last phone (the indestructo-phone) got washed twice with the laundry plus dropped and run over. I was running across the street and my cell phone must have fallen out of my pocket because 10 mintues later when I got home it was gone. Traced my path back a bit and found it in a puddle, in the middle of the street literally getting run over by cars. Waited until the light changed, went and picked it up. Three days later it was working fine again, just a few rocks stuck into the plastic casing from the cars. Now THAT was a phone. These new-fangled electronics are too delicate for my clumsy self. All the cool new phones these days look like they will break in a strong wind. I need a waterproof phone. (And I know they make them, but stupid Canadian carriers won't support them)
I am a brand-new gamer - the last game I really enjoyed playing a lot was duke nukem 1. I got into WoW because my boyfriend plays all the time he let my play with one of his characters sometimes. To me, $15 a month actually doesn't seem like that much even for a really casual gamer. It's less than I pay for cable, even though I play WoW probably more than I watch TV, and it's much MUCH less than my boyfriend paid for his 2 new gaming consoles which he now uses only rarely thanks to wow.
Oh please...it totally is true. Most of the research, especially preliminary research, that goes into the development of a new drug comes from publicly funded universities. The majority of the company's research costs are for clinical trials, which are expensive, but it's hardly the years of research you are talking about. In fact, often phase IV clinical trials (counted as R&D) have a large advertizing component to them because they have to recruit patients. In fact, as an example, take a look at pfizer's financial report for 2005. R&D is lower than the cost of selling, and significantly lower than "selling and administrative" costs
http://www.pfizer.com/pfizer/annualreport/2005/fin ancial/p2005fin35.jsp
While clinical trial are expensive, there is really no reason that they have to be funded by big companies. Typically they are, of course, because they want the patent rights to drug discoveries and are willing to put up the cash. But barring that, I dont see any reason why government research funding would not cover these types of discoveries if the funding application was made. Tonnes of way more dubious research is funded at high levels.
In Canada you get to be an engineer if your program comes from an accredited engineering school (and you get your engineering licence). And, yes, there are computer engineering course, and yes, they are different than CS. When I got my degree, CS was mostly programming, engineering was part software, lots of hardware, and a bunch of design courses, whereas CS was much more focused on just software and programming.
On the other hand, would ex. female game designers be more likely to design a game that would appeal to females (a rather large, untapped game market)? It's been pointed out many times that females and males are not necessarily the same in their likes and dislikes, be it due to nature or nurture or whatever. Sure, when you directly compare chips designs or code, there's likely to be little difference, but if you step back a level, who is to say that the extra diversity wouldn't lend itself to a whole different type of thinking that could be quite different from the status quo?
Whoops, sorry...don't know how half the text got misplaced, but I was going to say that clearly that's not a representative split (I'm a computer engineer, so I know a lot more gamers who are women), but still it's been a long time since I've seen so many females who not just play but like it enough to actually ADMIT it and talk about it in front of other people.
My boyfriend is going to get this afternoon. Then, when I get home, everything will be installed and ready. That's the way to do it.
Seriously, though, I actually don't know too many people who play, but of the group of us that do, about half are girls. It's been a long time since I've seen that split. Clearly that
For that matter, just recharging the thing in an non-standard location would be a problem. What happens if your car runs out of charge when you're not at a station? Now we can just grab a jerry can of gas and put in enough to get to the next station. How would one go about transporting something to recharge a car like this? I can't really see wanting to walk around with ex a giant battery to recharge your car.
We developed a motion capture system for a bit of a different application (6-DOF joint movement tracking for biomed research). Getting the cameras working is trivial compared to the processing required to actually get 3d motion capture working reliably. Of course, we were going for something that probably has to be much more accurate than what you need, but it's not a trivial manner to write the software for something like this. Of course, there may be stuff out there you can use. Anyway, here's a brief rundown of what we were using and what might help.
We used 3 point-grey cameras (the flea). They might be a bit expensive for what you want, but all their cameras are top-quality, and they are intended for use in computer vision applications, and thus come with some source code pre-written that you can use for the interface. http://www.ptgrey.com/
We actually used windows machines at the request of the lab, but we did originally look into linux. The cameras are firewire, and the best linux drivers we've found for these types of cameras are the the libdc1394 drivers on sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libdc1394/
The Open computer vision library is also invaluable. It has a lot of pre-written functions to deal with the more basic processing problems. It's got most of the major filters and algorithms in there that you'll need to extract the info from the camera pictures. Here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary
I'm not sure how you're planning on combining or calibrating the system, but we used a static set of known coordinates and used DLTs to actually give the real 3D coordinates. A good tutorial is here: http://www.kwon3d.com/theory/dlt/dlt.html
Lastly, good trackers can really help the processing a good deal. Our trackers used a 4-ball system because we needed the accuracy and refrences for the angular rotations, but even a 1-ball tracker can be well designed. If the ball is a significant bright point on the image, simple thresholding is all that is needed in terms of preprocessing before you extract location in the image. Reflective paint or another bright source is KEY. If you're going colour, a distinct colour is also a good option.
It comes in its own package, which was inside a box, which was then inside another box with padding around it, which was already kind of weird. Then when you actually get to openeing the thing, it's damn near impossible. My cool new toy, sitting there, all ready for some good robot times and I can't get him out of the damn box. It's like he's in a tiny plastic prison. Every time I think I've got a part free there's a new strap holding him in. And they're devious too...they hide the strap and then tape them down between two layers of cardboard so you have to cut and rip and pull just to get to the strap before you can even think of cutting it off. It was crazy. I have no idea how they even get some of those ties on there.
I just bought gift certificates from a certain company that shall remain nameless. They DO package them in an envelope, which is nice, but then they charge $14 for shipping, and it's literally going a distance I can travel in 40 minutes by car. For $14 I'd expect at least a box or something, but no...
And if it is so great and reliable, why are they using hot dogs and not this guys hand?
If you look at the movie, you'll see that there is a little cut on the hot dog. It stops the saw from cutting right through, but I'm sure the guy doesn't want to sit there taking small chunks off of his hand every 30 mins.
they never show wet wood. We have to cut wet lumber sometimes. Does that make any difference with this mechanism?
Probably not - the article states that the mechanism looks for specific changes in the conductivity pattern - it is doubtful that wet lumber would cause those changes. Besides, skin is salty, not just wet. Water on its own really isn't terribly conductive in comparison.
One of my friends worked a summer job at the airport and said basically if you put a laptop bag through as luggage that you wouldn't be seeing it come out the other end. Along with a lock, I'd try for something that doesn't look too obvious, or put the laptop bag inside the suitcase.
It's funny, becuase when I last travelled from the UK (month ago) they had signs up all over the place specifically saying not to put you laptop into the cargo hold. I had to take the computer out of my carry-on every time I went through a security gate, which was like every 3 feet. As a sidenote, every other gate they also made me take off my belt and my shoes. Unfortunately, I happened to be wearing pants that have become MUCH too big, so I ended up standing there at every gate, shoeless, holding up my pants with one hand, attempting to re-dress and re-pack in the middle of the airport. Not at all embarassing.
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I'd argue that for for drugs at least, that the R&D argument rings a bit hollow. The majority of major medical breakthroughs are made at universities where the research is publicly funded. Regulations state that these products have to have a corporate partner, which is where biig pharma steps in. Basically their "R&D" is paying for clinical and "stage 4" clinical trials, which is basically just figuring out ways to extend or get new patents on drugs for what would normally be off-label usage.
Plus, ethanol has a higher octane rating than normal gas (petroleum), meaning they can use ethanol to improve the octane rating of otherwise sub-standard product. Of course, if you blend it with normal gas you get a product with a higher octane rating. Depends on the seller. In Canada, you're allowed up to a 10% blend, but low-end gas is still 87 octane, even if it is blended. In some places, though, they have pumps with guaranteed 10%, and they sell the blend at the same price as regular gas, but with an 89 octane rating.
well, they woudln't have to if a doctor just prescibed it to them like the more acceptable/legal drugs.
I had the complete opposite experience at my university. Our instructor was fantastic and INCREDIBLY knowledgeable - he actually wrote part of the original BSD kernel back in the day. We were lucky because they did set up computers for us to play with - dual boot windows and freeBSD. Students were given the root password for the freeBSD, with the full knowledge that the installs WOULD be messed up and and have to be repaired pretty frequently. We didn't have individual accounts on freeBSD (used linux in CS and hpux on central), so we were warned about leaving files around etc. It worked out well actually. Assignments were fairly simple, usually only a few lines of code, stuff like replacing the missing parts of drivers, setting up simple things etc. They'd take maybe 30 mins if you knew what you were doing, much MUCH longer if you didn't quite get it. Overall very informative.
Anyway, there are a lot of universities that DO offer this kind of thing - that might be a good place to go. A lot of times they will let you take courses on their own if you jump through some hoops.
A while ago, I did some research for a small fuel company that was looking to switch their delivery trucks over to a bio-blend diesel and sell blended farm fuel and home heating oil. The company we used was called Biox (http://www.bioxcorp.com/), and they were doing some really neat stuff with using rendered fats from animal waste processing for fuel. At the time we were testing it, it was appallingly disgusting and not really suitable as a fuel, so we did testing and eventually released products using soybean (also likely because they were a farm fuel co. and were backed by the soybean growers for the project). Anyway, although the idea is a little off-putting, I think this is a great idea - we have loads of the stuff coming from these plants and really not a lot to do with it. Might be the next algae.
Canada has this coin restriction too. (http://www.canlii.org/ca/sta/c-52/sec8.html)
w .html - on the right).
Actually used this once because my condo corp. is absolutely insane (long story), so I decided to pay them in change one time. They were not pleased. On the other hand, they do have the right to refuse to take cash in Canada anyway (http://www.bank-banque-canada.ca/en/banknotes/la
Jumped in the lake with my phone just the other day. The phone itself seems to be working fine now that it's dry, but the backlight is spotty at best (sometimes it works, other times I can't see a thing), and the camera appears to be shot. I'll probably need a new phone.
On the other hand, my last phone (the indestructo-phone) got washed twice with the laundry plus dropped and run over. I was running across the street and my cell phone must have fallen out of my pocket because 10 mintues later when I got home it was gone. Traced my path back a bit and found it in a puddle, in the middle of the street literally getting run over by cars. Waited until the light changed, went and picked it up. Three days later it was working fine again, just a few rocks stuck into the plastic casing from the cars. Now THAT was a phone. These new-fangled electronics are too delicate for my clumsy self. All the cool new phones these days look like they will break in a strong wind. I need a waterproof phone. (And I know they make them, but stupid Canadian carriers won't support them)
Unless you put conditions on "Thou shalt not kill" then god would be directly contradicting himself.
er...yeah, like that never happens in the bible....
Same with standard latex formatting - the margins are deliberately kept wide because long lines are difficult to read.
Digital camera, ok, with lots of extra film
??
I am a brand-new gamer - the last game I really enjoyed playing a lot was duke nukem 1. I got into WoW because my boyfriend plays all the time he let my play with one of his characters sometimes. To me, $15 a month actually doesn't seem like that much even for a really casual gamer. It's less than I pay for cable, even though I play WoW probably more than I watch TV, and it's much MUCH less than my boyfriend paid for his 2 new gaming consoles which he now uses only rarely thanks to wow.
Oh please...it totally is true. Most of the research, especially preliminary research, that goes into the development of a new drug comes from publicly funded universities. The majority of the company's research costs are for clinical trials, which are expensive, but it's hardly the years of research you are talking about. In fact, often phase IV clinical trials (counted as R&D) have a large advertizing component to them because they have to recruit patients. In fact, as an example, take a look at pfizer's financial report for 2005. R&D is lower than the cost of selling, and significantly lower than "selling and administrative" costs http://www.pfizer.com/pfizer/annualreport/2005/fin ancial/p2005fin35.jsp
While clinical trial are expensive, there is really no reason that they have to be funded by big companies. Typically they are, of course, because they want the patent rights to drug discoveries and are willing to put up the cash. But barring that, I dont see any reason why government research funding would not cover these types of discoveries if the funding application was made. Tonnes of way more dubious research is funded at high levels.
In Canada you get to be an engineer if your program comes from an accredited engineering school (and you get your engineering licence). And, yes, there are computer engineering course, and yes, they are different than CS. When I got my degree, CS was mostly programming, engineering was part software, lots of hardware, and a bunch of design courses, whereas CS was much more focused on just software and programming.
And I know a few smokin' hot, toally smart engineering guys that I wouldn't want to work for either.
On the other hand, would ex. female game designers be more likely to design a game that would appeal to females (a rather large, untapped game market)? It's been pointed out many times that females and males are not necessarily the same in their likes and dislikes, be it due to nature or nurture or whatever. Sure, when you directly compare chips designs or code, there's likely to be little difference, but if you step back a level, who is to say that the extra diversity wouldn't lend itself to a whole different type of thinking that could be quite different from the status quo?
Whoops, sorry...don't know how half the text got misplaced, but I was going to say that clearly that's not a representative split (I'm a computer engineer, so I know a lot more gamers who are women), but still it's been a long time since I've seen so many females who not just play but like it enough to actually ADMIT it and talk about it in front of other people.
My boyfriend is going to get this afternoon. Then, when I get home, everything will be installed and ready. That's the way to do it.
Seriously, though, I actually don't know too many people who play, but of the group of us that do, about half are girls. It's been a long time since I've seen that split. Clearly that
Not sure where the apple came from...
n OfMan.jpg
Probably from Magritte's son of man painting, I'm guessing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Magritte_TheSo
For that matter, just recharging the thing in an non-standard location would be a problem. What happens if your car runs out of charge when you're not at a station? Now we can just grab a jerry can of gas and put in enough to get to the next station. How would one go about transporting something to recharge a car like this? I can't really see wanting to walk around with ex a giant battery to recharge your car.
We developed a motion capture system for a bit of a different application (6-DOF joint movement tracking for biomed research). Getting the cameras working is trivial compared to the processing required to actually get 3d motion capture working reliably. Of course, we were going for something that probably has to be much more accurate than what you need, but it's not a trivial manner to write the software for something like this. Of course, there may be stuff out there you can use. Anyway, here's a brief rundown of what we were using and what might help.
We used 3 point-grey cameras (the flea). They might be a bit expensive for what you want, but all their cameras are top-quality, and they are intended for use in computer vision applications, and thus come with some source code pre-written that you can use for the interface. http://www.ptgrey.com/
We actually used windows machines at the request of the lab, but we did originally look into linux. The cameras are firewire, and the best linux drivers we've found for these types of cameras are the the libdc1394 drivers on sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libdc1394/
The Open computer vision library is also invaluable. It has a lot of pre-written functions to deal with the more basic processing problems. It's got most of the major filters and algorithms in there that you'll need to extract the info from the camera pictures. Here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary
I'm not sure how you're planning on combining or calibrating the system, but we used a static set of known coordinates and used DLTs to actually give the real 3D coordinates. A good tutorial is here: http://www.kwon3d.com/theory/dlt/dlt.html
Lastly, good trackers can really help the processing a good deal. Our trackers used a 4-ball system because we needed the accuracy and refrences for the angular rotations, but even a 1-ball tracker can be well designed. If the ball is a significant bright point on the image, simple thresholding is all that is needed in terms of preprocessing before you extract location in the image. Reflective paint or another bright source is KEY. If you're going colour, a distinct colour is also a good option.
good luck.
It comes in its own package, which was inside a box, which was then inside another box with padding around it, which was already kind of weird. Then when you actually get to openeing the thing, it's damn near impossible. My cool new toy, sitting there, all ready for some good robot times and I can't get him out of the damn box. It's like he's in a tiny plastic prison. Every time I think I've got a part free there's a new strap holding him in. And they're devious too...they hide the strap and then tape them down between two layers of cardboard so you have to cut and rip and pull just to get to the strap before you can even think of cutting it off. It was crazy. I have no idea how they even get some of those ties on there.
I just bought gift certificates from a certain company that shall remain nameless. They DO package them in an envelope, which is nice, but then they charge $14 for shipping, and it's literally going a distance I can travel in 40 minutes by car. For $14 I'd expect at least a box or something, but no...
And if it is so great and reliable, why are they using hot dogs and not this guys hand?
If you look at the movie, you'll see that there is a little cut on the hot dog. It stops the saw from cutting right through, but I'm sure the guy doesn't want to sit there taking small chunks off of his hand every 30 mins.
they never show wet wood. We have to cut wet lumber sometimes. Does that make any difference with this mechanism?
Probably not - the article states that the mechanism looks for specific changes in the conductivity pattern - it is doubtful that wet lumber would cause those changes. Besides, skin is salty, not just wet. Water on its own really isn't terribly conductive in comparison.
One of my friends worked a summer job at the airport and said basically if you put a laptop bag through as luggage that you wouldn't be seeing it come out the other end. Along with a lock, I'd try for something that doesn't look too obvious, or put the laptop bag inside the suitcase.
It's funny, becuase when I last travelled from the UK (month ago) they had signs up all over the place specifically saying not to put you laptop into the cargo hold. I had to take the computer out of my carry-on every time I went through a security gate, which was like every 3 feet. As a sidenote, every other gate they also made me take off my belt and my shoes. Unfortunately, I happened to be wearing pants that have become MUCH too big, so I ended up standing there at every gate, shoeless, holding up my pants with one hand, attempting to re-dress and re-pack in the middle of the airport. Not at all embarassing.