I frequently have to create large collections of images from all sorts of file types -- some text-based, some graphics -- that get housed in a collection of images for easy, standardized review. If there were something that could avoid the step of extracting text from them, or later OCRing them and still end up with a searchable image collection, well, that would be exceedingly cool. It would cut the initial time outlay I have to devote to virtually any given project I have to deal with by 25 to 50%.
Have you considered trying some SIFT-based algorithms? It usually performs pretty well on detecting matches between 2D forms, if I'm understanding your problem correctly. There's some open-source libraries that implement SIFT, as well as a pretty nice demo from Evolution Robotics that applies SIFT to data from USB cameras, so you can have it do things like recognize dollar bills, book pages, etc.
Oh, don't be a wimp. How about this puppy [nuclearspace.com] which can lift 1,000 tons to orbit, is fully reusable, and has totally non-polluting exhaust! (Unless you're allergic to helium or something...)
Neat, but politically impossible. I mean, our government won't even allow breeder reactors.
For example: I want to find more cat images. I feed it a picture of a white cat. I am more likely to be returned results of white dogs than, say, tabby or black cats.
It seems it would be straightforward to implement something analogous to Google Sets, where you could supply a few photographs of what you're interested in (say, several cat pictures of various colors, or several white-colored pets). It could then learn which of the features were relevant, and add weigh to those in its search.
I'm reading the public forum, and someone ran the math and said that it would take 10,000 years to build a solar array large enough to replace our current energy use. The limiting factor is how hard it is to move something that large and heaving into orbit.
There's some pretty strong assumptions though going into the "10,000 years" figure. The first is that it would need to replace -all- our energy use. If space solar power only replaced a few percent of our energy usage, but at an economical price, it would still be an important endeavor.
Another is that the maximum lift capacity we could ever have is a single EELV Heavy per day. If there were demand for it, one could imagine that something like the Sea Dragon (which would have lift capacity of ~550 metric tons to LEO compared to ~25 metric tons for a Delta 4 Heavy) could be mass-produced. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX could get something like the Falcon 9 to launch several times a day.
We own a Wii, and both of my kids play all the games sitting down, even the sports ones. I would assert that the end of the couch potato is still a long long way off.
I guess that's what Wii Fit is for, although... now that I think about it, you could conceivably put a comfy chair on top of the pad and control it by shifting your weight around on the seat.;)
I applaud attempts to create a tourism of space, but so far there is nothing especially interesting in the presented solutions. They are just building smaller and cheaper rockets. These "space ships" don't even achieve stable orbits.
What I would like to see is some truly innovative solutions.
Innovation isn't necessarily the issue. The science of rocketry is now fairly well-understood, but up until companies like SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace came around, cost-efficiency in space systems was sort of an after-thought.
Some care to elaborate on the difference between this and a parachute? From the article:
The best hope on the horizon for making the human enterprise on Mars possible is a new type of supersonic decelerator that's only on the drawing board. A few companies are developing a new inflatable supersonic decelerator called a Hypercone. Imagine a huge donut with a skin across its surface that girdles the vehicle and inflates very quickly with gas rockets (like air bags) to create a conical shape. This would inflate about 10 kilometers above the ground while the vehicle is traveling at Mach 4 or 5, after peak heating. The Hypercone would act as an aerodynamic anchor to slow the vehicle to Mach 1.... "A high pressure inflatable structure in the form a of a torus is a logical way to support a membrane in a conical shape, which is stable and has high drag at high Mach numbers," Brown said, adding that the structure would likely be made of a coated fabric such as silicon-Vectran matrix materials. Vertigo is currently competing for funding from NASA for further research, as the next step, deployment in a supersonic wind tunnel, is quite expensive.
The structure would need to be about thirty to forty meters in diameter. The problem here is that large, flexible structures are notoriously difficult to control. At this point in time there are also several other unknowns of developing and using a Hypercone.
One train of thought is that if the Hypercone can get the vehicle under Mach 1, then subsonic parachutes could be used, much like the ones employed by Apollo, or that the CEV is projected to use to land on Earth. However, it takes time for the parachutes to inflate, and subsequently there would only be a matter of seconds of use, allowing time to shed the parachutes before converting to a propulsive system.
I don't know much about this particular controversy, but it's worth noting that New Scientist is basically the National Enquirer of science journalism, and has a tendency to sensationalize things quite a bit. Here's how things are worded on the actual Galaxy Zoo website:
But what about the wider Universe? Observing the rotation of galaxies also provides a probe of the large-scale properties of the Universe, and intriguingly there is already some indication from SDSS galaxies that all may not be as it seems! Our current theories about the Universe have it that galaxies should not prefer to rotate one way or the other, and we should therefore observe as many clockwise rotating spiral galaxies as anti-clockwise. This is related to a fundamental assumption we make in cosmology; that there are no special places or special directions in the Universe. Prof. Micheal Long from the University of Michigan has claimed, in his recent astro-ph preprint, that there is a preferred handedness (rotation direction) of galaxies in the local Universe. This is a revolutionary claim, that could force us to rethink our understanding about the underlying nature of space and employ a much more complicated background model for the Universe. The current claim is based on a sample of just 1660 galaxies from the SDSS survey, but a much larger sample is required to assess the significance of the effect which is where Galaxy Zoo comes in.
So, you want to get rid of anonymous sources then? Perhaps you didn't live through Watergate which eventually led to Nixon's impeachment. "Follow the money" said one source to a newspaper reporter.
The thing is, in the past reporters tended to at least do some other digging to corroborate the information from the anonymous sources. Nowadays they seem to just take their anonymous info at face value, which can have unfortunate results, as in the (totally fake) "flushed Koran" controversy.
And based on the above, I'm guessing the accelerometer measures tilt in 3 dimensions, so it provides an absolute reference that way as well.
Yup. The accelerometers can measure the 9.8 m/s^2 downward acceleration from gravity in order to determine which way the ground is. The Excite Truck game also uses this quite a bit, as the primary control is tilting the Wii Remote left and right like a steering wheel. It works remarkably well.
Global warming is a liberal issue like evolution and old Earth geology are liberal issues. What you're really saying is that vast majority of climatologists out there are part of some vast conspiracy.
Actually, I'd say it's more like how racial/income disparity is a liberal issue, and terrorism/immigration are conservative issues. There's certainly a real cause for concern with those issues, but for the most part they're used by politicians as boogeymen to push through expanded government powers.
Yeah, it's romantic, but if the goal is science, then it's a total waste.
The goal isn't science. The goal is to set the stage for eventual interplanetary colonization.
Science is great, but not everything having to do with space is science (slashdot's classification of everything space-related under "Science" to the contrary).
For nearly all the gamers that actually watched it, this conference was a disaster. They didn't really reach out to hardcore gamers, they basically told them to shut up about online, and yes, the three or four games you already knew about are still coming out
I'm not sure if this is silly, but I'm betting/hoping that they're saving the good stuff for the "hardcore" gamers at PAX, which has surpassed E3 as the biggest gamer event in North America.
the standard mythology is that cameras everywhere is all about the government controlling you. but with google maps, with cell phone cameras, etc., we are actually seeing the rodney king effect: that governments suddenly have to get used to a new democratic form of transparency that they never had to deal with before
But shortly after was shot down by hard science (anthropologist) who simple tested the theory globally and found tribal cultures that did not like the supposedly perfect 0.7 ratio.
Do you have a citation for that? The publications I can find all seem to confirm the cross-cultural universality of the 0.7 waist-hip ratio.
Here's another article with a more close-up photo. Does anybody else hear a slithering voice saying "The Stars Are Right" when you look into its ever-so-hypnotic eye?
This makes me wonder if Google will try coupling any of their speech recognition tech with GrandCentral's voicemail inbox. It'd be quite awesome to get text summaries of your voicemails, and then click on them to hear the full thing.
I'd argue that that using prediction markets like the ill-fated Policy Analysis Market work much better for predicting future events. It's really too bad that there was an kneejerk media firestorm in response to the Policy Analysis Market, which killed it off before it could even get started.
If they release it for Wii: - People will be more accepting of slightly outdated graphics. - Blizzard developers get some experience with coding controls for the Wii. - Introduce Starcraft and Blizzard to a whole new audience.
I agree. Additionally, I think the rave reviews of the control scheme in the recently-released Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition indicate that the Wii remote/nunchuk controls are ideal for a third-person shooter like Starcraft Ghost.
Actually aren't most of our space launch vehicles essentially modified ICBMs? I mean, isn't that true of most space launch vehicles? Von Braun and all that?
I think the general idea, as discussed in documents like this one, is that the primary design goal with ICBMs was maximizing the ratio between payload weight and rocket weight/size. This is great for ICBMs, where you want to cram missiles into tiny places, but not so good for space launches, where you should ideally be maximizing the payload/cost ratio. However, since most modern rockets are direct descendants of ICBMs, the original design constraints are still present in their current design, and are arguably embedded in the rocket engineering culture.
Most people say that the solution is then to pursue things like space elevators and scramjets, but groups like SpaceX are trying to show that low-cost rockets can still be developed if one designs them from the beginning to maximize the payload/cost ratio.
From Walt Mossberg: "Voice call quality was good, but not great. In some places, especially in weak coverage areas, there was some muffling or garbling. But most calls were perfectly audible. The iPhone can use Bluetooth wireless headsets and it comes with wired iPod-style earbuds that include a microphone."
I love PLoS Biology, but it also costs $2500 to publish in it. Nature Precedings seems more intended for the sort of rapid-fire result publication which wouldn't be economical or feasible with an actual peer-reviewed journal.
Slashdot Mirror
I frequently have to create large collections of images from all sorts of file types -- some text-based, some graphics -- that get housed in a collection of images for easy, standardized review. If there were something that could avoid the step of extracting text from them, or later OCRing them and still end up with a searchable image collection, well, that would be exceedingly cool. It would cut the initial time outlay I have to devote to virtually any given project I have to deal with by 25 to 50%.
Have you considered trying some SIFT-based algorithms? It usually performs pretty well on detecting matches between 2D forms, if I'm understanding your problem correctly. There's some open-source libraries that implement SIFT, as well as a pretty nice demo from Evolution Robotics that applies SIFT to data from USB cameras, so you can have it do things like recognize dollar bills, book pages, etc.
Oh, don't be a wimp. How about this puppy [nuclearspace.com] which can lift 1,000 tons to orbit, is fully reusable, and has totally non-polluting exhaust! (Unless you're allergic to helium or something...)
Neat, but politically impossible. I mean, our government won't even allow breeder reactors.
For example: I want to find more cat images. I feed it a picture of a white cat. I am more likely to be returned results of white dogs than, say, tabby or black cats.
It seems it would be straightforward to implement something analogous to Google Sets, where you could supply a few photographs of what you're interested in (say, several cat pictures of various colors, or several white-colored pets). It could then learn which of the features were relevant, and add weigh to those in its search.
I'm reading the public forum, and someone ran the math and said that it would take 10,000 years to build a solar array large enough to replace our current energy use. The limiting factor is how hard it is to move something that large and heaving into orbit.
There's some pretty strong assumptions though going into the "10,000 years" figure. The first is that it would need to replace -all- our energy use. If space solar power only replaced a few percent of our energy usage, but at an economical price, it would still be an important endeavor.
Another is that the maximum lift capacity we could ever have is a single EELV Heavy per day. If there were demand for it, one could imagine that something like the Sea Dragon (which would have lift capacity of ~550 metric tons to LEO compared to ~25 metric tons for a Delta 4 Heavy) could be mass-produced. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX could get something like the Falcon 9 to launch several times a day.
We own a Wii, and both of my kids play all the games sitting down, even the sports ones. I would assert that the end of the couch potato is still a long long way off.
;)
I guess that's what Wii Fit is for, although... now that I think about it, you could conceivably put a comfy chair on top of the pad and control it by shifting your weight around on the seat.
In related news, British forces have been accused of releasing ferocious man-eating badgers in the Iraqi city of Basra. From the BBC article:
Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.
But several of the creatures, caught and killed by local farmers, have been identified by experts as honey badgers.
The rumours spread because the animals had appeared near the British base at Basra airport.
UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.
I applaud attempts to create a tourism of space, but so far there is nothing especially interesting in the presented solutions. They are just building smaller and cheaper rockets. These "space ships" don't even achieve stable orbits.
p ment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Future_develo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Aerospace
What I would like to see is some truly innovative solutions.
Innovation isn't necessarily the issue. The science of rocketry is now fairly well-understood, but up until companies like SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace came around, cost-efficiency in space systems was sort of an after-thought.
The best hope on the horizon for making the human enterprise on Mars possible is a new type of supersonic decelerator that's only on the drawing board. A few companies are developing a new inflatable supersonic decelerator called a Hypercone.
Imagine a huge donut with a skin across its surface that girdles the vehicle and inflates very quickly with gas rockets (like air bags) to create a conical shape. This would inflate about 10 kilometers above the ground while the vehicle is traveling at Mach 4 or 5, after peak heating. The Hypercone would act as an aerodynamic anchor to slow the vehicle to Mach 1.
The structure would need to be about thirty to forty meters in diameter. The problem here is that large, flexible structures are notoriously difficult to control. At this point in time there are also several other unknowns of developing and using a Hypercone.
One train of thought is that if the Hypercone can get the vehicle under Mach 1, then subsonic parachutes could be used, much like the ones employed by Apollo, or that the CEV is projected to use to land on Earth. However, it takes time for the parachutes to inflate, and subsequently there would only be a matter of seconds of use, allowing time to shed the parachutes before converting to a propulsive system.
Yeah it was just "luck that those locked and unsold new cars parked in car dealership at night didn't have anyone in them!
9 164953.html
Not all the cars were at dealerships:
http://cbs4denver.com/investigates/local_story_13
Russell Bishop and his wife Evelyn got lucky. They found one of the firebombs beneath their Hummer and it did not go off.
"They're not just burning up a car," Bishop said. "They're risking people's lives."
Neither did the ELF setting fire to a bunch of SUVs, but that's been declared to be terrorism under federal law.
It was pretty much just luck that nobody was killed or injured by the firebombs which the ELF placed under people's cars.
I don't know much about this particular controversy, but it's worth noting that New Scientist is basically the National Enquirer of science journalism, and has a tendency to sensationalize things quite a bit. Here's how things are worded on the actual Galaxy Zoo website:
http://www.galaxyzoo.org/Project2.aspx
But what about the wider Universe? Observing the rotation of galaxies also provides a probe of the large-scale properties of the Universe, and intriguingly there is already some indication from SDSS galaxies that all may not be as it seems! Our current theories about the Universe have it that galaxies should not prefer to rotate one way or the other, and we should therefore observe as many clockwise rotating spiral galaxies as anti-clockwise. This is related to a fundamental assumption we make in cosmology; that there are no special places or special directions in the Universe. Prof. Micheal Long from the University of Michigan has claimed, in his recent astro-ph preprint, that there is a preferred handedness (rotation direction) of galaxies in the local Universe. This is a revolutionary claim, that could force us to rethink our understanding about the underlying nature of space and employ a much more complicated background model for the Universe. The current claim is based on a sample of just 1660 galaxies from the SDSS survey, but a much larger sample is required to assess the significance of the effect which is where Galaxy Zoo comes in.
So, you want to get rid of anonymous sources then? Perhaps you didn't live through Watergate which eventually led to Nixon's impeachment. "Follow the money" said one source to a newspaper reporter.
The thing is, in the past reporters tended to at least do some other digging to corroborate the information from the anonymous sources. Nowadays they seem to just take their anonymous info at face value, which can have unfortunate results, as in the (totally fake) "flushed Koran" controversy.
And based on the above, I'm guessing the accelerometer measures tilt in 3 dimensions, so it provides an absolute reference that way as well.
Yup. The accelerometers can measure the 9.8 m/s^2 downward acceleration from gravity in order to determine which way the ground is. The Excite Truck game also uses this quite a bit, as the primary control is tilting the Wii Remote left and right like a steering wheel. It works remarkably well.
Global warming is a liberal issue like evolution and old Earth geology are liberal issues. What you're really saying is that vast majority of climatologists out there are part of some vast conspiracy.
Actually, I'd say it's more like how racial/income disparity is a liberal issue, and terrorism/immigration are conservative issues. There's certainly a real cause for concern with those issues, but for the most part they're used by politicians as boogeymen to push through expanded government powers.
Yeah, it's romantic, but if the goal is science, then it's a total waste.
The goal isn't science. The goal is to set the stage for eventual interplanetary colonization.
Science is great, but not everything having to do with space is science (slashdot's classification of everything space-related under "Science" to the contrary).
For nearly all the gamers that actually watched it, this conference was a disaster. They didn't really reach out to hardcore gamers, they basically told them to shut up about online, and yes, the three or four games you already knew about are still coming out
I'm not sure if this is silly, but I'm betting/hoping that they're saving the good stuff for the "hardcore" gamers at PAX, which has surpassed E3 as the biggest gamer event in North America.
the standard mythology is that cameras everywhere is all about the government controlling you. but with google maps, with cell phone cameras, etc., we are actually seeing the rodney king effect: that governments suddenly have to get used to a new democratic form of transparency that they never had to deal with before
David Brin actually wrote a pretty good non-fiction book about this topic, The Transparent Society. I have a link to the first (freely-downloadable) chapter of the book in my sig.
But shortly after was shot down by hard science (anthropologist) who simple tested the theory globally and found tribal cultures that did not like the supposedly perfect 0.7 ratio.
Do you have a citation for that? The publications I can find all seem to confirm the cross-cultural universality of the 0.7 waist-hip ratio.
Here's another article with a more close-up photo. Does anybody else hear a slithering voice saying "The Stars Are Right" when you look into its ever-so-hypnotic eye?
This makes me wonder if Google will try coupling any of their speech recognition tech with GrandCentral's voicemail inbox. It'd be quite awesome to get text summaries of your voicemails, and then click on them to hear the full thing.
I'd argue that that using prediction markets like the ill-fated Policy Analysis Market work much better for predicting future events. It's really too bad that there was an kneejerk media firestorm in response to the Policy Analysis Market, which killed it off before it could even get started.
If they release it for Wii: - People will be more accepting of slightly outdated graphics. - Blizzard developers get some experience with coding controls for the Wii. - Introduce Starcraft and Blizzard to a whole new audience.
I agree. Additionally, I think the rave reviews of the control scheme in the recently-released Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition indicate that the Wii remote/nunchuk controls are ideal for a third-person shooter like Starcraft Ghost.
Actually aren't most of our space launch vehicles essentially modified ICBMs? I mean, isn't that true of most space launch vehicles? Von Braun and all that?
I think the general idea, as discussed in documents like this one, is that the primary design goal with ICBMs was maximizing the ratio between payload weight and rocket weight/size. This is great for ICBMs, where you want to cram missiles into tiny places, but not so good for space launches, where you should ideally be maximizing the payload/cost ratio. However, since most modern rockets are direct descendants of ICBMs, the original design constraints are still present in their current design, and are arguably embedded in the rocket engineering culture.
Most people say that the solution is then to pursue things like space elevators and scramjets, but groups like SpaceX are trying to show that low-cost rockets can still be developed if one designs them from the beginning to maximize the payload/cost ratio.
From Walt Mossberg: "Voice call quality was good, but not great. In some places, especially in weak coverage areas, there was some muffling or garbling. But most calls were perfectly audible. The iPhone can use Bluetooth wireless headsets and it comes with wired iPod-style earbuds that include a microphone."
Check out http://www.plos.org/ for biology and medicine topics.
I love PLoS Biology, but it also costs $2500 to publish in it. Nature Precedings seems more intended for the sort of rapid-fire result publication which wouldn't be economical or feasible with an actual peer-reviewed journal.