I think we can all relax about the throwaway example he tossed out there about coding with steganography. We can all see how it's a bad idea, so the 20 people who've made that same point now can rest assured that their unique insight is appreciated.
I would've loved to be able to do ~180 wpm when taking notes in university. For me, notes will always be far better than a recording because they're much easier to skim than video. Also the act of noting increases retention, and you can choose what is worth writing down and insert add your own thoughts or questions live, rather than by reviewing the video later (which, given the time crunch of university, usually doesn't/can't happen). This is why I still take notes, even while also recording audio to catch the sentences that I inevitably can't transcribe in time.
If there was some note-taking app that let you type steganographically, draw on the notes, and insert photos (e.g. of the whiteboard) in-line as you take them, that honestly would be a killer app that I'd invest time learning steganography for. (The time would come out of my Duolinguo budget; sorry France!:P)
Former member of the UK government's drugs advisory panel, until some pol fired him for pointing out (correctly) that the health risks of horseback riding outweigh those of doing ecstasy. He's the author of Drugs Without the Hot Air, a fantastic book.
http://boingboing.net/2012/06/20/drugs-without-the-hot-air.html
I think "gandhi_2" is a reference to the part in UHF showing a trailer for "Gandhi 2", where Ghandi goes around kicking over tables and shooting off machine guns. "No More Passive Resistance!"
I remember reading some fiction book where the protagonist's dad had convinced his young son that color itself was invented sometime in the 1950's, which is why old movies were in black and white. This would certainly jibe with that theory:D. Dads, try it today!
There's already a DARPA competition for small-scale vision-based navigation through cluttered terrain, though for more general purposes than landmine detection. It's called
LAGR. The NYU team has a
nice page on their system with pics and videos (I'm a member).
The Grand Challenge, I thought, was designed with a detrimentally macho mindset, with a needlessly high ratio of financial risk to scientific output. It sent many expensive cars through long stretches of very uniform-looking but occasionally high-risk (cliffs!) terrain. The cars had a road to follow. It was ok to hire an army of undergraduates to hand-design a path through the terrain (see the funny scenes involving CMU from chapter 6 of this online NOVA episode about the Grand Challenge).
Maybe they've learned a few lessons, because the DARPA LAGR competition does everything in almost the opposite manner:
Focus on software: The teams all use the exact same hardware. We each get a robot for testing, but for the competition we just hand off our software to the government organizers, who load it into their robot and let the robot run the course.
Focus on the difficult problems: Current robotic localization and mapping is heavily reliant on laser range scanners, which have a limited range (~30 feet) compared to vision, and therefore is unsuitable for long-range path planning. Instead of letting scientists wait for laser scanners to get incrementally better, this competition forces its entrants to adopt a vision-based solution, like people. As one organizer put it, we didn't get to the moon by incrementally improving the airplane.
A sane funding structure: A pool of 10 or so initial teams start out with funding, with each successive competition (with increasing demands) weeding out more and more teams. I've heard that other DARPA robot competitions happening in parallel have adopted similar funding systems. Contrast this with the grand challenge teams, who didn't get any money until the end (CMU notably sank $3 million into their efforts to win the $2 million prize).
The sexual abuse of children is still undiscussed in the sense that people still have many misconceptions about the phenomena beyond hysterical media-profitable images such as, well, the satanic ritual abuse hysteria in the 1980s. What's undiscussed is how it's often people who are fully social and functional in most senses who perpetrate these crimes, and how to detect and break through the small level of denial they use to blend into society, and what level of balance between civil liberties and children's safety do we adopt, etc.
The Kinsey Report revealed that infidelity was happening in much higher rates than imagined, which led to both some hysteria amongst those in denial but also alot of reckoning of the reality of it, which in turn led to a greater willingness to deal with the policy questions involved (such as divorce law, marriage counseling, etc.) There have been several such 'outings' of embarrassing but prevalent aspects of american society over the past few decades, where stereotypes are fleshed out or discarded, and both legal and personal discussions about the subject become more coherent and productive. I was guessing that maybe the sexual abuse of children was on deck to be the next.
I read the article before seeing the link, and never in its many pages did being "anti-internet" seem like a salient point of the story. It was a fascinating exploration of a sexual predator who doesn't fit the common dehumanized stereotype, who wasn't himself abused as a child, who gets along very well with his coworkers (who still hang out with him), who suddenly awakens to this destructive fetish well into his 40's.
The author reports on a number of perspectives: the offender, the leaders of support groups (discussing their design decisions), the offender's coworkers, and his wife's. I found two points particularly interesting from a policy perspective. One was that recidivism rates for child abuse are actually lower than 20% (still pretty high, but not as high as other crimes, and not as high as made seem in popular depictions). Second, a few very gossamer layers of denial are all it takes to seed the fields for future transgressions, and how that denial can be so hard to catch, even under the seemingly very close scrutiny of a wife and support group.
What I DIDN'T take away from the story was how dangerous the internet in general is, and how everybody needs to worry about scary relatives over the internet any more than in person. I especially didn't take the article, as some post patronizingly suggested, as a befuddled and clumsy strike by Old Media against New Media. Seriously guys, can't you get your heads out of the Slashdot talking-point framework for an issue as important and undiscussed as the sexual ause of children?
I imagine that this will be one of the next big awkward social issues that U.S. society has to deal with, as was the Kinsey Report fallout (e.g. widespread infidelity), domestic abuse, drug abuse, etc were in decades past. A possible artifact of this starting trend of reckoning (if it is one) is that recent Kevin Bacon movie which got pretty good reviews; I plan on seeing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops! steganography -> stenography
I think we can all relax about the throwaway example he tossed out there about coding with steganography. We can all see how it's a bad idea, so the 20 people who've made that same point now can rest assured that their unique insight is appreciated.
I would've loved to be able to do ~180 wpm when taking notes in university. For me, notes will always be far better than a recording because they're much easier to skim than video. Also the act of noting increases retention, and you can choose what is worth writing down and insert add your own thoughts or questions live, rather than by reviewing the video later (which, given the time crunch of university, usually doesn't/can't happen). This is why I still take notes, even while also recording audio to catch the sentences that I inevitably can't transcribe in time.
If there was some note-taking app that let you type steganographically, draw on the notes, and insert photos (e.g. of the whiteboard) in-line as you take them, that honestly would be a killer app that I'd invest time learning steganography for. (The time would come out of my Duolinguo budget; sorry France! :P)
Former member of the UK government's drugs advisory panel, until some pol fired him for pointing out (correctly) that the health risks of horseback riding outweigh those of doing ecstasy. He's the author of Drugs Without the Hot Air, a fantastic book. http://boingboing.net/2012/06/20/drugs-without-the-hot-air.html
The Yes Men's golden-phallused employee monitoring suit may be on the horizon: http://youtu.be/Rux-4LJr9mY
Perhaps this classic paper might be worth a read to him. The figures are hilarious: "Finding Naked People", by Margaret Fleck, David Forsyth, and Christoph Bregler http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.47.8929
Can anybody connected to the project comment on which open-source scene graph library was used?
Fair enough, but that doesn't explain the baffling hordes who type "google" into the google search bar (see Australia, Canada, Germany, India, more).
I think "gandhi_2" is a reference to the part in UHF showing a trailer for "Gandhi 2", where Ghandi goes around kicking over tables and shooting off machine guns. "No More Passive Resistance!"
I remember reading some fiction book where the protagonist's dad had convinced his young son that color itself was invented sometime in the 1950's, which is why old movies were in black and white. This would certainly jibe with that theory :D. Dads, try it today!
The Grand Challenge, I thought, was designed with a detrimentally macho mindset, with a needlessly high ratio of financial risk to scientific output. It sent many expensive cars through long stretches of very uniform-looking but occasionally high-risk (cliffs!) terrain. The cars had a road to follow. It was ok to hire an army of undergraduates to hand-design a path through the terrain (see the funny scenes involving CMU from chapter 6 of this online NOVA episode about the Grand Challenge).
Maybe they've learned a few lessons, because the DARPA LAGR competition does everything in almost the opposite manner:
The sexual abuse of children is still undiscussed in the sense that people still have many misconceptions about the phenomena beyond hysterical media-profitable images such as, well, the satanic ritual abuse hysteria in the 1980s. What's undiscussed is how it's often people who are fully social and functional in most senses who perpetrate these crimes, and how to detect and break through the small level of denial they use to blend into society, and what level of balance between civil liberties and children's safety do we adopt, etc. The Kinsey Report revealed that infidelity was happening in much higher rates than imagined, which led to both some hysteria amongst those in denial but also alot of reckoning of the reality of it, which in turn led to a greater willingness to deal with the policy questions involved (such as divorce law, marriage counseling, etc.) There have been several such 'outings' of embarrassing but prevalent aspects of american society over the past few decades, where stereotypes are fleshed out or discarded, and both legal and personal discussions about the subject become more coherent and productive. I was guessing that maybe the sexual abuse of children was on deck to be the next.
I read the article before seeing the link, and never in its many pages did being "anti-internet" seem like a salient point of the story. It was a fascinating exploration of a sexual predator who doesn't fit the common dehumanized stereotype, who wasn't himself abused as a child, who gets along very well with his coworkers (who still hang out with him), who suddenly awakens to this destructive fetish well into his 40's.
The author reports on a number of perspectives: the offender, the leaders of support groups (discussing their design decisions), the offender's coworkers, and his wife's. I found two points particularly interesting from a policy perspective. One was that recidivism rates for child abuse are actually lower than 20% (still pretty high, but not as high as other crimes, and not as high as made seem in popular depictions). Second, a few very gossamer layers of denial are all it takes to seed the fields for future transgressions, and how that denial can be so hard to catch, even under the seemingly very close scrutiny of a wife and support group.
What I DIDN'T take away from the story was how dangerous the internet in general is, and how everybody needs to worry about scary relatives over the internet any more than in person. I especially didn't take the article, as some post patronizingly suggested, as a befuddled and clumsy strike by Old Media against New Media. Seriously guys, can't you get your heads out of the Slashdot talking-point framework for an issue as important and undiscussed as the sexual ause of children?
I imagine that this will be one of the next big awkward social issues that U.S. society has to deal with, as was the Kinsey Report fallout (e.g. widespread infidelity), domestic abuse, drug abuse, etc were in decades past. A possible artifact of this starting trend of reckoning (if it is one) is that recent Kevin Bacon movie which got pretty good reviews; I plan on seeing it.
Can anybody who's used both OSG and Irrlicht talk about a few of the more important differences they've noticed?