and you mimic him/her. How do they act during meetings? How do they write tech-specs, documentation? Look at their check-ins, how do they approach code? How deep can they dive into a discussion? Then ask yourself how do you act during meetings, how does your writing stack up, how would you would have written that, where does your knowledge end? Repeat.
There is something to be said about faking it until you make it. Great engineers (and I've seen several in my day) have found a way to balance--their time, customer requirements, dealing with management, and other engineers and combined it with deep knowledge. Little of what separates a decent engineer and a great one is know-how, though. What really separates them IMHO is their countenance when dealing with a massive, ambiguous problem, their delivery record and the trust that they've garnered from that, their effective use of time and their innate, almost magically ability to be aware of any trade-offs the team and organization may be making due to their deep understanding.
If you aren't around good engineers you probably won't be one.
Right off the top of my head I can think of three methods of dewarping book scans that have nothing do to with Google's methods. While Google's method is definitely quite interesting and seems like a great solution, it is by no means whatsoever the only way of accomplishing this.
Please, do tell what your three methods are. None of the commercially available industrial scanners have solved this problem this well. You would have made a lot of money if your solutions are anywhere near as effective as this one. Really. Even if it was 10x slower.
I bet you've never dealt with large scale non-destructive scanning of books, and that your methods make assumptions that do not hold for all books, or require many fine-grained measurements that require the book to be perfectly placed.
Not only is this method highly accurate, it is fast, and make little assumptions on the nature of the binding, book thickness, what page your on (page 3 curves way differently than page 530), etc.
This method is near perfect as far as I can tell. You take two IR pictures, stitch them together the only way possible, and move on. It's a prime example of an elegant solution to an old, tricky problem.
Already facing a legal challenge for alleged copyright infringement, Google Inc.'s crusade to build a digital library has triggered a philosophical debate with an alternative project promising better online access to the world's books, art and historical documents.
Scanning a book is easy, it simply involves taking pictures. You can splice the spine off an take pictures of each page or use one of the panoply of non-destructive machines to correct the page warping effects of an open book. This is not particularly hard or expensive.
The latest tensions revolve around Google's insistence on chaining the digital content to its Internet-leading search engine and the nine major libraries that have aligned themselves with the Mountain View-based company.
Damn straight. The OCR process is the hardest part, of course they wouldn't allow access to highly valuable text to others. They might have a million books "scanned" this year but each page has to be OCRed. Most people don't decouple those operations and assume that after scanning the hard part is over. Say each book has 300 pages, so we're talking about running 300 million pages of text through OCR. Now you've got a real problem. How does one know if a page of a book is OCRed correctly? You can pay a human or even a large team of humans to QA the text but even then you can only spot check here and there. A 99.99% correct OCR program will mess up on the equivalent of 150,000 pages of text a year (spread out more or less uniformly across the 300 million). Also, not all pages of books are scanable (pictures, weird fonts, weird page layouts), and then there are headaches with keeping track of the related editions of a books, multiple editions of books, displaying pictures in the reader you don't have copyright to (which I think always gets glossed over with these sorts of articles), 10 digit to 13 digit ISBNs, etc. So yes, they aren't going to allow access to the text to others, because it's hard and expensive to do so because you can only automate so much if you want to the ensure accuracy of the text itself (I think Google does). If they opened the text up what stops the competitors from simply adding the data into their search engines after the difficult part is over? Google does no evil but they aren't stupid.
Automobile addiction, or just modern life?
Telephone addiction, or just modern life?
Newspaper addiction, or just modern life?
Machine addiction, or just modern life?
Agriculture addiction, or just modern life?
Clothes addiction, or just modern life?
Fire addiction, or just modern life?
Pointy stick addiction, or just modern life?
C'mon, now, you have to have better criteria for addiction other than heavy use (otherwise absurdities like "water addiction" would be valid). Addiction is continued use or behavior in the face of consequences. If two men are at the casino and lose 1000 dollars at the poker table four nights in a row, it's the man that has no money to buy diapers for his child and not the millionaire who who loses his tip money that is the addict. Or, take the case of drugs. Jonny's addicted to pot when he fails his third drug test in a row and is sent back to the slammer, but the man who smokes a bowl before going to bed once a week probably isn't.
Therefore it's not computer addiction until your girlfriend leaves you because you can't stop playing WoW, or you can't stop buying the latest, greatest video adapter and overcharge your credit card to the point of insurmountable debt. If there is no negative consequence, then by all means use the computer as much as you wish. But when things like relationships, finances or your health are in jeopardy, that's where the line that marks addiction lies.
Good writing cannot be taught, but it can be encouraged. My guess is that while 15 scientists (and potentially more in the future) will to the screenwriting class only a very small percentage can be successful.
Take the subject of mathematics for instance. It's usually easier to teach the mathematics, to say, a biologist studying population dynamics in the field than it is to take a mathematician and teach him the vast subject of biology.
This does not hold true for creative writing. You need a person who is has a "foot in both doors", more of a renaissance man, to be successful in bridging the gap between the humanities and science in this age of hyper-specialization. Some people can successfully do so (Alan Lightman comes to mind), but in general it takes a very special type of person to create something that mixes the sciences and humanities in a meaningful way. Writing is hard, and science writing is incredibly diffcult.
Every year, we will propose a challenge to coders to solve a simple data processing problem, but with covert malicious behavior. Examples include miscounting votes, shaving money from financial transactions, or leaking information to an eavesdropper. The main goal, however, is to write source code that easily passes visual inspection by other programmers.
Oh dear, now we're rewarding people for writing actual malicious code that is designed to pass visual inspection from other programmers.
When these sort of tricks will show up eventually in actual voting machines or the gigantic corpus of finincial code that's been hacked together?
Or when will we start to find the underhanded tricks in things we use?
For instance, how many people can solve partial differential equations?
If you must know, I'm a creative writing major and an applied mathematics minor. I can solve several classes of partial differential equations without a reference. Seperation of variables, fourier series and transforms, Laplacians in non-cartesian coordinates, whatever. I respect the rest of your comment, I just find it funny that you bring that up.
I'm a senior in the English Department at the University of Washington. I can tell you for a fact grammar has gone by the wayside. Last quarter, in my advanced expository writing class my teacher gave a room full of English majors a grammar quiz. Five out of twenty people understood when to use "whom". Two people could use "to lay" and "to lie" and their respective participles correctly. One person (me) found all the errors in the paragraph at the end of the test. This is not a class filled with freshman--this is an upper-level English class at a major University.
Part of the blame rests on the complexity involved with parsing language. That particular class relied heavily on peer review simply because editing is hard, time consuming work, even if you know all the rules. An instructor reading twenty rough drafts of a ten page paper cannot reply meaningfully to every one in a couple of hours. Content and structure always outweigh grammar and spelling when a teacher had limited time to really look at a student's work.
The other part of the blame arises from hubris associated with grammar. If you tell someone that they need to work on their grammar, they will probably think that you're insinuation that they return to grade school. I think studying grammar should not be relegated the ESL students and middle-schoolers. If you can tell me what the subjunctive mood is without looking it up or use a dash, colon and semicolon without fear then more power to you. If you cannot, perhaps MS Word's grammar checker isn't the only thing that needs a rehaul.
Insightful, lucid, and grammatically-correct writing is a by-product of hard, relentless work that cannot (yet) be replicated.
If any of you are building your own systems I must wholeheartedly recommend the Antec Sonata PC case. It comes with a single fan 380 power supply that is quieter than a whisper. Everything is mounted with rubber to prevent rattles. The loudest it gets is when I fire up my machine and my sata hard disk and it starts whirring up.
It's also a well designed case with firewire, usb and audio connections ports in the front, lockable drive bay doors and a sleek design. It also has a washable air filter. It's much better than fixing a loud PC case. As always prevention is better than the cure.
http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID= 15138
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and you mimic him/her. How do they act during meetings? How do they write tech-specs, documentation? Look at their check-ins, how do they approach code? How deep can they dive into a discussion? Then ask yourself how do you act during meetings, how does your writing stack up, how would you would have written that, where does your knowledge end? Repeat.
There is something to be said about faking it until you make it. Great engineers (and I've seen several in my day) have found a way to balance--their time, customer requirements, dealing with management, and other engineers and combined it with deep knowledge. Little of what separates a decent engineer and a great one is know-how, though. What really separates them IMHO is their countenance when dealing with a massive, ambiguous problem, their delivery record and the trust that they've garnered from that, their effective use of time and their innate, almost magically ability to be aware of any trade-offs the team and organization may be making due to their deep understanding.
If you aren't around good engineers you probably won't be one.
Right off the top of my head I can think of three methods of dewarping book scans that have nothing do to with Google's methods. While Google's method is definitely quite interesting and seems like a great solution, it is by no means whatsoever the only way of accomplishing this.
Please, do tell what your three methods are. None of the commercially available industrial scanners have solved this problem this well. You would have made a lot of money if your solutions are anywhere near as effective as this one. Really. Even if it was 10x slower. I bet you've never dealt with large scale non-destructive scanning of books, and that your methods make assumptions that do not hold for all books, or require many fine-grained measurements that require the book to be perfectly placed. Not only is this method highly accurate, it is fast, and make little assumptions on the nature of the binding, book thickness, what page your on (page 3 curves way differently than page 530), etc. This method is near perfect as far as I can tell. You take two IR pictures, stitch them together the only way possible, and move on. It's a prime example of an elegant solution to an old, tricky problem.
Given a string of 1's, matches if the length of the string is non-prime:
(This is the blog post http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/so-you-think-you-know-regex-fu.html)
Took me a while to figure out how this works. This is the sort of thing that makes me smile.
Scanning a book is easy, it simply involves taking pictures. You can splice the spine off an take pictures of each page or use one of the panoply of non-destructive machines to correct the page warping effects of an open book. This is not particularly hard or expensive.
Damn straight. The OCR process is the hardest part, of course they wouldn't allow access to highly valuable text to others. They might have a million books "scanned" this year but each page has to be OCRed. Most people don't decouple those operations and assume that after scanning the hard part is over. Say each book has 300 pages, so we're talking about running 300 million pages of text through OCR. Now you've got a real problem. How does one know if a page of a book is OCRed correctly? You can pay a human or even a large team of humans to QA the text but even then you can only spot check here and there. A 99.99% correct OCR program will mess up on the equivalent of 150,000 pages of text a year (spread out more or less uniformly across the 300 million). Also, not all pages of books are scanable (pictures, weird fonts, weird page layouts), and then there are headaches with keeping track of the related editions of a books, multiple editions of books, displaying pictures in the reader you don't have copyright to (which I think always gets glossed over with these sorts of articles), 10 digit to 13 digit ISBNs, etc. So yes, they aren't going to allow access to the text to others, because it's hard and expensive to do so because you can only automate so much if you want to the ensure accuracy of the text itself (I think Google does). If they opened the text up what stops the competitors from simply adding the data into their search engines after the difficult part is over? Google does no evil but they aren't stupid.
The Seahawks.
C'mon, now, you have to have better criteria for addiction other than heavy use (otherwise absurdities like "water addiction" would be valid). Addiction is continued use or behavior in the face of consequences. If two men are at the casino and lose 1000 dollars at the poker table four nights in a row, it's the man that has no money to buy diapers for his child and not the millionaire who who loses his tip money that is the addict. Or, take the case of drugs. Jonny's addicted to pot when he fails his third drug test in a row and is sent back to the slammer, but the man who smokes a bowl before going to bed once a week probably isn't.
Therefore it's not computer addiction until your girlfriend leaves you because you can't stop playing WoW, or you can't stop buying the latest, greatest video adapter and overcharge your credit card to the point of insurmountable debt. If there is no negative consequence, then by all means use the computer as much as you wish. But when things like relationships, finances or your health are in jeopardy, that's where the line that marks addiction lies.
I feel sorry for the last guy in the study. He just wanted to listen to some music and got split in half.
The code may be way too complex, but I'm certain this designer is not intelligent...
Good writing cannot be taught, but it can be encouraged. My guess is that while 15 scientists (and potentially more in the future) will to the screenwriting class only a very small percentage can be successful.
Take the subject of mathematics for instance. It's usually easier to teach the mathematics, to say, a biologist studying population dynamics in the field than it is to take a mathematician and teach him the vast subject of biology.
This does not hold true for creative writing. You need a person who is has a "foot in both doors", more of a renaissance man, to be successful in bridging the gap between the humanities and science in this age of hyper-specialization. Some people can successfully do so (Alan Lightman comes to mind), but in general it takes a very special type of person to create something that mixes the sciences and humanities in a meaningful way. Writing is hard, and science writing is incredibly diffcult.
My question is, does Stanford have any recourse for sending their grads off with mixed messages??
If he ever calls Stanford back can the school just blow Jobs off? Or can they hand Jobs less money for his speech?
Every year, we will propose a challenge to coders to solve a simple data processing problem, but with covert malicious behavior. Examples include miscounting votes, shaving money from financial transactions, or leaking information to an eavesdropper. The main goal, however, is to write source code that easily passes visual inspection by other programmers.
Oh dear, now we're rewarding people for writing actual malicious code that is designed to pass visual inspection from other programmers.
When these sort of tricks will show up eventually in actual voting machines or the gigantic corpus of finincial code that's been hacked together?
Or when will we start to find the underhanded tricks in things we use?
If you must know, I'm a creative writing major and an applied mathematics minor. I can solve several classes of partial differential equations without a reference. Seperation of variables, fourier series and transforms, Laplacians in non-cartesian coordinates, whatever. I respect the rest of your comment, I just find it funny that you bring that up.
I'm a senior in the English Department at the University of Washington. I can tell you for a fact grammar has gone by the wayside. Last quarter, in my advanced expository writing class my teacher gave a room full of English majors a grammar quiz. Five out of twenty people understood when to use "whom". Two people could use "to lay" and "to lie" and their respective participles correctly. One person (me) found all the errors in the paragraph at the end of the test. This is not a class filled with freshman--this is an upper-level English class at a major University.
Part of the blame rests on the complexity involved with parsing language. That particular class relied heavily on peer review simply because editing is hard, time consuming work, even if you know all the rules. An instructor reading twenty rough drafts of a ten page paper cannot reply meaningfully to every one in a couple of hours. Content and structure always outweigh grammar and spelling when a teacher had limited time to really look at a student's work.
The other part of the blame arises from hubris associated with grammar. If you tell someone that they need to work on their grammar, they will probably think that you're insinuation that they return to grade school. I think studying grammar should not be relegated the ESL students and middle-schoolers. If you can tell me what the subjunctive mood is without looking it up or use a dash, colon and semicolon without fear then more power to you. If you cannot, perhaps MS Word's grammar checker isn't the only thing that needs a rehaul.
Insightful, lucid, and grammatically-correct writing is a by-product of hard, relentless work that cannot (yet) be replicated.
It's also a well designed case with firewire, usb and audio connections ports in the front, lockable drive bay doors and a sleek design. It also has a washable air filter. It's much better than fixing a loud PC case. As always prevention is better than the cure.= 15138
http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID