Late post, probably won't get any attention, but I was asleep dammit.
Anyways, my wife is in medical school and this is absolutely how it is done. They immediately post every single lecture as mp3 audio. No video, which makes it a little different (maybe better?). It may be a little different for undergrads, but come on, college means self-responsibility. If a student chooses not to attend lecture, it's their loss. Sometimes it can be a gain - I have absolutely known people who will skip certain profs because their presentation is so terrible that it is actually detrimental to the learning process.
You're right. You can't do anything good in an embedded system without interrupt handling. I thought you meant multithreading in a broader sense. At that level I guess I wouldn't call it multithreading, but I'm used to stooping to that level:) Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
Yeah, I don't really advocate using ASM for anything extensive. I just meant, in the pedagogical sense, it was a good experience. I never really did anything in it again, but when I *did* use, for example, C or Labview to do embedded-type stuff, I fealt that the ASM+microprocessor+real I/O experience payed off. Actually I really fealt like it paid off, even with non-embedded stuff, on improving my skills and understanding overall.
LabView is definitely not the best way to learn, at any rate:-/ I thought NQC would handle most of the functionality of the old bricks, even a little interrupt handling. I'm sure someone will update it for the NXT bricks.
My university holds a real time systems course that uses Mindstorms so that CS majors can build physical systems without needing to know things like welding and soildering and other machining things. But labview is a bit underpowered for us, when you want to talk about things like multithreaded applications undergoing realtime constraints.
Soildering? hehe. Sorry. OK, the real info: I'm not sure how much storage space the NXT's micro has, but it's probably not enough to do any sophisticated software tricks *and* accomplish any sophisticated tasks. I don't know what your course is like specifically, but IMHO one of the main points of a microprocessor/realtime class is to teach you how to deal with those restrictions and still accomplish something sophisticated. When I took a similar course, we had to do all of our coding in assembly and learn to read the machine code that got spit out for debugging. The micro had about 1K of EEPROM, too. It was by far the best thing that's ever happened to my coding skills over all.
What the hell is service provider addiction? I get the internet addiction thing, but I've never said "I NEED Comcast... none of this other crap will do!!".
I can't be the only one who had to read the story and say "oooooooh".
2) In 2003 or so, during a limited lecture tour about his proof of the Poincare Conjecture, he responded deftly and hilariously to a comment of Misha Gromov in the audience. Gromov is one of the most difficult people to have in a talk- he is a great mathematician with not much patience and has derailed or rerouted talks by many great researchers, who sometimes get quite flustered. I can't remember the exact wording of the exchange, which is too bad since it was precious, but Gromov asked something like "I don't see how that goes, I'd like to see some more details" and Grisha responded with something like "well, yes, you would" and carried on as he had intended.
And for the record, I'm not an ME (sort of... it's complicated) and I've only used a PID once. I do like the ME approach to controls, though... mmmmgeometry.
They could make it really robust and easier to develop had they used a fuzzy logic controller. But that would be a little too imaginative for American engineers.
What the hell is the fascination with fuzzy logic?
There isn't any, or at least there hasn't been any with serious control theorists in the last 10 years since the fad went away. This guy is full of crap. Fuzzy control is just linear control with a non-smooth control surface.
At first I thought there's no way you can get 3D motion from a single video frame (not a completely off-the-cuff comment, I know a thing or two about computer vision). Then the geometer in me said "but the dimensionality of the configuration space is limited by limb rigidity." Not every point on the body can be in any point in 3D space; e.g. the hand has to be ~12" from the elbow. If you can track the shoulder, elbow, and hand, you can estimate how long they are and deduce (up to some reflections) where they are in 3D space based on the rigid body kinematics (assuming the shoulder to be fixed as an example). Eliminate the reflections by ruling out those that would violate anatomically impossible poses and/or produce occlusions. It has flaws, but I'm curious if anyone's tried it. An old prof of mine was working on something similar involving tracking limb movement for pattern recognition, so it wouldn't surprise me if someone has looked into this.
That's right, I just generated and solved my own argument. The electronic extension of the voices in my head.:)
As a 53 year old, I wish it was just the 'old' politicians that were into taking our freedoms away. Unfortunately, there is a new, younger generation that are ready to take over. Just check out any young Republicans club and see for yourself.
Indeed, Mike Fitzpatrick (cited above as a sponsor of said bill) is a relatively young 43.
"Does Slashdot know of labs where basic research in applied engineering is still done in the US, without the pressure of money and immediate results?""
How about starting with the "school of hard knocks"? One way or another money's going to be involved. Period! Results? Well sooner or later. Or were you under the impression that businesses (even Bell labs) did what they did out of the goodness of their hearts? Even the government wants results (albeit for different reasons).* The thing is not wishing that the world was something it will never be. But to fit within and control it enough that you get the desired results.
*Someone mentioned academia. Problem is that money's tight for various reasons and it's no longer the geek paradise it once was.
I concur, though maybe with a little more optimisim. One of my favorite profs had this great concept called the law of the "Conservation of Misery". If you want to work in academia, you may get lots of freedom but also lots of pressure from trying to get tenure and raising your own money. If you want to work in industry, you probably don't have to beg for money, but you probably have a lot less freedom. Conservation of misery.
I guess that doesn't sound so optimistic, but I always see it as a good justification to stop worrying about trying to find the perfect solution and just do what your gut says that you will enjoy doing. Usually works pretty well for me.
We all know that the Tunguska event was caused by Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower, which somehow was able to channel immense amounts of energy half-way around the globe. Apparently he was able to channel energy several thousand years into the past as well, creating the prehistoric glass for the Egyptians to find. Crazy guy, that Tesla. Crazy like a fox.
I shall now seek out this curious tome which neither I nor the rest of/. has read forty-two times over already, producing a such a familiarity that we reference it at the drop of a hat, such as in, say, a thread about a chicken's (in)ability to fly.
Let me be the first to welcome our new non-flying chicken overlords. But do they linux? Imagine a beowolf cluster of chickens.
"Spoiled white kids don't want to be into "Hip Hop / Gangsta Hood" or even "Goth". It has been way too overdone.
Unfortunately many of them are geting into "Emo/Screamo" bullshit.
Does anyone else find it sociologically interesting that we so easily interchange music and videogame rhetoric?
What about prog? I want to play a Rush game. I know I never really escaped the grunge era, but I would love to get my hands on a new single by Id Software.
Come to think of it, sometimes I feel like you get the same pompous attitude from game store clerks as you can get from record store clerks (the indie vynil type).
"The Guide says there is an art to flying, [...] or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." - Douglas Adams (Life, The Universe, and Everything)
Same here, it seems if ye do try to track them in England, ye can't because so many Americans' ancestors were weirdos who didn't register their babies with the Church of England.
But if they left because of debt (referring to the parent), then maybe you can find records relating to the debt that may point to another source which would have genealogically-useful information? The church is pretty good at keeping records, and so are people who are owed significant amounts of money:) Just a thought, I am not a genealogist.
"The dweebs largely end up in engineering or the quantitative business disciplines."
I'm an engineering geek and I take massive offense to being grouped with "quantitative business disciplines":P Then again, I think anyone in grad school for anything should fall into the geek category (except some of the people sent back to get an MS by their employers, and not even all of those). You don't spend 3-5 years of your life studying one subject if you aren't pretty geeked out about it.
If I could mod up what you just said, I would. It was informed, informative, and appropriate.
I appologize if my previous comment was too abrasive. You just hit a nerve for me. I make a living doing research and experimental work; I know how much work goes into it and I know how it takes lots of "baby steps" to acheive the kind of results that people seem to expect from every single experiment. Mostly my beef is with the media's role in this process. Honest work tends to get publicized as something it isn't, and then people are all-too-ready to provide harsh criticism based on what was an impressionistic portrayal to begin with. This happens to an extreme degree on slashdot, where you have lots of people with generally no journalism experience, some technical experience, and who seem to all feel that they're qualified to pass judgement.
Your first comment hit this nerve for me, since your criticisms were all mostly irrelevant to what appears to be the actual task (it's research, or maybe even an undergraduate project, not the end-all solution to hurricane damage). The second comment was spot on relevant, though I still imagine that the people in question have done their homework, considered the basic concerns, and still have a pretty good reason to do what they're doing and expect that it will be in some way helpful.
If you want to compare the size of our professional/intellectual dicks, then we can do that, but I'll go ahead and admit that I'm a little wet behind the ears (though not so wet that I don't expect a little more respect than that). I hold in high regard the wisdom of engineers, technicians, machinists, and other "old goats"; I didn't get where I am today by being naive and ignoring what everyone else has to say. That is to say, I'm no troll. I am, however, critical and defensive of people who share my profession and receive (seemingly) uninformed/misinformed criticism.
They're forgetting the most destructive part of a hurricane. Granted strong winds can and will do a significant amount of damage (I still remember what my parents house looked like after Ivan), but the most damage is done along the coastline where they get hit by storm surge.
That's how a controlled experiment works. If they wanted to study flood damage they would have done something completely different. Don't use criticism of someone's hard work as a launching point to tell anecdotes. If this gives anyone false hope it's because the media is portraying it as something it's not.
This experiment misses a couple of things that caused most of the destruction during Hurricane Andrew.
From the BYLINE of TFA: "A family home in Canada will be deliberately destroyed by scientists to understand how buildings react to hurricane force winds." Not the rain, not the building code, THE WINDS. That's how a controlled experiment works.
I am skeptical that this experiment will turn up anything we didn't already know.
I'm sure the researchers didn't do any literature review. At least not a thorough one if they didn't contact you, since you appear to be a leading expert.
This magical age limit thing is really bothering me.. especially since each country seems to have their own magical number.
The laws on age of consent vary not only by country, but also by state in the US. Many states have age-proximity clauses as well - for example if the age of consent is 16, but the girl is 16 and the guy is 18, it may not be a legal problem, or it may be a lesser offense like corruption of a minor rather than statutory rape.
Not to sound like a pedo; I started dating my now-wife in high school when I was a senior and she was a sophomore. It was in our business to be aware of these things (just in case, you know).
I work in an engineering department in academia. Macs are VERY popular... lots of profs have spiffy new(ish) powerbooks with huge, beautiful widescreen flatpanels for their docking stations. For many, having MATLAB and/or Mathematica is key and they are both nicely supported in OSX. Add in great support for Latex and other document/presentation prep tools, and you're set to go.
On a related note, there may be problems if something isn't done about the lack of ports of MATLAB/etc to run natively on the new intel-based machines. I know several people in the department and elsewhere that are hesitant to buy new intel macbook pros because of this.
Slashdot Mirror
Late post, probably won't get any attention, but I was asleep dammit.
Anyways, my wife is in medical school and this is absolutely how it is done. They immediately post every single lecture as mp3 audio. No video, which makes it a little different (maybe better?). It may be a little different for undergrads, but come on, college means self-responsibility. If a student chooses not to attend lecture, it's their loss. Sometimes it can be a gain - I have absolutely known people who will skip certain profs because their presentation is so terrible that it is actually detrimental to the learning process.
You're right. You can't do anything good in an embedded system without interrupt handling. I thought you meant multithreading in a broader sense. At that level I guess I wouldn't call it multithreading, but I'm used to stooping to that level :) Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
:-/ I thought NQC would handle most of the functionality of the old bricks, even a little interrupt handling. I'm sure someone will update it for the NXT bricks.
Yeah, I don't really advocate using ASM for anything extensive. I just meant, in the pedagogical sense, it was a good experience. I never really did anything in it again, but when I *did* use, for example, C or Labview to do embedded-type stuff, I fealt that the ASM+microprocessor+real I/O experience payed off. Actually I really fealt like it paid off, even with non-embedded stuff, on improving my skills and understanding overall.
LabView is definitely not the best way to learn, at any rate
That was, like, the point and stuff. All in good fun.
What the hell is service provider addiction? I get the internet addiction thing, but I've never said "I NEED Comcast... none of this other crap will do!!".
I can't be the only one who had to read the story and say "oooooooh".
It's OK, I was trying to agree with you :)
And for the record, I'm not an ME (sort of... it's complicated) and I've only used a PID once. I do like the ME approach to controls, though... mmmmgeometry.
They could make it really robust and easier to develop had they used a fuzzy logic controller. But that would be a little too imaginative for American engineers.
What the hell is the fascination with fuzzy logic?
There isn't any, or at least there hasn't been any with serious control theorists in the last 10 years since the fad went away. This guy is full of crap. Fuzzy control is just linear control with a non-smooth control surface.
At first I thought there's no way you can get 3D motion from a single video frame (not a completely off-the-cuff comment, I know a thing or two about computer vision). Then the geometer in me said "but the dimensionality of the configuration space is limited by limb rigidity." Not every point on the body can be in any point in 3D space; e.g. the hand has to be ~12" from the elbow. If you can track the shoulder, elbow, and hand, you can estimate how long they are and deduce (up to some reflections) where they are in 3D space based on the rigid body kinematics (assuming the shoulder to be fixed as an example). Eliminate the reflections by ruling out those that would violate anatomically impossible poses and/or produce occlusions. It has flaws, but I'm curious if anyone's tried it. An old prof of mine was working on something similar involving tracking limb movement for pattern recognition, so it wouldn't surprise me if someone has looked into this.
:)
That's right, I just generated and solved my own argument. The electronic extension of the voices in my head.
As a 53 year old, I wish it was just the 'old' politicians that were into taking our freedoms away. Unfortunately, there is a new, younger generation that are ready to take over. Just check out any young Republicans club and see for yourself.
Indeed, Mike Fitzpatrick (cited above as a sponsor of said bill) is a relatively young 43.
"Does Slashdot know of labs where basic research in applied engineering is still done in the US, without the pressure of money and immediate results?""
How about starting with the "school of hard knocks"? One way or another money's going to be involved. Period! Results? Well sooner or later. Or were you under the impression that businesses (even Bell labs) did what they did out of the goodness of their hearts? Even the government wants results (albeit for different reasons).* The thing is not wishing that the world was something it will never be. But to fit within and control it enough that you get the desired results.
*Someone mentioned academia. Problem is that money's tight for various reasons and it's no longer the geek paradise it once was.
I concur, though maybe with a little more optimisim. One of my favorite profs had this great concept called the law of the "Conservation of Misery". If you want to work in academia, you may get lots of freedom but also lots of pressure from trying to get tenure and raising your own money. If you want to work in industry, you probably don't have to beg for money, but you probably have a lot less freedom. Conservation of misery.
I guess that doesn't sound so optimistic, but I always see it as a good justification to stop worrying about trying to find the perfect solution and just do what your gut says that you will enjoy doing. Usually works pretty well for me.
We all know that the Tunguska event was caused by Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower, which somehow was able to channel immense amounts of energy half-way around the globe. Apparently he was able to channel energy several thousand years into the past as well, creating the prehistoric glass for the Egyptians to find. Crazy guy, that Tesla. Crazy like a fox.
I shall now seek out this curious tome which neither I nor the rest of /. has read forty-two times over already, producing a such a familiarity that we reference it at the drop of a hat, such as in, say, a thread about a chicken's (in)ability to fly.
Let me be the first to welcome our new non-flying chicken overlords. But do they linux? Imagine a beowolf cluster of chickens.
Yeesh.
"Spoiled white kids don't want to be into "Hip Hop / Gangsta Hood" or even "Goth". It has been way too overdone.
Unfortunately many of them are geting into "Emo/Screamo" bullshit.
Does anyone else find it sociologically interesting that we so easily interchange music and videogame rhetoric?
What about prog? I want to play a Rush game. I know I never really escaped the grunge era, but I would love to get my hands on a new single by Id Software.
Come to think of it, sometimes I feel like you get the same pompous attitude from game store clerks as you can get from record store clerks (the indie vynil type).
This is "interesting"? It should just be "funny"!
I mean, EVERYONE knows what an impulse function is, right?
Right?
It's so very lonely here.
P.S. It's not really a function. It's a distribution, measure, functional, possibly some other things, but not a function.
Yes, very lonely.
"It's called falling...with style."
"The Guide says there is an art to flying, [...] or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." - Douglas Adams (Life, The Universe, and Everything)
Same here, it seems if ye do try to track them in England, ye can't because so many Americans' ancestors were weirdos who didn't register their babies with the Church of England.
:) Just a thought, I am not a genealogist.
But if they left because of debt (referring to the parent), then maybe you can find records relating to the debt that may point to another source which would have genealogically-useful information? The church is pretty good at keeping records, and so are people who are owed significant amounts of money
"The dweebs largely end up in engineering or the quantitative business disciplines."
:P Then again, I think anyone in grad school for anything should fall into the geek category (except some of the people sent back to get an MS by their employers, and not even all of those). You don't spend 3-5 years of your life studying one subject if you aren't pretty geeked out about it.
I'm an engineering geek and I take massive offense to being grouped with "quantitative business disciplines"
Necessity is the mother of invention, but Nature is its wetnurse.
...and don't forget, Nature is a mother.
Easy, killer.
If I could mod up what you just said, I would. It was informed, informative, and appropriate.
I appologize if my previous comment was too abrasive. You just hit a nerve for me. I make a living doing research and experimental work; I know how much work goes into it and I know how it takes lots of "baby steps" to acheive the kind of results that people seem to expect from every single experiment. Mostly my beef is with the media's role in this process. Honest work tends to get publicized as something it isn't, and then people are all-too-ready to provide harsh criticism based on what was an impressionistic portrayal to begin with. This happens to an extreme degree on slashdot, where you have lots of people with generally no journalism experience, some technical experience, and who seem to all feel that they're qualified to pass judgement.
Your first comment hit this nerve for me, since your criticisms were all mostly irrelevant to what appears to be the actual task (it's research, or maybe even an undergraduate project, not the end-all solution to hurricane damage). The second comment was spot on relevant, though I still imagine that the people in question have done their homework, considered the basic concerns, and still have a pretty good reason to do what they're doing and expect that it will be in some way helpful.
If you want to compare the size of our professional/intellectual dicks, then we can do that, but I'll go ahead and admit that I'm a little wet behind the ears (though not so wet that I don't expect a little more respect than that). I hold in high regard the wisdom of engineers, technicians, machinists, and other "old goats"; I didn't get where I am today by being naive and ignoring what everyone else has to say. That is to say, I'm no troll. I am, however, critical and defensive of people who share my profession and receive (seemingly) uninformed/misinformed criticism.
They're forgetting the most destructive part of a hurricane. Granted strong winds can and will do a significant amount of damage (I still remember what my parents house looked like after Ivan), but the most damage is done along the coastline where they get hit by storm surge.
That's how a controlled experiment works. If they wanted to study flood damage they would have done something completely different. Don't use criticism of someone's hard work as a launching point to tell anecdotes. If this gives anyone false hope it's because the media is portraying it as something it's not.
This experiment misses a couple of things that caused most of the destruction during Hurricane Andrew.
From the BYLINE of TFA: "A family home in Canada will be deliberately destroyed by scientists to understand how buildings react to hurricane force winds." Not the rain, not the building code, THE WINDS. That's how a controlled experiment works.
I am skeptical that this experiment will turn up anything we didn't already know.
I'm sure the researchers didn't do any literature review. At least not a thorough one if they didn't contact you, since you appear to be a leading expert.
This magical age limit thing is really bothering me.. especially since each country seems to have their own magical number.
The laws on age of consent vary not only by country, but also by state in the US. Many states have age-proximity clauses as well - for example if the age of consent is 16, but the girl is 16 and the guy is 18, it may not be a legal problem, or it may be a lesser offense like corruption of a minor rather than statutory rape.
Not to sound like a pedo; I started dating my now-wife in high school when I was a senior and she was a sophomore. It was in our business to be aware of these things (just in case, you know).
... with the hard drive empty. Fill all of those 120 gigabytes and it weighs a full 20 lbs.
I work in an engineering department in academia. Macs are VERY popular... lots of profs have spiffy new(ish) powerbooks with huge, beautiful widescreen flatpanels for their docking stations. For many, having MATLAB and/or Mathematica is key and they are both nicely supported in OSX. Add in great support for Latex and other document/presentation prep tools, and you're set to go.
On a related note, there may be problems if something isn't done about the lack of ports of MATLAB/etc to run natively on the new intel-based machines. I know several people in the department and elsewhere that are hesitant to buy new intel macbook pros because of this.