Via MAKE:Blog: advice on managing digital images:
Having a systematic, organized rating process will streamline the tasks of searching for pictures and identifying images to throw away. For instance, you might want to throw out any images labeled as “outtakes” once the job has been delivered and paid for, or you might want to delete all neutral images from shoots with a large number of similar frames at some date in the future.
Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles explains the recent quantum computing results:
So, imagine a different experiment– rather than waiting until the results are 50/50, make the measurement a much shorter time after the excitation– a tenth of a second, say. The probability that the atom has already decayed is really, really small– 0.002%– so you’re really likely to find it in the excited state, after which the atom is entirely in the excited state again, and the decay clock starts over. Then measure it again, and again, and again, waiting a tenth of a second each time. After ten measurements, you’re one second past the original excitation, and the probability of finding the particle in the excited state is almost 100% (99.98%, give or take). If you keep making measurements at short intervals, you can keep the atom in the excited state basically forever.
The cool thing is, you can do this sort of thing with passive measurements. You don’t have to bounce a photon off the atom to prove that it’s in the excited state– instead, you can send in a photon that will only be absorbed by a ground-state atom, and see what happens. If it isn’t absorbed (and it most likely won’t be), that’s just as effective at keeping the atom in the excited state as if you’d done something more active to detect the excited-state atom.
Essentially the best, most concise explanation I’ve encountered.
Via MAKE: Blog: “Low-Cost sensing and communication using bidirectional LEDs”:
A novel microprocessor interface circuit is described which can alternately emit and detect light using only an LED, two digital I/O pins and a single current limiting resistor. This technique is first applied to create a smart illumination system that uses a single LED as both light source and sensor. We then present several devices that use an LED as a generic wireless serial data port. An important implication of this work is that every LED connected to a microprocessor can be thought of as a wireless two-way communication port. We present this technology as a solution to the “last centimeter problem”, because it permits disparate devices to communicate with each other simply and cheaply with minimal design modification.
As I’ve mentioned… I dunno, thousands of times? we scan books. Lots of books. Many of these have illustrations.
It strikes me as being surprisingly difficult to create a special-purpose feed of the images we scan. All I want is the figures. I’d like to add them here to share them, as we create them, and also would like to make the few-hundred older ones available. But the plethora of image gallery plugins for WordPress, and Flickr and its ilk, well they’re all about the photographs, and the placement and stuff. Those solutions are not made for uploading linked thumbnails of charming spot illustrations, and typically involve third-party software and accounts and all sorts of crap.
Simpler would be better. As in: putting the pictures in a folder somewhere, and getting them to show up here in WordPress as a special kind of aside—a blog post with a special style all its own, like the gray boxes the “pure blog” category ends up in. I’m working on it. Meanwhile:
That’s what a senior professor in the department said, when he heard my idea of using adaptive search to construct a model of some data.
This is the direction we call “uphill.”
Wants to know about snakes. By typing increasingly strident searches in the searchbox at a website patently not about snakes.
Makes you wonder what people think they’re seeing when they visit a web page.
- [22/Feb/2006:11:25:07 -0500] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=What+is+in+snake+venom+and+how+it+was+made.&spell=1″
- [22/Feb/2006:11:27:16 -0500] /oddends/index.php?s=Pictures+of+very+deadly+snakes
- [22/Feb/2006:11:28:17 -0500] /oddends/index.php?s=Pictures+of+very+deadly+snakes+dam+show+me+some+very+deadly+snakes
- [22/Feb/2006:11:28:49 -0500] /oddends/index.php?s=Snake+Picters
- [22/Feb/2006:11:31:32 -0500] /oddends/index.php?s=Snake+Picters
- [22/Feb/2006:11:32:49 -0500] /oddends/index.php?s=I+need+to+see+some+snakes+
- [22/Feb/2006:11:34:06 -0500] /oddends/index.php?s=Is+there+anything+i+can+learn+about+snakes
- [22/Feb/2006:11:34:34 -0500] /oddends/index.php?s=iongsnakes
- [22/Feb/2006:11:34:46 -0500] /oddends/index.php?s=pithons+
- [22/Feb/2006:11:36:14 -0500] /oddends/index.php?s=I+need+to+see+some+snakes+
- [22/Feb/2006:11:36:15 -0500] … “http://logiston.com/oddends/2005/07/kills-snake-venom/”
Well, he didn’t come out and say it, but he is pointing out some of the perennial realities of lab work:
“Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit creating human-animal hybrids like me and other members of my administration because I think they’re the work of the devil”
PZ Myers talks about something important to the biological sciences. An early commenter, amusingly, brings up my old boss, Stu Kauffman. My response: A lot of times, it’s not the words you say, but when you say them.
Sigh.
Inside Higher Ed has an article called “Moving Beyond Tenure” that you might enjoy:
Tenure creates a do-or-die moment 15 years into a career. What other profession has anything even vaguely like that? At least in law firms, if you don’t make partner, you have the option of putting out a shingle and starting your own practice. Most of us can’t afford to start our own colleges. After years of extended graduate training, some post-grad-school bouncing around, and more years of tenure-track teaching and writing, you are either set for life or summarily fired. No wonder people are edgy!
[Ever since my wife got me a lovely little iPod Nano for Valentine's Day, I've had long-lost songs in my head. Literally. This title, for those who may not have paid enough attention in the second quartile of the 90s, is a Spookey Ruben line from Volume I - Modes of Transportation. Seek out the album; it's great, and full of excellent earworms....]
As an exercise in Larry Seiford’s benchmarking class, I’ve just polled the volunteers over at Distributed Proofreaders about what kinds of projects they prefer to work on. Took the numbers and munged them into this “House of Quality” (Quality Function Deployment) diagram:
For those of you who may not have encountered these pseudo-quantitative extravaganzas before, here’s what’s going on: The left side lists a series of “Whats” culled from discussion from my “customers”—in this case, the people who will proofread and process the books we scan for Distributed Proofreaders. The top row of greenish columns is a series of “Hows”—in this case, what we as Content Providers think we can do to address those “whats”. Where a number appears in the intersection cell, it captures some of the positive association between them. The roof-like diagonal bit at the top is supposed to capture (though here only poorly hints at) correlations and conflicts between the “hows”. The right-most columns in funny colors summarize the intensity of reaction for and against the various “whats”, and collapses all the discussion down into a single number in the range 1–5 for each item. Finally, to fill the bottom rows floating down there, I multiply the weights on the right by the numbers in each column, and add them all up, and normalize them to the range 0–1000. The “hows” [columns] that produce the top quartile of these numbers are highlighted in green, the ones in the lowest quartile are highlighted in red.
Here’s what it’s nominally for: We, as Content Providers aiming to release projects at DP that most appeal to the volunteers (so they read them faster than they do now, so we can get our house-full old rotten volumes cleaned out faster than it fills up), want to focus on the “hows” that give the greatest benefit to our “customers”, and postpone thinking about the ones that they most dislike. It’s not like we’re competing with other large-scale Content Providers… but we are. For the time and attention of the volunteers. So: more interest, more books cleared out.
You may someday encounter, or even consider using, the House of Quality in your work. SixSigma people are all over it. Do not let the pseudo-quantitative aspects of the process fool you, and feel free to call bullshit on anybody—manager, dean, yourself, whoever—who jabs a finger at the bottom line and says, “Clearly we need to do this!” The point of the process is the conversation between consumer and supplier; forget the damned numbers. It’s a way of determining which subjects may warrant further discussion and attention, not a statistical method for driving without your hands on the wheel.
So the next step, as far as I’m concerned, is to talk more about why this weird prejudice against periodicals keeps cropping up. I have a teetering stack of maybe 200 volumes here; time to do some marketing.
Next book scanned I scanned last night? An 1899 novel. Woopsie.
Thanks to Kashou for the so-far-so-good-seeming tonus Wordpress theme. Expect minor tweaks, fizzes, and pops to be occurring as time allows.
Pontification without all the gritty gravitas
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