strebler

For anyone doing GLSL work, here's a shader debugger that is quite useful: http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/glsldevil/

Would love to see someone with resources (i.e. Valve) somehow maintain it (or do something similar).

Here's an open source fork: http://glsl-debugger.github.io/

Yes, absolutely, which (I'm assuming) is why CIE2K difference is not-quite-euclidean. My opinion is the we still need to find a better difference metric, rather than improving the color space.

On that front, it's amazing to see how much of an effect "switching color spaces" can have on many algorithms.

Color is actually much more difficult than most people realize! Even CIE2000 color distance still has fundamental "perceptual distance" problems, especially comparing non-saturated with saturated colors (although that's a blog post in its own).

Here's our engine linking "real world" photos into the Macys catalogue (based on color, shape, texture): http://www.pcsso.com/demo/macys.htm

That's the first explanation I've read that makes any sense.

I've got a thinkpad w530 too. It's a beast, definitely outperforms my Macbook pro. Not really a fair comparison though, totally different weight class :)

I know a number of aerial photo companies who have done this type of work for decades - what's new here?

My knowledge from local farmers is that they already pay for experts who amalgamate a variety of data sources (soil testing, aerial, satellite, etc) to assess & treat their crops. I mean, does a farmer even know what is NDVI or how to interpret it?

That'd be a good next post, color retrieval using solr.

I'm really interested in that question too, did anyone buy TinEye's color search service? I hope so.

Personally, I think the TinEye color results are better than Shutterstock's approach....although having meta-data alongside is definitely a must.

That's too bad, I guess the simple things don't always work (especially with autoimmune problems). I hope your wife can find something that works!

What about probiotics for ulcerative colitis? A brief scholar search shows some tentative promise:

http://www.nature.com/ajg/journal/v104/n2/abs/ajg2008118a.ht... http://www.nature.com/ajg/journal/v100/n7/abs/ajg2005272a.ht...

May only help for the more mild cases, but I know a number of people who speak very highly of probiotics for various digestive tract issues.

"As if governments have any sort of decent track record on spending intelligently."

Samsung and Hyundai would be prime examples of companies that would not exist if not for direct intelligent investment of significant government money. How else could South Korea compete with China and Japan "next door" if not for a focused effort such as what was done there? It would be quite difficult and I strongly doubt they would be anything like what they are today.

It's just regional perspective, I mean I'm quite happy with our taxation vs services provided (at both personal and corporate level). Free healthcare, 12 months maternity leave for my wife, subsidized daycare, clean water, decent EI just in case, etc, etc. Although it's Canada, so the weather sucks for most of the year.

Rose coloured glasses. You want to startup in Canada? Either a) have access to network with money, or b) bootstrap like there's no tomorrow.

Investors in Canada have an appetite for risk somewhere in the neighbourhood of "mutual fund vs GIC" levels. For someone with Silicon Valley connections, fine it could work, but this is not good general advice.

Even iNovia, which is probably the most forward looking VC in the country, has a fairly small fund (low $100M if memory serves), I believe below the size of the average US fund.

Clearly? Identical twins do not have the same likeliness of developing T1DM. Genetics do not explain why we have had a significant global growth (~3% per year) in the number of cases of Type 1 Diabetes Melanoma (T1DM) in recent decades. There are even a number of vaccines in development (with early successes).

In many cases a T1DM diagnosed child was sick with a cold/flu immediately prior to onset of T1DM. Disease has been theorized for quite a long time to influence the immune system's reaction. A large majority of T1DM cases are diagnosed in winter, Vitamin D / sunlight has been hypothesized to play a role - more northern countries tend to have higher rates.

Even in the hereditary factor, here is research indicating that epigenetics play a role - timing of food shortages during our grandparents' lives significantly increases likeliness of T1DM. That appears to be an environmental factor tweaking our genes.

You're right, it's ok for a project. I guess what I meant was it's quite easy compared to the problems my company deals with every day. 30 images in 24 hours (I think it said) is kind of a problem.

Given the constraints of the asker (all available in OpenCV), the solution I would suggest first is SIFT + homography, both easy to use and in OpenCV (sample code is around). Yes, there's a lot of other possibilities, but this would be an improvement over the original.

Well we do use both (and various others), but really what languages someone knows isn't such a big factor.

The original post really highlights the "problem with computer vision" - finding the coke can is fairly easy (SIFT), although the author goes off on some other random approach that I doubt would work very well. The field certainly has its share of Do-It-Yourselfers, plus it's also quite common to outsource labour overseas.

As for fees, it's entirely reflective of a) how much money the problem is costing the client and b) your ability to prove to them your value to the client. Clients do not always respect the complexity of the problems they're facing, so it's easier to work with those who have tried for themselves.

For what it's worth, we're hiring right now in this space (computer vision software development), located in Ottawa, Canada: http://ca.indeed.com/job/software-engineer-71a851096a104223

It depends on your market. In China, IE6 is still at 20-25% and it's even more if you count all of the smaller browsers that simply wrapped IE6 Trident into their own browser interface.

Wow, perfect timing, I am just writing a contract proposal this weekend!

This (novella-sized) article definitely resonated with me, will try applying some of their advice soon...

The situation is unfortunate, but basically inevitable at this stage in China's development. Take a look at the Chinese book publishing industry and you'll see a glimpse of the Chinese way - most books are put online for free by the authors (mostly in their entirety). The publishing companies pick the most popular ones, who get deals to have their books printed & sold in stores. Totally different from the west.

Doing business in China, I have noticed that there is somewhat of a "creativity gap" (as I call it). I believe that as their society evolves and begins to create more of their own IP, the laws will eventually adapt to protect such developments. In the meantime, it's very difficult.

But still, Cisco has had everything copied (down to the model #s) by you-know-who and yet still makes billions (also powering the great firewall). Like Microsoft & Cisco, there are ways to penetrate and dominate the market in the midst of the piracy.

However, if your IP is some "easily de-obfuscated" javascript (and you're a startup), it's a very difficult position and my heart goes out to them.

This is definitely one of the better (and more accurate) articles on the subject. I have been doing business in China and definitely see his view - it's easy to see why most of China's elite send their children abroad. I wouldn't live there for an extended period.

I'd say their education system (and society) tends to hammer the creativity out of people. I see strong evidence that who think differently are ridiculed. Only the strongest personalities could withstand this, and it is obvious that they often leave for greener pastures. Nurturing the free thinkers is not easy.

Superpower & housing bubble aside, first they have to figure out things like why having seatbelts in cars is important - that the individual is in fact valuable.

Me too! Why did I even click the link? I just assume the rest of the article went something along the lines of: "Also, Newton was a moron. Gravity would have been apparent to me without the apple.", etc, etc.

It's unlikely, as mortgages (and debt in general) are very unpopular in China. It's currently not possible to even get a mortgage. Chinese ghost towns are, for the vast majority, bought and paid for by rich speculators in cash.

Not to say speculation isn't trouble, but theirs isn't built on debt (as was ours).

It's definitely an interesting topic and a nice high level overview of the problems of colour and colour spaces. I like the 4 point colour wheel in some way, but I don't entirely see the benefits.

From a computer vision perspective, this representation still has problems (as do all colour spaces). Look at how massive the green space is. There's 4-5 greenish slices that are close to each other, yet only 1 slice for yellow and 2ish for red. Red is the colour humans see "best", physiologically it should have the largest representation, whereas blue should be smallest.

From the simpler side (i.e. a basic colour wheel application), I'm not sure if this makes it much easier or faster for me to find a colour.

In any case, the article is very nice high level overview of a fascinating problem.

I was reading that article thinking "I remember all of those features (and more) being in Sub7 about 12-13 years ago". Not so advanced, really.

What exactly is the operation being done in the video? My best guess is a noisy set of GPS coordinates / panoramas being repositioned via bundle adjustment on the street view panoramic captures. Or something.

That reminds me of an interesting article I read that may explain this: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

It basically argues that historical "male expendability" has geared men towards a predisposition for higher risk endeavors.

Oh I don't know, I enjoy tracking down obscure bugs from badly formatted data sent by a client system using a JSON API that I changed 6 months ago.

</sarcasm>

I wholeheartedly agree; introducing schemas is obviously a benefit to JSON. Schemas make things more predictable and plus, nobody's forcing you to use one.

Funny, I (very grudgingly) scrapped our (upcoming) Cassandra deployment last week. It's a nice project, but there were too many bugs and glitches for our production requirements.

HBase is an interesting choice, although I'd need to see stronger public "trials by fire" before I'd use it - but then again, we don't have dev resources to spare (like Facebook does).

Of course, he's out of California and you're in Canada where the admissions process is different (closer to the UK system). This is the sort of thing he's talking about:

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/10/12/24103/

"African-American applicants with SAT scores of 1150 had the same chances of being accepted as white applicants with 1460s and Asian applicants with perfect 1600s"

I'm not sure if that necessarily translates into graduate studies, but I'd guess that it does.

It depends on what you want to want to do - this library has a wider scope than others I've seen. The closest I know would be Raphael, which is nice in that it also supports IE (Canvas): http://raphaeljs.com/

If you just want Graphs/Charts, here's a few off the top of my head:

http://www.deensoft.com/lab/protochart/

http://www.liquidx.net/plotkit/

http://code.google.com/p/flotr/