Plastic eating fungi

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679201/fungi-discovered-in-the-amazon-will-eat-your-plastic

Step 1. Get Plastic Eating Fungi.
Step 2. Put plastic eating fungi in box with over the top eco branding.
Step 3. Profit!

Class of the future

https://plus.google.com/107809899089663019971/posts/4VuN2RsRggB

"We propose a flipped classroom model, in which students use our interactive videos to watch the content in advance, and classroom time is used for a more meaningful and engaging interaction between faculty and students, and between students themselves."

I like this idea a lot. 

Eye tracker

Here is an interesting idea:

The first article is about tricking your eye into seeing impossible color combinations. (Red-Green, Yellow-Blue, etc). The key is to use an eye tracker to always show the same parts of your eyes the same colors.
The second article is on eye tracking with open CV. It would take a bit of work, but I think this whole system could be done on iPad/etc.

http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2069-forbidden-colors-red-green.html
http://opencv-code.com/Real_Time_Eye_Tracking_and_Blink_Detection

Once you have the eyes, You can determine your position relative to the camera (and thus iPad screen) using some simple trig. X and Y for sure... Z would be a little more tricky, but essentially use pairwise distance/scale change.

The next step would be to determine the direction of the eyes themselves. I'm not entirely sure what the best method would be to do that. Any ideas? 

Once you had a general purpose library to give you this field of view information, I bet you could come up with a whole bunch of applications.

Optical illusions seem like the obvious first class of products, but I wonder if you could create an entirely new style of UI? For example a lot of UI's currently hide menu bars unless the cursor has entered a region... But the optical illusion idea seems to indicate a whole new class of objects can be drawn that aren't really there. More vivid colors for sure...perhaps some form of 3D that doesn't require glasses.

-JD

---Update---
Apparently you want "Gaze Tracking".

This guy apparently nailed it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQyG8eFJGgQ

And here is another project with source that _may_ be what we need:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/26897/TrackEye-Real-Time-Tracking-Of-Human-Eyes-Using-a

I think these people are utilizing a much simpler approach to detection, by using nightvision mode of a camera, and the iris' high reflectivity, etc.. But after that I suppose all the angle calculations would be the same.

http://www.gazegroup.org/downloads/23-gazetracker


Some papers:
http://books.google.com/books?id=k0VGgU0lHroC&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=calculate+eye+gaze+calculation&source=bl&ots=RQZLpULcAU&sig=AzWUX6VeRXON6cAvkrKQK7mObH8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3gsfT82BBeSjmQXc5cHIDg&ved=0CEAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=calculate%20eye%20gaze%20calculation&f=false

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=calculate%20eye%20direction%20of%20view&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cs.clemson.edu%2F~hmurphy%2Fpapers%2Fbrmic%2FBET102cr.pdf&ei=9ggfT7_JFqSfmQXsnvXADg&usg=AFQjCNHAuzIpjDXxWruUt0Aft5GbL8aD8Q&cad=rja

This must have been a lot of work

Practically full SQL support on top of Map Reduce framework.
http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37200.html

This is a pretty big deal.

This could be very useful

Techniques for: finding, solving, proving, optimizing .. etc

http://www.tricki.org/tricki/map

S-Expressions

All that is old is new again.

http://shinkirou.org/blog/2010/06/s-expressions-the-fat-free-alternative-to-json/

Goths up trees

Good for 5 minutes of entertainment.
http://gothsuptrees.net/

Integral Images

http://www.aishack.in/2010/07/integral-images/

Suppose an image is w pixels wide and h pixels high. Then the integral of this will be w+1 pixels wide and h+1 pixels high. The first row and column of the integral image are all zeros.

All other pixels have a value equal to the sum of all pixels before it.

recursive average

double average = 0;
int number_of_samples = 0;
for(int i=0; i<v.size(); ++i) {
  number_of_samples++;
  average = (average * (number_of_samples - 1) + v[i]) / number_of_samples;
};

The advantage is that the variable "average" will always keep a value that is roughly in the same order of magnitude as the elements that are being averaged. That should improve the resulting accuracy.

Why The Vasa Sank: 10 Lessons Learned

http://faculty.up.edu/lulay/failure/vasacasestudy.pdf

Lessons-Learned

The lessons to be learned from the sinking of the Vasa are as relevant today as in 1628. Those lessons are summarized as follows:

1. Excessive schedule pressure: The Vasa was completed under strong time constraints to meet a pressing need.

2. Changing needs: Many changes to operational characteristics were made during construction of the ship.

3. Lack of technical specifications: The (non-existent) specifications were not revised as the operational requirements changed.

4. Lack of a documented project plan: During a year-long transition in leadership it was difficult for the assistant to manage the project. This resulted in poor supervision of the various groups working on the ship (i.e., the shipwright, the ship builder, and the

Prepared by 5 of 7 R. Fairleynumerous subcontractors). There is no evidence that the new project manager (the former assistant) prepared any plans after the original shipwright died.

5. Excessive innovation: No one in Sweden, including the shipwright, had ever built a ship having two gun decks.

6. Secondary innovations: Many secondary innovations were added during construction of the Vasa to accommodate the increased length, the additional gun deck, and other changes.

7. Requirements creep: It seems that no one was aware of the degree to which the Vasa had evolved during the 2 1⁄2 years of construction.

8. Lack of scientific methods: There were no known methods for calculating center of gravity, stiffness, and the resulting stability relationships of the Vasa.

9. Ignoring the obvious: The Vasa was launched after failing a stability test.

10. Possible mendacity: Results of the stability test were known to some but were not communicated to others.

While #7 should be well known to everyone, I particularly like #5 and 6.

Someday I'm going to get around to putting together my personal "Lessons Learned". Perhaps a companion cheat sheet/flow chart to help alert me when things are going off the rails. Something like:

"Have I spent 2 months reimplementing a standard feature like SQL Transactions, but in application code?"

etc.

 

LAB Color Space

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_color_space

I like the idea of color spaces with imaginary colors...

But here is the best part:

The nonlinear relations for L*, a*, and b* are intended to mimic the nonlinear response of the eye. Furthermore, uniform changes of components in the L*a*b* color space aim to correspond to uniform changes in perceived color, so the relative perceptual differences between any two colors in L*a*b* can be approximated by treating each color as a point in a three dimensional space (with three components: L*, a*, b*) and taking the Euclidean distance between them.


If a saturated green is viewed until the green receptors are fatigued and then a saturated red is viewed, a perception of red more intense than pure spectral red can be experienced. This is due to the fatigue of the green receptors and the resulting lack of their ability to desaturate the perceptual response to the output of the red receptors.^[2]
 

 

At Walt Disney World, Kodak engineered Epcot's pavement to be a certain hue of pink so that the grass would look greener.