http://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_cooperate.html
TED
Apr 282012
Apr 192012
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2012 April 19
Image Credit & Copyright: Ben Cooper (Launch Photography)
< | Archive | Index | Search | Calendar | RSS | Education | About APOD | Discuss | >
Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.
NASA Web Privacy Policy and Important Notices
A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
Apr 182012
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| The revolutionary calculator that shows the answer only when you also enter a suitable mental estimate. |  |
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| With QAMA as the student’s regular calculator and used exclusively, calculations can no longer be performed without involving the head and the proper comprehension of the ingredients. As expected, its effects on performance and, more importantly – understanding, are phenomenal.
It is even fun: Getting estimates accepted is satisfying. Understanding is pleasing. Users at all levels rapidly find themselves much better at it than they thought. QAMA helps to, altogether, combat the reliance on useless rote performance that is so prevalent in math and science education. |
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US Patent 6820800 |
| TERMS AND CONDITIONS | PRIVACY POLICY | SHIPPING AND RETURNS |
Apr 052012
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2012 April 5
Copyright: Miloslav Druckmüller (UM FSI, Brno Univ. of Technology), Shadia Habbal (IfA, Univ. of Hawaii) Explanation: Sweeping from the eastern to western horizon, this 360 degree panorama follows the band of zodiacal light along the solar system’s ecliptic plane. Dust scattering sunlight produces the faint zodiacal glow that spans this fundamental coordinate plane of the celestial sphere, corresponding to the apparent yearly path of the Sun through the sky and the plane of Earth’s orbit. The fascinating panorama is a mosaic of images taken from dusk to dawn over the course of a single night at two different locations on Mauna Kea. The lights of Hilo, Hawaii are on the eastern (left) horizon, with the Subaru and twin Keck telescope structures near the western horizon. On that well chosen moonless night, Venus was shining as the morning star just above the eastern horizon, and Saturn was close to opposition. In fact, Saturn is seen immersed in a brightening of the zodiacal band known as the gegenschein. The gegenschein also lies near 180 degrees in elongation or angular distance from the Sun along the ecliptic. In the mosaic projection, the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy runs at an angle, crossing the horizontal band of zodiacal light above the two horizons. Nebulae, stars, and dust clouds of the bulging galactic center are rising in the east.
< | Archive | Index | Search | Calendar | RSS | Education | About APOD | Discuss | >
Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.
NASA Web Privacy Policy and Important Notices
A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
Apr 042012
Version 6.0
Xnumbers v.6.0 for Excel 2010 (and earlier versions) is an extension of the the original xnumbers.xla v.5.6, still available from the website of Leonardo Volpi, the author of Xnumbers, at Foxes Team for Excel 2000/XP/2003: It has many useful functions and the ability to calculate with up to 250 digits (the errors of standard “double precision” are sometimes intolerable). It is a great Add-In! If you have installed Office 2007 or 2010, spreadsheets might not calculate correctly with xnumbers.xla prior to v.5.6.3, as in some versions of Excel xPow(2,8) returned 128 instead of 256. Currently undocumented on Leonardo’s website is that the download “v.5.6 Feb 2008” is actually “v.5.6.3 Sept 2008”, which has a fix for the “xPow bug”. Even though his website warns that it does not support Excel 2007 or Vista, as far as I know the “xPow bug” was the only major problem.
My brother John, a highly skilled programmer, has extensively rewritten most of the code in Visual Basic. Xnumbers v.6.0 is not only much faster but can now calculate up to 4030 digits, depending on the compiled version that you use. It also has additional code to facilitate access to all of the functions from a Visual Basic Project, so that it can easily be used in the manner of xnumbers.dll. Vista and Windows 7 are supported in all versions. This newer version 6.0.5 has a few new functions, some bug fixes, and some great improvements for both speed & accuracy. More detailed changes to all versions are documented in the included file XN60_review.txt
Note: due to a Windows security measure the .zip files that you download might be “Blocked”. Before unzipping right-click the .zip, choose “Properties”, then in the “General” tab click “Unblock”, “Apply”, and “OK”. Otherwise you might need to perform these steps on each individual file (especially .chm helpfiles). If you are unsure whether you have 32-bit or 64-bit Office 2010, open Excel, go to the File Tab, select Help: on the right-hand side under About Microsoft Excel it will display your version number and either (32-bit) or (64-bit).
Packet size is digits per packet.
Apr 042012
http://search-by-drawing.franz-enzenhofer.com/
Google Image Search By Drawing
unofficial Google Image Search by Drawing
How To
Draw and Search
- Choose a color.
- Draw something.
- Adjust pencil size with the range slider.
- Choose another color.
- Draw some more.
- Click on the “Search by Drawing” button.
Drag’n Drop, Draw and Search
- Drag and drop an image from your computer into the drawing area.
- Wait a second.
- Draw something on the picture.
- Click on the “Search by Drawing” button.
- This works only in Chrome and Firefox, not Safari.
Take a picture
- You need to have Flash installed.
- You need to have a webcam.
- If you don’t have a webcam or Flash installed, this won’t work and you won’t see anything.
- Below you should see a Flash window.
- Click on “Allow”.
- Now you should see yourself.
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- If you don’t see yourself, please go to “Webcam Troubleshooting“
- Click on the “Take a photo” button.
- Wait a few seconds.
Webcam Troubleshooting
- Sadly we have to use Flash to access the webcam.
- Sadly Flash is a very buggy software.
- So there is no guarantee for success.
- Right click (on the Flash area) -> Settings
- Click on the ugly webcam icon on the right hand side.
- Select another webcam in the drop-down menu.
- Click on close.
- Wait a few seconds.
- If nothing shows up, try it again with another camera in the drop down menu.
- And then again.
- And again.
- Hope it works now.
Add a color
- Enter a color hex value #
- Click on
- Scroll up to the color gird.
Change the brush size
- Use the scroller below the drawing area.
- (Or the drop down on FireFox)
- Alternativly you can set the brush size here
px - Click on
- Scroll up to the drawing area.
FAQ
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- Does this work on iPads, iPhone, tablets, Androids, …?
- It should, sadly it doesn’t. Google offers a tablet/mobile experience for some mobile/tablet devices. This experience sadly redirects users from the “Google Search by Image” search page to the Google homepage. The bug is already reported to Google. You can star it to make it more prominent.
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- Does this work with Internet Explorer 6/7/8/9/10/…?
- No, yes, I don’t know. I don’t care. Get a real browser!
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- Is this an official Google product?
- No, this is totally unofficial .
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- Is this site affiliated with Google?
- No.
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- Are you a Googler?
- No.
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- Then why is the “Google” on top of the page?
- It’s a homage and the main image search action happens via Google Search by Image.
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- Who created this?
- I did. Well kinda. I glued it together. The “Search by Image” functionality is provided by Google. Accessible via a simple URL. The canvas drawing thingie is a fork of drawingCanvas by a guy called balaclark. The Flash webcam thingie was created by taboca.
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- How does this work?
- You mean technically? Quite simple actually.
- You draw something on an HTML5 canvas.
- Click on Search
- Image gets converted into a base64 encoded data uri
- Image data gets send to server (powered by Heroku)
- Image gets uploaded to Amazon S3
- The Amazon S3 Image URL gets communicated back to your browser.
- Browser gets redirected to Google Search by Image.
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- Who are you?
- Franz Enzenhofer – Github, Hacker News, Twitter, Google+ and i even have a Fan-Page on Facebook.
- And www.franz-enzenhofer.com
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- What technology did you use?
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- emacs
- HTML5 canvas
- HTML5 drag/drop API
- CoffeeScript
- jQuery
- socket.io
- node.js
- Heroku Cedar Stack
- Amazon S3
- Flash
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- Does this work over all browsers?
- No, i tested it on Chrome, Safari, Firefox on Mac.
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- Can i fork it?
- Sure. (Docs to come.)
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- Thx
- You are welcome.
Apr 012012
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There’s nothing boring about statistics!
In this one-hour long documentary, Hans Rosling goes on to prove it.
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Explore the world
Gapminder World shows the World’s most important trends
- Wealth & Health of Nations
- CO2 emissions since 1820
- Africa is not a country!
- Is child mortality falling?
- Where is HIV decreasing?
Apr 012012
