Testing out the new Firefox (3.5) with Wordpress visual editing. Speedier, but does not seem quite as responsive as Opera.
New Firefox
June 30th, 2009Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-28
June 28th, 2009- Settling in to watch some soccer. #
- GOOAAALLL #
- I totally thought of the double bookmark trick before I read it on the internet. #infsum #
- rt @mattyglesias: Soccer is awesome when USA is kicking ass. Can socialism be far behind? #
- In all fairness Brazil just got robbed. #
- Well, the non-goal goal didn't matter in the end. #
Bench
June 28th, 2009My spot analysis of the FIFA final — the US simply does not have the depth of a top flight national team. Brazil’s substitutions were strategic and effective. The US simply lost the advantage.
Top Five of the Moment
June 27th, 2009- Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper
- Dance Think LP, My Dear Disco
- Biennale
- Processing (for example)
Quote of the Day
June 26th, 2009Quote of the Day
June 25th, 2009Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.
–David Wallace, Infinite Jest
Maybe these conclusory sentences don’t work as well out of context as I imagine they do, but I must say, as I slowly make my way through Infinite Jest, I’m finding the end of each section eminently quotable.
Public Option
June 24th, 2009Andrew Sullivan posts this comment from a reader:
The economic argument against the public option is simple. Yes, it may reduce monetary outlays, but it will do so by forcing providers to accept prices lower than what they would in a competitive market. The public option can do this because it will be subsidized by taxpayer money. Thus, the public option will crowd out other insurers and achieve monopoly pricing power. Once monopoly pricing power is achieved, then you will see a decline in both quality and supply of health services. The key is the lack of supply. At the monopoly price, the number of people willing to provide heath services will be suboptimal. This is why you have to wait six months for a CAT scan in England. Effectively, supply is rationed. And yes, “costs” will be lowered, but only if you just count cash outlays. If you count the implicit cost of the having to wait too long for health care services or receiving lower quality care, then it’s not such a bargain. No free lunches I’m afraid.
This is textbook economics as to what happens with monopoly pricing. Don’t need to be an ideologue at all to believe this.
The comment seems to ignore its own analysis. If the implicit costs of care result in rationing under the public option, then people who can afford better care will move to private insurance, which pays more, and so has access to a wider supply of medical providers.
UPDATE: Some follow-up analysis here.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery
June 24th, 2009At the beginning of the summer, I always plan on reading all the things I did not quite get to during other seasons of the year. Though I am often too ambitious, I am making some progress on a number of fronts. The first is Karl Popper’s landmark The Logic of Scientific Discovery. As I read through Popper’s ideas on the logic of science I am struck by how pervasive his ideas have become among the scientific establishment. No, that’s not quite right, his ideas are a pervasive part of our cultural view, not the establishment, of science. I’m not sure if Popper was the first to formulate falsifiability as a rigorous philosophical criterion demarcating scientific hypotheses, but reading his clear exposition of the concept certainly makes his ideas ring true.
I will note that one question Popper does not seem to consider is: “What makes a particular scientific pursuit interesting?” I’ve been struggling with this question in my own research, as I sift through a number of silos of work in machine learning and robotics, looking for both the big picture and the motivations behind each community effort. I do think it is possible to pose scientific questions that meet all the criteria of demarcation that Popper spells out, which fail as scientific questions simply because nobody else cares. Indeed, I think such “trivial” science actually comprises the near totality of posable scientific hypotheses. We don’t notice this because of a combination of our own bias and the natural selection bias that any peer reviewed scientific community uses as an organizing social and meritocratic engine.
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-21
June 21st, 2009- @CBStober My lab has no mussels and no beer. That's where I ended up after hiking through Ann Arbor. So Ann Arbor != Urban. in reply to CBStober #
OpenCV and Bumblebee2 Stereo
June 18th, 2009Well, I just finished adding support for a Bumblebee2 camera to OpenCV. I wish I could give the code away, but it depends on Triclops, Point Grey’s proprietary library and I don’t really know how to submit a patch to OpenCV anyway. For those of you who are interested in accessing stereo vision capabilities for this type of camera through OpenCV, let me know and I can send you some patches or point you in the right direction.
The main useful source of information turned out to be this wiki on how to setup the Triclops library and the more important libpgrlibdcstereo. The latter is distributed with examples for reading right and left stereo channels using the library and computing disparities, which formed the basis for my OpenCV code. I followed the structure of cvcap*.cpp code and used calls to pgrstereolib to actually perform the capture.
[I noticed that support for Videre stereo cameras was already included. I suppose that must be what they use at Willow Garage. I was able to read from my Bumblebee2 camera without any code changes, but could not figure out how to access the channels separately or compute disparities.]
The tricky part is getting everything into OpenCV. This required adding a small number of carefully placed lines of code to the CMake files and a small number of careful #defines in the highgui source. The project is mature enough, and the patterns consistent enough, that doing so really just meant looking for how other’s did it for other, similar features.
ASIDE: For some weird reason libpgrlibstereo comes with an LGPL license, which might be compatible with OpenCV, but makes calls to Triclops, which doesn’t seem to have any license other than “you bought our very expensive camera so you get this library.” That, as I understand things, sort of nullifies the use of libpgrlibstereo in any setting where we would normally like to use LGPL library code.
