Robotic tuners actually do exist for guitars – but pianos have two to three strings resonating in unison per note, so tuning is not quite as simple. Nevertheless, it seems that a tuner could easily detect beats (probably using some sort of FFT/spectral analysis) and turn the tuning pegs automatically.
I am wondering whether there are certain associations between the properties of the skin and, say, the presence of a noncutaneous infection in the bloodstream (or even a change in the normal levels of various hormones and other things that we currently need to take blood to test). At the least, one would expect quantifiable changes in the skin as a result of, say, leukocytosis, which can be used as a highly noninvasive biomarker for infection. It’s a potential area to explore using data mining.
The disproportionate interest in legalization of medical marijuana on Digg is not due to any medical benefits. The development of a drug that decouples the medical effects from the high has shattered the pretense of righteousness that the adherents on Digg were previously clinging to. Take a look at the comments:
Digg – Cannabis like drug dims pain without the high.
Vs. a typical sort of article you’d see on Digg from last year:
Digg – Medical Marijuana User Commits Suicide After Long Being Denied Its Use.
I’m not here to engage in this debate (although it’s pretty predictable to see where someone who has lived a straight-edge lifestyle would fall), but I find hiding behind some flimsy pretense very hypocritical regardless of your position.
I can already see what the comments are going to look like, so I’m disabling them on this post.
One potential way to avoid deadlocks would be to unlock critical sections if the main lock controlling the section was unlocked OR if another lock indicating the resource was unavailable was unlocked. The program could then deal with the case that the requested resource depends on another locked resource without locking up.
I keep thinking that I should be doing something more exciting, more groundbreaking, more novel. There’s my university project, but I mean something that actually puts the considerable level of skill I’ve acquired in computer science to use. I didn’t go to grad. school to become an entrepreneur, after all; I went there to become a scientist.
But what grand challenges are there in my subfield? The only one I can identify is strong AI, and that is a problem I have no inclination to work on. There’s nothing like the development of MRI to be done here; the best I can hope for is development of some fancy image processing algorithm. Where are the deep, paradigm disrupting innovations? Mostly things that tend to be commercialized, rather than purely scientific innovations. Stuff like Google, which, had it not been commercialized, would have just been an interesting footnote in an algorithms journal somewhere. I’ll get to working on commercial things more at some point (I’m destined to, in a way), but not at the moment. I don’t have the time to split between what I’m currently doing and attempting to run another organization.
I am planning to pursue the biomedical aspect of my research more by enrolling in a medical program in 2010, with the hope of eventually convincing someone to finally train me enough to work on treating diseases, but I feel that there should be something more to show for my CS training than the work I’ve published.
Any teacher can tell you that there is definitely a correlation between distance from the front of the classroom and performance. But what I found interesting today was that my class, being confined to a smaller room and thus forced much closer to the professor, appeared bolder in answering questions and generally more engaged in the lecture. In short, they performed far better in class. This seems to suggest a causal relationship.
One thing that keeps unsuccessful people that way is the belief that one has finally finished learning; that one can never grow any further – or even worse, that one has no desire to grow any further.
Successful people never stop growing.
So many prospective college students exaggerate things on their applications… I’m listening to it happening right now, amidst sounds of a football game, on the very deadline for applications. I can’t help but think that such a person is not a fit college student. I don’t see why colleges don’t select for honesty. Force the applicants to justify their claims. Watch them all fall apart.
There was some interesting news today about an HIV+ person who received a stem cell transplantation (for leukemia) from someone who was naturally immune to HIV. He was ultimately cured of the disease (although the jury is still up as to whether the virus still inhabits his cells).
Natural immunity to HIV was discovered not too long ago. In the interest of preventing a delay in treatment of other viruses, I thought I would state the logical extrapolation of this idea outright:
For each virus capable of infecting humans, there are likely individuals who are naturally immune to it due to functional mutations.
How much of Seasonal Affective Disorder is truly a physiological reaction to a shorter day? I just realized around the DST change that most people probably get almost no sunlight at all in the winter thanks to the way a typical workday is set up (once the sun sets before 5 PM, that’s it; game over!)
This would be yet another instance of the dehumanization of perfectly normal people by placing them in a completely unreasonable environment, then labeling them defective because they are unable to cope with that environment.
Solution: shorten the workday by an hour or two (taking away people’s morning sunlight in exchange for giving it to them in the afternoon is not a solution). Most people are at their creative and intellectual nadir around 4 PM anyway, so you may actually be doing the organization a favor by adopting a 6 hour workday. Not to mention that it would be a huge boost for morale.
Ok, but you’re the type that plays Oregon Trail on the “Grueling” speed setting. So what if John breaks his leg, Timothy gets cholera, or the oxen die? You want those extra 2 hours.
Fine. So either shift the workday later (you’ll still overlap with that 4 PM slump, it will still be dark and depressing when employees leave work, and now you’ll have to deal with the fact that you are coming between employees and their dinner, but they will have a chance to catch some morning sunlight), or schedule a time in the evening for employees to telecommute, if possible. Attention levels rise in the evening, before finally dipping about an hour before a person’s typical sleep time. It’s a circadian thing.
Assuming SAD is purely a physical problem that cannot be attenuated through social change is likely detrimental to the productivity of the workforce as a whole.