My project topic will be “A Database Framework for Retrieval and Analysis of Tree-like Structures in Medical Images”, building upon my previous work at Temple.
The best part is that I get to both do research and code in Perl at the same time!
I received the DSLR I ordered, a Canon Digital Rebel XT with a Sigma 18-200 mm lens (all the way from super wide to telephoto with apertures from f/3.5 – f/6.3, IIRC), today. Coupled with my existing knowledge of digital image processing, this should become quite the fruitful art for me once my photography skills are up to par. I’ve been told I have talent at photography; let’s see how it turns out!
Interestingly, dictionary.com’s word of the day is polymath!
Renaissance humanism is a holistic philosophy that states that to be fully “human”, one should strive for perfection in all things. The ideal of this philosophy was the polymath, embodied by people such as Leonardo da Vinci.
That ideal is considered all but impossible to fulfill these days, since the breadth and depth of knowledge has grown enormously in the past century. Except for some small interdisciplinary research efforts, which typically span at most two disciplines and usually involve specialized experts in both fields collaborating, hyperspecialization is now the norm.
One solution to this state, which I believe pathological and suboptimal, is to raise the intellectual capacity of thinkers to meet this larger and more complex body of knowledge. Though there is no doubt in my mind that talented individuals can function as polymaths (so long as society tolerates them), most thinkers either cannot or will not. I strongly believe that if intellectual capacity is augmented, we will see the return of the polymath… so long as people are still willing to pursue beauty wherever it lies.
That may not be a good thing, for transhumanism could as easily destroy our sense of humanity as augment it. The tradeoff might not be worth it.
It’s sad that my life is beginning to resemble comics more than reality:
http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF057AD-Super_League.jpg#126
I wonder if Benford’s Law exists for colors or other non-numeric concepts. They can, after all, be mapped to numbers.
Chessboard, CAT5 cable, moving pieces. Need I say more?
Maybe I’ll try to actually build this. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with electronics on that level, but it seems feasible.
A recent discussion with a friend reminded me of an idea I had in high school: in order to encourage students to focus on course subject and content rather than difficulty and to reduce the variability in the grading system based on instructor, the current letter grading system should be replaced with Z scores: (numeric score or GPA – mean) / standard deviation, where the mean and std. dev. are grouped by course and professor (but cumulative over semester). Consequently, lower scores in more difficult courses would be competitive with higher scores in less difficult ones. Additionally, as I’ve seen twice, there are professors (and they were algorithmists both times) who simply do not give out “A” grades. Thus, under the current system, achieving a perfect GPA is as much a matter of avoiding these professors’ courses as it is a matter of performance. Under a system that takes the mean grade of the professor into account, however, they could not harm students GPAs in this way, as their means would be lower than other professors’.
While doing a literature review for online decision tree construction algorithms, it struck me that Google’s pagerank model, though designed to model the importance of pages as if they were papers in academic journals, is backwards for certain types of literature reviews. For example, suppose I were looking for state-of-the-art research rather than “classic” results in the field.
Using the pagerank model, papers that are cited often will have high pageranks (depending on the number of citations and pagerank of the citing papers), while most citing papers will tend to have lower pageranks, especially if new. However, if I am interested in the state-of-the-art, I would be most interested in papers that build upon many previous results; that is, papers with many outgoing citations. I would also like to eliminate very frequently-cited sources (such as The Art of Computer Programming or Introduction to Algorithms, which are cited for such trivial concepts as the definition of a tree) from the analysis, as those citations have lost almost all meaning.
This is the exact opposite of what the PageRank algorithm does as it is described in “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”. It is closer to techniques such as tf-idf if anything.
From a discussion on Wikipedia, describing the implications of the “quantum suicide” thought experiment: that a physicist whose consciousness does not end when it is probable for it to do so would end disabled or disfigured in the majority of universes in which he survives:
“Here’s another possibility: in the majority of universes where the physicist survives, there simply is no explosion. If the explosion does occur, it is highly probable that the physicist’s body would be damaged even if he miraculously survives. This would probably shorten the physicist’s lifespan, thus pruning the number of potential universes in which he endures. However, if the weapon does not detonate at all, the physicist would have an excellent chance of survival in both the short and long terms.
I suppose that this question essentially asks whether the strategy followed by the universe is greedy. I confess that I don’t understand enough of quantum mechanics to judge whether a non-greedy strategy makes sense. It’s appealing from an algorithmic point of view, however.”
Do hayfever sufferers have a tendency to enjoy nature less?
More generally, do people tend to follow the path of least resistance? That is, do they truly do what is easiest for them?
On an unrelated note, I also suspect that mathematical ability is inversely correlated with the ability to recognize and remember facial features.