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bert's blog v1.21 Powered by glolg Programmed with Perl 5.6.1 on Apache/1.3.27 (Red Hat Linux) best viewed at 1024 x 768 resolution on Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Mozilla Firefox 1.5+ entry views: 2236 today's page views: 248 (21 mobile) all-time page views: 3245423 most viewed entry: 18739 views most commented entry: 14 comments number of entries: 1214 page created Wed Apr 16, 2025 20:04:12 |
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Completed my Computer Vision assignment ten days in advance, which might be a record. Mechanically applying the Gram-Schmidt process, then solving simultaneous linear equations to transform bases, was a pain, and I really hope that this sort of questions doesn't come out for the exams; I've never been particularly quick in plowing through numerical manipulations (which computers are around for), but it's win some, lose some. The stitching of images together in MATLAB part (i.e. image mosaicking) was more fun, though the little bugs like neglecting the normalizing influence of the third element in the coordinate vector, stupidly using the uint8 data type that allows only integers from 0 to 255 for values that were much larger, and forgetting that MATLAB represents image data as matrices, thus a row times column array instead of the more conventional width by height format, were frustrating. Oh, and edchong introduced a paper that says that functional magnetic resonance imaging can be used to reconstruct natural images, or in tabloid terms, "Scientists Discover Mind Reading Device" - at least that's what I got from the paper summary (will read the thing someday). It's Bayesian Reconstruction of Natural Images from Human Brain Activity by Naselaris et al., for those itching to look at it themselves. Continuing with worthy research, the 2009 Ig Nobel prizes are out! Dearest to my own heart is the work of Medicine Prize winner Dr. Unger, who demonstrated by extremely lengthy experimentation that knuckle cracking does not cause arthritis of the fingers. To support his claim, he cracked the fingers of his left hand daily, and never cracked the fingers of his right hand, for a period of sixty years. Take that, anti-crackers! Hamilton won the Singapore Grand Prix, probably to the delight of smk, but for better or worse all the pre-race talk was dominated by the Crashgate scandal, where Nelson Piquet Jr. purposely crashed his car to hand an advantage to teammate Fernando Alonso, who won. Some were concerned that the incident would tarnish local reputation; well, this is SIN city after all, but more seriously, the matter obviously had nothing to do with the race organizers. The biggest sports shock to me was the capture of the EPL screening rights for the next three seasons by SingTel's mio TV, along with ESPN and Star Sports. The Today paper kindly provided comprehensive details of the sports split by mid-2010:
You know, if I were a more cynical fellow, I would say that this distribution practically forces sport fanatics to subscribe to both services. Wanna follow Federer? He's on SCV for the US Open, mio for Wimbledon. Tiger Woods? SCV for the PGA Tour, mio for Augusta. Like both American football and baseball? Why, SCV-plus-mio will cover it all! Bundling is one thing - what if a person just wants the local channels and the EPL/CL (a not-insignificant proportion of the viewership, methinks)? Can't be done, SCV says you need a minimum of three Basic Groups, which comes to a minimum of twelve channels, none of which our hypothetical EPL fan might have the slightest interest in, for S$25+/month, to begin with. Only then can they consider letting him have the add-on Sports group, again with a bunch of random sports he might not care about thrown in, for S$26+/month. Fair enough - or maybe not. But hey, competition will help the little guys like him, no? Enter mio TV, which starts its assistance by bidding for and winning the Champions League rights, such that our little guy now has even less of the content he wants on SCV, who of course aren't going to offer a refund or moderate their price. Finally, the "consumer-wins" competition cumulates in a nice split of the available programmes as seen above, such that the little guy effectively has to pay about twice as much, just to get what he had been getting before competition. He wins! Of course, sports is not an essential good (well, close to), so as with all such commodities, it can be argued that a company is well within its rights to maximize profits, whether by bundling or raising prices to what the market will bear. If the fans scream blue murder but end up biting the bullet and forking out the cash, it only proves that they (the companies, not the fans) were right. We are a capitalistic society, remember?  The strange realities of competition (Sources: Wikipedia, Findarticles, ZDNet Asia) [The figures for StarHub are slightly outdated, with Qatar Telecom getting a stake, but the big picture probably remains the same] Returning to the subject of the not-long-for-my-SCV-subscription EPL... Edited footage of the Downfall movie has been floating about for ages, but this particular one on the Manchester derby is too class to ignore: Too many Nazi references in recent posts, Godwin-ed? Oh dear. Then again, perhaps other than defined facts, the probability of anything happening approaches 1 as time passed approaches infinity, so Godwin's Law may just a trivial specialization. At a very healthy $664/$550 for the $100 Challenge. Pompey appear to be winning at Wolves as I type this, which is fortunate since I was tempted to back Wolves against them. Spurs meanwhile are getting pegged back by Bolton, another outcome I could not have foreseen. Well, there's always United, even at short odds: $50 on Man United to beat Sunderland (at 1.18) Next: Ranking Ranklings
Fran said... Hi there,
Thanks very much for your interesting blog. It's always nice to see how people on the other side of the globe live, how they share the same joys and sorrows, what they do in their free time, etc. I actually have a question about your blog. Would you mind helping us with a linguistic research project? We're compiling data from various Singaporean weblogs. All it requires is checking a few boxes. If you want to take part and/or have more questions, drop me a note ( hack2301@uni-trier.de RE: Question ) so that I can then send you the 'official' project eMail. We'd really appreciate your help. Thanks very much in advance! Best regards, - Fran
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