01 March
2007
Today I was supposed to travel to Orlando to give a colloquium on Robotics at UCF. Upon arrival at the airport, the U.S. Airways representative told me my flight was cancelled due to a shortage of staff! In other words, they somehow botched their planning so badly they didn't have staff for my flight.
Their customer service was terrible. Aside from the sloppy irresponsible scheduling, they failed to do simple things that would make a customer's experience better. In addition, their refund procedure is unhelpful, inconvenient, unfair and possibly fraudulent.
When U.S. Airways found they had not arranged for sufficient staff for the flight, why didn't they contact the customers like me? Why didn't they schedule us on other flights in advance of our arrival at the airport? By the time I was in line and discovered their mistake, there were no other options to get me to my destination for my talk (i.e. in less than 16 hours).
The specifics of my experience are long, so futher reading is only for the determined. (List of consumer affairs numbers is at the end.)
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There's more. Read the whole story on "US Airways delivers awful service"
05 March
2007
The Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) conference is on track for Atlanta, GA this summer. It will be adjacent to RoboCup so should be able to attract a range of participants. There had been a chance of attracting RSS to McGill and Montreal, but that would have represented a huge amount of work (for me!) and Georgia Teach seems to have superb infrastructure and financial support for this kind of thing. The big news is that RSS seems to have had a substantial increase in submissions this year, so the conference seems healthy and it promises to be exciting. Reviewing is in progress, and official figures should be available soon.
RSS is a key conference for hard core scientific results in all of robotics, from mapping algorithms to mechanical design. It features a single track of 30 to 60 minutes presentations of original scientific results. RoboCup involves a series of robot competitions from version seriosu teams. These include physical robots an software simulations. The teams that compete are typically composed of graduate students and/or professional who are pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved.
07 March
2007
The Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) 2007 will take place in Montreal this summer and the reviewing has just finished. Greg Mori and Richard Vaughn, the co-chairs, did a great job. The acceptance rate for orally presented papers was 25%. and the paper quality seems to be high. It will be combined with 3 other conferences: The Precarn Conference (Robotics, Intelliegnce Systems and ICT), Graphics Interface (Computer Graphics and HCI) and Artificial Intelligence. Tal Arbel from McGill is the general chair of the whole thing, working with Gary Gudbranson of Precarn. They have done a lot of work to make the entire combined project very appealing. The invited speakers for CRV are Michael Black (Brown U), Larry Matthies (JPL), and Martial Hebert (CMU) each of which is a real expert in an impressive domain that combines basic science with a cool appliction -- directly connecting to the human brain, controlling robotics on other planets and using vision in autonomous vehicles.
The entire package of 4 conferences will be a nice combination with a low registration cost, and Montreal in the summer tiem is really attractive. This combines a lot of cool science, amazing applications and some business networking. CRV is sponsored by the Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society (CIPPRS) which is the Canadian branch of the International Pattern Recognition Society (I am the president, so I am not totally impartial, but all the above comments are still true).
10 March
2007
This is a list of really useful python modules.
While I really dislike the poor support for concurrency in Python (and the GIL -- the global interpreter lock -- for threads) which I think makes the language so badly flawed it may prove fatal, the rest of the language is still really great.
15 March
2007
Background: Various groups track information flow by logging the URLs being exchanged when data is up- and down-loaded. An initiative is currently underway by the US Department of Justice, and already passed in Europe, to force internet providers (ISP) to log data transfers, and to retain these logs for a long time (despite the large amount of storage this requires). This is an ongoing effort and follows a
prior effort in the same direction. It seems the objective is not to save the actual data, just the information linking the URLs that were used: where did you visit and what filename did you upload. Such information is already used for DMCA "take-down" requests and
the legal page
at the infamous Pirate Bay bittorrent tracker provides many (amusing) examples. It also represents a huge incursion into personal privacy which is threatening in many ways.
Utility?: While anti-terrorism is cited as one of the benefits of this plan, it seems unlikely that actual terrorists operate by uploading data to public sites. The initiative is more likely to be motivated by DMCA enforcement. Even the most trivial passwording and encryption by organzied groups (such as terrorists) gets around this measure. I suppose one still might be able to catch the a really foolish bad guy,
which sounds insignificant, but perhaps that not as irrelevant is it seems.
Related work:
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There's more. Read the whole story on "Data retention: the issue, the concern and the simple circumvention mechanism (with example)."
19 March
2007
I recently decided to use the the open source program Audacity on OS X to record audio content. It's very complete.
If you want to encode to MP3 format, you need the separate lameLib library, to be used with Audacity (it isn't included due to the patent restrictions on the mp3 format). Despite documentation to the contrary, on a PPC macintosh you need the version of the library that is specified only for older Audacity 1.2.6 even if you are using the newer Audacity 1.3.2. That is, ignore the documentation and download the older LameLib from http://spaghetticode.org/lame/, not libmp3lame-osx-universal-3.97.zip. (This will presumably be fixed at some point.)
Here is the result and an audio description of the bug.
25 March
2007
Checking in
Natasha is taking part in a physics contest and has won a trip to Israel to participate in the finals. She left today along with the other members of the team from the school.
The
Shalheveth Freier Physics Tournament is organized by the Weizmann Institute of Science and is based on having students compete in teams to build the most effective physics-based impregnable safe. The idea is that the locking mechanism for the safe needs to be based on basic physics, but that it be at once both simple and yet obscure, so that the safe cannot easily be opened by those who don't know the trick.
In addition working on the design and construction, she ended up being in charge of packing the safe, which sat on our dining room table for a week as she planned how to pack it.
A previous entry, for example, involved the use of tuning forks that had to generate specific notes, and a computer inside the safe that computed Fourier transforms to identify the selected notes.
I can't explain the principle behind the St George's safe at this time, just in case one of the competing teams stumbles on this web page. A detailed example of a prior winning entry follows.
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There's more. Read the whole story on "Physics Challenge"
26 March
2007
The 2007 Quebec Provincial Election is underway. When I visited two different polling stations this morning and this afternoon, the traffic was very light, but the close election race is supposed to presage a good turnout. Presumably is will appear in the evening before the polls close at 8pm. 
As usual, the "PQ" party has a platform that calls for succession from Quebec from Canada. This is a genuine threat and they almost got approval in a past referendum. Two other parties are almost tied in the polls, and the numbers are far too close to call the outcome in advance.
By 10:21pm the election result, a minority Liberal Party government was declared, with the ADQ party in second place. This will probably have a major (negative) impact on the separatist PQ party.
