We all know that when a visual display is too cluttered, it takes longer to retrieve the information we desire and even if we could locate the information eventually, the cluttered environment might also impact the quality of the information we retrieve. This paper by Stefano Baldassi and others from Firenze, Italy (published in 2004) investigated how such visual clutter affect the quality of perceptual decisions, and came to the conclusion that
... perceptual clutter leads not only to an increase in judgment errors, but also to an increase in perceived signal strength and decision confidence on erroneous trials.
In other words, the more visual clutters we have, the more mistakes the user tends to make, and he is also more stubborn about it. Hmm, interesting!!
The researchers performed an interesting experiment and focused on how visual clutter could affect people's perception of orientation. Each user is shown very briefly (100 ms) a picture of various number of icons like the one shown below where one of them is tiled slightly and the others are all vertical. The user is then asked to describe the direction and magnitude of the tilt by either selecting one of 12 tilted icons of various degrees (in sorted order) on the screen, or manually rotating a big icon using the mouse. The user also has to specify how confident he is by marking icons of various sizes, where the sizes of the icons represent levels of confidence.
Figure 1 in the paper illustrating the experiment sequence
Experimental results show that under conditions of visual clutter people tend to perceive stimuli to be more strongly tiled when they were wrong about the tilting directions. To make sure this was not caused by low-level sensory interactions between adjacent stimuli when close proximity occurs as the number of icons increase, a technique of "partial cueing" was used, and the results showed similar trends. Confidence ratings reported by users also show that average confidence is significantly higher as icon set size increases.
To illustrate the practicality of the findings, the authors presented a fun example:
For example, soccer referees are frequently required to decide rapidly whether a player is "offside" if the ball is passed to him when there are no defenders (besides the goalkeeper) between him and the goal. this study predicts that when there are several candidate defenders that could place the forward onside, the decision will not only be more error-prone, but the confidence with which referees call their (often erroneous) decisions will be higher.
Argentina's goal against Germany disallowed because of offside. There was plenty of audio clutter (the vuvuzelas), but I guess there was still not enough visual clutter here! Alas!
The user study the authors performed is really a pilot study with only ten users (including the authors). Too better validate the findings, a more extensive user study of more human subjects of various age, profession, etc. is probably necessary. I am also curious about whether adding more types of distractors (such as circle icons without line in the middle) would affect the results. Another one to try would be comparing same number of icons that are spaced very tightly versus sparsely (another dimension of clutter).
The paper ended with a quote from John Kerry in the first 2004 debate, which I found quite amusing, I'll also use it to end this post:
It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain, and you can be wrong. Certainty sometimes can get you into trouble.
Videos of the Day:
Paul, the German psychic octopus, has become a world-wide superstar after it correctly predicted the outcomes of all six of Germany's games in the 2010 South Africa World Cup, including Germany's latest defeat in the semi-final against Spain. Since then, disgruntled German football fans have been sending death threats to the owner and the octopus suggesting a grilled octopus dinner.
With one more game to play for the German team fighting for the third place in the tournament against Uruguay tomorrow, the "Oracle Octopus" spoke again, predicting a German win, but one must wonder weather this has been influenced by the fear of ending up on a sushi menu. Tabarez, the Uruguay coach, however, vowed to beat Germany and the octopus at the same time! Well, may the better team win!
His name is Murata Boy, and it's hard to believe that he can ride a bicycle better than any person or any other robot. It is equally hard to believe that this robo-bicyclist robot has been out there for five years.
The Murata Boy robot only came to existence because the Japanese company Murata Manufacturing wanted to show off some of their various sensors technologies, hence the name. The robot made his first debut at CEATEC (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies) Japan 2005 and people immediately fell in love with this little adept robot who can ride a bicycle like no robots before.
The Murata Boy is only 2-foot tall, which means he can only ride the tiny bicycle custom-built for him. The robot is equipped with four types of sensors: two gyro sensors used to detect angular velocity and inclination; an ultrasonic sensor to detect obstacles; and a shock sensor to detect rough surfaces (you can see more detailed specifications at the project web page here). With wireless network connection to a PC, the robot can follow remote commands such as forward, stop, and reverse. It can also follow pre-programmed paths. The robot can reach maximum speed of 30 inches per second and can even balance while at a complete stop. The robot's sensors work so well that the robot can even ride on a very thin balance beam as show in the video below (toward the end of the video).
Ever since its first debut in 2005, the robot has become very popular at technology exhibitions. And throughout the years, it also had to take on additional challenges with the help of the team of developers. The newly acquired skills include ones such as riding on an S-shaped beam and going uphill on a quite steep slope. Such tasks might sound easy, but requires precise sensor measurements and very accurate motor control. The end result, a very amazed crowd whenever the robot goes. (Change the video resolution to 480 for the two videos below for better viewing experience.)
Murata Boy riding and balancing on an S-Shaped beam
Murata Boy riding uphill
Although the robot is not capable of complex autonomous behaviors (not something Murata Manufacturing wants to show off), it certainly gives a good demonstration of what the sensors are capable of. Once we can develop advanced intelligence to combine with the wonderful engineering feats, who knows, maybe once day we'll see robots throwing morning newspapers at your doors. That is, of course, after the robot is equipped with dog-repelling (or evading) mechanisms. But anyhow, respect to the engineering team behind the Murata Boy!
The team of engineers at Murata Manufacturing who developed the Murata Boy robot
It's worth mentioning that some people opted to turn real bikes directly into robots. For example, the first video below shows the effect of some Japanese inventors working on a noodle-delivering unmanned bike. And the second video shows a Vietnamese attempt. Just imagine a fleet of unmanned bikes on the streets of Beijing, China, taking people to their work! What an amazing scene that would be! Here in the US, however, an unmanned bike is likely to end up an exercise equipment so the robotic bike will do the exercise so the lazy fat human won't have to do it. LOL!
Video of the Day:
Vuvuzela Concerto in Bb. If you click the video to open it in YouTube, you can also click the soccer button in the lower right corner to make it a real concerto!! And here's the music score that goes with it.
Linghu Chong was dumbfounded. He had been concentrating so much on the energy cultivation and dispersion that he didn’t even realize that three days had passed and that it was the day he told Mr. Black-White to come back. He didn’t even notice Mr. Black-White’s arrival. Luckily his voice was so coarse now that Mr. Black-White didn’t find anything unusual. He quickly let out several hollow laughs as an acknowledgement.
“The revered mister seems to be in a pleasant mood today. Why not make it the day the revered mister receives a new apprentice?” Mr. Black-White suggested.
Linghu Chong thought to himself, “If I agree to take him in as an apprentice and teach him these energy cultivation techniques, as soon as he opens the door and comes in, he’ll notice that there’s only Feng Er-Zhong, but no revered mister Ren. For sure he’ll have a fall out immediately. Besides, even if it were the real revered mister Ren, once Mr. Black-White learns those techniques, he’ll most likely manage to murder revered mister Ren, like poisoning the food or something. Right! It would be so easy for Black-White to murder me with poison. Why would he want to let me escape after he learns the secret formulas? No wonder revered mister Ren wouldn’t ever agree to teach him the secret art in the last twelve years.”
“Once revered mister teaches me the magical art, the humble apprentice will show his respect by serving the revered mister great wine and tasty roast chicken,” not hearing a reply, Mr. Black-White immediately proposed.
Linghu Chong had been imprisoned for many days and was only given plain vegetables and tofu each day. As soon as he heard the words “great wine and tasty roast chicken,” his mouth drooled with greed. This was too tempting!
“Fine. Go get me some great wine and tasty chicken first. If they get me into a good mood, I might teach you something.”
“Sure! Sure! I’ll bring back some great wine and tasty chicken. But I am afraid it won’t be today. If opportunity allows, I’ll bring them in tomorrow,” Mr. Black-White replied hurriedly.
“Why not today?” Linghu Chong asked.
“To get in here, I have to pass through my eldest sworn-brother’s bedroom. Only when he is away, I could…could….” Mr. Black-White explained, to which Linghu Chong let out a snort without saying another word.
Afraid that Mr. Huang-Zhong might return to his bedroom, Mr. Black-White dared not to stay any longer. He quickly said his goodbye and then went away.
“How can I trick Black-White into the prison cell and whack him?” Linghu Chong thought to himself. “This man is so crafty; it would be impossible to swindle him. Moreover, without a way to break these iron shackles and chains around my wrists and ankles, even if I succeed in killing Black-White, I would still be stuck here.”
With that thought, his right hand naturally reached for his left wrist and then pulled. This was only a spontaneous move, and he certainly didn’t expect the iron shackle to break open, but to his great surprise, the iron shackle did actually open. He gave it a few more hard pulls and even managed to free his left wrist from the shackle.
This was definitely not something Linghu Chong could foresee, and his heart thumped quickly from the mixed feeling of shock and delight. He examined the iron shackle with his finger and then found a slit in the middle of the ring. If he had not dispersed the inner energy streams inside him, any hard movement would have made him faint. Even with the slit in the middle of the shackle ring, he would not have been able to pull it open. Since he had been working on dispersing inner energy streams for over two days, the energy streams the Peach Valley Six Fairies and Monk No-Commandment had forcefully injected into his body have been diffused into his Ren Channel, which in turn spontaneously originated strong inner force.
He felt the iron shackle on this right wrist. Sure enough, there was also a thin slit. He probably had felt the thin slit many times before, but never in his mind associated it with a crack in the shackle ring. He pulled hard with his left hand and freed his right hand from the shackle ring. Next he felt the two shackle rings around his ankles and also found thin slits in both. After some more hard pulling, he found himself breathless, covered in sweat, but completely free from all the shackles.
Once rid of the shackles, the iron chain no longer restrained him in anyway. He was truly puzzled: “Why is there a slit on each of the shackle ring? How could this kind of shackles have fettered anyone?”
The next day, when the deaf and mute old man delivered his food, Linghu Chong was able to actually look at the shackles closely. Next to each of the slits was a fine-grained saw pattern. Obviously someone had cut through the four shackles rings with a very thin steel wire saw. The slits shined under the dim light and there were no rust on the fractures. This meant that the cuts must have been made only recently.
“But why were these shackle rings closed again around my limbs?” Linghu Chong asked himself. “Someone must have tried to free me secretly. This underground dungeon is so well hidden; no one from the outside would be able to break in. Therefore, the secret rescuer must be someone inside the Plum Manor. Maybe he disliked the plot against me. That’s why he secretly cut open my shackles with a steel wire saw while I lay unconsciously in the prison cell. He probably didn’t want to openly declare himself an enemy of the Plum Manor, and he is still looking for an opportunity to help me escape.” At the thought, his spirit was greatly lifted.
“The entrance to the underground tunnel is concealed underneath Mr. Huang-Zhong’s bed in his bedroom. If it were Mr. Huang-Zhong who had wanted to rescue me, he could have done it anytime. He didn’t have to delay. Mr. Black-White obviously can’t be the one. Out of Mr. Bald-Brush and Mr. Paint, Mr. Paint is a confidant in the art of wine and had good fellowship with me. I bet it must be Mr. Paint.”
Then he remembered that Mr. Black-White would return the next day and thought about how he should cope with him. “I’ll just gloss things over with him. Why can’t I fool him with fake Kung Fu in exchange for some wine and meat?”
Then he thought, “Mr. Paint could come and rescue me any day now. I’ve gotta hurry and memorize all these formulas and techniques on the steel plate.”
He traced the carved characters and then recited each word carefully. When he studied these characters before, he didn’t pay very close attention, so memorizing everything with one hundred percent accuracy was no easy task. The handwritings on the steel plate were hasty and careless. With his limited education, he couldn’t recognize some of the poorly written characters. So he forced himself to memorize the strokes of the character and then randomly picked characters with similar strokes as substitutes. He knew that formulas for first-class martial arts are serious matters. Even one incorrect character could mean difference between life and death, success and failure. Any slight misunderstanding could very well lead to fire-deviation. Once he got out of the prison, who knows when he’ll be able to come back and reference the steel plate again? He must make sure he memorized everything with absolutely no errors.
So he read them again and again, losing count of how many times he had recited them, until he felt that he could even recite backward from the end to the beginning. Only by then, he felt at ease and allowed himself to fall asleep.
That night, in his dream, Linghu Chong actually saw Mr. Paint coming forth to open the prison cell door and let him out. The excitement woke him and then he realized it was only a fond dream. He didn’t let that depress him.
“He hasn’t come to rescue me today only because he doesn’t have the right opportunity. He’ll certainly come to my rescue before long,” he thought to himself.
He figured that although the formulas and techniques carved on the steel plate were very beneficial to him, they could be extremely harmful to others. If someone else gets locked up in this dark prison cell again in the future, that someone must have been a good person, and he wouldn’t let that person fall for Ren Woxing’s scheme. With that in mind, he traced the handwritings and recited the entire thing for another ten time or so, and then scraped off over a dozen characters in the passage from the steel plate using the iron shackles he freed himself from.
Mr. Black-White didn’t show up that day, but Linghu Chong didn’t care much about it. Instead, he continued cultivating his internal energy streams according to the formulas and methods on the steel plate. For the next several days, Mr. Black-White never came. Linghu Chong could tell that he had made great improvement in his training. Over sixty percent of the heterogeneous energy steams left inside him by the Peach Valley Six Fairies and Monk No-Commandment had been successfully dispersed out from his Dan-Tian and into his various Ren and Du Channels. He was sure that all of them could be dispersed out if he persevered.
Each day, he would recite the formulas scores of times and then scrape off a dozen or so characters from the steel plate. He noticed a gradual increase in his strength, and it became easier and easier to scrape the steel plate with the iron shackles. Another month went by in this manner. Although he lived deep underground, he could still sense a gradual decrease of the sweltering summer temperature.
“This must have been the work of divine providence. If I had been imprisoned here during winter, I would never have found the handwritings on the steel plate. Who knows? Perhaps before summer hits, Mr. Paint would have already had me rescued.”
At that moment, he suddenly heard the sound of Mr. Black-White’s footsteps from the outside tunnel.
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Video of the Day:
This is another great scene from the movie Fist of Legend by Jet Li. The moves he used here are typical Qin Na (grappling) techniques.
This paper was written by Hanjoon Kim and Sanggoo Lee from Seoul National University presented at the ninth international conference on Information and knowledge management, 2000.
Traditional document clustering methods are unable to correctly discern structural details hidden within the document corpus because they inherently strongly depend on the document themselves and their similarity to each other. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a clustering method that incorporates relevance feedback into a traditional complete-linkage clustering algorithm in order to find more coherent clusters.
The main contribution of this paper is the method of combining complete-linkage hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) algorithm using the VSM model with user relevance feedback using the fuzzy information retrieval. The HAC with VSM allows the forming of pre-clusters using a “fixed-diameter”. Then documents in small clusters (less than η) form a “training document set”, which is used for user relevance feedback where user can answer “yes/no” questions to indicate relevance of documents returned using fuzzy information retrieval. This way, positive and negative bundles can be created and used to help reassign pre-clusters. Note that all these techniques mentioned above are not original ideas from the authors. The paper simply proposed a way to combine the strengths of these techniques in order to improve performance of the clustering.
Toward the end of the paper, the authors included two subsections that discuss the sensitivity of the degree of supervision parameter and the pre-cluster size parameter (“fixed-diameter”). This is a good attempt to justify the “magic numbers” used in the experiments. However, there is no discussion or analysis of the parameter η used in the supervising phase at all. Also, the paper describes that, “the threshold diameter value for pre-clusters is experimentally adjusted to provide good quality clustering.” This makes the reader wonder whether the experimental results presented are truthful and question how well the proposed method would work in real world applications.
Clustering techniques are used to group together things that have common themes. However, frequently, there are many different ways to group things based on different common themes and the distance function used decides what common theme will be used for the clustering. For example, a bunch of people can be grouped by one of many themes (e.g. age, gender, race, wealth, and hair style). Similarly, a document collection can also be clustered by themes such as style, topic, language, or subject. The paper simply stated the two alternative ways to define the diameter of a cluster but didn’t analyze how such selections might affect the results of the document clustering. The paper also did not clarify which definition of the diameter is used in the experiments.
The authors mentioned in several places that the proposed method helps in discerning structural details hidden within documents. However, throughout the paper, there is no discussion about how structural details are extracted from documents. Arguably the users might be able to identify structural details through user relevance feedback. However, this really has nothing to do with the proposed algorithm. The users might not even be looking at the structural detail of these documents at all.
A core part of the proposed method relies on human to provide domain-specific knowledge for the method to work, yet the paper is missing detailed description of how the experiment was designed to incorporate human knowledge. For example, we don’t know how many human analysts are involved. Could the human analysts have different opinions? If so, how is that handled? Are these human analysts really domain experts who possess domain-specific knowledge about the subject? The paper is also missing detailed description about how the queries are reformulated, which is an integral part of the user relevance feedback method.
In the supervising phrase, the user is asked to answer “yes/no” questions to mark documents as relevant to non-relevant to the query document. Firstly, relevance is a subjective question. It is possible that document marked as relevant by one user might end up being marked as non-relevant by another user. Secondly, a binary answer completely ignores the level of relevance (ranking). This results in that documents border lining non-relevance could still be marked as relevant and have the same weight as the most relevant document. This leads to inaccuracy and misrepresentation. A non-binary weighting probably would work better.
When building the test document set, the authors intentionally picked those that had a single topic, claiming that this would avoid the ambiguity of documents with multiple topics. Is this really for technical convenience so the experiment results would look better? Does this mean the proposed method would not work well at all for documents with multiple topics (which is probably more like the real world scenarios)?
The authors used F1-measure as the performance metric and used the complete-linkage clustering method as a baseline. The baseline selected is reasonable in order to show how much benefit can be achieved by adding the user relevance feedback component. However, using this baseline alone is not very convincing because we already know the complete-linkage clustering method doesn’t work well, and we also know that adding user relevance feedback will certainly help. It would be much more convincing if the paper compared the performance of the proposed method with another common document clustering technique such as K-Means and Bisecting K-Means. Using only the F1-measure as the performance metric is also weak. Including other quantitative metrics together with some qualitative analyses would certainly help.
In summary, this paper proposes a novice approach that combines the strengths of several IR techniques. However, it also has plenty of room for improvement.
Picture of the Day:
The biggest failure of the 2010 World Cup -- Domenech! We still wonder, "Why not Henry and why not Malouda?"
This mini-robot has got to be the cutest robot I'd ever run across, and her name is HINA, made by Mujaki Clockwork (a secretive Ninja name of some sort, and here's the link to his blog in Japanese, which I can't understand). As soon as I laid my eyes on her, I couldn't help but think: "I so must get my daughter one of these!!"
HINA is not one of those cheap robot toys you can just buy at Wal-Mart, she is a real robot that has servos with many degrees of freedom and can run complex scripts. Besides being cute always, she can also be quite a little helper sometime and can even provide maid services such as making you a cup of morning coffee!
The above video is obviously staged, but it does shed some lights about what the robot is capable of. Hina is made using Kondo's KHR-2HV, a Japanese robotic kit that could cost $1,299.99 in the US, but customized by Mujaki to give her a very adorable look. She is 36 cm tall and weighs 1.1 kg. With a total of 21 DOFs (Degree of Freedoms) -- legs 6x2, arm 4x2, neck 1 -- she is capable of walking, lifting things up and moving them around. HINA is also equipped with 2 gyroscopes and acceleration sensor, which makes her a real robot, just not a very sensitive one. But with some further customization, it wouldn't be difficult to add a mini-webcam, some touch sensors, and two microphones to give her more capabilities to learn about the world around her. Laser and sonar would probably be out of the question for her tiny slim figure, which means you might need racks of server to process data collected from these sensor in order to produce some intelligent autonomous behaviors.
But still, isn't she the cutest robot in the planet?! And besides providing maid services, she can also entertain you with some cute break dancing moves! So what are you waiting for?
Watching World Cup games is another great way to put your 1.5 year old son to sleep (it might have something to do with the constant bee-like buzzing sounds from the vuvuzelas) .
This paper was written by Comaniciu and Meer of Rutgers University presented at International Conference on Computer Vision 99.
In order to avoid estimation of the probability density function, mean shift is applied as a nonparametric estimator of density gradient. In image segmentation as well as smoothing process, it’s difficult to keep details while merge similar parts solely by spatial domain or range domain solutions. Usually users are required to set many constraint parameters for these tasks.
This paper proves the convergence of mean shift on lattices, and employs mean shift in the joint, spatial-range domain of gray level and color images for discontinuity preserving filtering and image segmentation. In processing in Spatial-Range Domain, each data point becomes associated to a point of convergence which represents the local mode of the density in the d-dimensional space. The output of the mean shift filter for an image pixel is defined as the range of information carried by the point of convergence. For the segmentation task, the convergence points sufficiently close in the joint domain are fused to obtain the homogeneous regions in the image. And for smoothing task, these points are merged together.
Mean-shift applied to several videos by someone somewhere (not me).
Based on proof of the convergences and applications in image smoothing and segmentation, mean shift can merge similar regions while keeping high details at the same time. Also this method reduces parameters needed for these tasks. What is more, the mean shift has a more powerful adaptation to the local structure of the data, and can run until convergence without stopping criterion.
Picture of the Day:
The differences between the World Cup and the Ph.D., (credit: http://www.phdcomics.com).
Have you noticed that loud buzzing sound, like a gigantic swarm of bees coming right at you from your TV (or computer) no matter which world cup game you try to watch? This new world-wide sensation has become the dominating theme for the currently on-going 2010 World Cup hosted by South Africa, and the culprit is a South African "traditional instrument" (but the cheap plastic version) called Vuvuzela.
The vuvuzela is a long plastic horn/trumpet type instrument. It came to international attention during the run-up to the 2009 FIFA Confederations Cup, also hosted at South Africa as a testing run for the following year's World Cup tournament. As FIFA's official web site puts it:
The vuvuzela has become part of the official South African football fans arsenal. It is a plastic trumpet which makes a distinctive noise, comparable to an elephant blowing their trunk. A stadium can often erupt with noise from fans blowing on their vuvuzelas. The South African Football Association, in a community-building project, has helped manufacture the colored plastic trumpet.
At the price of only 60 South African Rand (approximately $8 USD), this plastic horn quickly gained the hearts of many South African football (the international football, not American football) fans whether rich or poor, and soon became a symbol representing the South African flavor for the sport of football. And as the many football fans from all over the world gathered at the South African nation, the fashion quickly caught on among everyone. When tens of thousands of fans blow their beloved plastic trumpets at the same time inside the same stadium, the effect can be quite dramatic and annoying to some.
Broadcasters have complained about the constant annoying buzzing noise created by the many vuvuzelas, complaining that they are ruining the viewers' World Cup experience, and asked for a ban of the plastic trumpet at the World Cup. Some viewers had opted to mute the games just to get rid of the constant noise. Some players also complained that the noise can affect players' ability to perform in the field. Spain striker David Villa, who played at the Confederation Cup had said:
"In many parts of the game it can bother you a bit because you can't communicate anything to a teammate who's more than 10 meters away from you."
The vuvuzela, a long plastic horn, is just about the most
popular item in South Africa right now. -- Photo: AFP
Dutch coach Bert van Marwijk actually banned spectators from blowing their vuvuzelas at his team's training sessions, and a London Doctor also warned that the vuvuzela can spread cold and flu germs. However, most viewers didn't mind the noise and actually liked it because it really brings out the enthusiasm at the stadium and make the experience more alive. And for those spectators at the stadium, this is one thing everyone must have. It also makes a great souvenir. England defender Jamie Carragher said that he had been asked to bring some back and his kids had been on the phone asking for two. FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, also defended South African fans' right to blow their vuvuzela horns at the World Cup:
"I have always said that Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound," the FIFA president Sepp Blatter said in a Twitter message on Monday. "I don't see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country."Blatter went on to ask: "Would you want to see a ban on the fan traditions in your country?"
So if you are quite annoyed by the buzzing sound from your TV (or computer), how can you improve the situation? Here are some suggestions:
Use a noise-canceling headphone such as these ones. Turn it on, but don't plug it into anything.
Watch your World Cup games on a desktop computer with very loud fans, so the loud noise of the fan covers the noise of the vuvuzelas and you get annoyed by the noisy fan instead --- this is my personal solution!
Buy a vuvuzela from an online store (e.g.this one) for each of your family members (and maybe friends) and then blow them as loud as you wish toward your TV (or computer) without exceeding the annoyance threshold of your neighbor. You can even use your vuvuzelas for a lot of other things as this web site has suggested:
1. Cricket bat.
2. Hearing Aid.
3. Petrol funnel.
4. Water sprayer. (force trumpet side down into water)
5. Drinking funnel. Nuff said.
6. 4G mobile communication
7. Walking stick,
8. Light saber. (Just insert a torch) as seen on Starwars….
9. Jousting Stick (simply insert one into another.)
10. And of coarse… supporting any team/thing you like…..
Having decided, he began tracing the handwritings on the steel plate and tried to memorized everyone word of it.
“I must completely memorize this thing, so that the formulas will simply bolt out when I teach him and he will never have any doubt about it. Only that my voice is too different from that of the senior master Ren. I’ll really have to lower my voice. I’ve got an idea! I can shout at the top of my lungs for the next two days and dampen my voice. Then I’ll also mumble when I speak, so it’ll be hard for him to detect anything unusual.”
In the next while, Linghu Chong would spend some time reading the formulas on the steel plate, and then spend the next moment shouting out loud. He knew that the dungeon was located deep underground, and with the many gates, even if he were to burn firecrackers in the cell, people outside would still not be able to hear anything. Crying at the top of his lungs, he cursed the Four Skunks of Jiangnan for a good while and then began singing songs and theater opera. Eventually, even he, himself, couldn’t withstand his own ugly singing. He burst out into loud laughter. Then he would go back to memorizing the formulas on the steel plate.
Suddenly, Linghu Chong came upon a few sentences: “Make Dan-Tian[1] an empty box and a deep valley. Empty box can store objects; deep valley is a reservoir for water. When inner energy flows through, distribute into the acupoints in the Ren Channel.”
He had actually traced these sentences with his fingers a few times before, but since he detested all energy cultivation techniques in his mind, he never really thought about the meaning inside. Now when they caught his attention, he was very dumbfounded.
“When Master taught me inner strength cultivation, the main essentials were all about storing inner energy inside Dan-Tian. The more vigorous and dense the inner entry streams inside Dan-Tian, the stronger the inner strength. Why would this formula say that there should be no inner energy stored inside Dan-Tian? If inner energy cannot reside inside Dan-Tian, then where inner strength would be coming from? No inner strength cultivation methods out there will ever suggest something like this. Is this technique a joke? Ha-ha! Black-White is a wicked and despicable man. Why don’t I pass this method on to him and make a fool out of him?”
He traced the handwritings on the steel plate and slowly pondered over the meaning. The first several hundred characters taught techniques on how to disperse one’s own inner strength and energy. The more he read it, the more shocked he felt.
“Who in the world would be so stupid and willing to dissolve the inner energy he had once diligently cultivated over his entire life? Unless he was determined to end his life. But if he wanted a suicide, he could just easily slash his throat with his own sword. Why make it so complicated? To dissolve inner energy this way is much more difficult than cultivating inner energy. Besides, what good does it do?”
He mulled over the matter some more and found himself in great depression.
“Once Black-White hears these formulas and techniques, he would know immediately that I am just messing with him. For sure he won’t fall for it. I guess my plan is not going to work at all.”
Linghu Chong became more and more annoyed as he recited the words again and again, “when there’s inner energy steams inside Dan-Tian, distribute them into the Ren Channel, like a bamboo is empty inside, like a valley is always void….” Anger built up as he went on and eventually he gave a good smack at his bed and cussed loudly, “Damn it! This guy was angry for being stuck in the dungeon, so he decided to play tricks and make fun of other people.”
He scolded for a while and then fell asleep again. In his sleep, his mind seemed to have started following the formulas on the steel plate and began the exercise. When he thought of the sentence “when there’s inner energy steams inside Dan-Tian, distribute them into the Ren Channel,” a stream of inner energy actually dispersed into his Ren Channel, and he felt ineffable comforts all over his body. This went on for a good while in his wooziness. Half-sleep and half-awake, Linghu Chong could feel the energy streams inside his Dan-Tian still flowing toward the Ren Channel. But all of a sudden, he realized what was going on.
“Oh, no! If my inner energy keeps flowing out like this, I’d turn into an invalid!”
Startled, he sat up hurriedly. The inner energy streams immediately flowed backward from the Ren Channel, and he found himself consumed by strong nausea and dizziness. After a long while, he was finally able to breathe normally. Then, a thought suddenly struck him and brought him a pleasant surprise.
“My inner injuries are so difficult to cure all because I have running wild inside me seven or eight heterogeneous inner energy streams from the Peach Valley Six Fairies and Monk No-Commandment. Even Dr. Ping One-Finger couldn’t cure me. Great Master Fang-Zheng, the abbot of the Shaolin Temple, said before that only the Tendon Altering Sutra of Shaolin would allow me to gradually tame and dissolve these heterogeneous inner energy streams. But aren’t these inner energy cultivation techniques carved on the steel plate teaching me exactly the same thing – how to dissolve the inner energy streams inside me? Ha-ha! Linghu Chong, you are such a fool! While others fear the loss of their inner energy, you actually fear that the inner energy wouldn’t go away. Now there’s this amazing method just perfect for my case. How wonderful!”
He knew that what happened was only because he dreamed what he thought. Because he recited the formulas again and again when he was awake, those meditation techniques and breathing exercises carved on the steel plate had occupied his entire mind. Once he fell asleep, his subconsciousness took over and simply started following suit involuntarily. However, since his mind was not focused in his dreams, he didn’t really follow the formulas letter to letter. Now, having figured out the great benefit, he found great inspiration. He carefully traced the carvings on the steel plate two more times and made sure he understood the true meanings before sitting down cross-legged in a meditation pose and beginning the energy cultivation step by step.
Only about two hours into the meditation, he could already sense a fraction of the heterogeneous energy streams, which had been stuck and getting wild in his Dan-Tian region for a long time, dispersing into his Ren Channel. Although he still couldn’t rid them out of his body, the pain and tension caused by those energy steams rolling over inside him had certainly been greatly reduced.
Great joy welled up in his heart and he couldn’t help but jump to his feet and sing at the top of his lungs. He soon realized how ugly and hoarse the singing was. Turned out his previous day’s screaming and shouting were very effective and had really done it for his voice.
“Ren Woxing! Ren Woxing! You had left these formulas behind with the intention to cause harm. You probably had no idea that one day I’d run into them and actually benefit instead of suffer from them! If you knew this, you’d probably turn over in your grave and cry! Ha-ha! Ha-ha!” he thought to himself.
He continued working on dispersing energy steams without any break. The more he exercised, the more comfortable he felt. Then he thought.
“After I completely disperse the energy streams from the Peach Valley Six Fairies and Monk No-Commandment, I could very well start all over with our Huashan School’s inner strength cultivation, following the instructions taught by Master. Although I’ll have to start from scratch again, and it might take a lot of time and effort, chances are, my life probably would be safe now. If Brother Xiang eventually comes and rescues me out of here, there’s a new life waiting for me out there in the martial world!”
Then he had a different thought, “Since Master had already banished me from the Huashan School, why bother practicing Huashan School’s inner strength? There are plenty of inner strength cultivation methods from the many schools in the martial world. Why can’t I study from Brother Xiang or even Ying-Ying?” Desolation and excitement entangled in his mind.
After eating the day’s meal, he practiced the techniques again and felt a great sense of soothing in his entire body. Not able to contain his joy, he burst into hearty laughter. Then, Mr. Black-White’s voice all of a sudden rose from outside of the prison door.
“How are you, revered mister? I have been humbly waiting outside for a good while!”
[1] Dan-Tian is an acupoint, but is normally used to refer to the lower abdomen region where inner energy can be stored at.
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Video of the Day:
Another great fighting scene in Kung Fu movie Ye Wen --- Ye Wen was Bruce Lee's Master in the style of Yong Chun. Here Ye Wen was played by Donnie Yen.
In a previous post, I talked about several robots used to fight oil spill at the Gulf of Mexico. Today I will focus on only one of them -- the iRobot 1KA Seaglider.
The Seaglider robot was originally developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory at University of Washington. It is submarine like UUV (Unmanned Underwater Vehicle) or AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) used to collect oceanology data under the surface of ocean water. (Go here to see more pictures.)
Seaglider ready to launch (Photo credit APL-UW)
Seaglider in action (Photo credit APL-UW)
Seaglider is 1.8 meter long with wing span of one meter and weighs only 52 kg dry. Powered by 24V Lithium battery, Seaglider has a cruising range of 4600 km and can dive up to 1000 meters. As shown in the short animation below, the robot doesn't have any propeller and flies through water using changes in buoyancy for thrust. This minimum energy consumption allows the robot to stay in water for very long missions that many times last months long.
The Seaglider robot had been used to "track deep-diving mammals by their high-frequency clicks and squeals." It had also been deployed to the poles months underneath the sea ice for a study of climate change as shown in the video below. Every once a while, the robot would surface and then using the long antenna in its tail to send data to a satellite, which then become accessible from web-enabled devices. The operator can also upload preset way points to the robot for it to survey a certain region. The robot is also capable of loiter and drift modes that will allow the robot to maintain neutral buoyancy at any depth.
In June 2008, the Massachusetts based robotics company, iRobot (yes, the one that makes the popular home vacuum cleaner robots), purchased the Seaglider technology to mass produce it for military use. With its top speed at 25 cm/s, I'd think the robot is probably going to used for reconnaissance use instead of the more action-packed 007 style attacking missions. However, at $100,000 a piece, I don't know if this is tax money well spent. In the BP Oil Spill Crisis currently in progress, iRobot has sent several of this sleek autonomous submarines to the Gulf of Mexico to help collect ocean data and track the movement of the oil spill.
Obviously, this robot is only good for the very patient type users. However, I just can't help asking this question, "if, by any chance, the robot gets swallowed by a big fish, will the fish get diarrhea?"
Picture of the Day:
How often do you see this man in a suit? And can you believe these two used to be teammates?
Argentina's coach Diego Maradona (L) speaks to midfielder Juan Sebastian Veron after substituting him during their 2010 World Cup Group B soccer match against Nigeria at Ellis Park stadium in Johannesburg June 12, 2010.
Photograph by: DAVID GRAY Credit: REUTERS
The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig burns as oil
pours into the Gulf of Mexico.[The Canadian Press]
If you follow the news somewhat, then you probably have heard about the Oil Spill at the Gulf of Mexico. The BP-owned well has been leaking for nearly two months, causing great disaster to the environment and ocean lives. In the process of fighting the oil leak, many new robotics technologies were put to test and proved to be very handy tools for gulf researchers.
iRobot Seaglider Robot
One robot used is the iRobot Seaglider, a deep-diving UUV (Underwater Unmanned Vehicle) used to detect and map leaked oil in the gulf. Seaglider was originally developed by University of Washington and later acquired by iRobot in June 2008. The robot is powered by changes of buoyancy and does not need a traditional propeller, which allows it to go on missions that last many months long. Sensors on the robot can detect levels of dissolved oxygen in the water, temperature, salinity, other ocean properties, and the presence of oil all the way down to 1,000 meters. The robot has been used to locate and monitor clouds of dispersed oil droplets. Data can be uploaded to a satellite and then distributed via the web to any web-capable devices around the world.
Scripps Glider: Spray
Another robot used is the Spray robot, which is also a submarine type underwater glider, developed under ONR (Office of Naval Research) support by Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Scientists. The robot is "fitted with a sensor similar to the one used used to measure chlorophyll, which is essential for the growth of plants." Scientists hope that the sensor can also pick up the spreading oil leak. The glider can dive up to 1,500 feet deep, and then periodically surface to relay data back to the scientists. It is also possible to use an i-Phone to command the glider, such as telling it to go up or down, turn, or to turn on/off sensors.
BP engineers also used ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicles) type robots to wield clamps and haul machinery in slow machine below the surface of the gulf to cap the renegade well. Video feeds showed the robots using a circular saw-like device to cut small pipes around the leaking riser. I cannot find more information about what kinds of ROV robots were used, but from the video below (from the perspective of the ROV robot) you can see that the ROV robot had arms and grippers tele-operated by human operators to perform manipulation tasks.
Isn't it amazing that we see robots everywhere these days? They are in the air, under the sea, and even in people's homes (not mentioning those ones on other planets). I sure have picked the right career! :)
Picture of the Day:
Giant Isopod that hitched a ride on an ROV in the Gulf of Mexcio. The subject of Isopocalypse 2010.
