One of the more amusing stories from Slashdot talks about an academic paper in computer science, which was accepted to be presented at a conference. The catch: all text, figures and references were randomly-generated and are completely incoherent (see Web site). Will a randomly-generated talk be delivered as the guys at MIT promise?

I have continously come across a couple of ducks that somehow found their way to the centre of Manchester. Today I dared to approach and take a picture — one of the 20 pictures that I take every day.

ach and every one of us writes and we all use quotes and apostrophes on occasions. Terrible it is to see how often they are chosen wrongly, or even worse, at random.

TECHWR-L provided me with a long-sought answer. It also revealed that I was using the British style without being aware of it. Statements require double quotes, scare quotes have a single. Have a read to get a short lesson in punctuation.

…I’d suggest British English generally uses double quotes for speech (“Let’s go to the beach,” Jane suggested) but single quotes for things like scare quotes (‘respected’ news sites)…

will apparently deliver a talk at University College London next week. Here is a gist of my current research work:

We are given a collection of raw images depicting an object such as the brain. We then construct a model which can produce synthetic images as shown below.

We developed a framework that can quantitatively evaluate such models, having constructed them automatically. For more details, see a previous entry on the subject or confer my research pages.

This work has recently been accepted for presentation in IPMI, which will be hosted in Colorado. I currently work on papers for MICCAI (due later tonight) in Palm Springs, California and BMVC in Oxford.

famous tale speaks of a naked king, who being the King, makes nakedness blindly accepted as a norm. No suspicion is raised until one man from the crowd yells “The King is naked“. This comes to show that the flock can accept things without using any self-judgement.

Likewise, Internet users circulate bits which gain their value from word of mouth. One such example is the Satellite Google Maps hype. When the net became aware of the service, everyone quickly got excited. This probably wouldn’t have been the case if was not a Google feature. I looked at satellite images of this type back in 1999 or 2000 (using TerraServer) and identified friends’ homes. It wasn’t as widespread at the time because there wasn’t as great a ‘buzz’.

An actual satellite image of a field in Illinois

I recently decided to take on a little obligation. I would like see if I can handle 20 low-resolution pictures a day; every single day, that is. I have made the process of transferring data from my camera to the Web very efficient and I will soon discover how my pictures collage extends (see an example from my health club).

Certain on-line services offer customised information as images. Wundeground deliver your local weather as a GIF file and DanaSoft provide informative signatures, as shown below. Since both are displayed regularly in my personal portal, I like using the functionality of CSS which clips images as illustrated in this example page. Feel free to copy.

Some relevant code from the example:

<div style="position:absolute; top:5; left:10;
clip:rect(12px auto 40px auto)">
<img
src="http://www.danasoft.com/sig/fookitnow.jpg"
style="border:1px #000 solid;" />
</div>