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### CERN Tests First Artificial Retina Capable of Looking For High Energy Particles

The algorithm combines data from several sensors.

about a week ago
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### CERN Tests First Artificial Retina Capable of Looking For High Energy Particles

Re:What about the US of A? (60 comments)

Quite a few US universities are heavily involved in CERN. And European universities. And Russian. And to an increasing amount, Chinese. And also many others.

The people "teaching" (implying that there is something worthwhile to learn) creationism, are not scientists - they are coming up with neither new data or reasonable interpretations. So thus no US scientists are "teaching" that steaming pile of poo.

As a European, it would be great if /. would stop descending into the "USA sucks" vs "Muh freeduuum units and muh F-150" idiot-fight it often does :/ It used to be a nice place...

about a week ago
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### CERN Tests First Artificial Retina Capable of Looking For High Energy Particles

> and they probably buy them fpga's and boards in industrial quantities anyway
Njaaa. Define "industrial quantities". Mostly I've seen people use a few 10s of them, not 100s or 1000s.

The really expensive part about ASICs are to make the masks for lithography etc., not how many chips you make. Thus you don't want to make a new chip unless you *really* need to.

about a week ago
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### CERN Tests First Artificial Retina Capable of Looking For High Energy Particles

FPGAs are very different beasts from normal CPUs - as far as I understand, they are very well suited to doing relatively simple tasks ridiculously fast, and one chip can treat tons of data in parallel. However, they do not do so well on really complex algorithms, algorithms requiring lots of fast memory and branches, and they are harder to program than CPUs.

In this case, I would think each cell cell in the (m,q) parameter space is handled by one "block" of the FPGA, and you then feed all the blocks the data stream coming off the detector. When you are finished reading the data into the FPGA, you can then read the result back from each block.

When you "burn" a chip from a FPGA, what it means is that you take the VHDL (etc) code and compile it into a format which you can use to produce specialized chips, instead of a format for programming an FPGA.

about a week ago
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### CERN Tests First Artificial Retina Capable of Looking For High Energy Particles

Oh, and 2 m should have been 2 um. Slashdot ate my alt-gr+m = \mu...

about a week ago
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### CERN Tests First Artificial Retina Capable of Looking For High Energy Particles

Part of the method may very well be to put the clustering algorithm directly onto the the same chip as is doing the digital readout of the sensor, i.e. bump-bonded on the back of the sensor, directly providing estimated (x,y) coordinates of the particle hits instead of raw pixel data with zero-suppression as is traditionally done.

However, this is not what this paper is discussing. It discusses mapping the parameter space (m,q) of the gradient and intercept of a particle track y=m*z+q into some kind of matrix, and then applying an algorithm which describes how well the data fits with each of the points in the parameter space. This is thus integrating the information from several sub-detectors, and can thus not be done on the "image sensor" (which is usually a "hybrid", i.e. a chip with an array of detector diodes, coupled to another chip which has the electronics).

While this paper is pretty light on details (I'm guessing some sort of conference paper), it references another single-author paper in NIM A (which author is also a co-author on this paper) from 2000:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
It appears to be open-access, at least I can read it without logging in to VPN.

about a week ago
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### CERN Tests First Artificial Retina Capable of Looking For High Energy Particles

So, to summarize the paper
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.1565... :

They have developed an algorithm for quickly giving a rough interpretation of the raw data stream coming out from the detector, i.e. converting the information that "value pixel A =12, value of pixel B = 43, ..." into useful physics data like "a particle with momentum vector P and charge Q was probably created 2 m from the collision point". This algorithm is special in that it can be implemented on an FPGA, and is somehow inspired by the retina of our eyes. Because it can run on an FPGA, it has the potential to be much faster, and can handle much larger data fluxes than current algorithms.

This is needed, because in a few years, we will upgrade the LHC such that it produces many more collisions per second, i.e. the data rates will be much higher. We do this to get more statistics, which may uncover rare physics processes (such as was done for the Higgs boson). Not all of this data deluge can be written to disk (or even downloaded from the detector hardware), so we use a trigger which decides which collisions are interesting enough to read out and store. This trigger works by downloading *part* of the data to a computing cluster that sits in the next room (yes, it does run on Linux), quickly reconstructing the event, and sending the "READ" signal to the rest of the detector if it fits certain criteria indicating that (for example) a heavy particle was created. If the data rate goes up, so must the processing speed, or else we will run out of buffers on the detector.

about a week ago
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### \$75K Prosthetic Arm Is Bricked When Paired iPod Is Stolen

Re:Hmmm ... (194 comments)

Still, there has to be some kind of mechanism to do the initial pairing, even if this requires removing a PCB and hooking it up to the diag/programming equipment they have at the factory. Even counting a few hours of engineers time, it would be much much less that 70k.

about three weeks ago
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### Net Neutrality Is 'Marxist,' According To a Koch-Backed Astroturf Group

Re:What's so American (531 comments)

> Do you think everyone needs the same speed? Does your grandmother need the same speed as an MIT researcher?

This is actually quite an interesting case: Without net neutrality, the grandmother would get the speed she paid for when she streams grandmothery movies from grandmaflix (who paid her ISP to not make it impossible for her to access their webpage at the speed she paid for). The MIT reseacher, who today probably pays for a much fatter connection, would not get to use all of his/her bandwidth to access the data stored on some computing center, because this computing center would not want to pay everyones ISP so that they can connect to them.

The solution today (i.e. with net neutrality) is fair: The grandmother pays for the bandwith she needs to send emails to her grandkids and watch grandmaflix in low resolution (because she can't see HD content anyway), while the researcher pays much more for the bandwith he/she needs to upload hundreds of gigabytes of data from NERSC and use the university's terminal services at low lag.

about three weeks ago
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### Paint Dust Covers the Upper Layer of the World's Oceans

Re: slowly (141 comments)

This is a true fallacy when the conclusion is already drawn, such as media trying to present "both sides" of climate change as if the relevant sides where "yes, it's warming" and "no, it's cooling" -- while the actual discussion is more like "is the impact of effect X on K equal A or B=A+0.01*A, while taking the interaction with effect Y into account?", where the relevant sides of the discussion are those saying it's A and those saying it is 1.01*A.

In this case (paint dust and zooplankton), I'm less sure if the effect is that well known, so presenting the argument between "it's important" and "it's less important" might be correct.

So in conclusion, the journalists can usually present a "balance" and be factually correct, but then it has to be between two sides of a non-settled question.

about a month and a half ago
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### Gmail Recognizes Addresses Containing Non-Latin Characters

Re:Next wave of phishing? (149 comments)

There are languages, such as the Scandinavian languages, which are "mostly latin". This means we have the full A-Z as used in English (although C,Q,W,X,Z are never used) PLUS some extra letters "Æ/Ø/Å" (dunno if this displays correctly here). There are also domains which uses these letters like "lånekassen.no", which is the state agency handling student loans. (They are also available at the alternative address "laanekassen.no".)

Thus a "hard and fast" rule disallowing domain names with mixed types of characters won't work well, it needs to be slightly more nuanced.

about a month and a half ago
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### Fixing a 7,000-Ton Drill

Except that recently, reading /. is like reading only the bottom comments in the /r/all subs at reddit. Reddit's voting system works better in filtering out bullshit, like the "Kill Yourself" coward above your post.

about a month and a half ago
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### In France, Most Comments on Gaza Conflict Yanked From Mainstream News Sites

Re:Or maybe you're not so good at math (512 comments)

99% of people are fully capable of separating Israel the state and jews the people, even if they are criticising Israel the state. That people are (verbally) "attacking jews" when they are criticizing the actions of the Israeli government is mostly a right-wing strawman.

about 2 months ago
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### In France, Most Comments on Gaza Conflict Yanked From Mainstream News Sites

Re:Or maybe you're not so good at math (512 comments)

This.

Israel is in western countries (Europe and US) regarded as "one of us" - and we hold them to a higher standard than some dictator in small far-away country we don't have very tight relations to. Also, because of these relations, and because Israel is somewhat dependent on support from the west and many Israelis have tight connections to (family, business), we regard it as more likely that they would listen to protests in the rest of the west, than whoever is fighting in Sudan would listen.

about 2 months ago
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### Elite Group of Researchers Rule Scientific Publishing

Re:Just an opinion... (123 comments)

Physics is the same: First and often 2nd author did 90% of the work, then comes people who contributed a little, and finally the supervisor/advisor.

However, some conference papers in my field (accelerator physics) have a different scheme of author sorting: First listed is the corresponding author, i.e. the person who actually wrote the paper and did most of the work. Then comes the rest of the people in his/her institution, listed alphabetically. Then comes the rest of the people, sorted first by institution and then by name.

about 2 months ago
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### Ode To Sound Blaster: Are Discrete Audio Cards Still Worth the Investment?

Computers are different here. I now have a Dell Latitude 14" machine (I can't find the model number now... On older model the model number was printed over the keyboard, but it isn't anymore), and it came with two mic's built into the top of the display bezel, next to a reasonable web cam. With Skype and similar apps on Linux, the audio is really good.

My old machine (also a Latitude, but a 7-8 year old model) had the mic on the main body of the machine, above the keyboard. That meant it picked up all sort of keyboard and fan noises, making an external webcam with a built-in USB mic completely necessary for internet telephony.

about 2 months ago
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### The View From Inside A Fireworks Show

Re:Illegal and Dangerous? (200 comments)

The F35 is a single engine aircraft.

about 2 months ago
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### Norway Scraps Online Voting

Re:What logic! (139 comments)

Huh. State elections or presidential/senate/house of representatives? Is it a "real" mail-in vote, or is it more like an election booth at the post office (such that you vote in private)?

But yeah, maybe it's better than the endless queues that seems to happen on every US election...

about 3 months ago
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### Norway Scraps Online Voting

Re:What logic! (139 comments)

Exactly - they are equivalent except for the ease-of-use. And voting in Norway is already pretty easy (source: I am a citizen) - you have voting booths at basically every primary school during election day with quite short queues, and you can pre-vote a lot of places (which was my preference a couple of times - go to the booth in the corner of the university canteen). They also come around to hospitals, retirement homes etc. so that even if you're stuck in bed, they bring the ballot box to you.

Where is mail-in voting the default?

about 3 months ago

# Submissions

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### Programming in schools

kyrsjo (2420192) writes "The Economist has an article on how information technology — the real stuff, not just button-pushing — is making it's way back to schools across the world. As the article argues: "Digital technology is now so ubiquitous that many think a rounded education requires a grounding in this subject just as much as in biology, chemistry or physics."

In today's society, teaching computer science in schools is absolutely necessary, and that means getting a real understanding of computers and how they work. That requires working with algorithms and programming, not just learning which buttons to push in the program that the school happened to use."

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