Tracking animals as if they were stars

Here is a good story in the New scientist on how star pattern recognition was applied to find matching whale shark in the ECOCEAN database

Stanford Racing Team is the winner of the DARPA Grand Challenge

Outstanding! three contestants arrived within 10 minutes of each other!

Seeing things the way a robot does

There are interesting videos from DARPA's National Qualification Event before selections are made on Thursday. They can be found on the CarTV site. In this video, Stanford provides insight in the vision system of their entry. Stanford has their own stock of videos.

Nuit Blanche 2005, Paris

http://www.pegasus-bridge.com/nuitblanche/

Bonjour si vous parlez Francais, il y a de tres fortes chances que vous connaissiez la Nuit Blanche de Paris. Je me suis essaye a faire cette carte car le site de la ville de Paris est deficient pour ce qui est de representer les evenements qui ne sont pas sponsorises par la dite Mairie. Comme Google Maps ne fait pas les rues/plans pour la France, il y a de fortes chance que ce soit la premiere application du Google maps pour la France. Prevenez moi de toutes erreurs ( je pense qu'il y en a beaucoup sur le chemin vert.) Le site se trouve ici:

http://www.pegasus-bridge.com/nuitblanche/

et met un peu de temps a charger, mais on ne peut plus s'arreter quand on commence a l'utiliser. Vous avez ete avertis. Cliquez sur les icones pour plus d'informations. On peut naviguer sur la carte en cliquant et en déplaçant la souris. Cliquez sur + pour zoomer. Les couleurs font reference au parcours de couleur du site officiel de la Ville de Paris. Les icones/signets blancs sont les evenements non sponsorises par la ville.

The "Nuit Blanche" event in Paris, is a night sponsored by the local government and industry that features all kinds of artists during the night (from 7 pm till 7 am the next morning.) I just toyed with the Google Maps API and did the following maps of the upcoming Nuit Blanche in Paris (this coming Saturday) for two reasons:

I wanted to try out the Google Maps API and

since France is still not been given any mapping/street capability I thought it would be pretty unique to do this type of thing.

I am pretty sure I got it wrong on the green path though. The light and prefered Google map of the Nuit Blanche in Paris is here. The larger version can be found here (it may crash on you). It takes a while to load but is eventually very addictive. you have been warned.

"...I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..."

We just had confirmation that Voyager 1 reached
termination shock last December.

Cassini took pictures of two Saturn moons two days ago.

A webcam is installed in the middle of the African desert and you can watch it live.


For the next three days, you'll be able to go deep underwater in real time.

Educating Rita

Trapping Rita into a corner ?

What should we make out of the fact that the strike probability of Rita has moved West ?
On september 21, warm water was all over the Texas coast.
A day later, that warm water has shifted West.
Could it be that because of the evacuation of the population from the coast and Houston in particular, warm water rejected into the river stream (houston channel) and on the coast has decreased to the point where other locations on the coast are warmer ? If this is indeed a possible explanation, it is not the best move to have it hit a part of the coast where most refineries are.
On the other hand, if it means that flooding won't occur in Galveston, I am all for it.

Leaving Houston

It looks like, there have been only three recorded Category 5 hurricanes before (Labor Day 1935, Camille 1969 and Andrew in 1992) according to NOAA. Traffic reports from Houston at 4:40 AM show most Highways are jammed. In 1900, a Category 4 wiped out Galveston. Sea temperatures for the Gulf show that it is unlikely to decrease in size and strength before it hits the mainland.


The other benchmark we have for this type of situation in Texas is that of Hurricane Carla in 1961. While in the Gulf it reached Category 5 but hit mainland as a category 3.


According to the people at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC), JSC will be flooded.
To give an idea of the potential damage, here is the landscape photo of the region before a 22 feet flood (that occured with Carla)...

... and here is the same photographs with a 22 feet flood.

The Brazos Valley was hit with 74 mph winds from this Category 3 Hurricane. Katrina was a category 4 at landfall.

The perfect non-normal storm ?

Rita is now a category 5 hurricane. The Gulf of Mexico is very warm. It is supposed to hit south of Houston and then heads its way toward Bryan-College Station. Is it the storm that I mentioned earlier.

How many dimensions is a smile worth ?

Echoing a previous story on how bad face recognition algorithms were, it looks like other methods might do the job other than HLLE.
One of them is diffusion geometry. A good demonstration of its power can be found in Stephane Lafon's web page. In this demonstration, one discovers that the suite of images on the left can be put in order following one parameter (rotation angle). So the big question is, how many dimensions would enable the classification of a smile ? This is very important because, for instance, it is known that people affected with autism have difficulty to make emotions out....