Construct

The iPad has a massive touchscreen. I can think of several clever ways to visually 'build' queries by dragging-and-dropping query building blocks, column names, etc. into place.

Designing iPad apps around the idea of typing everything in is quite wasteful of that big touchscreen. Also, it doesn't give anyone a reason to purchase your app when they can just type the queries into their laptop/desktop with great efficiency.

Leveraging the touchscreen to turn a typing task into a visual, tactile task is a great use of the iPad.

People are extraordinarily good at learning how to game incentive systems. Even more so when the incentive system is simplified (badges, points, etc.) and the underlying problem is complex (fixing bugs).

The risk you run with any game mechanics system is rewarding those who game the system more than those who dig into the deeper problems. It would be easy to lose motivation to track down a segfault when another guy earned 20 'points' for fixing 20 sufferer typos, for example.

The only way to compensate for this is to have someone actively and intensely assign priorities and estimated difficulties for each bug. Getting this right could take some time and effort, and you still run the risk of undervaluing the little bugs, etc.

I think a better system would be 'now that...' rewards instead of 'if then' rewards. Recognizing someone for their contributions after the fact has been shown to be more motivating in the long term than incentives laid out ahead of time. Public, non-systematic recognition for a job well done goes a long way.

I always wonder if bills like this one which radically alter the structure of our government are proposed in seriousness or merely as a distraction to please certain voters.

Obviously, adding a 1% tax on all financial transactions, as this bill proposes, would drastically change how our economy operates. Keeping the markets efficient and accurately priced becomes much more difficult when any trade comes with a 1% cost. Especially when the 1% is imposed whether it results in a profit or a loss. From what I see in this bill, even selling one stock to purchase another would incur a 1% fee on the first sale and a 1% fee on the purchase of the second stock.

1% may not sound like much, but as money continues to change hands the government's take grows significantly. Let $100 change hands 10 times, and you're left with $90.44 of the original money. Let $100 change hands 100 times and you're down to $36.60.

Of course this scheme would transfer money to the government to pay down our debt (in theory, if the money is used as the bill intends), but at what cost? This additional financial friction could seriously slow down the economy and disrupt efficient market pricing. Finding the proper balance of taxes, debt, and economy growth is a very, very difficult problem, and this solution is not well thought out at all. Furthermore, eliminating our national debt is not going to solve all of our problems, as many would like us to believe.

Throwing ridiculous bills like this in the mix only serves to muddy the waters. It distract us from the real problems and the potentially viable solutions. Let's make small, incremental changes within our current tax structure to fix our problems in a reasonable manner.

It's far easier to be the person writing and enforcing policies and procedures than it is to be the one who must accomplish something within the bounds of all of those policies.

At the last startup I worked for, management loved to hire heavy-hitters from big companies. Almost universally, they spent more time writing proposals, calling meetings, soliciting approvals, and gathering input than they did working on actual solutions. Not surprisingly, they accomplished very little and had a hard time keeping up with the demanding schedules of a startup.

Within a big company, it would be easy to mistake all of this bureaucratic churn and superfluous paperwork for progress and hard work. In a startup, it becomes obvious to all that it is anything but progress.

17% may leave their job, but I'm sure many more simply stay put without truly being engaged, all the while collecting a paycheck.

Recognition arbitrage, employees claiming credit for the work of others, by corporate-climber types is probably to blame in many cases. From my experience, credit usually goes to whoever delivers the results or the news first. Smart corporate climbers will go to great lengths to be the first to take credit for new ideas or inventions within a company, and they will work hard to maintain a high profile.

I've tried to do a modest amount of self-promotion to stay visible within my companies after a few very bad experiences early in my career. Just as importantly, I try to go out of my way to call out another person's accomplishments whenever I get an opportunity.

A company that fails to recognize valuable people isn't likely to succeed. When self-aggrandizing people are promoted faster than the get-it-done types, I take it as a red flag that management has no clue how things are actually done within the company. Companies who instead go out of their way to recognize valuable team members and promote those who work hard will end up with competent and motivated management. Now if only I had identified this pattern earlier in my career I could have avoided some train-wreck companies.

A Faraday cage is, by definition, a conductive cage. You'll have a hard time getting a conductive material through a metal detector.

Your best bet would be to construct a garment from a material which is significantly absorbs/attenuates the extremely high frequencies (30GHz to 300GHz) used by these millimeter-wave imaging scanners. Normal clothing passes these waves with minimal attenuation, where they bounce off of your skin and return to the scanner. The scanner then uses these returned signals to reconstruct an image of your naked body for the TSA to examine. If your clothing instead absorbs most of this signal, or at least attenuates it significantly enough to fall below the dynamic range of the imager, the TSA won't be able to see much.

Absorbing millimeter-wave signals to a significant enough degree will require a relatively thick material. I typically use RF foam in the lab when I'm working on EMI compliance issues because it is cheap and easy to cut to size. Attenuation data is scarce for the EHF band, but ARC Technologies has a lossy flexible foam that has 25dB of attenuation at 40GHz ( http://www.arc-tech.com/lossyflexiblefoam.php ), which amounts to 50dB of round-trip attenuation from the imager to your skin back to the imager. 50dB loss means only 0.001% of the original signal will bounce back to the scanner.

Even more absorption can be had if you use pyramidal foam, much like you see in a typical antenna chamber. ( http://www.ets-lindgren.com/pdf/absorber.pdf ) Of course, this probably won't be the most comfortable garment you've ever worn.

Still, I would imagine wearing such a garment would immediately raise red flags and you would quickly find yourself in a back room with some unfriendly TSA agents. You're much better off opting out.

FYI, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate the slides.

Took me a minute to figure that one out.

The term hyperfocus doesn't appear in the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the gold standard by which all mental disorders, including ADHD, are officially defined) at all.

The term shows 0 results on PubMed, a repository for studies, journals, and other biomedical literature. (Note: If you search for 'hyperfocus' it will give you results for 'hypertonus' because the original term returned no results)

And finally, the Wikipedia article is heavily flagged with 'Original Research' and 'Unverifiable/Biased Information' tags, and is also flagged for not having any real sources or citations.

I know the term 'hyperfocus' has worked its way into pop-psychology lately, but I've never been able to find reliable research supporting the claim. I am a bit wary of how easily it stretches the definition of ADHD to encompass just about every person I've ever worked with. After all, who wouldn't identify with the idea that they can 'hyperfocus' on video games or fun projects, but have difficulty concentrating on difficult or uninteresting work? Very slippery slope here.

Nor does the FDA info I quoted say that Modafinil is not a stimulant. Either way, you're arguing semantics and using personal anecdotes as your sources. We've already established that the effects of Modafinil are similar to that of other stimulants, and I've linked multiple studies showing that its mode of action overlaps with that of stimulants, and that the side effects of traditional stimulants show up in Modafinil (albeit with reduced frequency and magnitude). You can call it what you want, but none of that changes what I've posted here.

I'm going to step out of this debate, as arguing semantics only detracts from the topic at hand at this point.

It is supposedly hard on the liver. I'd strongly recommend not dosing any medication without a doctor's supervision no matter what, and this is one more reason to avoid going that route.

Excellent point, and definitely worth pointing out.

It's amazing how many people are quick to self-diagnose ADHD, but have no problem spending hours on their hobbies or interesting projects. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in the coding community who never has problems concentrating on uninteresting projects.

The Physician's Drug Reference (PDR) is not the last word on this. It is literally just a desk reference, as the name implies. It isn't meant to be a definitive guide to medications. It is meant to be a quick and easy way for physicians to get an overview of a medication.

The following is taken directly from the FDA's website for Modafinil ( http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2007/020... ). This information is also included in the product information sheet you receive with your prescription, and on the Provigil website. To say that Modafinil does not have the physical effects of other stimulants is not true. They are present to a lesser degree, but still exist.

  In addition to its wake-promoting effects and ability to
 increase locomotor activity in animals, modafinil produces 
 psychoactive and euphoric effects, alterations in mood, 
 perception, thinking, and feelings typical of other CNS 
 stimulants in humans. Modafinil has reinforcing properties,
 as evidenced by its self-administration in monkeys previously
 trained to self-administer cocaine. Modafinil was also
 partially discriminated as stimulant-like.

Arguing that Modafinil is not a stimulant is like arguing that alcohol is not a drug. Sure, you can twist words and definitions, but all you're doing is re-drawing the cutoff line between what is and what is not a stimulant.

Modafinil is not a typical stimulant, but it provides stimulation, increases brain activity, increases self-reported measures of aggression, restlessness, and anxiety in double-blind testing, is a controlled substance with recognized abuse potential, and many of the stimulating effects are blocked by the same drugs that block the effects of stimulants.

Cephalon marketing is probably eager to get away and "stimulant" moniker, but this is an argument over semantics rather than pharmacology.

Modafinil is, by all measures and effects, a stimulant.

Taking Modafinil will not make you smarter, but it will heavily diminish the negative effects of sleep deprivation. Remember, the primary indications for this medication are narcolepsy, sleep apnea, and excessive daytime sleepiness.

It also increases dopamine and norepinephrine activity in certain areas of the brain, similar to Adderall and Ritalin, so it will boost your concentration. It actually showed a positive effect on concentration in ADHD treatment trials, but the FDA declined to approve it for that purpose due to some concerns over a rare skin-rash disorder. Many people are under the misconception that it is not a stimulant, but it most certainly is.

As for controlled, double-blind trials, the results are not promising in non-sleep-deprived individuals. Controlled tests tend to show self-reported increases in restlessness, aggression, and anxiety, but the standardized cognitive and memory tests show very little, if any, improvement in the Modafinil groups. (See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12672167 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15738750 for more).

Finally, don't try to import Modafinil (Provigil) into the US without a prescription. It is a Schedule IV controlled substance and the legal ramifications for importing a controlled substance can be serious. If you're still eager to try it outside of a doctor's supervision, which I definitely do not recommend, then know that Adrafinil is metabolized (partly) to Modafinil within the body but is not a controlled substance. Importing it is a still a gray area, though.

Bottom line: Getting a healthy amount of sleep should be your #1 goal for cognitive improvement. If that isn't actually possible, then Modafinil could be helpful for reversing the effects of sleep deprivation. If concentration is your problem, Modafinil may help you, but you'd probably be better off pursuing proper ADHD treatment with a medication approved for ADHD.

Modafinil is most certainly a stimulant.

Its mode of action isn't identical to that of Adderall (amphetamine) and Ritalin (methylphenidate) but then again neither is that of caffeine, but it is still a stimulant. Adderall and Ritalin increase extra-cellular concentrations of dopamine and norepinephrine. Modafinil has been shown in many studies to elevate dopamine and norepinephrine concentrations in certain regions of the brain. It may not accomplish this as directly as Ritalin or Adderall, but the effect is there. There are additional glutamate-enhancing and GABA-reducing effects to Modafinil as well, which is perhaps where the "Modafinil is not a stimulant" misconception comes from. Still, administering a dopamine antagonist diminishes some of Modafinil's effects, much in the same way it diminishes the effects of Adderall or Ritalin.

But even without delving into the pharmacology of Modafinil, how you can you possibly not call Modafinil a stimulant? It promotes wakefulness, increases concentration, and substitutes for Adderall and Ritalin in narcolepsy treatment. It is also a Schedule IV controlled substance (FYI, do not attempt to import a controlled substance, but Adrafanil is a Modafinil precursor and is not scheduled.) indicating there is even a risk of abuse.

This sounds delicious, thanks for the advice. Do you ever have problems with pests?

It creates a conflict of interest for the attorneys. It sets a precedent that wealthy people can receive faster treatment from the SEC. Of course, the SEC tends to investigate people who have made large amounts of money through potentially illegal means, so this may not be an issue. However, it also provides less incentive for the SEC to move quickly on other cases. If the SEC can accept money in exchange for speeding up the process, they are now one step away from slowing down or drawing out the whole process as a means for extorting money.

Good point.

Motorcycle engines, with their smaller cylinder sizes and thus lower combustion chamber surface area vs. volume, have a much easier time cooling their cylinders and heads. This reduces hot spotting, making it easier to get away with larger displacements. I'm sure there was a healthy amount of overlap in your cam, since that motor was designed to rev to the moon.

Still, I did have a 14:1 piston in my single-cylinder, 450cc dirt bike motor and ran 91 Octane in it all day long without problems. Granted, I never took it below 4000ft altitude, which probably helped, but the cylinder, head, and valves were all designed for excellent cooling. And I had a really aggressive cam setup.

Either way, kudos to Mazda for pushing the limits here.

They weren't specifically collecting this information. They were collecting packets that happened to come their way. Combine enough packets, and in some cases you'll find emails and URLs and password.

This quote is taken out of context. Google was not specifically collecting emails, URLs, and passwords. They were collecting packets. Collect enough packets, and you will wind up with emails, URLs, and passwords in the data.

From the article, from Alan Eustace's (Senior VP Research & Engineering) quote:

>It’s clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords.

With a compression ratio of 14:1, it will be interesting to see if this car requires 91+ Octane (Premium Unleaded). Higher compression ratios are a great way of squeezing more power out of the same amount of gasoline, but raising the compression ratio also raises the risk of detonation.

Detonation occurs when the pressure and temperature inside the cylinder cause the air-fuel mixture to literally detonate, rather than burn (relatively) slowly and evenly as desired. If this occurs before the spark, it is called pre-ignition. When it occurs after the spark, while the flame front is progressing through the cylinder, it is referred to as detonation. Higher octane fuels are more resistant to detonation and pre-ignition, and usually go hand-in-hand with higher compression ratios.

As a side note, E85 Ethanol has a ridiculously high octane rating, among other things, which allows for higher compression ratios and much higher boost in forced-induction engines. I keep hoping E85 will catch on outside of the corn belt so I can effectively get race gas performance from pump gas in my turbocharged motor, but no such luck yet.

There are plenty of tricks that can be played to reduce the risk of detonation using low-octane fuels in high compression motors. Efficient head design with excellent cooling will reduce cylinder temperatures and minimize hot spotting within the cylinder head, reducing the risks of detonation and pre-ignition. Getting the heat out of the valves is particularly challenging as they only meet the cylinder head in a relatively small contact patch. The valves can be filled with sodium, which turns to liquid as the motor reaches operating temperature and circulates within the valve, cooling the valve and further reduce hot spots (pre-ignition points) within the motor. Also, designing the piston and head to thoroughly mix and swirl the intake charge helps create a quick, even, clean burn.

However, to get up to 14:1 on a production motor, I wonder if Mazda is playing serious games with the intake camshaft timing to reduce the effective compression ratio. If you leave the intake valves open long enough after the piston begins the compression stroke, it will actually push a tiny amount of air back out of the intake valves, reducing the effective compression ratio of the motor at top dead center. With variable valve timing, Mazda could just be doing this near full load, where detonation and pre-ignition are problems. At partial load, you can get away with much higher compression ratios (up to 20:1 in certain cases, IIRC) with associated increases in efficiency (and thus higher MPG).

Either way, I'm glad to see more efficient internal combustion engines. The internal combustion engine is a 100+ year old technology, so significant improvements are hard to come by without drastically increasing the cost of the motor. Good stuff.

Whenever I deal with SVG these days I use Google's svgweb project for near-universal compatibility: http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/

It uses native rendering when available, but falls back to a flash plugin that emulates SVG support when it isn't (meaning pre-IE9 Internet Explorer). This ends up covering ~95% of the market.

Also, I'd disagree that SVG is languishing. True, canvas is getting a lot of attention, but SVG is more than sufficiently mature to support projects like this.

Even worse, many manager-types tend to be hands-off when everything is going well but are quick to seize upon failures or shortcomings as they come up. This has the unfortunate side effect of encouraging employees to keep a low profile and not pursue anything risky or innovative. As innovation goes out the window, the company stagnates.

I've had too many managers go this route, which is why I always make a point to stop by coworkers' cubicles and thank them for their help or work on different projects.

Try the Pomodoro Technique. Give yourself 25 minutes to focus, and absolutely force yourself not to do anything else but the task at hand. No exceptions. When the 25 minutes are up, you have 5 minutes to relax and unwind. Force yourself to do anything but work for these 5 minutes. I'd strongly recommend leaving your computer/workspace and walking around rather than browsing the internet, but to each their own. Again, no exceptions on the not working part though. When the 5 minutes are up, get back to work.

Adjust the time intervals as appropriate. I tend to prefer 45/10 but other days I do the original 25/5.

There are plenty of pomodoro timer applications for every OS. My favorite for windows is pomodairo: http://code.google.com/p/pomodairo/ and I can't recall the name of my Mac OS X timer at the moment, but I'm sure you'll find it with a little searching.

Here is the original website for the technique: http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

I doubt anyone will argue that officers aren't owed a reasonably large salary in exchange for their training, the risks they take and their accumulated experience.

However, it is unreasonable to be giving near 100% raises over 2 year periods like we see in this data. In these cases, they are obviously gaming the system to increase their pension payouts. This is an unintended consequence of basing pension payouts on the salary of a person's last year of employment.

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, it's very difficult to become a highway patrol officer. Just getting into the academy is hard to do. But apparently once you're in, you're set for life with a decent salary and these last-year-pay-raise games to make sure you have an unreasonably large pension as well. Artificially limiting the supply of officers in this way allows them to spread their budget over fewer people at the expensive of a smaller force.

In this system, Californians lose out not only on tax dollars that go to artificially inflated pensions, but with a smaller number of on-duty officers as well. If anything, this sounds like corruption to me.

I have no doubt the training is difficult and perhaps it is a tough field to break into, but neither of those facts can justify near 100% pay increases over 2 years.

They are very obviously gaming the system in their last year before retirement to award themselves unreasonable large pensions.

It's better in the sense that it takes 10 seconds from start to finish.

If your goal is instead to block the ads completely, I still prefer to use AdBlock Pro and let them manage the block list, rather than clutter up my hosts file.

Great write-up on the thought process of solving this problem.

Bit tricks like these are one of the reasons I love working on a few microcontroller projects each year. It's too easy to get lazy and sloppy when you have multiple GB of RAM and multi-GHz CPUs at your disposal. Coding for a microcontroller with 2KB of flash and 128 bytes of RAM forces you to carefully evaluate the architecture of your code and find the most efficient way of solving your problems. From my experience, that tight-code thought process tends to stick with me when I return to bigger projects in higher-level languages.

On the first day of my first job out of college, the sales engineer of the company took me out to lunch to give me some career advice. He said the best thing he ever did for his career was not learning how to code. Apparently he had graduated as a CS major and went straight for a software company, but really just could not program. Of course, as he put it he chose not to program, but I ultimately saw some of his work and it was beyond terrible.

Instead, he made sure never to actually be useful to the programming or hardware teams, but talk to them just enough to know the basics and keep updated. Since he wasn't actually ever working on anything, he used his free time to mingle with management and used his inside knowledge from the programming teams to announce potential problems to management before the actual programming teams could communicate this info.

Sure enough, he slowly moved into management and higher salary brackets by never actually learning how to program. Of course, the programmers and hardware teams caught on to his game and cut him off from any useful information, and without any actually knowledge he hit a ceiling within the company pretty quickly. Still, it was an important business lesson for me, and ever since watching this all take place I've made sure to carve out some time from my heads-down work to maintain visibility and directly communicate with management.

Hopefully they'll let one of the larger rapid-prototyping companies handle that task.

Typically, when I need more than a handful of 3D rapid prototypes I'll order cast urethane pieces. The rapid prototype shop will take my part, create a two-piece SLA (type of 3D printing) mold, then cast the individual pieces in this 3D-printed mold. Turn-around times are very quick.

Lately, though, I've been able to get molds cut and have 20-100 first article pieces (sans final texture) in 4-6 weeks from China. If they've already settled on the design, they may want to just send the $50 contributors a first article and then ship them a final unit again later. Of course, it's not entirely the same feel as a 3D printed part, but it's probably far stronger and still gets them to the front of the line.