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"Not every civil court case proceeds to trial. Some are settled "out of court" by the parties involved. Others are settled by the judge in a "summary dismissal" or "summary judgment". The suit is deemed to be unworthy of trial, even without a full hearing. In this way valuable time is saved and litigants are discouraged from bringing frivolous lawsuits. We often do the same thing with ideas. In fact, a great deal of what appears to be debate about ideas actually takes place in a "pre-trial" phase, in which people discuss whether an idea should even be granted a serious hearing. Many - most? - discussions go no further."
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"[R]eading experts all agree that boys need to be allowed to pick the books that really interest them. Of course it's okay to make suggestions to your son about things he might like-boys very much value the opinion of other boys and men in making their reading selections. So here are 50 books that many boys and young men will really love. We've included some classics, but we also threw in some more modern and accessible choices-after all, not every boy has the desire or the aptitude to dive into Dickens."
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"See if you can enhance that license plate."
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"Graphene is one of the hottest materials out there right now in condensed matter physics, and I'm trying to figure out what tactic to take in making some blog postings about it. One good place to start is the remarkably fast rise in the popularity of graphene. Why did it catch on so quickly? As far as I can tell, there are several reasons."
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"Who's more "sociable," men or women? Common sense says it's women, right? And many research studies back this impression up: Women are more interpersonal, more connected, more interdependent than men. Women are more likely to share intimate information with each other than men. But is that really the whole story? There is also research suggesting that men have larger social networks than women do, and that male-male friendships last longer than female-female ones."
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"Our researchers can find no evidence that Tina Fey belongs to the Taliban. Could you send us the sourcing for that reference?"
Uncertain Principles
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"Uncertain Principles" features the miscellaneous ramblings of a physicist at a small liberal arts college. Physics, politics, pop culture, and occasional conversations with his dog.
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« Dorky Poll: How Do You Say That? | Main | Creepiness Is Contagious »
Links for 2009-11-18
Category: Links Dump
Posted on: November 18, 2009 8:29 AM, by Chad Orzel
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Regarding the license plate link: I'm certainly nowhere close to be an expert, pretty uneducated actually. But I read a lot of news and I'm pretty sure that you can indeed enhance car plates. For one with a statistical analysis of pixel distribution and second, if you have a video of a static plate I think you can combine many frames to interpolate a higher resolution photo for that different parts (pixels) of the plate are being captured in each frame. I may be totally wrong though...
Check this: http://ikena.motiondsp.com/ikena-technology/
Posted by: XiXiDu | November 18, 2009 12:08 PM
@ XiXiDu
That analysis is for removal of blur form the camera shaking, much like "lucky imaging" in astronomy removes blurring from atmospheric disturbances. Notice that while the slightly blurred image of the digits become sharper, you still can't read the name of the state.
Posted by: Tom | November 19, 2009 8:42 AM