Science in retreat, Nature editorial says

According to Nature, it would seem Canada, after being in the top 10 as a research leader is slowly falling under the current government's policies. I hope the next government (soon ?) will understand the importance of science within today's globalization context. In this time when our industry suffers from a strong dollar, our expertise must not fall, it must raise.

Bursary for master degree

I had the confirmation today I will be awarded a bursary (see CGS M) for my master degree in electrical engineering I will begin in May or in September of this year. It will allow me to keep work outside my studies to a manageable minimum. I will work on subcutaneous wireless power and data transfer for Cortical Visual Prosthesis at École Polytechnique de Montréal.

Heli-OS advances, helicopter hovers using quaternions

Heli-OS, obviously for Helicopter Operating System, is a project I started a year ago with a friend of mine. The challenge is to render a radio-controlled helicopter entirely autonomous (no human input allowed for flight). Progress has been made recently as I grabbed latitude and longitude from a GPS in a C# application (not much of a feat, but I made a PCB to render the GPS USB), made a bridge between MatLAB/SimuLink and X-Plane (through UDP), and finally, made a successful hover of the helicopter (in simulation) using PID controllers on each axis (pitch, roll, yaw) and on altitude. Attitude is measured and controlled with quaternions, which allows me to define the error in the control loop as another quaternion, representing the rotation between current attitude and desired attitude.

Speech Recognition

Recently I have been fussing with speech recognition under Windows XP (I am not yet a Vista enthusiast [I tried it] and speech support does not ship with XP as it does with Vista). Being a programmer, I was more interested in using speech recognition within my applications than within Word or the operating system itself. I finally found a way to use System.Speech.Recognition (I am a .NET fan) with C# to distinguish between certain given terms. The engine is highly sensitive and often gives false positives, but is pretty deterministic and gets it right most of the time. Increased difference of pronunciation between expected words and the smaller their number, the better the recognizer will operate. Contextual dictionaries are the key to successful non annoying speech recognition.

Google Custom Search Engine

I have been spending some time on Google looking at a few peculiar services they provide and tumbled on this: Engineering Podcast Search Engine

In other words, Google allows you to create your own search engine, that is specify keywords added in background to your search and a list of websites to search within.

Learning Japanese

It may have shown either from my spelling, grammar and especially from my name that I am not an English native. I speak French as a mother language, and I can read some Spanish (I had 4 years of classes on it in high school). However these languages all use the Latin alphabet with some variations, French and Spanish being romance languages and English being a germanic language.

I decided to learn Japanese, a long and hard journey it seems. The japanese language is written using two distinct syllabaries (Hiragana and Katakana) and Kanjis (imported chineese caracters from the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD)). Until now I know the Hiragana syllabary and I am progressing with the Katananas. Both have 46 distinct symbols, mapping to syllables. Kanjis are much more of a long shot though with their 1945 official minimum symbols. According to a site, the actual upper limit to these is more around 50 000, while a working knowledge of them would be around a few thousands.

Monkey controls a (third) robotic arm

Scientists have interfaced a robotic arm to a BMI (brain-machine interface) implanted on a monkey. Results, if not a hoax, are pretty interesting to the very least. YouTube - Monkey controls a robotic arm

WiTricity

People at MIT have found an elegant match of the wireless concept and 175 years-old induction law. Read the story at: Goodbye wires… - MIT News Office

Welcome

The name of this blog, window on the world, is a simple reminder that one's vision on the world is very limited. Even though the ubiquitous Internet reduces far to close and long to short, the quality of the information seen daily is still very random. The goal of this blog is to present a selection of enlightenments encountered while I was surfing the web. If you enjoy science, chances are you will enjoy this blog.