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Submission + - S&P Downgrades U.S. Credit Rating (cnn.com)

mayberry42 writes: Fresh after China's Dongang downgrading of the U.S. debt quality, the United States has suffered another hit: S&P downgraded America's debt from AAA to AA+. Fitch and Moody's retained their AAA rating, albeit with a "negative" outlook.
Government

Submission + - United States loses AAA credit rating 1

oxide7 writes: The United States lost its top-notch AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's on Friday in an unprecedented reversal of fortune for the world's largest economy. S&P cut the long-term U.S. credit rating by one notch to AA-plus on concerns about the government's budget deficits and rising debt burden. The move is likely to raise borrowing costs eventually for the American government, companies and consumers.

Comment Re:Stupid project (Score 0) 122

It includes reviews by anyone who has never used the product. Example, this Zenith watch. I won't debate the hilarity of the reviews, but no doubt they are fake.

I think the "undecidability" factor comes into play in any machine learning problem. For example, which email is spam and which isn't? But significant strides have been made to solve that problem and I don't see why online review system is any different.

Comment Re:Realy? (Score 1) 250

The current law stipulates that no more than 65,000 H1-B visas be issued each fiscal year. As of July 18, only 20,500 of these are filled. Of those, around 12,800 hold a Master's degrees. Are you suggesting that stopping the H1-B program is going to improve employment in US? No. What you'll be doing is reducing the quality of workers in American workplaces.

As regards to removing taxation, I am somewhat ambiguous. One could argue that since H1-B holders are not eligible to receive Social Security benefits, so they should not pay taxes However, a significant number of H1-B holders stay on to obtain a green card, making them eligible for the said benefits. Personally, I have no problem paying the Social Security taxes. The job that I am going to start in a month or so is fairly high-tech, the work is very intellectually stimulating and is simply not done in my home country. I am more than happy to help the currently unemployed Americans by paying my share of taxes. I view this as a price I pay for the better living conditions and greater job satisfaction. Mind you, that does not mean that either of them will be able to do my job. If any American is as skilled as I am, he won't have any problem getting a similar job position as mine.
Medicine

Submission + - World's First ManMade Organ Transplant Carried Out (gizmocrazed.com)

Mightee writes: "Luckily a lung cancer patient got a synthetic transplant for the tumor that can't be operated. Scientists from University College London worked at making a glass artificial windpipe including trachea and two primary bronchi i.e. left and right — covered with a polymer having small holes in it for better transmission of air.

Later stem cells from his bone marrow and cells from nose are extracted and planted over the artificial organ — which are then placed in a bioreactor for two days to let the cells grow and cover the whole of the windpipe so that it could easily be incorporated into the human body without the fear of tissue rejection.

During 12 hours surgery, patient Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene was transplanted with the hand-made organ in Karolinska University Hospital Stockholm. This didn't require any potential donor with same genetic sequence for the transplant. The patient own body cells were used in the whole process."

Comment Tabbed Putty? (Score 1) 184

My search for a good version of tabbed putty still continues. Currently I'm using Superputty. Unfortunately, it is far from a finished product - the main problems being lack of proper keyboard shortcuts and non-regain of focus on maximize/minimize.

If someone knows a good tabbed putty version, my life would become a lot simpler.

Comment Re:Meh (Score 1) 87

It was Dana Ballard. IIRC, the work that I referred to was done when he was at Rochester. He seems to have a link to the peanut butter and jelly video up on his page, but I am not able to download it.

I couldn't gather much from TFA apart from that they recognized the activities and the learning model behind it. I don't recall how much training data Dr. Ballard used, but the activity recognition in real time was very accurate.

Comment Meh (Score 3, Insightful) 87

My Machine Learning professor at University of Texas was hugely into Reinforcement Learning. He and one of his graduate student had developed this kind of system many years ago. Basically, only using a simple video camera, the computer could identify correctly all sub-activities involved in making a peanut butter sandwich; such as 'open jar', 'jelly on bread', 'jar closed', etc. We were shown the video during first class of the course and it was pretty cool.

The MSR guys are doing interesting stuff but this is nothing groundbreaking.

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