GeertNimage - Slashdot User

Comment Re:This ain't the first time ... (Score 1) 470

by GeertNimage on Thursday February 07, 2013 @02:51PM (#42822661) Attached to: Is the Era of Groundbreaking Science Over?

Explanations are usually descriptions at a lower level:

Q: Explain vision
A: well, light falls on the retina at the back of the eye...
Q: retina?
A: yeah, it contains rods and cones, and they convert light into neural activity
Q: neural activity?
A: when the firing threshold is reached, voltage dependent sodium gates open and cause an action potential
Q: sodium?
A: that is a cation; an atom that misses one electron
Q: atom? electron?

Well, you get the idea. Ultimately you get a description that can only be done in mathematical terms. But can I explain vision? No. I can describe it (to some degree), but it is really a miracle to me (not that I am religious BTW)

Open Source OCR That Makes Searchable PDFs 133

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 22, 2010 @03:21PM from the word-of-advice dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In my job all of our multifunction copiers scan to PDF but many of our users want and expect those PDFs to be text searchable. I looked around for software that would create text searchable pdfs but most are very expensive and I couldn't find any that were open source (free). I did find some open source packages like CuneiForm and Exactimage that could in theory do the job, but they were hard to install and difficult to set up and use over a network. Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface. Hope this proves helpful to someone else who has this same situation."

OpenSSL 1.0.0 Released 105

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 29, 2010 @04:31PM from the sweet-when-is-2.0 dept.

hardaker writes "After over 11 years of development since the start of the OpenSSL Project (1998-12-23), OpenSSL version 1.0.0 has finally hit the shelves of the free-for-all store."

Comment Bilaterality of blindsight is special (Score 2, Interesting) 191

by GeertNimage on Thursday December 25, 2008 @07:37AM (#26229397) Attached to: Blind Man Navigates Obstacle Maze Unaided

It is not mentioned very clearly in the NYT article, but it is mentioned in the original Current Biology paper: this patient has BILATERAL lesions in both the left and right visual cortices. IMO, this is what makes this case especially interesting.

Of course, blindsight has been demonstrated many times before, but always in patients with unilateral lesions. This has some methodological advantages (the patients can act as their own control), but the unilaterality has also been criticised. Maybe these patients make microsaccades, maybe some light is reflected by the nose into the other eye halves, etc. In short, maybe some information reached the intact hemisphere.

This is not possible in the present patient, and that is especially interesting. AFAIK, this is the first and only patient with a bilateral blindsight.

-- Geert

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