Tag: Research Posts

My First Patent In Voice Over IP

 Journal

I was doing a Google search the other day, looking for some photos of me at the last company I worked at, when I discovered US patent 7,958,276, Automatic Configuration of Peripheral Devices. When I worked at my previous company I started playing around with an algorithm to automatically configure a voice over IP device. One of the main problems people would have previously is that they would plug in a new audio device and have to spend a pile of time figuring out how to configure it. The same was true with video. So at the time I came up with basically a complicated priority list that would place certain classes of devices above other ones. For example, if you plugged in a $200 Plantronics headset, I considered it pretty likely you would want to use that over the internal microphone and speaker, so it would be configured automatically. […]

New Heart Disease Story in the BBC

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I was in bed, reading the BBC’s website on my iPad using their ultra cool application, when I came across an article showing new research linking blood fats with heart disease. The link to that article is here. First, I should point out that there’s never really been a definitive link between high fat diets and heart disease. That comes as a surprise to a lot of people, mainly because it’s recited over and over so often as to be the conventional dogma. But research has never really backed that up in any capacity. There is a mild link between cholesterol and heart disease, but it’s often misconstrued in the press based on a lack of understanding about how cholesterol works. There are many people with high cholesterol that don’t have any heart disease, and many people with low cholesterol that have advanced heart disease. While research is obviously still […]

Paying For Content

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This is actually kind of a sore spot, so I thought that I would touch upon it. The New York Times recently announced that they were going to start charging for content in 2011. Strangely enough, most people who grew up in the Internet age seem to think that everything, including premium content, should be free of charge. I personally don’t believe that’s the case, and would even go so far to say that having an economy based on content generated at the expense of advertising dollars is an extremely bad thing. But at the end of the day, it always amazes me how little people are willing to pay for online content. Most people I know spend $2 – $5 at Starbucks (or some equivalent) each day. So we obviously think coffee is worth $2/day. Yet when it comes to anti-war sentiments or well-informed research pieces on the economy, […]

Insulin And Caffeine

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I do the odd post from time to time on health issues and current research I think is interesting. About a year ago I posted an article discussing how caffeine seems to have a negative influence on the body’s insulin signaling, which ultimately affects blood sugar levels in the blood. What this ultimately means is that caffeine might be a major contributing factor in the obesity epidemic, since high insulin levels in the blood promote the storage of fat and make it difficult to burn it. Here’s a recent 2008 study that investigated the effects of caffeinated coffee and decaffeinated coffee on the body’s insulin and glucose systems. Why I think it’s interesting is that it’s one of the first studies that I’ve seen in a while that used coffee as the source of caffeine instead of caffeine pills. BACKGROUND: The ingestion of caffeine (5 mg/kg body weight) and a […]

Americans Suck At Sex

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I just read the results of an interesting study done down south. Apparently americans spend approximately three hours per week grooming themselves and looking good, but less than an hour (per week people) on foreplay and intercourse. So it appears the collective mass would rather look good in bed than be good in bed. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the write-up. Americans spend nearly three hours every week grooming themselves, but less than one hour on foreplay and sexual intercourse. It’s no wonder that only 46% of us describe our love lives as exciting, or existent for that matter. On average, Americans spend 35 minutes on foreplay and sexual intercourse each session. And since we have sex once every 4.3 days, that averages out to about 57 minutes per week and 14 minutes below the global average. Durex also revealed that Americans are having a lot less sex than […]

Good Calories, Bad Calories

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I picked up a book the other day that I’ve been meaning to read for a few months now. It is a book by a scientific journalist named Gary Taubes entitled Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage) (although after reading it, I think a more appropriate title might be something like “The People’s History Of Diet And Nutrition.”) For those of you who follow nutritional research, you may remember Gary from a controversial article he wrote in 2002 in the New York Times called ‘What If It’s Been A Big Fat Lie?” In that article, he proposed an alternative nutritional hypothesis – that it wasn’t fat that ultimately caused obesity or led to the current epidemics of heart disease and diabetes, but it was instead largely influenced by dietary carbohydrates. If there is some truth in that hypothesis (and a great […]

Website Data Analysis Starting

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Big thanks to all of you who pinged me about helping with my little web experiment. So far we have six hosts represented, but I’d love to have a lot more. So if you have any friends that have blogs and can help out, please direct them to me. I’m collecting data in real time right now, so it will be interesting to see what it’ll all look like after a few days. When this is done, we should all have a pretty intimate insight into all the various hosting companies out there and how they compare to each other during normal wear and tear. The teaser is over for now! Stay tuned, in a few days I’ll post some detailed results.

Web Hosting Experiment

 Journal

Hey guys. I want to do a fairly simple web experiment this week. I want to try to assess real-world uptime and latency for a bunch of popular hosting sites. I need a bunch of volunteers to help out. Basically all I’ll need you to do is upload a file to your root directory and allow me to ping it from time to time to do some measurements. I’ll tabulate the data next week and put it online for everyone to see. So, if you can help out, drop me a comment and let me know: The name of your hosting company The address to your site Your email address where I can contact you about this The more people the better. Thanks. I am currently on Media Temple and HostMonster, so I can represent those two.

Microsoft to Open Vancouver Research Facility

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I caught the original news for this in a Skype back channel yesterday, and have had a few people email me links about this since. For those of you who missed it, Microsoft has announced that it will be opening a Vancouver office to attract Canadian talent and to sidestep some of the immigration problems it has had in the past: Microsoft Corp. has ratcheted up the pressure on the U.S. government to boost the number of foreign worker visas it gets by announcing plans for a new software development centre in Vancouver. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant said yesterday it plans to open the centre this fall in the Greater Vancouver Area, about 2? hours from its headquarters, but an exact location had not yet been chosen. Microsoft also had not decided what product lines the initial staff of 200 would be working on, nor what the cost of […]

Master's Thesis

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I’ve had a few requests lately from people asking if I could send them a copy of my master’s thesis. So in the interest of saving time, I’m throwing it up here in case anyone wants to download it and read themselves to sleep. My research was primarily in the area of high definition video compression, specifically on a new codec called H.264 that is used in the new HD DVD formats such as Blue-Ray and HD-DVD. I proposed a novel scheme to combine concurrently broadcoast MPEG-2 standard definition (SD) streams with H.264 spatial difference information to create a HD broadcast stream at a reduced bitrate. So, here it is. Enjoy.