When you want to edit an image, you can either turn to MS Paint, that wacky editor that came with your digital camera, or you can grab for some seriously dangerous bazooka-style software like Adobe Photohop. In a world of bazookas, ImageJ is a suitcase nuke. Seriously, this software is sensationally raw. ImageJ is sortof like Photoshop or the GIMP in the same way that crack is like cocaine.
ImageJ is funded by the NIH, presumably to give medical science a powerful tool for image analysis. If you think about it, it makes great sense to provide a reference tool so that all research can be predictably comparable.
…but obviously, this type of work isn’t exclusive to the medical field, and ImageJ happens to be equal parts tool and platform, because a thriving plugin community has developed hundreds of fascinating commands and macros. It’s so open and extendable – check out this list of plugins.
I found ImageJ when I wanted a free image stabilization tool, because I had recorded some shaky outdoor scenes with a digital camera. ImageJ handled this task admirably, even if a 2-minute clip required 2 gigs of ram and about 60 minutes of rendering time.
ImageJ is the most general-purpose image manipulation platform I have ever seen. Let’s hear it for government-sponsored Public Domain software!
ImageJ is a public domain, Java-based image processing program developed at the National Institutes of Health. ImageJ was designed with an open architecture that provides extensibility via Java plugins and recordable macros.[1] Custom acquisition, analysis and processing plugins can be developed using ImageJ’s built-in editor and a Java compiler. User-written plugins make it possible to solve many image processing and analysis problems, from 3-dimensional live-cell imaging,[2] to radiological image processing,[3] multiple imaging system data comparisons[4] to automated hematology systems.[5] ImageJ’s plugin architecture and built in development environment has made it a popular platform for teaching image processing.[6]
More than a decade ago, a bunch of banks thought it would be a good idea to make some plans for … cooperation. Recent events have … enhanced cooperation.
On October 3, 1998, the Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors of the G7 countries commissioned Dr Hans Tietmeyer, President of the Deutsche Bundesbank, to recommend new structures for enhancing co-operation among the various national and international supervisory bodies and international financial institutions so as to promote stability in the international financial system.
G7 Ministers and Governors reinforced their commitment to reforms to the international financial system and financial stability in a declaration issued on 30 October 1998. He recommended the creation of a Financial Stability Forum.
Dr Tietmeyer presented his report to G7 Ministers and Governors at the meeting in Bonn on 20 February 1999 and G7 Ministers and Central Bank Governors endorsed the creation of a Financial Stability Forum (FSF) bringing together:
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national authorities responsible for financial stability in significant international financial centres, namely treasuries, central banks, and supervisory agencies;
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sector-specific international groupings of regulators and supervisors engaged in developing standards and codes of good practice;international financial institutions charged with surveillance of domestic and international financial systems and monitoring and fostering implementation of standard;
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committees of central bank experts concerned with market infrastructure and functioning.
The FSF was first convened on 14 April 1999 in Washington. Mr Andrew Crockett, General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements, was appointed Chairman of the FSF in a personal capacity.
The Financial Stability Forum is a group consisting of major national financial authorities such as finance ministries, central bankers, and international financial bodies. The Forum was founded in 1999 to promote international financial stability. Its founding resulted from discussions among Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors of the G7 countries, and a study which they commissioned.[1]
The Forum facilitates discussion and co-operation in supervision and surveillance of financial institutions, transactions and events. FSF is managed by a small secretariat housed at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.[2] It is chaired by Mario Draghi, an Italian banker and economist who became the governor of the Bank of Italy in January 2006 for a six-year term.
The FSF membership includes about a dozen nations who participate through their central banks, financial ministries and departments, and securities regulators, including (in descending economic size): the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and some other industrialized economies.[3] It also includes several international economic organizations. [4] At the G20 summit on 15 November 2008 it was agreed that the membership of the FSF will be expanded to include emerging economies, such as China.
A new report raises questions about the “double bird impact” theory, as to the cause of flight 1549’s Hudson landing. This is just a compilation of interesting coincidences, but I’d like you to connect the dots. Please leave a comment with your interpretation.
Two days before US Airways Flight 1549 crashed into the Hudson River, passengers on the same route and same aircraft say they heard a series of loud bangs and the flight crew told them they could have to make an emergency landing, CNN has learned.
Steve Jeffrey of Charlotte, North Carolina, told CNN he was flying in first class Tuesday when, about 20 minutes into the flight, “it sounded like the wing was just snapping off.”
“The red lights started going on. A little pandemonium was going on,” Jeffrey recalled.
He said the incident occurred over Newark, New Jersey, soon after the plane — also flying as Flight 1549 — had taken off from LaGuardia Airport in New York.
“It seemed so loud, like luggage was hitting the side but times a thousand. It startled everyone on the plane,” Jeffrey said. “We started looking at each other. The stewardesses started running around. They made an announcement that ‘everyone heard the noise, we’re going to turn around and head back to LaGuardia and check out what happened.’”
It seems like bad luck to fly on the same plane as bank executives, especially when a major deal is in the works. In this case, 15% of the 155 passengers happened to be Bank of America executives.
The flight, which left La Guardia Airport late after a gate change, was packed with a diverse cross-section: 23 frequent-flying Bank of America executives returning home after meetings in New York; a band of buddies on a golf trip to Myrtle Beach, S.C.; a 74-year-old man who had just attended his brother’s funeral; a family trying to visit a grandmother before her surgery. And, in Seat 13F, Emma Sophina, 26, a pop singer from Australia, who was working on a song, titled “Bittersweet,” forever linked in her mind now to a day that was anything but.
This footage was prepared recently by a citizen-journalist / advocate in Vancouver. Contrary to what one might think, it’s a pretty good PSA for crack addicts wanting to manage their addiction … and it’s apparently legal, too.
When it comes to drug legalization, there are a few approaches. Harm reduction, for example, makes the argument that the purpose of public policy is to reduce harm, and that any policy that creates more problems than it solves isn’t actually successful. There’s decriminalization, which is essentially driven by voter initiative. There’s rescheduling, which seeks to alter the definition of a drug so that it no longer meets certain criteria for enforcement. There’s the medicinal movement, which seeks to alter access to certain drugs on the basis of their beneficial qualities. One of the features that all of these techniques share is that they directly address currently illegal drugs, and attempt to directly argue that these drugs should not be illegal.
…and then there’s this guy from Vancouver, who has created a Jonathan Swift-esque Modest Proposal, of sorts. Essentially, our Vancouver Videographer has created a tutorial that illustrates how to take plain coffee, combine it with a household cleanser, and end up with a super-pure, smokable form of caffeine. Essentially, his challenge to policymakers is this: criminalize coffee. Naturally, after coffee is criminalized will inevitably come the next food that can be purified, and so on… This is the argument of absurdity (reductio ad absurdum); how ridiculous could we theoretically make policy before policy has become too absurd to take seriously?
Some people will doubtless be shocked that the Vancouver Videographer suggests selling it on the school playground with the name “black magic,” but he insists that it must be sold with the disclaimer that it is legal to sell. Of course, anyone who is shocked by the suggestion is clearly missing the point of the video. In A Modest Proposal, Swift never advocated for cannibalism, and he would probably have been disgusted if people actually ate the children as a result of his proposal. On the contrary, people ought to be shocked by what is currently criminalized.
Personally, I love this message, but I’m not about to freebase some coffee. I would suggest that a more direct route to smokable caffeine would be to purchase chemically pure caffeine, rather than using the coffee method depicted in the video. I’ve heard that United Nuclear is a good source, but I’ve never purchased from them, and I make no warranties. Although this does have me thinking about some possibilities, let me reiterate: making freebase caffeine isn’t the point of the video.
I’d venture that all anyone really needs to hear are the words “freebase caffeine” and they are less than an hour from actually making it a reality. The knowledge is already out there, and a video tutorial isn’t a necessary step to making your own freebase caffeine. Any process that can be explained in 120 seconds is childishly simple, so it’s not like this video is the groundbreaking source of some “great new technique.”
What is groundbreaking, however, is the suggestion that we could criminalize everything simply by showing how easy it is to transform it into a “scary form.” Hot peppers, for example, are well known for their accompanying endorphin rush – perhaps peppers aren’t too far behind coffee? In fact, someone could just walk down the aisles of a supermarket and identify which products, fruits, and vegetables have any conceivable potential for becoming “scarier.” Why not create an act stipulating that nothing, whatsoever, can be sold in a store unless it has first been confirmed that it could never be made into a scary form?
Because it is absurd.
If it is plain to see why this line of reasoning is absurd, then we need to work backwards to figure out where this absurd line of reasoning began, and then remedy the situation so that it is no longer absurd.
[UPDATE 2009-01-20]
Since there is question about whether or not anyone has ever done this, I submit for your evaluation the following Erowid report:
I recently bought a bottle of ’stacker 2′ pills. I really like these pills taken orally but I find that the excessive amount of caffeine (200mg) is a bit much for me. It also contains several vitamins, herbs, etc–but most importantly, ma huang extract (standardized 25mg ephedrine). I decided to do what the cigarette companies do to tobacco in order to convert the nicotine salt into a freebase–soak it in ammonia. I opened up one of the capsules onto a glass dish, added 5ml household clear ammonia via medicine dropper, ‘cut’ with razor blade until capsule contents were fully saturated, and let soak for approx. 1 hour. Next, I evaporated the ammonia in the microwave, scraped up sticky goo (light brown in color, almost rubbery but sticky when rolled into a ball), and smoked through my trusty bowl. That was bout two hours ago. Since then, have taken about 7 hits of the pharmaceutical-tasting lump…
Obviously, RTFA. I take two things from this report:
1) the guy lived
2) the caffeine was hard to disambiguate from the ephedrine (which he also freebased).
So, this doesn’t strictly mean it’s safe to do, but there is more that you can read about the topic…
The US National Security Agency has helped put together a list of the world’s most dangerous coding mistakes.
The 25 entry list contains errors that can lead to security holes or vulnerable areas that can be targeted by cyber criminals.
Experts say many of these errors are not well understood by programmers.
According to the SANS Institute in Maryland, just two of the errors led to more than 1.5m web site security breaches during 2008.
Here’s the list:
CWE-20:Improper Input Validation
CWE-116:Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output
CWE-89:Failure to Preserve SQL Query Structure
CWE-79:Failure to Preserve Web Page Structure
CWE-78:Failure to Preserve OS Command Structure
CWE-319:Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information
CWE-352:Cross-Site Request Forgery
CWE-362:Race Condition
CWE-209:Error Message Information Leak
CWE-119:Failure to Constrain Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer
CWE-642:External Control of Critical State Data
CWE-73:External Control of File Name or Path
CWE-426:Untrusted Search Path
CWE-94:Failure to Control Generation of Code
CWE-494:Download of Code Without Integrity Check
CWE-404:Improper Resource Shutdown or Release
CWE-665:Improper Initialization
CWE-682:Incorrect Calculation
CWE-285:Improper Access Control
CWE-327:Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm
CWE-259:Hard-Coded Password
CWE-732:Insecure Permission Assignment for Critical Resource
CWE-330:Use of Insufficiently Random Values
CWE-250:Execution with Unnecessary Privileges
CWE-602:Client-Side Enforcement of Server-Side Security
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