Pointed out to my boss that my new job responsibilities will mean I've dramatically underpaid compared to industry average. He went from "we see this as a role where you'll be learning a lot, so that's the extra compensation and there's no need to change the pay" to giving me a 20% raise. (Actually did this late December.)
My MSc thesis topic got approved. Nothing of interest to LW (EE, control systems engineering), but finishing it by the end of this year will allow me to get into a subsidised machine learning/big data PhD course.
Please feel free to elaborate on your thesis. Control systems engineering sounds a lot like shaping an environment to achieve goals through a rational process. Something we are interested in.
The working title is "an imaging- and odometry-based localisation and guidance system for land autonomous systems". The abstract, translated:
Autonomous land-traversing robots are faced with the problem of accurately determining their position in order to plan the route to their targets. The thesis presents an approach to solving the positioning problem in an environment where neither local odometry, global positioning nor image recognition individually provide sufficient data for accurate position determination. The effectiveness of several strategies for using each data source as a source of information on the agent's position and the positions of obstacles are evaluated, as is the effectiveness of different methods for combining information sources for increased accuracy. Based on simulation results, selected solutions are implemented and tested in real robots in a realistic testing environment.
Asimov’s Science Fiction has published one of my stories! "Red Legacy," on page 48 of the current issue. Details on how to get it at my blog if you're interested. I think it's a rational story, but I'm interested in opinions if anyone here ends up reading it.
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The only thing is that now that it is more visible for me how corporations, the media, and politicians are so blatantly dishonest I am even more frustrated!
Well done!
Also, you might be interested in the high level reasons that corporations are dishonest and unethical, in this very long post by a prominent LessWronger :-)
I bought spores of Ceratopteris richardsii, which if I will be able to grow, might become the most researchable plant among all species our Department works with. Who knows, we may even enter the international community, win grants and publish papers in serious journals... Sorry, I'm posting this mostly to have some warm feeling to counteract the cost of delivery to Ukraine. Still, it's a start, isn't it?..
For those of why don't know much about this sort of thing can you tell us why you are optimistic about C. richardsii?
Sorry, I erred on the side of brevity. It's a rapidly propagating, well-adapted to in vitro culture fern whose genome, I think, has been sequenced and mutants (many of them viable) described in detail. Compared to irregularly reproducing, of-unknown-variety-within-a-variable-species, growing-in-the-wild plants with who knows how many offspring missed in survey, it's a goldmine. I only have to persuade my Dept. Head of this.
Not much, but I have finally (a decade too late) properly understood and hopefully internalized that Penrose diagrams show only a/the rotation axis.
Is it allowed to talk about what you have done in january 2015 even if it is no longer january 2015, or should I wait for another bragging thread and tell about what i did in january 2015? This thread seems kinda dead :D
Improved the speed of some code by at least 1 to two orders of magnitude by moving all the disk IO that happened while crunching numbers to RAM. The code is run at least 30,000 times a day and is part of a set of steps that can end with my company sending an urgent text message to first responders (e.g. firemen, police chiefs, etc.).
Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.
Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.
So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?