The entire device is tiny: 20mm x 5mm x 5mm approx. It looks to work using a small laser and a lens which focuses the beam about 5mm above the device. The sensor unit contains a photodiode(s), and algorithms count the particulates. It looks to need a heat sink.
Readit Newssmingo commented on A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet theguardian.com/education... · Posted by u/Hooke
I briefly worked as a teacher for comp sci, math, and physics at a local high school. Luckily, I hardly ever had to interact with people higher up in the education hierarchy (DOE) but everytime I did, there was this attitude of "you know nothing about how to teach, we know everything". Like, you have to use tablets in math class these days, what am I thinking suggesting that pen and paper is appropriate??
The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy is borderline quackery. If you read articles like this (and that's certainly not the only one), you realize pretty quickly that there is little scientific basis and a lot of it is just plain guess work. And it all comes with this air of self-confidence that is really not grounded in reality.
And don't get me wrong: I'm not against proposing a learning theory and then verifying or falsifying it empirically. But that's not really what's happening when you force some wild out-there method on a whole generation of students, only to find out years later that, oh, maybe that was all baloney. I mean, besides my foray into teaching I actually worked in academia for most of my career, and everytime you apply for funding for anything that's remotely related to user experiments, you must get ethics clearing, and that's not a joke. I'm amazed that new bogey teaching methods are so easily introduced and made mandatory in our school system with apparently no ethical considerations.
There are quite a few examples of very misguided educational strategies.
Whole Language[1] failed so many students, but had significant funding and guru-level support for decades. Brain Gym[2] is regarded as pseudoscience. Even Discovery Learning has had serious detractors.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International
smingo commented on Commodore 64 Ultimate gets released tomshardware.com/video-ga... · Posted by u/smingo
Commodore release a new variant of their C64 computer, with a '99%' faithful recreation of the original hardware on an AMD Artix 7 FPGA, along with some more up-to-date specifications. Suitable for retro gaming.
That is Chinese New Year, it has always a very large drop. It's very impactful but expected and yearly.
My companies reporting needs to correct for it since the date shifts on western calendar and if would mess up all reporting otherwise, so yes, this is extremely significant.
Chinese New Year falls between 21 January and 20 February. This would be somewhere between week 3 and week 8.
Some ISO 8601 week numbers for CNY:
2022 CNY fell on Feb 1 , which is Week 5
2023 CNY fell on Jan 22, which is Week 3
2024 CNY fell on Feb 10, which is Week 6
2025 CNY fell on Jan 29, which is Week 5
smingo commented on Martin Skirrow, campylobacter researcher, obituary theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/smingo
Skirrow was significant in the Nobel-winning discovery of H. Pylori, has an Agar gel named after him, and championed public health.
smingo commented on New export controls curb China's AI chips wired.com/story/2024-chip... · Posted by u/smingo
USA has increased its export controls on advanced process node chips, with an act that comes in to effect today, and will get published in a few days' time. The preview is available at https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2024-28270... .
And good news: it's been open sourced: https://freecomputerbooks.com/Expert-C-Programming-Deep-C-Se... and its well regarded on Hacker News https://hackernewsbooks.com/book/expert-c-programming-deep-c... .