January 24 2017, 00:24

Medical bills gradually come in. Jumping ahead, I’ll say that it cost me nothing because insurance covers 100% of expenses up to a $2000 quota. After that, it’s out of pocket.

So, Lisa went to the doctor for a procedure that included: teeth cleaning, examination, prevention, panoramic X-ray, and a radiographic image. We’ll go for treatment the day after tomorrow. The bill came only for the examination.

So, just one examination cost $371 (out of the $2000 available per year through insurance!). The clinic billed the insurance $530, but then their lawyers fought it out, and settled on $371. Also, there’s a limit of two exams per year. The third time, you’ll pay 100% out of pocket, since the limit is reached.

Payment works like this: first you receive treatment, then comes the bill, including the amount agreed upon between the insurance and the clinic, usually seen for the first time. The clinic might give some estimate of the amount, but if you don’t ask yourself, no one will talk about the money. And if you do ask – you’ll just get the procedure.

How much an implant costs – better not to think about it.

All this points to two things: everyone knows that Americans have pearly white teeth. This comes at a high cost, but primarily because from childhood, they know that even slightly neglected teeth will definitely backfire.

January 23 2017, 13:43

Just bought car insurance, a little over a hundred bucks a month. On the website of one of the insurance companies where I was making inquiries, I found an interesting thing. They offer to let you drive it around in your car for free, and then the insurance company’s big data servers will process information about your movements and driving style and might lower the insurance. But so far, all colleagues who have used it say that it only increases the cost of insurance. Apparently, insurance companies inherently have a higher opinion of us.

I wonder, can you ride it on a bicycle?

January 22 2017, 03:23

Today, Elizaveta Alieva and I crafted an erudite-scrabble from scratch in the last five hours, a large playing field on a big table. The standard one we have is too small for the table. Finished at two in the morning)

The idea was to create a “container” for different board games, with interchangeable panels. Scrabble – two interchangeable panels. Next up – backgammon. The size of the playing field is 19″ on each side, the overall size is 24″ x 24″. The photo shows the entire creation process from start to finish. Materials from Michaels – Baltic birch 9mm 12″ x 24″, balsa strips, foam sheets, alphabet tiles.

The first two photos – the final result, the rest – the creation process.

January 19 2017, 20:09

Gentlemen Java developers, does anyone know if there’s a product out there for creating interactive forms that can be easily integrated into a Java system? It would suffice if this module could output the filled form as XML or JSON or as a Java structure, be easy to configure (like adding a new field in two minutes, preferably via some tool) – and importantly, to be free and independent from any service, i.e., once downloaded and set up, to work forever 🙂 (I know many services for this purpose)

January 18 2017, 08:45

Blog update on hybris: Tutorial on Pentaho ETL, converting XML to hybris Impex format (almost CSV). The task is simple, but it demonstrates the key capabilities of Pentaho. Quite useful for data migration projects from legacy systems to new ones. In the previous article, I wrote about a custom made tool. This time – about an enterprise solution. Open source, community edition. https://hybrismart.com/2017/01/15/migrating-data-with-pentaho-etl-kettle/

January 18 2017, 00:35

Today I was driving from DC, and on the way, I wondered why no one was doing lip-reading based speech recognition? Pulled over, sent myself a reminder by email from my phone. Now, back home, I googled it and found that the topic is fresh and the results are impressive. It is claimed that the neural network LipNet achieves a recognition accuracy of 93.4%. The videos demonstrate voice commands with the radio blasting, featuring various drivers. Another video about LipNet shows that even a set of short words is recognized fairly well, not just whole sentences. If it really works that well, one can expect this system to be an adjunct to speech recognition for improving accuracy. For those who have read this far – found an interesting detailed work on this subject: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.453.7204&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Interestingly, theoretically all these AI systems could be trained on the myriad of videos already available. Feed it YouTube with faces, and wait for the outcomes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTkqA189pzQ

January 16 2017, 19:12

In July 2013, I bought these bio-recording watches (link to my article below) for $199 plus $73 for shipping. Today, the manufacturer refunded me $244.

After these watches, they released another model, and then an updated version, and the latest one had a blunder akin to the Samsung Note. They probably didn’t calculate the refunds for the latest model and decided to shut down the whole company. Since without their service my watches don’t work as well as with the service, the manufacturer decided to recall them as well and completely shut down the service. The service closed on December 31 last year, I sent the watches back a couple of weeks ago, and now, I’ve received the compensation.

It’s nice to be a customer in the States, right? Almost three years passed since I got the watches.

https://habrahabr.ru/post/187878/

https://m.geektimes.ru/post/269764/