Lose It! is an American health and wellness mobile app developed by FitNow, Inc. The app generates calorie budgets for users by tracking weight, exercise, food and calorie intake, and personal goals, primarily to assist them in achieving weight loss. == History == Lose It! was developed in Boston and debuted in 2008. The app and its associated company were founded by J.J. Allaire, Charles Teague and Paul Dicristina. Prior to founding Lose It!, Teague and Allaire had founded the online research tool Onfolio, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. The Lose It! app was originally released as an iOS app before being released as a website in 2010 and an Android app in 2011. In 2015, Lose It! announced plans to release the app internationally. Lose It! was also available as an app for Apple Watch at its launch in 2015. The app’s “Snap It” feature, which allows users to approximate calorie counts by taking pictures of their daily meals and snacks, was released in beta in 2016. Snap It was named an Innovation Awards Honoree at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. In 2020, Patrick Wetherille, one of the company’s earliest employees, was appointed chief executive officer. == App == Lose It! is weight loss app. The app allows users to set goals such as increasing strength, overall health/maintenance, and weight loss. It provides users recommended calorie budgets based on data such as their current weight and their desired weight. Lose It! also tracks data such as exercise/activity level and food consumption and allows users to track calories consumed by scanning barcodes for food products then retrieving calorie information for products. The app can also estimate the amount of calories in a food products. Lose It! has integration features connecting it to other apps such as Fitbit and Runkeeper. It also has social features such as joining groups and sharing progress with friends. The Premium version of the app allows users to track foods according to specific diets like keto, heart healthy or Mediterranean.
Image destriping
Image destriping is the process of removing stripes or streaks from images and videos without disrupting the original image/video. These artifacts plague a range of fields in scientific imaging including atomic force microscopy, light sheet fluorescence microscopy, and planetary satellite imaging. The most common image processing techniques to reduce stripe artifacts is with Fourier filtering. Unfortunately, filtering methods risk altering or suppressing useful image data. Methods developed for multiple-sensor imaging systems in planetary satellites use statistical-based methods to match signal distribution across multiple sensors. More recently, a new class of approaches leverage compressed sensing, to regularize an optimization problem, and recover stripe free images. In many cases, these destriped images have little to no artifacts, even at low signal to noise ratios.
Hardware security
Hardware security is a discipline originated from the cryptographic engineering and involves hardware design, access control, secure multi-party computation, secure key storage, ensuring code authenticity, measures to ensure that the supply chain that built the product is secure among other things. A hardware security module (HSM) is a physical computing device that safeguards and manages digital keys for strong authentication and provides cryptoprocessing. These modules traditionally come in the form of a plug-in card or an external device that attaches directly to a computer or network server. Some providers in this discipline consider that the key difference between hardware security and software security is that hardware security is implemented using "non-Turing-machine" logic (raw combinatorial logic or simple state machines). One approach, referred to as "hardsec", uses FPGAs to implement non-Turing-machine security controls as a way of combining the security of hardware with the flexibility of software. Hardware backdoors are backdoors in hardware. Conceptionally related, a hardware Trojan (HT) is a malicious modification of electronic system, particularly in the context of integrated circuit. A physical unclonable function (PUF) is a physical entity that is embodied in a physical structure and is easy to evaluate but hard to predict. Further, an individual PUF device must be easy to make but practically impossible to duplicate, even given the exact manufacturing process that produced it. In this respect it is the hardware analog of a one-way function. The name "physical unclonable function" might be a little misleading as some PUFs are clonable, and most PUFs are noisy and therefore do not achieve the requirements for a function. Today, PUFs are usually implemented in integrated circuits and are typically used in applications with high security requirements. Many attacks on sensitive data and resources reported by organizations occur from within the organization itself.
Electronics
Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other electrically charged particles. It is a subfield of physics and electrical engineering which uses active devices such as transistors, diodes, and integrated circuits to control and amplify the flow of electric current and to convert it from one form to another, such as from alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC) or from analog signals to digital signals. Electronic devices have significantly influenced the development of many aspects of modern society, such as telecommunications, entertainment, education, health care, industry, and security. The main driving force behind the advancement of electronics is the semiconductor industry, which continually produces ever-more sophisticated electronic devices and circuits in response to global demand. The semiconductor industry is one of the global economy's largest and most profitable industries, with annual revenues exceeding $481 billion in 2018. The electronics industry also encompasses other branches that rely on electronic devices and systems, such as e-commerce, which generated over $29 trillion in online sales in 2017. == History and development == Karl Ferdinand Braun's development of the crystal detector, the first semiconductor device, in 1874 and the identification of the electron in 1897 by Sir Joseph John Thomson, along with the subsequent invention of the vacuum tube which could amplify and rectify small electrical signals, inaugurated the field of electronics and the electron age. Practical applications started with the invention of the diode by Ambrose Fleming and the triode by Lee De Forest in the early 1900s, which made the detection of small electrical voltages, such as radio signals from a radio antenna, practicable. Vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) were the first active electronic components which controlled current flow by influencing the flow of individual electrons, and enabled the construction of equipment that used current amplification and rectification to give us radio, television, radar, long-distance telephony and much more. The early growth of electronics was rapid, and by the 1920s, commercial radio broadcasting and telecommunications were becoming widespread and electronic amplifiers were being used in such diverse applications as long-distance telephony and the music recording industry. The next big technological step took several decades to appear, when the first working point-contact transistor was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Labs in 1947. However, vacuum tubes continued to play a leading role in the field of microwave and high power transmission as well as television receivers until the middle of the 1980s. Since then, solid-state devices have all but completely taken over. Vacuum tubes are still used in some specialist applications such as high power RF amplifiers, cathode-ray tubes, specialist audio equipment, guitar amplifiers and some microwave devices. In April 1955, the IBM 608 was the first IBM product to use transistor circuits without any vacuum tubes and is believed to be the first all-transistorized calculator to be manufactured for the commercial market. The 608 contained more than 3,000 germanium transistors. Thomas J. Watson Jr. ordered all future IBM products to use transistors in their design. From that time on, transistors were almost exclusively used for computer logic circuits and peripheral devices. However, early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis, which limited them to a number of specialised applications. The MOSFET was invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960. It was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. Its advantages include high scalability, affordability, low power consumption, and high density. It revolutionized the electronics industry, becoming the most widely used electronic device in the world. The MOSFET is the basic element in most modern electronic equipment. As the complexity of circuits grew, problems arose. One problem was the size of the circuit. A complex circuit like a computer was dependent on speed. If the components were large, the wires interconnecting them must be long. The electric signals took time to go through the circuit, thus slowing the computer. The invention of the integrated circuit by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce solved this problem by making all the components and the chip out of the same block (monolith) of semiconductor material. The circuits could be made smaller, and the manufacturing process could be automated. This led to the idea of integrating all components on a single-crystal silicon wafer, which led to small-scale integration (SSI) in the early 1960s, and then medium-scale integration (MSI) in the late 1960s, followed by VLSI. In 2008, billion-transistor processors became commercially available. == Subfields == == Devices and components == An electronic component is any component, either active or passive, in an electronic system or electronic device. Components are connected together, usually by being soldered to a printed circuit board (PCB), to create an electronic circuit with a particular function. Components may be packaged singly or in more complex groups as integrated circuits. Passive electronic components are capacitors, inductors, resistors, whilst active components are such as semiconductor devices; transistors and thyristors, which control current flow at electron level. == Types of circuits == Electronic circuit functions can be divided into two function groups: analog and digital. A particular device may consist of circuitry that has either or a mix of the two types. Analog circuits are becoming less common, as many of their functions are being digitized. === Analog circuits === Analog circuits use a continuous range of voltage or current for signal processing, as opposed to the discrete levels used in digital circuits. Analog circuits were common throughout electronic devices in the early years, in devices such as radio receivers and transmitters. Analog electronic computers were valuable for solving problems with continuous variables until digital processing advanced. As semiconductor technology developed, many of the functions of analog circuits were taken over by digital circuits, and modern circuits that are entirely analog are less common; their functions being replaced by hybrid approach which, for instance, uses analog circuits at the front end of a device receiving an analog signal, and then use digital processing using microprocessor techniques thereafter. Sometimes it may be difficult to classify some circuits that have elements of both linear and non-linear operation. An example is the voltage comparator, which receives a continuous range of voltage but only outputs one of two levels, as in a digital circuit. Similarly, an overdriven transistor amplifier can take on the characteristics of a controlled switch, having essentially two levels of output. Analog circuits are still widely used for signal amplification, such as in the entertainment industry, and conditioning signals from analog sensors, such as in industrial measurement and control. === Digital circuits === Digital circuits are electric circuits based on discrete voltage levels. Digital circuits use Boolean algebra and are the basis of all digital computers and microprocessor devices. They range from simple logic gates to large integrated circuits, employing millions of such gates. Digital circuits use a binary system with two voltage levels labelled 0 and 1 to indicate logical status. Often logic 0 will be a lower voltage and referred to as Low while logic 1 is referred to as High. However, some systems use the reverse definition (0 is High) or are current based. Quite often, the logic designer may reverse these definitions from one circuit to the next as they see fit to facilitate their design. The definition of the levels as 0 or 1 is arbitrary. Ternary (with three states) logic has been studied, and some prototype computers made, but have not gained any significant practical acceptance. Universally, computers and digital signal processors are constructed with digital logic circuits using transistors such as MOSFETs in the electronic logic gates to generate binary states. Logic gates Adders Flip-flops Counters Registers Multiplexers Schmitt triggers Highly integrated devices: Memory chip Microprocessors Microcontrollers Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) Digital signal processor (DSP) Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) Field-programmable analog array (FPAA) System on chip (SOC) == Design == Electronic systems design deals with the multi-disciplinary design issues of complex electronic devices and systems, such as mob
Creepiness
Creepiness is the state of being creepy, or causing an unpleasant feeling of fear or unease to someone and/or something. Certain traits or hobbies may make people seem creepy to others; interest in horror or the macabre might come across as 'creepy', and often people who are perverted or exhibit predatory behavior are called 'creeps'. The internet, especially some functions of social media, has been described as increasingly creepy. Adam Kotsko has compared the modern conception of creepiness to the Freudian concept of unheimlich. The term has also been used to describe paranormal or supernatural phenomena. Some people have phobias which are irrational fears, which can make them perceive something as creepy. == History and studies == "Creepiness" is subjective: for example some dolls have been described as creepy, while what makes something "creepy" or "strange" to someone might seem normal to someone else. The adjective "creepy", referring to a feeling of creeping in the flesh, was first used in 1831, but it was Charles Dickens who coined and popularized the term "the creeps" in his 1849 novel David Copperfield. In the 20th century, association was made between involuntary celibacy and creepiness. The concept of creepiness has only recently been formally addressed in social media marketing. The sensation of creepiness has only recently been the subject of psychological research, despite the widespread colloquial use of the word throughout the years. Francis T. McAndrew of Knox College is the first psychologist to do an empirical study on creepiness. == Causes == The state of creepiness has been associated with "feeling scared, nervous, anxious or worried", "awkward or uncomfortable", "vulnerable or violated" in a study conducted by Watt et al. This state arises in the presence of a creepy element, which can be an individual or, as recently observed, new technologies. === Individuals === Creepiness can be caused by the appearance of an individual. Another study investigated the characteristics that make people creepy. Creepy people were thought to be more often male than female by an overwhelming majority of participants (around 95% of both male and female participants). Another study conducted by Watt et al. also found that participants associated the ectomorphic body type (more linear) with creepiness, more than the other two body types (51% vs mesomorphic, 24% and endomorphic, 23%). Other cues of creepiness included low hygiene, especially according to female participants, and a disheveled appearance. Participants also identified the face as an area with potentially creepy features: in particular the eyes and the teeth. Both of those physical features were deemed creepy not only for their unpleasant appearance (ex. squinty eyes or crooked teeth) but also for the movements and expressions they engaged it (ex. darting eye movements and odd smiles). In fact, appearance does not seem to be the only factor making an individual creepy: behaviors provide cues as well. Behaviors such as "being unusually quiet and staring (34%), following or lurking (15%), behaving abnormally (21%), or in a socially awkward, "sketchy" or suspicious way (20%)" are all contributing to a feeling of creepiness, as described by Watt et al.'s study. === Technology === In addition to other individuals, new technologies, such as marketing's targeted ads and AI, have been qualified as creepy. A study by Moore et al. described what aspect of marketing participants considered creepy. The main three reasons are the following: using invasive tactics, causing discomfort and violating of norms. Invasive tactics are practiced by marketers that know so much about the consumer that the ads are "creepily" personalized. Secondly, some ads create discomfort by making the consumer question "the motives of the company advertising the product". Finally, some ads violate social norms by having inappropriate content, for example by unnecessarily sexualizing it. It is marketing's extensive knowledge used in an improper way, together with a certain loss of control over our data, that creates a feeling of creepiness. Another creepy aspect of technology is human-looking AI: this phenomenon is called the uncanny valley. Humans find robots creepy when they start closely resembling humans. It has been hypothesized that the reason why they are viewed as creepy is because they violate our notion of how a robot should look. A study focusing on children's responses to this phenomenon found evidence to support the hypothesis. == Evolutionary explanation == Several studies have hypothesized that creepiness is an evolutionary response to potentially dangerous situations. It could be linked to a mechanism called agent detection which makes individuals expect malignant agents to be responsible for small changes in the environment. McAndrew et al. illustrates the idea with the example of a person hearing some noises while walking in a dark alley. That person would go in high alert, fearing that some dangerous individual was there. If that was not the case the loss would be small. If, on the other hand, a dangerous individual was actually in the alley and the person had not been alerted by this creepy feeling, the loss could have been significant. Creepiness would therefore serve the purpose of alerting us in situations in which the danger is not outright obvious but rather ambiguous. In this case, ambiguity both refers to the possible presence of a threat and to its nature, sexual or physical for example. Creepiness "may reside in between the unknowing and the fear" in the sense that individuals experiencing it are unsure if there truly is something to fear or not. Creepy characteristics are not simply caused by threat potential: in fact, ectomorphic body types are not the most powerful bodies and facial expressions are not a proxy of physical strength either. Therefore, creepiness is not only related to how threatening a characteristic is, in the sense of how dangerous and strong the individual can be. There are more facets to consider. Another characteristic of creepiness is unpredictable behavior. Unpredictability links back to this idea of ambiguity. When an individual is unpredictable it is not possible to tell when their behavior will turn violent: this adds to the ambiguity of a potentially dangerous situation. This theory is endorsed by studies. Not only is unpredictability directly listed as a creepy characteristic, but other behaviors, such as norm-breaking behaviors are indirectly linked with unpredictability. Such behaviors show that the individual does not conform to some social standards others would expect in a given situation. For example, the aforementioned staring at strangers or lack of hygiene—behaviors that make us uneasy or creeped out because they do not fit the norm and therefore are not expected. More generally, participants tended to define creepiness as "different" in the sense of not behaving, or looking, socially acceptable. Such differences point towards a "social mismatch". Humans have a natural system of detection of such mismatch: a physical feeling of coldness. When an individual is creeped out, they report feeling those "cold chills". This phenomenon has been studied by Leander et al, with relation to nonverbal mimicry in social interactions, meaning the unintentional copying of another's behavior. Inappropriate mimicry may leave a person feeling like something is off about the other. Absence of non-verbal mimicry in a friendly interaction, or the presence of it in a professional setting, raises suspicion as it does not follow the relevant social norms. Individuals are left wondering what other unusual behavior the other might engage in.
Automation engineering
Automation engineering is a branch of engineering that deals with the development of methods and facilities that replace, in whole or in part, manual labour related to the control and monitoring of systems and processes. == Automation engineer == Automation engineers are experts who have the knowledge and ability to design, create, develop and manage machines and systems, for example, factory automation, process automation and warehouse automation. Automation technicians are also involved. == Scope == Automation engineering is the integration of standard engineering fields. Automatic control of various control systems for operating various systems or machines to reduce human efforts & time to increase accuracy. Automation engineers design and service electromechanical devices and systems for high-speed robotics and programmable logic controllers (PLCs). == Work and career after graduation == Graduates can work for both government and private sector entities such as industrial production, and companies that create and use automation systems, for example, the paper industry, automotive industry, metallurgical industry, food and agricultural industry, water treatment, and oil & gas sectors such as refineries, rolling mills, and power plants. == Job description == Automation engineers can design, program, simulate and test automated machinery and processes, and are usually employed in industries such as the energy sector in plants, car manufacturing facilities, food processing plants, and robots. Automation engineers are responsible for creating detailed design specifications and other documents, developing automation based on specific requirements for the process involved, and conforming to international standards like IEC-61508, local standards, and other process-specific guidelines and specifications, simulating, testing, and commissioning electronic equipment for automation.
Electronics
Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other electrically charged particles. It is a subfield of physics and electrical engineering which uses active devices such as transistors, diodes, and integrated circuits to control and amplify the flow of electric current and to convert it from one form to another, such as from alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC) or from analog signals to digital signals. Electronic devices have significantly influenced the development of many aspects of modern society, such as telecommunications, entertainment, education, health care, industry, and security. The main driving force behind the advancement of electronics is the semiconductor industry, which continually produces ever-more sophisticated electronic devices and circuits in response to global demand. The semiconductor industry is one of the global economy's largest and most profitable industries, with annual revenues exceeding $481 billion in 2018. The electronics industry also encompasses other branches that rely on electronic devices and systems, such as e-commerce, which generated over $29 trillion in online sales in 2017. == History and development == Karl Ferdinand Braun's development of the crystal detector, the first semiconductor device, in 1874 and the identification of the electron in 1897 by Sir Joseph John Thomson, along with the subsequent invention of the vacuum tube which could amplify and rectify small electrical signals, inaugurated the field of electronics and the electron age. Practical applications started with the invention of the diode by Ambrose Fleming and the triode by Lee De Forest in the early 1900s, which made the detection of small electrical voltages, such as radio signals from a radio antenna, practicable. Vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) were the first active electronic components which controlled current flow by influencing the flow of individual electrons, and enabled the construction of equipment that used current amplification and rectification to give us radio, television, radar, long-distance telephony and much more. The early growth of electronics was rapid, and by the 1920s, commercial radio broadcasting and telecommunications were becoming widespread and electronic amplifiers were being used in such diverse applications as long-distance telephony and the music recording industry. The next big technological step took several decades to appear, when the first working point-contact transistor was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Labs in 1947. However, vacuum tubes continued to play a leading role in the field of microwave and high power transmission as well as television receivers until the middle of the 1980s. Since then, solid-state devices have all but completely taken over. Vacuum tubes are still used in some specialist applications such as high power RF amplifiers, cathode-ray tubes, specialist audio equipment, guitar amplifiers and some microwave devices. In April 1955, the IBM 608 was the first IBM product to use transistor circuits without any vacuum tubes and is believed to be the first all-transistorized calculator to be manufactured for the commercial market. The 608 contained more than 3,000 germanium transistors. Thomas J. Watson Jr. ordered all future IBM products to use transistors in their design. From that time on, transistors were almost exclusively used for computer logic circuits and peripheral devices. However, early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis, which limited them to a number of specialised applications. The MOSFET was invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960. It was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. Its advantages include high scalability, affordability, low power consumption, and high density. It revolutionized the electronics industry, becoming the most widely used electronic device in the world. The MOSFET is the basic element in most modern electronic equipment. As the complexity of circuits grew, problems arose. One problem was the size of the circuit. A complex circuit like a computer was dependent on speed. If the components were large, the wires interconnecting them must be long. The electric signals took time to go through the circuit, thus slowing the computer. The invention of the integrated circuit by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce solved this problem by making all the components and the chip out of the same block (monolith) of semiconductor material. The circuits could be made smaller, and the manufacturing process could be automated. This led to the idea of integrating all components on a single-crystal silicon wafer, which led to small-scale integration (SSI) in the early 1960s, and then medium-scale integration (MSI) in the late 1960s, followed by VLSI. In 2008, billion-transistor processors became commercially available. == Subfields == == Devices and components == An electronic component is any component, either active or passive, in an electronic system or electronic device. Components are connected together, usually by being soldered to a printed circuit board (PCB), to create an electronic circuit with a particular function. Components may be packaged singly or in more complex groups as integrated circuits. Passive electronic components are capacitors, inductors, resistors, whilst active components are such as semiconductor devices; transistors and thyristors, which control current flow at electron level. == Types of circuits == Electronic circuit functions can be divided into two function groups: analog and digital. A particular device may consist of circuitry that has either or a mix of the two types. Analog circuits are becoming less common, as many of their functions are being digitized. === Analog circuits === Analog circuits use a continuous range of voltage or current for signal processing, as opposed to the discrete levels used in digital circuits. Analog circuits were common throughout electronic devices in the early years, in devices such as radio receivers and transmitters. Analog electronic computers were valuable for solving problems with continuous variables until digital processing advanced. As semiconductor technology developed, many of the functions of analog circuits were taken over by digital circuits, and modern circuits that are entirely analog are less common; their functions being replaced by hybrid approach which, for instance, uses analog circuits at the front end of a device receiving an analog signal, and then use digital processing using microprocessor techniques thereafter. Sometimes it may be difficult to classify some circuits that have elements of both linear and non-linear operation. An example is the voltage comparator, which receives a continuous range of voltage but only outputs one of two levels, as in a digital circuit. Similarly, an overdriven transistor amplifier can take on the characteristics of a controlled switch, having essentially two levels of output. Analog circuits are still widely used for signal amplification, such as in the entertainment industry, and conditioning signals from analog sensors, such as in industrial measurement and control. === Digital circuits === Digital circuits are electric circuits based on discrete voltage levels. Digital circuits use Boolean algebra and are the basis of all digital computers and microprocessor devices. They range from simple logic gates to large integrated circuits, employing millions of such gates. Digital circuits use a binary system with two voltage levels labelled 0 and 1 to indicate logical status. Often logic 0 will be a lower voltage and referred to as Low while logic 1 is referred to as High. However, some systems use the reverse definition (0 is High) or are current based. Quite often, the logic designer may reverse these definitions from one circuit to the next as they see fit to facilitate their design. The definition of the levels as 0 or 1 is arbitrary. Ternary (with three states) logic has been studied, and some prototype computers made, but have not gained any significant practical acceptance. Universally, computers and digital signal processors are constructed with digital logic circuits using transistors such as MOSFETs in the electronic logic gates to generate binary states. Logic gates Adders Flip-flops Counters Registers Multiplexers Schmitt triggers Highly integrated devices: Memory chip Microprocessors Microcontrollers Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) Digital signal processor (DSP) Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) Field-programmable analog array (FPAA) System on chip (SOC) == Design == Electronic systems design deals with the multi-disciplinary design issues of complex electronic devices and systems, such as mob