Poladroid software is FREE and available for Mac and Windows. Notes: converted pictures will be saved under My Pictures in Windows and Pictures directory in Mac.

Features:

1. Easy to use : Drag & Drop
2. Generate High-resolution pictures (400 dpi), “ready-to-print” with a Polaroid design
3. Funny : only 10 treatments per session, like the content of a cartridge ; interactive (look at the demo below) ; random and realistic Polaroid-like colors variation…

Download:Poladroid

Open Source: It’s always been a part of what makes Imageworks tick. However, up until now we haven’t had a chance to contribute back to the open source community. We’re beginning to change that now.

We’ve chosen 5 projects to release as open source. This software can be freely used by large and small studios around the world. We’ve intentionally chosen popular non-restrictive licensing models to help ensure you have lots of options.

Each of these projects have passionate people behind them who are interested in seeing the code widely used. We’re into the idea of building small development communities around this code. If you’re interested in contributing, join the respective mailing lists and introduce yourself.

Take a moment to familiarize yourself with Imageworks’ open source offerings. I hope you find something useful.

Rob Bredow
CTO
Sony Pictures Imageworks

April 13, 2009 · Posted in Employee Engagement, Leadership, Lean Business Strategy
A guest posting by Andrew Dillion

Extraordinary times call on us to look again to the core of the Toyota revolution and how we can make it our own

Strange things happen in a crisis. Consider, for example, that some companies, in retrenchment mode, are cutting back on investments that not too long ago they were eager to make in learning and implementing the principles of the Toyota Production System. At least part of the market for improvement seems to be shrinking, in other words, at precisely the moment when just about everything in the marketplace seems to need improvement.

This is more than just strange. After all, Toyota’s management system was forged as a response to severe economic hardship, its basic mindset tempered by the threat of catastrophe. Circumstances have changed over the years, of course, but the Toyota system has proven to offer a potent and strikingly reliable way to survive-and even thrive-against fierce competition, in hard times as well as good. Its signal strengths-relentless cost cutting, commitment to people and dedication to long-term vision-are made for crisis.

Clearly the message is not lost on some businesses, where leaders are intensifying their focus on learning lean. But other companies remain a puzzlement. Why, when they stand to profit from it most, are some retreating from efforts to reap the benefits of the Toyota revolution?

One reason may be that, over the years, we have allowed ourselves to misconstrue Toyota’s achievement and how we might best absorb and extend it. Despite our best intentions, we have sometimes treated it as we vowed we never would: as a commodity, a set of “tools” or techniques, a “program.” We have bought and sold it in the form of workshops and how-to books, training regimens, acronyms, certificates and prizes. No matter how sophisticated our grasp of lean’s deep roots, we have nonetheless been willing to shape it to the market’s eagerness for surefire recipes, delegable formulas and instant gratification. We have busied ourselves with superficialities and too often found convenient distractions from the hard work of criticizing ourselves, nurturing others and contributing to society.

Criticizing, nurturing, contributing-these are not empty words. They lie at the explicit heart of what Toyota’s leaders have been striving to achieve all along.

Rebranded as “lean” by Jim Womack and Dan Jones, Toyota’s approach to management is notoriously difficult to define, a dynamic infrastructure, at once straightforward and complex, of shared convictions, principles and practices. In order to make lean intelligible (and, some might say, marketable), proselytizers variously explain it in terms of structures (e.g., houses, pyramids), procedures (”First do this, then do that….”) or “tools” (5S programs, kanban, OEE, value stream maps, A3s, etc). All reasonable enough on the face of it.

But something seems to be missing. While none of these elements is foreign to lean, it seems fair, especially in the current context of economic upheaval, to ask whether some of our representations of lean might not be fragmented or rootless. Do the parts-like the parts of the blind men’s elephant-somehow obscure the whole? Have we neglected common principles and key unifying forces underpinning lean’s success, forces such as commitments to internal and external communities, near-obsessive quality consciousness, relentless diligence or even, tellingly, the motivating fear of failure?

Questions such as these take us back to a deeper lean, a lean in which techniques are inextricably bound to underlying principles and convictions-principles of Takt, Flow and Pull, to be sure, but also the conviction, for example, that current methods are deeply inadequate, that enduring commitment to people is essential, and that true competitive strength relies on strategic coherence between everyday workplace decisions and long-range aspirations to collective betterment.

That such things are difficult to talk about and difficult to package doesn’t authorize us to ignore them. Especially not now. Indeed, this is a crucial time to rededicate ourselves to such basics, not merely because they provide an extraordinarily sound basis for cost cutting in the short term-which they assuredly do-but because they lie at the core of building competitive strength for the long term.

There is more, too. Lean’s animating convictions and principles turn out to be directly relevant to what appear more and more to be fundamental shifts in marketplace values.

Evolving Values

Consider one example of lean’s connections to the changing nature of value.

Communications technologies and recent political trends are bringing ever more transparency to the relationship between private and public interests. As this happens, social considerations increasingly enter into the calculations of profit-making enterprises. Businesses are taking greater account of the impact of their behavior on the greater community, the well being of their employees, the health and safety of consumers, the overall energy supply and even the sustainability of the natural environment. As costs increasingly attach to private use of the commons, for example, it is becoming harder to see any advantage in fouling the nest. Social responsibility is newly respectable.

This trend is already underway in at least two forms. On the one hand, many businesses must increasingly prepare for public scrutiny and regulation of their activities.  On the other hand, positive social contributions are looking more and more like useful selling points. Wal-Mart’s embrace of energy-efficient light bulbs, the flowering of the renewable energy industry and Honda’s quest to improve bystander safety are small signs of this evolution in values. It is not tangential that the president of the United States wants to see American automakers build more energy-efficient vehicles.

And lean’s role? It turns out that lean’s defining preoccupations-with relentless waste reduction, with nurturing people and with strategic coherence-provide powerful models for cutting-edge thinking and practice in this changing landscape. Examples abound, from the extension of healthcare improvements beyond industrial notions of heightened efficiency, to manufacturing’s emerging recognition that pollution and wasted energy are forms of muda, to new insights on how service industries can meet evolving standards of customer privacy. The opportunities for improvement are rich and potentially enriching. To see them, however, we need to stop thinking of lean as a toolbox and start recognizing its true breadth and depth.

Learning Lean

How can we most effectively tap into this “deep” lean?

There are undoubtedly some aspects of effective lean leadership that depend on knowledge; others are expressed by how we reorganize processes and structures. Intertwined with all of these and of far more consequence than any, however, are deeper lean attributes, shared in the community but rooted in each individual: distinctive sensitivities, values, perspectives, convictions, habits, attitudes and reflexes. Even for accomplished leaders, developing these qualities-developing a robust lean “mindset”-requires time, persistence and guided engagement with the workplace in all its chaotic intricacy. This implacable fact applies, indeed, to everyone, because the lean ideal envisions an organization in which all can and do contribute their capacities for improvement. It stimulates the intellect to learn about lean’s “DNA,” but nothing actually changes until we learn how to replicate that DNA through practice.

For individuals, as for organizations, learning lean beyond its superficial aspects is less like acquiring tools than it is like knowing how and if and when to use them. One doesn’t become a virtuoso pianist, after all, by buying a piano or attending workshops or reading books. Such activities may have supplemental value, but the core of acquiring mastery lies in disciplined practice. Practice, practice, practice. It lies in taking action and making mistakes and thereby learning to hear and see subtle distinctions that others don’t. It lies in developing new reflexes and in pursuing perfection. To borrow the language of the old joke, there are two ways to get to Carnegie Hall, but only one of them will get you on stage.

Pursuing the metaphor of musicianship a bit further can be helpful. Great musicians-even good musicians-are invariably nurtured by good teachers. This is as true of orchestra or ensemble players as it is for soloists. One can find similar examples with little difficulty: athletes and their coaches, soldiers and their trainers or doctors and their mentors. Self-taught virtuosos in lean, in any case, are rare enough that you wouldn’t want your organization’s success to have to depend on your being able to hire them.

This truth about learning should recall to students of lean the importance of wisely guided practice and application of lean’s core values. It also underscores a challenge for conscientious lean teachers (who are likely, by the way, to shun boastful labels such as “guru” and “sensei“). The challenge is this: history shows that lean, like music, is most reliably taught through forms of coaching or mentoring. Numerous complementary activities may be valuable and can and should be exploited, but the essential reflexes and convictions that make superior lean leaders-and lean organizations-are best developed though guided, disciplined practice and experience. That good coaching may be difficult to scale, market or commodify is irrelevant or at least of secondary importance to the central fact of its effectiveness. Yes, there are subtleties and complexities to be reckoned with, especially when one considers the needs of transforming large organizations. The basic lesson, though, is pretty straightforward: If you’re serious about getting better at lean, get a coach. If you’re serious about teaching lean, be a coach.

Moving Forward

Toyota, facing the same difficult times as everyone else, shows no signs of giving up on the Toyota Way. That hard times prompt some other organizations to retreat from their commitment to lean indicates, perhaps more than anything else, the degree to which we-students and teachers alike-have allowed ourselves to be distracted from the powerful convictions, principles and practices at the heart of the revolution. This is an exciting time for lean, but only, paradoxically, when we return to the basics and only when we remember to apprentice our ambitions to sustained and disciplined practice.
Andrew Dillon, an independent management consultant, is a long-time observer and participant in the lean revolution. In the 1980s he served as Shigeo Shingo’s interpreter in the United States and translated many seminal works on lean. He works in English, French, Japanese and Chinese. He can be reached via apdillon@att.net.

I am looking at a number of songs online, but when put in the local voice that even if the speaker to open the school compared to the greatest sound, still it was not. This is not the computer itself, but the problem songs. This will require major software used to do songs sound great tune. In fact, without the major software web Vloud can be relaxed to become the voice of song larger.

Vloud first web log (http://www.vloud.com/), then click the Browse button to upload songs to amend the document. Supporting MP3 and WAV format, file size should not exceed 10MB. Level selection in the above public address, a total of four level to choose from. Choose well after all, Vloud website will automatically upload files of songs sound bigger, without having to manually change (Figure).

Tip: use of web Vloud modify the size of the voice, we must stop before going too far, not to transfer the voice is too large, it will be very prone to noise.

StreamDrag is a Music search engine which let you find your musics and allows you to make playlist and listen on it. Sorry, There is no download link!

Tivo owners with Picasa or Photobucket accounts just got another way to view their photos on their TVs — everyone’s favorite DVR company announced deals with both services today that will allow users to access their photos from any Tivo device. Photos will be pulled down at the highest resolution your Tivo supports, so Series3 and Tivo HD owners will get HD-res images displayed, and what’s more, users can also access friends’ photo albums. The feature should be rolling out starting today — between this and that Rhapsody partnership, it seems like Tivo is starting to get serious about branching into the still-dormant media streamer / extender market.

[Via TG Daily]

I get a kick out of you

Is this useful? The scientists think so. For a start, understanding the neurochemical pathways that regulate social attachments may help to deal with defects in people’s ability to form relationships. All relationships, whether they are those of parents with their children, spouses with their partners, or workers with their colleagues, rely on an ability to create and maintain social ties. Defects can be disabling, and become apparent as disorders such as autism and schizophrenia—and, indeed, as the serious depression that can result from rejection in love. Research is also shedding light on some of the more extreme forms of sexual behaviour. And, controversially, some utopian fringe groups see such work as the doorway to a future where love is guaranteed because it will be provided chemically, or even genetically engineered from conception.

The scientific tale of love begins innocently enough, with voles. The prairie vole is a sociable creature, one of the only 3% of mammal species that appear to form monogamous relationships. Mating between prairie voles is a tremendous 24-hour effort. After this, they bond for life. They prefer to spend time with each other, groom each other for hours on end and nest together. They avoid meeting other potential mates. The male becomes an aggressive guard of the female. And when their pups are born, they become affectionate and attentive parents. However, another vole, a close relative called the montane vole, has no interest in partnership beyond one-night-stand sex. What is intriguing is that these vast differences in behaviour are the result of a mere handful of genes. The two vole species are more than 99% alike, genetically.

Why do voles fall in love?

The details of what is going on—the vole story, as it were—is a fascinating one. When prairie voles have sex, two hormones called oxytocin and vasopressin are released. If the release of these hormones is blocked, prairie-voles’ sex becomes a fleeting affair, like that normally enjoyed by their rakish montane cousins. Conversely, if prairie voles are given an injection of the hormones, but prevented from having sex, they will still form a preference for their chosen partner. In other words, researchers can make prairie voles fall in love—or whatever the vole equivalent of this is—with an injection.

A clue to what is happening—and how these results might bear on the human condition—was found when this magic juice was given to the montane vole: it made no difference. It turns out that the faithful prairie vole has receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin in brain regions associated with reward and reinforcement, whereas the montane vole does not. The question is, do humans (another species in the 3% of allegedly monogamous mammals) have brains similar to prairie voles?

To answer that question you need to dig a little deeper. As Larry Young, a researcher into social attachment at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, explains, the brain has a reward system designed to make voles (and people and other animals) do what they ought to. Without it, they might forget to eat, drink and have sex—with disastrous results. That animals continue to do these things is because they make them feel good. And they feel good because of the release of a chemical called dopamine into the brain. Sure enough, when a female prairie vole mates, there is a 50% increase in the level of dopamine in the reward centre of her brain.

Similarly, when a male rat has sex it feels good to him because of the dopamine. He learns that sex is enjoyable, and seeks out more of it based on how it happened the first time. But, in contrast to the prairie vole, at no time do rats learn to associate sex with a particular female. Rats are not monogamous.

This is where the vasopressin and oxytocin come in. They are involved in parts of the brain that help to pick out the salient features used to identify individuals. If the gene for oxytocin is knocked out of a mouse before birth, that mouse will become a social amnesiac and have no memory of the other mice it meets. The same is true if the vasopressin gene is knocked out.

The salient feature in this case is odour. Rats, mice and voles recognise each other by smell. Christie Fowler and her colleagues at Florida State University have found that exposure to the opposite sex generates new nerve cells in the brains of prairie voles—in particular in areas important to olfactory memory. Could it be that prairie voles form an olfactory “image” of their partners—the rodent equivalent of remembering a personality—and this becomes linked with pleasure?

Dr Young and his colleagues suggest this idea in an article published last month in the Journal of Comparative Neurology. They argue that prairie voles become addicted to each other through a process of sexual imprinting mediated by odour. Furthermore, they suggest that the reward mechanism involved in this addiction has probably evolved in a similar way in other monogamous animals, humans included, to regulate pair-bonding in them as well.

You might as well face it …

Sex stimulates the release of vasopressin and oxytocin in people, as well as voles, though the role of these hormones in the human brain is not yet well understood. But while it is unlikely that people have a mental, smell-based map of their partners in the way that voles do, there are strong hints that the hormone pair have something to reveal about the nature of human love: among those of Man’s fellow primates that have been studied, monogamous marmosets have higher levels of vasopressin bound in the reward centres of their brains than do non-monogamous rhesus macaques.

Other approaches are also shedding light on the question. In 2000, Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki of University College, London, located the areas of the brain activated by romantic love. They took students who said they were madly in love, put them into a brain scanner, and looked at their patterns of brain activity.

The results were surprising. For a start, a relatively small area of the human brain is active in love, compared with that involved in, say, ordinary friendship. “It is fascinating to reflect”, the pair conclude, “that the face that launched a thousand ships should have done so through such a limited expanse of cortex.” The second surprise was that the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted to love,” Dr Young observes. Like the prairie voles.

It seems possible, then, that animals which form strong social bonds do so because of the location of their receptors for vasopressin and oxytocin. Evolution acts on the distribution of these receptors to generate social or non-social versions of a vole. The more receptors located in regions associated with reward, the more rewarding social interactions become. Social groups, and society itself, rely ultimately on these receptors. But for evolution to be able to act, there must be individual variation between mice, and between men. And this has interesting implications.

Last year, Steven Phelps, who works at Emory with Dr Young, found great diversity in the distribution of vasopressin receptors between individual prairie voles. He suggests that this variation contributes to individual differences in social behaviour—in other words, some voles will be more faithful than others. Meanwhile, Dr Young says that he and his colleagues have found a lot of variation in the vasopressin-receptor gene in humans. “We may be able to do things like look at their gene sequence, look at their promoter sequence, to genotype people and correlate that with their fidelity,” he muses.

It has already proved possible to tinker with this genetic inheritance, with startling results. Scientists can increase the expression of the relevant receptors in prairie voles, and thus strengthen the animals’ ability to attach to partners. And in 1999, Dr Young led a team that took the prairie-vole receptor gene and inserted it into an ordinary (and therefore promiscuous) mouse. The transgenic mouse thus created was much more sociable to its mate.

Love, love me do

Scanning the brains of people in love is also helping to refine science’s grasp of love’s various forms. Helen Fisher, a researcher at Rutgers University, and the author of a new book on love*, suggests it comes in three flavours: lust, romantic love and long-term attachment. There is some overlap but, in essence, these are separate phenomena, with their own emotional and motivational systems, and accompanying chemicals. These systems have evolved to enable, respectively, mating, pair-bonding and parenting.

Lust, of course, involves a craving for sex. Jim Pfaus, a psychologist at Concordia University, in Montreal, says the aftermath of lustful sex is similar to the state induced by taking opiates. A heady mix of chemical changes occurs, including increases in the levels of serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin and endogenous opioids (the body’s natural equivalent of heroin). “This may serve many functions, to relax the body, induce pleasure and satiety, and perhaps induce bonding to the very features that one has just experienced all this with”, says Dr Pfaus.

Then there is attraction, or the state of being in love (what is sometimes known as romantic or obsessive love). This is a refinement of mere lust that allows people to home in on a particular mate. This state is characterised by feelings of exhilaration, and intrusive, obsessive thoughts about the object of one’s affection. Some researchers suggest this mental state might share neurochemical characteristics with the manic phase of manic depression. Dr Fisher’s work, however, suggests that the actual behavioural patterns of those in love—such as attempting to evoke reciprocal responses in one’s loved one—resemble obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

Because they are independent, these three systems can work simultaneously—with dangerous results. As Dr Fisher explains, “you can feel deep attachment for a long-term spouse, while you feel romantic love for someone else, while you feel the sex drive in situations unrelated to either partner.” This independence means it is possible to love more than one person at a time, a situation that leads to jealousy, adultery and divorce—though also to the possibilities of promiscuity and polygamy, with the likelihood of extra children, and thus a bigger stake in the genetic future, that those behaviours bring. As Dr Fisher observes, “We were not built to be happy but to reproduce.”

The stages of love vary somewhat between the sexes. Lust, for example, is aroused more easily in men by visual stimuli than is the case for women. This is probably why visual pornography is more popular with men. And although both men and women express romantic love with the same intensity, and are attracted to partners who are dependable, kind, healthy, smart and educated, there are some notable differences in their choices. Men are more attracted to youth and beauty, while women are more attracted to money, education and position. When an older, ugly man is seen walking down the road arm-in-arm with a young and beautiful woman, most people assume the man is rich or powerful.

These foolish things

Of course, love is about more than just genes. Cultural and social factors, and learning, play big roles. Who and how a person has loved in the past are important determinants of his (or her) capacity to fall in love at any given moment in the future. This is because animals—people included—learn from their sexual and social experiences. Arousal comes naturally. But long-term success in mating requires a change from being naive about this state to knowing the precise factors that lead from arousal to the rewards of sex, love and attachment. For some humans, this may involve flowers, chocolate and sweet words. But these things are learnt.

If humans become conditioned by their experiences, this may be the reason why some people tend to date the same “type” of partner over and over again. Researchers think humans develop a “love map” as they grow up—a blueprint that contains the many things that they have learnt are attractive. This inner scorecard is something that people use to rate the suitability of mates. Yet the idea that humans are actually born with a particular type of “soul mate” wired into their desires is wrong. Research on the choices of partner made by identical twins suggests that the development of love maps takes time, and has a strong random component.

Work on rats is leading researchers such as Dr Pfaus to wonder whether the template of features found attractive by an individual is formed during a critical period of sexual-behaviour development. He says that even in animals that are not supposed to pair-bond, such as rats, these features may get fixed with the experience of sexual reward. Rats can be conditioned to prefer particular types of partner—for example by pairing sexual reward with some kind of cue, such as lemon-scented members of the opposite sex. This work may help the understanding of unusual sexual preferences. Human fetishes, for example, develop early, and are almost impossible to change. The fetishist connects objects such as feet, shoes, stuffed toys and even balloons, that have a visual association with childhood sexual experiences, to sexual gratification.

So love, in all its glory, is just, it seems, a chemical state with genetic roots and environmental influences. But all this work leads to other questions. If scientists can make a more sociable mouse, might it be possible to create a more sociable human? And what about a more loving one? A few people even think that “paradise-engineering”, dedicated to abolishing the “biological substrates of human suffering”, is rather a good idea.

As time goes by

Progress in predicting the outcome of relationships, and information about the genetic roots of fidelity, might also make proposing marriage more like a job application—with associated medical, genetic and psychological checks. If it were reliable enough, would insurers cover you for divorce? And as brain scanners become cheaper and more widely available, they might go from being research tools to something that anyone could use to find out how well they were loved. Will the future bring answers to questions such as: Does your partner really love you? Is your husband lusting after the au pair?

And then there are drugs. Despite Dr Fisher’s reservations, might they also help people to fall in love, or perhaps fix broken relationships? Probably not. Dr Pfaus says that drugs may enhance portions of the “love experience” but fall short of doing the whole job because of their specificity. And if a couple fall out of love, drugs are unlikely to help either. Dr Fisher does not believe that the brain could overlook distaste for someone—even if a couple in trouble could inject themselves with huge amounts of dopamine.

However, she does think that administering serotonin can help someone get over a bad love affair faster. She also suggests it is possible to trick the brain into feeling romantic love in a long-term relationship by doing novel things with your partner. Any arousing activity drives up the level of dopamine and can therefore trigger feelings of romance as a side effect. This is why holidays can rekindle passion. Romantics, of course, have always known that love is a special sort of chemistry. Scientists are now beginning to show how true this is.

【原载《经济学人》◎周亦丹 译】

The Apache MINA project is pleased to announce the release of MINA 2.0.0-M1.

Apache MINA is a network application framework which helps users develop high performance and high scalability network applications easily. It provides an abstract, event-driven, asynchronous API over various transports such as TCP/IP and UDP/IP via Java NIO.

The latest release is now available here:

http://mina.apache.org/downloads.html

This release has too many changes and fixed to enumerate in their entirety. Some of the key improvements include:

• Simplified and more consistent API
• Ability to share I/O processor threads between multiple servers and/or
  clients
• Improved support for streaming files
• Improved String and JMX integration
• Improved logging support
• Framework for simplifying state machine creation and maintenance
• Support for synchronous clients
• OSGi integration

This is a milestone release and is not yet considered suitable forproduction use. The intent of this release is to showcase the new modified API and other improvements in MINA. We hope that developers will start to use this release and provide feedback.