May 2003

Hello friends,

One of the noticeable differences between Canada and Israel is the tax system. All prices here do not include 15% tax. In the beginning I thought the difference is negligible. But when all prices have the regular pattern *99, you immediately feel any increase (that also proves that the *99 pattern is effective). At first it was very annoying. Why can’t they include the tax in the prices? Then I realized that in Israel there is 18% tax, which is 20% more tax than here. There is a huge psychological difference between the two systems. In Israel, tax is deducted for you. When you get a salary slip, you never got the money which was paid as tax. In Canada, you meet the tax collection system every day, even for few cents, and the tax is paid from your pocket. So although the taxes here may be lower, they are felt much more. Another difference is that here everyone has to file a yearly tax report. While preparing the tax return, you find out how much money you earned, how much you spent, and how much tax you paid. Again, it is very different when you prepare the report by yourself. There are many laws you have to understand, and you become a little accountant. To simplify things, there is a web site to file online. You answer a series of questions, and the program does all the calculations for you. The site generates a personalized PDF file for you, containing the filled (official) documents, which can be download, printed and submitted. You can also ask them to send the information electronically to the tax authority, which saves them the typing work. For low-income residents, like me, this service is free. The tax system causes people to wonder how the tax money is spent, and oppose to tax increases. Another consequence is tax evasion. It is estimated that the size of the underground economy in Canada is 15% of the GDP. I think this is a result of the tax system, not the tax level.

At the university, the winter term ended and the summer term is starting (here it is 13 weeks). The university is mostly deserted. In the last three weeks we had a series of interview talks, about three talks each week. The speakers were people applying for faculty positions at the department. Because of the competition and since the speakers give the same talk at several universities, these talks were very polished and interesting.

At the vision lab we got a new toy. It's a cheap robot, manufactured by Evolution Robotics (http://www.evolution.com/). The basic parts cost 500$, and there are extensions. It's a platform on which you stuck a laptop. The revolution is the architecture of the robot, where the laptop is the brain, so it is painless to upgrade. The wheels and the arm are just additional hardware devices of the laptop. All the motors, sensors, camera and so on are connected to the laptop with USB cables. They provide software for image processing and tracking, path planning, obstacle avoidance, and so on. You can configure its behaviors and program the actions on a very high level and convenient way. For example, the robot can use the standard Microsoft voice recognition or speech synthesis programs. The robot can use standard GPS cards. It is possible to connect the robot (actually the laptop) to a wireless network and program the robot to send emails when he finds things on his route. It is possible to exchange messages between several robots. And since this robot is ideal for research, I am sure its software will eventually combine many research efforts and become something that no single company can develop. The robot we got is limited, but that shows you the direction these things are going. The days of the patrolling security robots are getting close.


Ady.