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Arthropods paint by walking on the canvas.

looks ideal to me for our next ACT gimmik after the t-shirts and the cups! who wants to give a try?

Dance your PhD - if that isn't a promising ACT topic!

we should maybe try this in the team to see if the scientific output increases :-) ... LS

Funny pictures

How has your country been envisaged ?

Very nice simulation of a heated liquid.

an interesting comic about maths, ideas etc. Co-written by a greek mathematician / writer and a Berkeley computer science professor, sold out in Greece and since its international release a couple of months ago is occupying the top selling comics lists of Amazon etc. also: http://www.logicomix.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=53

btw I just ordered it from Amazon, so if you want after I finish it I can lend it

"When in the desert he came up with the idea to use the two dominating features in the desert -- the sun and the sand -- in his next project.". I wonder where we should send him next.

Arts project with implications for space science... Awesome! Note how this guy is dressed in the middle of an Egyptian desert, lol...

Make sure you have a look at the gallery: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15293922 Some are pretty interesting...

Interdisciplinary teams of handpicked individuals chosen for their field-leading expertise and innovative mind combine humanitarian questions with state of the art science, cutting-edge technology and endless fantasy. Organised by THE Port Association, hosted by CERN (IdeaSquare tbc) and with partners from other non-governmental organisations, a three-day problem solving workshop hackathon will be devoted to humanitarian, social and public interest topics. Interdisciplinary teams of selected participants will work together in the fields of: communication - transport - health - science - learning - work - culture - data

Today we released the Astro Drone app. People that have the Parrot AR drone can freely download the game. While they fly their drone in the real world, they are trying to dock to the ISS in the virtual world. But the app is more than a game. Players can choose to participate in a scientific crowd sourcing experiment that aims to improve autonomous capabilities of space probes, such as landing, obstacle avoidance, and docking. If participating, the app extracts visually salient features from the images made by the drone's camera. The features are then combined with the estimates of the drone's state and uploaded. The data is then used in a research aiming to improve robot navigation.

Visit the main ESA website and you'll be greeted with a 6-minute Rosetta promo movie by a kickass Polish artist... P.S. You can also find the video here. P.P.S It seems I've just discovered a way to hijack old diigo entries ;-)

Very surprising - at least for me ...

Dataset automatically constructed from public images uploaded by users on FB/Instagram with hashtags used as labels! They refer to this as 'weakly supervised learning'. Then neural net fine-tuned for ImageNet and achieved record 85.4% accuracy.

A college course at University of Washington on "Calling Bullshit". We should invite them to give a lunch lecture at ESA... Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences. While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Our learning objectives are straightforward. After taking the course, you should be able to: * Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet. * Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it. * Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit. * Provide a statistician or fellow scientist with a technical explanation of why a claim is bullshit. * Provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit. We will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.

love it: "Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit - and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit. We're sick of it. It's time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument."

Very cool recap document on state of the art sequential convex programming and lossless convexification techniques. It's written by the main authors who work on these, worth a look if you're into autonomous trajectory planning.