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johannessimon81

Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past - 6 views

www.wired.com/...cliodynamics-peter-turchin

INF science

shared by johannessimon81 on 10 Apr 13 - No Cached
LeopoldS and Dario Izzo liked it
  • johannessimon81 on 10 Apr 13
     
    Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Dario Izzo on 12 Apr 13
     
    Good luck to them!!
  • Luzi Bergamin on 12 Apr 13
     
    "Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past". GREAT! And physicists probably predict the past with data from the future?!? "scientists and mathematicians analyze history in the hopes of finding patterns they can then use to predict the future". Big deal! That's what any scientist does anyway... "cliodynamics"!? Give me a break!
  • LeopoldS on 16 Apr 13
     
    still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and
  • Luzi Bergamin on 17 Apr 13
     
    It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.
fichbio

First evidence that sperm epigenetics affect the next generation - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...ics-affect-the-next-generation

BIO science your future

shared by fichbio on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • fichbio on 19 Apr 16
     
    A frog study provides the strongest evidence yet that a father's lifestyle may affect the next generation, via chemical tags that change gene activity SPERM pass on more than just their DNA. Chemical switches attached to the genomes of sperm - known as epigenetic tags - have been shown to alter the next generation for the first time.
pandomilla

Not a scratch - 7 views

www.economist.com/21545971

BIO

shared by pandomilla on 12 Apr 12 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • pandomilla on 12 Apr 12
     
    I hate scorpions, but this could be a nice subject for a future Ariadna study! This north African desert scorpion, doesn't dig burrows to protect itself from the sand-laden wind (as the other scorpions do). When the sand whips by at speeds that would strip paint away from steel, the scorpion is able to scurry off without apparent damage.
  • LeopoldS on 13 Apr 12
     
    Nice research, though they have done almost all the work that we could do in an Ariadna, didnt they? "To check, they took further photographs. In particular, they used a laser scanning system to make a three-dimensional map of the armour and then plugged the result into a computer program that blasted the virtual armour with virtual sand grains at various angles of attack. This process revealed that the granules were disturbing the air flow near the skeleton's surface in ways that appeared to be reducing the erosion rate. Their model suggested that if scorpion exoskeletons were smooth, they would experience almost twice the erosion rate that they actually do. Having tried things out in a computer, the team then tried them for real. They placed samples of steel in a wind tunnel and fired grains of sand at them using compressed air. One piece of steel was smooth, but the others had grooves of different heights, widths and separations, inspired by scorpion exoskeleton, etched onto their surfaces. Each sample was exposed to the lab-generated sandstorm for five minutes and then weighed to find out how badly it had been eroded. The upshot was that the pattern most resembling scorpion armour-with grooves that were 2mm apart, 5mm wide and 4mm high-proved best able to withstand the assault. Though not as good as the computer model suggested real scorpion geometry is, such grooving nevertheless cut erosion by a fifth, compared with a smooth steel surface. The lesson for aircraft makers, Dr Han suggests, is that a little surface irregularity might help to prolong the active lives of planes and helicopters, as well as those of scorpions."
  • Ma Ru on 13 Apr 12
     
    What bugs me (pardon the pun) is that the dimensions of the pattern they used were scaled up by many orders of magnitude, while "grains of sand" with which the surface was bombarded apparently were not... Not being a specialist in the field, I would nevertheless expect that the size of the surface pattern *in relation to* to size of particles used for bombarding would be crucial.
LeopoldS

Quantum teleportation over 143[thinsp]kilometres using active feed-forward : Nature : N... - 1 views

www.nature.com/...nature11472.html

shared by LeopoldS on 05 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 05 Sep 12
     
    Sorry ,here now the right link to the nature paper ...in english
Luke O'Connor

Scientists at MIT replicate brain activity with chip - 2 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-15772240

shared by Luke O'Connor on 18 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Luke O'Connor on 18 Nov 11
     
    A new chip that simulates the behaviour of a synapse. 1 down, a few hundred trillion to go...
Kevin de Groote

BBC - Future - 1 views

www.bbc.com/future

shared by Kevin de Groote on 13 Jun 12 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Kevin de Groote on 13 Jun 12
     
    Worth following for inspiration?
  • LeopoldS on 15 Jun 12
     
    Yes, definitely!
  • Ma Ru on 17 Jun 12
     
    "We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com." In other words, UK is not part of the world...
Athanasia Nikolaou

Spray cyanobacteria on the desert to halt its spread - 2 views

www.newscientist.com/...desert-to-halt-its-spread.html

climate BIO

shared by Athanasia Nikolaou on 20 Jan 14 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 20 Jan 14
     
    A wide scale 8 year experiment in China on combating desertification seems to have been successful. Instead of using cyanobacteria blooms in the sea, the tested method proposes to spray them on the boundaries of desert/farmland every few days, so that the carbon they capture stays on the ground. It is useful in fixing the organic material against wind erosion only complementary to planting hardy grasses. Very fast result, nevertheless. Could be classified as a geoengineering activity.
  • LeopoldS on 22 Jan 14
     
    130 km2 as next step will be quite an area
Thijs Versloot

Underground oceans - 1 views

phys.org/...014-01-ocean-beneath-feet.html

science

shared by Thijs Versloot on 29 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 29 Jan 14
     
    Interesting report on water transport in deep see fault lines. Subduction can suck huge quantities of water of water underground where friction and pressure heat it up causing the mantle to partly melt which leads to volcanic activities around the fault zones. Not all the water would make it back up, leading to the possibility that there might be large quantities of water stored within the earths crust.
Guido de Croon

Will robots be smarter than humans by 2029? - 2 views

robohub.org/be-smarter-than-humans-by-2029

AI

shared by Guido de Croon on 10 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Guido de Croon on 10 Mar 14
     
    Nice discussion about the singularity. Made me think of drinking coffee with Luis... It raises some issues such as the necessity of embodiment, etc.
  • ...9 more comments...
  • Luís F. Simões on 12 Mar 14
     
    "Kurzweilians"... LOL. Still not sold on embodiment, btw.
  • Ma Ru on 12 Mar 14
     
    The biggest problem with embodiment is that, since the passive walkers (with which it all started), it hasn't delivered anything really interesting...
  • Paul N on 13 Mar 14
     
    The problem with embodiment is that it's done wrong. Embodiment needs to be treated like big data. More sensors, more data, more processing. Just putting a computer in a robot with a camera and microphone is not embodiment.
  • Marcus Maertens on 14 Mar 14
     
    I like how he attacks Moore's Law. It always looks a bit naive to me if people start to (ab)use it to make their point. No strong opinion about embodiment.
  • johannessimon81 on 14 Mar 14
     
    @Paul: How would embodiment be done RIGHT?
  • Guido de Croon on 16 Mar 14
     
    Embodiment has some obvious advantages. For example, in the vision domain many hard problems become easy when you have a body with which you can take actions (like looking at an object you don't immediately recognize from a different angle) - a point already made by researchers such as Aloimonos.and Ballard in the end 80s / beginning 90s. However, embodiment goes further than gathering information and "mental" recognition. In this respect, the evolutionary robotics work by for example Beer is interesting, where an agent discriminates between diamonds and circles by avoiding one and catching the other, without there being a clear "moment" in which the recognition takes place. "Recognition" is a behavioral property there, for which embodiment is obviously important. With embodiment the effort for recognizing an object behaviorally can be divided between the brain and the body, resulting in less computation for the brain. Also the article "Behavioural Categorisation: Behaviour makes up for bad vision" is interesting in this respect. In the field of embodied cognitive science, some say that recognition is constituted by the activation of sensorimotor correlations. I wonder to which extent this is true, and if it is valid for extremely simple creatures to more advanced ones, but it is an interesting idea nonetheless. This being said, if "embodiment" implies having a physical body, then I would argue that it is not a necessary requirement for intelligence. "Situatedness", being able to take (virtual or real) "actions" that influence the "inputs", may be.
  • Ma Ru on 17 Mar 14
     
    @Paul While I completely agree about the "embodiment done wrong" (or at least "not exactly correct") part, what you say goes exactly against one of the major claims which are connected with the notion of embodiment (google for "representational bottleneck"). The fact is your brain does *not* have resources to deal with big data. The idea therefore is that it is the body what helps to deal with what to a computer scientist appears like "big data". Understanding how this happens is key. Whether it is the problem of scale or of actually understanding what happens should be quite conclusively shown by the outcomes of the Blue Brain project.
  • johannessimon81 on 17 Mar 14
     
    Wouldn't one expect that to produce consciousness (even in a lower form) an approach resembling that of nature would be essential? All animals grow from a very simple initial state (just a few cells) and have only a very limited number of sensors AND processing units. This would allow for a fairly simple way to create simple neural networks and to start up stable neural excitation patterns. Over time as complexity of the body (sensors, processors, actuators) increases the system should be able to adapt in a continuous manner and increase its degree of self-awareness and consciousness. On the other hand, building a simulated brain that resembles (parts of) the human one in its final state seems to me like taking a person who is just dead and trying to restart the brain by means of electric shocks.
  • Paul N on 17 Mar 14
     
    Actually on a neuronal level all information gets processed. Not all of it makes it into "conscious" processing or attention. Whatever makes it into conscious processing is a highly reduced representation of the data you get. However that doesn't get lost. Basic, low processed data forms the basis of proprioception and reflexes. Every step you take is a macro command your brain issues to the intricate sensory-motor system that puts your legs in motion by actuating every muscle and correcting every step deviation from its desired trajectory using the complicated system of nerve endings and motor commands. Reflexes which were build over the years, as those massive amounts of data slowly get integrated into the nervous system and the the incipient parts of the brain. But without all those sensors scattered throughout the body, all the little inputs in massive amounts that slowly get filtered through, you would not be able to experience your body, and experience the world. Every concept that you conjure up from your mind is a sort of loose association of your sensorimotor input. How can a robot understand the concept of a strawberry if all it can perceive of it is its shape and color and maybe the sound that it makes as it gets squished? How can you understand the "abstract" notion of strawberry without the incredibly sensible tactile feel, without the act of ripping off the stem, without the motor action of taking it to our mouths, without its texture and taste? When we as humans summon the strawberry thought, all of these concepts and ideas converge (distributed throughout the neurons in our minds) to form this abstract concept formed out of all of these many many correlations. A robot with no touch, no taste, no delicate articulate motions, no "serious" way to interact with and perceive its environment, no massive flow of information from which to chose and and reduce, will never attain human level intelligence. That's point 1. Point 2 is that mere pattern recogn
  • Ma Ru on 18 Mar 14
     
    All information *that gets processed* gets processed but now we arrived at a tautology. The whole problem is ultimately nobody knows what gets processed (not to mention how). In fact an absolute statement "all information" gets processed is very easy to dismiss because the characteristics of our sensors are such that a lot of information is filtered out already at the input level (e.g. eyes). I'm not saying it's not a valid and even interesting assumption, but it's still just an assumption and the next step is to explore scientifically where it leads you. And until you show its superiority experimentally it's as good as all other alternative assumptions you can make. I only wanted to point out is that "more processing" is not exactly compatible with some of the fundamental assumptions of the embodiment. I recommend Wilson, 2002 as a crash course.
  • Paul N on 24 Mar 14
     
    These deal with different things in human intelligence. One is the depth of the intelligence (how much of the bigger picture can you see, how abstract can you form concept and ideas), another is the breadth of the intelligence (how well can you actually generalize, how encompassing those concepts are and what is the level of detail in which you perceive all the information you have) and another is the relevance of the information (this is where the embodiment comes in. What you do is to a purpose, tied into the environment and ultimately linked to survival). As far as I see it, these form the pillars of human intelligence, and of the intelligence of biological beings. They are quite contradictory to each other mainly due to physical constraints (such as for example energy usage, and training time). "More processing" is not exactly compatible with some aspects of embodiment, but it is important for human level intelligence. Embodiment is necessary for establishing an environmental context of actions, a constraint space if you will, failure of human minds (i.e. schizophrenia) is ultimately a failure of perceived embodiment. What we do know is that we perform a lot of compression and a lot of integration on a lot of data in an environmental coupling. Imo, take any of these parts out, and you cannot attain human+ intelligence. Vary the quantities and you'll obtain different manifestations of intelligence, from cockroach to cat to google to random quake bot. Increase them all beyond human levels and you're on your way towards the singularity.
Thijs Versloot

Fun fact of the day: the uses of the elements in the periodic table - 1 views

www.webelements.com/uses.html

fun science

shared by Thijs Versloot on 01 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 01 Aug 13
     
    To browse all the elements by usage in everyday products
  • Ma Ru on 02 Aug 13
     
    Not sure for whom "commercial fixation of nitrogen from the air in the Haber ammonia process" is an everyday activity, but still my favourite is: "As only very little lawrencium has ever been made, lawrencium has no uses." Awww...
jmlloren

HUBbub 2013 - 0 views

hubzero.org/hubbub

INF

shared by jmlloren on 21 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • jmlloren on 21 Aug 13
     
    HUBbub 2013 is the annual conference for researchers, educators, and IT professionals engaged in building and using cyberinfrastructure. Learn about the latest features in the HUBzero tool box and how they can be used to address the unique challenges of scientific pursuits.
  • jmlloren on 21 Aug 13
     
    It is probably more interesting to check the parent site: hubzero.org: HUBzero ® is a powerful, open source software platform for creating dynamic web sites that support scientific research and educational activities.
LeopoldS

Space News - September 9, 2013 - 4 views

bt.e-ditionsbyfry.com/...article.php

cubesat

shared by LeopoldS on 12 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 12 Sep 13
     
    why are we not getting these type of startups in Europe .... btw: Will is british
  • ...1 more comment...
  • dejanpetkow on 12 Sep 13
     
    Nobody in Europe would invest 13Mio $ (or the equivalent in €) venture capital for this idea, it's just a different mentality. In Europe, VCs start to get interested when the investment risk is significantly lower.
  • Juxi Leitner on 13 Sep 13
     
    I agree, the mentality is different, it's hard to find VC funding for hardware stuff, even more so if you wanna shoot your HW into space. but there is movement, e.g. pioneers.io, they are in vienna and are actively trying to get more VC funding (in europe) for HW and other engineering startups
  • LeopoldS on 13 Sep 13
     
    thanks for the link ... just read this blog ... http://pioneers.io/blog/space-race-2-0-putting-satellites-into-the-hands-of-everyone a lot of selling talk but fundamentally I agree that they have a point ... and as ACT we will face the criticism in not so long that we have not managed (nor tried hard enough) to convince ESA about the need to embrace this "new space"
LeopoldS

Getting more out of your satellite TV / Telecommunications & Integrated Applications / ... - 2 views

www.esa.int/..._more_out_of_your_satellite_TV

shared by LeopoldS on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 12 Nov 13
     
    smart idea
Dario Izzo

Climate scientists told to 'cover up' the fact that the Earth's temperature hasn't rise... - 5 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...emperature-risen-15-years.html

climate temperature

shared by Dario Izzo on 20 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Dario Izzo on 20 Sep 13
     
    This is becoming a mess :)
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 20 Sep 13
     
    I would avoid reading climate science from political journals, for a less selective / dramatic picture :-) . Here is a good start: http://www.realclimate.org/ And an article on why climate understanding should be approached hierarcically, (that is not the way done in the IPCC), a view with insight, 8 years ago: http://www.princeton.edu/aos/people/graduate_students/hill/files/held2005.pdf
  • Dario Izzo on 20 Sep 13
     
    True, but fundings are allocated to climate modelling 'science' on the basis of political decisions, not solid and boring scientific truisms such as 'all models are wrong'. The reason so many people got trained on this area in the past years is that resources were allocated to climate science on the basis of the dramatic picture depicted by some scientists when it was indeed convenient for them to be dramatic.
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 20 Sep 13
     
    I see your point, and I agree that funding was also promoted through the energy players and their political influence. A coincident parallel interest which is irrelevant to the fact that the question remains vital. How do we affect climate and how does it respond. Huge complex system to analyse which responds in various time scales which could obscure the trend. What if we made a conceptual parallelism with the L Ácquila case : Is the scientific method guilty or the interpretation of uncertainty in terms of societal mobilization? Should we leave the humanitarian aspect outside any scientific activity?
  • Dario Izzo on 20 Sep 13
     
    I do not think there is anyone arguing that the question is not interesting and complex. The debate, instead, addresses the predictive value of the models produced so far. Are they good enough to be used outside of the scientific process aimed at improving them? Or should one wait for "the scientific method" to bring forth substantial improvements to the current understanding and only then start using its results? One can take both stand points, but some recent developments will bring many towards the second approach.
pandomilla

Flexible, stretchable fire-ant rafts - 2 views

phys.org/...tretchable-fire-ant-rafts.html

bio science PHY

shared by pandomilla on 27 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • pandomilla on 27 Nov 13
     
    An ant raft stays on top of the water surface even when it is hardly pressed by a branch -- showing water repellency and buoyancy. What do Jell-O, toothpaste, and floating fire-ant rafts have in common?
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Dario Izzo on 27 Nov 13
     
    wow!! cool experiments ..... I had no idea
  • Paul N on 28 Nov 13
     
    It's a strategy the ants actually actively exploit in the wild: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A042J0IDQK4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r04kAnzgjR4
  • LeopoldS on 03 Dec 13
     
    somebody showed such videos some years ago in one of our talks on swarm cooperation ... probably Tobias? or P. Dario? ... still impressive indeed
Tom Gheysens

New theory of synapse formation in the brain - 2 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...131010205325.htm

Bio science AI brain

shared by Tom Gheysens on 14 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Tom Gheysens on 14 Oct 13
     
    I have no idea if an algorithm based on this already exists, but it would certainly be a good one for autonomous AI, I think. I think an algorithm based on this should be able to select his own input parameters and reject them if they are not stimulated any further or integrate them in the algorithm if they are continiously stimulated... this could enable self learning, etc.
  • johannessimon81 on 14 Oct 13
     
    By steering the neuron's back to an intermediate activity level the mechanism probably optimizes their efficiency within the network (after all a neuron that fires all the time is just as useless as one that never fires).
Isabelle Dicaire

Hey, it's weird up here - there must be an earthquake in the atmosphere - GeoSpace - AG... - 4 views

blogs.agu.org/...n-earthquake-in-the-atmosphere

shared by Isabelle Dicaire on 02 May 14 - No Cached
  • Isabelle Dicaire on 02 May 14
     
    CNES research to detect warning signs of earthquakes in the ionosphere. Jaxa is also interested in conducting such studies. To my opinion it's worth taken a closer look at what they are doing!! 
  • Isabelle Dicaire on 02 May 14
     
    Update: it seems we are already looking into it, I found this recent call from ESRIN: IONOSPHERIC SOUNDING FOR IDENTIFICATION OF PRE-SEISMIC ACTIVITY (RE-ISSUE) ESA Open Invitation To Tender AO7548 Open Date: 08/07/2013 Closing Date: 09/09/2013
Thijs Versloot

Active Metasurfaces for Advanced Wavefront Engineering #Harvard - 4 views

phys.org/...ces-grant-merge-classical.html

technology optics quantum metamaterials

shared by Thijs Versloot on 02 May 14 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 02 May 14
     
    Metasurfaces have been made, but the problem is that they usually are static and for quantum optic applications the question is how to make a rapidly configurable metasurface. for this Harvard has initiated a multidisciplinary team that involves theoretical physics, metamaterials, nanophotonic circuitry, quantum devices, plasmonics, nanofabrication, and computational modeling
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 02 May 14
     
    Reading "wavefront engineering" in the title I thought it had to do with wave manipulation in the sea. Nothing to do though. As I read further in this article, Harvard thrives in forming multidisciplinarity groups. Their practice is to call the best team in each expertise they need to merge. Not one researcher from each discipline, but teams of experienced professors and a series of graduate students. Maybe we could discuss it in the retreat!
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