Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past - 6 views
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Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?
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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
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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.
First evidence that sperm epigenetics affect the next generation - 0 views
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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.
Not a scratch - 7 views
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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.
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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."
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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.
Sweeping Away Space Debris With Dust | Space Safety Magazine - 2 views
BBC - Future - 1 views
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Worth following for inspiration?
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Yes, definitely!
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"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...
Spray cyanobacteria on the desert to halt its spread - 2 views
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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.
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130 km2 as next step will be quite an area
Underground oceans - 1 views
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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.
Will robots be smarter than humans by 2029? - 2 views
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Nice discussion about the singularity. Made me think of drinking coffee with Luis... It raises some issues such as the necessity of embodiment, etc.
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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.
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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.
HUBbub 2013 - 0 views
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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.
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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.
Space News - September 9, 2013 - 4 views
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why are we not getting these type of startups in Europe .... btw: Will is british
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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
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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"
Climate scientists told to 'cover up' the fact that the Earth's temperature hasn't rise... - 5 views
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This is becoming a mess :)
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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?
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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.
Flexible, stretchable fire-ant rafts - 2 views
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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?
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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
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somebody showed such videos some years ago in one of our talks on swarm cooperation ... probably Tobias? or P. Dario? ... still impressive indeed
New theory of synapse formation in the brain - 2 views
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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.
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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).
Hey, it's weird up here - there must be an earthquake in the atmosphere - GeoSpace - AG... - 4 views
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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!!
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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
Active Metasurfaces for Advanced Wavefront Engineering #Harvard - 4 views
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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
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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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