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LeopoldS

Self-organized adaptation of a simple neural circuit enables complex robot behaviour : ... - 3 views

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    is this really worth a nature paper??
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    Funny to read this question exactly from you, the all and ever fan of anything linked to bio :-) I have read worse papers in nature and in addition it's just "Nature physics", viz. "Nature garbage." Could be that they don't find enough really good stuff to publish in all their topical clones of Nature.
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    francesco already posted this below
Tobias Seidl

Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design -- Tero et al. 327 (5964): 439 ... - 4 views

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    Navigation for robtos. That's how we should have done the hybrid controller study.
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    and why didnt we?
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    Because I have no clue about fungi. They are no animals. (Neither they are plants, of which I also don't have a clue.)
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    so what are they then? ... and don't tell me "fungi" now ..
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    Well, it has always been a long discussion. Fungi are according to the most recent findings definitely no plants. Since they have always been in botanic textbooks, I would assume that they were never considered animals.No fauna, no flora, no stones. Maybe they are extraterrestrials. But that wouldn't solve the questions. Maybe they are just "fungi"?
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    what about then: "can we use them for space?"
pacome delva

Superconductors could simulate the brain - 2 views

  • who have shown how networks of artificial neurons containing two Josephson junctions would outpace more traditional computer-simulated brains by many orders of magnitude. Studying such junction-based systems could improve our understanding of long-term learning and memory along with factors that may contribute to disorders like epilepsy.
  • The existing design does not permit learning since the weighting of connections between synapses cannot be changed over time, but Segall believes that if this feature can be added then their neurons might allow a lifetime's worth of learning to be simulated in five or ten minutes. This, he adds, should help us to understand how learning changes with age and might give us clues as to how long-term disorders like Parkinson's disease develops.
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    What I don't get is how the measure the extent of matching: how "close", or realistic is the modelisation they achieve with different methods? And moreover, if weights cannot adapt and there are no direct connections between neurons and layers of neurons, isnt that a very arbitrary matching?
Luís F. Simões

Shell energy scenarios to 2050 - 6 views

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    just in case you were feeling happy and optimistic
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    An energy scenario published by an oil company? Allow me to be sceptical...
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    Indeed, Shell is an energy company, not just oil, for some time now ... The two scenarii are, in their approach, dependant of economic and political situation, which is right now impossible to forecast. Reference to Kyoto is surprising, almost out-dated! But overall, I find it rather optimistic at some stages, and probably the timeline (p37-39) is unlikely with recent events.
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    the report was published in 2008, which explains the reference to Kyoto, as the follow-up to it was much more uncertain at that point. The Blueprint scenario is indeed optimistic, but also quite unlikely I'd say. I don't see humanity suddenly becoming so wise and coordinated. Sadly, I see something closer to the Scramble scenario as much more likely to occur.
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    not an oil company??? please have a look at the percentage of their revenues coming from oil and gas and then compare this with all their other energy activities together and you will see very quickly that it is only window dressing ... they are an oil and gas company ... and nothing more
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    not JUST oil. From a description: "Shell is a global group of energy and petrochemical companies." Of course revenues coming from oil are the biggest, the investment turnover on other energy sources is small for now. Knowing that most of their revenues is from an expendable source, to guarantee their future, they invest elsewhere. They have invested >1b$ in renewable energy, including biofuels. They had the largest wind power business among so-called "oil" companies. Oil only defines what they do "best". As a comparison, some time ago, Apple were selling only computers and now they sell phones. But I would not say Apple is just a phone company.
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    window dressing only ... e.g. Net cash from operating activities (pre-tax) in 2008: 70 Billion$ net income in 2008: 26 Billion revenues in 2008: 88 Billion Their investments and revenues in renewables don't even show up in their annual financial reports since probably they are under the heading of "marketing" which is already 1.7 Billion $ ... this is what they report on their investments: Capital investment, portfolio actions and business development Capital investment in 2009 was $24 billion. This represents a 26% decrease from 2008, which included over $8 billion in acquisitions, primarily relating to Duvernay Oil Corp. Capital investment included exploration expenditure of $4.5 billion (2008: $11.0 billion). In Abu Dhabi, Shell signed an agreement with Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to extend the GASCO joint venture for a further 20 years. In Australia, Shell and its partners took the final investment decision (FID) for the Gorgon LNG project (Shell share 25%). Gorgon will supply global gas markets to at least 2050, with a capacity of 15 million tonnes (100% basis) of LNG per year and a major carbon capture and storage scheme. Shell has announced a front-end engineering and design study for a floating LNG (FLNG) project, with the potential to deploy these facilities at the Prelude offshore gas discovery in Australia (Shell share 100%). In Australia, Shell confirmed that it has accepted Woodside Petroleum Ltd.'s entitlement offer of new shares at a total cost of $0.8 billion, maintaining its 34.27% share in the company; $0.4 billion was paid in 2009 with the remainder paid in 2010. In Bolivia and Brazil, Shell sold its share in a gas pipeline and in a thermoelectric power plant and its related assets for a total of around $100 million. In Canada, the Government of Alberta and the national government jointly announced their intent to contribute $0.8 billion of funding towards the Quest carbon capture and sequestration project. Quest, which is at the f
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    thanks for the info :) They still have their 50% share in the wind farm in Noordzee (you can see it from ESTEC on a clear day). Look for Shell International Renewables, other subsidiaries and joint-ventures. I guess, the report is about the oil branch. http://sustainabilityreport.shell.com/2009/servicepages/downloads/files/all_shell_sr09.pdf http://www.noordzeewind.nl/
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    no - its about Shell globally - all Shell .. these participations are just peanuts please read the intro of the CEO in the pdf you linked to: he does not even mention renewables! their entire sustainability strategy is about oil and gas - just making it (look) nicer and environmentally friendlier
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    Fair enough, for me even peanuts are worthy and I am not able to judge. Not all big-profit companies, like Shell, are evil :( Look in the pdf what is in the upstream and downstream you mentionned above. Non-shell sources for examples and more objectivity: http://www.nuon.com/company/Innovative-projects/noordzeewind.jsp http://www.e-energymarket.com/news/single-news/article/ferrari-tops-bahrain-gp-using-shell-biofuel.html thanks.
Joris _

Tracking Whale Sharks With Astronomical Algorithms | Wired Science | Wired.com - 3 views

  • equations were developed for astronomers using the Hubble telescope, Holmberg’s crew adapted them for biologists studying Earth’s biggest fishes
  • Holmberg also hopes that other programmers will follow his lead and lend their coding skills to worthy projects. “Pick the species or concern you’re most passionate about, pick the researchers who are working on it, and identify their technical needs,” he said. “I’m not even a great programmer. I’m underqualified but highly productive
Christos Ampatzis

Plants: Adaptive behavior, root-brains, and minimal cognition - 1 views

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    Hello? Tobias, Dario, Luis: Should we take a look?
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    They are philosophers, and they don't quote your study... might be interesting nevertheless...
Thijs Versloot

A Groundbreaking Idea About Why Life Exists - 1 views

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    Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough
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    :-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.
anonymous

Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In 2 Minutes - The Physics arXiv Blog - Medium - 7 views

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    Robot self-adapts its gait when limbs are damaged.
Nina Nadine Ridder

Watching an exoplanet in motion around a distant star - 5 views

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    Imaging of gas giant orbiting its central star (related to Jai's YGT proposal): With GPI, astronomers image the actual planet--a remarkable feat given that an orbiting world typically appears a million times fainter than its parent star. This is possible because GPI's adaptive optics sharpen the image of the target star by cancelling out the distortion caused by the Earth's atmosphere; it then blocks the bright image of the star with a device called a coronagraph, revealing the exoplanet.
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    such a simple image, such an awesome feat of science and engineering!
jcunha

AI system teachs itself to play 49 classic computer games - 4 views

shared by jcunha on 26 Feb 15 - No Cached
Paul N and Heha Zant liked it
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    In this paper published on Nature, AI researchers used deep Q-network with very good adaptability and obtained performances comparable to those of a human games tester.
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    Bastards! And that was to be my next idea. Still no recurrency as I see it so far, so this is just some fancy way to do a markov model. Not sure if this is that particular paper or an earlier version but here it is for those interested: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/dqn.pdf
Alexander Wittig

The Whorfian Time Warp: Representing Duration Through the Language Hourglass. - 0 views

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    How do humans construct their mental representations of the passage of time? The universalist account claims that abstract concepts like time are universal across humans. In contrast, the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds that speakers of different languages represent duration differently. The precise impact of language on duration representation is, however, unknown. Here, we show that language can have a powerful role in transforming humans' psychophysical experience of time. Contrary to the universalist account, we found language-specific interference in a duration reproduction task, where stimulus duration conflicted with its physical growth. When reproducing duration, Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity. These patterns conform to preferred expressions of duration magnitude in these languages (Swedish: long/short time; Spanish: much/small time). Critically, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals performing the task in both languages showed different interference depending on language context. Such shifting behavior within the same individual reveals hitherto undocumented levels of flexibility in time representation. Finally, contrary to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, language interference was confined to difficult discriminations (i.e., when stimuli varied only subtly in duration and growth), and was eliminated when linguistic cues were removed from the task. These results reveal the malleable nature of human time representation as part of a highly adaptive information processing system.
jcunha

Adaptive foveated single-pixel imaging with dynamic supersampling - 4 views

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    "In contrast to conventional multipixel cameras, single-pixel cameras capture images using a single detector that measures the correlations between the scene and a set of patterns. However, these systems typically exhibit low frame rates, because to fully sample a scene in this way requires at least the same number of correlation measurements as the number of pixels in the reconstructed image."
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    Is that the same method Andrej and Jai use in their super-telescope Ariadna?
gpetit

Intrinsic functional connectivity reduces after first-time exposure to short-term gravi... - 1 views

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    Loss of connectivity in the multisensory integration cortical areas after short term microgravity experience, which could explain astronauts decrease of performance in sensorimotor tasks and spatial working memory. However, the effect should wear off after a few days in microgravity and after adaptation to incongruent vestibular information. ISS experiment needed...
pablo_gomez

RMA: Rapid Motor Adaptation for Legged Robots - 0 views

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    71 Arguments why the ACT needs legged robots and a pretty impressive work.
Luís F. Simões

Why Is It So Hard to Predict the Future? - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • The Peculiar Blindness of Experts Credentialed authorities are comically bad at predicting the future. But reliable forecasting is possible.
  • The result: The experts were, by and large, horrific forecasters. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, and (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting and bad at long-term forecasting. They were bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that future events were impossible or nearly impossible, 15 percent of them occurred nonetheless. When they declared events to be a sure thing, more than one-quarter of them failed to transpire. As the Danish proverb warns, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
  • Tetlock and Mellers found that not only were the best forecasters foxy as individuals, but they tended to have qualities that made them particularly effective collaborators. They were “curious about, well, really everything,” as one of the top forecasters told me. They crossed disciplines, and viewed their teammates as sources for learning, rather than peers to be convinced. When those foxes were later grouped into much smaller teams—12 members each—they became even more accurate. They outperformed—by a lot—a group of experienced intelligence analysts with access to classified data.
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  • This article is adapted from David Epstein’s book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.
pablo_gomez

Penrose Tiling Remixed - Penrose-Voronoi Tiling by Jessica In and Max Cooper - 0 views

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    I wonder if this could be used for irregular adaptive grids? From the description: "One application of the diagram is the idea of Voronoi entropy - a mathematical tool for quantitative characterisation of the orderliness of points distributed on a surface - i.e. how visually 'ordered' the tessellation is. I found this idea particularly fascinating especially when thinking about the aperiodicity and the infinite structure of the Penrose tiling. In these visuals, the Voronoi diagram is created using the vertices of the Penrose as its seed points. This creates a new type of Penrose Tiling, clearly different from the classical Penrose, however still exhibiting the fivefold structure of the original, while 'defects' begin to appear at the peripheries."
eblazquez

The Visual Microphone - 1 views

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    Cool project from a few years ago! Checked for some recent updates but they seem to have adapted the concept to structural health monitoring and visual vibrometry to estimate material properties and wear.
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