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santecarloni

TacoCopter - Tacos Delivered Straight to Your Home With GPS Guided Quadcopters | Singul... - 3 views

singularityhub.com/...me-with-gps-guided-quadcopters

technology Quadcopters

shared by santecarloni on 27 Mar 12 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • santecarloni on 27 Mar 12
     
    Around since last July, the TacoCopter website suddenly grabbed the web's attention days ago with its claim that they will take your order via a smartphone and deliver tacos straight to your location with GPS-guided, unmanned quadcopters....
  • Ma Ru on 27 Mar 12
     
    According to the picture of the quadrocopter, you end up being chased by four flying, GPS-guided rotating blades...
Luís F. Simões

Encouraging Behavioral Diversity in Evolutionary Robotics: An Empirical Study - MIT Pre... - 2 views

www.mitpressjournals.org/...EVCO_a_00048

evolutionary computation neural_networks robotics behaviour

shared by Luís F. Simões on 04 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • several papers recently proposed to explicitly encourage the diversity of the robot behaviors, rather than the diversity of the genotypes as in classic evolutionary optimization. Such an approach avoids the need to compute distances between structures and the pitfalls of the noninjectivity of the phenotype/behavior relation; however, it also introduces new questions: how to compare behavior?
  • In this paper, we review the main published approaches to behavioral diversity and benchmark them in a common framework.
  • The results show that fostering behavioral diversity substantially improves the evolutionary process in the investigated experiments, regardless of genotype or task.
  • Luís F. Simões on 04 Mar 12
     
    paywall skipping: http://www.isir.upmc.fr/files/2011ACLI2061.pdf The most complete study I've seen so far on a new approach (Novelty Search) that has been gaining a lot of attention lately. And they even use parallel coordinates to visualize the results!! ;)
Robert Musters

Optimize work efficiency using music - 2 views

focus@will is a new neuroscience based music service that helps you focus, reduce distractions and retain information when working, studying, writing and reading. The technology is based on hard sc...

science sound focus attention

started by Robert Musters on 10 Feb 14 no follow-up yet
pacome delva

Girls Get Math: It's Culture That's Skewed - 2 views

www.livescience.com/...090601-gender-math.html

sociology math

shared by pacome delva on 19 Apr 10 - Cached
  • "There's a gender stereotype that boys are better at math than girls are, and stereotypes die very hard," Hyde told LiveScience. "Teachers and parents still believe that boys are better at math than girls are." The researchers provide several possible cultural factors keeping females from excelling in math, including classroom dynamics in which teachers pay more attention to boys, while even mathematically gifted girls are not nurtured. In addition, stereotypes may drive guidance counselors and others to discourage girls from taking engineering courses.
  • Nina Nadine Ridder on 26 Apr 10
     
    The guidance counselor at my high school discouraged me to study physics but was very excited when I was contemplating to become a teacher. Maybe I should send her this article...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 26 Apr 10
     
    Oh yeah, real new!! And in the 90s it was obvious that girls are smarter but discriminated, today its obvious that the poor boys are neglected; some years ago female teachers were proven to discriminate even stronger against girls than male teachers and today politicians demand more male teachers... because they would pay more attention to the neglected boys! Great, that's what I like about sociological research, every couple of years one can sell the same old story again and again and again... sorry, I'm in a real bullshitter mood today!
  • Nicholas Lan on 27 Apr 10
     
    gotta agree with luzi here. girls at secondary school in the UK have been outperforming boys for years now after numerous government programmes. As to guidance counsellors - if they were any good at guidance wouldn't they have better jobs?
Friederike Sontag

Aerosols make methane more potent - 1 views

www.nature.com/...news.2009.1049.html

air_pollution methane VOCs climate_change

shared by Friederike Sontag on 03 Nov 09 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Friederike Sontag on 03 Nov 09
     
    "climate policy-makers need to pay much more attention to restricting short-lived pollutants, such as methane, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and aerosols. This could create significant changes in the local and global climate quite quickly, whereas the effects of efforts to reduce emissions of long-lived carbon dioxide will not be seen for many years."
  • LeopoldS on 04 Nov 09
     
    interesting indeed ... but coming at the right time before copenhagn?
  • Friederike Sontag on 04 Nov 09
     
    These conclusions come too late to have a real impact on decisions that will be taken in Copenhagen, I assume. But I think it is a hot topic as climate change 'solutions' that work QUICKLY are more and more needed!!
marliesarnhof

Attention PGP Users: New Vulnerabilities Require You To Take Action Now - 2 views

www.eff.org/...es-require-you-take-action-now

INF security

shared by marliesarnhof on 14 May 18 - No Cached
  • marliesarnhof on 14 May 18
     
    no cutting-edge space-related science, but important anyways
  • benjaminroussel on 15 May 18
     
    The EFF communicate is actually quite inaccurate. This is disappointing from the EFF, though for some part, it is due to the communication from the researchers who "discovered" the attack. PGP itself is not broken, but rather some implementations on some email clients (notably Enigmail, though it was patched several months ago). See https://protonmail.com/blog/pgp-vulnerability-efail/ On the other hand, if you are very keen on security, there is an XSS attack reported on Signal, so… https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/signal-messenger-code-injection.html The *good* recommendation here is actually rather to keep your software stack up to date (surprising, no?) and keep encrypting your emails.
johannessimon81

Nuclear isomer - 2 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Nuclear_isomer

technology science PHY space

shared by johannessimon81 on 23 Nov 12 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • johannessimon81 on 23 Nov 12
     
    We had a short discussion yesterday about using nuclear isomers as batteries for spacecraft. The principle is that energy is stored as an excitation of the nucleus which can then release the energy as a gamma-photon. However angular momentum has to be conserved an this suppresses the decay strongly - making these states stable up to 10^35 longer than a typical decay.
  • dejanpetkow on 27 Nov 12
     
    The key is the triggering of the dacay wheras the triggering comsumes less energy than the decay provides. The x-ray based triggering of the gamma photon decay turned out to be quite controversial and needs significantly more scientific attention.
  • LeopoldS on 28 Nov 12
     
    I think that there should be some references and traces of the discussions we had on this on the shared drive or wiki ... One other aspect: converting the omnidirectional gamma bursts into useful energy ....
LeopoldS

ESA Telecommunications:ARTES-supported GNSS receivers attract worldwide attention - 3 views

telecom.esa.int/...index.cfm

PHY science space

shared by LeopoldS on 14 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 14 Dec 11
     
    ESA involvement in device central to neutrino speed measurement
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.
LeopoldS

Plant sciences: Plants drink mineral water : Nature : Nature Publishing Group - 1 views

www.nature.com/...512351e.html

plant water Mars exploration terraforming

shared by LeopoldS on 02 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 02 Sep 14
     
    Here we go: we might not need liquid water after all on mars to get some nice flowering plants there! ... and terraform ? :-) Thirsty plants can extract water from the crystalline structure of gypsum, a rock-forming mineral found in soil on Earth and Mars.

    Some plants grow on gypsum outcrops and remain active even during dry summer months, despite having shallow roots that cannot reach the water table. Sara Palacio of the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Jaca, Spain, and her colleagues compared the isotopic composition of sap from one such plant, called Helianthemum squamatum (pictured), with gypsum crystallization water and water found free in the soil. The team found that up to 90% of the plant's summer water supply came from gypsum.

    The study has implications for the search for life in extreme environments on this planet and others.

    Nature Commun 5, 4660 (2014)
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 02 Sep 14
     
    Very interesting indeed. Attention is to be put on the form of calcium sulfate that is found on Mars. If it is hydrated (gypsum Ca(SO4)*2(H2O)) it works, but if it is dehydrated there is no water for the roots to take in. The Curiosity Rover tries to find out, but has uncertainty in recognising the hydrogen presence in the mineral: Copying : "(...) 3.2 Hydration state of calcium sulfates Calcium sulfates occur as a non-hydrated phase (anhydrite, CaSO4) or as one of two hydrated phases (bassanite, CaSO4.1/2H2O, which can contain a somewhat variable water content, and gypsum, CaSO4.2H2O). ChemCam identifies the presence of hydrogen at 656 nm, as already found in soils and dust [Meslin et al., 2013] and within fluvial conglomerates [Williams et al., 2013]. However, the quantification of H is strongly affected by matrix effects [Schröder et al., 2013], i.e. effects including major or even minor element chemistry, optical and mechanical properties, that can result in variations of emission lines unrelated to actual quantitative variations of the element in question in the sample. Due to these effects, discriminating between bassanite and gypsum is difficult. (...)"
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 02 Sep 14
jcunha

Why are the Dutch so tall - 1 views

phys.org/...04-tall-story-dutch-tower.html

FUN

shared by jcunha on 08 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • jcunha on 08 Apr 15
     
    Following a discussion with Kzrystof, where he came up with gravity anomaly reasons for why Dutch people are so tall. Funny to see this fact gathers scientific attention as well.
  • Dario Izzo on 15 Apr 15
     
    We solved this darwinian riddle years ago. They must be tall in order to find their partners above the fog and thus reproduce in the dutch weather.
Giusi Schiavone

Selective attention processes - 2 views

www.youtube.com/...NatureVideoChannel

shared by Giusi Schiavone on 27 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Giusi Schiavone on 27 Oct 10
     
    they use invasive BCI for accessing to single neural cell on patiences with epilepsy.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • LeopoldS on 27 Oct 10
     
    scary ...
  • Giusi Schiavone on 27 Oct 10
     
    why? I think they used patients with epilepsy because they already had an implants with electrodes, for other reasons. Otherwise in normal subjects they could not obtain these results. I wonder who (among normal subject) would like to have electrodes implanted in the brain....thus they use subjects that already have an implant.
  • LeopoldS on 27 Oct 10
     
    well if I got it correctly then the had to cut and fizzle around in these brains ... always scaring, and then they claim that we have in our brains in single neurons abstract images e.g. of marilyn monroe . they speak even of Marilyn Monroe neurons :-) similarily his question "who is in control? are we in control of our neurons or our neurons in control of us? " ....
Joris _

Why Computers Can't Mimic The Brain - Forbes.com - 3 views

www.forbes.com/...ology-breakthroughs-brain.html

BIO brain

shared by Joris _ on 06 Dec 09 - No Cached
  • engineers seem to have a diminished ability to understand biology
  • Remember them the next time you read a story claiming some brain-like accomplishment of a computer. The only really human thing these programs are doing is attracting attention to themselves
Juxi Leitner

Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition - 3 views

cs.stanford.edu/...deepimagesent

ai computer vision learning classification deep university INF

shared by Juxi Leitner on 28 Nov 14 - No Cached
Paul N liked it
  • Juxi Leitner on 28 Nov 14
     
    pretty impressive stuff!
  • ...3 more comments...
  • Paul N on 28 Nov 14
     
    Amazing how some guys from some other university also did pretty much the same thing (although they didn't use the bidirectional stuff) and published it just last month. Just goes to show you can dump pretty much anything into an RNN and train it for long enough and it'll produce magic. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.1090v1.pdf
  • Luís F. Simões on 01 Dec 14
  • Paul N on 04 Dec 14
     
    Seems like quite the trend. And the fact that google still tries to use LSTMs is even more surprising.
  • Luís F. Simões on 04 Dec 14
     
    LSTMs: that was also the first thing in the paper that caught my attention! :) I hadn't seen them in the wild in years... My oversight most likely. The paper seems to be getting ~100 citations a year. Someone's using them.
  • Paul N on 05 Dec 14
     
    There are a few papers on them. Though you have to be lucky to get them to work. The backprop is horrendous.
dharmeshtailor

Opening the Black Box of Deep Neural Networks via Information Theory - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

technology AI

shared by dharmeshtailor on 09 Apr 18 - No Cached
Dario Izzo liked it
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