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Marcus Maertens

SpaceX's Starlink Constellation Construction Begins. 2,200 Satellites Will go up Over t... - 3 views

www.universetoday.com/...ll-go-up-over-the-next-5-years

space

shared by Marcus Maertens on 17 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Marcus Maertens on 17 Apr 19
     
    Finally some Internet for our meeting room!
LeopoldS

Meteorite Crashes In Russia, Panic Spreads (Updating) - 5 views

gizmodo.com/...rashes-in-russia-panic-spreads

shared by LeopoldS on 15 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Joris _ on 15 Feb 13
     
    Latest update: the European Space Agency says their experts "confirm there is no link between the meteor incidents in Russia and asteroid 2012DA14 flyby tonight". How did they find this? As they did not see this one coming, how could they come to that conclusion that early!
  • ...5 more comments...
  • johannessimon81 on 15 Feb 13
     
    As you can see from the videos of this meteorite it is coming in from an east to south-east direction (i.e. the direction of the sunrise, more or less). 2012DA14 is coming from due south as you can see here: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/02/how-to-watch-asteroid-2012-da14/ So the two objects seem to be coming from different directions - at least that would be my explanation.
  • Joris _ on 15 Feb 13
     
    My point is, that if you want to come to such a conclusion (that it is not rubble) you need to be able to construct back the orbits of both objects. 2012DA14 has been observed for one year only, but it is well enough. When the meteor has been observed for the first time, such that we knew its orbit? has it been observed before? if yes, why the impact has not been predicted?
  • johannessimon81 on 15 Feb 13
     
    If you can show that they come from different directions you know that they are not associated, even if you don't reconstruct their orbits.
  • Joris _ on 15 Feb 13
     
    I don't think so. If both objects were part of the same, they would be on different but intersecting orbits anyway, hence different directions. Anyway, I am not knowledgeable in atmospheric entry ... But, with so few information about the object, I am surprised they are 100% certain it is not related to DA14. I think science requires more cautions ... With only the direction they are 100% sure, while the probability of such event is itself extremely small, I am amazed... They can't even predict with 100% certainty where a space debris will fall... plus, nobody consider the object being part of a bigger one that broke up during early entry (which has not been observed) ... so many uncertainties and possible hypothesis... and i am not the only one :) http://www.infowars.com/russian-meteor-linked-to-da14-asteroid/
  • LeopoldS on 17 Feb 13
     
    was not that evident to me also but apparently with the right understanding it was quite clear; was amazed also how quickly NASA has published the likely trajectory of the russian object - have a look at it: quite evident that these are not coming from the same body
  • Joris _ on 17 Feb 13
     
    yes, now i get my 100% certainty with the reconstructed orbits nothing else (http://wiki.nasa.gov/cm/blog/Watch%20the%20Skies/posts/post_1361037562855.html) ... I still think that esa anouncemement was highly premature but with a high probability of being right...
  • Ma Ru on 26 Feb 13
     
    Some more results on the topic (link to an arxiv article inside): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21579422
Thijs Versloot

Seeing the world through an insect's eyes - 1 views

www.nature.com/...497047a.html

bio technology camera

shared by Thijs Versloot on 07 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 07 Aug 13
     
    "An elegant combination of electronics and elastic materials has been used to construct a small visual sensor that closely resembles an insect's eye. The device paves the way for autonomous navigation of tiny aerial vehicles."
Ma Ru

Probabilistic fluidic modular construction - 17 views

Looks cool... in simulation. And even there it seems to work terribly slow (note how much they have to speed it up).

started by Guido de Croon on 14 Mar 11 2 follow-ups, last by Ma Ru on 15 Mar 11
Daniel Hennes

Japan is planning to build huge floating solar power plants - 4 views

www.sciencealert.com.au/...20140109-26104.html

shared by Daniel Hennes on 05 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Daniel Hennes on 05 Sep 14
     
    Japan has started construction of two floating solar power plants, which will become part of a huge, 60 megawatt floating renewable energy network.
  • annaheffernan on 06 Oct 14
     
    They should probably buddy up with the wave energy dudes and create the ultimate reneweable energy plant
jcunha

NASA challenges designers to construct habitat for deep space exploration - 3 views

phys.org/...at-deep-space-exploration.html

technology architech competition FUN 3D printer

shared by jcunha on 19 May 15 - No Cached
  • jcunha on 19 May 15
     
    NASA is setting a $2.25 million competition to design and build a 3-D printed habitat for deep space exploration - new task for the future architect of the team?
  • Paul N on 26 May 15
     
    I kind of like Thijs's space mirror ablation method as a way of printing :))
Juxi Leitner

Fabbaloo - Fabbaloo Blog - Sintering the Moon - 0 views

fabbaloo.com/...sintering-the-moon.html

moon construction technology space printing rapid manufacturing

shared by Juxi Leitner on 22 Jul 10 - Cached
  • So let's recap here: ubiquitous uniformly-powdery lunar soil can be very efficiently fused using microwaves. That sounds very similar to technologies used in 3D printing,
Joris _

Watch construction of Nasa's new Mars rover live on the web - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...10-10-nasa-mars-rover-web.html

nasa space

shared by Joris _ on 22 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Joris _ on 22 Oct 10
     
    nice!!! They always have excellent ideas!
  • Ma Ru on 22 Oct 10
     
    What about installing a webcam in ACT's meeting room?
Joris _

China kicks off manned space station program - 2 views

news.xinhuanet.com/...c_13578017.htm

china space MAD

shared by Joris _ on 28 Oct 10 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • to complete construction of a "relatively large" manned space laboratory around 2020
pacome delva

Invisibility cloaks shield the large and visible - physicsworld.com - 1 views

physicsworld.com/...44641

phy metamaterials transformation_optics

shared by pacome delva on 04 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Two independent groups of physicists have built invisibility cloaks that can shield large objects lying on a plane. These "carpet cloaks" are far closer to the intuitive idea of an invisibility cloak than devices previously built, they argue, because they hide objects that can be seen with the naked eye and do so at visible wavelengths. The cloaks are also relatively cheap and easy to make, being constructed from the natural material calcite.
  • The team used a technique known as transformation optics to design their cloak.
  • Tomas Tyc of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, who was not a member of either group, thinks that the papers "describe important achievements in the area of experimental cloaking." But he maintains that a carpet cloak is quite different to a fully fledged Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak. He points out that a carpet cloak only really works when viewing an object – be it a rucksack or a sword on someone's back, for example – side on. Otherwise the object will appear flat but still be visible.
Joris _

Let's Reconstitute Humans From Genomes Launched Into Space! and Other Ambitious Proposa... - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...military-and-public-darpa-says

technology darpa

shared by Joris _ on 17 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Fragmented human genomes could be shipped toward the stars and reconstructed upon their arrival,
  • to spur the monumental technology advances that would be required for such a feat. So the 100-Year Starship is more like a thought experiment than a construction project.
  • “The crux, to us, is inspiration of research — not just in solving the physics-based problems. It’s across all of the domains
  • Joris _ on 17 Jun 11
     
    disruptive!
Joris _

Researchers demonstrate a better way for computers to 'see' (w/ Video) - 1 views

www.physorg.com/news178997486.html

ai bio

shared by Joris _ on 03 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Rather than building a single model and seeing how well it could recognize visual objects, the team constructed thousands of candidate models, and screened for those that performed best on an object recognition task
pacome delva

Physics - Fruit flies swim through air - 1 views

physics.aps.org/...PhysRevLett.106.178103

bio insect_wings flies

shared by pacome delva on 27 Apr 11 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • A new experiment reported in Physical Review Letters shows that—contrary to popular wisdom—paddling can be as effective in air as it is in water. This could imply that insects evolved their flight capability from some earlier swimming trait.
  • Using high-speed video cameras to track wing motion, the team observed certain cases where the flies paddled their wings forward and backward. To confirm that this was indeed drag-based motion, the team plugged their wing data into an “insect flight simulator” and found that they could reproduce the fly’s overall movement. The authors constructed a simple model of paddling, which seems to support the theory that insect wings evolved in water.
Thijs Versloot

Programmable biological circuits - 3 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...141023100741.htm

BIO technology science

shared by Thijs Versloot on 28 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 28 Oct 14
     
    Several new components for biological circuits have been developed by researchers. These components are key building blocks for constructing precisely functioning and programmable bio-computers. "The ability to combine biological components at will in a modular, plug-and-play fashion means that we now approach the stage when the concept of programming as we know it from software engineering can be applied to biological computers.
Dario Izzo

Miguel Nicolelis Says the Brain Is Not Computable, Bashes Kurzweil's Singularity | MIT ... - 9 views

www.technologyreview.com/...the-brain-is-not-computable

Singularity AI Brain

shared by Dario Izzo on 28 Feb 13 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Dario Izzo on 28 Feb 13
     
    As I said ten years ago and psychoanalysts 100 years ago. Luis I am so sorry :) Also ... now that the commission funded the project blue brain is a rather big hit Btw Nicolelis is a rather credited neuro-scientist
  • ...14 more comments...
  • LeopoldS on 28 Feb 13
     
    nice article; Luzi would agree as well I assume; one aspect not clear to me is the causal relationship it seems to imply between consciousness and randomness ... anybody?
  • Luís F. Simões on 01 Mar 13
     
    This is the same thing Penrose has been saying for ages (and yes, I read the book). IF the human brain proves to be the only conceivable system capable of consciousness/intelligence AND IF we'll forever be limited to the Turing machine type of computation (which is what the "Not Computable" in the article refers to) AND IF the brain indeed is not computable, THEN AI people might need to worry... Because I seriously doubt the first condition will prove to be true, same with the second one, and because I don't really care about the third (brains is not my thing).. I'm not worried.
  • Dario Izzo on 01 Mar 13
     
    In any case, all AI research is going in the wrong direction: the mainstream is not on how to go beyond Turing machines, rather how to program them well enough ...... and thats not bringing anywhere near the singularity
  • Luís F. Simões on 01 Mar 13
     
    It has not been shown that intelligence is not computable (only some people saying the human brain isn't, which is something different), so I wouldn't go so far as saying the mainstream is going in the wrong direction. But even if that indeed was the case, would it be a problem? If so, well, then someone should quickly go and tell all the people trading in financial markets that they should stop using computers... after all, they're dealing with uncomputable undecidable problems. :) (and research on how to go beyond Turing computation does exist, but how much would you want to devote your research to a non existent machine?)
  • Dario Izzo on 01 Mar 13
     
    [warning: troll] If you are happy with developing algorithms that serve the financial market ... good for you :) After all they have been proved to be useful for humankind beyond any reasonable doubt.
  • Ma Ru on 04 Mar 13
     
    Two comments from me: 1) an apparently credible scientist takes Kurzweil seriously enough to engage with him in polemics... oops 2) what worries me most, I didn't get the retail store pun at the end of article...
  • Dario Izzo on 04 Mar 13
     
    True, but after Google hired Kurzweil he is de facto being taken seriously ... so I guess Nicolelis reacted to this.
  • Ma Ru on 04 Mar 13
     
    Crazy scientist in residence... interesting marketing move, I suppose.
  • Luzi Bergamin on 05 Mar 13
     
    Unfortunately, I can't upload my two kids to the cloud to make them sleep, that's why I comment only now :-). But, of course, I MUST add my comment to this discussion. I don't really get what Nicolelis point is, the article is just too short and at a too popular level. But please realize that the question is not just "computable" vs. "non-computable". A system may be computable (we have a collection of rules called "theory" that we can put on a computer and run in a finite time) and still it need not be predictable. Since the lack of predictability pretty obviously applies to the human brain (as it does to any sufficiently complex and nonlinear system) the question whether it is computable or not becomes rather academic. Markram and his fellows may come up with a incredible simulation program of the human brain, this will be rather useless since they cannot solve the initial value problem and even if they could they will be lost in randomness after a short simulation time due to horrible non-linearities... Btw: this is not my idea, it was pointed out by Bohr more than 100 years ago...
  • Dario Izzo on 05 Mar 13
     
    I guess chaos is what you are referring to. Stuff like the Lorentz attractor. In which case I would say that the point is not to predict one particular brain (in which case you would be right): any initial conditions would be fine as far as any brain gets started :) that is the goal :)
  • Luzi Bergamin on 05 Mar 13
     
    Kurzweil talks about downloading your brain to a computer, so he has a specific brain in mind; Markram talks about identifying neural basis of mental diseases, so he has at least pretty specific situations in mind. Chaos is not the only problem, even a perfectly linear brain (which is not a biological brain) is not predictable, since one cannot determine a complete set of initial conditions of a working (viz. living) brain (after having determined about 10% the brain is dead and the data useless). But the situation is even worse: from all we know a brain will only work with a suitable interaction with its environment. So these boundary conditions one has to determine as well. This is already twice impossible. But the situation is worse again: from all we know, the way the brain interacts with its environment at a neural level depends on his history (how this brain learned). So your boundary conditions (that are impossible to determine) depend on your initial conditions (that are impossible to determine). Thus the situation is rather impossible squared than twice impossible. I'm sure Markram will simulate something, but this will rather be the famous Boltzmann brain than a biological one. Boltzman brains work with any initial conditions and any boundary conditions... and are pretty dead!
  • Dario Izzo on 05 Mar 13
     
    Say one has an accurate model of a brain. It may be the case that the initial and boundary conditions do not matter that much in order for the brain to function an exhibit macro-characteristics useful to make science. Again, if it is not one particular brain you are targeting, but the 'brain' as a general entity this would make sense if one has an accurate model (also to identify the neural basis of mental diseases). But in my opinion, the construction of such a model of the brain is impossible using a reductionist approach (that is taking the naive approach of putting together some artificial neurons and connecting them in a huge net). That is why both Kurzweil and Markram are doomed to fail.
  • johannessimon81 on 06 Mar 13
     
    I think that in principle some kind of artificial brain should be feasible. But making a brain by just throwing together a myriad of neurons is probably as promising as throwing together some copper pipes and a heap of silica and expecting it to make calculations for you. Like in the biological system, I suspect, an artificial brain would have to grow from a small tiny functional unit by adding neurons and complexity slowly and in a way that in a stable way increases the "usefulness"/fitness. Apparently our brain's usefulness has to do with interpreting inputs of our sensors to the world and steering the body making sure that those sensors, the brain and the rest of the body are still alive 10 seconds from now (thereby changing the world -> sensor inputs -> ...). So the artificial brain might need sensors and a body to affect the "world" creating a much larger feedback loop than the brain itself. One might argue that the complexity of the sensor inputs is the reason why the brain needs to be so complex in the first place. I never quite see from these "artificial brain" proposals in how far they are trying to simulate the whole system and not just the brain. Anyone? Or are they trying to simulate the human brain after it has been removed from the body? That might be somewhat easier I guess...
  • Luís F. Simões on 06 Mar 13
     
    Johannes: "I never quite see from these "artificial brain" proposals in how far they are trying to simulate the whole system and not just the brain." In Artificial Life the whole environment+bodies&brains is simulated. You have also the whole embodied cognition movement that basically advocates for just that: no true intelligence until you model the system in its entirety. And from that you then have people building robotic bodies, and getting their "brains" to learn from scratch how to control them, and through the bodies, the environment. Right now, this is obviously closer to the complexity of insect brains, than human ones. (my take on this is: yes, go ahead and build robots, if the intelligence you want to get in the end is to be displayed in interactions with the real physical world...) It's easy to dismiss Markram's Blue Brain for all their clever marketing pronouncements that they're building a human-level consciousness on a computer, but from what I read of the project, they seem to be developing a platfrom onto which any scientist can plug in their model of a detail of a detail of .... of the human brain, and get it to run together with everyone else's models of other tiny parts of the brain. This is not the same as getting the artificial brain to interact with the real world, but it's a big step in enabling scientists to study their own models on more realistic settings, in which the models' outputs get to effect many other systems, and throuh them feed back into its future inputs. So Blue Brain's biggest contribution might be in making model evaluation in neuroscience less wrong, and that doesn't seem like a bad thing. At some point the reductionist approach needs to start moving in the other direction.
  • Luzi Bergamin on 06 Mar 13
     
    @ Dario: absolutely agree, the reductionist approach is the main mistake. My point: if you take the reductionsit approach, then you will face the initial and boundary value problem. If one tries a non-reductionist approach, this problem may be much weaker. But off the record: there exists a non-reductionist theory of the brain, it's called psychology... @ Johannes: also agree, the only way the reductionist approach could eventually be successful is to actually grow the brain. Start with essentially one neuron and grow the whole complexity. But if you want to do this, bring up a kid! A brain without body might be easier? Why do you expect that a brain detached from its complete input/output system actually still works. I'm pretty sure it does not!
  • johannessimon81 on 06 Mar 13
     
    @Luzi: That was exactly my point :-)
mkisantal

Learning to Interpret Satellite Images Using Wikipedia - 3 views

arxiv.org/1809.10236v1.pdf

AI

shared by mkisantal on 23 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • mkisantal on 23 Nov 18
     
    "We construct a novel large-scale, multi-modal dataset by pairing geo-referenced Wikipedia articles with satellite imagery of their corresponding locations."
dharmeshtailor

FB pre-trained deep neural net on billion image user-hashtag dataset - 0 views

code.facebook.com/...with-deep-learning-on-hashtags

AI technology

shared by dharmeshtailor on 04 May 18 - No Cached
  • dharmeshtailor on 04 May 18
     
    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.
Alexander Wittig

Calling Bullshit - 2 views

callingbullshit.org/index.html

science

shared by Alexander Wittig on 27 Feb 17 - No Cached
LeopoldS and jcunha liked it
  • Alexander Wittig on 27 Feb 17
     
    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.
  • LeopoldS on 01 Mar 17
     
    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."
Alexander Wittig

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

psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/xge0000314

shared by Alexander Wittig on 04 May 17 - No Cached
  • Alexander Wittig on 04 May 17
     
    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.
hannalakk

The Adorable Microbots That Swarm to Build Structures - 2 views

www.wired.com/...that-swarm-to-build-structures

shared by hannalakk on 29 Sep 17 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • hannalakk on 29 Sep 17
     
    At SRI International in Silicon Valley, researchers have developed perhaps the most impressive microbot army yet: the MicroFactory. It's an ant colony made robotic, with half-millimeter machines zipping around to construct truly impressive structures.
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