Group items tagged

"slides which were presented by an executive at Toyota during some kind of task force meeting that discusses Japan's direction/strategy in space exploration"

as discussed at lunch: "Robert Newman gets to grips with the wars and politics of the last hundred years - but rather than adhering to the history we were fed at school, he places oil centre stage as the cause of all commotion."

Hilarious critique to a quite important paper from Stanford trying to push the agenda of global warming .... "You might therefore be surprised that, as I will discuss below, this paper is completely wrong. Nothing in it is correct. It fails in every imaginable respect."

also good overview: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/noaa_nasa_global_analysis_2015.pdf

just a footnote here, that climate warming aspect is not derived by an agenda of presenting the world with evil. If one looks at big journals with high outreach, it is not uncommon to find articles promoting climate warming as something not bringing the doom that extremists are promoting with marketing strategies. Here is a recent article in Science: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26612836 Science's role is to look at the phenomenon and notice what is observed. And here is one saying that the acidification of the ocean due to increase of CO2 (observed phenomenon) is not advancing destructively for coccolithophores (a key type of plankton that builds its shell out of carbonates), as we were expecting, but rather fertilises them! Good news in principle! It could be as well argued from the more sceptics with high "doubting-inertia" that 'It could be because CO2 is not rising in the first place'', but one must not forget that one can doubt the global increase in T with statistical analyses, because it is a complex variable, but at least not the CO2 increase compared to preindustrial levels. in either case : case 1: agenda for 'the world is warming' => - Put random big energy company here- sells renewable energies case 2: agenda for 'the world is fine' => - Put random big energy company here - sells oil as usual The fact that in both cases someone is going to win profits, does not correllate (still not an adequate statistical test found for it?) with the fact that the science needs to be more and more scrutinised. The blog of the Statistics Professor in Univ.Toronto looks interesting approach (I have not understood all the details) and the paper above is from JPL authors, among others.

Of interest for debris monitoring and SSA? It has been suggested in the kelvins discussions.....

this is something that I think would really make sense to look closer into, also checking what ESA might have already done on it

The redbull mission will attempt to transcend human limits. Supported by a team of experts Felix Baumgartner plans to ascend to 120,000 feet in a stratospheric balloon and make a freefall jump rushing toward earth at supersonic speeds before parachuting to the ground.

since months austria is not speaking about anything else ... hope it is over soon :-) seriously: they even had last year Armstrong coming over to discuss with this guy on television (have posted it here) and the whole Red Bull advertisement machinery is working full speed on this ... quite impressive for just a jump ...

And thats the bad news .... obviously from texas

we just had discussion about how it makes easier to have a gun and now US Government is demanding to take blueprints offline http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22478310

Linked to the discussion we had last week on elastically non-linear polymers. The inverted liquid->solid phase transition might be interesting and the material might be self-healing just above the transition.

"A platform for public participation in and discussion of the human perspective on machine-made moral decisions" Machine Ethics is basically the return of philosophy through code. Here you can learn a bit about it, and help the MIT collect data on how humans make choices when faced with ethical dilemmas, and how we perceive AIs making such choices.

Very interesting presentation on how the brain can back-propagate error signals during learning (using time-derivatives to encode errors). Hinton discusses how back-propagation can be achieved with very limited / unsophisticated tools and in excessively noise environments.

Maybe of interest for the ever lasting discussion around the coffee machines of our meeting room... :) paper at http://epubs.siam.org/doi/pdf/10.1137/15M1036658

An intermediate level discussion of those results by Scott Manley (Physicist, Kerbal Space Program YouTuber): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGcvxg7jJTs

We discussed a few times about whether it is possible to determine the quality of a paper by extracting visual features from the paper and then learning a mapping to a measure of quality such as the number of citations etc. This paper circulated at CVPR 2010, and does exactly that, mapping visual features to estimate whether it has been accepted for the main conference or the workshops.

hmmm, I was wondering how many ESA employees do know that ACT does exist....

And my son studying at Stanford (he just sent me the same link !) follows the courses this semester of two of the teachers mentioned in the article, Thrun - very good and Ng - excellent

Put together two ACT topics and see what happens.

I remember discussing this briefly and then discarding the idea - but don't remember why any more; duncan?

Well, I think that although the antenna is small, you counteract this with a much large metameterial lens. Probably if you design an antenna of a similar size to the 'lens' you can couple power equally well over the same distance. Then again, further optimization might help improve the size. Maybe in the end you want to combine both together, optimization of the antenna, including a metamaterials lens.

Interesting discussion is going about, on how work anxiety is spreading in academia, with possible mental consequences. And with robust links to the "Doing What You Love" motto of life/work. Could be proven an unsustainable model though. Recalling of Higgs' recent declaration, that today's Academia productivity demands would be hectic for him, could point to the direction of the problem and the solution...?

After a discussion this morning on robust computing and possible implementations in biological systems I found this really nice result (from 2008) on molecular RNA computers that get assembled within cells and perform simple functions. Of course by having different types of computers within the same cell one could go on to process the output of the other and more complex computations could be executed... Food for thought. :-)

Interesting read if you're interested on the kind of coding that goes into something like the Curiosity rover. :) btw.. nice fill-packet being sent by Curiosity: "Elvis has Spirit. The answer is 42....END\r\n"