China broke ground on its fourth space center Monday, highlighting the country's soaring space ambitions six years after it sent its first man into orbit. - .6.000 people had to be relocated for the construction
I worked at Google from 2005-2010, and saw the company go through many changes, and a huge increase in staff. Most importantly, I saw the company go from a place where engineers were seen as violent disruptors and innovators, to a place where doing things “The Google Way” was king, and where thinking outside the box was discouraged and even chastised.
Let engineers do what they do best, and forget the rest.
This is probably the most important single point. Engineers at Google spend way too much time fussing about with everything other than engineering and product design.
Meetings. Seriously, people are drenched in “status update” and “team” meetings.
Weekly Snippets, perf, etc. I was continually amazed by the amount of “extra cruft work” that goes on. I know it sounds important, but engineers should be coding & designing.
An opinion piece by an ex-Googler, talking, among other things, about how corporate culture is creeping into Google. I've highlighted some snippets which I've found eerily familiar :)
"A Soviet supercavitation torpedo called Shkval was able to reach a speed of 370km/h or more - much faster than any other conventional torpedoes," he said.
However,
The SCMP highlighted two problems in supercavitation technology. First, the submerged vessel needed to be launched at high speeds, approaching 100km/h, to generate and maintain the air bubble. Secondly, it is difficult if not impossible to steer the vessel using conventional mechanisms, which are inside the bubble, without direct contact with water. As a result, its application has been limited to unmanned vessels, fired in a straight line.
It's out there for TWO days and no one has posted it here yet? What's happening to the ACT...
In any case, yet-another-year-ACT-didn't-make-it... Better luck next time.
I think e.g. de Tommaso et al. results have application in almost any business, ESA notwithstanding, in terms of implications for optimal office decor...
I was actually at the mid-term review in Sweden last year. Also played the game for a few minutes. The final presentation is next week in case anyone in the ACT is interested.
As I now work in the Centre for Robotics *and Neuroscience*, here's a story for you.
Some highlights:
"It sent the iron straight up into his skull and out of the top of his head, landing some 30 metres away. (...) Phineas was unconscious before getting up and riding an oxcart into town with, 'a big bleedin' hole in his head'. (...) although Phineas survived, he was a changed man. Now he was reportedly unreliable, partial to swearing and often making inappropriate remarks."
I guess If I were him I'd be a little partial to swearing too.
Perhaps some of ACTers will find this conference interesting... One of the talks:
"Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication"
[Edit] Oh, I see someone has already posted this link... a year ago. Anyway, if anyone of you plans to go, let me know - I'll be around ;-)
Just came back from ESOF 2010... I was on look for ACT agents undercover, but either they were not there or the cover was good enough... Anyway here's a few remarks from me (I could write a nice report... if you paid):
1) In general, to say that ESA was underrepresented on the conference as a whole is not enough (I guess ESA just failed to notice the event taking place). For instance, on the GMES presentation, ESA as such was not mentioned at all... at some point I started to wonder if ESA is actually involved in the project, but now I checked the website and apparently it is. On the other hand, GMES presentation was crap anyway, as after 1:15 of talking, I didn't gain any knowledge of what GMES is and what its contributions to the EU community will be.
2) There was a lot of talk about LHC and particle research (well, at least among those that I attended). Some of them were very good, some of them rather crap...
3) "Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication" talk - quite interesting, but focusing mainly on Science-to-Wide Public and Science-to-Journalists communication. Not really on Science-to-Science (as in Ariadnet). There was quite an extensive discussion with the public. You may be interested that Nature is trying to stimulate Web 2.0 communication, running blog service, but also I think a kind of social network - perhaps you'd like to have a look. In general the conclusion was that Web 2.0 is not so useful for scientific communication because practising it requires TIME (blogs, etc.) and often some professional skills (podcasts/videocasts, etc.), and scientists have neither of these. This can be run on corporation level (like ESA does actually), but then it looses the "intimate" character.
4) "How much can robots learn?" talk... very nicely presented: understandable by the wide public, but conveying the message... which is something like "we can already make the robots do stuff absolutely imp
Well, my comment was cut in half, and I don't feel like typing it again... the most important highlight from the rest is that the only presenter from ESA (ESTEC) did not show up on his talk because his department was undergoing some sort of audit on the same day :)
A compilation of the highlights of the year, with Rosetta on the first page. There is a follow-up article about potential breakthroughs for 2015 based on ongoing research very interesting to see as well.
A new so called 5D data storage that could potentially survive for billions of years. The research consists of nanostructured glass that can record digital data in five dimensions using femtosecond laser writing.
Very scarce scientific info available..
I'm very curious to see a bit more in future.
From https://spie.org/PWL/conferencedetails/laser-micro-nanoprocessing
I made a back of envelop calc: for 20 nm spaced, each laser spot in 5D encryption encodes 3 bits (it seemed to me) written in 3 planes, to obtain the claimed 360TB disk one needs very roughly 6000mm2, which does not complain with the dimensions shown in video. Only with larger number of planes (order of magnitude higher) it could be..
Also, at current commercial trends NAND Flash and HDD allow for 1000 Gb/in2. This means a 360 TB could hypothetically fit in 1800mm2.
I had the same issue with the numbers when I saw the announcement a few days back (https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-update.page). It doesn't seem to add up. Plus, the examples they show are super low amounts of data (the bible probably fits on a few 1.44 MB floppy disk).
As for the comparison with NAND and HDD, I think the main argument for their crystal is that it is supposedly more durable. HDDs are chronically bad at long term storage, and also NAND as far as I know needs to be refreshed frequently.
Yes Alex, indeed, the durability is the point I think they highlight and focus on (besides the fact the abstract says something as the extrapolated decay time being comparable to the age of the Universe..). Indeed memories face problems with retention time. Most of the disks retain the information up to 10 years. When enterprises want to store data for longer times than this they use... yeah, magnetic tapes :-). Check a interesting article about magnetic tape market revival here http://www.information-age.com/technology/data-centre-and-it-infrastructure/123458854/rise-fall-and-re-rise-magnetic-tape
I compared for fun, to have one idea of what we were talking about.
I am also very curious so see the writing and reading times in this new memory :)