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tsk tsk typical ex-ACT criticism.. Maybe for me too from next week;P

WRONG! You ignore the fact that I complained already while I was yet in the ACT!! Seriously: I clicked around in "ResearchGate" a little bit, couldn't find too many interesting things. Many scientists from India, Iran etc. desperately looking for contacts, retired engineers/scientists from industry that now remember that they were once at university and also quite a number of semi-crackpots. My honest conclusion: not a must. Btw: wish you a nice post-ACT depression! Keep a stiff upper lip, esp. in case you go back to Greece...

surprising? not really ...

http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=7933596&story_id=13176056 similar info for beverages. coffee bad. particularly since i assume they're considering british coffee rather than a ristretto in rome

... which means that the quality-to-amount-of-water-used ratio is even more terrible.

Although I'm not sure if fighting ash clouds lies within space industry interests, but "Weird science" in the title makes it an obligatory read for an ACTer, doesn't it?

I just can't see how their way of finding non-state funding for a 100 year project could work but would be happy to be surprised positively ...

they used names of scientists and research centres without these actually knowing about their involvement it seems.... I am wondering what they actually reported back in terms of results? randomly generated papers? Christos?

Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'm very pessimistic. I guess they will impose even more control, ask for even more detailed description of the results that will be delivered and concentrate even more on project funding instead of funding open research.

maybe this is what happen when there is so much paper involved... a simple phone call to one of the research scientist and the fraud is unveiled :) or maybe the "bored project officer" has a brand new mercedes...

Some juicy sound bites from the former Google CIO.

who wants 100 cores ... future of PAGMO?

The problem with this flurry of activity today regarding multicore architectures is that it is really unclear which one will be the winner in the long run. Never understimate the power of inertia, especially in the software industry (after all, people are still programming in COBOL and Fortran today). For instance, NVIDIA gives you the Teslas with 10000 cores, but then you have to rewrite extensive parts of your code in order to take advantage of this. Is this an investment worth undertaking? Difficult to say, it would certainly be if the whole software world moves into that direction (which is not happening - yet?). But then you have other approaches coming out, suche as the Cell processor by IBM (the one on the PS3) which has really impressive floating point performance and, of course, a completely different programming model. The nice thing about this Tilera processor seems to be that it is a general-purpose processor, which may not require extensive re-engineering of existing code (but I'm really hypothesizing, since the thechincal details are not very abundant on their website).

Moreover PaGMO computation model is more towards systems with distributed memory, and not with shared memory (i.e. multi-core). In the latter, at certain point the memory access becomes the bottleneck.

Just read about this, it looks like an interesting example of bottom-up innovation and self-organization.

Interesting article on ultra-fast stock market manipulation.

Quotes from the comments: "I know for a fact a few houses have been able to get micro-second trades, whereas the rest of the industry is still dealing in milli-second trades." For when the nano-second trades...!

oups ... pretty smart, they seem to have found the real aggressors :-)

FEM modelling of bone structures in woodpeckers combined with high speed video of pecking motion etc headgear? shock absorbing structures? low mass hammering penetrators? Lizhen Wang1,2, Jason Tak-Man Cheung3, Fang Pu1, Deyu Li1, Ming Zhang2*, Yubo Fan1* 1 Key Laboratory for Biomechanics and Mechanobiology of Ministry of Education, School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, People's Republic of China, 2 Department of Health Technology and Informatics, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, 3 Li Ning Sports Science Research Center, Beijing, People's Republic of China Head injury is a leading cause of morbidity and death in both industrialized and developing countries.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said Friday that it has succeeded in transmitting 10 kW of power through 500 m. An announcement that comes just after JAXA scientists reported one more breakthrough in the quest for Space Solar Power Systems (http://phys.org/news/2015-03-japan-space-scientists-wireless-energy.html). One step closer to Power Generation from Space/

from the press release (https://www.mhi-global.com/news/story/1503121879.html) "10 kilowatts (kW) of power was sent from a transmitting unit by microwave. The reception of power was confirmed at a receiver unit located at a distance of 500 meters (m) away by the illumination of LED lights, using part of power transmitted". So 10kW of transmission to light a few efficient LED lights??? In a 2011 report (https://www.mhi-global.com/company/technology/review/pdf/e484/e484017.pdf), MHI estimated this would generate the same electricity output as a 400-megawatt thermal plant - or enough to serve more than 150,000 homes during peak hours. The price? The same as publicly supplied power, according to its calculations. There are no results to boost these claims however. The main work they do now is focused on beam steering control. I guess the real application in mind is more targeted to terrestrial applications, eg wireless highway charging (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120312-wireless-highway-to-charge-cars). With the distances so much shorter, leading to much smaller antenna's and rectenna's this makes much more sense to me to develop.

not sure what to make of this. seems like an odd change of direction "Spaceports will be key to us opening up the final frontier of commercial space travel," said Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander at the announcement of the new sites. Mr Alexander hinted that the plans could lead to Scotland becoming the home of the UK's commercial space ambitions, even as the Scottish government warns that only independence will secure a successful space industry for the country.

A free software tool that could revolutionize the drone industry to design and build your own drone/aircraft/fighter with a 3-D online software that generates aerodynamic information (maybe optimization also) about your own design.

"Publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself"

On a related topic - a nice read written in 1939 from Abraham Flexner the founder of Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, home of some great minds on the "Usefulness of Useless Knowledge". Enjoy https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf

This article is fantastic - starts already well with : "r IT not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women-old and young-detach them-selves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation ofbeauty, to the exten-sion ofknowledge, to the cure ofdisease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering?" Could almost be written now