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Nicholas Lan

Kerbal Space Program | Media - 2 views

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    what seems to be an impressively detailed space game
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    Yeah... 2011 called with the greetings. However, there was quite an interesting news about KSP recently... Perhaps it's been ACT's small failure to spot this opportunity? Considering we wrote space missions games ourselves...
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    This guy actually makes very detailed video tutorials about how to master the orbital dynamics in Kerbal. I think the level of detail (and sometimes realism) is quite impressive: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxzC4EngIsMrPmbm6Nxvb-A
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    I will have to try this definitely, looks like a lot of fun.. I also saw some crazy 'Insane Rocket Division' videos.. :)
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    @Marek: true, old news. But "opportunity"? For what? The games we write are always games with a scientific purpose (not training not educational) Kerbal Space programme is cool, but it is a game just like Microsoft Flight Simulator (but less accurate). Having ESA mission simulated in it is also cool but is it what we should or could do? Even more is it want we want to do? My personal opinion: No-No-No
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    > The games we write are always games with a scientific purpose (not training not educational) I'd say investigating how to get the crowd may be an important part of "science of crowdsourcing". So, an obvious example would be comparing how many participants the original ACT space mission game attracted versus a variant implemented in Kerbal and why. Easily made and easily publishable I think. But that's just an obvious example I can give on the spot. I think there is more potential than that, so would not dismiss the idea so definitively. But then, correct me if I'm wrong, social sciences are still not represented in the ACT... Perhaps an idea to revive during the upcoming retreat? ;-)
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    it's on sale on steam til tomorrow by the way if anyone's interested
Marcus Maertens

Physics Just made the Axe Cooler - 2 views

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    Need to chop some wood? Use the Lever Axe!
johannessimon81

IBM Speech Recognition, 1986 - 0 views

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    Interesting historical perspective. Progress since the late '80 really seems to be fairly slow. ?: Do we need to wait for the singularity until speech recognition works without flaws?
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    funny - tried just yesterday the one built in on mavericks: sending one email took three times as long at least as typing it And now my speech PowerPoint Funny, trade trust yesterday they're built in speech recognition in Mavericks sending one e-mail to at least three times a talk as long as typing it. Well this was actually quite okay and relatively fast cheers nice evening
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    "I thought I would give it a try on my android sexy seems to work pretty well and I'm speaking more less at normal speed" Actually I was speaking as fast as I could because it was for the google search input - if you make a pause it will think you finished your input and start the query. Also you might notice that Android thinks it is "android sexy" - this was meant to be "on my Android. THIS seems to work...". Still it is not too bad - maybe in a year or two they have it working. Of course it might also be that I just use the word "sexy" randomly... :-\
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    The problem is that we don't yet understand how speech in humans actually works. As long as we merely build either inference or statistical language models we'll never get perfect speech recognition. A lot of recognition in humans has a predictive/expectational basis to it that stems from our understanding of higher lvl concepts and context awareness. Sadly I suspect that as long as machines remain unembodied in their perceptual abilities their ability to either properly recognize sounds/speech or objects and other features will never reach perfection.
Chritos Vezyri

New fabrication technique could provide breakthrough for solar energy systems - 3 views

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    The principle behind that is Nantenna.
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    this is fantastic!!!! waiting of somebody to make this happen since years The size of the gap is critical because it creates an ultra-fast tunnel junction between the rectenna's two electrodes, allowing a maximum transfer of electricity. The nanosized gap gives energized electrons on the rectenna just enough time to tunnel to the opposite electrode before their electrical current reverses and they try to go back. The triangular tip of the rectenna makes it hard for the electrons to reverse direction, thus capturing the energy and rectifying it to a unidirectional current. Impressively, the rectennas, because of their extremely small and fast tunnel diodes, are capable of converting solar radiation in the infrared region through the extremely fast and short wavelengths of visible light - something that has never been accomplished before. Silicon solar panels, by comparison, have a single band gap which, loosely speaking, allows the panel to convert electromagnetic radiation efficiently at only one small portion of the solar spectrum. The rectenna devices don't rely on a band gap and may be tuned to harvest light over the whole solar spectrum, creating maximum efficiency. Through atomic layer deposition, Willis has shown he is able to precisely coat the tip of the rectenna with layers of individual copper atoms until a gap of about 1.5 nanometers is achieved. The process is self-limiting and stops at 1.5 nanometer separation The size of the gap is critical because it creates an ultra-fast tunnel junction between the rectenna's two electrodes, allowing a maximum transfer of electricity. The nanosized gap gives energized electrons on the rectenna just enough time to tunnel to the opposite electrode before their electrical current reverses and they try to go back. The triangular tip of the rectenna makes it hard for the electrons to reverse direction, thus capturing the energy and rectifying it to a unidirectional current. Impressively, the rectennas, because of th
Joris _

Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | ESA needs to 'tighten the belt' amid budget crisis - 2 views

  • ESA is freezing spending
  • France is planning to boost its funding by 12 percent
  • ESA selected Thales Alenia Space and OHB Technology to build the satellites, but the production contract is still bogged down by Germany's complaints about the distribution of MTG work between France and Germany
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    no much news in regard to the january's talk of Dordain althought just a thought : what if ESA tries to make money - as CNES does - rather than just spending it ?
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    to begin with european industry (and probably governments) would complain that ESA was taking business away from industry? or any part that started to make money would be quickly spun-off
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    really bad interview in my view ... btw: how is CNES making money and how much?
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    CNES is known to be a semi-autonomous agency in the sense that it can auto-finance parts of its activities. Besides the money coming from the state, money comes from the participation of CNES in private companies (e.g. Arianespace) and its own activities (e.g. SPOT among others...). It is about 400M€ per year (almost a class-M mission in Cosmic Vision). For the figures (in French): http://www.cnes.fr/automne_modules_files/standard/public/p4354_c050f7963b54a839a843723401bfddf2budget.pdf
Luzi Bergamin

You know you have been in Finland too long, when... - 4 views

shared by Luzi Bergamin on 23 Jun 10 - Cached
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    How you know you have been to long in xy. The Finnish version. My favorite is 33. You accept that 80°C in a sauna is chilly, but 20°C outside is freaking hot. Quite a lot of them are outdated, esp. about opening hours of shops, and one is definitely missing. Your normal mealtime has shifted to 11am for lunch and 5pm for dinner. But don't worry, it's a really comfy place here, isnt' it Jose??
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    well somethings you get used to in a year (like salmiakki or koskenkorva) others don't (seriously, lunch at 11?!?!)
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    But what stage are you in already, Luzi?
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    I would say a 50% Finn. I do have lunch at 11am, every working day, an 80 degrees sauna indeed is just a warm room. But I will never get used to salmiakki (which is just literally eating a cleaning agent!!) and you can imagine that "silence is fun" is not really MY motto...
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    True?? 22. You understand why the Finnish language has no future tense. No, I don't think I ever will understand that one... Finns are quite future-oriented at two particular times of the year. On the day after Midsummer (see above), they say "Well, it's all downhill from now on" and prepare feverishly for winter, and similarly after December 21st they perk up and start thinking about Midsummer - ignoring the fact that they still have to get through January, February and March before the place becomes inhabitable again...
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    ... Finnish language has no future tense. That's true
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    everything expressed with "tomorrow I go to " or "in one year" etc? what about the distinction between to future events, one conditional on the other?
Tobias Seidl

Looting, Cannibalism and Death Blows: The 'Shock and Awe' of Ant Warfare | Danger Room ... - 2 views

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    Just some ant suff again.
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    what strategies!!!
Juxi Leitner

How I became a Foursquare cyberstalker | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Foursquare is now being widely touted as the app which will, after years of anticipation and prediction, mark the beginning of "life as a game" computing. Whatever you do, wherever you go, you will be scoring points, earning "medals", and be in, at the very least, social competition with other users around you.
  • Privacy seems to be very low down their priorities. In theory, if every user knows the risks, this is fine. But they just don't. It's being targeted at 18 to 25-year-olds. Facebook was forced in the end to change its default privacy settings due to public concerns. Foursquare should do the same. Some people are even checking in when they're at home. Think of the implications. It's crazy
  • Recruitment is a form of stalking, I suppose. But I can now see the negative implications of Foursquare in the real world.
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  • Ten days ago Foursquare reached the two-million-users landmark, just three months after it had reached the one-million mark. A week earlier, the company received $20m in venture capital from a who's who of Silicon Valley luminaries. It appears the trajectory for Foursquare is only upwards. But as the critical mass of Foursquare users swells and intensifies over the coming months and years, the concerns over privacy are likely to magnify. In June, Webroot, a Denver-based internet security firm, surveyed 1,645 users of "geo-location-ready mobile devices", including 624 in the UK: 29% said they shared their location with people other than their friends; 31% said they accepted a friend request from a stranger; and, yet, 55% still said they were worried about their loss of privacy.
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    anybody here using Foursquare already? Location is supposed to be "the future" (this time)
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    this is worse than having a mobile ... !
jmlloren

Exotic matter : Insight : Nature - 5 views

shared by jmlloren on 03 Aug 10 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
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    Trends in materials and condensed matter. Check out the topological insulators. amazing field.
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    Aparently very interesting, will it survive the short hype? Relevant work describing mirror charges of topological insulators and the classical boundary conditions were done by Ismo and Ari. But the two communities don't know each other and so they are never cited. Also a way to produce new things...
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    Thanks for noticing! Indeed, I had no idea that Ari (don't know Ismo) was involved in the field. Was it before Kane's proposal or more recently? What I mostly like is that semiconductors are good candidates for 3D TI, however I got lost in the quantum field jargon. Yesterday, I got a headache trying to follow the Majorana fermions, the merons, skyrnions, axions, and so on. Luzi, are all these things familiar to you?
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    Ismo Lindell described in the early 90's the mirror charge of what is now called topological insulator. He says that similar results were obtained already at the beginning of the 20th century... Ismo Lindell and Ari Sihvola in the recent years discussed engineering aspects of PEMCs (perfect electro-megnetic conductors,) which are more or less classical analogues of topological insulators. Fundamental aspects of PEMCs are well knwon in high-energy physics for a long time, recent works are mainly due to Friedrich Hehl and Yuri Obukhov. All these works are purely classical, so there is no charge quantisation, no considerations of electron spin etc. About Majorana fermions: yes, I spent several years of research on that topic. Axions: a topological state, of course, trivial :-) Also merons and skyrnions are topological states, but I'm less familiar with them.
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    "Non-Abelian systems1, 2 contain composite particles that are neither fermions nor bosons and have a quantum statistics that is far richer than that offered by the fermion-boson dichotomy. The presence of such quasiparticles manifests itself in two remarkable ways. First, it leads to a degeneracy of the ground state that is not based on simple symmetry considerations and is robust against perturbations and interactions with the environment. Second, an interchange of two quasiparticles does not merely multiply the wavefunction by a sign, as is the case for fermions and bosons. Rather, it takes the system from one ground state to another. If a series of interchanges is made, the final state of the system will depend on the order in which these interchanges are being carried out, in sharp contrast to what happens when similar operations are performed on identical fermions or bosons." wow, this paper by Stern reads really weired ... any of you ever looked into this?
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    C'mon Leopold, it's as trivial as the topological states, AKA axions! Regarding the question, not me!
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    just looked up the wikipedia entry on axions .... at least they have some creativity in names giving: "In supersymmetric theories the axion has both a scalar and a fermionic superpartner. The fermionic superpartner of the axion is called the axino, the scalar superpartner is called the saxion. In some models, the saxion is the dilaton. They are all bundled up in a chiral superfield. The axino has been predicted to be the lightest supersymmetric particle in such a model.[24] In part due to this property, it is considered a candidate for the composition of dark matter.[25]"
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    Thank's Leopold. Sorry Luzi for being ironic concerning the triviality of the axions. Now, Leo confirmed me that indeed is a trivial matter. I have problems with models where EVERYTHING is involved.
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    Well, that's the theory of everything, isn't it?? Seriously: I don't think that theoretically there is a lot of new stuff here. Topological aspects of (non-Abelian) theories became extremely popular in the context of string theory. The reason is very simple: topological theories are much simpler than "normal" and since string theory anyway is far too complicated to be solved, people just consider purely topological theories, then claiming that this has something to do with the real world, which of course is plainly wrong. So what I think is new about these topological insulators are the claims that one can actually fabricate a material which more or less accurately mimics a topological theory and that these materials are of practical use. Still, they are a little bit the poor man's version of the topological theories fundamental physicists like to look at since electrdynamics is an Abelian theory.
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    I have the feeling, not the knowledge, that you are right. However, I think that the implications of this light quantum field effects are great. The fact of being able to sustain two currents polarized in spin is a technological breakthrough.
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    not sure how much I can contribute to your apparently educated debate here but if I remember well from my work for the master, these non-Abelian theories were all but "simple" as Luzi puts it ... and from a different perspective: to me the whole thing of being able to describe such non-Abelian systems nicely indicates that they should in one way or another also have some appearance in Nature (would be very surprised if not) - though this is of course no argument that makes string theory any better or closer to what Luzi called reality ....
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    Well, electrodynamics remains an Abelian theory. From the theoretical point of view this is less interesting than non-Abelian ones, since in 4D the fibre bundle of a U(1) theory is trivial (great buzz words, eh!) But in topological insulators the point of view is slightly different since one always has the insulator (topological theory), its surrounding (propagating theory) and most importantly the interface between the two. This is a new situation that people from field and string theory were not really interested in.
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    guys... how would you explain this to your gran mothers?
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    *you* tried *your* best .... ??
Dario Izzo

File Compression: New Tool for Life Detection? - 4 views

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    As mentioned today during coffee .... we could think to link this to source localization
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    Not sure by what you mean by source localisation, but this using gzip to discern "biological" from "non-biological" images seems to me *very* tricky... I mean, there's a lot of other factors that may affect compressibility of an image than just mere "regularity" of the pattern, and if they haven't controlled for these, this is just bullsh1t... (For instance did they use the same imaging device to take those images? What about lighting conditions and exposure? etc). The apostle of sometimes surprising uses of compression is prof. Shmidhuber from IDSIA...
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    I completely agree with you..... still if you have one instrument on board the spacecraft and your picture compressibility is a noisy indicator of some interesting source .... we could try to perform some probabilistic reasoning
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    I think they (IDSIA-Schmidhuber) are planning on putting something about that also inside the Acta Futura paper...
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    Really, you think they'd target such a low impact factor publication? ;-P
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    you will all soon be begging to publish in Acta Futura! We will be bigger than Nature.
nikolas smyrlakis

The Space Game - 3 views

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    already on slashdot with a lot of comments. Amazing work, I have no words ! I will just start playing
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    best comment, act style : If we assume teleporters, it wouldn't even take a second. Therefore my completely unrealistic solution is much better than your completely unrealistic
duncan barker

Vienna University of Technology: News Detail - 2 views

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    Storing energy with flywheels instead of batteries. This is not a new idea, but i just put it on here so you are aware of it.
andreiaries

Upping the Anti: CERN Physicists Trap Antimatter Atoms for the First Time: Scientific A... - 0 views

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    Not really the first time, but they seem to be much closer to be being able to study them. Apparently, they had 38 atoms trapped for miliseconds. Now it's time to prove it behaves just like matter.
nikolas smyrlakis

The Future Of Energy? Bloom Energy Boxes Already Power Google, eBay, Others - 0 views

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    just another fuel cell?the vid is interesting
Francesco Biscani

Google chrome using Gentoo's Portage - 2 views

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    Just a heads up for Dario :)
pacome delva

981.pdf (Objet application/pdf) - 6 views

shared by pacome delva on 14 Dec 09 - No Cached
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    Where do you want to go to do academic research and still have a decent salary ? certainly not sweden, France or Germany... prefer the UK, US or the top... Switzerland !
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    Where do you want to go to do academic research and still have fun? Where can you really do research instead of becoming an overpaid secretary? If you want to get rich go and work in investment banking...
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    well.. i'd better live decently than get rich... which is not possible in Paris (take 1680 euros for one family and a 1000 euros rent, minus all normal expenses (health, car, insurance, ...), it's difficult to finish the month...) Without mentioning that in France you would become an underpaid secretary...!!! My ex phd director is a professor and she doesn't even have a secretary to manage the 150 applications to the master she is in charge... My experience would rather say that the salary and the time you have for research are quite decorrelated.
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    Sure, 44k for a full professor, that's a bad joke! Just my experience from conferences: high saleries do not make good research, I rather suspect there's something like an optimal salery. People with too high saleries often seem to feel obliged to make much noise (whatever the reason might be), the result is not research but PR campagns.
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    I agree ! Just a correction, net salary for a full professor starting in France: 36456 euros/year... For a McF (equivalent junior prof.): 20160 euros/year, and of course a shitload of admistrative tasks and teaching. I don't know why i still dream to have a position...?
nikolas smyrlakis

Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movies, 2000 and Beyond | Underwire | Wired.com - 0 views

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    some ideas for movie Fridays A "must" see on my opinion (never heard about it in the past!) : Primer Sounds ideal: "Primer is a 2004 American science fiction film about the accidental discovery of time travel. The film was written, directed and produced by Shane Carruth, a mathematician and a former engineer, and was completed on a budget of $7,000.[1] Primer is of note for its extremely low budget, experimental plot structure and complex technical dialogue, which Carruth chose not to 'dumb down' for the sake of his audience. One reviewer said that "anybody who claims [to] fully understand what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar."[2] The film collected the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004 before securing a limited release in US cinemas, and has since gained a cult following."
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    I watched it a while ago during my studies in Belgium... The plot is quite well summarized on this diagram: http://xkcd.com/657/large/ According to the text above I'm either savant or a liar (you choose). But I watched the movie under significant exposure to Belgian beer, so this may have helped...
Christos Ampatzis

Insectlike 'microids' might walk, run, work in colonies - 2 views

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    If a microid were stepped on, it would probably just get up and walk away...
nikolas smyrlakis

UNITED KINGDOM SPACE AGENCY UKSA (fake website) - 3 views

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    according to the normal website (http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/): "The UK Space Agency website will officially launch on 1 April 2010. Until then, the BNSC website will be in a state of transition " the guys above i think just take the piss coz theres no official website. Mission statement: TOGETHER WE ARE GOING TO EMBARK ON A JOURNEY INTO SPACE. ..........................THE MISSION IS......MARS................................."
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    I've just read a blog entry about this on New Scientist, and while the entry itself is not interesting, I learned from it where the UKSA and ESA's UK establishment are going to be based. Answer: it's even more in the middle of nowhere than Plymouth! BTW does anyone (Leo?) know what is the basis on which new ESA establishments locations are chosen (if this info is classified, you can send it on priv ;) [Edit] Esa has released a news item about it... Whatever one can say about the British Space Agency, they certainly have a fantastic logo!
Joris _

Researchers Claim They Can Translate Infant Cries, But is it Just Noise? | Popular Science - 0 views

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    nice conclusion! Published paper: "Statistical method for classifying cries of baby based on pattern recognition of power spectrum" in Int. J. Biometrics, 2010, 2, 113-123
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    This must have been a hot topic is space research during last months... well, at least within the ESA's Advanced Concepts Team ;-)
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