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LeopoldS

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence - 2 views

shared by LeopoldS on 18 Jan 13 - Cached
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    does any of you know the value/standing of this association?
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    quite well-reputed, they were founded as the American Association for AI (and only recently cahnged it to be more international). They are partly organizing IJCAI and the AAAI conferences (mostly in the US), which are quite good. Symposia around specific topics are also done and at those mostly professors and researchers with high impact are going.
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    Thanks Juxi. was contacted by one of the organisers for the Berlin edition of it in 2 years. looking at your answer, it seems having the ACT associated to it is not a bad idea. will check with the team. Would you yourself be interested?
Dario Izzo

Climatologists are no Einsteins, says his successor | NJ.com - 2 views

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    I know at least of a few people who share this point of view :)
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    I think it is worth noting that Dyson's is not saying that climate change is an illusion - it is evident that a lot of CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere and hence something will change. His point is that we just don't know what will change and by how much and that (much) more experimental data is necessary to make predictive models.
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    On missing experimental work: just read in the news that condensation in cirrus clouds has been studied recently and that the models where incorrect as to what the significance of organic substances and soot is in cirrus cloud formation. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/05/08/science.1234145
fichbio

Bacteria's Social Media - 2 views

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    Perhaps when you think of bacterial communities you think of a flask full of rapidly dividing E. coli. But in non-lab conditions, bacteria grow in complex, heterogeneous communities composed of diverse microscopic organisms. In these communities, bacteria need a means to communicate with their kin, and they do this through a language known as quorum sensing (QS), where bugs secrete and detect factors that tell them whether they're surrounded by kin (and if so, how many there are).
dejanpetkow

Light Table - a new IDE concept - 2 views

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    "Despite the dramatic shift toward simplification in software interfaces, the world of development tools continues to shrink our workspace with feature after feature in every release. Even with all of these things at our disposal, we're stuck in a world of files and forced organization - why are we still looking all over the place for the things we need when we're coding?"
Athanasia Nikolaou

Spray cyanobacteria on the desert to halt its spread - 2 views

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    A wide scale 8 year experiment in China on combating desertification seems to have been successful. Instead of using cyanobacteria blooms in the sea, the tested method proposes to spray them on the boundaries of desert/farmland every few days, so that the carbon they capture stays on the ground. It is useful in fixing the organic material against wind erosion only complementary to planting hardy grasses. Very fast result, nevertheless. Could be classified as a geoengineering activity.
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    130 km2 as next step will be quite an area
Tom Gheysens

Cheap battery stores energy for a rainy day : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

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    Thijs interested? quinones are my field
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    I think the major benefit of this system is the low cost of the products involved compared to standard flow batteries. However, two issues still remain, corrosion and size. I think these things need to be big right due to the volumetric storage using quinones? Nevertheless, it is interesting to see where this development will lead to. "The system is far from perfect, however: bromine and hydrobromic acid are corrosive, and could cause serious pollution if they leaked. "The bromine is, right now, the Achilles heel of this particular battery," Aziz says. The answer could be to go completely organic, he adds: "We are working on replacing the bromine with a different quinone." Are there quinones which would not be corrosive but retain good volumetric performance?
Athanasia Nikolaou

Water in the supercritical region of the P-T phase diagram (ISS experiment) - 1 views

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    Bringing water to that supercritical phase (high pressurization and temperature) renders it into an oxidation agent of organic material with pure CO_2 and H2O as products. Less waste volume in the ISS. Also, all contained salts precipitate out at that phase.
Aurelie Heritier

'Sixth sense' really exists, scientists say - 1 views

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    New research reveals that humans utilize a part of the brain that is organized topographically to determine, for example, the number of jelly beans in a bowl or the number of cookies in a jar.
Thijs Versloot

Survival without oxygen, some animals needs surprisingly little - 2 views

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    :-D Tom and me had just exchanged emails about this last night. Fascinating how adaptive organisms can be!
LeopoldS

Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free software movement founder - 3 views

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    "I don't have a cell phone. I won't carry a cell phone," says Stallman, founder of the free software movement and creator of the GNU operating system. "It's Stalin's dream. Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I'm not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I'm not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop." he is right once more ...
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    I am going to live in the forest! Sadly, while true, there's no way around it these days. On the up-side the information overflow these days exceeds processing speeds. Soon it will become increasingly difficult for NSA or other organizations to find anything in the tons of data they stash away. Like some guy said in a random youtube video I can't find now anymore: "good luck trying to find my personal data when I'm tagged in 5000 pictures of cats!"
Nicholas Lan

A Case Study of Gut Fermentation Syndrome (Auto-Brewery) with Saccharomyces cerevisiae ... - 0 views

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    man infected with brewer's yeast brews beer and gets drunk whenever he injests carbohydrates. This surely presents an excellent opportunity to address long term manned space exploration psychological issues by infecting astronauts with yeast rather than investing in costly and bulky space-brewing equipment.
johannessimon81

Weather patterns on Exoplanet detected - 1 views

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    so it took us 70% of the time Earth is in the habitable zone to develop, would this be normal or could it be much faster? In other words, would all forms of life that started on a planet that originated at a 'similar' point in time like us, be equally far developed?
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    That is actually quite tricky to estimate rly. If for no other reason than the fact that all of the mass extinctions we had over the Earth's history basically reset the evolutionary clock. Assuming 2 Earths identical in every way but one did not have the dinosaur wipe-out impact, that would've given non-impact Earth 60million years to evolve a potential dinosaur intelligent super race.
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    The opposite might be true - or might not be ;-). Since usually the rate of evolution increases after major extinction events the chance is higher to produce 'intelligent' organisms if these events happen quite frequently. Usually the time of rapid evolution is only a few million years - so Earth is going quite slow. Certainly extinction events don't reset the evolutionary clock - if they would never have happened Earth gene pool would probably be quite primitive. By the way: dinosaurs were a quite diverse group and large dinosaurs might well have had cognitive abilities that come close to whales or primates - the difference to us might be that we have hands to manipulate our environment and vocal cords to communicate in very diverse ways. Modern dinosaur (descendents), i.e. birds, contain some very intelligent species - especially with respect to their body size and weight.
Athanasia Nikolaou

Science on Mars and Mars on Science - 0 views

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    Some sort of organic carbon has been detected by the sampling of Curiosity; the contamination source was isolated and the signal persists. The scientists suggest as a source meteorites transporting interstellar matter, or maybe some sort of ancient life whose biomass production only survived cosmic radiation as it was buried underground. a big deal: six relevant articles were published simultaneously online: http://www.sciencemag.org/site/extra/curiosity/index.xhtml?utm_content=&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=Science&utm_source=shortener
Nicholas Lan

amines found to be far more important than cosmic rays in cloud formation - 0 views

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    relationship between living organisms and cloud formation seems interesting
Tom Gheysens

Scientists discover double meaning in genetic code - 4 views

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    Does this have implications for AI algorithms??
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    Somehow, the mere fact does not surprise me. I always assumed that the genetic information is on multiple overlapping layers encoded. I do not see how this can be transferred exactly on genetic algorithms, but a good encoding on them is important and I guess that you could produce interesting effects by "overencoding" of parameters, apart from being more space-efficient.
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    I was actually thinking exactly about this question during my bike ride this morning. I am surprised that some codons would need to have a double meaning though because there is already a surplus of codons to translate into just 20-22 proteins (depending on organism). So there should be about 44 codons left to prevent translation errors and in addition regulate gene expression. If - as the article suggests - a single codon can take a dual role, does it so in different situations (needing some other regulator do discern those)? Or does it just perform two functions that always need to happen simultaneously? I tried to learn more from the underlying paper: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6164/1367.full.pdf All I got from that was a headache. :-\
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    Probably both. Likely a consequence of energy preservation during translation. If you can do the same thing with less genes you save up on the effort required to reproduce. Also I suspect it has something to do with modularity. It makes sense that the gene regulating for "foot" cells also trigger the genes that generate "toe" cells for example. No point in having an extra if statement.
Thijs Versloot

NASA set to debut online software catalog April 10 - 1 views

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    The catalog, a master list organized into 15 categories, is intended for industry, academia, other government agencies, and general public. The catalog covers technology topics ranging from project management systems, design tools, data handling, image processing, solutions for life support functions, aeronautics, structural analysis, and robotic and autonomous systems. NASA said the codes represent NASA's best solutions to an array of complex mission requirements. McMillan reported that "Within a few weeks of publishing the list, NASA says, it will also offer a searchable database of projects, and then, by next year, it will host the actual software code in its own online repository, a kind of GitHub for astronauts."
Luís F. Simões

Singularity University, class of 2010: projects that aim to impact a billion people wit... - 8 views

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    At the link below you find additional information about the projects: Education: Ten weeks to save the world http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100915/full/467266a.html
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    this is the podcast I was listening to ...
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    We can do it in nine :)
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    why wait then?
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    hmm, wonder how easy it is to get funding for that, 25k is a bit steep for 10weeks :)
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    well, we wait for the same fundings they get and then we will do it in nine.... as we say in Rome "a mettece un cartello so bboni tutti". (italian check for Juxi)
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    and what you think about the project subjects?
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    I like the fact that there are quite a lot of space projects .... and these are not even bad in my view: The space project teams have developed imaginative new solutions for space and spinoffs for Earth. The AISynBio project team is working with leading NASA scientists to design bioengineered organisms that can use available resources to mitigate harsh living environments (such as lack of air, water, food, energy, atmosphere, and gravity) - on an asteroid, for example, and also on Earth . The SpaceBio Labs team plans to develop methods for doing low-cost biological research in space, such as 3D tissue engineering and protein crystallization. The Made in Space team plans to bring 3D printing to space to make space exploration cheaper, more reliable, and fail-safe ("send the bits, not the atoms"). For example, they hope to replace some of the $1 billion worth of spare parts and tools that are on the International Space Station.
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    and all in only a three months summer graduate program!! that is impressive. God I feel so stupid!!!
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    well, most good ideas probably take only a second to be formulated, it's the details that take years :-)
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    I do not think the point of the SU is to formulate new ideas (infact there is nothing new in the projects chosen). Their mission is to build and maintain a network of contacts among who they believe will be the 'future leaders' of space ... very similar to our beloved ISU.
jcunha

Maze-solving automatons can repair broken circuits - 1 views

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    Researchers in Bangalore, India together with the Indian Space Research organization come up with an intelligent self-healing algorithm that can locate open-circuits faults and repair them in real-time. They used an insulating silicon oil containing conductive particles. Whenever a fault happens, an electric field develops there, causing the fluid to move in a 'thermodynamic automaton' way repairing the fault. The researchers make clear it could be one advantage for electronics in harsh environments, such as in space satellites.
Thijs Versloot

Solar singlet fission bends the laws of physics to boost solar power efficiency by 30% ... - 2 views

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    Chemists at UCR have found a way of turning a single photon into two excitons, by a process known as singlet fission. By doubling the yield of excitons in a solar cell, you theoretically double the number of electrons produced and could lead to having a max theoretical efficiency of 60% or more in an (organic) solar cell See also DOI: 10.1021/jz500676c - "Singlet Fission: From Coherences to Kinetics"
Dario Izzo

Optimal Control Probem in the CR3BP solved!!! - 7 views

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    This guy solved a problem many people are trying to solve!!! The optimal control problem for the three body problem (restricted, circular) can be solved using continuation of the secondary gravity parameter and some clever adaptation of the boundary conditions!! His presentation was an eye opener ... making the work of many pretty useless now :)
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    Riemann hypothesis should be next... Which paper on the linked website is this exactly?
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    hmmm, last year at the AIAA conference in Toronto I presented a continuation approach to design a DRO (three-body problem). Nothing new here unfortunately. I know the work of Caillau, although interesting what is presented was solved 10 years ago by others. The interest of his work is not in the applications (CR3BP), but in the research of particular regularity conditions that unfortunately make the problem limited practically. Look also at the work of Mingotti, Russel, Topputo and other for the (C)RTBP. Smart-One inspired a bunch of researchers :)
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    Topputo and some of the others 'inspired' researchers you mention are actually here at the conference and they are all quite depressed :) Caillau really solves the problem: as a one single phase transfer, no tricks, no misconvergence, in general and using none of the usual cheats. What was produced so far by other were only local solutions valid for the particular case considered. In any case I will give him your paper, so that he knows he is working on already solved stuff :)
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    Answer to Marek: the paper you may look at is: Discrete and differential homotopy in circular restricted three-body control
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    Ah! with one single phase and a first order method then it is amazing (but it is still just the very particular CRTBP case). The trick is however the homotopy map he selected! Why this one? Any conjugate point? Did I misunderstood the title ? I solved in one phase with second order methods for the less restrictive problem RTBP or simply 3-body... but as a strict answer to your title the problem has been solved before. Nota: In "Russell, R. P., "Primer Vector Theory Applied to Global Low-Thrust Trade Studies," JGCD, Vol. 30, No. 2", he does solve the RTBP with a first order method in one phase.
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    I think what is interesting is not what he solved, but how he solved the problem. But, are means more important than end ... I dunno
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    I also loved his method, and it looked to me that is far more general than the CRTBP. As for the title of this post, OK maybe it is an exageration as it suggests that no solution was ever given before, on the other end, as Marek would say "come on guys!!!!!"
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    The generality has to be checked. Don't you think his choice of mapping is too specific? he doesn't really demonstrate it works better than other. In addition, the minimum time choice make the problem very regular (i guess you've experienced that solving min time is much easier than mass max, optimality-wise). There is still a long way before maximum mass+RTBP, Topputo et al should be re-assured :p Did you give him my paper, he may find it interesting since I mention the homotopy on mu but for max mass:)
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    Joris, that is the point I was excited abut, at the conference HE DID present solutions to the maximum mass problem!! One phase, from LEO to an orbit around the moon .. amazing :) You will find his presentation on line.... (according to the organizers) I gave him the reference to you paper anyway, but no pdf though as you did not upload it on our web pages and I could not find it in the web. So I gave him some bibliography I had with be from the russians, and from Russell, Petropoulos and Howell, As far as I know these are the only ones that can hope to compete with this guy!!
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    for info only, my phd, in one phase: http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/CDReadyMAST08_1856/PV2008_7363.pdf I prefered Mars than the dead rock Moon though!
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    If you send me the pdf I can give it to the guy .. the link you gave contains only the first page ... (I have no access till monday to the AIAA thingy)
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    this is why I like this Diigo thingy so much more than delicious ...
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    What do you mean by this comment, Leopold? ;-) Jokes apart: I am following the Diigo thingy with Google Reader (rss). Obviously, I am getting the new postings. But if someone later on adds a comment to a post, then I can miss it, because the rss doesn't get updated. Not that it's a big problem, but do you guys have a better solution for this? How are you following these comments? (I know that if you have commented an entry, then you get the later updates in email.) (For example, in google reader I can see only the first 5 comments in this entry.)
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    I like when there are discussions evolving around entries
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    and on your problem with the RSS Tamas: its the same for me, you get the comments only for entries that you have posted or that you have commented on ...
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