PD's article presented to the idea storm:
"They find the data can best be explained using a model that says an individual can join a team if she/he can bring some new, complementary skills to the group. This interpretation goes against the idea that an individual will tend to mainly join-and remain comfortable in-groups of "like-minded" people."
nice article according to the abstract but can't download the paper (can we from within ESA? do you have it already downloaded - would be interested in reading the full paper - can we apply this to behaviour and size of the ACT?
Basics of Space Flight is a tutorial designed primarily to help operations people identify the range of concepts associated with deep space missions, and grasp the relationships among them.
The Halfbakery is a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users. It was created by people who like to speculate, both as a form of satire and as a form of creative expression.
Unveiled today, the second annual "IBM Next Five in Five" is a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years.
This is an article on the problems of defining a scientific term. Or better how people can argue when trying to agree on a definition. Rather funny than important
A recently-published book by the Ubuntu Community Manager, Jono Bacon. I just started reading it: lots of information, experiences and revealing hints on how open-source communities are born and evolve today.
"Since I released The Art of Community, one thing has become evident: the people who are buying it are awesome. If you have bought it you are awesome. If you have not, you too can be awesome."
To me seems more interesting the topic than the author. I have the impression that many people in this community behave like high-school pupils, though their production it's absolutely "awesome".
Whether society embraces face recognition on a larger scale will ultimately depend on how legislators, companies and consumers resolve the argument about its singularity. Is faceprinting as innocuous as photography, an activity that people may freely perform? Or is a faceprint a unique indicator, like a fingerprint or a DNA sequence, that should require a person's active consent before it can be collected, matched, shared or sold?
Actually these sort of things are also quite easy to exploit. Print a picture of Osama bin Laden on your t-shirt and have the entire police force scared out of their wits.
"The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet's interaction with its own ripples, which form what's known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles - including behaviors seen as evidence that these particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured."
Pilot-wave theory reresurrected. Maybe something for the next "fundamental" :P physics RF?
And for the next 'Experimental Physics Stagiaire' position why not try to do "Unpredictable Tunneling of a Classical Wave-Particle Association" http://stilton.tnw.utwente.nl/people/eddi/Papers/PhysRevLett_TUNNEL.pdf, there are some rumors online that the results of Yves Couder Experiments can be reproduced with simple DIY vibrating tables!
It is very funny to see the videos of the MIT's replication of this experiment (with lightening legends for those who are uncomfortable with the concepts involved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF5iHQMjcsM)
The technology behind bitcoin lets people who do not know or trust each other build a dependable ledger. This has implications far beyond the cryptocurrency
Ledgers that no longer need to be maintained by a company—or a government—may in time spur new changes in how companies and governments work, in what is expected of them and in what can be done without them. A realisation that systems without centralised record-keeping can be just as trustworthy as those that have them may bring radical change.
The blockchain technology behind bitcoin has been gaining traction. This article makes a good job of describing it, and the different (not-bitcoin) ways in which it's being adopted. Worth reading, even if only for the funny bit about self-driving self-owning cars who pay themselves for fuel, parking and repairs.
one of these again. french illustrations from 1910 of life in the year 2000. some pleasingly close. a lot of flying and robots. some inexplicable (bunch of people staring at a horse). some bmi.
Ha! The one about the horse is that "in 100 years there will be people who've never seen a live horse in their lives" :-) Actually it's more than true now with children asking my mother who works in the school "so, do those kangaroos really exist"? Children are fed with so much realistic BS on TV (dinosaur parks etc.) that they can hardly tell the difference between fiction and reality. If you already have offspring: have they seen, say, a live cow or chicken already?
(This is most probably a reference to the quote: "Horse is as everyone can see")