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Nicholas Lan

Cut EU red tape: Report from the Business Taskforce - 2 views

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    some interesting recommendations part of a current discussion between the commission and some member states in a general, and apparently popular with all parties, drive to reduce bureaucracy to, among other things, stimulate innovation. Firms face a challenge. They produce superb products, offer world-class services and benefit from being able to sell to a European market of 500 million customers. But they are often encumbered by problematic, poorly-understood and burdensome European rules. The impact is clear: fewer inventions are patented, fewer sales are made, fewer goods are produced and fewer jobs are created.
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    what hypocrites ... "As businesspeople, we are convinced that these and many other problems must be addressed if British and European firms are to compete in the global marketplace. We need regulation to operate in a pan-European market. We are not against regulation per se. But we need regulation that is pro-growth and pro-innovation." sure ....
Alexander Wittig

Picture This: NVIDIA GPUs Sort Through Tens of Millions of Flickr Photos - 2 views

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    Strange and exotic cityscapes. Desolate wilderness areas. Dogs that look like wookies. Flickr, one of the world's largest photo sharing services, sees it all. And, now, Flickr's image recognition technology can categorize more than 11 billion photos like these. And it does it automatically. It's called "Magic View." Magical deep learning! Buzzword attack!
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    and here comes my standard question: how can we use this for space? fast detection of natural disasters onboard?
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    Even on ground. You could for example teach it what nuclear reactors or missiles or other weapons you don't want look like on satellite pictures and automatically scan the world for them (basically replacing intelligence analysts).
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    In fact, I think this could make a nice ACT project: counting seals from satellite imagery is an actual (and quite recent) thing: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0092613 In this publication they did it manually from a GeoEye 1 b/w image, which sounds quite tedious. Maybe one can train one of those image recognition algorithms to do it automatically. Or maybe it's a bit easier to count larger things, like elephants (also a thing).
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    In HiPEAC (High Performance, embedded architecture and computation) conference I attended in the beginning of this year there was a big trend of CUDA GPU vs FPGA for hardware accelerated image processing. Most of it orbitting around discussing who was faster and cheaper with people from NVIDIA in one side and people from Xilinx and Intel in the other. I remember of talking with an IBM scientist working on hardware accelerated data processing working together with the Radio telescope institute in Netherlands about the solution where they working on (GPU CUDA). I gathered that NVIDIA GPU suits best in applications that somehow do not rely in hardware, having the advantage of being programmed in a 'easy' way accessible to a scientist. FPGA's are highly reliable components with the advantage of being available in radhard versions, but requiring specific knowledge of physical circuit design and tailored 'harsh' programming languages. I don't know what is the level of rad hardness in NVIDIA's GPUs... Therefore FPGAs are indeed the standard choice for image processing in space missions (a talk with the microelectronics department guys could expand on this), whereas GPUs are currently used in some ground based (radio astronomy or other types of telescopes). I think that on for a specific purpose as the one you mentioned, this FPGA vs GPU should be assessed first before going further.
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    You're forgetting power usage. GPUs need 1000 hamster wheels worth of power while FPGAs can run on a potato. Since space applications are highly power limited, putting any kind of GPU monster in orbit or on a rover is failed idea from the start. Also in FPGAs if a gate burns out from radiation you can just reprogram around it. Looking for seals offline in high res images is indeed definitely a GPU task.... for now.
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    The discussion of how to make FPGA hardware acceleration solutions easier to use for the 'layman' is starting btw http://reconfigurablecomputing4themasses.net/.
jmlloren

Public Service Broadcasting: 'The Other Side,' - 1 views

shared by jmlloren on 25 Aug 15 - No Cached
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    The sound track of Apolo mission. They have a full album devoted to the space race.
Alexander Wittig

PQCRYPTO ICT-645622 - 0 views

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    Horizon2020 project on post quantum cryptography just released their first draft of recommendations for quantum computer safe encryption algorithms. No big surprise with the symmetric algorithms (what's used today is fundamentally sound), but the asymmetric public-key methods will be interesting.
LeopoldS

Artificial companions and the fourth revolution ... - 2 views

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    fourth revolution?? what you make of this ...
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
Nicholas Lan

Letter from Intergovernmental panel on climate change. - 2 views

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    To Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors, and Review Editors for the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) "I would also like to emphasize that enhanced media interest in the work of the IPCC would probably subject you to queries about your work and the IPCC. My sincere advice would be that you keep a distance from the media and should any questions be asked about the Working Group with which you are associated, please direct such media questions to the Co-chairs of your Working Group and for any questions regarding the IPCC to the secretariat of the IPCC." and an amusing related memo on how to deal with reporters if you can't avoid them. I particularly enjoyed the list of words that mean one thing to scientists and something else to other people. https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B88iFXWgVKt-NDc2N2FiM2QtYzQzYS00MWMxLWE4MGEtZjUwZDlmNzc3MTcz&hl=en
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    This. Memo. Is. Awesome.
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    quite weird this note of IPCC... I feel more like people have to be educated...
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    i agree. however, (and perhaps it would have been useful to post my source which didn't seem so interesting at the time) the contents of this particular memo seems to have been interpreted as a more or less direct consequence of "ClimateGate" rather than standard practice. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-climate-change/ On the other hand, I'd suggest that talking to the press is not necessarily a great way of educating the public, there being some truth i think to the contents of the memo.
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    don't know why this seems weired or shocking - looks like some good practice advice to me
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    well compare to ESA it's sure it doesn't seem weird. Imagine one second a journal article about climate change: "We contacted Dr. X of the IPCC, who refused to answer to our questions..."
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    this is not what the memo recommends ... it just says speak only about what you can confidently speak about and refer to others for other questions ...
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 ... !
LeopoldS

World Space Week - 1 views

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    you all probably prefer Juri's Night (http://yurisnight.net/) to the World Space Week .... but still: any suggestions what we could do during that week as an "event"?
Giusi Schiavone

The importance of stupidity in scientific research. - 10 views

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    I suggest you this easy reading ( is on a peer-reviewed scientific journal, IF = 6.14) 'We just don't know what we're doing!!!'
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    as a start of a peer reviewed paper this is an interesting first paragraph: "I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else."
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    Hilarious! Mr Schwartz, who made a PhD at Stanford(!) and apparently is working as a postdoc now, has finally discovered what science is about!!! Quote: "That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem." And he seems so excited about it! I think he should not only get published in 6.14 journal, but also get the Nobel Prize immediately! Seriously, after reading something like this, how one may not have superstitions about the educational system in the US?
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    I tend to agree with you but I think that you are too harsh - its still only an "essay" and one of his points of making sure that education at post graduate level is not about indoctrinating what we know already is valid ...
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    I think this quote by Richard Horton is relevant to the discussion: "We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong." :P
Joris _

The seeds of disruptive innovation within the European Space Agency - 24 August 2010 > ... - 5 views

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    :p
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    haha :) well.. don't shoot me Dario. I wasn't involved in this disclosure. But now that the link is public, you might all want to consider subscribing to their feed: http://ewds.strath.ac.uk/space/Podcasts.aspx They have some nice talks there. One of them is by Ken McLeod, the science fiction writer. Is anyone else with me on the idea that we should also invite science fiction writers for science coffees? :)
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    So nice to hear Dario again! :-) But apparently UoS needs someone a bit more skilled to handle these videos...
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    Only one self-comment alla Barney ..... suit-up
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.
Joris _

LaTeX Search - Mathematical Equations in Scientific Publications. - 2 views

shared by Joris _ on 10 Nov 10 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
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    can be helpful ... but also very tricky. There are so many ways to write the same equation...
LeopoldS

NASA - NASA's Fermi Telescope Finds Giant Structure in our Galaxy - 5 views

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    wow ....
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    I guess that's the "exceptional object in our cosmic neighbourhood"...
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    impressive! I'm sure it's connected to the black hole, at some point it must have been active. It shows how it's important to put all observations public !
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    this is what they speculate ... the original image looks though much less impressive ...
Luzi Bergamin

World Fertility Patterns 2009 - 1 views

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    fertility world_population
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    Perhaps Mister Burkeman should have read this first...
LeopoldS

IISC - International Institute of Space Commerce - 5 views

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    interesting collection / source of reports linked to space ...
Juxi Leitner

Data Nerds Hack NASA - in a Good Way | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

  • The event is just one of dozens this weekend being promoted by the Sunlight Foundation as part of its Great American Hackathon. Each one is being organized by volunteers who want to make government data easier to access and more useful to the public. In Pittsburgh, the hackers will be working on making stimulus spending easier to understand. In Boston, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation data will be the focus.
Francesco Biscani

Official Google Blog: Announcing Google's Focused Research Awards - 0 views

  • Today, we're announcing the first-ever round of Google Focused Research Awards — funding research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These awards, totaling $5.7 million, cover four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy.
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    Might be of some interest to Christos?
LeopoldS

HiWish: Public Suggestion Page - 2 views

shared by LeopoldS on 02 Apr 10 - Cached
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    take your own high resolution pictures of Mars ...
LeopoldS

Why Humans Have Sex | The New York Academy of Sciences - 4 views

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    nice podcast ... ESTEC YGT community might be an interesting study pool ....
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    haha ;) I dunno what the general idea of the YGTs here at ESTEC is ;)
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