Group items tagged

forecasting to 2050 wouldn't recommend the executive summary but the collection of reports seems to be quite comprehensive across a range of relevant areas "The Project has involved around 400 leading experts and stakeholders from about 35 countries across the world. Drawing upon over 100 peer-reviewed evidence paper commissioned by the Project which can be accessed in full here (hyperlink). "

He also has a recent book: http://www.amazon.com/Filter-Bubble-What-Internet-Hiding/dp/1594203008/

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.

Apparently the peer review process is no better than chance.

Not new, but always good to read: British intelligence recommend not having password expiry dates. Something we should apply at ESA!

I second that. It has been an open secret for long though that frequent password changes are creating more problems than they solve. See Bruce Schneier: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/frequent_passwo.html

no cutting-edge space-related science, but important anyways

The EFF communicate is actually quite inaccurate. This is disappointing from the EFF, though for some part, it is due to the communication from the researchers who "discovered" the attack. PGP itself is not broken, but rather some implementations on some email clients (notably Enigmail, though it was patched several months ago). See https://protonmail.com/blog/pgp-vulnerability-efail/ On the other hand, if you are very keen on security, there is an XSS attack reported on Signal, so… https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/signal-messenger-code-injection.html The *good* recommendation here is actually rather to keep your software stack up to date (surprising, no?) and keep encrypting your emails.

If you have 45 minutes and you want to learn a bit about inverse design of metasurfaces using machine learning, then I would highly recommend this talk. I found it very easy to follow both the physics and machine learning parts of it.

A very nice expo currently showcased in Berlin, well worth a visit. https://www.koeniggalerie.com/exhibitions/38455/machine-hallucinations-nature-dreams/ The concept is quite cool and teh result just stunning (I recommend giving the youtube videos a good luck on your TV if you have teh chance)