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Kevin de Groote

WordItOut - Transform your text into word clouds! - 4 views

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    Transform your text into word clouds! Word clouds are a fun way to show words, where the most important ones are bigger than the others. Make and share word clouds from any text with WordItOut!
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    WOW!!!!
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    Impressive. Really nice work!!!
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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...
Ma Ru

Neuro-based olfactory model for artificial organoleptic tests - 1 views

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    The paper looks to be very related to the idea that came out once from Tobias based on the work of Gilles Laurent. Unfortunately I don't have access to this journal, so I can't peep into the article itself.
Luzi Bergamin

Compact metallo-dielectric optical antenna for ultra directional and enhanced radiative... - 3 views

shared by Luzi Bergamin on 26 Mar 10 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
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    A new paper related to our old Ariadna on microstructured radiators.
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    This is actually a very nice paper in my view .... José, have a look at it!! "This study demonstrates that appropriately designed metallo-dielectric systems can serve as compact, highly directive and ultra radiative antennas. Let us emphasize that contrary to fully metallic antennas, the high directivity of this antenna does not result from a plasmonic effect, and that it is efficient over a wide range of frequencies. In consequence, the high directivity does compromise the high radiative decay rate enhancement offered by two coupled metallic particles and it is possible to exploit whispering gallery modes to further enhance the radiative decay rates. This work paves the way towards the design of compact, simple and highly efficient optical antennas."
Christos Ampatzis

BBC NEWS | Health | A step closer to reading the mind - 3 views

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    memory cloning
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    "It would be very easy not to co-operate, and then it wouldn't work", that's still the important part. I'm sure Dario LOVES this paper. Would be nice to have a coffee with him right now...
pacome delva

BEC coupled to mechanical oscillator - 0 views

  • Treutlein and colleague’s work represents an important step forward in the use of ultracold atoms to study mechanical systems. "This experiment clearly demonstrates the possibility to use ultracold atomic systems as diagnostic tools and high-precision sensors, this is a very promising route of research," he said.
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    nice!!!
pacome delva

3D invisibility cloak unveiled - physicsworld.com - 1 views

  • For Wegener the aim of the work is not about focusing all efforts on creating invisibility cloaks, but is about exploring a range of applications in transformation optics. This involves calculating what kind of material is needed to bend light in a certain way, by considering light trajectories as the result of the warping of space. Wegener says that transformation optics should lead, for example, to the design of better antennas or smaller optical resonators.
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    We don't have Science Express subscription here, so I have to wait till the normal paper is out. From what I heard about it, I doubt that this would have made it to Science without the names Pendry and Wegener in the autor list! Certainly, they are two of the smartest guys in Metamaterials, but they are also two of the absolut class A sellers. Pendry by definition is the first in whatever (at least in HIS talks...) but apart from this he's a very nice guy. Better let's not try to characterize Wegener...
pacome delva

Novel negative-index metamaterial bends light 'wrong' direction - 1 views

  • the first negative index metamaterial to operate at visible frequencies
  • By engineering a metamaterial with such properties, we are opening the door to such unusual -- but potentially useful -- phenomena as superlensing (high-resolution imaging past the diffraction limit), invisibility cloaking, and the synthesis of materials index-matched to air, for potential enhancement of light collection in solar cells
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    I forwarded the link to my experimental colleagues and here is the comment from Sergei (the master himself:) "this is what Igor has been doing - an array of plasmonic nanocables. This basically works as a wire-medium slab. All their epsilon and mu are rubbish." * If Sergei is as strict as in this comment, then it IS rubbish. He's not one of the notorious complainer (as e.g. myself.) * Please DO NOT FORWARD this to anybody else, Sergei's comment is NOT FOR PUBLIC USE!
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    UPDATE: I had a short chat with Sergei and Pekka, Sergei noticed that there is an increasing number of papers on metamaterials, especially in Nature and Science, which are simply wrong, this one being an example. * The idea is based on a very well known effect of wired media. What appears to be interesting about this paper is that they manage to make an optical analogue with aparently low losses. This could be interesting. * The whole interpretation as NIM, "wrong" refraction etc. is total nonsense.
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    wow, good to know ! But for the privacy you should be aware that this is a public group, so anyone has access to our comments i think !
pacome delva

The Mysterious Molasses Markings of Pluto - 0 views

  • Pluto can get so cold, researchers believe, that its atmosphere can actually freeze and fall to the ground. If Earth's atmosphere did that, it would make a layer 30 feet thick, but Pluto has less to work with. When it’s on the ground, Pluto's entire blanket of air is no more than a frosty film of nitrogen and methane.
Joris _

DARPA Looking for Partner On Wireless Spacecraft Demo | SpaceNews.com - 1 views

  • DARPA for several years has been working on a program dubbed System F6 that seeks to prove that a cluster of small spacecraft can perform the mission of a large spacecraft by communicating wirelessly with one another in space
  • DARPA plans to launch three dedicated System F6 spacecraft either to low Earth orbit or geostationary orbit in mid-2013 to 2014
  • semi-autonomous cluster reconfiguration
nikolas smyrlakis

Good-Bye Alta-Vista, Delicious | ZDNet - 2 views

shared by nikolas smyrlakis on 17 Dec 10 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
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    we were 1,5 year ahead to switch to diigo !
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    Man, I remember, long long time ago, altavista was my first contact with the internet ever.
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    indeed ... and it was largely thanks to you ... remember well the discussion in the group meeting with the arguments brought forward: why change, it works ...
Ma Ru

Sun For Everyun - 3 views

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    Nice initiative, isn't it?
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    some citizen science added to this would make it even better ... as it is it's rather, boh ...
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    Well, true - making data public is one thing, and making others to work through them for you is another... I love the new term "citizen science" though (and an explanation on the Wikipedia page why they had to invent a new one because "crowdsourcing" is soooooo - politically - wrong).
pacome delva

Invisibility cloaks shield the large and visible - physicsworld.com - 1 views

  • Two independent groups of physicists have built invisibility cloaks that can shield large objects lying on a plane. These "carpet cloaks" are far closer to the intuitive idea of an invisibility cloak than devices previously built, they argue, because they hide objects that can be seen with the naked eye and do so at visible wavelengths. The cloaks are also relatively cheap and easy to make, being constructed from the natural material calcite.
  • The team used a technique known as transformation optics to design their cloak.
  • Tomas Tyc of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, who was not a member of either group, thinks that the papers "describe important achievements in the area of experimental cloaking." But he maintains that a carpet cloak is quite different to a fully fledged Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak. He points out that a carpet cloak only really works when viewing an object – be it a rucksack or a sword on someone's back, for example – side on. Otherwise the object will appear flat but still be visible.
Luís F. Simões

Polynomial Time Code For 3-SAT Released, P==NP - Slashdot - 0 views

  • "Vladimir Romanov has released what he claims is a polynomial-time algorithm for solving 3-SAT. Because 3-SAT is NP-complete, this would imply that P==NP. While there's still good reason to be skeptical that this is, in fact, true, he's made source code available and appears decidedly more serious than most of the people attempting to prove that P==NP or P!=NP. Even though this is probably wrong, just based on the sheer number of prior failures, it seems more likely to lead to new discoveries than most. Note that there are already algorithms to solve 3-SAT, including one that runs in time (4/3)^n and succeeds with high probability. Incidentally, this wouldn't necessarily imply that encryption is worthless: it may still be too slow to be practical."
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    here we go again...
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    slashdot: "Russian computer scientist Vladimir Romanov has conceded that his previously published solution to the '3 SAT' problem of boolean algebra does not work."
Joris _

What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation. - 5 views

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    If I could write, this is exactly what I would write about rocket, GO, and so on... :) "we are decadent and tired. But none of the bright young up-and-coming economies seem to be interested in anything besides aping what the United States and the USSR did years ago. We may, in other words, need to look beyond strictly U.S.-centric explanations for such failures of imagination and initiative. ... Those are places we need to go if we are not to end up as the Ottoman Empire of the 21st century, and yet in spite of all of the lip service that is paid to innovation in such areas, it frequently seems as though we are trapped in a collective stasis." "But those who do concern themselves with the formal regulation of "technology" might wish to worry less about possible negative effects of innovation and more about the damage being done to our environment and our prosperity by the mid-20th-century technologies that no sane and responsible person would propose today, but in which we remain trapped by mysterious and ineffable forces."
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    Very interesting, though I'm amused how the author tends to (subconsciously?) shift the blame to non-US dictators :-) Suggestion that in absence of cold war US might have abandoned HB and ICBM programmes is ridiculous.
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    Interesting, this was written by Neal Stephenson ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson#Works ). Great article indeed. The videos of the event from which this arose might be equally interesting: Here Be Dragons: Governing a Technologically Uncertain Future http://newamerica.net/events/2011/here_be_dragons "To employ a commonly used metaphor, our current proficiency in rocket-building is the result of a hill-climbing approach; we started at one place on the technological landscape-which must be considered a random pick, given that it was chosen for dubious reasons by a maniac-and climbed the hill from there, looking for small steps that could be taken to increase the size and efficiency of the device."
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    You know Luis, when I read this quote, I could help thinking about GO, which would be kind of ironic considering the context but not far from what happens in the field :p
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    Fantastic!!!
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    Would have been nice if it were historically more accurate and less polemic / superficial
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    mmmh... the wheel is also an old invention... there is an idea behind but this article is not very deepfull, and I really don't think the problem is with innovation and lack of creative young people !!! look at what is done in the financial sector...
Ma Ru

IEEE Trans. Evolutionary Computation - Special Issue on Differential Evolution - 3 views

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    Dario - perhaps worth giving a look to be up-to-date... There's even an article "Improving Classical and Decentralized Differential Evolution with New Mutation Operator and Population Topologies". They quote our CEC paper, but not the ParCo.
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    Don't know if you have full text access, so here goes the quote: "Recently, Izzo et al. designed in [27] a heterogeneous asynchronous island model for DE. They considered five islands and five DE strategies (DE/best/1/exp, DE/rand/1/exp, DE/rand-to-best/1/exp, DE/best/2/exp, and DE/rand/2/exp), and studied five distributed DEs using the same DE strategy in all the islands, and a heterogeneous model with one different DE strategy in every island. As a result, the heterogeneous model is not outstanding, but performs as well as the others."
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    Isn't it a bit a paper-killing quote?
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    :) It's in the context of a review of the work that's been done about DE with island model in general, they don't evaluate. Pity they didn't refer to the ParCo article on topologies, as it was a bit more extensive and more focused on the method (as they do in the article) rather than on the problem (as was our CEC paper, if I recall well).
Loretta Latronico Poulain

Behavioural Economics? Try Biological Economics - 2 views

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    The "Biological Economics" thing is a hyping (or misunderstanding) of the BBC article. The work it refers to seems to be an application of Complex Networks theory to financial networks. I found what appear to be some of the related publications: Andrew G. Haldane (April 2009) Rethinking the financial network (further references in the footnote to page 10) Erlend Nier, Jing Yang, Tanju Yorulmazer and Amadeo Alentorn (April 2008) Network models and financial stability Funny how these issues have been repeatedly popping up at the ACT in recent weeks. This connects both with the discussions on information spreading in networks, and with roadmaps' robustness.
Ma Ru

Phineas Gage - 3 views

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    As I now work in the Centre for Robotics *and Neuroscience*, here's a story for you. Some highlights: "It sent the iron straight up into his skull and out of the top of his head, landing some 30 metres away. (...) Phineas was unconscious before getting up and riding an oxcart into town with, 'a big bleedin' hole in his head'. (...) although Phineas survived, he was a changed man. Now he was reportedly unreliable, partial to swearing and often making inappropriate remarks." I guess If I were him I'd be a little partial to swearing too.
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    what sort of story is this please???
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    Apparently you didn't read it... This is a story about how science is born :)
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    now I did ... :-) just had read your comment ....
Francesco Biscani

Why I don't care very much about tablets anymore - 5 views

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    There it goes :)
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    "So a new tablet will never be exciting the way that a new, luxury gel ink pen will be exciting" Man, I immediately felt like ordering some new luxury gel ink pens!
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    like also this one: "Some of the really savvy new media efforts like Flipboard are exciting, but after the initial "wow" factor wears off, these apps mainly serve to remind me that there's already too much good stuff to read out there, and that my life is slipping away from me in an infinite stream of interesting bits about smart animals, dumb criminals, outrageous celebs, shiny objects, funny memes, scientific discoveries, economic developments, etc.. I invariably end up closing the app in a fit of guilt, and picking up one of the truly fantastic dead tree or Kindle books that I'm working my way through at the moment, so that I can actually exercise my brain (as opposed to simply wearing it out)."
Nicholas Lan

Global Farming futures - 2 views

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    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). "
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