Spare processing power anyone? Based on BOINC.

Surprisingly cool initiative from Microsoft...

Anyhow related to the "scent of science"?

Sounds quite ACT-ish...

Some quite obvious, some perhaps a bit less...

From the alternative computing series...

Finally some applied research, that is...

I'll just leave this here... Found them through a recent publication of LeDoux in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Ah, and if there are no strong objections, from now on every brainstorming session shall commence with this: http://thebeautifulbrain.com/2010/10/ledoux-amygdaloids-brainstorm/2/

For non-computer scientists who ever wondered what is this thing that computer scientists keep babbling about after a few beers (apart from MtG)... Relatively correctly explained in this article.

May be an interesting reading for those who add auxiliary on-line materials to their publications. This reminds me... results of my topology study aren't on-line yet :-)

I was so shocked not to see Dario in the authors list!

Yeah I've figured it out from his CV at the end of the article after posting :)

We're all here about inventiveness and creativity, so here you go... Story of a guy who's life's motto has been "Gold lies on the streets and you just need to dig it up with ideas. Ideas are like the shovel" Add to it Monte Carlo, Marlene Dietrich and, say, King Farouk and you get quite an amazing story... And most of all, after reading this you'll know the value of knowing how to ski.

Looks cool... in simulation. And even there it seems to work terribly slow (note how much they have to speed it up).

Some introspection's always good...

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.

Apparently you didn't read it... This is a story about how science is born :)

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.

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."

:) 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).

145m/pixel... in case you plan any follow-ups to curiosity cloning ;)

Personally, I have the habit of switching off keypad sounds in any device I use (mobile, camera, etc.). Now I have scientific results to back this philosophy up :) P.S. Mass-media version is here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20139-predictive-texting-alters-our-perception-of-numbers.html

Very ACT-ish...

Prices in UK oscillate between 200 and 300 GBP