"Affluent western individuals are increasingly fretting about the carbon dioxide emissions from their lifestyle and energy use but one key issue, having fewer children, is little considered. "
If sb has access to the article... Having fewer children as a solution to climate change makes me curious...
nice paper:
like especially:
To our knowledge, our model provides the first unified explanation of high-frequency, intra-conflict data across human insurgencies. Other explanations of human insurgency are possible, though any competing theory would also need to replicate the results of Figs 1, 2, 3. Our model's specific mechanisms challenge traditional ideas of insurgency based on rigid hierarchies and networks, whereas its striking similarity to multi-agent financial market models24, 25, 26 hints at a possible link between collective human dynamics in violent and non-violent settings1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19.
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This is an interesting report from a student in sociology, who worked with a group of scientists on a synthetic biology project for the competition IGEM (http://2009.igem.org/Main_Page). This is what happen when you mix hard and soft sciences.
For this project they won the special prize for "Best Human Practices Advance".
You can read the part on self or exploded governance (p.34). When reading parts of this reports, I thought that it could be good to have a stagiaire or a YGT in human science to see if we can raise interesting question about ethics for the space sector. There are many questions I'm sure, about the governance, the legitimacy of spending millions to go in space, etc...
For Dario: the PI computation record was established on a single desktop computer using a cache optimized algorithm. Previous record was obtained by a cluster of hundreds of computers. The cache optimized algorithm was 20 times faster.
did you read any of the books he recommends?
suggest:
Modern Computer Arithmetic by Richard Brent and Paul Zimmermann, version 0.4, November 2009, Full text available here.
The Art of Computer Programming, volume 2 : Seminumerical Algorithms by Donald E. Knuth, Addison-Wesley, third edition, 1998. More information here.
Zimmerman is the same guy behind the MPFR multiprecision floating-point library, if I recall correctly:
http://www.mpfr.org/credit.html
I've not read the book... Multiprecision arithmetic is a huge topic though, at least from the scientific and number theory point of view if not for its applications to engineering problems.
"The art of computer programming" is probably the closest thing to a bible for computer scientists :)
"btw: we will very soon have the very same processor in the new iMac .... what record are you going to beat with it?"
Fastest Linux install on an iMac :)
"Fastest Linux install on an iMac :)" that is going to be a though one but a worthy aim!
""The art of computer programming" is probably the closest thing to a bible for computer scientists :)"
yep! Programming is art ;)
to reduce the chances of the LHC being derailed again by a similar accident, physicists at the Geneva lab have decided to run the collider at just half its design energy for the next 18-24 months.
Once the 7 TeV run is over, CERN will shut the LHC down in 2012 for a year or more to prepare it to go straight to maximum-energy 14 TeV collisions in 2013. This will be a complex job that will involve replacing some 10,000 superconducting magnet connections with more robust ones.
choosing to stay at lower energies is a big price to pay in terms of the Higgs search. "We will need more than twice the data at 7 TeV compared to that needed at 10 TeV to reach the same discovery potential," she says. "At this energy we can at best expect to exclude a Higgs with a mass between 155 and 175 GeV."
no Higgs boson before 2013... and a replacement of 10,000 superconducting magnet connections !
Reminds me of the the gravitational detectors... no detection before an upgrade in 2013...!
There are the big announcements to make the cash flow... and reality !
Higgs is almost 81, so he should better invest in his health if he wants the Nobel prize... But who cares, it's another 5 years window where high-energy theorists can produce nonsense with no experimental evidence. They should be happy!
NASA's grand plan to return to the moon, built on President George W. Bush's vision of an ambitious new chapter in space exploration, is about to vanish with hardly a whimper
a commercial spacecraft that could taxi astronauts into low Earth orbit
Well, the constellation program was a waste of money in its current form, overrun by delays and insufficient budget. We would have had Apollo 2.0 sixty years later, for what? At least now they are talking about going to asteroids, martian moons and stuff like that.
Industry wants to rely on tried-and-true tools and techniques,
but is also addicted to dreams of "silver bullets,"
"transformative breakthroughs," "killer apps," and so forth.
This leads to
immense conservatism in the choice of basic tools (such as
programming languages and operating systems) and a desire for
monocultures (to minimize training and deployment costs).
The
idea of software development as an assembly line manned by
semi-skilled interchangeable workers is fundamentally flawed and
wasteful.
"for many, "programming" has become a strange combination of unprincipled hacking and invoking other people's libraries (with only the vaguest idea of what's going on). The notions of "maintenance" and "code quality" are typically forgotten or poorly understood. " ... seen so many of those students :(
and ad "My suggestion is to define a structure of CS education based on a core plus specializations and application areas", I am not saying the austrian university system is good, but e.g. the CS degrees in Vienna are done like this, there is a core which is the same for everybody 4-5 semester, and then you specialise in e.g. software engineering or computational mgmt and so forth, and then after 2 semester you specialize again into one of I think 7 or 8 master degrees ...
It does not make it easy for industry to hire people, as I have noticed, they sometimes really have no clue what the difference between Software Engineering is compared to Computational Intelligence, at least in HR :/
he panel finds the 2005 order to find 90% of Earth-threatening asteroids 460 feet or larger infeasible,
No method for diverting asteroids has been experimentally demonstrated
Options include a "gravity tractor" orbiting slow-moving objects and tugging them off course with tidal tugs, a "kinetic" impact of a heavy spacecraft into an asteroid, or a nuclear explosion
In a sign that the web is becoming more sociable than searchable
Although Facebook is enjoying rapid growth, it is only beginning to cash in on its success. Revenues at the social media company are estimated to be in the range of $1bn to $1.5bn this year, while Google took in $23.7bn last year.
- Smart Tractors?!?!?
- "Guidance systems are enablers," said Mr James. "Farmers buy them with one job in mind and then realise they can use it for lots more."
bit confused about what they actually have achieved so far but sounds like it might turn out to be interesting.
"The scientists first infiltrated the leaves of Anemone vitifolia -- a plant native to China -- with titanium dioxide in a two-step process. Using advanced spectroscopic techniques, the scientists were then able to confirm that the structural features in the leaf favorable for light harvesting were replicated in the new TiO2 structure. Excitingly, the AIL are eight times more active for hydrogen production than TiO2 that has not been "biotemplated" in that fashion. AILs also are more than three times as active as commercial photo-catalysts. Next, the scientists embedded nanoparticles of platinum into the leaf surface. Platinum, along with the nitrogen found naturally in the leaf, helps increase the activity of the artificial leaves by an additional factor of ten."
Once connected, the sensor will wirelessly connect to all electrical
devices in the house and self configure to record the voltages from each
source in real time.
"The first thing everyone did after seeing the energy graph on the family PC was to turn off the lights". Kind-of we are becoming slaves of the technology. Do we really need a sensor to tell us to turn-off the light when we are leaving the room!?
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.
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...
"Patents, licensing practices and technology transfer from rich to poor countries are major issues in the fight against climate change," says Ahmed Abdel Latif, the programme manager for intellectual property at the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development
For 15 years, J. Craig Venter has chased a dream: to build a genome from scratch and use it to make synthetic life. Now, he and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California, say they have realized that dream.
"One thing is sure," Boeke says. "Interesting creatures will be bubbling out of the Venter Institute's labs."
But isn't it just yet another word abuse? From what I understand, they just synthesised a genome identical to the one of an existing bacteria... while undoubtedly nice work, this is *very* far from "creating life from scratch"... The fact that you are able to copy something, doesn't mean you understand how it works...
well of course we are far from engineering specific functions, and this is just a copy of a function that already existed. However it is quite impressive and the first time it is done. And the challenge here is not really to "copy" the ADN, but the fact that it works... in other words it is not because you copy the ADN identically that the phenotype (traduction of the ADN) will be the same, which is the case in this experiment.
All the satellite-related systems (except for the rocket to launch it) are DIY programs -- designed so that regular people may also have the chance of developing and eventually launching their own.
I was saying that mainly because of some flaws - the piggy-pack installation, no dedicated stage, the limited control, ...
It is so far very funny, but once he can fill all the gaps, it should be an excellent initiative - although careful about the debris if anyone has its own ;p
his quote: "when art becomes practical, we call it technology;
when technology becomes useless, we call it art" ...
this is probably the later one ....