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An opinion piece by an ex-Googler, talking, among other things, about how corporate culture is creeping into Google. I've highlighted some snippets which I've found eerily familiar :)

smart!

... proof that humanity is good?

"The dataset contains practically all actions of all players of the MMOG Pardus since the game went online in 2004 [18]. Pardus is an open-ended online game with a world- wide player base of currently more than 370,000 people. Play- ers live in a virtual, futuristic universe in which they interact with others in a multitude of ways to achieve their self-posed goals [22]. Most players engage in various economic activities typically with the (self-posed) goal to accumulate wealth and status. Social and economical decisions of players are often strongly influenced and driven by social factors such as friend- ship, cooperation, and conflict." quite impressive ...

article written a bit as if they had invented rectennas ... they are used since the 60s (Brown powered a small helicopter via 2.45 GHz ... and Kaya-san has showed wireless power transmission via advanced rectenna's at almost every SPS conference since 20 years ...

Apparently the peer review process is no better than chance.

If anybody's interested, here are the presentations from all FP7 Space Projects presented at the "Let's Embrace Space" in Budapest. A hard-copy book with information is with Leopold and here: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/space/research/publications/index_en.htm you can find brochures with information

Hello? Tobias, Dario, Luis: Should we take a look?

They are philosophers, and they don't quote your study... might be interesting nevertheless...

Make sure you have a look at the gallery: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15293922 Some are pretty interesting...

Good to solve the Landing problem!!!! No skew due to perspective and gimballed by definition

Very very nice idea! Unfortunately samples show they still have quite some work to do on the image processing side... which is interesting because there are very good open-source solutions for stitching.

"Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: What are you working on?" Have you tried it yet?

For the first time ever, astronomers have discovered a ring system surrounding an asteroid. The finding is a complete surprise to planetary scientists, who are yet unsure exactly how such rings could have formed. The cosmic bling was found around an object named Chariklo, which orbits in a region between Saturn and Uranus.

Each year the dutch NSA (AIVD) comes out with a christmas puzzle (never knew) which consists of 20 severe cryptic questions. Unfortunately, all the questions are in Dutch :( I solved 3 at the moment...

Whether society embraces face recognition on a larger scale will ultimately depend on how legislators, companies and consumers resolve the argument about its singularity. Is faceprinting as innocuous as photography, an activity that people may freely perform? Or is a faceprint a unique indicator, like a fingerprint or a DNA sequence, that should require a person's active consent before it can be collected, matched, shared or sold?

Dr. Atick is firmly in the second camp.

Actually these sort of things are also quite easy to exploit. Print a picture of Osama bin Laden on your t-shirt and have the entire police force scared out of their wits.

I saw so many bin laden t-shirts already ... they must have better filters than this

.. We're doomed ...

Most likely

Regarding our discussion on resource self-sufficiency of a Mars colony. Would it ever be possible (from a resource perspective that is..) A NASA report on availability of resources. A self-sufficiency trade study described in Boston (1996) identifies the mission duration at which the development of local life support resources becomes advantageous. Within 30 days, without recycling, or with the equivalent leakage, it becomes advantageous to derive oxygen from local resources. The time constants for water and food are about 6 months and 3 years, respectively.

I guess it depends on the number of astronauts that have to be supporte ... 3 years for food looks like a lot

Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready in a decade.

Is positive news definitely, but when it comes to fusion energy being skeptic is the wisest course of action. On the back of a truck basically means that the energy density of the device is such that the surface energy of a (steady state) plasma is beyond currents materials limits. It is probably a pulsed (ignitor-type) device, which are prone to instabilities. That could therefore refer to their breakthrough claim, of which they hardly say anything though. Lets see

Since there were already a lot of false alarms on the field, one should definitively be careful about it. However not a single detail about its structure or how it works in this new... Here http://www.fusenet.eu/node/400 you can find a bit more of information about it.

The problem is that the light cone angle has a limit - all particles with high momentum (mass x velocity) generate light cones with the same angle. Hence, these particles are indistinguishable. Now Chalmers researcher Philippe Tassin and his colleagues at the Free University of Brussels have designed a material that manipulates the Cherenkov cone so that also particles with high momentum get a distinct light cone angle too. The work is on the cover of this week's issue of the journal Physical Review Letters ("Controlling Cherenkov Radiation with Transformation-Optical Metamaterials").

"The OpenBCI Board is a versatile and affordable analog-to-digital converter that can be used to sample electrical brain activity (EEG), muscle activity (EMG), heart rate (EKG), and more" Perhaps some work or ideas on brainwave analysis would be interesting ? (User interfaces, mood classifier, detection of various alertness levels )

It's not worth it for $400... The chips are seriously nothing special and you can get a lot better for a lot cheaper. I would just get the electrodes and link them to a RPi or an Odroid or something.

True, but the selling feature here is that they take care of that stuff and sell it for 400$. Lets say the hardware is 100USD, then an RF-grade person here here has to do the coding, interfacing, testing within roughly (300/16eur/hour) 20 hours to break even and even then the interface is much nicer in their case.

pretty impressive stuff!

LSTMs: that was also the first thing in the paper that caught my attention! :) I hadn't seen them in the wild in years... My oversight most likely. The paper seems to be getting ~100 citations a year. Someone's using them.

There are a few papers on them. Though you have to be lucky to get them to work. The backprop is horrendous.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.