Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ Advanced Concepts Team
1More

"God Machine" Critics to U.N.: Experiment an Affront to Human Rights - 3 views

  •  
    The end of the world is for this month...
2More

BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Road trains' get ready to roll - 3 views

  •  
    sleeping and driving on the highway
  •  
    "The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the status of the road train. Those in following vehicles could take their hands off the wheel, read a book or watch TV, while they travel along the motorway. Their vehicle would be controlled by the lead vehicle." .... what or who is defining a professional driver? one of the always overly tired truck drivers?
3More

The Go Programming Language - 3 views

  •  
    new programming language - hybrid between c and python .... from google .... of any interest for us?
  •  
    See the other post for my comments....
  •  
    sorry - did not see Juxi's entry ....
3More

The Art of Community - 3 views

  •  
    A recently-published book by the Ubuntu Community Manager, Jono Bacon. I just started reading it: lots of information, experiences and revealing hints on how open-source communities are born and evolve today.
  •  
    "Since I released The Art of Community, one thing has become evident: the people who are buying it are awesome. If you have bought it you are awesome. If you have not, you too can be awesome." To me seems more interesting the topic than the author. I have the impression that many people in this community behave like high-school pupils, though their production it's absolutely "awesome".
  •  
    Awesome!
2More

New LHC Sabotage Theory - 3 views

shared by Ma Ru on 15 Nov 09 - Cached
  •  
    I find it much more plausible than the theory of a bird bombing it with a baguette...
  •  
    The obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/401/
2More

Expedition Week | Mars: Making the New Earth | National Geographic Channel - 3 views

  •  
    announcement of broadcast of documentation about Terraforming Mars on the 19th of November (with nice videos)
  •  
    Please give the title of at least one Sci-fi novel in which terraforming was mentioned ;)
1More

Optics InfoBase - Photorealistic images of carpet cloaks - 3 views

  •  
    nice paper ... José and Luzi you will like it ...
2More

Physics - Power laws in chess - 3 views

  • Finding power laws has now become de rigueur when analyzing popularity distributions. Long tails have been reported for the frequency of word usage in many languages [2], the number of citations of scientific papers [3], the number of visits (hits) to individual websites in a given time interval [4], and many more.
  •  
    Is there such a law for the technology used in satellites ?
1More

Forschung in der Paläontologie - 3 views

  •  
    sorry for the german ... but underlines the unfortunately failed idea storm proposal I made :-)
1More

TEDxAmsterdam /today - 3 views

  •  
    watch the live streaming of TEDxAmsterdam
1More

Alertme energy - 3 views

  •  
    energy consumption meter that integrates with google powermeter. bottom-up smart grid?
1More

biomimetic wind turbines - 3 views

  •  
    schools of fish => schools of wind turbines
2More

Cambridge University Engineering Department - Qi Pan - 3 views

  •  
    nice tool ... but apparently not open source :-(
  •  
    already posted further down the page
1More

Primal Fusion - 3 views

  •  
    just discovered this thought cloud alpha stage website .... I am sure that Kevin would LOVE this one ...
4More

Artificial meat grown in laboratory - UPI.com - 3 views

  •  
    bioengineers did it in the Netherlands - hope sodexho doesn't find out soon !!
  • ...1 more comment...
  •  
    geee... I want to see how they "exercise" it :)
  •  
    "If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it.", sounds like the normal dutch mentality on food. it feels and tastes smth like it
  •  
    aaah! completely crazy these dutch. What's wrong with killing cows and pigs...
3More

David Copperfield's Flying Illusion Revealed or how to protect your invention? | Presans - 3 views

  •  
    nice article reflecting on how to best "protect" ideas ....
  •  
    "we should not forget that the technical solution disclosed in this article is only 5% of illusion" Certainly... but I wonder how did they measure it?
  •  
    Obviously, they subtracted the percentage amount of bullshit from the total :P
2More

Why Computers Can't Mimic The Brain - Forbes.com - 3 views

  • engineers seem to have a diminished ability to understand biology
  • Remember them the next time you read a story claiming some brain-like accomplishment of a computer. The only really human thing these programs are doing is attracting attention to themselves
9More

Probabilistic Logic Allows Computer Chip to Run Faster - 3 views

  •  
    Francesco pointed out this research one year ago, we dropped it as noone was really considering it ... but in space a low CPU power consumption is crucial!! Maybe we should look back into this?
  • ...6 more comments...
  •  
    Q1: For the time being, for what purposes computers are mainly used on-board?
  •  
    for navigation, control, data handling and so on .... why?
  •  
    Well, because the point is to identify an application in which such computers would do the job... That could be either an existing application which can be done sufficiently well by such computers or a completely new application which is not already there for instance because of some power consumption constraints... Q2 would be then: for which of these purposes strict determinism of the results is not crucial? As the answer to this may not be obvious, a potential study could address this very issue. For instance one can consider on-board navigation systems with limited accuracy... I may be talking bullshit now, but perhaps in some applications it doesn't matter whether a satellite flies on the exact route but +/-10km to the left/right? ...and so on for the other systems. Another thing is understanding what exactly this probabilistic computing is, and what can be achieved using it (like the result is probabilistic but falls within a defined range of precision), etc. Did they build a complete chip or at least a sub-circiut, or still only logic gates...
  •  
    Satellites use old CPUs also because with the trend of going for higher power modern CPUs are not very convenient from a system design point of view (TBC)... as a consequence the constraints put on on-board algorithms can be demanding. I agree with you that double precision might just not be necessary for a number of applications (navigation also), but I guess we are not talking about 10km as an absolute value, rather to a relative error that can be tolerated at level of (say) 10^-6. All in all you are right a first study should assess what application this would be useful at all.. and at what precision / power levels
  •  
    The interest of this can be a high fault tolerance for some math operations, ... which would have for effect to simplify the job of coders! I don't think this is a good idea regarding power consumption for CPU (strictly speaking). The reason we use old chip is just a matter of qualification for space, not power. For instance a LEON Sparc (e.g. use on some platform for ESA) consumes something like 5mW/MHz so it is definitely not were an engineer will look for some power saving considering a usual 10-15kW spacecraft
  •  
    What about speed then? Seven time faster could allow some real time navigation at higher speed (e.g. velocity of a terminal guidance for an asteroid impactor is limited to 10 km/s ... would a higher velocity be possible with faster processors?) Another issue is the radiation tolerance of the technology ... if the PCMOS are more tolerant to radiation they could get more easily space qualified.....
  •  
    I don't remember what is the speed factor, but I guess this might do it! Although, I remember when using an IMU that you cannot have the data above a given rate (e.g. 20Hz even though the ADC samples the sensor at a little faster rate), so somehow it is not just the CPU that must be re-thought. When I say qualification I also imply the "hardened" phase.
  •  
    I don't know if the (promised) one-order-of-magnitude improvements in power efficiency and performance are enough to justify looking into this. For once, it is not clear to me what embracing this technology would mean from an engineering point of view: does this technology need an entirely new software/hardware stack? If that were the case, in my opinion any potential benefit would be nullified. Also, is it realistic to build an entire self-sufficient chip on this technology? While the precision of floating point computations may be degraded and still be useful, how does all this play with integer arithmetic? Keep in mind that, e.g., in the Linux kernel code floating-point calculations are not even allowed/available... It is probably possible to integrate an "accelerated" low-accuracy floating-point unit together with a traditional CPU, but then again you have more implementation overhead creeping in. Finally, recent processors by Intel (e.g., the Atom) and especially ARM boast really low power-consumption levels, at the same time offering performance-boosting features such as multi-core and vectorization capabilities. Don't such efforts have more potential, if anything because of economical/industrial inertia?
3More

Computers in space - 3 views

  •  
    A link to help the discussion a few posts below....
  •  
    one post above you mean ...?
  •  
    Now that you commented, it's below :) [Edit] Fun reading btw.
« First ‹ Previous 581 - 600 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page