Advanced Concepts Team

Where do you want to go to do academic research and still have a decent salary ? certainly not sweden, France or Germany... prefer the UK, US or the top... Switzerland !

Sure, 44k for a full professor, that's a bad joke! Just my experience from conferences: high saleries do not make good research, I rather suspect there's something like an optimal salery. People with too high saleries often seem to feel obliged to make much noise (whatever the reason might be), the result is not research but PR campagns.

I agree ! Just a correction, net salary for a full professor starting in France: 36456 euros/year... For a McF (equivalent junior prof.): 20160 euros/year, and of course a shitload of admistrative tasks and teaching. I don't know why i still dream to have a position...?

nice video, and some criticism below

I knew it !!!

maybe 90' is too much but we ve been saying for so long about the power nap and never actually did it. I think the management tries to promote only politically correct methods for more creativity and new ways of working etc etc and neglects the potential power naps could have for some of us. I suggest as a first step a pillow on the desk and leaning on it after lunch for 10 - 15 '

"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...

Potential lessons for out own trainee program?

well - part of it we already do ... e.g. : (did you see the picture in the report?) "Tolerate a little crowding. It took a little creativity to suddenly find a dozen new workspaces in our two-room office. Fortunately, we've found that a room can always fit one more person-and by induction, you can fit as many as you need. (All those years we spent proving math theorems came in handy after all.) "

make you wonder when the FLPP will actually lead to something flying !

I did not even know that the airforce continued the X37 project when it was cancelled at NASA ... interesting stuff indeed ...

Sounds like one of Calvin's alibis: Aliens! Dad, aliens! A sarcastic Venusian entered the kitchen...

i think they could also be a cause for Greece's economic crisis

Well, then I suggest to elect Spaceman Spiff instead of Papandreou as Prime Minister! :-)

The outcome should be interesting. Voting starts march 29th.

"has a new capability to make its own choices about whether to make additional observations of rocks that it spots on arrival at a new location"

Finally LaTeX for Google docs?

Here it works fine in Chromium, Firefox and Opera (Linux).

Worked fine, but after saving a document I can't get it back to the LaTeX mode...

very nice!! could not find the dimensions yet ...

20m diagonal http://www.jspec.jaxa.jp/e/activity/ikaros.html http://www.jspec.jaxa.jp/e/activity/images/ikaros/pic_07_l.jpg

that is honestly a little bit less impressive than I had hoped for ... this "just" 200 m2 ... our Furoshiki net had already 130m2 and we deployed it within 1 min under much worse conditions ...

cool. space station made from space debris?

Just some ant suff again.

what strategies!!!

for the dropbox users.. in case you e.g. would like to add things behind restrictive firewalls to your dropbox shared drives

are they going to see the content of all my dropbox after the authorisation process this requires?

I dunno but it would be nice if you could give permission to specific folders ... dunno how the API handles it...

nice demonstration of power of html5

oh yeah Arcade Fire :)

Interview with the director: http://pitchfork.com/news/39927-directors-cut-arcade-fire-we-used-to-wait/

"We fit data to zonal interaction models and characterize which individual interaction forces suffice to explain observed spatial patterns." You can get the paper from the first author's website: http://people.stfx.ca/rlukeman/research.htm

PNAS? Didnt strike me as sth very new though... We should refer to it in the roots study though: "Social organisms form striking aggregation patterns, displaying cohesion, polarization, and collective intelligence. Determining how they do so in nature is challenging; a plethora of simulation studies displaying life-like swarm behavior lack rigorous comparison with actual data because collecting field data of sufficient quality has been a bottleneck." For roots it is NO bottleneck :) Tobias was right :)

Here they assume all relevant variables influencing behaviour are being observed. Namely, the relative positions and orientations of all ducks in the swarm. So, they make movies of the swarm's movements, process them, and them fit the models to that data. In the roots, though we can observe the complete final structure, or even obtain time-lapse movies showing how that structure came out to be, getting the measurements of all relevant soil variables (nitrogen, phosphorus, ...) throughout the soil, and over time, would be extremely difficult. So I guess a replication of the kind of work they did, but for the roots, would be hard. Nice reference though.

Pretty close to what we suggested for "system of systems." Was an excellent exercise in bullshitting, but of course ESA is not innovative enough. Now it's too late, Daimler did it...

not sure they will end up needing a lot of "space" though ...

There is no "space" yet, at least I didn't find any. But that's because they didn't consider specific hardware, but normal mobile phones. The step to include "space" is obvious, though, and I'm sure they thought about this as well...