Probabilistic fluidic modular construction - 17 views
Looks cool... in simulation. And even there it seems to work terribly slow (note how much they have to speed it up).

Luís F. Simões liked it
The Future… One Hundred Years Ago - 12 views
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one of these again. french illustrations from 1910 of life in the year 2000. some pleasingly close. a lot of flying and robots. some inexplicable (bunch of people staring at a horse). some bmi.
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No idea... another one I don't get is the one with the waiter presenting some small black-white thing to the white hair guy on a chair.
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love the clockwork orange one
3D Fractals - 7 views
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Amazing renderings.
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wow, amazing pictures !
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nice
10 Business Models That Rocked 2010 - 11 views
What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation. - 5 views
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If I could write, this is exactly what I would write about rocket, GO, and so on... :)
"we are decadent and tired. But none of the bright young up-and-coming economies seem to be interested in anything besides aping what the United States and the USSR did years ago. We may, in other words, need to look beyond strictly U.S.-centric explanations for such failures of imagination and initiative. ... Those are places we need to go if we are not to end up as the Ottoman Empire of the 21st century, and yet in spite of all of the lip service that is paid to innovation in such areas, it frequently seems as though we are trapped in a collective stasis."
"But those who do concern themselves with the formal regulation of "technology" might wish to worry less about possible negative effects of innovation and more about the damage being done to our environment and our prosperity by the mid-20th-century technologies that no sane and responsible person would propose today, but in which we remain trapped by mysterious and ineffable forces." - ...4 more comments...
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Would have been nice if it were historically more accurate and less polemic / superficial
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mmmh... the wheel is also an old invention...
there is an idea behind but this article is not very deepfull, and I really don't think the problem is with innovation and lack of creative young people !!! look at what is done in the financial sector...
Singularity University, class of 2010: projects that aim to impact a billion people wit... - 8 views
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At the link below you find additional information about the projects:
Education: Ten weeks to save the world
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100915/full/467266a.html - ...8 more comments...
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well, most good ideas probably take only a second to be formulated, it's the details that take years :-)
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I do not think the point of the SU is to formulate new ideas (infact there is nothing new in the projects chosen). Their mission is to build and maintain a network of contacts among who they believe will be the 'future leaders' of space ... very similar to our beloved ISU.
Quadrocopters can now fly through thrown hoops, the end really is nigh (video) -- Engadget - 2 views
Leap Motion - 7 views
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Very quick and accurate gesture interface. A bit like Kinect, but better. Watch the video, its neat!
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Aww... new toy coming! Great Leo! :)
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they also have a developer program, the ACT should apply :)
BBC Nature - 'Brinicle' ice finger of death filmed in Antarctic - 7 views
Black Holes play drums - 8 views
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Another great presentation at this conference!! Plus I always wanted to enter the numerical computations of orbit around black holes.... with Luzi we had a project on formation flying around black holes .... revolutionary idea (of course we did not do it!!!)
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nice movie, and song :)
we should definitely implement GR orbits in pagmo ! -
I agree Marek, yet was it practical for Apollonio to study conic sections more than 1500 years before Kepler found his three laws?
And here is a good paper to start with: http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v77/i10/e103005, making an analogy between the periodic table and the taxomony of all orbits around a black hole.
Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist - 4 views
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Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but - wait for it - to academic publishers.
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fully agree ...
"But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more."
very nice also:
"Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive. But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on "the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies". You bet they will.
In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating - along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität - a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers.
The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us." -
It is a really great article and the first time I read something in this direction. FULLY AGREE as well.
Problem is I have not much encouraging to report from the Brussels region...
Astronomer Captures Enormous True-Color Photo of Night Sky - 4 views
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And some interactive versions:
http://skysurvey.org/ -
this is very very nice! thanks for sharing
I know at least *some* of you will like it... - 13 views
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Great Scott, Leo! Honest answers?? I was kinda expecting Francesco's score, but this...
Physics in a Crisis - 3 views
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Luckily I'm far away from Geneva, but this has to be said today, when the LHC starts! No, not tiny black holes will eat us (what a nonsense!), but the supernovae energy will let LHC explode!!!
Pacome, I expect you to debunk this with gratest care! - ...2 more comments...
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Unfortunately, most information I have about the guy (Hans Lehner, a Swiss) is in German, his official homepage is http://www.rqm.ch/
According to EsoWatch he is the Swiss analogue to Dr. Mills and his Blacklight power. Lehner apparently founded a company, which should have produced a "Raum-Quanten-Motor" that -- of course -- produces energy out of nothing. The theory is based on spookey forces mediated by Lehneronen. 11 Million Swiss Franks (about 8 Million Euro) were lost when the company bankrupt. And the guy is selling new stocks on his homepage again...
Lehner calls another crackpot named Oliver Crane Zweistein (from Einstein being "Onestone") and himself "Dreistein". Now he is looking for Mister or Misses Vierstein. Perhaps you should apply, good luck!! -
i like the first line of their supernovae energy technology document
"Dear potential investor:"...
Amount of profanity per programming language - 8 views
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And the winner is... C++ :) Love the comment on Slashdot:
"C++ Templates will turn the most pious programmer into a curse-slinging, chain-smoking alcoholic." -
Nice one... However note the sample could be biased, because I'd expect some interaction between "using github" and "being a curse-slinging, chain-smoking alcoholic" ;-)
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Fair enough :)
What happens when two artificial-intelligence bots talk to each other? - 7 views
APOD: 2012 March 12 - The Scale of the Universe Interactive - 3 views
The importance of stupidity in scientific research. - 10 views
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I suggest you this easy reading ( is on a peer-reviewed scientific journal, IF = 6.14)
'We just don't know what we're doing!!!' - ...2 more comments...
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I tend to agree with you but I think that you are too harsh - its still only an "essay" and one of his points of making sure that education at post graduate level is not about indoctrinating what we know already is valid ...
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I think this quote by Richard Horton is relevant to the discussion:
"We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong."
:P
Seminar: You and Your Research, Dr. Richard W. Hamming (March 7, 1986) - 10 views
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This talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?" From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.
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Here's the link related to one of the lunch time discussions. I recommend it to every single one of you. I promise it will be worth your time.
If you're lazy, you have a summary here (good stuff also in the references, have a look at them):
Erren TC, Cullen P, Erren M, Bourne PE (2007) Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming. PLoS Comput Biol 3(10): e213. - ...3 more comments...
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honestly I think that some of these rules actually make sense indeed ... but I am always curious to get a good book recommendation (which book of Copernic would you recommend?)
btw Pacome: we are in Paris ... in case you have some time ... -
I warmly recommend this book, a bit old but fascinating: The sleepwalkers from Arthur Koestler. It shows that progress in science is not straight and do not obey any rule... It is not as rational as most of people seem to believe today.
http://www.amazon.com/Sleepwalkers-History-Changing-Universe-Compass/dp/0140192468/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1294835558&sr=8-1
Otherwise yes I have some time ! my phone number: 0699428926
We live around Denfert-Rochereau and Montparnasse. We could go for a beer this evening ?
... or we could reach the point, unthinkable only few years ago, of being able to exchange text messages in almost real time! OMG, think of the possibilities!
Seriously, does the author even browse the internet?
You need a set of rules and a common objective. This is clearly observable in "some team", where these rules are lacking, making team work inexistent.
The additional difficulties here are that it involves people that are almost strangers to each other, and the immateriality of the project. The support they are using (web, wiki) is only secondary.
What they achieved is remarkable, disregarding the subject!
Open source developers have been organizing themselves with emails since the early '90s, and most projects (e.g., the Linux kernel) still do not use anything else today. The Linux kernel mailing list gets around 400 messages per day, and they are managing just fine to scale as the number of contributors increases.
I agree that what they achieved is remarkable, but it is more for "what" they achieved than "how". What they did does not remotely qualify as "massively" collaborative: again, many open source projects are managed collaboratively by thousands of people, and many of them are in the multi-million lines of code range.
My personal opinion of why in the scientific world these open models are having so many difficulties is that the scientific community today is (globally, of course there are many exceptions) a closed, mostly conservative circle of people who are scared of changes. There is also the fact that the barrier of entry in a scientific community is very high, but I think that this should merely scale down the number of people involved and not change the community "qualitatively". I do not think that many research activities are so much more difficult than, e.g., writing an O(1) scheduler for an Operating System or writing a new balancing tree algorithm for efficiently storing files on a filesystem. Then there is the whole issue of scientific publishing, which, in its current form, is nothing more than a racket. No wonder traditional journals are scared to death by these open-science movements.
but maybe too many things mixed up together - open science journals vs traditional journals, conservatism of science community wrt programmers (to me one of the reasons for this might be the average age of both groups, which is probably more than 10 years apart ...) and then using emailing wrt other collaboration tools ....
.... will have to look at the paper now more carefully ... (I am surprised to see no comment from José or Marek here :-)
In collaborations and team work, it is about rules, not only about the technology you use to potentially collaborate. Otherwise, all projects would be successful, and we would noy learn management at school!
They did not write they managed the colloboration exclusively because of wikipedia and emails (or other 2.0 technology)! You are missing the part that makes it successful and remarkable as a project.
On his blog the guy put a list of 12 rules for this project. None are related to emails, wikipedia, forums ... because that would be lame and your comment would make sense.
Following your argumentation, the tools would be sufficient for collaboration. In the ACT, we have plenty of tools, but no team work. QED
Don't get me wrong, this is the dynamic of the team and I am OK with it ... in the end it is less work for me :)
team = 3 members or more. I am personally not looking for a 15 member team work, and it is not what I meant.
Anyway, this is not exactly the subject of the paper.
As far as I am concerned, this happened many times during my ACT period.
And this is happening now with me in Delft, where I have the chance to be in an even more international group than the ACT. I do efficient collaborations with those people who are "close" to me not only in scientific interest, but also in some private sense. And I have people around me who have interesting topics and they might need my help and knowledge, but somehow, it just does not work. Simply lack of sympathy.
You know what I mean, don't you?
About the article: there is nothing new, indeed. However, why it worked: only brains and not the people worked together on a very specific problem. Plus maybe they were motivated by the idea of e-collaboration. No revolution.
Let me try to say it more clearly: my point is that what they accomplished is nothing new methodologically (i.e., online collaboration of a loosely knit group of people), it is something that has been done countless times before. Do you think that now that it is mathematicians who are doing it makes it somehow special or different? Personally, I don't. You should come over to some mailing lists of mathematical open-source software (e.g., SAGE, Pari, ...), there's plenty of online collaborative research going on there :)
I also disagree that, as you say, "in the case of Linux, what makes the project work is the rules they set and the management style (hierachy, meritocracy, review)". First of all I think the main engine of any collaboration like this is the objective, i.e., wanting to get something done. Rules emerge from self-organization later on, and they may be completely different from project to project, ranging from almost anarchy to BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) style. Given this kind of variety that can be observed in open-source projects today, I am very skeptical that any kind of management rule can be said to be universal (and I am pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of project organizers never went to any "management school").
Then there is the social aspect that Tamas mentions above. From my personal experience, communities that put technical merit above everything else tend to remain very small and generally become irrelevant. The ability to work and collaborate with others is the main asset the a participant of a community can bring. I've seen many times on the Linux kernel mailing list contributions deemed "technically superior" being disregarded and not considered for inclusion in the kernel because it was clear that
For me what is very new is mainly the framework where this collaborative (open) work is applied. I haven't seen this kind of working openly in any other field of academic research (except for the Boinc type project which are very different, because relying on non specialists for the work to be done). This raise several problems, and mainly the one of the credit, which has not really been solved as I read in the wiki (is an article is written, who writes it, what are the names on the paper). They chose to refer to the project, and not to the individual researchers, as a temporary solution...
It is not so surprising for me that this type of work has been first done in the domain of mathematics. Perhaps I have an ideal view of this community but it seems that the result obtained is more important than who obtained it... In many areas of research this is not the case, and one reason is how the research is financed. To obtain money you need to have (scientific) credit, and to have credit you need to have papers with your name on it... so this model of research does not fit in my opinion with the way research is governed.
Anyway we had a discussion on the Ariadnet on how to use it, and one idea was to do this kind of collaborative research; idea that was quickly abandoned...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki
Again, if the research process is completely transparent and publicly accessible there's no way to fake contributions or to give undue credit, and one could cite without problems a group paper in his/her CV, research grant application, etc.