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Guardians of Earth - Nightly. Ron Garan, July, 29 2012 Next week, the international forum uniting generations, "The Guardians of Earth," is bringing together high school students ages 14-17 from around the world to share their ideas for protecting Earth with astronauts, cosmonauts, scholars and each other. This is another example of why you don’t have to be in orbit to have the orbital perspective, Based on the belief that by joining together our international community can make a difference - and that each of us can make a difference - the forum brings tomorrow's leaders together to get to know each others cultures and capabilities.

During the August 5th - 8th forum at the Yuri A. By interacting with astronauts and cosmonauts, they are further exposed to the unique perspective of those who have seen Earth's fragility from space. I hope all the students have a wonderful time and they come away from the experience with a commitment to work together to improve life on Earth and not accept the status quo on our planet.

Predicting what topics will trend on Twitter - MIT News Office - Nightly. Twitter’s home page features a regularly updated list of topics that are “trending,” meaning that tweets about them have suddenly exploded in volume. A position on the list is highly coveted as a source of free publicity, but the selection of topics is automatic, based on a proprietary algorithm that factors in both the number of tweets and recent increases in that number.

At the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks at MIT in November, Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and his student Stanislav Nikolov will present a new algorithm that can, with 95 percent accuracy, predict which topics will trend an average of an hour and a half before Twitter’s algorithm puts them on the list — and sometimes as much as four or five hours before. Let the data decide In the standard approach to machine learning, Shah explains, researchers would posit a “model” — a general hypothesis about the shape of the pattern whose specifics need to be inferred. Keeping pace. WoRMS - World Register of Marine Species - Nightly. PRESS RELEASE: At Least One-Third of Marine Species Remain UndescribedAdded on 2012-11-15 18:10:22 by Appeltans, Ward At least one-third of the species that inhabit the world’s oceans may remain completely unknown to science.

That’s despite the fact that more species have been described in the last decade than in any previous one, according to a report published online on November 15 in the Cell Press publication Current Biology that details the first comprehensive register of marine species of the world—a massive collaborative undertaking by hundreds of experts around the globe. The researchers estimate that the ocean may be home to as many as one million species in all—likely not more. About 226,000 of those species have so far been described. There are another 65,000 species awaiting description in specimen collections. “For the first time, we can provide a very detailed overview of species richness, partitioned among all major marine groups. Why Are Physics Classes Full of Old Stuff? – Uncertain Principles - Nightly. Everybody and their siblings have been linking to this Minute Physics video, an “open letter” to President Obama complaining about the way that most high school and even intro college physics classes don’t teach anything remotely modern: I’m not entirely sure where the date of 1865 comes from, but it’s true, the standard intro physics sequence doesn’t really touch what’s normally called “modern physics,” a term which is itself laughably out of date, as it generally refers to special relativity and quantum mechanics as it stood around 1935.

We don’t teach really new stuff until about the 300 level in college courses (junior/senior year for students on the normal track), with the possible exception of hand-wavey non-majors courses. So, why is that, anyway? Are physics teachers and professors just totally oblivious to how backwards and out-of date their curriculum is? No, of course not, especially at the college level. CreativeProgrammingAssignment201204 - Creative Programming for Designers - Nightly. Please read AssignmentDescription . Please follow the instructions below carefully. It will save us a lot of time. For your convenience, please buy a copy of , by By Casey Reas, Ben Fry. e-Books and hard copies are available from O'Reilly Before the first lecture, Please download and install Processing on your laptop.

Always bring with you your laptop, with fully charged batteries and power cables. The assigner will announce a help hour during his lecture. 1. This assignment has two parts, each of which has two lectures and one interactive session. There will be two challenges, one for each part. All the assigners and the students will visit the exhibition and give comments to each other. Some of the results will be selected for plenary presentation in the interactive session. 2. Part 1: Week 1: 25-04-2012 08:45 until 10:30 AUDITORIUM 14 Week 2: 02-05-2012 08:45 until 10:30 AUDITORIUM 14 Week 3: 09-05-2012 08:45 until 10:30 AUDITORIUM 14 Part 2: 2.1.

. : Creating static visual arts. Source code. The coming civil war over general purpose computing - Boing Boing - Nightly. This talk was delivered at Google in August, and for The Long Now Foundation in July 2012. A transcript of the notes follows. I gave a talk in late 2011 at 28C3 in Berlin called "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing" In a nutshell, its hypothesis was this: • Computers and the Internet are everywhere and the world is increasingly made of them. • We used to have separate categories of device: washing machines, VCRs, phones, cars, but now we just have computers in different cases. [[VCR, washing machine] [[747]] [[Hearing aid]] • This means that all of our sociopolitical problems in the future will have a computer inside them, too—and a would-be regulator saying stuff like this: "Make it so that self-driving cars can't be programmed to drag race" "Make it so that bioscale 3D printers can't make harmful organisms or restricted compounds" Which is to say: "Make me a general-purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out.

" [[Turing - 1]] [[Hal]] [[AACS key]] 1. The Particle Zoo: Subatomic Particle Softies - Nightly.

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An Invitation to Participate in the International Space Apps Challenge - Nightly. Ron Garan, April, 12 2012 Yuri Gagarin was 27 years old when he left the protective atmosphere of Earth, and then returned 108 minutes later with the perspective nearly all of us privileged to follow him would come to understand: “Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!” Fifty years later, when I left Earth from the same launchpad as Yuri Gagarin, I took with me another long held view of astronauts and cosmonauts: you can’t see borders from space. Despite this, the orbital perspective of living and working in space shows us just how interconnected we are. The International Space Apps Challenge On April 21st and 22nd, citizens of Earth will pool their brainpower and their passion for problem solving in a 48 hour technology development marathon taking place on all seven continents – and in space.

Competition among nations thrust one human into space fifty-one years ago today. James Burke Institute for Innovation in Education the Knowledge Web - Nightly. James Burke: Connections | Watch Free Documentary Online - Nightly. Connections explores an Alternative View of Change (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own (e.g., profit, curiosity, religious) motivations with no concept of the final, modern result of what either their or their contemporaries' actions finally led to.

The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels. Connections (1978) 1. The Trigger Effect details the world’s present dependence on complex technological networks through a detailed narrative of New York City and the power blackout of 1965. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Connections² (1994) 1.

View from the ISS at Night. Silicon Valley Worries About Addiction to Devices. Time Dilation. Paradox Vermilion thinks Cerulean's clock runs slow. But of course from Cerulean's perspective it is Vermilion who is moving, and Vermilion whose clock runs slow. How can both think the other's clock runs slow? Paradox! The resolution of the paradox, as usual in special relativity, involves simultaneity, and as usual it helps to draw a spacetime diagram, such as this one from the Centre of the Lightcone page.

While Vermilion thinks events happen simultaneously along horizontal planes in this diagram, Cerulean thinks events occur simultaneously along skewed planes. Thus Vermilion thinks her clock ticks when Cerulean is at the point , before Cerulean's clock ticks. Ticks when Vermilion is at the point , before Vermilion's clock ticks. Where do the two light beams in Vermilion's and Cerulean's clocks go in this spacetime diagram?

Tetris takes over MIT building in case of hack as high art (video) THE SOUND WE CAN'T HEAR. The Music of Science: it may be too deep to be audible to humans, but Oliver Morton thinks infrasound could nonetheless have plenty to tell us... From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, July/August 2012 Untrue as it is, there is something wonderful about the notion that you can hear the ocean when you hold a conch to your ear—a synecdoche of shell for sea, a beguiling fantasy that if you listen hard enough you can hear the womb-sound of the world. The systems used to study infrasound are less poetic; the ones I’ve seen look like little tarmac car parks with sawn-off drainpipes sticking up out of them. But they make the seashell’s promise real.

Infrasound is, like sound (and, for that matter, ultrasound), a matter of vibration. Things that make a vast amount of audible noise often make inaudible infrasound, too. In the 1930s Hugo Benioff, who, with his Caltech colleague Charles Richter, was revolutionising the study of earthquakes, found that there was infrasound that had no audible counterpart.

Howie Choset's Serpentine Robots. Technology – Uncertain Principles - Nightly. Carbon, Bacteria, and Fish Balls: The Machines of the Future | Wired Enterprise. EDU - YouTube - Nightly. First Earth: Uncompromising Ecological Architecture | Watch Free Documentary Online - Nightly. First Earth is a documentary about the movement towards a massive paradigm shift for shelter - building healthy houses in the old ways, out of the very earth itself, and living together like in the old days, by recreating villages. It is a sprawling film, shot on location from the West Coast to West Africa. An audiovisual manifesto filmed over the course of 4 years and 4 continents, First Earth makes the case that earthen homes are the healthiest housing in the world; and that since it still takes a village to raise a healthy child, it is incumbent upon us to transform our suburban sprawl into eco-villages, a new North American dream.

First Earth is not a how-to film; rather, it's a why-to film. It establishes the appropriateness of earthen building in every cultural context, under all socio-economic conditions, from third-world communities to first-world countrysides, from Arabian deserts to American urban jungles. Watch the full documentary now (playlist - 1 hour, 27 minutes). Describing Nature With Math - Nightly.

Share Inquiry: AN OCCASIONAL COLUMN How do scientists use mathematics to define reality? And why? By Peter Tyson Posted 11.10.11 NOVA How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of reality? If you're like me, you understand readily how one can describe nature's wonders using poetry or music, painting or photography.

This photograph does a pretty good job of "describing" ripples. Extremely well, as Einstein knew better than most, of course. How is this so? Ancient math While many early civilizations, including Islamic, Indian, and Chinese, made important contributions to mathematics, it was the ancient Greeks who invented much of the math we're familiar with. "With a few symbols on a page, you can describe a wealth of physical phenomena. " The Greeks' discoveries are timeless: Euclid's axioms are as unimpeachable today as when he devised them over 2,000 years ago.

The measure of all things A tidy sum Aftermath. Multidimensional Math - Nightly. Free Educational Videos for K-12 Students - Nightly. WatchKnowLearn ratings are intentionally harsher than what you might find on YouTube, for example. Most of our videos have been imported by people who want to use them with kids, not by the creators of the videos. We take a hard-nosed attitude toward quality. Four and five stars should be reserved for really excellent quality. Three stars isn't bad. Two is often watchable and shouldn't be ruled out. Unusually helpful and well produced.

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UCLA creates transparent solar cell, dreams of current generating windows. UCLA researchers create highly transparent solar cells for windows that generate electricity UCLA researchers have developed a new transparent solar cell that is an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their study appears in the journal ACS Nano. The UCLA team describes a new kind of polymer solar cell (PSC) that produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light, not visible light, making the cells nearly 70% transparent to the human eye. They made the device from a photoactive plastic that converts infrared light into an electrical current. Yang added that there has been intense world-wide interest in so-called polymer solar cells. "Our new PSCs are made from plastic-like materials and are lightweight and flexible," he said.

Polymer solar cells have attracted great attention due to their advantages over competing solar cell technologies. Open Source Creativity - Hackerspaces: Science on the SPOT - YouTube - Nightly.