Author Archives: curiouscat

Teen Tackles Centuries-old Numbers challenge

teen tackles centuries-old numbers challenge

A 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant in central Sweden has single-handedly figured out a formula with Bernoulli numbers that is normally reserved for much more seasoned mathematicians, earning him praise from professors at prestigious Uppsala University.
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While it’s not the first time that someone has shown such Bernoulli number relationships, it’s highly unusual for a first year high school student to make his way through the complicated calculations, according to Uppsala University senior maths lecturer Lars-Ã…ke Lindahl. “He’s a very clever guy,” Lindahl told The Local.

“What he did isn’t necessarily new, but it is quite remarkable for a first year high school student to take on these types of problems all on his own. It’s certainly an achievement.”
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Altoumaimi plans to continue studying advanced math and physics over the summer. “I wanted to be a researcher in physics or mathematics; I really like those subjects. But I have to get better at English and social science,” he told Falu-Kuriren.

Great Lake Sinkholes

Grand Valley State University Scientist Discovers Great Lake ‘sinkholes’

Biddanda said the sinkholes are home to “bizarre” ecosystems dominated by brilliant purple mats of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, but largely devoid of fish.

“Groundwater from beneath Lake Huron is dissolving minerals from the defunct seabed and carrying them into the lake to form these exotic, extreme environments,” Biddanda said. “Those ecosystems are in a class not only with Antarctic lakes, but also with deep-sea, hydrothermal vents and cold seeps.”
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The Lake Huron sinkholes are dominated by brilliant purple mats of cyanobacteria — cousins of microbes found on the bottom of permanently ice-covered lakes in Antarctica — and pallid, floating pony-tails of other microbial life

Backyard Scientists Aid Research

Backyard scientists use Web to catalog species, aid research

When a scientist caught onto her efforts, Jirachareonkul and a friend assembled about 20 volunteers — a group she calls the “Toad NUTS” — to collect data on the endangered Western Leopard Toad. The information they collect is being used in scientific research.
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At a time when climate change and urbanization are poised to set off a new wave of extinction, some members of the scientific community are turning toward backyard biologists for the data they need to monitor ecosystems and protect struggling species.
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Project BudBurst, out of Boulder, Colorado, aims to collect so much amateur data about plant species that scientists will be able to tell how climate change is altering the seasons in North America.
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Technology is amplifying this passion for citizen science, which has been around since scientists started cataloging species. Researchers at several universities are working on iPhone applications and computer programs that could analyze digital photos of plant leaves and automatically identify the plant’s species.
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The relationship between formal science and citizen science is similar to that between professional news reporters and bloggers; some scientists worry that the information coming in from nonprofessionals will be inaccurate, said John Musinsky, a senior director at Conservation International.

Great stuff. And you can get involved if you want. Just follow the links or search around the internet to find projects that interest you. These projects can be great ways to get kids involved in science.

Automatic Dog Washing Machine

I think this is pretty cool; I’m sure some will object though. It was “designed by a team of veterinarians and engineers to clean the dog very very well. Its very very safe.” You probably can’t afford one for your house though: it cost $30,000. The
The Dog-Washing Machine is available in France and elsewhere, too (the video above is from Vancouver, Canada).

The brainchild of French entrepreneur Romain Jerry, the Dog’O’Matic takes about 30 minutes: 5 minutes for the actual washing with soft jets of water and a mild shampoo and an additional 25 minutes for drying with warm air.
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A French reporter tried the invention with her own dog, and though the pooch initially tried to jump out of the machine, the dog quickly calmed down once the process started and completed the wash.

I imagine some will react emotionally that it must be mean because a machine sounds mean. I don’t really see why it must be mean. Plenty of people pay others to wash their dogs and the dogs jump around and bark and shake when they are getting lathered up. That isn’t cruel, I don’t see why this would be.

The Million Dollar Programming Prize

One of the main areas of collaborative filtering we exploited is the nearest-neighbor approach. A movie’s “neighbors” in this context are other movies that tend to be scored most similarly when rated by the same viewer. For example, consider Saving Private Ryan (1998), a war movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks. Its neighbors may include other war movies, movies directed by Spielberg, or movies starring Tom Hanks. To predict a particular viewer’s rating, we would look for the nearest neighbors to Saving Private Ryan that the viewer had already seen and rated. For some viewers, it may be easy to find a full allotment of close neighbors; for many others, we may discover only a handful of neighboring movies.
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A second area of collaborative-filtering research we pursued involves what are known as latent-factor models. These score both a given movie and a given viewer according to a set of factors, themselves inferred from patterns in the ratings given to all the movies by all the viewers [see illustration, “The Latent-Factor Approach“]. Factors for movies may measure comedy versus drama, action versus romance, and orientation to children versus orientation to adults. Because the factors are determined automatically by algorithms, they may correspond to hard-to-describe concepts such as quirkiness, or they may not be interpretable by humans at all.
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The model may use 20 to 40 such factors to locate each movie and viewer in a multidimensional space. It then predicts a viewer’s rating of a movie according to the movie’s score on the dimensions that person cares about most. We can put these judgments in quantitative terms by taking the dot (or scalar) product of the locations of the viewer and the movie.
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We found that most nearest-neighbor techniques work best on 50 or fewer neighbors, which means these methods can’t exploit all the information a viewer’s ratings may contain. Latent-factor models have the opposite weakness: They are bad at detecting strong associations among a few closely related films, such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003).

Because these two methods are complementary, we combined them, using many versions of each in what machine-learning experts call an ensemble approach. This allowed us to build systems that were simple and therefore easy to code and fast to run.

Interesting article. See some other posts on challenge prizes.

Read: posts on programing – Problems Programming Math – Programmers (comic)

Using Barn Owls for Bilogical Pest Control in Israel

Using Barn Owls (Tyto alba erlangeri) For Biological Pest Control In Israel

Agricultural pests come in all forms, but worldwide it is small mammals, mostly rodents, that are responsible for the destruction of about 35% of the total world agriculture. To combat rodents, farmers use rodenticides. However, these pesticides are relatively ineffective as they are short-lived
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During the late 1960’s, hundreds of birds of prey (some of them threatened and endangered species) were killed throughout Israel from secondary poisoning after eating rodents that had been poisoned with rodenticides.
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Once farmers grasp the concept that their ‘winged’ neighbours can help to solve rodent damage if they stop using poisons, Barn Owls and Kestrels will be able to rise to the occasion and control rodents. By living in harmony, both farmers and these birds will be able to benefit from living in co-existence. As we are just beginning to understand the power of nature we realise its many economic benefits, even in modern times. As Barn Owls and Kestrels truly know no boundaries, they not only solve economic problems, but are also bringing peoples together. This is very much needed in the Middle East.

Great stuff.

Tiny Machine Commands a Swarm of Bacteria

Researchers in Canada have created a solar-powered micro-machine that is no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. The tiny machine can carry out basic sensing tasks and can indirectly control the movement of a swarm of bacteria in the same Petri dish.

Sylvain Martel, Director of the NanoRobotics Laboratory at the Ã‰cole Polytechnique de MontrÃ©al, previously showed a way to control bacteria attached to microbeads using an MRI machine. His new micro-machine, which measure 300×300 microns and carry tiny solar panels, will be presented this week at ICRA ’09 in Japan.

On such a small device there is little room for batteries, sensors or transmitters. So the solar cell on top delivers power, sending an electric current to both a sensor and a communication circuit. The communication component sends tiny electromagnetic pulses that are detected by an external computer.

The sensor meanwhile detects surrounding pH levels–the higher the pH concentration, the faster the electromagnetic pulses emitted by the micro-machine. The external computer uses these signals to direct a swarm of about 3,000 magnetically-sensitive bacteria, which push the micro-machine around as it pulses. The bacteria push the micro-machine closer to the higher pH concentrations and change its direction if it pulses too slowly. This is more practical than trying to attach the bacteria onto the micro-machines, says Martel, since the bacteria only have a lifespan of a few hours. “It’s like having a propulsion engine on demand,” he says…

Intel Science and Engineering Fair 2009 Webcasts

Tara Adiseshan, 14, of Charlottesville, Virginia; Li Boynton, 17, of Houston; and Olivia Schwob, 16, of Boston were selected from 1,563 young scientists from 56 countries, regions and territories for their commitment to innovation and science. Each received a $50,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation.

(video removed, so the embed code has been removed)

In the webcast, Tara Adiseshan, talks about her project studying the evolutionary ties between nematodes (parasites) and sweat bees. She identified and classified the evolutionary relationships between sweat bees and the nematodes (microscopic worms) that live inside them. Tara was able to prove that because the two have such ecologically intimate relationships, they also have an evolutionary relationship. That is to say, if one species evolves, the other will follow.

Li Boynton developed a biosensor from bioluminescent bacteria (a living organism that gives off light) to detect the presence of contaminants in public water. Li’s biosensor is cheaper and easier to use than current biosensors, and she hopes it can be used in developing countries to reduce water toxicity. Li Boynton on What’s Great About Science:

Olivia Schwob isolated a gene that can be used to improve the intelligence of a worm. The results could help us better understand how humans learn and even prevent, treat and cure mental disabilities in the future.

In addition to the three $50,000 top winners, more than 500 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair participants received scholarships and prizes for their groundbreaking work. Intel awards included 19 “Best of Category” winners who each received a $5,000 Intel scholarship and a new laptop. In total, nearly $4 million is scholarships and awards were provided.

Top Ranked Engineering Blog

I ran across another site that ranks this blog first for engineering, which I always like – even if I realize the ranking is just one computation and hardly definitive.

Google returns this blog 3rd in search results. Yahoo also has us 3rd (behind 2 different blogs than Google show). We are the 5th results on live search. The ranking on Top 100 Engineering Blogs slipped to 7th (they eliminated the subscriber factor from the calculation, and that hurt our ranking). We are the number one ranked engineering blog on blogged.

Meeting the Challenge of Simplicity

Interesting webcast by Meeting the Challenge of Simplicity by Giles Colborne. This session addresses abstract notion of simplicity, looks at why it is critical in modern UI design and answers questions: Why does simplicity matter? Is there a meaningful definition of simplicity? Why do design processes and good intentions undermine simplicity? What processes and techniques can software developers use to achieve simplicity?

InfoQ is a great site for watching presentations online. With a simple but superior interface showing a live video with a separate area showing the current slides.