Category Archives: Education

Sudoku Science

This places Sudoku in an infamously difficult class, called NP-complete, that includes problems of great practical importance, such as scheduling, network routing, and gene sequencing.

“The question of whether there exists an efficient algorithm for solving these problems is now on just about anyone’s list of the Top 10 unsolved problems in science and mathematics in the world,” says Richard Korf, a computer scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles. The challenge is known as P = NP, where, roughly speaking, P stands for tasks that can be solved efficiently, and NP stands for tasks whose solution can be verified efficiently.
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The route-finding algorithm that powers car navigation systems, for instance, was first demonstrated on the Sliding Tile puzzle, a child’s toy in which a player tries to move 15 tiles around a grid so that their surfaces form a picture. The same algorithm helps video game characters steer through virtual worlds. “This is an algorithm developed back in 1968 in abstract kinds of things,” says UCLA’s Korf, who himself has explored algorithms for the Rubik’s Cube. “It’s used all the time.”

Water Jacket

Four youths design India’s first water jacket:

Four engineering students, have designed a water jacket, a wearable vest capable of holding water that when strapped to the body, provides a cushioning effort to the wearer by distributing the weight of the water evenly.

“About 20 kg of water can be stored in this jacket – 10 in the front chamber and an equal volume of liquid in the back chamber. The chambers are designed to maintain a balance in the body so that no part of the body gets strained,” says T R Neelakantan, one of the innovators, who was recently awarded National Innovation Foundation’s (NIF) fourth national awards by President A P J Abdul Kalam in New Delhi.

The other three contributors are Balaji T K, Kunal Kumar and Arun Rosh, all students at the S R M Engineering College, Chennai.

Karl Popper Webcast

Webcast discussing Karl Popper’s ideas by Melvyn Bragg with John Worrall, Anthony O’Hear and Nancy Cartwright, BBC (by the way, the BBC does a wonderful job of running web properties – presenting great material and they don’t break web links by removing content).

Karl Popper is one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th Century, whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientists’ theories could be proved true.

Popper wrote: “The more we learn about the world and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance”. He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead it had simply not proved false, yet! This became known as the theory of falsification.

He called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called “pseudo sciences” which couldn’t be tested.

Pixar Is Inventing New Math

Pixar Is Inventing New Math:

According to DeRose, Pixar is the first Hollywood studio equipped with it’s very own in-house scientific research facility. Mathematicians and computer scientists there are figuring out new mathematical ways to solve problems in animation.
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What they’re finding is that the interplay between academics and industry has been hugely successful. According to DeRose they now have more courage to explore scientific musings that would normally only have been possible in a university environment.

Biomolecules in Motion

Biomolecules in Motion by Kathleen M. Wong:

Proteins are the parts that make living engines run. They supply cells with energy, build muscle and bone, and catalyze countless other reactions that let the spark of life burn bright. To do their jobs, proteins must curl around substrate molecules, stretch to let their substrates go, travel around cells and assemble into work crews.
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Scientists have long believed that when an enzyme is empty, it gapes open like a hungry alligator, and that after it has caught its substrate, it remains closed until the reaction has been completed. Yang’s single-molecule microscopy studies have turned this notion upside-down. “Even when it has substrate, it doesn’t just bind the substrate tightly and stop moving. It’s still flapping,” he says. This constant motion makes perfect sense, considering how fast enzymes operate; some can process a million substrate molecules per minute. “Like a door, it has to be able to swing even without me going in and out.

Wakamaru Robot Blog

Wakamaru Robot

The Wakamaru Robot Blog is only in published in Japanese (and infrequently updated). You can get the site translated to english but I have a feeling the translation is not that great, the start of the last post:

Recently, the daughter inside (1st it is elementary schools grade, still), “0 your [tsu] [te], [ero] it was and” with it reached the point where you say.ã€€
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As for Suzuki of the father generation, already the @ (*) the @ (the ear is intention of [danbo]). By the way, method of catching suitable the [tsu] [te] which is different informing by the country it increased the yellow which is the color of wakamaru?

At the end of each post it has a nice note on comments: “< Note > As for the comment which deviates from the gist of this plan, it is not possible to publish. Please acknowledge beforehand.”

Seeing Patterns Where None Exists

I call data dredge studies the “Rorschach tests” of epidemiology, because researchers can pull out characteristics about people in almost unlimited combinations to find all sorts of correlations and conclude just about anything they set out to find. Just like the Rorschach test, seeing patterns where none exists, finding connections that are there but not as strongly as believed, and seeing what one expects to see, are common.

Page 8 of Statistics for Experiments by George Box, Willliam Hunter (my father) and Stu Hunter (no relation) shows a graph of the population (of people) versus the number of storks which shows a high correlation. “Although in this example few would be led to hypothesize that the increase in the number of storks caused the observed increase in population, investigators are sometimes guilty of this kind of mistake in other contexts.” And some might make it in this context 🙂

Page: Marketing Science

Google’s Page urges scientists to market themselves:

And that was his main advice to the scientists in the room: take their scientific studies, market them better and make them readily accessible to the world. That way, the world might have a better chance at solving problems like energy consumption, poverty and global climate change.

“Virtually all economic growth (in the world) was due to technological progress. I think as a society we’re not really paying attention to that,” Page said. “Science has a real marketing problem. If all the growth in world is due to science and technology and no one pays attention to you, then you have a serious marketing problem.”

To that end, Page urged the group to take on more leadership roles in society, i.e., politics, so that they could control more funding for research and development. He also said that scientists should get in the habit of investing part of their scientific grant money to marketing budgets, in order to get the word out to the media about their research.

Entrepreneurialism should also be more ingrained in university culture, Page said, much like it is at his alma mater Stanford University and Google’s home-base, Silicon Valley. Finally, he called on the scientists to make more of their research available digitally. Even though Google Scholar tries to open access to scientific work, it still falls short.

Leading Causes of Death

The leading causes of death, Chart showing the odd of death in the USA:

Heart Disease – 20% then Cancer – 14% then Stroke – 4%
also (Motor Vehicle accident – 1% Suicide – 1% Falling – .5% Gun shot – .3%)

CDC’s report on the leading causes of death in the USA in 2004: Heart Disease 27%, Cancer 23%, Strokes 6%, Chronic lower respiratory diseases (emphysema…) 5%, accidents 4.5%, Diabetes 3%, Alzheimer’s 2.7%, Influenza and pneumonia 2.5%… (FYI, homicide is .7% the 16th leading cause, or very close to it)

What are the odds of dying? provides details on deaths due to injuries and includes a sensible disclaimer:

The odds given below are statistical averages over the whole U.S. population and do not necessarily reflect the chances of death for a particular person from a particular external cause. Any individual’s odds of dying from various external causes are affected by the activities in which they participate, where they live and drive, what kind of work they do, and other factors.

Himalayas Geology

Mystery of the Himalayas Solved:

The mystery of why the Himalaya mountains and the Tibetan plateau are the highest in the world has at last been answered, with the discovery of a gigantic chunk of rock slowly sinking towards the centre of the Earth. When the massive slab – up to eight times the area of the UK and as thick as a dozen Everests on top of each other – dropped off, the lighter crust above it rebounded upwards like a cork released under water, geophysicists say. This “sudden uplift” would have raised the Himalayas by as much as 2km (1.24 miles) to their present height.

If not for the surge, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay might have found themselves reaching the “roof of the world” by conquering Aconcagua (6,962m) in Argentina while Everest languished at a mere 6,848m above sea level, 2,000m below its actual peak. The discovery of the missing mantle – the cold, heavy rock beneath the crust – was revealed last week by Professor Wang-Ping Chen at the University of Illinois, whose team used more than 200 super-sensitive seismometers strung across the Himalayas, from India deep into Tibet.
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But some scientists remain sceptical. One geologist at Cambridge, who wanted to remain anonymous because he hadn’t yet read Professor Chen’s paper, suggested that the slab could be the remains of the Tethys Ocean plate. Professor England counters that both the Asian and Indian plates have moved north since then