Stimulate Innovation

What if America Had an Innovation Czar?, good ideas from Keven Kelly:

1. More large prizes, like the Grand Challenger, for specific results. Cheap, effective, popular. The best Mars rover gets sent to Mars, etc.
2. Reform patent law, to reflect reality of current conditions (no submarine patents, etc.).
3. Mandate science fairs in high schools, the secret sauces for American innovation.
4. Open-source scientific literature.

Missing laptop found in ET hunt

Missing laptop found in ET hunt:

Kimberly was more enamored with Melin’s detective work.

“I always knew that a geek would make a great husband,” she said. “He always backed up all my data, but this topped it all. It became like `Mission: Impossible’ for him, looking for hard evidence for the cops to use. … He’s a genius – my hero.”
…
One of the computers on which Melin installed SETI(at)home is his wife’s laptop, which was stolen from the couple’s Minneapolis home Jan. 1.

Annoyed – and alarmed that someone could delete the screenplays and novels that his wife, Melinda Kimberly, was writing – Melin monitored the SETI(at)home database to see if the stolen laptop would “talk” to the Berkeley servers. Indeed, the laptop checked in three times within a week, and Melin sent the IP addresses to the Minneapolis Police Department.

Scientifically Illiterate

216 Million Americans Are Scientifically Illiterate:

Let’s start by focusing on the positive. In just 17 years, over 50 million people have been added to the rolls of Americans who can understand a newspaper story about science or technology, according to findings presented last weekend at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

Michigan State University political scientist Jon D. Miller, who conducted the study, attributed some of the increase in science literacy to colleges, many of which in recent years have required that students take at least one science course. Miller says people have also added to their understanding through informal learning: reading articles and watching science reports on television.

Okay, now let’s talk (dare I say rant?) about the 200 million Americans out there who cannot read a simple story in, say, Technology Review or the New York Times science section and understand even the basics of DNA or microchips or global warming.

This level of science illiteracy may explain why over 40 percent of Americans do not believe in evolution and about 20 percent, when asked if the earth orbits the sun or vice versa, say it’s the sun that does the orbiting–placing these people in the same camp as the Inquisition that punished Galileo almost 400 years ago.

Online Mathematics Textbooks

Online Mathematics Textbooks:

The writing of textbooks and making them freely available on the web is an idea whose time has arrived. Most college mathematics textbooks attempt to be all things to all people and, as a result, are much too big and expensive. This perhaps made some sense when these books were rather expensive to produce and distribute–but this time has passed.

A few years ago when I first posted a list of mathematics textbooks freely available on line, there existed only a handful of such books. Now there are many.

Including: Calculus by Gilbert Strang – Linear Algebra, Infinite Dimensions, and Maple by James Herod – Euclid’s Elements – Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by David J. C. MacKay

Antarctic Robo-sub

Robo-sub takes Antarctic plunge

The submersible, which when not at sea is based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, is built to withstand enormous pressure and can dive to depths of 6.5km (four miles). It is equipped with a number of instruments, including cameras, sonars, and sample-collectors that are deployed using its mechanical arms. It is tethered to its “mothership” – on this expedition the RSS James Clark Ross – with a 10km (6 miles) cable.

Scientists manoeuvre the ROV from a control room onboard the ship, and can see the data it produces in real-time. Professor Dowdeswell said: “When you are sat there in the control room, surrounded by monitors, you really feel that you are down at the sea bed with the ROV. You have to pinch yourself to remember that you are not.”
…
Professor Tyler, like Professor Dowdeswell, deemed the mission a success: “The wealth and diversity of the fauna in this area was incredible. “We knew it would be diverse, but when you think the area we were looking at is totally ice-covered for about six to nine months of the year, this is extremely interesting.”

Sudoku Science

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.
…
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.

Hiring Software Developers

Interviewing and Hiring by Tom Van Vleck

“Let’s take a break from talking to people. Why don’t you have a seat in this empty office, and write a small program. Use any language you want to. The program can do anything you’d like. I’ll be back in about 30 minutes, and ask you to explain the program to me.”
…
It seemed reasonable, if the job was programming, to ask people how they felt about actually doing some. And sure, it caused interview stress. We allowed for that in our evaluation; but the job was going to be stressful at times too, and we needed people who could enjoy it. The important thing was not what the candidate wrote, but the account he or she gave of it.
…
And you’d be surprised how many people couldn’t do it. Couldn’t write a simple program and talk sensibly about it. They’d huff, and bluster, and make excuses, and change the subject, rather than actually write some code. “Oh, I think of myself as more an architect than a coder.”

Mobilizing Tomorrow’s Engineers

Girl Day And Global Marathon: Mobilizing Tomorrow’s Engineers:

For the past seven years, the National Engineers Week Foundation has focused on diversifying the ranks of engineering with efforts to reach young women and girls, especially during the annual Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, this year slated for Thursday, February 22 during Engineers Week 2007, February 18-24, and in a more recent venture, the Global Marathon For, By and About Women in Engineering, scheduled for March 22 and 23.

“Girl Day,” as it’s known among engineers, is the only outreach of its kind aimed at a single profession. On February 22, and then in programs continued throughout the year, women engineers and their male counterparts reach as many as one million girls with workshops, tours, speaking engagements, on-line discussions and a host of other activities that showcase engineering as an important career option for everyone.

Continue reading →