Sunday, April 23, 2006

A new twist on the energy challenge

thinking about 10 billion folks' energy needs ...

Posted by E Moritz @ 05:50 PM CST [Link]

Friday, February 17, 2006

The Bernard Chazelle Challenge ....

according to physorg "At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Bernard Chazelle, professor of computer science at Princeton University, plans to issue a call to arms for his profession, challenging his colleagues to grab society by the lapels and evangelize the importance of studying computer science. According to the most recent data available, the top 36 computer science departments in the United States saw enrollments drop nearly 20 percent between 2000 and 2004." ... WOW what does this mean?

Chazelle's Point of view ... Algorithms are where its at ...

see:

Algorithm Design by Jon Kleinberg, Éva Tardos

Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition by Thomas H. Cormen
[more]

Posted by E Moritz @ 08:49 PM CST [Link]

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Johnjoe McFadden and the CEMI field

Another take on hard problems .... consciousness IS a hard problem --- McFaddenn has an angle ... we'll be tracking. --- Johnjoe McFadden, Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, has previously proposed that consciousness is generated by the brain’s electromagnetic field, the cemi field. The cemi field theory – that our thoughts are electric fields in the brain – has generated a lot of interest both in the UK and across the world. In McFadden’s theory nerve signals – the wires of the brain – are responsible for driving our unconscious actions (like walking or driving to work every day, when our conscious mind seems to be elsewhere) but our conscious thoughts are the electric fields that ebb and flow through the brain. Nerves and wires can only encode (know) ones and zeros but fields can encode the complexity of our thoughts. see the innovations-report

Posted by E Moritz @ 07:02 PM CST [Link]

Friday, December 30, 2005

Why is "One million" interesting?

from Wikipedia One million (1,000,000), one thousand thousand, is the natural number following 999,999 and preceding 1,000,001

The million is sometimes used in the English language as a metaphor for a very large number, as in "Never in a million years" and "You're one in a million", or a hyperbole, as in "I've walked a million miles". Hence, a millionaire is a rich person, no matter the actual currency or the exact quantity. Il Milione is the title of Marco Polo's narration of his travel to China. The name is supposed to come from Polo's nickname after his tales of riches and multitudes.

The word "million" is common to the short scale and long scale numbering systems (and also to the proposed Rowlett numbering system), unlike the larger numbers, which have different names in the two systems.

The name is derived from Italian, where milla was 1,000, and 1,000,000 became millione, "a large thousand!"..

There are other interesting 7-digit numbers. The Wiki article lists a few of them.

and then there's the The Million Dollar Homepage

[see Wiki's commentary.

Posted by E Moritz @ 11:12 AM CST [Link]

Hilbert's 23 Mathematical Problems

still influencing mathematical thinking ... additional pointers here, here, and here

Posted by E Moritz @ 11:04 AM CST [Link]

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Computers maintain their chess advantage ... but is it fair

Recent CNN TECHNOLOGY NOTE ia n intersting read ... key observations and discussion raise an intersting set of questions .... "Aside from far better memories, computers can tap databases containing millions of games -- including those of their rivals -- while calculating moves, while human opponents face overnight grandmasters who have left no trail of games to study.

"It's quite tough because of the advantages the computers have at the beginning. They know everything about us, and we know little about them," he said." --- theu have a point there ... actuallly, more than one.

Posted by E Moritz @ 11:24 PM CST [Link]

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Heineken Prizes

The five international scientific Heineken Prizes recognise and reward unique achievement in the fields of biochemistry and biophysics, medicine, environmental sciences, history and cognitive science. The sixth Heineken Prize, the A.H. Heineken Prize for Art, is awarded every two years to an artist living and working in the Netherlands. -- from Heineken Prizes website

Posted by E Moritz @ 02:11 PM CST [Link]

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Grady Booch on Grand Challenges

Grady, an IBM Fellow, in a recent post "A couple of weeks ago, I posed the following in my blog: what are the grand challenges of software and software engineering? What do we know we don't know?"

notable remarks:

"Communication was a common theme."

Marasco ... "it seems to me that after all these years we have not yet sorted out the 'people' versus 'process' conundrum in software development. "

Rich Hill ... "The biggest paradigm shift in modern programming would have to be the ability to use visual representation of object in the development process. "

Oskar Ojala ... "How to keep significantly raising the level of abstraction in face of ever growing software complexity."

take a look ...

and by the way, The Software Development Edge : Essays on Managing Successful Projects [by Joe Marasco] was highly recommended [as in run, "don't walk, to buy his book"]

Posted by E Moritz @ 07:15 PM CST [Link]

M-Prize (Methuselah Mouse Prize)

It would appear that the Methuselah Mouse Prize has captured the imagination of many with donations now exceeding $3 Million. Their statement: The Methuselah Mouse Prize is the premiere effort of The Methuselah Foundation™; a scientific competition designed to draw attention to the ability of new technologies to slow and even reverse the damage of the aging process, preserving health and wisdom ... . Wow! We need to see more specific focus endowments and foundations. Its great to see this ... of course we'd like to see this spread to other areas like Artificial Intelligence and Affordable space travel ...

Posted by E Moritz @ 06:51 PM CST [Link]

Intellagon,

what kind a name is that? In any case Intellagon, maintains a list of Innovation Prizes in the following categories: Transportation, Sports & Entertainment, Space, Social Systems, Natural Resources, Money, Materials, Machines, Life, Information Technology, Environment, Energy, Education, Communications, Agriculture, and other ... The Natural Resources and Machines categories lead the pack with 4 prize listings

Posted by E Moritz @ 06:44 PM CST [Link]

Impact Lab & more

track Impact Lab [self claim: one of the top five science blogs in the known universe by Popular Science Magazine, the DaVinci Institute's Impact Lab is a relentless pursuit of the future and all the critical components that will make up the world to come]

Posted by E Moritz @ 06:32 PM CST [Link]

Sunday, October 2, 2005

In Vivo In Silico [iViS] Grand Challenge

This is pretty interesting ... take a look at the In Vivo In Silico Gand challenge here ... simply stated the goal is to realise fully detailed, accurate and predictive computer embodiments of plants, animals and unicellular organisms. according to Ronald Sleep ... A rather speculative timeline is:

Within 5 years: early results on e.g. developmental phenomena in plants and animals, and first unicellular demonstrations.

Within 10 years: first prediction of a textbook result from an assembly of component models; models of arabidopsis meristem growth; models of simple animal development.

within 13 years: the D'Arcy milestone (100 years after the publication of D'Arcy Thompson's paper "On Growth andForm"): first demonstration of iViS (e.g. for Arabidopsis).

Within 20 years: iViS models form the core of many Virtual Knowledge Centres for the life iences.

We'll be watching ... look at the other goals of the British Computing Society outline in their paper Grand Challenges in Computing:

GC1 In Vivo–in Silico (iViS): the virtual worm, weed and bug;
GC2 Science for global ubiquitous computing;
GC3 Memories for life: managing information over a human lifetime;
GC4 Scalable ubiquitous computing systems;
GC5 The architecture of brain and mind;
GC6 Dependable systems evolution;
GC7 Journeys in non-classical computation.

Posted by E Moritz @ 11:21 AM CST [Link]

Sunday, September 25, 2005

In Praise of Tweaking:

take a look at the article by By Ned Gulley of The MathWorks, Inc. he states Programming contests have become a regular feature of geek culture. The ACM, for example, runs a collegiate programming competition that has grown to include almost 4000 teams from around the world ... his argument in favor of collboration is quite convinving ... it sgoes something like this .... I know something you want to know. But will I tell you? Why should I? What's in it for me? Internet technology makes the simple act of online collaboration easy, but human nature stubbornly resists change. Why should I collaborate with you? What would convince me to share my ideas with you, given that you might use them to compete with me? In a larger sense, how might we build a system that encourages people to collaborate in, for example, writing useful code? ... read the whole thing and find out what MATHWORKS has done in:

Mapping Mars: Given several robotic rovers and a rough map of part of the surface of Mars, find optimal routing so as to explore the most area in the least time.
Protein folding: A protein is a string of amino acids, each of which is either hydrophobic or hydrophilic. Given such a protein, fold it in two dimensions so as to minimize the distance between hydrophobic amino acids.
Mastermind Solve for the hidden colored pegs in a generalized Mastermind problem that may have any number of pegs and colors.
Molecular Modeling: Given a table of distances between various pairs of atoms in a molecule, reconstruct the molecule's shape.

ITS REALLY NICE TO SEE FOLKS CREATE AND TANGIBLY SUPPORT CHALLENGE FORMULATIONS, PROGRESS AND CREDIT TRACKING ...

[via Crummy: The Site]

Posted by E Moritz @ 04:01 PM CST [Link]

Monday, September 12, 2005

Disaster Resilient America Grtand Challenge ...

In the wake of Katrina megadisaster ... Creating a Disaster Resilient America: Grand Challenges in Science and Technology: Summary of a Workshop from the National Academy of Sciences is quite timely ...

The Disaster Roundtable has extensive material - presented in many workshops with fascinating presentations like this one

Posted by E Moritz @ 10:08 PM CST [Link]

Topic Report: Grand Challenge Problems

John Thrall at Washington and Lee University provides a topic report on grand challenges. He lists: Real Time Virtual Reality Modeling, The Human Genome Project, Real Time Radio-Astronomy, Galaxy Simulations, Seismic Models, Total Climate Model, Human Vision Modeling, Combustion Modeling, and Nuclear Modeling. He mentions the "the four NSF supercomputing centers formed the Grand Challenge Allocations Committee (GCAC). Drawing dynamically on the skills and talents of the combined local center peer review boards, the GCAC meets once a year to review proposals of this scope. The process streamlines proposal submission and administration of grants for the researcher ..." [ via Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) ??]

Posted by E Moritz @ 10:01 PM CST [Link]

Saturday, September 3, 2005

IT PAYS TO LOOK UP

Physorg reports Astronomer Geoffrey Marcy's tenacious pursuit of planets outside our solar system has paid off with the discovery by him and his team of more than 110 extrasolar planets.
Now, that doggedness is paying off in another way. On Friday, Sept. 2, he will receive $500,000 from the Hong Kong-based Shaw Prize Foundation in recognition of his pioneering achievements. the story explains he will share the $1 million Shaw Prize in astronomy with Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva for "finding and characterizing the orbits and masses of the first planets around other stars, thereby revolutionizing our understanding of the processes that form planets and planetary systems."

The Shaw Prizes, established by Sir Run Run Shaw, a Hong Kong film producer honor scholars in the fields of astronomy, mathematics and life science and medicine. ... referred to as the "Nobel Prize of the East," they recognize those whose work contributed to a positive and profound impact on mankind.

Posted by E Moritz @ 04:59 PM CST [Link]

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Leapfrogging is interesting

Envisioning a Leapfrogged World by Vinay Gupta is a really interesting essay ... he discussess what can be leapfrogged, what cannot be leapfrogged, some thinking about the embedded capital base of the first world, and "invisible leapfrogging" - the leapfrogging which happened so fast, nobody called it that! [or is it stealth leapfrogging/]

for those who don't know the term ... VInay explains Leapfrogging .... is the idea that countries without basic infrastructure like universal telecommunications can go directly to the best, most fitting solutions without having labor through the developmental struggle of telegraph, manually-switched telephony, direct-dial, brick-sized cell phones, analog cell phones, 3G digital. They just hop straight to 3G, piggybacking off the enormous human and capital investements it took to get there. ...

he concludes:

I've simplified, almost to the point of parody, by saying "if you can put it in a box and ship it, it's leapfroggable."

However, as a rule of thumb, it is close enough to explain most of what we see around us: even a cell phone tower is, in essence, something you can ship in a Sea Container.

The Leapfrogged world is shipped in boxes. There are almost no backhoes. In the rural world, on arrival, unskilled or semi-skilled people open the boxes and unpack the goods. Instructions make it clear how the devices are to be used and once every couple of weeks, a Barefoot Solar Engineer comes around to help make sure everything is set up correctly and that the water is clean, the toilets properly operated, the batteries charged properly, the refrigerators used correctly, and so on.

....

Modular, granular, fine-grained, and shipping in on trucks. Not the Aswan Dam, but a hundred thousand 12 volt village solar grids. A curiously future-retro combination of space-aged and mud-and-stick houses. High density, ultra-wire(less)ed urban hubs, and villages with solar-electric lighting and drinking water.

This is the leapfrogged world.

this is very intersting ...actually, more than interesting ... and more than the future ... its already the present ... its just not very visible yet ... read the whole essay...

Posted by E Moritz @ 09:35 PM CST [Link]

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Ekpyrotic Universe - Fact or Fiction

Paul J. Steinhardt of Princeton University explains that "The Ekpyrotic Model of the Universe proposes that our current universe arose from a collision of two three-dimensional worlds (branes) in a space with an extra (fourth) spatial dimension." ... does this make sense? Here's a pretty hard/strong/tough challenge question ... Just how did the Universe begin?

Posted by E Moritz @ 06:51 PM CST [Link]

Sunday, August 14, 2005

Basic Grand Challenges

of course there are those longstanding grand challenges ... like figuring out how life began, how mind and consciousness arise ...and so on

Posted by E Moritz @ 10:04 PM CST [Link]

NEW NASA CHALLENGES: Astronaut Glove Challenge; MoonROx (Moon Regolith Oxygen) challenge

GET READY .... TWO NEW CHALLENGES .... GO!

NASA Announces New Centennial Challenge
Category: Centennial Challenges
Dateline: July 22, 2005. NASA, in collaboration with the Volanz Aerospace Inc./Spaceflight America (Volanz), today announced a new Centennial Challenges prize competition.

The Astronaut Glove Challenge award will go to the team that can design and manufacture the best performing glove within competition parameters. The $250,000 purse will be awarded at a competition scheduled for November 2006, when competing teams test their glove designs against each other.

For the Challenge, teams must develop the bladder-restraint portion of an astronaut glove that is strong, easy on the hands, and gives the operator a high degree of dexterity.

"Reducing space suit glove fatigue is a critical technological goal that, if successful, would have an important impact on astronaut performance and mission planning," said NASA's acting Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, Douglas Cooke.

Each team will provide two gloves for three key tests. First, the forces required to move the fingers and thumb on each glove will be measured. Gloves requiring the least force will be awarded more points. Second, each team will perform standardized dexterity tasks in a depressurized glove box. Teams completing the most tasks within a specified time will win the most points. Third, one glove from each team will be subjected to a burst test. Glove designs that withstand greater internal pressures will be awarded more points. The team with the glove design that wins the most points, while exceeding the performance of existing astronaut glove technologies will win the contest.

NASA's Centennial Challenges promotes technical innovation through a novel program of prize competitions. It is designed to tap the nation's ingenuity to make revolutionary advances to support the Vision for Space Exploration and NASA goals.

"With this competition, we are continuing to develop Centennial Challenges' base of smaller, targeted technology prizes and laying the ground work for our larger competitions," said NASA's Centennial Challenges program manager Brant Sponberg.

The Astronaut Glove Challenge will be administered and executed by Volanz at no cost to NASA. Volanz will officially kick-off the challenge at a conference in November in Houston.

"New technologies and innovations will have to be developed quickly to improve the wearability and dexterity of astronaut gloves. This challenge will help NASA meet this key requirement in support of the Vision for Space Exploration," said Volanz chairman and chief executive officer, Alan Hayes. "Like other Centennial Challenges' competitions, the Astronaut Glove Challenge will encourage innovation that will greatly enhance our capabilities in this area," he added.

The Centennial Challenges program is managed by NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. Volanz is a non-profit Maryland corporation formed in 1998 to provide space science educational and research programs for researchers, educators, and students.

NASA Announces New Centennial Challenge
Category: Centennial Challenges
Dateline: May 19, 2005. NASA, in collaboration with the Florida Space Research Institute (FSRI), today announced a new Centennial Challenges prize competition.

The MoonROx (Moon Regolith Oxygen) challenge will award $250,000 to the first team that can extract breathable oxygen from simulated lunar soil before the prize expires on June 1, 2008.

For the MoonROx challenge, teams must develop hardware within mass and power limits that can extract at least five kilograms of breathable oxygen from simulated lunar soil during an eight-hour period. The soil simulant, called JSC-1, is derived from volcanic ash. The oxygen production goals represent technologies that are beyond existing state-of-the-art.

PRETTY COOL ... can you pick up that regolith with a challenge glove? Will the prize be doubled? whatever it is ... it'll be much more useful than the on-line poker gambling craze ...

Posted by E Moritz @ 06:22 PM CST [Link]