Category Archives: STEM

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

Finding the Source of the Pioneer Anomaly

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These spacecraft also underscore the value of data preservation. In the early days of the Pioneer missions, scientists and engineers often viewed the medium as more valuable than the data it contained. Many considered raw data to be worthless once “useful” scientific and technical information had been extracted. Nowadays data storage may be cheap, but we’re still in danger of suffering from shortsightedness when it comes to data custodianship. Every experiment needs a clear plan in place to ensure that a record of the original observations is still available and readable, even decades into the future. It may very well be the only way we’ll resolve the next confounding mystery.

via Finding the Source of the Pioneer Anomaly – IEEE Spectrum.

Theresa Christy of Otis Elevator: Making Elevators Go

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Here is a typical problem: A passenger on the sixth floor wants to descend. The closest car is on the seventh floor, but it already has three riders and has made two stops. Is it the right choice to make that car stop again? That would be the best result for the sixth-floor passenger, but it would make the other people’s rides longer.

via Theresa Christy of Otis Elevator: Making Elevators Go | Creating – WSJ.com.

Mars Science Laboratory: Update Set In San Francisco About Curiosity Mars Rover

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Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect. The news conference will be an update about first use of the rover’s full array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil. One class of substances Curiosity is checking for is organic compounds — carbon-containing chemicals that can be ingredients for life. At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.

via Mars Science Laboratory: Update Set In San Francisco About Curiosity Mars Rover.

Probably in reference to this site:

Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Press Releases.

It had me going for awhile and it’s not even April 1.  People like having fun on these intertubes.  🙂

Research discovery could revolutionise semiconductor manufacture

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Instead of starting from a silicon wafer or other substrate, as is usual today, researchers have made it possible for the structures to grow from freely suspended nanoparticles of gold in a flowing gas.

via Research discovery could revolutionise semiconductor manufacture – Lund University.

The structures are referred to as nanowires or nanorods. The breakthrough for these semiconductor structures came in 2002 and research on them is primarily carried out at Lund, Berkeley and Harvard universities.

For Winning The Nobel Prize, Niels Bohr Got A House With Free Beer

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Niels Bohr is one of the greatest scientists who ever lived and a personal hero of mine. He was also a favorite of his fellow Danes when he lived in Copenhagen. Today, however, I found out just how much they loved him. Apparently, after he won the Nobel Prize in 1922, the Carlsberg brewery gave him a gift – a house located next to the brewery. And the best perk of the house? It had a direct pipeline to the brewery so that Bohr had free beer on tap whenever he wanted.

via For Winning The Nobel Prize, Niels Bohr Got A House With Free Beer – Forbes.

So was free beer the reason why Bohr was able to make great strides in developing quantum mechanics? Okay, probably not – but I’m sure a few late night drinking sessions with other physicists didn’t hurt.

Halving day is almost upon us!

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Bitcoin is built so that this reward is halved every 210,000 blocks solved.  The idea is as bitcoin grows the transaction fee’s become the main part of the reward and the introduction of new bitcoin’s slows down to a trickle.  This also means that there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins in circulation.

Well, in less than 4 days the block count will reach the first of these 210,000 block milestones and the reward for solving a Bitcoin block will half from 50BTC to 25BTC. (Have a look at bitcoinclock.com)

via Halving day is almost upon us! | Mineforeman.

Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

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Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

via Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence – NYTimes.com.

Now E-Textbooks Can Report Back on Students’ Reading Habits

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Those details are what will make the new CourseSmart service tick. Say a student uses an introductory psychology e-textbook. The book will be integrated into the college’s course-management system. It will track students’ behavior: how much time they spend reading, how many pages they view, and how many notes and highlights they make. That data will get crunched into an engagement score for each student.

The idea is that faculty members can reach out to students showing low engagement, says Sean Devine, chief executive of CourseSmart. And colleges can evaluate the return they are getting on investments in digital materials.

via Now E-Textbooks Can Report Back on Students’ Reading Habits – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Book Review: Presentation Patterns

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Presentation Patterns aims to apply patterns to the task of creating and delivering presentations and for the most part it succeeds. The format of the book is slightly biased towards those in the software industry as the authors all have software backgrounds. However after reading the introduction which explains the rationale behind patterns in general, as well as the specifics of how they are covered, this book should be useful to anyone interested in improving their presentation skills.

via Book Review: Presentation Patterns – Slashdot.

Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business

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Online education isn’t new—in the United States more than 700,000 students now study in full-time “distance learning” programs. What’s different is the scale of technology being applied by leaders who mix high-minded goals with sharp-elbowed, low-priced Internet business models. In the stories that will follow in this month’s business report, MIT Technology Review will chart the impact of free online education, particularly the “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent (see “The Crisis in Higher Education”).

via Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business | MIT Technology Review.

Will they succeed and create something truly different? If they do, we’ll have the answer to our question: online learning will be the most important innovation in education in the last 200 years.

From:  MOOCs will eat academia

MOOCs will al­most cer­tainly hol­low out the teach­ing com­po­nent of uni­ver­si­ties as it stands today. I don’t see any­thing on the hori­zon that will re­verse this tide. In most tech­ni­cal fields, the nuts and bolts tech­ni­cal in­ter­view and on-the-job learn­ing and per­for­mance mon­i­tor­ing long ago re­placed any faith in de­grees as cre­den­tials. That leaves very few fields, such as law, where you ab­solutely do need the de­gree as a cre­den­tial.