Out of my insterest for cooking and for video sharing sites, I have created videoricette.net
I know, its not the first of its kind, but its main target is the italian internet where none of the existing sites on the subject really gathers it all.
Feel free to contribute even if you’re not italian, international cuisine is very welcome.
22
Aug
VideoRicette
22
Aug
WebTV
I thought I would add my personal webtv on this site where to show various stuff I find around the internet.
If you have a special interest in something you’d like to see in this webtv add your requests in the comments and I’ll see if it can be added.
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News
A space mission that will be critical to our understanding of climate change has launched from California.
The Jason-2 satellite will become the primary means of measuring the shape of the world’s oceans, taking readings with an accuracy of better than 4cm.
Its data will track not only sea level rise but reveal how the great mass of waters are moving around the globe.
This information will be fundamental in helping weather and climate agencies make better forecasts.
The satellite left Earth at 0746 GMT atop a Delta-2 rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base.
The spacecraft, built by Thales Alenia Space, represents the joint efforts of the US and French space agencies (Nasa and CNES), and the US and European organisations dedicated to studying weather and climate from orbit (Noaa and Eumetsat).
Down below
Jason-2 will provide a topographic map of 95% of the Earth’s ice-free oceans every 10 days.Although we think of our seas as being flat, they are actually marked by “hills” and “valleys”, where the highs and lows may be as much as two metres apart.
Elevation is a key parameter for oceanographers.Just as surface air pressure reveals what the atmosphere is doing above, so ocean height will betray details about the behaviour of water down below.
The data gives clues to temperature and salinity.When combined with gravity information, it will also indicate current direction and speed.
The oceans store vast amounts of heat from the Sun; and how they move that energy around the globe and interact with the atmosphere are what drive our climate system.
“The ocean constitutes the long-term memory of the climate system; the time-scales over which the ocean is changing are the climatic timescales,” explained Mikael Rattenborg, the director of operations at Eumetsat.
“In order to understand climate, in order to be able to predict the evolution of the atmosphere over months, years, and decades even, you need to understand the ocean.”
Number one
Jason-2 is a continuation of a programme that started in 1992 with the Topex/Poseidon mission and is currently maintained by the Jason-1 satellite launched in 2001.
JASON-2 SPACECRAFT
- 1. Advance Microwave Radiometer - measures signal delay caused by water vapour
- 2. GPS antennas - ensures knowledge of precise orbit path
- 3. Poseidon-3 altimeter- measures sea level
- 4. Doris antenna - tracking and positioning control
- 5. Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) - tracks and calibrates measurements
- Satellite mass: 525kg (1,155lb) Power generation: 511 watts
- Satellite height: 3m (9ft 8in) Orbit: 1,338km (831 miles)
(Source: Eumetsat, Cnes, Nasa)
The project provides the global reference data for satellite-measured ocean height.
Although other spacecraft in service today can acquire similar data sets, none can match the precision achieved by Jason-1; and Jason-2, when in service, will be the benchmark against which all other spacecraft will be judged and calibrated.
At the heart of the latest mission is the Poseidon 3 solid-state altimeter.The instrument constantly bounces microwave pulses off the sea surface.By timing how long the signal takes to make the return trip, it can determine sea surface height.
Additionally, the signal can indicate the height of waves and wind speed.
“It is not a revolution between Jasion-1 and Jason-2; it is an evolution, because the main objective is to ensure continuity,” explains Francois Parisot, the Jason-2 project chief at Eumetsat.
“Nevertheless, there are some improvements in the instruments.We hope to make better measurements closer to the coast [and over inland waters and rivers]; and also, we will deliver near-realtime products - products that will be available within three hours of the measurements.”
Whale watching
The latter will be particularly useful in storm prediction.Jason will see the surface waters rise as warm eddies fuel hurricanes.The data will tell meteorologists how a storm is likely to intensify and allow them to issue better, more timely warnings.
Jason-2 data will have many other uses that may not be immediately obvious.Industry will take the information to make decisions about when conditions are most suitable for undersea drilling or cable laying.
Jason can help identify where wreckage or pollution will drift; and the satellite will assist marine biologists as they track whales by pinpointing waters with the potential to be prime feeding and breeding grounds.
One very important use will be in maritime navigation.
“Now that the fuel price is going up, saving fuel for the companies that run ships has become very sensitive; and knowing the currents, you can select your route so that you go faster and save fuel,” said Philippe Escudier, a space oceanography at CLS (Collecte Localisation Satellites), Toulouse, France.
“You can save up to 5% on fuel consumption by making best use of the currents.”
Formation flying
Jason-2 will spend its first few months flying a “tandem mission” with Jason-1.
The two spacecraft will be positioned so that they sweep around the Earth, one following the other, with a separation of just 60 seconds.
This will enable, essentially, the two satellites to measure the same patch of ocean surface at very nearly the same time.
Scientists will use this opportunity to cross-calibrate the instruments so that when Jason-1 is retired (or fails), the future data collected by its successor will be directly comparable with past records.
This continuity of information will be critical in recognising long-term trends in ocean behaviour.It is the data which underpins the observation that global sea level is rising by about three millimetres per year.
Once the tandem phase is completed, Jason-1 will be moved to the side, doubling the return of data.The importance of the Jason programme means both spacecraft will almost certainly be run for as long as they are serviceable.
Discussions are already in progress on a Jason-3 satellite.Given Europe’s role in the project, there is a compelling case for the next mission to be included in the GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) programme.This would attract significant EU money.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
The US military in Iraq has said four militants have been killed during operations against bombing networks run by al-Qaeda in Iraq.
One of those killed in a clash just north of Baghdad, is said to have been involved in weapons smuggling.
Earlier, the US military said 12 al-Qaeda members were arrested in continuing operations in Mosul.
One of those held is accused of overseeing attacks in Mosul itself and in the western Anbar province.
Another is said to have been involved in planning car bombings in Mosul.
Iraqi and American forces say Mosul is the last major urban stronghold of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Meanwhile, American-backed Iraqi security forces are continuing a big operation they say is targeting Shia militiamen and criminal groups in the southern city of Amara.
Operations in the city involve US and Iraqi forces going house to house in search of weapons.
Reports say five provincial council officials representing the movement led by Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr have been arrested for aiding militias.
This follows the arrest on Thursday of Amara’s mayor, Rafi Abdul Jabbar, among others. He is also a supporter ofMoqtada Sadr.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered the hallucinogenic drug LSD, has died of a heart attack at his home in Basel at the age of 102.
Mr Hofmann first produced LSD in 1938 while researching the medicinal uses of a crop fungus.
He accidentally ingested some of the drug and said later: “Everything I saw was distorted as in a warped mirror”.
He hoped LSD could be used to treat mental illness, but it became a popular street drug in the 1960s.
‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’
While working with the drug in the Sandoz pharmaceutical laboratory a few years after first producing it, Mr Hofmann ingested some of the drug through his fingertips.
He went home and experienced what he described as visions of “fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours”.
The drug was popularised by Harvard professor Timothy Leary who suggested that people “turn on, tune in, drop out”.
Rock stars and the counter-culture of the 1960s picked up LSD as a wonder drug but horror stories began to emerge of users suffering permanent psychological damage.
LSD was made illegal in many countries beginning in the late 1960s
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
Boston Dynamics released a new video of BigDog the other day. The improvements since last year’s demo are absolutely incredible. BigDog can now maneuver up and down rugged hills, balance on ice and jump. I’m not an avid fan of exclamation marks, but wow! In my honest opinion this quadruped is the most life-like robot made to date. Must-see video after the jump.
The New BigDog Video
Loving the Machine
It’s so interesting how most people I’ve talked to (and me myself) feel an emotional response when BigDog is slipping or being kicked. I felt like giving it a hand to balance on the ice — although on second thought I’m sure he’d crush me with his frantic maneuvers. The version of BigDog in the video weighs 106Kg (235 lbs).
The speed and agility of the feet give the fellow such natural (â€messy instinctsâ€) appearance that it’s hard to keep in mind it’s a machine. Unbelievable.
The control system depends heavily on internal state, awareness of joint positions, acceleration et cetera — which enables intelligent, real-time control. I hope the technologies spread to consumer markets, rather than being exclusively used for military purposes (this is what the AIBO should’ve looked like).
BigDog has an on-board computer that controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system manages the dynamics of its behavior to keep it balanced, steer, navigate, and regulate energetics as conditions vary. Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a laser gyroscope, and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge and others. [BostonDynamics]
Boston Dynamics are also the creators of RiSE — an insect-like hexapod robot that climbs; and whose video demo ranked 10th in the most popular robot videos. A hat tip to the Boston Dynamics team for their achievements.
Links & References
- Boston Dynamics’ official site
- Hat tip for infosharing to Think Artificial reader Alebotta.
By all likelihood you’ve heard of the vodka company’s Absolut campaigns. Recently they launched Absolut Machines, a new campaign that’ll be running for a year and centers around two artificial creativity projects; AI systems that compose music on accompanying mechanical instruments and can be watched & interacted with via live video feeds.
The Absolut Machines
By visiting Absolut Machines you’ll eventually find yourself on a page with two live videofeeds, presented in an old-school, gray window system. One of the machines is placed in Stockholm, Sweden and the other in New York City. The machines at these locations are music-composing AI systems you can interact with to augment the music they generate.
The interaction sessions are recorded and you can get a compressed quicktime video of your visit sent via email or download it from the “Gallery†tab which lists all recent videos.
Think Artificial VIP Access
Dearly devoted Think Artificial readers have been allotted VIP codes that allow cutting to the front of the line to interact with the machines. Leave a comment on this entry and I’ll mail it to the address you enter in the comment form. Alternatively you can contact me directly. Note that there’s a limited supply of codes and they’ll be distributed on a first come first served basis.
Obligatory disclaimer: To participate in this giveaway you must be at least 21 years of age.
Absolut Choir
The Absolut Choir is a system composed of speech synthesizers implemented in the physical form of 10 robotic characters. Each of the machines, or choir members, has a unique voice ranging from women, to tenors and sopranos. A “mother character†virtually conducts by synchronizing and distributing sounds to the other members, each of which contains a Linux box for processing and a speaker.
As the Choir starts singing, the user may input words to the machine. As the machine receives the words, it immediately uses them to generate a musical composition and lyrics. The robotic choir follows the lead of its human partner, and with the help of generative algorithms, the machine engenders a melody, tempo, dynamics, timbre and lyrics inspired by the user-generated input. The composition is also infused with the machine’s current mood and from the most recently analyzed words input by previous users. A lot of short words with many consonants may result in a fast arpeggio-like song, while softer words may result in a slower composition. [Absolut Press Kit]
The sound feed was suffering from some technical difficulties when I tried the choir. But the video worked, and the choir was receiving my lyrics glorifying Think Artificial (I figured I’d attempt to create a themesong for us).
The video compilation I received afterwards was okay. But I discovered that the lyrics were (intentionally) rendered hieroglyphic by the choir, so it sadly doesn’t make the cut as our themesong.
Absolut Quartet
The Quartet is quite different from the Choir. The machines are three; the main one is a marimba which the system plays by shooting rubber balls into the air, aimed at the marimba keys it wants to hit — or multiple balls if the objective is to play a chord. It’s quite fun to look at.
The marimba rubber ball blaster implementation and design.
Overview of the Quartet under construction.
The second machine is a series of glasses which basically replicate the “finger on a wine glass trickâ€. The glasses are spun, each tuned to a various pitches, and small robotic fingers touch them to produce sounds. The third part of the installation is an automated percussion instrument.
And then there’s the fourth part, us - the users. At the beginning of a session the human user plays notes on a miniature piano. The melody played dictates what kind of music the Quartet will produce, or in other words, your input is the machines inspiration for a following 3 minute song.
The machines are brainchilds of Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman. Both of which attend at MIT and have many cool projects in their backpack that combine aesthetics, artificial intelligence, kinetic sculpting and robotics.
Looking Closer at Robotics in the Media
This project is not an academic foray into the realms of creative AI, but rather a project intended to be looked at in terms of aesthetics. That being said: The artificial creativity of the machines is very primitive. If we take for example how the Quartet works; the software takes the melody played by a human user and compares it to a pre-existing collection of songs. Once a similar match has been found the machine mixes the two together producing the ultimate outcome. What interested me more than the software implementation of creativity was the overall aesthetic appeal of the project. In addition to Jeff and Dan’s artwork, the media related to this campaign was superb (partly handled by Noise Marketing, creators of the Appleseed website).
When exploring how we are creating our world; augmenting our environment — it’s intriguing to zoom out of AI context: How we (humans) advertise and perceive products is environmental augmentation. The ultimate sentiment is to be aware of the augmentations. To study them. Be aware of their effect and purpose; and to adapt and further develop whatever it is we want to achieve.
When I saw AI-colored advertisements from a major company (a company that essentially has nothing to do with machines) I immediately wondered whether it gave an indication of the public appeal of robots in Western societies. Certainly, machines in general play a larger role in everyone’s lives than ever before; and the same can be said about robotics even though we’re still in very early stages of that development. When we note that Puma has been sporting robotic-prosthetic cyberpunk campaigns as well, I think we can at least safely venture that robotics are on the rise in terms of public interest.
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was born on the 16th of December 1917 in Minehead, England. Perhaps best known for his contributions to science fiction, and his inventions, his achievements will certainly not be forgotten anytime soon.
Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a radar instructor from 1941-1946. It was there where he invented & proposed the idea of communications satellites in 1945 — an idea that materialized quickly and we now know, use and depend on to sustain our societies. His proposal won him the Franklin Institute Gold Medal and in 1994 he was nominated for a Nobel Prize. Consequently he became the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society.
He collaborated with Stanley Kubrick to create, in my and many others’ opinion, one of the greatest films of all time — and concurrently developed what later became a novel of the same name: 2001: A Space Odyssey shook the world and continues to inspire and provoke thought.
Moved to Sri Lanka in 1956. Knighted in 1998.
A Hero Passed Away on March 19th, 2008.
Arthur Charles Clarke will be missed.
By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
For more than 40 years the silicon industry has delivered ever faster, cheaper chips.
The advances have underpinned everything from the rise of mobile phones to digital photography and portable music players.
Chip-makers have been able to deliver many of these advances by shrinking the components on a chip.
By making these building blocks, such as transistors, smaller they have become faster and firms have been able to pack more of them into the same area.
But according to many industry insiders this miniaturisation cannot continue forever.
MOORE’S LAW
- The number of transistors it is possible to squeeze in to a chip for a fixed cost doubles every two years
- First outlined by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel
- Published in Electronics Magazine on 19 April, 1965
“The consensus in the industry is that we can do that shrink for about another ten years and then after that we have to figure out new ways to bring higher capability to our chips,” said Professor Stanley Williams of Hewlett Packard.
Even Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel and the man that gave his name to the law that dictates the industry’s progression, admits that it can only go on for a few more years.
“Moore’s Law should continue for at least another decade,” he recently told the BBC News website. “That’s about as far as I can see.”
Tiny tubes
As a result, researchers around the world are engaged in efforts to allow the industry to continue delivering the advances that computer users have come to expect.
Key areas include advanced fabrication techniques, building new components and finding new materials to augment silicon.
Already new materials are creeping into modern chips.
As components have shrunk critical elements of the transistors, known as gate dielectrics, do not perform as well allowing currents passing through the transistors to leak, reducing the effectiveness of the chip.
To overcome this, companies have replaced the gate dielectrics, previously made from silicon dioxide, with an oxide based on the metal hafnium.
The material’s development and integration into working components has been described by Dr Moore as “the biggest change in transistor technology” since the late 1960s.
But IBM researchers are working on materials that they believe offer even bigger advances.
“Carbon nanotubes are a step beyond [hafnium],” explained Dr Phaedon Avouris of the company.
‘Superior’ design
CARBON NANOTUBES
- Sheets of carbon atoms folded into a cylinder
- Unusual strength and electrical properties
- Promise to revolutionise electronics, computers, chemistry and materials science
Carbon nanotubes are tiny straw-like molecules less than 2 nanometres (billionths of a metre) in diameter, 50,000 times thinner than a strand of a human hair.
“They are a more drastic change but still preserve the basic architecture of field effect transistors.”
These transistors are the basic building blocks of most silicon chips.
Dr Avouris believes they can be used to replace a critical element of the chip, known as the channel.
Today this is commonly made of silicon and is the area of the transistor through which electrons flow.
Chip makers are constantly battling to make the channel length in transistors smaller and smaller, to increase the performance of the devices.
Carbon nanotube’s small size and “superior” electrical properties should be able to deliver this, said Dr Avouris.
Crucially, he also believes the molecules can be integrated with traditional silicon manufacturing processes, meaning the technology would more likely be accepted by an industry that has spent billions perfecting manufacturing techniques.
The team have already shown off working transistors and are currently working on optimising their production and integration into working devices.
Tiny improvement
Professor Williams, at Hewlett Packard is also working on technology that could be incorporated into the future generations of chips.
As well as exploring optical computing - using particles of light instead of electrons to significantly increase the speed of today’s computers -he is building new electronic components for chips called memristors.
He says it would be the “fourth” basic element to build circuits with, after capacitors, resistors and inductors.
“Now we have this type of device we have a broader palette with which to paint our circuits,” said Professor Williams.
Professor Williams and his team have shown that by putting two of these devices together - a configuration called a crossbar latch - it could do the job of a transistor.
“A cross bar latch has the type of functionality you want from a transistor but it’s working with very different physics,” he explained.
Crucially, these devices can also be made much smaller than a transistor.
“And as they get smaller they get better,” he said.
Professor Williams and his team are currently making prototype hybrid circuits - built of memristors and transistors - in a fabrication plant in North America.
“We want to keep the functional equivalent of Moore’s Law going for many decades into the future,” said Professor Williams.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
Silicon electronics are a staple of the computing industry, but researchers are now exploring other techniques to deliver powerful computers.
A quantum computer is a theoretical device that would make use of the properties of quantum mechanics, the realm of physics that deals with energy and matter at atomic scales.
In a quantum computer data is not processed by electrons passing through transistors, as is the case in today’s computers, but by caged atoms known as quantum bits or Qubits.
“It is a new paradigm for computation,” said Professor Artur Ekert of the University of Oxford. “It’s doing computation differently.”
A bit is a simple unit of information that is represented by a “1″ or a “0″ in a conventional electronic computer.
A qubit can also represent a “1″ or a “0″ but crucially can be both at the same time - known as a superposition.
This allows a quantum computer to work through many problems and arrive at their solutions simultaneously.
“It is like massively parallel processing but in one piece of hardware,” said Professor Ekert.
‘Complex systems’
This has significant advantages, particularly for solving problems with a large amount of data or variables.
“With quantum computing you are able to attack some problems on the time scales of seconds, which might take an almost infinite amount of time with classical computers,” Professor David Awschalom of the University of California, Santa Barbara told the BBC News website recently.
In February 2007, the Canadian company D-Wave systems claimed to have demonstrated a working quantum computer.
At the time, Herb Martin, chief executive officer of the company said that the display represented a “substantial step forward in solving commercial and scientific problems which, until now, were considered intractable.”
But many in the quantum computing world have remained sceptical, primarily because the company released very little information about the machine.
The display also failed to impress.
“It was not quite what we understand as quantum computing,” said Professor Ekert.”The demonstrations they showed could have been solved by conventional computers.”
However, Professor Ekert believes that quantum computing will eventually come of age.
Then, he said, they will not be used in run-of-the-mill desktop applications but specialist uses such as searching vast databases, creating uncrackable ciphers or simulating the atomic structures of substances.
“The really killer application will probably be in designing new materials or complex systems,” he said.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
