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Category: Science Snippets

  • Ruminations – 5jul12 (updated 6jul12)

    George Rebane There’s plenty of reason for celebrating the pretty good likelihood that the Higgs boson has finally been observed by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.  That massive boson fills in a long-empty part of our understanding how the universe is composed and works.  To be sure, there is a lot more work to be done…

  • Wireless Communication Breakthrough

    George Rebane A major breakthrough in wireless communication was announced by the University of Waterloo, Canada.  ACM reports that Dr A.K. Khandani and his team have demonstrated (and patented) a full-duplex, single channel methodology for wireless communication that promises to revolutionize all wireless communications.  Full-duplex means the ability to concurrently transmit and receive at the…

  • Knowledge Engines

    George Rebane Part of our rush toward Singularity involves the web becoming ‘smarter’.  In case you haven’t noticed, search engine technologies are rapidly evolving from providing ‘information’ to becoming so-called knowledge engines.  Wolfram Alpha was an early one into this functionality, and it is now being joined by Google’s Knowledge Graph Microsoft will soon upgrade…

  • Placebos vs Big Pharma

    George Rebane A recent ’60 Minutes’ surprised me with a segment in which it was reported that placebos worked just as well as drugs like Prozac for fighting depression – well, almost as well.  Prozac did have a tiny edge in really severe cases of depression.  The research was done by Dr Irving Kirsch of…

  • Discrimination by the numbers

      George Rebane Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County is being sued by the Dept of Justice for discrimination through the use of profiling.  When ol’ Sheriff Joe stops a car for some traffic, licensing, or other safety violation, it seems that he puts the occupants through an immigration check nine times more frequently…

  • Fair Division 101

    George Rebane It’s usually tough to divide up a set of assets when a partnership breaks up, spouses get divorced, or any set of in/divisible assets or resources must be allocated between multiple parties.  The study of fair division algorithms has seen a considerable amount of research and it isn’t over yet.  A good fair…

  • ‘Why the technical stuff?’

    George Rebane I was asked that question recently by a regular RR reader.  He went on to opine that not many of my readers would make the effort to understand all that high falootin’ stuff and just skip over it.  In short, I’m wasting time and effort in offering up such posts.  And, of course,…

  • TechTest welcomes TechTestJr

    George Rebane TechTest2012, the sixth edition of SESF’s annual merit scholarship exam, was held on 14 April 2012 in the Nevada Union High School’s science lecture hall.  As has become tradition, the exam’s solution key has been posted on the SESF website (here), and the upcoming annual ‘Survivor’s Breakfast’, with the obligatory ‘Where the Elite…

  • Scattershots – 17apr12

    George Rebane The Financial Times reports (here) that Spain’s central government is looking to federalize financially distressed regions of the country.  (Greece essentially succumbed to such central control early on so as to avoid the rush.)  RR has anticipated a similar fate for California and states like Illinois, New Jersey, … under equally astute financial…

  • Super-Turing Computation is Coming

    George Rebane Kurzweil reports that computer scientist Dr Hava Siegelmann (Univ of Mass, Amherst) “is translating her 1993 discovery of what she has dubbed 'super-Turing' computation into an adaptable computational system that learns and evolves, using input from the environment in a way much more like our brains do than classic Turing-type computers." "This model…

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