- 法国《世界报》在周末期间刊登一篇对台湾文化多样性的介绍，题目是：“台湾：高技术和对精神信仰的追求”。文章介绍说，台湾是一个千神岛，是一个让人缓缓进入中国人世界的理想的大门，台湾小是小，但向参观者奉献了自己的多姿多彩，是传统和现代精神，野生的自然和发展到极致的都市化的精妙结合。台北市一点也不比它的“大姐姐”上海差，台北的道路宽阔，广告大屏幕和中文的店铺招牌比比皆是。文章还介绍台北的故宫博物馆有65万件珍贵的馆藏，台北周围的山水美丽，庙宇众多，台湾人拥有精神信仰和宗教崇拜。台湾有一万六千个庙宇，108个进行宗教默想的中心，其中最大的中心里有1600个和尚与尼姑长年生活，成为一个宗教城市，有特有的饮食，公园，印刷所，录音棚等等。西方的游客可以受到台湾的宗教机构接待。
- The handbook offers practical advice and techniques on how to create a blog, make entries and get the blog to show up in search engine results. It gives clear explanations about blogging for all those whose online freedom of expression is subject to restrictions, and it shows how to sidestep the censorship measures imposed by certain governments, with a practical example that demonstrates the use of the censorship circumvention software Tor.
Our world may be a giant hologram - space - 15 January 2009 - New Scientist
- Gravitational wave detectors like GEO600 are essentially fantastically sensitive rulers. The idea is that if a gravitational wave passes through GEO600, it will alternately stretch space in one direction and squeeze it in another. To measure this, the GEO600 team fires a single laser through a half-silvered mirror called a beam splitter. This divides the light into two beams, which pass down the instrument's 600-metre perpendicular arms and bounce back again. The returning light beams merge together at the beam splitter and create an interference pattern of light and dark regions where the light waves either cancel out or reinforce each other. Any shift in the position of those regions tells you that the relative lengths of the arms has changed.
At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard - NYTimes.com
A Breakthrough in Imaging - A New Way to See a Virus - NYTimes.com
Slipstream - In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates - NYTimes.com
- Mr. Nelson anticipated and inspired the World Wide Web, and he coined the term “hypertext,” which embodies the idea of linking a web of objects including text, audio and video.
- One-way links can be easily broken, and there is no simple way to preserve authorship and credit, as was possible with a project called Xanadu that Mr. Nelson began in the 1960s. His two-way links might have avoided the Web’s tornado-like destruction of the economic value of the printed word, he has contended, by incorporating a system of micropayments.
My Genome, My Self - Steven Pinker Gets to the Bottom of his own Genetic Code - NYTimes.com
- Robot innovation continued its relentless advances during 2008. In this post we would like to showcase some of our favorite robots and robot videos of the last year or so. This review is heavily slanted to consumer robots and research robots. Perhaps in the future we can do a review of industrial robots. Given the sheer number of robots that are out there we know there will be several excellent robots that we have overlooked in this review. If you know of any really awesome robots or robot videos that we have missed please let us know and we will consider adding them to this post. So without further delay, lets take a look at some of the best robots and robot videos of 2008 (maybe some are from 2007 too), broken down by category:
Stanford announces $100 million energy institute - San Jose Mercury News
The donations came from three alumni who said they were motivated by the desire to protect the environment from greenhouse gases, improve energy efficiency and reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.
Oil and gas executive Jay Precourt donated $50 million to create what will be called the Precourt Institute for Energy. Farallon Capital Management partner Thomas Steyer and his wife, Kat Taylor, gave $40 million to create a new research center within that institute, the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy. The final $10 million came from other donors.
- An even larger $500 million energy institute supports work at the University of California-Berkeley, but it is controversial because it's supported by international energy company BP and industry scientists collaborate on research.
- Other recent gifts from alumni include a $75 million pledge in 2007 by Jerry Yang, co-founder and a director of the Internet search engine Yahoo and his wife, Akiko Yamazaki. Of that, $50 million was used to build the Environment and Energy Building, which will house the new Precourt Institute for Energy. In 2006, Stanford University trustee Ward Woods and his wife, Priscilla, committed $30 million for what is now named the Woods Institute for the Environment. The energy institute will work in tandem with Woods' environmental researchers.
Technology Review: Basking in Big Data
Technology Review: Basking in Big Data
- Recently, however, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that they have developed software that makes analysis and visualization of huge data sets possible without the aid of a supercomputer. The researchers' algorithm slices up data into more manageable chunks, then stitches it back together on the fly, so that the data can be manipulated in three dimensions, all on a computer with the power and capacity of a high-end laptop.
- The software employs a mathematical tool called the Morse-Smale complex, which has been used for around 4 years to extract and visualize elements of large data sets by sorting them into segments that contain mathematically similar features. But while the Morse-Smale complex has been known for decades, it normally requires huge amounts of memory to perform the necessary calculations on a computer.
Our world may be a giant hologram - space - 15 January 2009 - New Scientist
- The "holographic principle" challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.
- 几年来，寻找引力波却一无所获的研究人员努力定位和消除试验中的干涉和噪声来源。几个月来，他们苦苦思考无法解释的噪声源。随后费米实验室粒子物理实验室的物理学家Craig Hogan，接触了他们，提供了一个可能的答案，那就是：GEO600也许偶然发现了时空的根本性限制—时空停留处的点其行为是如爱因斯坦所描述的光滑的连续统一体，而不是分解成“粒状”—就像新闻照片放大时呈现的颗粒。Hogan称，如果GEO600所发现的就是他所推测的，那么人类其实就生活在一个巨大的宇宙全息图中。Hogan的“全息原理（holographic principle）”认为宇宙在小尺寸上将是模糊的，它的最小尺寸要远大于普朗克长度（约10^(-35）米），可以被现有的设备如GEO600探测到。如果得到证实，它将驱除量子引力论，因为量子引力论无法合并到全息原理中。相反它会推动如弦论和矩阵理论的发展。但GEO600的首席科学家表示现在高兴还早。
- Accordingly, this year sees continuing plans by governments across the world
to limit Internet traffic by content type, or expand existing systems of control.
China heads the list of censoring states in the public consciousness.
Last week, its Ministry of Public Security demanded action and an apology from
search engines for failing to take "efficient" measures against "vulgar
content". Baidu apologized,
and Google committed to "working with the community to establish a healthy
social climate". Smaller blogging sites like bullog.cn were simply shut down.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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