Monthly Archives: March 2014

Check into Oahu’s Royal Hawaiian or Moana Surfrider Resorts and Enjoy Waikiki’s Beaches – Video

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Check into Oahu #39;s Royal Hawaiian or Moana Surfrider Resorts and Enjoy Waikiki #39;s Beaches
Visit beautiful Oahu, the lush tropical paradise offering a mix of Hawaiian island tradition with all of the amenities of modern living. Enjoy the beaches of...

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Check into Oahu's Royal Hawaiian or Moana Surfrider Resorts and Enjoy Waikiki's Beaches - Video

Bacon and dentures: Weird trash hits UK beaches

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(CNN) From craggy cliffs to broad sandy beaches, Britain is rightly proud of its thousands of miles of shoreline.

But campaigners say great stretches of it are now under threat from a tide of trash thats endangering wildlife and could impact visitors.

The UKs Marine Conservation Society (MCS) has published the results of its annual big clean up, which sees hundreds of volunteers take to the countrys beaches armed with garbage bags.

The event, last September, saw more than 223,400 individual pieces of trash scooped from the shoreline the largest haul since the cleanups began 20 years ago.

Among the more bizarre items recovered were a French bulletproof vest, an unopened packet of bacon, a brass candlestick and, disturbingly, a set of dentures.

Ordinary people were seen as the biggest shoreline spoilers blamed for nearly 40% of the trash washing up or blowing onto beaches.

Commercial and recreational fishing, shipping and sewage outlets are also blamed for detritus including nets, floats, used diapers and syringes.

Disgusting tide

Lauren Eyles of MCS says the quantity of litter found was disheartening.

This is a disgusting tide of litter which is threatening the safety of beach visitors both human and animal. Its coming in from the sea, being blown from the land or simply being dumped and dropped, she said in a statement.

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Bacon and dentures: Weird trash hits UK beaches

Astronomy April Fools

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Astronomy Picture of the Day Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) likes to make little jokes on April 1, usually re-captioning existing images. For example, on April 1, 2003 it reported that a new constellation was surprising star gazers. The constellation of Ollie the Owl has suddenly started dominating the southern hemisphere. The picture showed a bird perching on the Tololo All Sky Camera, and APOD admitted that it would have been funnier if the bird hadn't scratched the plastic dome.

However on March 31, 2005, APOD showed the next day's picture as water on Mars . . . which did leave people wondering. This was before orbiters and rovers had gathered considerable evidence of water on the red planet. The April 1 picture was of a glass of water on top of a Mars bar.

Mercury's moon On March 31, 2012 NASA provided the discovery image of a moon for Mercury, as captured by the MESSENGER spacecraft. Even on the eve of April 1, this was credible after all, spacecraft often discover moons. But like many good April Fools, there are clues.

Firstly, the enlarged picture of the moon is immediately recognized by many astronomy buffs. It's a well-known image of asteroid 243 Ida, taken by the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter.

Secondly, they outlined the plan to collide MESSENGER with the moon to knock it free of Mercury's gravity and set it on an Earth-crossing trajectory suitable for recovery as a Mercury meteorite. In fact, they'd do this with such precision that the moon would arrive at a remote location in Antarctica, avoiding population centers. Whew! Pretty impressive planning for something that had only been discovered the day before!

And finally, there's a mission proposal in the planning stage for X-ray analysis of Mercury's surface. It's name: Hermean On-surface Analysis with X-rays. (What's its acronym?)

Astronauts April Fool in space, 2010. The three-man crew of the International Space Station got a laugh out of Mission Control with a doctored photo of themselves spacewalking - not wearing space suits, but slacks, T-shirts and sunglasses. (Hope they remembered their sunblock!)

On April 1, 2013 Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield tweeted a picture of himself with two space grenades, which were actually air sampling devices. And during the day he tweeted a series of images of an unidentified object nearing the Space Station. I imagine his followers had worked out the April Fool long before the final picture of him with a little green alien. "I don't know what it is or what it wants, but it keeps repeating 'Sloof Lirpa' over and over. Alert the press." (The alien message isn't so strange if you read it backwards.)

The Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect The online Museum of Hoaxes lists Patrick Moore's April Fool as one of the 100 Best Hoaxes. The popular British astronomer, with the help of BBC radio, explained the Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect to listeners on April 1, 1976. He said that at 9:47 a.m., a rare conjunction of Jupiter and Pluto would partially negate Earth's gravity and that if you jumped at that time, you would get a floating feeling.

A number of people later phoned the BBC to describe their experiences of floating. I don't know if they were serious or were joining in on the joke.

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Astronomy April Fools

Charlie Elliot chapter to host observing Saturn program

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Dr. Julius Benton, Jr. will give a presentation at the Charlie Elliot chapter of the Atlanta Astronomy Club on April 5.

MANSFIELD The Charlie Elliott chapter of the Atlanta Astronomy Club plans to give beginner astronomers some tips to better observe the large ringed planet of Saturn.

Author and Saturn observing expert Dr. Julius L. Benton Jr. will give a presentation at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, April 5, to explain how beginner and amateur astronomers with basic equipment can see the rings and satellites of Saturn from their own backyard.

Benton said he will first discuss his involvement with the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers and the programs it offers.

ALPO is an international organization devoted to study the sun, moon, planets, asteroids, meteors and comets. Its purpose is to stimulate, coordinate, and generally promote the study of these bodies using methods and instruments that are available within the communities of both amateur and professional astronomers, according to its website, http://www.alpo-astronomy.org.

The Charlie Elliott chapter meeting is free and open to the public. Bentons visual aids will show the hows and whys of observing.

There are plenty of programs that people can participate in in order to learn how to observe and understand, Benton said. I think one of the things people will walk away with is that a large telescope isnt needed to observe and theres a lot of programs available that can be enlightening. Not all the observing is done by NASA. We can all contribute in learning more about the planets.

After Bentons discussion, there will be a short presentation of what to expect to see in sky with binoculars and small telescopes during the month of April. The meeting will end with a chance to observe Saturn with participants own telescopes or those supplied by astronomy club members.

A Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (FRAS), Benton has authored many articles on planetary observing. His book, Saturn and How to Observe It, provides the latest information about the planet, and amateur and professional Saturn images, followed by advice on how to best observe Saturn using a variety of telescope apertures, color filters and magnifications.

Benton is coordinator of the Venus and Saturn observing sections for the ALPO, a worldwide organization of professional astronomers and serious students of solar system astronomy.

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Charlie Elliot chapter to host observing Saturn program

Transcendence Featurette Artificial Intelligence 2014 Johnny Depp Sci Fi Movie HD 1 1 – Video

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Why Nvidia thinks it can power the AI revolution

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6 hours ago Mar. 31, 2014 - 12:07 PM PDT

Smarter robots and devices are coming to a home near you, and chipmaker Nvidia wants to help make it happen. It wont develop the algorithms that dictate their behavior or build the sensors that let them take in our world, but its graphics-processing units, or GPUs, might be a great way to handle the heavy computing necessary to make many forms of artificial intelligence a reality.

Most applications dont use GPUs exclusively, but rather offload the most computationally intensive tasks onto them from standard microprocessors. Called GPU acceleration, the practice is very common in supercomputing workloads and its becoming ubiquitous in the area of computer vision and object recognition, too. In 2013, more than 80 percent of the teams participating in the ImageNet image-recognition competition utilized GPUs, said Sumit Gupta, general manager of the the Advanced Computing Group at Nvidia.

In March 2013, Google acquired DNNresearch, a deep learning startup co-created by University of Toronto professor Geoff Hinton. Part of the rationale behind that acquisition was teams performance of Hintons team in the 2012 ImageNet competition, where the groups GPU-powered deep learning models easily bested previous approaches.

Source: Nvidia

It turns out that the deep neural network problem is just a slam dunk for the GPU, Gupta said. Thats because deep learning algorithms often require a lot of computing power to process their data (e.g., images or text) and extract the defining features of the things included in that data. Especially during the training phase, when the models and algorithms are being tuned for accuracy, they need to process a lot of data.

Numerous customers are using Nvidias Tesla GPUs forimage and speech recognition, including Adobe and Chinese search giant Baidu. Nvidia is working on other aspects of machine learning as well, Gupta noted. Netflix uses them (in the Amazon Web Services cloud) to power its recommendation engine, Russian search engine Yandex uses GPUs to power its search engine, and IBM uses them to run clustering algorithms inHadoop.

Nvidia might be so excited about machine learning because it has been pushing GPUs as a general-purpose computing platform not just a graphics and gaming chip for years with mixed results. The company has tried to do this by simplify programming its processors via the CUDA language it has developed, but Gupta acknowledged theres still an overall lack of knowledge about how to use GPUs effectively. Thats why so much real innovation still remains with these large users that have the parallel-programming skills necessary to take advantage of 2,500 or more cores at a time (and even more in multi-GPU systems).

Source: Nvidia

However, Nvidia is looking beyond servers and into robotics to fuel some of its machine learning ambitions over the next decade. Last week, the company announced its Jetson TK1 development kit, which Gupta called a supercomputing version of Raspberry Pi. At $192, the kit is programmable using CUDA and includes all the ports one might expect to see, as well as a Tegra K1 system-on-a-chip (the latest version of Nvidias mobile processor) thats comprised of a 192-core Kepler GPU, an ARM Cortex A15 CPU and 300 gigaflops of performance.

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Why Nvidia thinks it can power the AI revolution

Latest XPrize challenges teams to deliver a TED Talk using artificial intelligence

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The XPrize Foundation wants to find out if an artificial intelligence can compose and deliver a good TED Talk

TED Talks are known for being delivered in a captivating, compelling fashion that's why the events' organizers are fairly picky when it comes to selecting speakers. With that in mind, XPrize has teamed up with TED for its latest competition, in which an artificial intelligence (AI) must deliver a TED Talk with no human assistance.

For those who don't know, TED is a non-profit group that regularly presents conferences featuring lectures on "ideas worth spreading." The topics can include just about anything that will enlighten the listeners. The XPrize Foundation, on the other hand, stages competitions in which teams compete to achieve a goal that drives innovation.

The just-announced AI XPrize is described as "a modern-day Turing test to be awarded to the first AI to walk or roll out on stage and present a TED Talk so compelling that it commands a standing ovation from you, the audience."

Although the rules and format of the contest have yet to be finalized, at this point the competing AIs could be contained within a robot, they could simply be disembodied voices, or they could take some other form. A suggested scenario involves them being presented with a topic for a 3-minute talk, 30 minutes before having to take the stage. They would then have to autonomously compose a lecture, deliver it to a live audience in an engaging fashion, and then answer two questions on the topic, as posed by the host of the conference.

The winner would be decided based on the audience's applause.

As mentioned, though, that's just a suggestion. XPrize is open to hearing other peoples' ideas, which can be submitted via the link below.

Source: XPrize

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Latest XPrize challenges teams to deliver a TED Talk using artificial intelligence