"What you saw there was a scaled prototype, 35 feet in diameter. During the test run it arrived on-site in a dock attached to a trailer, then deployed, activated the turbine, and returned to the ground—all automatically. At its highest altitude of 350 feet, it successfully got the turbine to generate twice as much juice than it gets at tower height. We'd say Altaeros is one to watch."

"This paper develops generalizations of empowerment to continuous states. Empowerment is a recently introduced information-theoretic quantity motivated by hypotheses about the efficiency of the sensorimotor loop in biological organisms, but also from considerations stemming from curiosity-driven learning. Empowemerment measures, for agent-environment systems with stochastic transitions, how much influence an agent has on its environment, but only that influence that can be sensed by the agent sensors. It is an information-theoretic generalization of joint controllability (influence on environment) and observability (measurement by sensors) of the environment by the agent, both controllability and observability being usually defined in control theory as the dimensionality of the control/observation spaces.…"

"Using memristive properties common for the titanium dioxide thin film devices, we designed a simple write algorithm to tune device conductance at a specific bias point to 1% relative accuracy (which is roughly equivalent to 7-bit precision) within its dynamic range even in the presence of large variations in switching behavior. The high precision state is nonvolatile and the results are likely to be sustained for nanoscale memristive devices because of the inherent filamentary nature of the resistive switching. The proposed functionality of memristive devices is especially attractive for analog computing with low precision data. As one representative example we demonstrate hybrid circuitry consisting of CMOS summing amplifier and two memristive devices to perform analog multiply and accumulate computation, which is a typical bottleneck operation in information processing."

"As in the car industry for quite some time, dynamic simulation of complete vehicles is being practiced more and more in the development of off-road machinery. However, specific questions arise due not only to company structure and size, but especially to the type of product. Tightly coupled, non-linear subsystems of different domains make prediction and optimisation of the complete system's dynamic behaviour a challenge. Furthermore, the demand for versatile machines leads to sometimes contradictory target requirements and can turn the design process into a hunt for the least painful compromise. This can be avoided by profound system knowledge, assisted by simulation-driven product development. This paper gives an overview of joint research into this issue by Volvo Wheel Loaders and Linkoping University on that matter, lists the results of a related literature review and introduces the term "operateability". Rather than giving detailed answers, the problem space for ongoing and future research is examined and possible solutions are sketched."

"With the aim of producing a stable human-like bipedal gait, a five-link planar walking mechanism is coupled with a central pattern generator (CPG) neural network, consisting of units based on Matsuoka's half-center oscillator model with a firm basis in neurophysiology. As a minimalistic approach to bipedal walking, this type of walking mechanism contains only four actuators, and is lacking feet and ankles. The mechanism is simulated with accurate physics, allowing realistic fitness evaluations for the creation of CPG controllers through evolutionary computation. The oscillatory parameters, internal connectivity structure, and external feedback pathways of the networks are determined through genetic algorithms (GA) optimization. The evolved CPG networks are transferred to a hardware implementation of the mechanism, to test their performance under real-world dynamics. Results confirm that the biologically inspired CPG model is very well suited for controlling legged locomotion, since a diverse manifestation of CPG networks (with and without external feedback) have been observed to succeed during the course of GA evaluations. Observations also imply that while the CPG mechanism is inherently able to sustain a stable gait, the utilization of feedback pathways makes the gait more human-like and is needed to provide a means to adapt to irregularities in the environment."

"Recent trends in planning research have led to empirical comparison becoming commonplace. The field has started to settle into a methodology for such comparisons, which for obvious practical reasons requires running a subset of planners on a subset of problems. In this paper, we characterize the methodology and examine eight implicit assumptions about the problems, planners and metrics used in many of these comparisons. The problem assumptions are: PR1) the performance of a general purpose planner should not be penalized/biased if executed on a sampling of problems and domains, PR2) minor syntactic differences in representation do not affect performance, and PR3) problems should be solvable by STRIPS capable planners unless they require ADL. The planner assumptions are: PL1) the latest version of a planner is the best one to use, PL2) default parameter settings approximate good performance, and PL3) time cut-offs do not unduly bias outcome. The metrics assumptions are: M1) performance degrades similarly for each planner when run on degraded runtime environments (e.g., machine platform) and M2) the number of plan steps distinguishes performance. We find that most of these assumptions are not supported empirically; in particular, that planners are affected differently by these assumptions. We conclude with a call to the community to devote research resources to improving the state of the practice and especially to enhancing the available benchmark problems."

"There is an increasing need for automated support for humans monitoring the activity of distributed teams of cooperating agents, both human and machine. We characterize the domain-independent challenges posed by this problem, and describe how properties of domains influence the challenges and their solutions. We will concentrate on dynamic, data-rich domains where humans are ultimately responsible for team behavior. Thus, the automated aid should interactively support effective and timely decision making by the human. We present a domain-independent categorization of the types of alerts a plan-based monitoring system might issue to a user, where each type generally requires different monitoring techniques. We describe a monitoring framework for integrating many domain-specific and task-specific monitoring techniques and then using the concept of value of an alert to avoid operator overload. We use this framework to describe an execution monitoring approach we have used to implement Execution Assistants (EAs) in two different dynamic, data-rich, real-world domains to assist a human in monitoring team behavior. One domain (Army small unit operations) has hundreds of mobile, geographically distributed agents, a combination of humans, robots, and vehicles. The other domain (teams of unmanned ground and air vehicles) has a handful of cooperating robots. Both domains involve unpredictable adversaries in the vicinity. Our approach customizes monitoring behavior for each specific task, plan, and situation, as well as for user preferences. Our EAs alert the human controller when reported events threaten plan execution or physically threaten team members. Alerts were generated in a timely manner without inundating the user with too many alerts (less than 10 percent of alerts are unwanted, as judged by domain experts)."

"The feathering maneuver rotates the wing tips upward, slowing down the craft and allowing it to reenter the atmosphere from any angle without requiring the absolutely precise reentry angles of the Space Shuttle, which returns to Earth at orbital speeds of 16,000 mph."

"Local Motors, a revolutionary crowd-sourced car company, is holding a concept design competition for a transcontinental race vehicle with a support ship."

It's called the DLR Hand Arm System. It has an anthropomorphic design and packs 52 motors, ultra-miniaturized control electronics, a supercapacitor-based power supply, and a web of high-strength tendons. But what makes it stand out compared to conventional systems is its ability to withstand collisions, thanks to ingeniously designed joints and actuators that can absorb and dissipate energy, much like our own arms and hands do.

"Whether because they're Canadian or because they're engineers, or both, they are unusual among aid organizations because they focus on understanding what didn't work. For the last three years, they've published Failure Reports detailing their specific failures. The reports make an interesting read, not just for aid organizations, but for anyone trying to manage engineering teams."

"On March 30th, Lux Research released an update on the vehicle electrification market titled "Small Batteries, Big Sales: The Unlikely Winners in the Electric Vehicle Market" that predicts:…"

“Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

"he motility of the worm nematode \textit{Caenorhabditis elegans} is investigated in shallow, wet granular media as a function of particle size dispersity and area density ($\phi$). Surprisingly, we find that the nematode's propulsion speed is enhanced by the presence of particles in a fluid and is nearly independent of area density. The undulation speed, often used to differentiate locomotion gaits, is significantly affected by particle size dispersity for area densities above $\phi \geq 0.55$, and is characterized by a change in the nematode's waveform from swimming to crawling in dense polydisperse media \textit{only}. This change highlights the organism's adaptability to subtle differences in local structure between monodisperse and polydisperse media."

"At the most fundamental level, computers are an assembly of gates that are used to perform the basic operations required to execute a program. For problems in the probability domain, even the values used in these most basic operations are not constrained to be either a 0 or a 1. Instead, the basic gates must determine the probability that a bit is a 1, or the probability that it is a 0.
Lyric’s gates are designed to model relationships between probabilities natively in the device physics. For this reason, Lyric can perform mathematical operations in the probability domain with just a handful of transistors – creating power and area savings of more than 10X over traditional implementations."

"Whereas a conventional NAND gate outputs a "1" if neither of its inputs match, the output of a Bayesian NAND gate represents the odds that the two input probabilities match. This makes it possible to perform calculations that use probabilities as their input and output."

"We survey and show our earlier results about three different ways of fluctuation-enhanced sensing of bio agent, the phage-based method for bacterium detection published earlier; sensing and evaluating the odors of microbes; and spectral and amplitude distribution analysis of noise in light scattering to identify spores based on their diffusion coefficient."

"Fatal crush conditions occur in crowds with tragic frequency. Event organisers and architects are often criticised for failing to consider the causes and implications of crush, but the reality is that the prediction and mitigation of such conditions offers a significant technical challenge. Full treatment of physical force within crowd simulations is precise but computationally expensive; the more common method of human interpretation of results is computationally "cheap" but subjective and time-consuming. In this paper we propose an alternative method for the analysis of crowd behaviour, which uses information theory to measure crowd disorder. We show how this technique may be easily incorporated into an existing simulation framework, and validate it against an historical event. Our results show that this method offers an effective and efficient route towards automatic detection of crush."

"We have shown that there exists a large ensemble of minimal Boolean networks that show reliable and robust dynamics. The networks are minimal in the respect that the number of connections of a node is not larger than necessary for obtaining a desired reliable trajectory. A reliable trajectory is an attractor of the dynamics of the network that does not change when the update schedule is changed or randomized. This means that under parallel update, at each time step only one node changes its state. The reliable trajectories were chosen at random, given a fixed average number of flips per node. High robustness was achieved by using an evolutionary algorithm that modifies the update functions and that accepts only those changes that do not decrease robustness.…"

"Our 2.546-approximation is quite simple. The performance guarantee is based on a simple area argument. This gives rise to the following question: what is the smallest square that suffices for packing any set of circles of total area 1? We believe the worst-case may very well be shown in Figure 13, which yields a lower bound of 1.471299... We believe there are relatively easy ways to improve the upper bound."

"Neuronal activity arises from an interaction between ongoing firing generated spontaneously by neural circuits and responses driven by external stimuli. Using mean-field analysis, we ask how a neural network that intrinsically generates chaotic patterns of activity can remain sensitive to extrinsic input. We find that inputs not only drive network responses, they also actively suppress ongoing activity, ultimately leading to a phase transition in which chaos is completely eliminated. The critical input intensity at the phase transition is a non-monotonic function of stimulus frequency, revealing a "resonant" frequency at which the input is most effective at suppressing chaos even though the power spectrum of the spontaneous activity peaks at zero and falls exponentially. A prediction of our analysis is that the variance of neural responses should be most strongly suppressed at frequencies matching the range over which many sensory systems operate."

"The efficiency of a simple model of crossflow fan is maximized when the geometry depends on a design parameter. The flow field is numerically computed using a Galerkin method for solving a Poisson partial differential equation."

"A particle that moves along a smooth track in a vertical plane is influenced by two forces: gravity and normal force. The force experienced by roller coaster riders is the normal force, so a natural question to ask is: what shape of the track gives a normal force of constant magnitude? Here we solve this problem. It turns out that the solution is related to the Kepler problem; the trajectories in velocity space are conic sections."

"We consider the problem of scheduling in multihop wireless networks subject to interference constraints. We consider a graph based representation of wireless networks, where scheduled links adhere to the K-hop link interference model. We develop a distributed greedy heuristic for this scheduling problem. Further, we show that this distributed greedy heuristic computes the exact same schedule as the centralized greedy heuristic."

"We present designs of 2D isotropic, disordered photonic materials of arbitrary size with complete band gaps blocking all directions and polarizations. The designs with the largest gaps are obtained by a constrained optimization method that starts from a hyperuniform disordered point pattern, an array of points whose number variance within a spherical sampling window grows more slowly than the volume. We argue that hyperuniformity, combined with uniform local topology and short-range geometric order, can explain how complete photonic band gaps are possible without long-range translational order. We note the ramifications for electronic and phononic band gaps in disordered materials."

"The transition of the flow in a duct of square cross-section is studied. Like in the similar case of the pipe flow, the motion is linearly stable for all Reynolds numbers; this flow is thus a good candidate to investigate the 'bypass' path to turbulence. Initially the so-called 'linear optimal perturbation problem' is formulated and solved, yielding optimal disturbances in the form of longitudinal vortices. Such optimals, however, fail to elicit a significant response from the system in the nonlinear regime. Thus, streamwise-inhomogeneous, sub-optimal disturbances are focussed upon; nonlinear quadratic interactions are immediately evoked by such initial perturbations and an unstable streamwise-homogeneous large amplitude mode rapidly emerges. The subsequent evolution of the flow, at a value of the Reynolds number at the edge between fully developed turbulence and relaminarization, shows the alternance of patterns with two pairs of large scale vortices near opposing parallel walls.…"

I ♡ pragmatic physics. "We propose a simple rubber friction law, which can be used, e.g., in models of tire (and vehicle) dynamics."

"This paper introduces the theory and practice of formal verification of self-assembling systems. We interpret a well-studied abstraction of nanomolecular self assembly, the Abstract Tile Assembly Model (aTAM), into Computation Tree Logic (CTL), a temporal logic often used in model checking. We then consider the class of "rectilinear" tile assembly systems. This class includes most aTAM systems studied in the theoretical literature, and all (algorithmic) DNA tile self-assembling systems that have been realized in laboratories to date. We present a polynomial-time algorithm that, given a tile assembly system T as input, either provides a counterexample to T's rectilinearity or verifies whether T has a unique terminal assembly. …"

"This paper is concerned with designing self-driven fitness functions for Embedded Evolutionary Robotics. The proposed approach considers the entropy of the sensori-motor stream generated by the robot controller. This entropy is computed using unsupervised learning; its maximization, achieved by an on-board evolutionary algorithm, implements a "curiosity instinct", favouring controllers visiting many diverse sensori-motor states (sms). Further, the set of sms discovered by an individual can be transmitted to its offspring, making a cultural evolution mode possible. Cumulative entropy (computed from ancestors and current individual visits to the sms) defines another self-driven fitness; its optimization implements a "discovery instinct", as it favours controllers visiting new or rare sensori-motor states. Empirical results on the benchmark problems proposed by Lehman and Stanley (2008) comparatively demonstrate the merits of the approach."

"We study the acoustic scattering properties of a phononic crystal designed to behave as a gradient index lens in water, both experimentally and theoretically. The gradient index lens is designed using a square lattice of stainless-steel cylinders based on a multiple scattering approach in the homogenization limit. We experimentally demonstrate that the lens follows the graded index equations derived for optics by mapping the pressure intensity generated from a spherical source at 20 kHz. We find good agreement between the experimental result and theoretical modeling based on multiple scattering theory."

"Distributed medium access control (MAC) protocols are essential for the proliferation of low cost, decentralized wireless local area networks (WLANs). … In this work, we propose a class of protocols that limit the performance gain which nodes can obtain through selfish manipulation while incurring only a small efficiency loss. The proposed protocols are based on the idea of a review strategy, with which nodes collect signals about the actions of other nodes over a period of time, use a statistical test to infer whether or not other nodes are following the prescribed protocol, and trigger a punishment if a departure from the protocol is perceived. We consider the cases of private and public signals and provide analytical and numerical results to demonstrate the properties of the proposed protocols."

"We have shown that a multi-scale optical system can be used to dramatically improve the collection efficiency of light from multiple point sources simultaneously. The micromirror could be integrated with ion traps to achieve a factor of 5 enhancement in light collection over the current state-of-the-art of 5%…."

"In this paper, we briefly review the concept of memory circuit elements, namely memristors, memcapacitors and meminductors, and then discuss some applications by focusing mainly on the first class. We present several examples, their modeling and applications ranging from analog programming to biological systems. Since the phenomena associated with memory are ubiquitous at the nanoscale, we expect the interest in these circuit elements to increase in coming years."

"…The conclusion is that nondeterminism confers extra power to assemble a shape from a small tile system, but unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses, it is computationally more difficult to exploit this power by finding the size of the smallest tile system, compared to finding the size of the smallest deterministic tile system."

"…This idea arises from previous works in which computational models of self-assembly were subject to evolutionary design in order to perform the automatic construction of user-defined structures. Then, the aim of this paper is to present a novel methodology for the automated design of heuristics by means of self-assembly."

"The goal of topology optimization is to find optimal material distribution in the given design domain subject to some constraints governed by certain physical properties and/or some other practical constraints during the design. In the past two decades, advances in the theory of homogenization, optimization, numerical analysis as well as newly developed engineering approaches make topology opti- mization techniques to become a standard tool of engineering design, in particular in the field of structural mechanics."

"This paper introduces the FLOSS Free Libre Open Source Software [VEMSA3D], a contraction of "Visual Electromagnetic Simulator for 3D Antennas", which are geometrically modeled, either exactly or approximately, as thin wire polygonal structures; presents its GUI Graphical User Interface capabilities, in interactive mode and/or in handling suitable formed antenna data files; demonstrates the effectiveness of its use in a number of practical antenna applications, with direct comparison to experimental measurements and other freeware results; and provides the inexperienced user with a specific list of instructions to successfully build the given source code by using only freely available IDE Integrated Development Environment tools-including a cross-platform one.…"

"Applying a sparse constraint on the beam pattern has been suggested to suppress the sidelobe of the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer recently. To further improve the performance, we add an improved block-sparse constraint on the beam pattern. It matches the beam pattern better and encourages dense distribution in mainlobe and sparse distribution in sidelobe. The obtained beamformer has a lower sidelobe level and deeper nulls for interference avoidance than the standard sparse constraint based beamformer. Simulation demonstrates that the SINR gain is considerable for its lower sidelobe level and deeper nulling for interference, while the robustness against the mismatch between the steering angle and the direction of arrival (DOA) of the desired signal, caused by imperfect estimation of DOA, is maintained too."

"Research into properties of heterogeneous artificial materials, consisting of arrangements of rigid scatterers embedded in a medium with different elastic properties, has been intense throughout last two decades. The capability to prevent the transmission of waves in predetermined bands of frequencies -called bandgaps- becomes one of the most interesting properties of these systems, and leads to the possibility of designing devices to control wave propagation. The underlying physical mechanism is destructive Bragg interference. Here we show a technique that enables the creation of a wide bandgap in these materials, based on fractal geometries. We have focused our work in the acoustic case where these materials are called Phononic/Sonic Crystals (SC) but, the technique could be applied any types of crystals and wave types in ranges of frequencies where the physics of the process is linear."

"We consider scheduling weighted packets in a capacity-bounded buffer. In this model, there is a buffer with a limited capacity B such that at any time, the buffer cannot accommodate more than B packets. Packets arrive over time. Each packet has a non-negative real value. Packets do not expire and they leave the buffer only because either we send them or we drop them. The packets that have left the buffer will not be reconsidered for delivery any more. In each time step, at most one packet in the buffer can be sent. The order in which the packets are sent should comply with the order of their arriving time. The objective is to maximize the total value of the packets sent in an online manner.…"

"In this paper we consider spatial networks that realize a balance between an infrastructure cost (the cost of wire needed to connect the network in space) and communication efficiency, measured by average shortest pathlength. A global optimization procedure yields network topologies in which this balance is optimized. These are compared with network topologies generated by a competitive process in which each node strives to optimize its own cost-communication balance. Three phases are observed in globally optimal configurations for different cost-communication trade-offs: (i) regular small worlds, (ii) star-like networks and (iii) trees with a centre of interconnected hubs. In the latter regime, i.e. for very expensive wire, power laws in the link length distributions $P(w)\propto w^{-\alpha}$ are found, which can be explained by a hierarchical organization of the networks…"

"The results from the computational approximation of Physarum support the findings of [15] that the organism can be used to construct simple logic gates, and also the computing schemes within this paper which explored the creation of more complex combined gates and half adder circuitry. The findings suggest that, although such circuits can indeed be built, the presence of both timing errors and junctional (search) errors would severely limit the effectiveness and practicality with even more complex circuits."

"In communication networks, cognitive network (CN) is a new type of data network that makes use of cutting edge technology from several research areas (i.e. machine learning, knowledge representation, computer network, network management) to solve some problems current networks are faced with. Cognitive network is different from cognitive radio as it covers all the layers of the OSI model (not only layers 1 and 2 as with cognitive radio).…"

"Siemens's plans hinge on a new design that reduces the weight of the system's generator. In conventional wind turbines, the gearbox increases the speed of the wind-driven rotor several hundred fold, which radically reduces the size of the generator required. Direct-drive generators operate at the same speed as the turbine's blades and must therefore be much bigger--over four meters in diameter for Siemens's three-megawatt turbine. Yet Siemens claims that the turbine's entire nacelle weighs just 73 metric tons--12 tons less than that on its less powerful, gear-driven 2.3-megawatt turbines."

"Just as the auto-industry is fragmenting as it becomes clear the majors can’t satisfy niche demand propelled by personalization, the mobile phone industry knows that the success of Apple’s iPhone is a sign that customization and personalization are now more important than engineering excellence. No manager, executive or designer is unaware of it – though we’ve seen a succession of ultra-high functionality phones launched recently, with a phone-based Sony playstation device to come."

[search results]

"The challenges are still significant. The first is proving that the technology is ready for the punishment of the open water, where many wave and tidal prototypes have met their match. For example, the fiberglass rotors on early tidal turbine prototypes installed in New York City's East River in 2007 were fractured by unexpected turbulence. The following year, Pelamis Wave Power pulled its snake-like 750-kilowatt generators out of Portuguese waters amid technical difficulties."

via: Genetic Argonaut

"This paper briefly highlights the features of the software tool [RadPat4W], named after Radiation Patterns for Windows but also compatible with the [Wine] environment of Linux. The tool is a stand-alone part of a freeware suite that is based on an alternative exposition of fundamental Antenna Theory and is under active development for many years now. Nevertheless, [RadPat4W] source code has been now released as FLOSS Free Libre Open Source Software and thus it may be freely used, copied, modified or redistributed, individually or cooperatively, by the interested user to suit her/his personal needs for reliable antenna applications from the simplest to the more complex."

can;t actually read this :/

"Google SketchUp is software that you can use to create 3D models of anything you like. With its embedded Ruby application programming interface (API), you can extend and customize the program to suit your needs. If you love SketchUp but ever thought "I just wish it did XYZ," then there's a good chance the Ruby API can make it happen. "

"cocoaNEC 2.0 is a Mac OS X application intended primarily for the design and modeling of antennas.

cocoaNEC 2.0 is a Universal Binary Cocoa based application. It runs natively on both Intel based and PowerPC based Macintosh computers that use Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or newer.

The application is free and it can be downloaded from the Download tab button at the top of this page.

Online tutorials, reference manuals and example files for the application are available through the User's Manual tab button. The What's New page lists features that have changed since the previously released version of cocoaNEC 2.0. "

"The purpose of this site is to provide a comprehensive list of links related to optics and optical simulation in general. Topics include optical design, optical engineering, illumination, Laser, optical materials, thin film coatings, and many more subjects needed to build and analyze complex optical systems."

"BiotSavart is an application for Mac OS X and Windows XP that calculates the magnetic field resulting from general 3-D configurations of current-carrying conductors. It has proven useful in the design of superconducting and copper coil systems in physics laboratories worldwide. With BiotSavart, you design the conductors while you view them on the screen."

"To investigate the optimal shape a 3-D panel might take in order to harvest the most light, scientists used a "genetic algorithm" to evolve solar panels in a computer simulation.

The model they developed randomly generated jumbles of flat, triangular double-sided solar panels and analyzed which generated the most power as a virtual sun moved across the sky. The best ones were then "mated" together for "offspring" that combined features of each with "mutations" that varied their structures. This process was then repeated for up to millions of generations, all in order to see what might evolve."

"The rest of the items in SEMAT’s proposal are mush. Of course our theories need to address technological and social issues. Of course they need wide support by several communities to be successful. Of course they must be flexible. But what should they consist of? What stake is SEMAT putting on the ground? Unfortunately, beyond a wish to be more like an engineering discipline, this proposal is completely vague, and therefore I cannot support it."

"Using a numerical optimization program, Gilbert and colleagues showed it's possible to reduce the amount of material in parabola-shaped cables by 0.3% if Hencky nets are used at their ends. The researchers have been working under the assumption that the well-know and simple parabolic-shaped cables represented the optimum bridge design until Gilbert realized that the only option was that the current wisdom was wrong."

"It was also realised that had the layout optimization solver been incorporated within a user-friendly interactive software package, then it would have been very much easier to rapidly change the design problem in response to feedback from other members of the design team..."

Want to breed replacements for the models in Section 4

"The Commission’s resolution also included a call for ODOT to attend their next meeting on February 2 (9 am at City Hall) to discuss the benefits of a bike/ped path included in the bid process. ODOT will release the RFQ that same day, so Brown pointed out that the resolution and alternative technical specification in the RFQ will have to be sent to ODOT this week. ODOT will host a meeting for parties interested in designing the Innerbelt Bridge on Feb. 9. Kuri asked if this was a public meeting (and offered after that a group of advocates might consider forming as a design ‘firm’ to bid on the project – for at least the purpose of attending the Feb. 9 meeting. The guidlines for bidding on the Innerbelt Bridge can be found here.)"

"Suppose you are given a simple closed curve in the plane. (“Simple” means the curve does not intersect itself, “closed” means the curve ends at the same point where it begins.) Can you always find four points on the curve which form the vertices of a square?"

"Welcome to definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2009. First up - What is open source hardware? These are projects in which the creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source software like Linux, but this hardware centric."

"Faro Measuring System's Laser ScanArm might bring back bad memories of the dentist, but in fact it's another 3D scanning solution--this one mounted to an articulated arm that not only helps you hold it steady, but records the scanner's position in space. Faro's Orlando Perez shoots and captures a mini Lady Liberty:..."

things to do

"The core of this wonderful museum is the Reuleaux collection of mechanisms and machines, a set of 19th century models built to demonstrate the elements of machine motion (more collections here). Also of interest are the tutorials and this extensive list of online references."

"This page reports the result of the iGEM competition for 2009. You can visit the team's wiki by clicking on the team's name. You can see what medal the team won and view the slides from their presentation, a video of their presentation, and their poster using the other icons."

"One day the technology of electroactive polymers will drastically change the way we percieve products. Products will gain new dimensions ranging from changing tactile surfaces over active membranes to morphing shapes. Products of the future will be "alive". " via Bill Merrill

"This paper has two aspects. First, it describes the use of genetic programming to automatically synthesize a solution to the challenge problem posed at an international competition held every four years in the field of optical design. In 2002, the competition at the International Optical Design Conference attracted 42 entries from 39 well-known optical designers, commercial consultants, and patent holders from many of the field's most prominent companies, universities, and research institutions. The 39 human contestants spent an average of 34.1 hours working on their entries. Virtually all entries were considered good solutions to the challenge problem. Genetic programming automatically synthesized a design "from scratch" - that is, without starting from a pre-existing human-created design and without pre-specifying the number of lenses, the physical layout of the lenses, or the numerical or non-numerical parameters of the lenses...."

Me: "Solving interesting problems" well involves a frequent iterative dialog between the techniques, intermediate results, and the practitioner. Agility, in other words.

[Watch the video] "The sensor meanwhile detects surrounding pH levels--the higher the pH concentration, the faster the electromagnetic pulses emitted by the micro-machine. The external computer uses these signals to direct a swarm of about 3,000 magnetically-sensitive bacteria, which push the micro-machine around as it pulses. The bacteria push the micro-machine closer to the higher pH concentration."

publications

A number of very nice theses and whitepapers.

"We are defined by what we build. It’s not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s that we believe we can and decide to act. I’m happy to report our new President agrees when he says,

“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”"

"Antenna arrays have been studied and used for years, but the latest NIST work provides several new twists. Unlike the typical case in which antenna arrays boost signals to or from a distant target, a first responder’s radio would be relatively close to the portable transmitters, ideally within the perimeter of the array. More importantly, since disaster sites rarely allow for niceties of design, NIST studied the benefits of a fast and imprecise technique—randomly placed antennas combined with coarse signal matching. The signals produced by the radio and portable transmitters need to operate at the same frequency and roughly in phase, such that the radio waves are fairly well synchronized and thus build on each other. Phase-matching was performed manually in the experiments but might eventually be possible remotely."

"Lenders are offered returns based on a rolling six-month average so dud projects will be offset by sales of profitable ones. It takes just a few deals to strike it big, Huynh and Stack say, and because it is a community that is not just passionate but also knowledgeable, better projects are likely to get funded.

The promise of returns is enough to get former investment banker Andrew de Montille excited.

"I put money in the bank not because I consider it as a charitable investment," says de Montille. "Rather, I am very confident that some of the projects will do well enough to be profitable to the investors.""

"In Belarus they use planes with ellipse wings. They say it has a few benefits comparing to the simple one or double winged planes, like the wing can be less in size, it’s more firm because the ellipse form is self sustaining, also there are now air vortexes by the sides of the wings which gives up to 30% increase in power compared to the traditional planes."

"The Twenty-First International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE'09) will be held at the Hyatt Harborside at Boston's Logan Int'l Airport, Boston, USA, July 1-3, 2009.

The conference aims at bringing together experts in software engineering and knowledge engineering to discuss on relevant results in either software engineering or knowledge engineering or both. Special emphasis will be put on the transference of methods between both domains."

"Solar Red thinks it can do two things: First, reduce the cost of attaching panels, by integrating the process into the construction of a house, or periodic renovations; and second, push down the learning curve enough that regular roofers and construction workers can put on the panels."

ridiculously overpriced vertical engineering simulator