Martian trippers enjoy storm free journey

Great news for all Martian wannabes.

The trip to Mars can be made much safer with the realisation of a “Force Field”. This will drastically cut down the problems the solar wind can cause, especially when a solar storm occurs.

The high speed particles flowing from the Sun during a Solar Storm can cause serious medical problems for the astronauts, so using technology developed during Fusion research it was found that a “magnetic bubble” can be used to envelope the spaceship and all and protect them in the same way the Earth is protected from the Solar Winds.

More information can be found here:
http://www.physorg.com/news145004546.html

Human computing power

The idea

There are still quite a few tasks that computers struggle to do, image recognition is a good example. Currently there’s only one way to complete these tasks and that’s manually. This can obviously take a long time to do but there is a solution, you just need to find thousands of people to take part – this is exactly what we are seeing more and more of right now.

The internet is ideal way to get many thousands of people together, and with the right task really great things can be achieved. Of course, it’s not as easy as uploading thousands of images and expecting people to look through them for you – if we don’t find the images interesting then we are simply not going to take part. One way to keep a task interesting is to make the process into a game and compete with other like minded people.

The other problem is making sure the tasks are being performed correctly. The current preferred solution is to first train the participants and secondly to randomly test them against already checked responses. This also removes any unscrupulous individuals intent on causing problems and ultimately makes the completed task more reliable.

Some examples of human computing follow.

Clickworkers
The first test of the idea was back in 2000, and was called Click Workers. It was run by Nasa and the idea was simply to select craters on Mars. The interface is quite basic, and reflects some of the early internet’s draw backs clearly lacking some of the enhancements in more recent projects, but the project proved that the concept could work.

The stardust project

One of the first projects to use some of the latest Web 2.0 ideas was the Stardust Project. Stardust was a sample return mission to collect interstellar particles passing through the Solar System. The particles were tiny and captured in a gel like substance (see image), it was as they put it

“…like looking for 45 ants on a football pitch.”

more information about the project here.

For the website the “gel” was imaged at a high resolution and small pieces then farmed off to an individuals. First each individual was given a test to make sure they knew what they were looking for, then they were given a really image of the “gel” and had to decide if it contained a particle or not. The whole idea was to pretty much search for the stuff stars (and everything) are made of, as if you were some intergalatic explorer, as they put it:

“The best attitude for this project is this: Have fun!”

good advice for anyone wanted to set up their own human computing experiment.

The galaxy zoo project

The next project to give this a try was the galaxy zoo project. The idea here was to try to classify galaxies into spiral (as image) or elliptical. There exists thousands and thousands of photographs of the night sky unseen by human eyes and just waiting for the next great discovery to be made – step up the next group of intergalatic explorers.

This project was in a similar vain to the previous one but executed with a slightly slicker interface. This also had a massive following, with quite quickly millions of galaxy classifications taking place. Participants were again trained and tested during their continual classification. Friendly competition was enhanced with high score tables and records of right and wrong classifications.

The foldit game

One of the more advanced software programs in human computing tasks is the FoldIt Game, it’s also one of the cleverest ideas and one of the most fun to do. The idea is you have to fold proteins so that they can have the right shape to combine with other proteins, these can then be used to cure real world diseases.

This one is attempting something slightly different from the other examples here. Rather than classification, this one actually wants you to solve some rather complex problems. Many of the puzzles have unknown solutions and there may even be some that have no solution.

It’s fairly simple to get started, the puzzles have a nice learning curve and the interface has been well designed. Just use the mouse to grab or shake parts of the protein to see what happens. You’ll have to download the program to try it yourself.

More detailed information can be found here.

GWAP.com
This is the final one we’ll look at here, and the idea takes various human computing tasks into the mainstream. GWAP comes from “Games With A Purpose” and there are several games here to compete in. All are primarilly designed to be fun to play but are cleverly designed to help computers recognise things like images or words.

To check that it is being correctly played, couples co-operate anomonously and try to, for instance, tag a photo with the same word, or ring the same part of an image. Doing this means it effectively checks itself, and the more people that play the games the more reliable the information becomes.

Check out more info here. And for an in depth look into GWAP and similar ideas check this video out.

Summary
It seems like more and more projects are being started that utilise these unique human abilities, and with each new project becomes an ever more ingenious idea. But the question is how long will it be before computers have the abilities to do t
hese tasks themselves? Well, with more of these projects actually aimed at improving computers in the first place, maybe it’ll be sooner than we think.

One last thing I must mention though is the darker side of human computing. It’s already been shown that criminals have used this technique to bypass the CAPTCHA login systems by employing enough humans to sort through the vast outputs.

Let me know of any other human computing projects you’ve come across.

The future is big, bendy and transparent.

You might have seen bendable displays before, but unfortunately they’ve

always had something that stopped them going main stream. Until now.
All of the problems have been fixed: any size, any resolution, flexible and
bright.

Check out the new report here:

I think it’s hard to imagine the many ways this will transform today’s world, but just imagine what a roll up, light weight, flexible screen could do:

  • Wrap around your arm like a bracelet.
  • Sewn directly onto fabrics.
  • Floated into the sky by balloons.
  • Embedded into spectacles or any glass surface.

Do you have some good ideas?

Project Euler. Problem Solving, Maths and programming

Here’s a fun little website to stretch those little grey cells.
http://projecteuler.net/

Named after the great Mathematician “Leonhard Euler”, it’s a website to test your programming and Maths prowess. Of course I’d only recommend it if you do actually enjoy solving maths puzzles and enjoy programming, otherwise it might be just a little torturous!

Each puzzle has a single number which you can enter on the website as a solution. It will keep a record of all the solutions you’ve found and if you solve enough, your name will be immortalised on the high score board (Though there’s a lot of work to do to get there!). Once you’ve got the right answer you can see how other people worked it out too in various different programming languages. You will certainly learn a few new skills and probably improve your own programming along the way.

I’ll see you there.

Update: It’s also a great way to practice any new programming languages you may be learning. Check out the list of languages people have used.

Exciting software – Phun

Continuing from my previous blog Exciting software, here’s another one.

Phun is a very clever 2D physics engine. With realistic water movement, gravity, friction and tweakable. The interface is actually very intuitive to. A very nice user experience.

See a video here:

And you can actually try the software from here:
http://www.acc.umu.se/%7Eemilk/

I’ve found it to be very impressive, easy to use and accurate.

Let me know what you think.

Becoming an intergalatic explorer 2 – Visit the zoo


I’m sure you’ll remember my last post about becoming an intergalactic explorer, well now there’s a new project to help you explore the cosmos but in a similar way to the last one.

The project is:
http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

You’ll be rummaging through the Slaon Digital sky survey – a huge database of galactic images. Your mission is to find the images that look like galaxies then pick a category for them. Most of these images haven’t been seen by anyone else.

THe image above is an example. it looks pretty good, and I’ve chosen an anti-clockwise spiral. (I hope you agree…)

Have fun and find something interesting…

UPDATE:
Here’s a few nice looking galaxies I’ve come across:
One, two, three and four.

Earth II? Or would you prefer "GLIESE 581 C"?

A planet which is suspected to be the closet resemblance to Earth has been seen, and its a neighbour.

Just 20 light years away (almost in touching distance) around the star Gliese 581 is a planet not much bigger than Earth (1.5x). It orbits much closer to its star than the Earth does to the Sun, and takes only 13 “Earth” days to orbit. However, the star Gliese is much smaller and weaker than the Sun so a planet orbiting that close would actually have temperatures very similair to Earth, in fact within the temperature limit that would allow liquid water to exist on the surface.

All this has been estimated from the slight wobble of the star seen from Earth, which is created when a something large orbits around, although the effect is very small.

This would make an ideal candidate for the upcoming planet hunting space telescopes, designed to image planets around stars – unfortunately, we still have to wait several decades for this to be achieved…

More info here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6589157.stm
http://obswww.unige.ch/Instruments/harps/Welcome.html (The discovers)

Petitions and light pollution.

The UK goverment now lets people create online petitions which amongst others, the prime minister will see. Not a bad idea.

If you want to have a look click here:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/search?q=light+pollution

Also note that these few petitions are for solutions to the problem of light pollution, something which I get quite annoyed about, so please go ahead and support these ideas, I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to.

Some people don’t even realise that there should be 1000’s of stars visible in the night sky, a view which makes us far to inward looking. Also, less light pollution equals less electricity used, so less greenhouses gases released as well as less pollution. It’s a no lose decision!


#flag: “Light pollution”, Petitions

OU Planetary Science End

At last, my OU course is completed – not that I didn’t enjoy doing it, it just means I have much more free time and I don’t have to worry about revision or pending exams.

Just took the exam yesterday after a couple of solid days at home revising. It didn’t go to badly me thinks but to be sure I’ll have to wait a couple more months for my results to come in – no doubt they’ll be posted as soon as I know.

If I do pass it, it does means I’ll be able to claim a certifcate in (something like) “Space Physics” which should be handy for my CV and look cool (if nerdy) on my wall.


#flag: OU, “Planetary Science”, Exam