Category: Calculatin’
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How to reduce extremism? Travel!
Andre Martins studies agent-based computer models of extremism at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. We’ve heard from him before following his claim that extremism is an emergent phenomenon in our society. Now he’s back with the results of a study on how to reduce extremism. Martins creates a network model in which agents…
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The mysterious volume of a black hole
Work out the surface area of a non-spinning black hole and you’ll get the answer: 16π(Gm/c^2) /c^2 But ask what volume this surface contains and you’re in for a surprise. Turns out that the volume depends on how the 3-space within the black hole is defined. Now Brandon DiNunno and Richard…
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The shower temperature problem
Here’s an interesting problem. Imagine a large hotel in which many people are taking a shower at the same time. There isn’t enough hot water to give everyone the shower temperature they’d like and a change in temperature in one shower effects everyone else’s. What strategy should individuals use to achieve the same temperature for…
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Four letter wordistics
Ah know many of ya have a penchant for four letter words judging by the comments ya leave, so this post will be of interest. There are a possible (26)^4 = 456,976 possible four letter words although we English speakers have only got round to using a tiny fraction of ’em. It’s fairly easy to…
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The Turing alternatives
Ya’ll heard of the Turing test for measuring machine intelligence. Seems kinda odd, doncha think, that after 50 years we ain’t never thought of any other ways to test machine intelligence. Same thing occurred Shane “Hind” Legg at the IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull’Intelligenza Artificiale) in Switzerland and his buddy Marcus so they…
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WiFi worms: the next generation of virus
If the next generation of malware targets our WiFi routers, it’s gonna spread like wildfire, taking out 37 per cent of routers within two weeks of infection That’s the conclusion of Steve Meyers and buddies, computer security experts at Indiana University in Bloomington. They say that the density of WiFi routers within our cities has…
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Does surgery cause cancer to metastasize?
Medicos are increasingly turning to mathematical and computer models of disease to better understand how it works. But these models ain’t easy to build: the human body has many nonlinear properties that are hard to measure let alone model. But mathematicians have a tool called superstatistics for dealing with nonlinear phenomena. It’s essentially the superposition…
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The tricky task of river delta modelling
Geobods have a problem: they can’t model any geophysical process worth its salt on computer because of the complexity of the processes involved and the timescales over which they take place. It’s just too computationally demanding. One process in particular has defied attempts to model it: river delta formation. But Hansjorg Seybold from the Swiss…
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The smoking gun that may prove our climate models wrong
If ya live in Europe, fall 2006 musta been one helluva season. Many climatologist worry that climate models severely underestimate the effects of global warming. The extraordinary temperatures recorded in Europe in Autumn 2006 might just be the smoking gun that proves that these models really do get it wrong, big time. Here’s what happened.…
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Breaking the Netflix Prize dataset
Hell, this is good work. In October last year, Netflix released over 100 million movie ratings made by 500,000 subscribers to their online DVD rental service. The company then offered a prize of $1million to anyone who could better the company’s system of DVD recommendation by 10 per cent or more. Of course, Netflix assured…