Galactic Views (42)

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SPACE WATCH

A Supernova Cocoon Breakthrough
NASA – Observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have provided the first X-ray evidence of a supernova shock wave breaking through a cocoon of gas surrounding the star that exploded. This discovery may help astronomers understand why some supernovas are much more powerful than others.

On Nov. 3, 2010, a supernova was discovered in the galaxy UGC 5189A, located about 160 million light years away. Using data from the All Sky Automated Survey telescope in Hawaii taken earlier, astronomers determined this supernova exploded in early October 2010 (in Earth’s time-frame).

This composite image of UGC 5189A shows X-ray data from Chandra in purple and optical data from Hubble Space Telescope in red, green and blue. SN 2010jl is the very bright X-ray source near the top of the galaxy.

A team of researchers used Chandra to observe this supernova in December 2010 and again in October 2011. The supernova was one of the most luminous that has ever been detected in X-rays. more> http://tinyurl.com/bpe4u2w

G-8 Platitudes Don’t Solve Anything

By Paul Roderick Gregory – Headlines speak of bold agreements: “G-8 Leaders Agree to Mix Growth, Cuts” that closer reading reveals to be hot air. When German chancellor Angela Merkel injects the word “growth” into her remarks, the press breathlessly reports a weakening of her austerity stance. Barack Obama’s insistence on both growth and “fiscal discipline” resembles calls for motherhood and apple pie. The new French President Francois Hollande pushes a financial transactions tax and mutes his election rhetoric for stimulus. British Premier David Cameron nixes Hollande’s transaction tax post haste. Newly-inaugurated President Vladimir Putin boycotts the G-8 in a huff.

The EU crisis resembles mountain climbers, tied together by ropes, scaling a rocky cliff. One (Greece) is balanced on a thin ledge. A few others teeter perilously (Portugal, Spain, and Ireland). They know that if one falls, others could be pulled along. One the climbers (Germany) has a knife either to cut himself free or to sever the rope of climbers about to fall. The knife-wielder fears he could end up alone on the cliff. more> http://tinyurl.com/bt2bak3

Related articles

• G-8 Leaders Agree: More Rosy Platitudes, Empty Statements Needed (blogs.the-american-interest.com)
• Mighty Merkel may be the odd woman out – Reuters (reuters.com)
• Merkel Resists G-8 Spending Pressure as Soccer Breaks the Ice – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
• Obama welcomes Hollande as French president hints at Afghanistan compromise (guardian.co.uk)
• Angela Merkel stands firm on Greece at G8 talks (guardian.co.uk)
• Obama Pushes Growth and Stability More Debt At G8 Summit (thegatewaypundit.com)
• You: DIPLOMACY: Hollande seeks G8 backing against Merkel’s austerity (france24.com)
• Europe woes take centre stage at G8 summit (todayonline.com)
• G8 summit: French €57bn financial tax plan rejected by UK (guardian.co.uk)
• G8 talks focus in on eurozone crisis as Merkel holds out on stimulus package – The Guardian (guardian.co.uk)
• Germany isolated over euro crisis plan at G8 meeting in Camp David, Patrick Wintour, guardian.co.uk
• G-8 leaders put focus on European financial crisis, Jim Kuhnhenn, BusinessWeek
• E. Europe euro hopefuls disorientated by crisis, Michael Winfrey and Michael Dolan, Reuters
• A War of Words Over the Euro Crisis, Melissa Eddy and Nicholas Kulish, NYTimes.com

Dropping out: Is college worth the cost?

CBS News – Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, is beseeching students to drop out of a university system he says is broken — churning out too many half-educated graduates seeking too few jobs. Thiel put his money where his mouth is and pays selected students $100,000 each to drop out and focus on ideas that will benefit themselves and the world at large. Waiting for graduation, he says, is an expensive waste of time.

Peter Thiel: “We have a bubble in education, like we had a bubble in housing in the last decade. Everybody believed you had to have a house. They’d pay whatever it took. Today, everybody believes that we need to go to college, and people will pay whatever it takes.” more> http://tinyurl.com/7a8m5s6

Related articles

• Peter Thiel Will Pay You To Drop Out Of College (InnovationToronto.com)
• Thiel’s college dropout plan scrutinized by ’60 Minutes’ (news.cnet.com)
• Peter Thiel Will Pay You To Drop Out Of College (bigthink.com)
• Peter Thiel Keeping It Real About Education On 60 Minutes (startupgrind.com)
• We Don’t Need No Education! (isellerfinance.wordpress.com)
• Peter Thiel Fellowship Bursts Education Bubble (savings.com)
• Get College Degree, Live 9 Years Longer (newser.com)
• Peter Thiel’s unexpected job requirement (finance.fortune.cnn.com)

How can we change the world of research for the better?

SERVICE REVIEW

Mendeley [mendeley.com] – The collective knowledge across scholarly research is growing exponentially, however much of it can be found buried in desk drawers, left unloved on servers or locked away behind publisher paywalls. Our ability to search, harvest and interpret this information is hugely significant for encouraging future advances and helping researchers organize and navigate a growing ocean of research papers.

Mendeley has built a searchable database of research now numbering in excess of 225 million documents. At the same time, the 1.6 million Mendeley users worldwide have become a social ecosystem for research – sharing, commenting and collaborating on research together across the Internet.

Mendeley gives control of research data back to the community in an effort to make research more collaborative, open, and efficient.

With one of the largest research databases in the world, Mendeley is not only helping to liberate knowledge – now it is using crowdsourcing to help us understand the impact of it. Using metadata from the growing database, and collaborative filtering technologies Mendeley learns about users’ preferences and interests and then connects them to people with similar interests. It also highlights and recommends related papers for reading that might have been missed. Crowdsourcing heralds a new way of working for researchers, where documents can be ’pushed’ to them based on who they are as individuals, rather than them having to be sought our via search engines – saving them time, and ensuring the widest possible understanding of the body of literature available. ♦

Related articles

• Cool Tool | Mendeley: Changing the Way We Do Research (edtechdigest.wordpress.com)
• Mendeley for libraries by Swets (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
• Mendeley: Free Reference Manager, Collaboration Tool, & Online Catalog of Millions of Documents (intellogist.wordpress.com)
• Mendeley: a “Facebook for Researchers”? (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
• The Top research papers in computer science by Mendeley readership (mendeley.com)
• Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS Summer Startups: Mendeley (aws.typepad.com)
• Social awareness tools for Science research: Mendeley and SciVee (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
• Mahout Becomes a Researcher: Large Scale Recommendations at Mendeley (slideshare.net)

IBM’s first tape drive turns 60

By Simon Sharwood – IBM’s first tape drive turns 60 today, May 21st 2012.

The 726 used half-inch tapes with seven tracks. Six were used for data and the seventh was a parity track. Data was stored as six-bit characters, one to a track, for a total storage density of 100 bits per linear inch.

A unique control system developed for the 726” which meant “a tape reached full speed in 1/100th of a second, or before moving half an inch,” and important feature as the drive started and stopped during operations. Once the tape reached its top speed of 75 inches per second it could “read or write at a rate of 12,500 digits a second.” more> http://tinyurl.com/cs4bk74

Related articles

• IBM PureSystems, StrategyGroup
• IBM announces 60th anniversary of digial tape storage systems (ibm.com)