Trip to Vietnam!!!!!

A new way of using neural networks to perform vision and other machine understanding tasks has emerged from the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London. By separating the problem into perception and recognition tasks, the new algorithm makes it possible to train the neural network with less outside intervention. Read the full story.

From slashdot.org: Solve the Goldbach Conjecture and be famous (oh, and you win $1,000,000 too)! From Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics: Goldbach's original conjecture, written in a 1742 letter to Euler, states that every Integer is the Sum of three Primes. As re-expressed by Euler, an equivalent of this Conjecture (called the ``strong'' Goldbach conjecture) asserts that all Positive Even Integers can be expressed as the Sum of two Primes. Here is the main story at The Times.

This Wired story reveals that: Statistics show that even though there are more Asian American scientists in the United States than the total number of African American and Latino scientists combined, they're glaringly underrepresented in high-level academic positions. This seems to be true in the engineering field from my perspective. I was shocked into momentary silence when I met the CEO of SuSE Linux who was an Asian woman no less! People seem to think that just because Asians are stereotypically smart that we're represented in management or high-level positions, but apparently, this is not The Way It Is.

I'd like to run for some public office some day...how about you?

An interesting article from thavibu.com describes how lacquer paintings are made. My dad brought some of these over from Vietnam and they are very intricate and beautiful. Read the link to find out a little about these Vietnamese works of art.

Salon has a funny story about the Darwin Awards. As the official site, darwinawards.com, states: In the spirit of Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives. Darwin Award winners eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species' chances of long-term survival. The 1999 winners are terrorists who forgot to take into account the switch into daylight savings time when setting the timer on their bombs. Hilarious reading!

This BBC story reports on the first ever recorded case of a three-testicled cat. Unfortunately for him, surgeons have removed them all. "... putting an end to any plans McLeod might have had for an exciting climax to the millennium." Funny people, these BBC writers.

This BBC News Online story explains how The Shimura-Taniyama-Weil (STW) Conjecture has been solved by an international team: ". . . Fermat's Last Theorem is only a particular part of the more profound STW conjecture. In technical terms, Andrew Wiles, a professor at Princeton, proved the STW conjecture for what are called semistable elliptic curves. "

Here's an interesting site that claims to have found the smoking gun in the JonBenet Ramsey murder. It's the QuietSamanthaFoster.com site and the people doing the investigation are called The Stillwater Committee. Supposedly, they are mostly made up of medical doctors who can afford to pay a $20+K due each year to belong to the organization which tries to solve true-life crimes. There is a small financial motive to the site since one member plans on publishing a book, but on the surface, the site and the Committee seem well-balanced and scientific.

This Washington Post article sheds light on Thomas Gold, an iconoclastic scientist, who theorizes that oil did not come from dinosaurs. Sounds crazy at first, but it just might be.

This ABCNews story talks about the coming age of the wearable computer. Though still somewhat bulky and intrusive, they are getting smaller and more powerful. The current device allow you to wear a web server with a webcam. Cool stuff!

This CNN story tells of a strange object in the direction of the constellation Serpens which has astronomers stumped for three years. They are unable to determine its distance or composition with some believing it to be a new class of quasar, sources of energy found in the center of galaxies and believed to be powered by matter falling into massive black holes.

This Sunday Times story about a new physics experiment that has some scientists pondering the worst-case scenario that includes the creation of a black hole or strange quarks gobbling up the Earth. Weird, cool, and scary.

Divx finally dies the horrible death that it deserves. It was an inferior format to DVDs and just plain really sucked! Good riddance!

This article at SFGate.com presents interesting news about the validity of cold fusion research and how many with conflicts of interest oppose it. Very interesting read.

Wired also has an older story on the possible reality of cold fusion.

A story at CNN describes how a star called Eta Carinae which is 7,500 light years away from Earth is behaving strangely. So strange that it has scientists nervous. It will go hypernova within 10,000 years and the radiation might be dangerous even at that distance. Cool techno-nerd stuff.

My first return trip to Vietnam...

Check out VietNews.net! They've got lots of great Vietnam news.