observe "electron" motion on video

• Researchers catch motion of a single electron on video, June 6, 2007
  http://www.physorg.com/news100354343.html
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFezmUzzs_E&NR=1
  To observe the motion of an electron – an elementary particle with a mass that is one billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a gram – has been considered to be impossible. So when two Brown University physicists showed movies of electrons moving through liquid helium at the 2006 International Symposium on Quantum Fluids and Solids in Kyoto, they raised some eyebrows.

• Electron filmed for first time ever, Feb 22m 2008
  http://www.physorg.com/news122897584.html
  http://www.atto.fysik.lth.se/

• http://www.hitachi.com/rd/research/em/doubleslit-f2.html
  

Off-line data sets for researchers

1. DARPA Intrusion Detection Data Sets
http://www.ll.mit.edu/mission/communications/ist/corpora/ideval/data/index.html

2. This page describes large-scale corpora of forensically interesting information that are available for those involved in forensic research.
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Forensic_corpora

3. Test call generators {TCGs) are revenue assurance solutions that replicate events on a telecoms network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_call_generator 

Money and happiness

Money CAN buy you happiness ... but only if you earn more than your friends, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1259789/Why-money-CAN-buy-happiness--earn-friends.html

Earning more money only makes people happier if they feel richer than their friends, neighbours and colleagues, a study has found
....

Dr Boyce went on: 'The standard of living has gone up for each individual over the past 40 years but it has gone up for everyone.

'So our cars are faster now but our neighbours have faster cars too, so they haven't got that advantage over people close to you.

You've got to work on important problems.

Richard Hamming "You and Your Research",
Transcription of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar, 7 March 1986
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

... And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" ...

... If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious.

Good and Bad Procrastination, December 2005, Paul Graham
http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good rocrastination.

Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.
Good in a sense, at least. The people who want you to do the errands won't think it's good.

In his famous essay You and Your Research (which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what they're working on),

Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions:
- What are the most important problems in your field?
- Are you working on one of them?
- Why not?

What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

BigDog - An amazing four legs robot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigDog

BigDog is a dynamically stable quadruped robot created in 2005 by Boston Dynamics with Foster-Miller, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Harvard University Concord Field Station. BigDog is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the hopes that it will be able to serve as a robotic pack mule to accompany soldiers in terrain too rough for conventional vehicles. Instead of wheels or treads, BigDog uses four legs for movement, allowing it to move across surfaces that would defeat wheels. The legs contain a variety of sensors, including joint position and ground contact. BigDog also features a laser gyroscope and a stereo vision system.

Boston Dynamics Big Dog (new video March 2008)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

DARPA's Amazing Robot Pack Mule Keeps its Balance On Ice
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2008-03/darpas-amazing-robot-pack-mule-keeps-its-balance-ice

Geoengineering

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoengineering

The modern concept of Geoengineering (or Climate Engineering) is usually taken to mean proposals to deliberately manipulate the Earth's climate to counteract the effects of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions. The National Academy of Sciences defined geoengineering as "options that would involve large-scale engineering of our environment in order to combat or counteract the effects of changes in atmospheric chemistry."

Bill Gates's Hidden Dreams of Geoengineering Revealed --Popular Science
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-01/bill-gates-geoengineering-passion-revealed

Bill Gates has already proven his interest in geoengineering schemes with his earlier co-patent filing for reducing the intensity of killer hurricanes. So perhaps we're not too surprised that Science Insider has dug up the Microsoft chairman's past projects on altering the Earth's climate, ranging from filtering carbon dioxide to reflecting sunlight via brighter clouds.

Research funds not disbursed due to old mindsets: Dr M

Research funds not disbursed due to old mindsets: Dr M
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/1/27/nation/20100127143921&sec=nation

SHAH ALAM: The Government has funds for research but these have not been distributed because of the “conventional mindsets” of those in charge of them.

Former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said the people in charge of these funds look at research as an investment and expect returns.

“Research is not about making profits. This kind of thinking is not up to date,” he told journalists and guests during a visit to I-City at Section 7 here Wednesday.

Augmented reality (AR), Mixed reality (MR), Augmented virtuality (AV)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery - creating a mixed reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_reality
Mixed reality (MR) (encompassing both augmented reality and augmented virtuality) refers to the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualisations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. A mix of reality, augmented reality, augmented virtuality and virtual reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_virtuality
Augmented virtuality (AV) (also referred to as Mixed reality) refers to the merging of real world objects into virtual worlds.

Sentient computing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_computing
Sentient computing is a form of ubiquitous computing which uses sensors to perceive its environment and react accordingly. A common use of the sensors is to construct a world model which allows location-aware or context-aware applications to be constructed.

Swarm Intelligence

Group Thinker: Researcher Gets $2.9 Million to Further Develop Swarm Intelligence
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=swarm-intelligence-research

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

Swarm intelligence (SI) describes the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.[1] 

SI systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents or boids interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global behavior, unknown to the individual agents. Natural examples of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling. 

The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics, while 'swarm intelligence' refers to the more general set of algorithms. 'Swarm prediction' has been used in the context of forecasting problems.

Ants vs. worms: New computer security mimics nature

http://www.physorg.com/news173108776.html

In the never-ending battle to protect computer networks from intruders, security experts are deploying a new defense modeled after one of nature's hardiest creatures -- the ant.

Unlike traditional security devices, which are static, these "digital ants" wander through computer networks looking for threats, such as "computer worms" — self-replicating programs designed to steal information or facilitate unauthorized use of machines. When a digital ant detects a threat, it doesn't take long for an army of ants to converge at that location, drawing the attention of human operators who step in to investigate.

create a realistic picture from a sketch

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage
http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/main.htm

...composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels

Nanotech 50 years ago...

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics
by Richard P. Feynman

This transcript of the classic talk that Richard Feynman gave on December 29th 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was first published in the February 1960 issue of Caltech's Engineering and Science, which owns the copyright. It has been made available on the web at http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html with their kind permission.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_Plenty_of_Room_at_the_Bottom