matterhacker

US halts solar energy projects over environment fears. Telegraph article here

The US government is putting a hold on new solar energy projects on public land for two years so it can study the environmental impact of sun-driven plants.

House Democrats Introduce National Feed-in Tariff for Renewable Energy Projects.  Article here.

U.S. Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA), Bill Delahunt (D-MA), Jim McDermott (D-WA), and Mike Honda (D-CA) introduced landmark legislation [PDF] on Thursday that will provide security for investments in the renewable-energy sector by guaranteeing rates for renewable-energy generation.

The Climate Time Machine from JPL.  It’s an online flash app that lets you display avg global temp, sea level, CO2 emission, and ice melt during any time in the past century or so.

Electric air vehicles. Story here.

The idea of personal planes may conjure up dark visions of “Blade Runner,” but the first batch of two-seater aircraft to fly on electricity rather than fossil fuels could reach more than a dozen buyers by year’s end...

From Investopedia:

An index published by the Conference Board that is a broad-based measurement of current economic conditions, helping economists and investors to determine which phase of the business cycle the economy is currently experiencing.. The Composite Index of Coincident Indicators comprises four cyclical economic data sets:

1. the number of employees on non-agricultural payrolls (released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics)
2. the Index of Industrial Production
3. the level of manufacturing and trade sales
4. the aggregate amount of personal income excluding transfer payments

Given a kernel, want to construct a feature space (aka space obtained by map from data to feature space) . Feature spaces that can be constructed from a given kernel are not unique (they can even have different dimensions) but vice versa is not true… see below. Want to show that this constructed feature space is a dot product Hilbert space (aka pre-Hilbert space). Can construct a reproducing kernel map and show that it has the properties of a dot product space. Also can use mercer thm to construct a mercer map and show that it’s a dot product space. Although a mercer map is a rkm (is a mm a subspace of a rkm??). Other notes:

• A reproducing kernel hilbert space uniquely determines a kernel.
• Think of the map to feature space as a function at a particular data point . that relates it to the other data points x: Phi(x)(.) = k(.,x)

Ha!  Cool little thing for the office computer. A heat driven paper propeller:

The guy has posted a PDF with the cutout here.

Wired has a story on the BIL conference. It’s like the TED conference, but you don’t have to be invited to come and see the speakers. It’s also free. Wish I could go, but unfortunately there’s the APS March Meeting conference for which I need to prepare for. Perhaps next year. Haha… Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure just came to mind… I’ve spent too much time in the lab lately hehe.

Cool article over at the New Yorker about how humans process numerics naturally….

Ok so I’ve been contemplating ditching physics for quantitative finance, but wow it is not looking too good in the financial sector recently. A couple stories here and here about the markets taking a major hit today. Oh and I found this informative guide by a headhunting agency for quants in London. Gives a pretty good overview of what it’s like to work in quantitative finance.

Here’s a story on yahoo about an Irish man who had his ssight restored after surgeons implanted his son’s tooth in his eye socket and stuck a lens on it. This cannot be true. Update: Oh hell yes it is! Pretty amazing procedure. I found out a bit more about it. It’s called the Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP) procedure. That pdf has all the details and a pictorial description is below: