dyscalculia – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com Open Source Entertainment, on Demand. Mon, 22 Feb 2016 02:46:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/cropped-favicon-32x32.png dyscalculia – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com 32 32 Multitasking & Tractor Beams | SciByte 79 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/30961/multitasking-tractor-beams-scibyte-79/ Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:12:40 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=30961 We take a look at multitasking abilities, red pens, tractor beams, bicycle airbags, tracking twitter, spacecraft updates, viewer feedback, and more.

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We take a look at multitasking abilities, red pens, tractor beams, bicycle airbags, tracking twitter, spacecraft updates, viewer feedback, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Multitasking Proficiency

  • The low down
  • Most people believe they can multitask effectively, but a new study indicates that people who multitask the most – including talking on a cell phone while driving – are least capable of doing so.
  • The Study
  • The study participants were 310 University of Utah psychology undergraduates – 176 female and 134 male with a median age of 21 – who volunteered for their department\’s subject pool in exchange for extra course credit.
  • The subjects were put through a battery of tests and questionnaires to measure actual multitasking ability, perceived multitasking ability, cell phone use while driving, use of a wide array of electronic media, and personality traits such as impulsivity and sensation-seeking.
  • Research suggests that people who engage in multitasking often do so not because they have the ability, but because they are less able to block out distractions and focus on a singular task
  • The more people multitask by talking on cell phones while driving or by using multiple media at once, the more they lack the actual ability to multitask, and their perceived multitasking ability \”was found to be significantly inflated
  • The Results
  • To measure actual multitasking ability, participants performed a test named Operation Span, or OSPAN.
  • The test involves two tasks: memorization and math computation where participants must remember two to seven letters, each separated by a math equation that they must identify as true or false
  • A simple example of a question: \”is 2+4=6?, g, is 3-2=2?, a, is 4×3=12.\” Answer: true, g, false, a, true.
  • Participants also ranked their perceptions of their own multitasking ability by giving themselves a score ranging from zero to 100, with 50 percent meaning average, 70 percent of participants thought they were above average at multitasking
  • Study subjects reported how often they used a cell phone while driving, and what percentage of the time they are on the phone while driving
  • Subjects also completed a survey of how often and for how many hours they use which media, including printed material, television and video, computer video, music, nonmusic audio, video games, phone, instant and text messaging, e-mail, the Web and other computer software such as word processing
  • Multitasking, including cell phone use while driving, correlated significantly with sensation-seeking, indicating some people multitask because it is more stimulating, interesting and challenging, and less boring – even if it may hurt their overall performance
  • Of Note
  • The data suggest the people talking on cell phones while driving are people who probably shouldn\’t.
  • In fact the people who are most likely to multitask harbor the illusion they are better than average at it, when in fact they are no better than average and often worse
  • People who score high on a test of actual multitasking ability tend not to multitask because they are better able to focus attention on the task at hand
  • Study participants also reported spending 13 percent of their driving time talking on a cell phone, which Strayer says roughly squares with federal estimates that one in 10 drivers are on the phone at any given time
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Automated Operation Span Tutorial | zupef
  • Image Driving simulator they use in some research | David Strayer, University of Utah
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Frequent multitaskers are bad at it: Motorists overrate ability to talk on cell phones when driving | MedXPress.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Attack of the red pens

  • The low down
  • Sociologists claim in a paper they\’ve had published that when teachers use a red pen to add comments to student papers, students perceive them more negatively than if they use another color pen
  • The Study
  • The two researchers enlisted the assistance of 199 undergraduate students – each was given four versions of an already graded essay by an unknown instructor
  • The graded remarks were deemed as high or low in quality with some written in red, others in blue
  • Students were asked to read the essay and the remarks given by the instructor and then to rate how they felt about what the instructor had written and to suggest what grade they would have given the essay
  • They were also asked how they felt about the instructor that had written the original remarks
  • The Results
  • After they\’d finished with their opinions, each was also given a questionnaire designed to provide the researchers with more concrete data.
  • The researchers found that the student volunteers didn\’t seem to be impacted one way or another by pen color when they agreed with the instructor\’s comments and grade
  • When they disagreed; however, there were definitely some differences – mainly negative
  • When the instructors\’ comments were written in red versus blue the volunteers judged them more harshly and as a result, rated them lower in \”bedside manner.\”
  • The volunteers didn\’t seem to judge the quality of the comments any differently – their negative feelings were aimed at the person that had written the remarks when they wrote in red ink
  • Of Note
  • The researchers theorize that red ink is akin to using all caps when writing e-mail or text messages – it\’s like shouting at a person
  • Those being graded naturally feel a little bit abused and respond by growing angry or sad, which, they note, doesn\’t really promote the learning process
  • The team suggest instructors stop using red pens and go with a shade of blue instead
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Study shows red pen use by instructors leads to more negative response | phys.org

Tractor Beams a reality?

  • Although light manipulation techniques have existed since the 1970s, this is the first time a light beam has been used to draw objects towards the light source, albeit at a microscopic level.
  • What is it?
  • Researchers have found a way to generate a special optical field that efficiently reverses radiation pressure of light.
  • The new technique could lead to more efficient medical testing, such as in the examination of blood samples
  • The team discovered a technique which will allow them to provide \’negative\’ force acting upon minuscule particles
  • The technique
  • Normally when matter and light interact the solid object is pushed by the light and carried away in the stream of photons
  • Such radiation force was first identified by Johanes Kepler when observing that tails of comets point away from the sun
    Over recent years researchers have realised that while this is the case for most of the optical fields, there is a space of parameters when this force reverses.
  • Scientists have now demonstrated the first experimental realisation of this concept together with a number of exciting applications for biomedical photonics and other disciplines
  • What does it mean to todays science?
  • The occurrence of negative force is very specific to the properties of the object, such as size and composition
  • This allows optical sorting of micro-objects in a simple and inexpensive device
  • Optical fractionation has been identified as one of the most promising biomedical applications of optical manipulation allowing
  • Scientists identified certain conditions, in which objects held by the \”tractor\” beam force-field, rearranged themselves to form a structure which made the beam even stronger
  • Multimedia
  • Image Example of comet with two tails | SpacePlace.nasa.gov
  • First video reveals working tractor beam in action | newscientist.com
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Star Trek\’s \’tractor\’ beam created in miniature by researchers | phys.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Bicycle Airbags

HIggs-Boson Twitter Rumors and Following

  • Last time on SciByte
  • SciByte 53 | Higgs Boson – To Higgs-Boson or not to Higgs-Boson | July 10, 2012
  • The low down
  • For the first time scientists have been able to analyse the dynamics of social media on a global scale before, during and after the announcement of a major scientific discovery.
  • The model is based on the spread of gossip on Twitter prior to the Higgs boson discovery announcement
  • The Data
  • According to the analysed data, the rumours that the Higgs boson had been discovered started around 1st July 2012
  • That means it was one day before the announcement at Tevatron, and three days before the official announcement from CERN on 4th July.
  • The research shows that rumours started to spread on Twitter firstly in the USA, UK, Spain, Canada, Australia, as well as Italy, France, Switzerland and Germany, all countries with strong scientific connections to the experiments at the LHC.
  • What it means
  • Other researchers on the project are also interested in how information spreads on social media
  • This is really useful for practical applications such as marketing, for example if you want to run a global marketing campaign you can identify key people on social media to help you to spread your message
  • Once you have identified these key advocates, you can change and steer the message in a different direction, potentially modifying opinions of millions of people or keep the interest in the topic going
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube The Anatomy of a Scientific Gossip – World View | networkedsystemslab
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Scientists analyse global Twitter gossip around Higgs boson discovery | phys.org

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE —

Opportunity rover still on the move

  • Last time on SciByte
  • SciByte 61 | ‘Tatooine’ Exoplanets & Eye’s – Opportunity, Driving Distance and life | September 4, 2012
  • Nine Years of Service
  • NASA\’s Opportunity rover landed on Mars the night of Jan. 24, 2004 PST (just after midnight EST on Jan. 25), three weeks after its twin, Spirit, touched down
  • Spirit and Opportunity were originally supposed to spend three months searching for evidence of past water activity on the Red Planet
  • Spirit finally stopped communicating with Earth in March 2010, after getting mired in soft sand and failing to maneuver into a position that would allow it to slant its solar panels toward the sun over the 2009-2010 Martian winter. NASA declared the rover dead in 2011 after 7 years of service
  • Opportunity, after 9 years of service, is currently inspecting clay deposits along the rim of Mars\’ huge Endeavour Crater. Clays form in relatively neutral (as opposed to acidic or basic) water, so
  • Rover road trips
  • So far, robotic rovers have been to the moon and Mars, with astronauts actually driving a lunar car on the moon during NASA\’s Apollo program
  • Soviet-era Lunakhod 2 : In the lead for total distance travelled the farthest is the the Soviet-era Lunakhod 2, which drove 23 miles (37 kilometers) during its 1973 mission
  • NASA\’s Apollo 17 moon rover : The next rover with the most driving distance is NASA\’s Apollo 17 moon rover, which was driven 22.3 miles (35.89 km) by astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt in 1972
  • Opportunity rover : Next, in a close third, is the Opportunity rover, which has been driving across the plains of Meridiani Planum on the Red Planet since 2004 and has driven more than 22.03 miles (35.46 km) and is still going today
  • This means that Opportunity is a mere one third of a mile (0.4 km) to being the second farthest driven, and a little under a mile (1.5 km) to being the farthest
  • I estimate, barring any delays for science or equipment and based on past mileage, that in the next 2 months it might overtake the distance travelled by Apollo 17 rover, and the distance by the Lunokhod in the next 6 months.
  • The latest to enter the race is Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity, which is just getting started with only 0.4 mile (0.7 km) traveled so far.
    the area may once have been capable of supporting primitive microbial life
  • Multimedia
  • Distances Driven on Other Worlds Infographic | Space.com
  • Social Media
  • Spirit and Oppy @MarsRovers
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Distance Traveled, Extraterrestrial Vehicles | Wheeled Vehicles, Moon & Mars | Space.com
  • NASA\’s Opportunity Rover Begins Year 10 on Mars | Space.com

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Dyscalculia

  • Last time on SciByte
  • SciByte 78 | Dyscalculia & the Flu – Dyscalculia | January 22, 2013
  • James Lewis
  • Suggests a concern that there is an overdiagnosis of \’labels\’
  • Could simply be that you could learn differently
  • Response
  • Almost certainly “the system” can over-diagnose students
  • Are you or were you “diagnosed”? If so learn what exemptions, etc, that you qualify for should you choose to utilize them
  • Try different ways of learning outside the classroom that can help in the classroom or supplement

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

THIS WEEK

  • NASA – Day of Remembrance
  • Apollo 1 | January 27, 1967 | Command Pilot Virgil \”Gus\” Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee
  • Challenger | January 28, 1986 | Francis R. Scobee – Mission Commander, Michael J. Smith – Pilot, Ellison S. Onizuka – Mission Specialist 1, Judith A. Resnik – Mission Specialist 2, Ronald E. McNair – Mission Specialist 3, Christa McAuliffe – Payload Specialist 1, Gregory B. Jarvis – Payload Specialist 2
  • Columbia | February 1, 2003 | Rick Husband, Commander; William C. McCool, Pilot; Michael P. Anderson, Payload Commander; David M. Brown, Mission Specialist 1; Kalpana Chawla, Mission Specialist 2; Laurel Clark, Mission Specialist 4; and Ilan Ramon, Payload Specialist 1

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • Feb 01, 1972 : 40 years ago : Hand-held calculator : The first scientific handheld calculator was introduced for $395 by Hewlett- Packard, named the HP-35 for having 35 keys. It was the first handheld calculator able to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions with one keystroke. The red LED display could give scientific notation up to 10 digits mantissa and 2 digits exponent. The price was reduced several times, eventually to $195. By Feb 1975 (when production of the model was discontinued), 300,000 had been sold. The numbers and functions for calculations were entered in “Reverse Polish Notation”(RPN), which used an “ENTER” key but needed no parentheses or “=” key. It ran on rechargeable batteries and had electronics with several integrated circuits in a 3.1\” x 5.8\” x 1.4\” (79 ×147×34 mm) case.
  • Image author : Seth Morabito | originally posted to Flickr as HP 35 Calculator

Looking up this week

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Dyscalculia & the Flu | SciByte 78 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/30581/dyscalculia-the-flu-scibyte-78/ Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:40:03 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=30581 We take a look at dyscalculia, the flu, laser communication, viewer feedback, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news and more!

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We take a look at dyscalculia, the flu, laser communication, viewer feedback, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Download | Ogg Download | Video | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | Ogg Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed

Support the Show:

Show Notes:

Dyscalculia

  • Researchers estimate that as much as 7% of the population has dyscalculia, sometimes called number blindness, which is marked by severe difficulties in dealing with numbers despite otherwise normal, or well above normal, intelligence
  • A cognitive scientist who studies numerical cognition and a learning disability likened to dyslexia for mathematics works on identifying its cause as well as ways to help those who suffer from it
  • Approximate number sense
  • Approximate number sense, distinguishes larger quantities from smaller ones, be they dots flashing on a screen or fruits in a tree.
  • A second ancient number system allows humans and many other animals to instantly and precisely recognize small quantities, up to four.
  • People who are poor at distinguishing approximate quantities do badly in maths, suggesting that the approximate-number system is crucial.
  • Some work shows that dyscalculics are poor at recognizing small numbers, suggesting that this ability is also fundamental to numeracy
  • If, dyscalculia is at heart a deficiency of basic number sense and not of memory, attention or language, as others have proposed, then nurturing the roots of number sense should help dyscalculics
  • Testing
  • The team tested 31 eight- and nine-year-old children who were near the bottom of their class in mathematics but did well enough in other subjects.
  • Compared with normal children and those with dyslexia, the dyscalculic children struggled on almost every numerical task, yet were average on tests of reading comprehension, memory and IQ.
  • The study confirmed for some that developmental forms of dyscalculia are the result of basic problems in comprehending numbers and not in other cognitive faculties
  • Determining exactly what those problems are would prove challenging
  • Approximation and a sense of small numbers, while critical, are not enough for humans to precisely grasp large numbers,
    argues that another cognitive capacity is even more fundamental to number sense
  • ‘Numerosity coding’
  • ‘Numerosity coding’ is the understanding that things have a precise quantity associated with them, and that adding or taking things away alters that quantity.
  • Young children who could not yet count past two nonetheless understood that adding pennies to a bowl containing six somehow altered its number, even if the children couldn’t say exactly how.
  • If numerosity coding is fundamental, it predicts that dyscalculics struggle to enumerate and manipulate all numbers, large and small.
  • Number Sense Games
  • The Number Sense games are intended to nurture the abilities that might be the root of numerical cognition and the core deficit of dyscalculia — manipulating precise quantities.
  • One game involves a number line, then the child is asked “What is the number that is right in the middle between 200 and 800? Do you know it?
  • A classic sign of dyscalculia is difficulty in grasping the place-value system,
  • A soft computer voice tells “Christopher” to “find the number and click it
  • The game involves zooming in and zooming out to rescale the number line, with the computer talking him through each move, a strategy that is encouraged, however it takes him more than a minute to locate 210
  • A Tetris-like game called Numberbonds, in which bars of different lengths fall down the screen and the person has to select a block of the correct size to fill out a row
  • This game emphasizes spatial relationships, which some dyscalculics also struggle with.
  • In a game called Dots to Track, for example, children must ascribe an Arabic numeral to a pattern of dots, similar to those on dice.
  • When they enter the wrong value the game asks the children to add or remove dots to achieve the correct answer.
  • Three months into the study one student seemed to be faring better at the number-line game, going so quickly that he is asked to slow down and explain his reasoning for each move
  • Dyscalculic children tend to learn much more quickly when they talk through what they do
  • It is also believed that his maths anxiety, a near-universal trait of child and adult dyscalculics, is fading
  • Other Studies
  • In 2011 a Swiss team reported that a game that involves placing a spaceship on a number line helped eight- to ten-year-old dyscalculics with arithmetic
  • They studied the children in an fMRI scanner during a task that involved arranging numbers.
  • One month after training, the children showed increased activation in the intraparietal sulcus and reduced neural activation elsewhere in the parietal lobes – a hint that their improvements in arithmetic were related to changes involving brain areas that respond to number.
  • There are now hopes to monitor the brains of students such as they practice Number Sense, to see if their parietal lobes are indeed changing
  • Scans of people with dyscalculia suggest that their intraparietal sulci are less active when processing numbers and less connected with the rest of the brain compared with numerate children and adults.
  • However these may be seen as a result of these consequences, not causes, of the poor numerical abilities that characterize dyscalculia.
  • Complications
  • While some students improve Other students are improving more slowly, but it is not easy to say why
  • Dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder are common among dyscalculics, and it can be difficult to untangle these problems,
  • In 2009 Number Race, a game developed, modestly improved the ability of 15 dyscalculic kindergarten children to discern the larger of two numbers, but that it had no effect on their arithmetic or counting
  • With the right practice and attention from teachers and parents, dyscalculic children can thrive, computer games are a supplement, not a replacement, for one-on-one tutoring.
  • In addition the games are designed with the interest of the children to have a fun game full of ideas and variety, is not very compatible with an analytic approach
  • Funding
  • Currently it is hard to get funding as dyscalculia doesn’t attract much attention or money
  • In the United States, the National Institutes of Health spent $2 million studying dyscalculia between 2000 and 2011, compared with more than $107 million on dyslexia.
  • Cubans, curiously, are putting money into this, even though they’ve got very little
  • The Future
  • The team now has tentative plans to evaluate its software with researchers at the Cuban Neurosciences Center and the University of Pedagogical Sciences in Havana next year
  • There are also plans to place the games in other countries, including China and Singapore.
  • There are hopes that Number Sense, if it can improve dyscalculia, will help the academic debate over the cognitive basis of numeracy there are some difficulties however
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube clip How many Dots?
  • YouTube clip | Counting dots in groups
  • YouTube Understanding Dyscalculia at Western | WesternUniversity
  • YouTube Discovering Dyscalculia | tvoparents
  • YouTube What Is Dyscalculia? | NCLD1401
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Dyscalculia Forum
  • Numbers Games Devised to Aid People with “Dyscalculia” | Scientific American

— NEWS BYTE —

The War Against Flu

  • The flu knows how long it has to invade our cells and spread to other humans. So new treatments could fight the virus by resetting its clock.
  • Viruses
  • Viruses multiply by invading a host cell, hijacking its machinery and using it to make new copies of itself.
  • Cells have warning systems that can detect this invasion and call in reinforcements, but that can take a while.
  • The virus has to orchestrate its actions carefully–if it moves too fast, it won’t have time to make new copies of itself, and if it moves too slowly, it might be stopped by immune defenses.
  • The Flu Virus
  • Researchers have knows that the flu virus needs about eight hours to make copies of itself before a cell will notice it
  • In order to make enough copies of itself to infect another human, it needs about two days of continuous activity inside our cells
  • Researchers have figured out that the virus slowly gathers a protein it needs to make its exit, they tricked the virus into changing the amount of time it took to gather the protein.
  • In one case they made it acquire the protein too quickly, which caused the flu to leave the cell before it had made enough copies of itself.
  • In another they altered it to leave too late, giving immune cells enough time to respond and kill the virus before it escaped.
  • Of Note
  • Although currently a flu vaccine is still the best way to protect yourself against the flu, not everyone is eligible to get one
  • However, current vaccines must rely on an educated guess about which flu will spread throughout the population in a season, and there are only so many vaccines.
  • A treatment that targets the virus’ clock wouldn’t need a dead or weakened version of the flu–it would just need to fool the virus’s internal protein clock into losing track of time
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Flu Attack! How A Virus Invades Your Body | npr
  • YouTube Clip Flu virus invading and being attacked | npr
  • YouTube Clip Flu virus copying and spreading | npr
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • The Flu Virus Can Tell Time. Here’s Why You Should Care | Popular Science

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Mona Lisa to the Moon and Back

  • The low down
  • Typically, satellites that go beyond Earth orbit use radio waves for tracking and communication
  • As part of the first demonstration of laser communication with a satellite at the moon, scientists with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) beamed an image of the Mona Lisa to the spacecraft from Earth.
  • The iconic image traveled nearly 240,000 miles in digital form from the Next Generation Satellite Laser Ranging (NGSLR) station at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument on the spacecraft.
  • By transmitting the image piggyback on laser pulses that are routinely sent to track LOLA’s position, the team achieved simultaneous laser communication and tracking.
  • Significance
  • This was accomplished without interfering with LOLA’s primary task of mapping the moon’s elevation and terrain and NGSLR’s primary task of tracking LRO.
  • The success of the laser transmission was verified by returning the image to Earth using the spacecraft’s radio telemetry system.
  • Precise timing was the key to transmitting the image, every pixel was converted into a shade of gray, represented by a number between zero and 4,095.
  • They divided the Mona Lisa image into an array of 152 pixels by 200 pixels with each pixel transmitted by a laser pulse, with the pulse being fired in one of 4,096 possible time slots during a brief time window allotted for laser tracking
  • The complete image was transmitted at a data rate of about 300 bits per second.
  • The laser pulses were received by LRO’s LOLA instrument, which reconstructed the image based on the arrival times of the laser pulses from Earth
  • Turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere introduced transmission errors even when the sky was clear, the team employed Reed-Solomon coding, which is the same type of error-correction code commonly used in CDs and DVDs.
  • Of Note
  • LRO is the only satellite in orbit around a body other than Earth to be tracked by laser as well.
  • The next step after LLCD is the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), NASA’s first long-duration optical communications mission.
  • In the near future, this type of simple laser communication might serve as a backup for the radio communication that satellites use, in the more distant future, it may allow communication at higher data rates than present radio links can provide
  • Social Media
  • LRO_NASA @LRO_NASA
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • YouTube NASA beams Mona Lisa to Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at the moon (w/ video)

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Picture of the Moon

– SPACECRAFT UPDATE –

Kepler

  • Safe Mode
  • The Kepler telescope went into safe mode on Jan. 17 for a planned 10 days, during which time the telescope’s reaction wheels — spinning devices used by the observatory to maintain its position in space —will be rested after researchers detected an unexpected increase in the amount of torque needed to rotate
  • Kepler officials say they are “Resting the wheels provides an opportunity to redistribute internal lubricant, potentially returning the friction to normal levels”
  • Once the 10-day rest period ends, the team will recover the spacecraft from this resting safe mode and return to science operations
  • When the Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009, it had four functional reaction wheels — three for immediate use, plus one spare; however, one of the wheels failed last July
  • Opening the Data Sets
  • Researchers are now posting all exoplanet sightings by the Kepler observatory into a single, comprehensive website called the “NASA Exoplanet Archive.”
  • Instead of going through the long planet confirmation process before making data publicly available
  • So the day NASA knows about the list, the archive knows about the list. And then everybody,
  • In addition the list is dynamic so if anyone, including a community person, makes an observation and says, ‘Hey, I looked at this planet candidate but it’s really an eclipsing binary,’ then that entry in the archive will be changed."
  • The archive has information about the size, orbital period and other metrics of any possible planet discovered and investigated by Kepler
  • Planet Hunters, a collective of amateur astronomers, recently found 42 new alien planets using Kepler data that was publicly available prior to the launch of the new archive system.
  • Multimedia
  • Image Galleries | kepler.nasa.gov
  • Social Media
  • NASA Kepler @NASAKepler
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Kepler Space Telescope | kepler.nasa.gov
  • Kepler Participating Scientist Program Announcement | kepler.nasa.gov
  • Alien Planet Archive Now Open to World | NASA Kepler Spacecraft | Space.com
  • Planet-Hunting Kepler Spacecraft Shut Down Temporarily After Glitch | Space.com

– CURIOSITY UPDATE –

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • Jan 24, 1948 : 64 years ago : Early computer : IBM dedicated its “SSEC” in New York City. The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator handled both data and instructions using electronic circuits made with 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays. It occupied three sides of a 30-ft x 60-ft room. On the back wall, three punches and thirty readers provided paper-tape storage. Banks of vacuum tube circuits for card reading and sequence control and 36 paper tape readers comprising the table-lookup section occupied the left wall. Most of the right wall was filled by the electronic arithmetic unit and storage. In the center of the room were card readers, card punches, printers, and the operator’s console. It was visible to pedestrians on the sidewalk outside.

Looking up this week

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