Super-heavy carrier rocket could be created
jointly with Ukraine, Kazakhstan

Moscow, Russia (Voice of Russia) Aug 28, 2012
The space rocket corporation Energia, based in Korolyov near Moscow, has proposed a plan to create a super-heavy carrier rocket, Commonwealth, for long-distance space missions, jointly with Ukraine and Kazakhstan, Energia President and General Designer Vitaly Lopota told reporters on Monday. "Energia is proposing that a carrier rocket, Commonwealth, be created in cooperation with Ukraine a

Read The Full Article:
http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Super_heavy_carrier_rocket_could_be_created_j
ointly_with_Ukraine_Kazakhstan_999.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Space race, on a budget, was not how Armstrong
saw it

Washington (AFP) Aug 26, 2012
More than 40 years after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, humans continue to push the frontiers of space exploration but missions are being tempered by costs, a trend that concerned the astronaut. The blank check from government that financed adventures in the Cold War-era is no longer available, with today's missions depending more on the private sector and international cooperation - of

Read The Full Article:
http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Space_race_on_a_budget_was_not_how_Armstrong_
saw_it_999.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Space Launch System Giving Marshall, Langley Wind
Tunnels a Workout

Huntsville AL (SPX) Aug 28, 2012
Launching rockets is no easy or inexpensive task. Developers must consider the ground support infrastructure, fuel elements and flight hardware itself; not to mention the safety of everyone involved. Since well before the inception of NASA, engineers used wind tunnels and scale models to test how vehicles would respond and interact with the atmosphere. At the Marshall Space Flight Ce

Read The Full Article:
http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Space_Launch_System_Giving_Marshall_Langley_W
ind_Tunnels_a_Workout_999.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

China eyes next lunar landing as US scales back

Beijing (AFP) Aug 27, 2012
Neil Armstrong's 1969 lunar landing marked a pinnacle of US technological achievement, defining what many saw as the American century, but the next person to set foot on the moon will likely be Chinese. As the United States has scaled back its manned space programme to cut costs - a move strongly criticised by Armstrong, who died on Saturday - Asian nations have aggressively expanded into

Read The Full Article:
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/China_eyes_next_lunar_landing_as_US_scales_back
_999.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Can Math Explain Ideological Conflict

Oftentimes, history has revealed humans' ever-changing allegiances to certain ideologies regarding politics, economics, fashion and academia. In the U.S., for instance, legislators prohibited the sale of liquor in 1920 only to reverse that decision in 1933. The balance of political power often fluctuates between two majority parties here, especially in recent years. And fashion trends come, go, and resurface years later.

Societies frequently abandon one ideology in favor of an opposite yet equally radical ideology ? e.g. from tolerance to prohibition or from bell bottoms to skin-tight white jeans. While these ideological jumps certainly don't define our entire past, radical shifts mark many pivotal moments throughout history.

With the right tools, physicists and mathematicians can begin to model these shifts and better explain their persistence. Most recently, a group of researchers reporting in Physical Review Letters has developed such a model to explain why populations often transition from one extreme ideology to another. Within their model, the team found that very few scenarios lead to moderate ideologies prevailing, but there's at least one way to achieve more balanced public opinion.

Image courtesy of Steve Rhodes via flickr.

Lead author Seth Marvel from the University of Michigan and his collaborators used four different subgroups as their basis to model ideological shifts:

1. A Group: The "A's" hold one extreme position. For simplicity, let's say they strongly support everyone wearing black, thick-framed glasses without lenses, as a fashion statement. We'll call the ironic A group the militant hipster contingent. (Note: There's no mention of hipsters in the scientific paper, but they work as an example case.)
2. B Group: The "B's" hold the opposite view. Hipsters need not apply.
3. The Moderates: Moderates neither support nor oppose these glasses. They remain undecided or uninterested.
4. The Zealots: The zealots will steadfastly support black frame glasses to the death. While the hipsters, hipster opponents, and moderates can all be swayed to join another group, the zealots will never switch sides under this simple model. Both the zealots and the A group support the same ideology, but the zealots support it more strongly.
   

Over time, two members of any group are randomly selected to be "speakers" and "listeners." Speakers spread their ideology to listeners, but the effectiveness of this spreading depends upon the two individuals' respective groups.

In the most basic version of the model, an A or B (extremist) speaker will always convince a moderate listener to join their cause. As a speaker, an extremist from group A will convince an extremist from group B to become a moderate and vice versa. Moderates can't change anyone's mind, however. The chart below details the various interactions and ideological shifts that change under this most basic model.

All of the interactions and outcomes for the most basic version of the model. A_c represents the zealot group that will never change its mind, and AB represents the moderates. Image Courtesy of Marvel et al./American Physical Society
With a framework in place, the team could map ideological changes with fairly simple rate equations. Although this very simple model may not fully represent how ideologies change, the results are fascinating.

The team ran the model until the populations reached an equilibrium. According to their simulations, all of the hipster opponents and moderates will join the black-framed ranks if there's a sufficiently large contingent of zealot hipsters at the beginning.

If the zealots represent 13.4 percent of the population and everyone else is a B group member (hipster opponent) initially, all moderates and B group members will eventually change their minds under this model.

When the team simulated their model on the backbones of several real life social networks, they found similar results. The critical percentage of zealots required to sway public opinion was uniformly smaller, however.

But this situation doesn't encompass all of the ways people change their minds in real life. Surely, for instance, someone who's indifferent to hipster fashion wouldn't immediately don new clothes after someone told them to. People aren't that fickle.

To account for this fact, the team ran their model again with a "stubbornness" factor. Intuitively, you might expect that making the moderates more stubborn ? or less likely to change their minds ? would lead to more moderates at the end of the simulation. That's what happens, up to a certain point.

However, stubbornness eventually causes the extreme A group to take control of public opinion once a threshold has been reached. Overly stubborn moderates will rarely convert to the B group, allowing the zealots who support the A position to dominate the ideological battle.

In addition to adding stubbornness, the researchers modeled 6 other scenarios in an attempt to find the most moderate-friendly situation. All but one failed to deliver.

The researchers tried several other scenarios, including one where the moderates could influence the extremists, but five of these scenarios failed to provide a sustained equilibrium of moderate ideology. Only when an external parameter swayed the extremists (the authors suggested this could be a "media campaign or environmental influence") did the moderates maintain control.

Below is a glimpse into three of the scenarios, including the "stubborn moderates" and externally influenced extremists (labeled as "nonsocial deradicalization").

In both graphs, the end populations as a fraction of the total population are shown for the B group/"hipster opponents" in our case (blue dots), A group/hipster supporters (red plus signs), and moderates (large, magenta circles). Image courtesy of Marvel et al./American Physical Society.
In the above graph on the left, the authors mapped the equilibrium populations for the A, B, and moderate groups for varying levels of moderates' stubbornness. Every scenario started with a small, constant population of zealots that isn't graphed. The y-axis measures the fraction of each sub-population that represents the total population at the end of the simulation. Along the x-axis, the stubbornness factor, s, ranges from 0 to 1 with 0 representing moderates that will always convert and 1 representing moderates who will never change their mind.

Although small amounts of stubbornness lead to a small moderate population surviving the ideological battle, overly stubborn moderates will eventually succumb to the hipsters' ideology.

On the right, the same y-axis population fractions are graphed against r ? the likelihood that moderates will convince the extremists to join their ranks. For a significant range for this r value, all of the "evangelical moderates" (represented by magenta circles) will eventually join the zealots (who remain constant) and A group hipsters (red plus signs). If the moderates are convincing enough and have a correspondingly high r value, however, the opposite will happen.

This scenario, in which extremists were convinced by an external influence and not the moderates, always led to the moderate ideology surviving to some degree. Image courtesy of Marvel et al./American Physical Society.
The final case depicted above was the only scenario that always left at least some moderates surviving. Here, "u" represents the likelihood that an extremist would become a moderate due to pressure from an external influence. According to these preliminary results, external influences leads to more moderate public opinion than direct contact among the various groups. At least that's true for this simulation.

The authors cautioned in their paper that there's plenty of room to build upon this model, and the simplified model has several assumptions worth investigating further. Nonetheless, the research provides an interesting avenue to start mathematically mapping ideological shifts.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you want to keep up with Hyperspace, AKA Brian, you can follow him on Twitter.














Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/physicscentral/PhysicsBuzz/~3/7tONzCUfVRI/can-math
-explain-extreme-ideological.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

NCBI ROFL: Smilies, emoticons scientifically
proven not worthless.

Same same but different!? The differential influence of smilies and emoticons on person perception.

“Emoticons (ASCII-based character strings) and smilies (pictograms) are widely used in computer-mediated communication as substitutes to compensate for the absence of nonverbal cues. Although their usage has been investigated in numerous studies, it remains open whether they provoke differential effects and whether they lead to person perception patterns similar to what is known from face-to-face interactions. Based on findings from research about person perception and nonverbal communication, we investigated the differential effects of smilies and emoticons with regard to recipients’ mood, message evaluation, and person perception in an experimental online study (n=127) with a 2(smiley/emoticon) by 2(positive/negative) between-subjects design (with an additional control condition). Results generally support earlier findings, indicating that the valence of the cue (smiley or emoticon) affects the corresponding impression formation. Further, findings concerning the differential influence of both forms of cues show that there are no differences with regard to message interpretation, whereas smiling smilies have a stronger impact on personal mood than smiling emoticons. The perception of a writer’s commitment was only altered by smilies, suggesting that they elicit a stronger impact than emoticons.”

Bonus figure from ...

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NcbiRofl/~3/bHZV5diqiKA/

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!