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4 people are living in an isolated habitat for 30 days. Why? Science!

2016 Feb 1, 3:27

nasa:

This 30 day mission will help our researchers learn how isolation and close quarters affect individual and group behavior. This study at our Johnson Space Center prepares us for long duration space missions, like a trip to an asteroid or even to Mars.

image

The Human Research Exploration Analog (HERA) that the crew members will be living in is one compact, science-making house. But unlike in a normal house, these inhabitants won’t go outside for 30 days. Their communication with the rest of planet Earth will also be very limited, and they won’t have any access to internet. So no checking social media kids!

The only people they will talk with regularly are mission control and each other.

image

The crew member selection process is based on a number of criteria, including the same criteria for astronaut selection.

What will they be doing?

Because this mission simulates a 715-day journey to a Near-Earth asteroid, the four crew members will complete activities similar to what would happen during an outbound transit, on location at the asteroid, and the return transit phases of a mission (just in a bit of an accelerated timeframe). This simulation means that even when communicating with mission control, there will be a delay on all communications ranging from 1 to 10 minutes each way. The crew will also perform virtual spacewalk missions once they reach their destination, where they will inspect the asteroid and collect samples from it. 

A few other details:

  • The crew follows a timeline that is similar to one used for the ISS crew.
  • They work 16 hours a day, Monday through Friday. This includes time for daily planning, conferences, meals and exercises.  
  • They will be growing and taking care of plants and brine shrimp, which they will analyze and document.

But beware! While we do all we can to avoid crises during missions, crews need to be able to respond in the event of an emergency. The HERA crew will conduct a couple of emergency scenario simulations, including one that will require them to maneuver through a debris field during the Earth-bound phase of the mission. 

image

Throughout the mission, researchers will gather information about cohabitation, teamwork, team cohesion, mood, performance and overall well-being. The crew members will be tracked by numerous devices that each capture different types of data.

image

Past HERA crew members wore a sensor that recorded heart rate, distance, motion and sound intensity. When crew members were working together, the sensor would also record their proximity as well, helping investigators learn about team cohesion.

Researchers also learned about how crew members react to stress by recording and analyzing verbal interactions and by analyzing “markers” in blood and saliva samples.

image

In total, this mission will include 19 individual investigations across key human research elements. From psychological to physiological experiments, the crew members will help prepare us for future missions.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

PermalinkComments

4 people are living in an isolated habitat for 30 days. Why? Science!

2016 Feb 1, 3:27

nasa:

This 30 day mission will help our researchers learn how isolation and close quarters affect individual and group behavior. This study at our Johnson Space Center prepares us for long duration space missions, like a trip to an asteroid or even to Mars.

image

The Human Research Exploration Analog (HERA) that the crew members will be living in is one compact, science-making house. But unlike in a normal house, these inhabitants won’t go outside for 30 days. Their communication with the rest of planet Earth will also be very limited, and they won’t have any access to internet. So no checking social media kids!

The only people they will talk with regularly are mission control and each other.

image

The crew member selection process is based on a number of criteria, including the same criteria for astronaut selection.

What will they be doing?

Because this mission simulates a 715-day journey to a Near-Earth asteroid, the four crew members will complete activities similar to what would happen during an outbound transit, on location at the asteroid, and the return transit phases of a mission (just in a bit of an accelerated timeframe). This simulation means that even when communicating with mission control, there will be a delay on all communications ranging from 1 to 10 minutes each way. The crew will also perform virtual spacewalk missions once they reach their destination, where they will inspect the asteroid and collect samples from it. 

A few other details:

  • The crew follows a timeline that is similar to one used for the ISS crew.
  • They work 16 hours a day, Monday through Friday. This includes time for daily planning, conferences, meals and exercises.  
  • They will be growing and taking care of plants and brine shrimp, which they will analyze and document.

But beware! While we do all we can to avoid crises during missions, crews need to be able to respond in the event of an emergency. The HERA crew will conduct a couple of emergency scenario simulations, including one that will require them to maneuver through a debris field during the Earth-bound phase of the mission. 

image

Throughout the mission, researchers will gather information about cohabitation, teamwork, team cohesion, mood, performance and overall well-being. The crew members will be tracked by numerous devices that each capture different types of data.

image

Past HERA crew members wore a sensor that recorded heart rate, distance, motion and sound intensity. When crew members were working together, the sensor would also record their proximity as well, helping investigators learn about team cohesion.

Researchers also learned about how crew members react to stress by recording and analyzing verbal interactions and by analyzing “markers” in blood and saliva samples.

image

In total, this mission will include 19 individual investigations across key human research elements. From psychological to physiological experiments, the crew members will help prepare us for future missions.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

PermalinkComments

Retweet of SwiftOnSecurity

2015 Nov 1, 10:18
"Should driverless cars kill their occupants to save pedestrians?" Humans will evolve to walk in packs for protection. Time is a circle.
PermalinkComments

Tweet from David_Risney

2015 Sep 17, 7:57
BerenstXin Bears spelling is only indication you're living in the simulation. Recall it w/ e? Your once human memories have been duplicated.
PermalinkComments

Retweet of OtherDanOBrien

2014 Nov 20, 6:02
[Testing Cat-Human Translator] Scientist: Cat, what is your name? Cat: I AM KANG THE DESTROYER Owner: It's not working. His name is Socks.
PermalinkComments

Gamers Messed With The Steam Sale, Then Valve Changed The Rules

2014 Jun 24, 3:51

Applied game theory 101: Valve’s Steam Summer Sale involves a meta game with teams of Steam users competing for daily prizes. On Reddit the players join together to take turns winning daily. Valve gets wise and performs an existential attack, changing the rules to make it harder for players to want to coordinate.

Still, that all the players joined together to game the system gives me hope for humanity. Its a self organized solution to a tragedy of the commons problem. Only in this case the tragedy is by design and is updated to be more tragic.

PermalinkCommentsgame video-game game-theory valve

(via Pareidoloop) “Phil McCarthy’s Pareidoloop...

2012 Aug 6, 4:11


(via Pareidoloop)

“Phil McCarthy’s Pareidoloop overlays randomly generated polygons on top of one another until facial recognition software recognizes a human face. Can’t sleep, at SIGGRAPH! [via @Brandonn]”

PermalinkCommentstechnical images facial-recognition siggraph

wired: [via motherjones]: theweekmagazine: Sticking to an...

2012 Jun 7, 3:29


wired:

[via motherjones]:

theweekmagazine:

Sticking to an exercise routine takes dedication, and many fitness junkies swear that a running companion can be a huge help. That’s why researchers have developed “Joggobot,” a quad-rotor helicopter drone designed to motivate joggers by flying in front of them. 

The aerial robot uses its camera to spot a colorful pattern on a T-shirt worn by the jogger, and flies at a safe distance ahead. The runner can control Joggobot using a smartphone: In “companion mode,” the drone simply maintains the jogger’s pace; in “coach mode,” it pushes its human trainee a little faster.

Don’t worry, there’s a video

Science!

Maybe it should chase you instead?

PermalinkCommentshumor exercise robot future video

Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter? | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

2012 Apr 26, 9:53

As Hammond explained what he did, the critic became agitated. Times are tough enough in journalism, he said, and now you’re going to replace writers with robots? “I just looked at him,” Hammond recalls, “and asked him: Have you ever seen a reporter at a Little League game? That’s the most important thing about us. Nobody has lost a single job because of us.” At least not yet.

PermalinkCommentsnews algorithm ai newspaper journalism

EFF White Paper Outlines How Businesses Can Avoid Assisting Repressive Regimes

2012 Apr 18, 6:24

A House subcommittee has passed the Global Online Freedom Act (GOFA), which would require disclosure from companies about their human rights practices and limit the export of technologies that “serve the primary purpose of” facilitating government surveillance or censorship to countries designated as “Internet-restricting.”

PermalinkCommentstechnical human-rights eff software government law surveillance

How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy (bueno.org)

2012 Feb 22, 6:54

Automated authors writing books and automated middle men trying to sell over priced books at a profit. The author of the blog post claims to be human, but I’m not so sure.

PermalinkCommentshumor technical amazon economics bots

Marvel lawyers insist mutants aren't humans

2011 Dec 30, 1:41

‘to avoid getting taxed as “dolls,” rather than lower for “toys”’

PermalinkCommentshumor xmen toys legal

A shuffled deck of cards is unique in all human history (matthewweathers.com)

2011 Nov 17, 1:01

Possible combinations to shuffle a deck of cards is 8.0658X1067 compared to the number of times a deck of cards has been shuffled thus far in history 1.546X1023

PermalinkComments

Mind vs. Machine - Magazine - The Atlantic

2011 Feb 17, 1:01Brian Christian on his involvement in the 2009 Turing Test and his goal of winning Most Human Human.PermalinkCommentshistory ai science

RFC 5870 - A Uniform Resource Identifier for Geographic Locations ('geo' URI)

2010 Jun 9, 3:31"A 'geo' URI identifies a physical location in a two- or three-dimensional coordinate reference system in a compact, simple, human-readable, and protocol-independent way."PermalinkCommentstechnical geo uri url ietf rfc standard

Members Of The Supreme Court As Human Beings

2010 May 14, 9:37New York Times article from May 15th 1910 titled "MEMBERS OF THE SUPREME COURT AS HUMAN BEINGS: When Not on the Bench They Are Pretty Much Like Other People — Characteristic Stores About Them". This is the NYT 1910's version of US Weekly's current "Celebrities Are Just Like Us!" feature.PermalinkCommentshumor history article supreme-court

PLoS ONE: Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science

2009 Nov 23, 11:33A map of the sciences generated via science web portals: "Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia...The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences."PermalinkCommentsvia:pskomoroch visualization science map graph

Time/Date Conversion Tool

2009 Aug 28, 3:39

I built timestamp.exe, a Windows command line tool to convert between computer and human readable date/time formats mostly for working on the first run wizard for IE8. We commonly write out our dates in binary form to the registry and in order to test and debug my work it became useful to be able to determine to what date the binary value of a FILETIME or SYSTEMTIME corresponded or to produce my own binary value of a FILETIME and insert it into the registry.

For instance, to convert to a binary value:

[PS C:\] timestamp -inString 2009/08/28:10:18 -outHexValue -convert filetime
2009/08/28:10:18 as FILETIME: 00 7c c8 d1 c8 27 ca 01

Converting in the other direction, if you don't know what format the bytes are in, just feed them in and timestamp will try all conversions and list only the valid ones:

[PS C:\] timestamp -inHexValue  "40 52 1c 3b"
40 52 1c 3b as FILETIME: 1601-01-01:00:01:39.171
40 52 1c 3b as Unix Time: 2001-06-05:03:30:08.000
40 52 1c 3b as DOS Time: 2009-08-28:10:18:00.000
(it also supports OLE Dates, and SYSTEMTIME which aren't listed there because the hex value isn't valid for those types). Or use the guess option to get timestamp's best guess:
[PS C:\] timestamp -inHexValue  "40 52 1c 3b" -convert guess
40 52 1c 3b as DOS Time: 2009-08-28:10:18:00.000

When I first wrote this I had a bug in my function that parses the date-time value string in which I could parse 2009-07-02:10:18 just fine, but I wouldn't be able to parse 2009-09-02:10:18 correctly. This was my code:

success = swscanf_s(timeString, L"%hi%*[\\/- ,]%hi%*[\\/- ,]%hi%*[\\/- ,Tt:.]%hi%*[:.]%hi%*[:.]%hi%*[:.]%hi", 
&systemTime->wYear,
&systemTime->wMonth,
&systemTime->wDay,
&systemTime->wHour,
&systemTime->wMinute,
&systemTime->wSecond,
&systemTime->wMilliseconds) > 1;
See the problem?

To convert between these various forms yourself read The Old New Thing date conversion article or Josh Poley's date time article. I previously wrote about date formats I like and dislike.

PermalinkCommentsdate date-time technical time windows tool

Question Suggestions - small voyages into the collective psyche of humans who ask google questions

2009 Jul 29, 4:40Lists of Google's search suggestions for the starts of various phrases. Sometimes humorous.
PermalinkCommentshumor google search search-suggestions web psychology

APOKALIPS - Prove You're Human

2009 Jul 20, 5:04On robot tattoos.
PermalinkCommentshumor comic via:waxy robot tattoo captcha
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