2018年12月6日 星期四

張首晟

張首晟在2013年當選中國科學院外籍院士。同一年,他與學生谷安佳創立丹華資本。
該公司稱其專注於投資美國具有影響力的科技成果和商業創新,投資領域涵蓋人工智能、虛擬與增強現實、大數據、區塊鏈、企業級應用等具有顛覆性的新興技術。
https://bbc.in/2Ej4f6g


張首晟的家人通過多家中國媒體發表訃告,稱其與抑鬱頑強對抗後,在12月1日「意外離世」,終年55歲。
張首晟的家人在這份英文訃告中稱,張首晟「渴望通過科學研究見證世間的壯麗,他給整個世界帶來了孜孜以求的精神。」
2018年11月,美國貿易代表辦公室(USTR)更新《301調查報告》,指中國利用風險投資幫助中國政府獲得美國的尖端技術和相關知識產權,其中就包括丹華資本。

2018年12月4日 星期二

Third Thoughts By Steven Weinberg



Varieties of Symmetry

In Third Thoughts, Nobel Prize-winning author, Steven Weinberg offers a wise, personal, and wide-ranging meditation of

Varieties of Symmetry

In Third Thoughts, Nobel Prize-winning author, Steven Weinberg offers a wise, personal, and wide-ranging meditation of science and society. Here is a brief excerpt looking at Weinberg’s perspective on symmetry.
When I first started doing research in the late 1950s physics seemed to me to be in a dismal state. There had been a great success a decade earlier in quantum electrodynamics, the theory of electrons and light and their interactions. Physicists then had learned how to calculate things like the strength of the electron’s magnetic field with a precision unprecedented in all of science. But now we were confronted with newly discovered exotic particles, some existing nowhere in nature except in cosmic rays. And we had to deal with mysterious forces: strong nuclear forces that hold particles together inside atomic nuclei, and weak nuclear forces that can change the species of these particles. We did not have a theory that would describe these particles and forces, and when we took a stab at a possible theory, we found that either we could not calculate its consequences, or when we could, we would come up with nonsensical results, like infinite energies or in finite probabilities. Nature, like a resourceful enemy, seemed intent on concealing from us its master plan.
At the same time, we did have a valuable key to nature’s secrets. The laws of nature evidently obeyed certain principles of symmetry whose consequences we could work out and compare with observation, even without a detailed theory of particles and forces. It was like having a spy in the enemy’s high command.
I had better pause to say something about what physicists mean by principles of symmetry. In conversations with friends who are not physicists or mathematicians, I find that they often take symmetry to mean the identity of the two sides of something symmetrical, like the human face or a butterfly. That is indeed a kind of symmetry, but it is only one simple example of a huge variety of possible symmetries.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a symmetry is “the quality of being made up of exactly similar parts.” A cube gives a good example. Every face, every edge, and every corner is just the same as every other face, edge, or corner. This is why cubes make good dice; if a cubical die is honestly made, when it is cast it has an equal chance of landing on any of its six faces.
The cube is one example of a small group of regular polyhedra — solid bodies with at polygons for faces — that satisfy the symmetry requirement that every face, every edge, and every corner should be precisely the same as every other face, edge, or corner.
These regular polyhedra fascinated Plato. He learned (probably from the mathematician Theaetetus) that regular polyhedra come in only five possible shapes, and he argued in Timaeus that these were the shapes of the bodies making up the elements: earth consists of little cubes, while re, air, and water are made of polyhedra with four, eight, and twenty identical faces, respectively. The fifth regular polyhedron, with twelve identical faces, was supposed by Plato to symbolize the cosmos. Plato offered no evidence for all this — he wrote in Timaeus more as a poet than as a scientist, and the symmetries of these five bodies evidently had a powerful hold on his poetic imagination.
The regular polyhedra in fact have nothing to do with the atoms that make up the material world, but they provide useful examples of a way of looking at symmetries, a way that is particularly congenial to physicists. A symmetry is at the same time a principle of invariance. That is, it tells us that something does not change its appearance when we make certain changes in our point of view. For instance, instead of describing a cube by saying that it has six identical square faces, we can say that its appearance does not change if we rotate our frame of reference in special ways, for instance by 90 degrees around directions parallel to the cube’s edges.
The set of all the transformations of points of view that will leave something looking the same is called its invariance group. This may seem like an awfully fancy way of talking about things like cubes, but often in physics we make guesses about invariance groups, and test them experimentally, even when we know nothing else about the thing that is supposed to have the conjectured symmetry. There is a large and elegant branch of mathematics known as group theory, which catalogs and explores all possible invariance groups, and is described for general readers in two recently published books.
Each of Plato’s five regular polyhedra has its own invariance group. Each group is finite, in the sense that there are only a nite number of distinct changes in point of view that leave the polyhedron looking the same. All these different finite invariance groups are contained in an in finite group, the group of all rotations in three dimensions. This is the invariance group of the sphere, which of course looks the same from all directions.
For aesthetic and philosophical reasons, spheres also figured in early speculations about nature — as a model not of atoms, but of planetary orbits. The seven known planets (including the Sun and Moon) were supposed to be bright spots on spheres that revolve around the spherical Earth, carrying planets on perfect circular orbits. But it was hard to reconcile this with the observed motions of planets, which at times seem even to reverse their direction of motion against the background of stars. According to the neo-Platonist Simplicius, writing in the sixth century ad, Plato had put this problem to mathematicians at the Academy, almost as if assigning a bit of homework. “Plato lays down the principle,” says Simplicius, “that the heavenly bodies’ motion is circular, uniform, and constantly regular. Therefore he sets the mathematicians the following problem: What circular motions, uniform and perfectly regular, are to be admitted as hypotheses so that it might be possible to save the appearances presented by the planets?”
“Save the appearances” is the traditional translation, but what Plato meant by this is that a combination of circular motions must precisely account for the apparent motions of the planets across the sky.
This problem was addressed in Athens by Eudoxus, Calippus, and Aristotle, and then more successfully, with the introduction of epicycles, at Alexandria by Hipparchus and Ptolemy. The problem of planetary motions continued to vex astronomers and philosophers in the Islamic and Christian worlds, up to and beyond the time of Copernicus. Of course, much of the difficulty in solving Plato’s problem arose from the fact that the Earth and what we now call the planets go around the Sun, not the Sun and planets around the Earth. The Earth’s motion explained in a natural way why planets seem sometimes to jog backward in their paths through the zodiac. But even when this had been understood by Copernicus, he still had trouble making his theory agree with observation, because he shared Plato’s conviction that planetary orbits had to be composed of circles.
No really satisfactory solution to Plato’s homework problem could be found, because planetary orbits are actually ellipses. This was the discovery of Kepler, who incidentally as a young man had like Plato also been fascinated by the five regular polyhedra. Astronomers and philosophers for two millennia had been too much impressed with the beautiful symmetry of the circle and sphere.

2018年11月30日 星期五

We can now customize cancer treatments, tumor by tumor

“You can imagine a scenario where every single cancer patient would benefit from this vaccine ... That’s unheard of.”

2018年11月18日 星期日

Forrest Shreve (July 8, 1878 – July 19, 1950)


Plants
Barrel Cactus
Brittle Bush
Chainfruit Cholla
Creosote Bush
Crimson Hedgehog Cactus
Desert Ironwood
Joshua Tree
Jumping Cholla
Mojave Aster
Ocotillo
Palo Verde
Pancake Prickly Pear Cactus
Saguaro Cactus
Soaptree Yucca
Triangle-leaf Bursage
http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/desert_plant_page.htm
張文亮
漠植物的價值
在近代的科學史上,約翰‧霍浦金斯大學史瑞夫(Forrest Shreve,1878-1950)博士,是一個非常有趣的人,他被稱為「普世研究沙漠植物的第一人」。史瑞夫在1908年進入亞歷桑那沙漠,在沙漠四十二年之久,他研究「沙漠植物存在沙漠裡,到底有什麼目的?」他與妻子住在沒有水、沒有電、沒有公路、沒有電話的

話的文明邊緣地,只為瞭解上帝創造沙漠植物的目的。
他幾乎走遍北美洲與中美洲的沙漠,並且進入沙漠古老的地穴裡,他採取地穴裡不同地質年代蕨類的標本,發現早期蕨類葉子的氣孔較大,後來逐漸變小。植物的氣孔愈小代表天氣愈來愈乾燥,植物蒸散水量較低。1919年他提出:「這裡以前長了許多植物,後來氣候改變,才成為沙漠。」。
1928年,他又提出:「沙漠是大自然最具變化的展示場,這裡平常幾乎看不到什麼生命的蹤跡,一下雨,許多的生物都會出來活動。原來,沙漠植物留在沙漠,能保護沙漠殘存的土壤與其他生物。下雨後,沙漠植物就立刻開花、結果。儘管97.5%的種子都不會發芽,但是能夠發芽,就一定能夠成長。」過去多數人認為沙漠植物不能作建材,又不能吃,是沒有用的植物。1940年,史瑞夫卻提出:沙漠植物具有許多功用,如果沒有沙漠植物,沙漠地表溫度將更高。
這位基督徒科學家在沙漠地尋找沙漠植物,熱愛沙漠植物,他長期量測一種沙漠植物saguaro,發現這種植物每300年才能生長30公分,他呼籲世人珍惜這種長不高的植物。
他在晚年時寫下:「我在沙漠裡,所學最重要的一門課是,沙漠裡的植物與動物,不是無法適應外面更好的環境,而被趕來這裡,是喜歡這裡。我愈認識這些生物,才知道,我也可以在這種環境下生存,不失去力量與智慧…研究大自然,真是認識上帝的一部分。」

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Forrest Shreve
Forrest Shreve.jpg
BornJuly 8, 1878
EastonMaryland, U.S.
DiedJuly 19, 1950 (aged 72)
TucsonArizona, U.S.
Alma materJohns Hopkins University
Scientific career
InstitutionsGoucher College
Carnegie Institution for Science
Author abbrev. (botany)F. Shreve
Forrest Shreve (July 8, 1878 – July 19, 1950) was an internationally known American botanist. His professional career was devoted to the study of the distribution of vegetation as determined by soil and climate conditions.[1] His contributions to the plant biology world set the groundwork for modern studies and his books are regarded as classics by botanists worldwide.[2]

Early life and education[edit]

Shreve, the son of Henry and Helen Garrison Shreve, was born in Easton, Maryland.[1] After receiving his preparatory education at George School, in NewtownPennsylvania, Shreve earned his BA at Johns Hopkins University in 1901.[1] He earned his Ph.D. from the same university in 1905. From 1904 to 1908, Shreve conducted a botanical survey of the state of Maryland.

Career[edit]

From 1905 to 1906, and again in 1909, Shreve studied the mountain vegetation of Jamaica. In 1906, he became an associate professor of botany at Goucher College, and remained there until 1908, when he moved to TucsonArizona, to work at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Desert Library. From 1911 to 1919, Shreve worked as an editor of the botanical scientific journal Plant World. In 1914, Shreve published his book A Montane Rain-forest. In 1915, he helped found the Ecological Society of America, where he served as a secretary-treasurer until 1919, and as president, in 1921. In 1926, Shreve worked as an editor of the book Naturalist's Guide to the Americas. In 1928, Shreve was placed in charge of Desert Investigations of the Carnegie Institution, and in 1932 he began floristics studies on the Sonoran Desert region. He served as vice president of the Association of American Geographers in 1940, and published "The Desert Vegetation of North America" in Botanical Review. He retired in 1946.[3]

Personal life[edit]

His religious affiliation was with the Society of Friends. Politically, he was a Republican. His hobby was collecting and studying stamps. He married Edith Coffin on June 17, 1909 in Florence, AL (aged 30), and had a daughter, Margaret. He died in TucsonArizona in 1950.[1]

Publications[edit]


The Plant Life of Maryland. The Johns Hopkins Press. 1910.
A Montane Rain-forest: A Contribution to the Physiological Plant Geography in Jamaica. Carnegie Institute of Washington. Washington D.C: 1914.[5]
The Vegetation of a Desert Mountain Range as Conditioned by Climatic Factors. Carnegie Institute of Washington. Washington D.C.: 1915.[6]
Naturalist's Guide to the Americas (editor). 1926.
The Cactus and its Home. The Williams & Wilkins company. 1931.
"The Desert Vegetation of North America". The Botanical Review. Vol. 8, No. 4 (Apr., 1942), pp. 195–246.
Vegetation and Flora of the Sonoran Desert (posthumously). Stanford University Press. 1964.

2018年11月16日 星期五

科學與國際交流:The UK's strength in science is because of the EU – not in spite of it



Our Vice-Chancellor has been telling The Guardian why we need to nurture even stronger links with our friends in Europe after Brexit. He's also sent an open letter to the Universities Minister explaining why a global university like Essex values our links with Europe so much: https://www.theguardian.com/…/the-uks-strength-in-science-i…

2018年11月14日 星期三

「台灣杉二號」(TAIWANIA 2);「 APCS演算法實作營」一線國立大學的補習班


本來不想得罪朋友,也不想擋人財路的,但該說的話還是要說,尤其是蘇文鈺 (Alvin W. Y. Su)教授氣到快不行了,因為他最憂心的事情正在發生。
政大與民間單位合作,推出「2019高中程式冬令營」[1],乍看是一件美事,但是蘇教授與我對於其中的第三個班次「 APCS演算法實作營」是有意見的。「 APCS演算法實作營」的介紹,如截圖所示。
我想,直接以準備APCS為訴求的課程,坊間補習班、才藝班可以做,但不應該由一線的國立大學來做。而且還是與坊間單位合作,加上收費頗高、講師的學經歷、以及與大學招生掛勾等問題,難免惹人物議。
⋯⋯更多


*****

......科技部長陳良基也透露,台灣杉二號主機原本的效能預估是7 PFLOPS,但在團隊優化調校與測試下,一舉提升至9 PFLOPS,除了主機系統,在軟體服務平台、數據中心設備用電、系統散熱、網路連接都展現了本土團隊技術力,台灣杉二號預計2019年上半啟用。

科技部表示,未來台灣杉二號主機中50%運算資源會提供給政府主導的智慧機器人、自駕車實驗場域、AI創新研究中心等前瞻計畫及學研界使用,另外50%運算資源會提供創新產業使用,期望加速AI應用於金融科技、智慧製造、智慧醫療及健康及智慧城市等領域。

廣達取經MIT,華碩投入中文語音技術

而台灣隊此次積極爭取國網中心AI雲端平台標案,據了解是由廣達董事長林百里所主導,林百里很早就帶領廣達投身雲端產業,他13日表示,2000年曾去麻省理工學院(MIT)取經,當時MIT談的AI發展,跟廣達能開發的AI伺服器仍有很大一段距離,不過,現在廣達做的AI伺服器產品,已經追上MIT講的AI技術,然而,10月他又去MIT參訪四天,發現MIT又在講AI新的發展,這也意味,廣達AI發展還有很光明的路可以走下去。


《台灣杉二號》規格
國網中心

不只是台灣AI超級電腦展現實力,前瞻計畫「科技大擂台,與AI對話」也積極推動華語語音應用,鼓勵參賽隊伍建置多情境的中文語音大數據,開發中文語音對話核心技術,科技部12日也公佈前4支得分最高團隊,包括台大的hungyilee分數領先第一,而華碩也有三支隊伍Intellection、Kandelia、和ctcasus緊追在後,展現華碩在中文語意辨識方面的實力。
BNEXT.COM.TW

史上最佳、擠入全球超級電腦20強!廣達、華碩、台灣大打造「台灣杉二號」|數位時代