Google drive: a missed opportunity

No, I am not talking about whether launching Google Drive was too late. Nor whether it was up par with available services. Many people have expressed their views.

What I was thinking was in a research perspective. Now and then there are research about tracing the social influence map of the internet. While releasing the products like Google Drive, Google/ or any company gets a rare opportunity to map the influence or spread of it.  For example a news splash by techcrunch might be spread much faster than say another site with similar theme.
What Google could have done was incentive-tize the process of referring the Google Drive. For example, Dropbox and Sugarsync (yes they have referral links) give the referral links for people who want to recommend it to their friends/mass. Studying the click through rate via referral link, can be done by enabling invite only through Emails ("Give G-drive to your friend").

This is not only true for Google, but also to any other company who is planning to release a new product, that could go vibrating in the web.
My assumption is that by studying the spread of influence, it might be useful to infer how the news spread in the human network. Or, at the least, who is the most relevant networker to get the point across.

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Common Student Mistakes in Lab Report

One of the TA duties of graduate students is to instruct in Lab and grade the lab reports. The report writing aspect of lab is very useful skill, which students can learn and also find it useful later in their career.

Here is a list of common mistakes the students make in the lab report (in no particular order):

• Use the wrong date (often use the date they do write-up rather than the date of the lab)
• Forget their lab partners last/name
• Wrong format for name, lab, etc
• Introduce the lab rather than simply state their objective
• Forget to define the equation variable in the theory
• Forget to relate theory to experiment
• Forget to put units (or wrong units)
• Not state general equations
• Error not 1 sig fig or rounded down
• Value corresponding to error has more decimal places than the decimal place of the error
• Forget to put title on the graph or have x vs y instead of y vs x
• max/min lines not encompass all of the points and their error
• Not labeling the y-intercepts and/or the slopes (or labeling incorrectly)
• Majority of the graph space left unused
• Use data points instead of graph points to find the slope
• Forget to compare equation of a line with theory equation
• Not restate results to prove statements in discussion and conclusion
• Use human error such as "I may have calculated wrong" or "human reaction time" in the sources of error.

Would you like to add that you have encountered?

Adopted from
http://www.unbc.ca/assets/physics/labs/phys_labs_common_mistakes.pdf

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Write your Name with Galaxies: Galaxify

Reach for the stars, write your name with Galaxies!

http://mygalaxies.co.uk/g92oqg/

Note the website above, created by astronomer Steven Bamford, which uses images of galaxies to recreate your message as an image.  The galaxy images are acquired through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Galaxy Zoo projects.

Well, nabinkm.com appears as:

Did you ask: Which galaxies are used in this image?

Letter

SDSS ID (click for more information)

I

587741821065101540

K

588017627238367250

N

588017948290449585

a

587729782813491982

b

588017719576625235

c

587738574072971384

m

587731681191068026

m

587725471208112391

n

587738617558663207

o

587741708883329169

.

587727942951765078

For the Geeky love birds out there:

Find out which ones were used!
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Solution to "Newton's Math Problem" by Shouryya Ray

OR,
Analytical solution of two fundamental unsolved problems of particle dynamics

When I heard that "Newton's math puzzle was solved", I searched for the problem. All I could find was the news with variation of the title: Newton math puzzle, a 350 year old problem, solved by an Indian boy who lives in Germany. Everyone is simply running after the boy and his origin. No description of his work. Yahoo, Google, Bing, all of them capturing the same news item! Of course they show what the interest has been.

The main contribution, which mattered to me, was buried in the pages.

Here is the winner abstract (the webpage was translated using Google translator in Chrome):

• Category: Mathematics / computer science 
• Supervisor: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jochen Fröhlich, Dr.-Ing. Tobias Kempe 
• Competition Energy: Youth Research

Awards received:

• Second Place in the national competition
• Regional winner
• Regional winner for the best interdisciplinary project

Two problems in classical mechanics have withstood several centuries of mathematical endeavor. The first problem is to calculate the trajectory of a body thrown at an angle in the Earth's gravitational field and Newtonian flow resistance. The underlying law was discovered by Newton (17th century). The second problem is the objective description of a particle-wall collision under Hertzian collision force and linear damping. The collision energy was derived in 1858 by Hertz, a linear damping force has been known since Stokes (1850).
This paper has so far only the analytical solution of this approximate or numerical targets for the problems solved. First, the two problems are solved fully analytically generalized context, they are then compared with numerical solutions and, finally, on the basis of the analytical solutions derived statements about the physical behavior.

Original page here:

Youth Research 2012 DD Ostsachsen
And the picture of Ray holding the equation:
https://www.jugend-forscht.de/images/1MAT_67_download.jpg
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Dragon Captured in Space

"Houston, looks like we got Dragon by the tail", Don Petit, astronaut in ISS controlling the Canadaarm2, announced.
SpaceX's Space dragon capsule has been roaming around the ISS for about three days. It carries cargo to ISS. After sophisticated tests and affirmation that Dragon will not be harmful to ISS, it has now been captured by a robotic arm. The process known as Berthing.

Credit: NASA TV screenshot.

... and now bolted to ISS...
https://plus.google.com/u/0/102371865054310418159/posts/aRSmBE2ZeYZ
---
On May 22nd, @SpaceX  uccessfully launched the #Dragon capsule into orbit! 
This is the new venture to commute to the international space station (ISS) through private efforts and is the first commercial resupply vehicle to ISS. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18154937)

Here is a tweet linked to the beautiful arc when SpaceX lifted Dragon to space.

RT @SpaceX: Incredible shot of Falcon 9 launch (photo credit: James Fink) twitter.com/SpaceX/status/…
— BloggerDai(@nabinkm) May 23, 2012

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