from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/
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Showing posts with label first. Show all posts
Showing posts with label first. Show all posts
Sunday, September 4, 2016
Stuxnet the first digital weapon
from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/
Sunday, August 28, 2016
This day in history the first tweet
from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/
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Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Celebrating the First Set of Google Geo Education Awardees and Announcing Round Two
Googles GeoEDU Outreach program is excited to announce the opening of the second round of our Geo Education Awards, aimed at supporting qualifying educational institutions who are creating content and curricula for their mapping, remote sensing, or GIS initiatives.
If you are an educator in these areas, we encourage you to apply for an award. To celebrate the first round of awardees, and give a sense of the kind of work we have supported in the past, here are brief descriptions of some of our previous awards.
Nicholas Clinton, Tsinghua University
Development of online remote sensing course content using Google Earth Engine
Nick is building 10 labs for an introductory remote sensing class. Topics include studying electromagnetic radiation, image processing, time series analysis, and change detection. The labs are being taught currently, and materials will be made available when the course has been completed. From Lab 6:
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| Lets look at some imagery in Earth Engine. Search for the place Mountain View, CA, USA. What the heck is all that stuff!? We are looking at this scene because of the diverse mix of things on the Earth surface. |
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| Add the Landsat 8 32-day EVI composite. What do you observe? Recall that the more vegetative cover the higher the index. It looks like the "greenest" targets in this scene are golf courses. |
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| Lets say we dont really care about vegetation (not true, of course!), but we do care about water. Lets see if the water indices can help us decipher our Mountain View mystery scene. |
Dana Tomlin, University of Pennsylvania
Geospatial Programming: Childs Play
Dana is creating documentation, lesson plans, sample scripts, and homework assignments for each week in a 13-week, university-level course on geospatial programming. The course uses the Python computer programming language to utilize, customize, and extend the capabilities of three geographic information systems: Google’s Earth Engine, ESRI’s ArcGIS, and the open-source QGIS.
Declan G. De Paor, Old Dominion University
A Modular Approach to Introducing Google Mapping Technologies into Geoscience Curricula Worldwide
Declans award supports senior student Chloe Constants who is helping design Google Maps Engine and Google Earth Engine modules for existing geoscience coursework, primarily focused on volcanic and tectonic hazards, and digital mapping. Declan and Chloe will present the modules at faculty development workshops in person and online. They see GME/GEE as a terrific way to offer authentic undergraduate research experiences to non-traditional geoscience students.
Mary Elizabeth Killilea, New York University
Google Geospatial Tools in a Global Classroom: “Where the City Meets the Sea: Studies in Coastal Urban Environments"
Mary and the Global Technology Services team at NYU are developing a land cover change lab using Google Earth Engine. NYU has campuses around the world, so their labs are written to be used globally. In fact, students in four campuses around the globe are currently collecting and sharing data for the lab. Students at their sites analyze their local cities, but do so in a global context.
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| One group of students used Android mobile devices to collect land use data in New Yorks Battery Park. |
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| While others in the same course collected these points in Abu Dhabi. Upon collection, the observations were automatically uploaded, mapped, and shared. |
Scott Nowicki and Chris Edwards, University of Nevada at Las Vegas
Advanced Manipulation and Visualization of Remote Sensing Datasets with Google Earth Engine
Scott and Chris are taking biology, geoscience, and social science students on a field trip to collect geological data, and are generating screencast tutorials to show how these data can be queried, downloaded, calibrated, manipulated and interpreted using free tools including Google Earth Engine. These tutorials may be freely incorporated into any geospatial course, and all the field site data and analyses will be publicly released and published, giving a full description of what features are available to investigate, and how best to interpret both the remote sensing datasets and ground truth activities.
Steven Whitmeyer and Shelley Whitmeyer, James Madison University
Using Google Earth to Model Geologic Change Through Time
Steven and Shelley are building exercises for introductory geoscience courses focusing on coastal change, and glacial landform change. These exercises incorporate targets and goals of the Next Generation Science Standards. They are also developing tools to create new tectonic reconstructions of how continents and tectonic plates have moved since Pangaea breakup. Some of the current animations are available here and here.
We hope this overview of previous award recipients gives you a sense for the range of educational activities our GeoEDU awards are supporting. If you are working on innovative geospatial education projects, we invite you to apply for a GeoEDU award.
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Where were the worlds first computer animations produced
from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/
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Saturday, February 20, 2016
The first detailed maps of global forest change
Most people are familiar with exploring images of the Earth’s surface in Google Maps and Earth, but of course there’s more to satellite data than just pretty pictures. By applying algorithms to time-series data it is possible to quantify global land dynamics, such as forest extent and change. Mapping global forests over time not only enables many science applications, such as climate change and biodiversity modeling efforts, but also informs policy initiatives by providing objective data on forests that are ready for use by governments, civil society and private industry in improving forest management.
In a collaboration led by researchers at the University of Maryland, we built a new map product that quantifies global forest extent and change from 2000 to 2012. This product is the first of its kind, a global 30 meter resolution thematic map of the Earth’s land surface that offers a consistent characterization of forest change at a resolution that is high enough to be locally relevant as well. It captures myriad forest dynamics, including fires, tornadoes, disease and logging.
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| Global 30 meter resolution thematic maps of the Earth’s land surface: Landsat composite reference image (2000), summary map of forest loss, extent and gain (2000-2012), individual maps of forest extent, gain, loss, and loss color-coded by year. Click to enlarge |
Key to the study’s success was the collaboration between remote sensing scientists at the University of Maryland, who developed and tested models for processing and characterizing the Landsat data, and computer scientists at Google, who oversaw the implementation of the final models using Google’s Earth Engine computation platform. Google Earth Engine is a massively parallel technology for high-performance processing of geospatial data, and houses a copy of the entire Landsat image catalog. For this study, a total of 20 terapixels of Landsat data were processed using one million CPU-core hours on 10,000 computers in parallel, in order to characterize year 2000 percent tree cover and subsequent tree cover loss and gain through 2012. What would have taken a single computer 15 years to perform was completed in a matter of days using Google Earth Engine computing.
Global forest loss totaled 2.3 million square kilometers and gain 0.8 million square kilometers from 2000 to 2012. Among the many results is the finding that tropical forest loss is increasing with an average of 2,101 additional square kilometers of forest loss per year over the study period. Despite the reduction in Brazilian deforestation over the study period, increasing rates of forest loss in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Tanzania, Angola, Peru and Paraguay resulted in a statistically significant trend in increasing tropical forest loss. The maps and statistics from this study fill an information void for many parts of the world. The results can be used as an initial reference for countries lacking such information, as a spur to capacity building in such countries, and as a basis of comparison in evolving national forest monitoring methods. Additionally, we hope it will enable further science investigations ranging from the evaluation of the integrity of protected areas to the economic drivers of deforestation to carbon cycle modeling.
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| The Chaco woodlands of Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina are under intensive pressure from agroindustrial development. Paraguay’s Chaco woodlands within the western half of the country are experiencing rapid deforestation in the development of cattle ranches. The result is the highest rate of deforestation in the world. Click to enlarge |
If you are curious to learn more, tune in next Monday, November 18 to a live-streamed, online presentation and demonstration by Matt Hansen and colleagues from UMD, Google, USGS, NASA and the Moore Foundation:
Live-stream Presentation: Mapping Global Forest Change
Live online presentation and demonstration, followed by Q&A
Monday, November 18, 2013 at 1pm EST, 10am PST
Link to live-streamed event: http://goo.gl/JbWWTk
Please submit questions here: http://goo.gl/rhxK5X
For further results and details of this study, see High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change in the November 15th issue of the journal Science.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Medal of Honor 2 Heroes First Impressions
Some of you may have been aware that I got Medal of Honor for the Wii today. Yes. Medal of Honor. As in that clichéd WWII thats been around for too long.And no, I havent taken leave of my senses. The reason I got Hereos is two fold. Firstly, it is meant to have a sweet control scheme - arguably the future of FPSs. But, more importantly, it has 32 player online. So, is the game any good. Well, as it turns out, I could have told you that before I got it.
Good parts:
The first point of frustration is the melee, executed by chucking the Wiiremote an N/Chuck forwards. This is very difficult to do and will usually end up with you reloading, loosing your aim, loosing your sense of direction and completely missing the enemy. I imagine, however, it is quite realistic, because you do not see the British army melee-ing people left right and centre, however, coming from Halo, it feels an intrinsic part of killing someone! Fortunately, online you do not have to bother with this, as you can just press Z.
The next example, is the sniper rifle. To alter the zoom, you rotate the Wiiremote. Apart from the fact this is very fiddly when you are being shot and you are also trying to line up a head shot, it adds nothing to the game as to zoom in in real life does not involve putting the gun upside down. It is good to see EA using the Wiiremote, but like Super Monkey Ball, some of it feels hit a miss.
Finally, the shotgun requires you to "pump" the N/Chuck. For the first two shots you will forget completely and wonder why you arent shooting. Then, there are, perhaps, four shots after you have worked it out where it is quite cool and is a really nice finishing touch when you kill someone. The problem is, the shotgun isnt very good, and having to pump after every shot, like the melee, just messes up your aim.
There are some good ones, like the grenade throw, where how you throw actually effects the course of the grenade and of course aiming with the pointer is great! Please buy this game, as it may encourage a real shooter and the multiplayer is genuine fun. Full review coming out in March hopefully.
Read More..
Good parts:
- Sweet controls
- Neat, lagless online
- Some funky gimicks
- The arcade mode is fun
- It is so MoH, it feels like it is taking the mic out of itself
- A couple of the gestures are fidly and annoying
- The single player is Medal of Honour
The first point of frustration is the melee, executed by chucking the Wiiremote an N/Chuck forwards. This is very difficult to do and will usually end up with you reloading, loosing your aim, loosing your sense of direction and completely missing the enemy. I imagine, however, it is quite realistic, because you do not see the British army melee-ing people left right and centre, however, coming from Halo, it feels an intrinsic part of killing someone! Fortunately, online you do not have to bother with this, as you can just press Z.
The next example, is the sniper rifle. To alter the zoom, you rotate the Wiiremote. Apart from the fact this is very fiddly when you are being shot and you are also trying to line up a head shot, it adds nothing to the game as to zoom in in real life does not involve putting the gun upside down. It is good to see EA using the Wiiremote, but like Super Monkey Ball, some of it feels hit a miss.
Finally, the shotgun requires you to "pump" the N/Chuck. For the first two shots you will forget completely and wonder why you arent shooting. Then, there are, perhaps, four shots after you have worked it out where it is quite cool and is a really nice finishing touch when you kill someone. The problem is, the shotgun isnt very good, and having to pump after every shot, like the melee, just messes up your aim.
There are some good ones, like the grenade throw, where how you throw actually effects the course of the grenade and of course aiming with the pointer is great! Please buy this game, as it may encourage a real shooter and the multiplayer is genuine fun. Full review coming out in March hopefully.
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