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Comment Re:Negative Power Frequently Happens in the NW US (Score 1) 217

Mostly correct. This is old news in the PNW. A few corrections: - Spill almost never happens over the top of dams, they have spillways for this. - Forced spill due to negative prices (called lack of market spill) is the last thing to happen when prices are negative, because of the water quality issues you describe. Wind gets cut before any spill happens. - The Bonneville Power Administration (biggest energy wholesaler in the PNW) does not pay negative prices.

Comment Validation for the R language (Score 1) 57

I'm not sure how I feel about this, but this is a wonderful validation for the popularity of the R language. When I started using R almost 10 years ago, few had heard its name outside of select academic disciplines. Now, in addition to it being quite ubiquitous in academia, its something that I list as a main skill on my resume.

Comment Re:Who cares? R is a lousy language, anyway (Score 3, Informative) 105

You have no idea what you're taking about. There is absolutely no better language for doing advanced statistical analysis. Python is the only thing that is close and it is lightyears behind in terms of contributed packages that provide statistical functions.

Submission + - Amazon Purchases .buy Domain for $4.6 Million

Submitted by onproton
onproton writes: Amazon outbid Google at the ICANN auction this week for the top-level domain .buy, to which it now has exclusive rights, paying around 4.6 million for the privilege. Google was also reportedly outbid for the .tech domain, which went for around $6.7 million. No word yet on Amazon's plans for the new domain suffix, but it's probably safe to say amazonsucks.buy will be added to Amazon's collection of reserved anti-Amazon URLs.

Submission + - Google Offers a Cool Million Bucks For a Better Inverter

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the Little Box Challenge, Google (and IEEE, and a few other sponsors like Cree and Rohm) is offering a $1 million prize to the team which can "design and build a kW-scale inverter with the highest power density (at least 50 Watts per cubic inch)." Going from cooler-sized to tablet sized, they say, would make whole lot of things better, and the prize is reserved for the best performing entrant.

"Our testing philosophy is to not look inside the box. You provide us with a box that has 5 wires coming out of it: two DC inputs, two AC outputs and grounding connection and we only monitor what goes into and comes out of those wires, along with the temperature of the outside of your box, over the course of 100 hours of testing. The inverter will be operating in an islanded more—that is, not tied or synced to an external grid. The loads will be dynamically changing throughout the course of the testing, similar to what you may expect to see in a residential setting." he application must be filled out in English, but any serious applicants can sign up, "regardless of approach suggested or team background, will be successful in registering." Registration runs though September.

#power #google #invertor #contest #ieee #technology

Submission + - KDE Releases Frameworks 5 (kde.org)

Submitted by KDE Community
KDE Community writes: The KDE Community is proud to announce KDE Frameworks 5.0. Frameworks 5 is the next generation of KDE libraries, modularized and optimized for easy integration in Qt applications. The Frameworks offer a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. There are over 50 different Frameworks as part of this release providing solutions including hardware integration, file format support, additional widgets, plotting functions, spell checking and more. Many of the Frameworks are cross platform and have minimal or no extra dependencies making them easy to build and add to any Qt application.

Submission + - Tractor Beam Created Using Water Waves

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: The idea that light waves can push a physical object is far from new. But a much more recent idea is that a laser beam can also pull objects like a tractor beam. Now a team of Australian physicists has used a similar idea to create a tractor beam with water waves that pulls floating objects rather than pushes them. Their technique is to use an elongated block vibrating on the surface of water to create a train of regular plane waves. When the amplitude of these waves is small, they gradually push the surface of the water along, creating a flow that pushes floating objects with it. However, when the amplitude increases, the waves become non-linear and begin to interact with each other in a complex way. This sets up a flow of water on the surface in the opposite direction to the movement of the waves. The result is that floating objects--ping pong balls in the experiment--are pulled towards the vibrating block, like a tractor beam.

Comment Re:Python FTW (Score 2) 143

Sorry but calling R from Python just doesn't cut it. Some of the best tools in R rely on complex data structures that are not compatible with Rpy. Plus Rpy support on windows is abysmal. You are better off using Python for all non-stats scripting, get your data set up, then analyze and plot with R.

Submission + - Ask Stewart Brand About Protecting Resources and Reviving Extinct Species

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: Stewart Brand trained as a biologist at Stanford, was associated with Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters", and served as an Infantry officer in the U.S. Army. His books include Whole Earth Discipline: The Rise of Ecopragmatism, The Clock of the Long Now, How Buildings Learn, and The Media Lab. He is the founder/editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, the co-founder of The Long Now Foundation, The WELL, and the Global Business Network. His latest project, Revive & Restore, may be his most ambitious yet. Revive and Restore aims to bring back extinct species and provide genetic rescue for endangered species that are spiraling down with inbreeding problems. Mr. Brand has agreed to answer any questions you may have but please limit yourself to one question per post.

Comment Double slap! (Score 1) 1144

by DaBombDotCom (#45054063) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: How Does the US Gov't Budget Crunch Affect You?
I work for the government half time and am a graduate student the other half. Of course I am furloughed, but on top of that, all the data for my research comes from NOAA which has shut down all its websites! Basically I am stuck doing diagnostics on data I happen to already have. Just loving my gov't right now....

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