miércoles, 21 de junio de 2017

The Second Law of Thermodynamics a Useful Lesson for Hollywood

I went to sleep before Jordan Horowitz, a producer for "La La Land," had to announce, "There's been a mistake" — that "Moonlight" had in fact won the Oscar for best picture.

Reading Twitter the next morning, it took a while to figure out what happened. It sounded like Warren Beatty or Faye Dunaway — the final presenters of the night — had done something so bizarre that men in white coats should have escorted them off the stage.

But it turns out they weren't crazy, they were victims of the greatest screw-up in Academy Awards history.

The first thing to say is that Sunday night's bizarreness fits into a more general trend of universal weirdness. It's as if at some point we took the wrong exit into a parallel universe, and the bungled Oscars are just the latest example that we're strangers in a strange land (as John Podhoretz joked on Twitter, "The Man in the High Envelope").

Maybe there's some weird version of the Beetlejuice curse, where if you say "that'll never happen" three times, it happens.

This certainly seems true in sports, where decades-long rules of the universe have been rescinded. The Chicago Cubs exorcised the curse of the billy goat. The New England Patriots came back from a Super Bowl deficit everyone "knew" was insurmountable. And Cleveland, violating all biblical prophecy, is now a sports powerhouse.

In politics, the first obvious sign that the world was off its axis was the Florida recount in 2000. But the unraveling has been accelerating. A black guy named Barack Hussein Obama will defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary and be elected president? "Never happen." Donald Trump, president of the United States? "Never happen." How many times have the polls been wrong now? The pundits? The economists? Google "Brexit" or "financial crisis" and you'll see.

Maybe the experts aren't clueless; they just don't realize that for some reason we live on Earth 2, where these things are normal.

But there is an explanation that doesn't rely on parallel universes, magic or someone poisoning the water with crazy pills.

Perhaps the second law of thermodynamics explains it. Well, not the sports victories, but the political and institutional screw-ups.

Steven Pinker recently wrote a wonderful little essay (for edge.org) on how people need to better appreciate the second law. Specifically, they need to understand that if we don't actively work to keep chaos at bay, entropy wins. "Closed systems inexorably become less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes, until they slide into an equilibrium of gray, tepid, homogeneous monotony and stay there," Pinker writes.

"The Second Law of Thermodynamics," he adds, "is acknowledged in everyday life" whenever we say things like "Ashes to ashes," "Things fall apart" or "Rust never sleeps."

Complicated things are . . . complicated. If you don't work hard at keeping them running, the natural order of the universe is for them to break down. Planes don't "want" to fly, bikes don't "want" to stay upright, and people, markets and institutions don't always "want" to behave the way experts in Washington want or expect them to.

This is a particularly useful lesson for Hollywood to learn — and not just when it comes to awards-show planning. I've lost count of the number of movies and television shows that work on the assumption that the government is superhumanly competent. Say the wrong word into a cellphone in Jason Bourne's universe, and within seconds a van full of hyper-competent assassins will appear out of nowhere. Big corporations, too, not only have people killed, but they're really good at it.

There is the occasional concession to reality. In "Wag the Dog," the government is hapless — but Hollywood producers, the sort who put on the Oscars, can accomplish anything.

The real-life producers dispelled that myth. As they say on the internet, the accountants in charge of the envelopes had only one job — and they butchered it. And the producers of one of the most watched, most important (and self-important) cultural events in American life never thought to have a protocol in place in the event that someone hands a presenter the wrong envelope.

I guess someone said, "That'll never happen."

Source

lunes, 28 de marzo de 2016

Altair releases HyperWorks v14 for Windows and Mac

Altair has recently released HyperWorks 14.0, a comprehensive computer-aided engineering (CAE) platform with an open architecture, multi physics, and a new graphics engine. HyperWorks 14 runs on both Windows and Mac OS X platforms and the company provides virtual cloud appliance solutions.

New in HyperWorks 14

This latest version includes expanded optimization and non-linear solver capabilities, along with an accelerated meshing tool, assembly functions and a new graphics engine. Additionally, as part of the Altair Partner Alliance, new tools have been added.

HyperWorks 14 is a suite of solutions. And an important tool is that suite is OptiStrut, a series of technologies we have already seen come down the pipeline to solidThinking’s Inspire tool.

A key highlight in version 14 are the improvements to OptiStrut in this latest release. There are new contact and optimization algorithms, a breakthrough solution for the design and optimization of lattice structures and many other improvements pertaining to speed.

“With OptiStruct 14.0, it is now possible to run larger, full vehicle NVH models for more accuracy without the errors generated by our existing NVH solver on the same computer,” says Tae-Won Park of SsangYong Motors.

HyperMesh has a new part and assembly workflow which promotes flow of data directly from PDM (product lifecycle management) software solutions like Siemens PLM software (see, Architosh, “Playing Nice is Best—Autodesk and Siemens Sign Agreement on CAD Interoperability,” 11 Mar 2016, ) with support for their data structures. New in this release is a new high-velocity graphics engine tuned to handle the largest models resulting in performance up to 15x faster for large FE (finite element) models with solid elements and up to 60x faster for geometry models, while using less hardware memory.

“The new HW 14.0 graphics engine is nothing short of amazing. We can achieve much better performance even with low-end graphics cards,” says Patrick Bandeira of Prodrive Aston Martin Racing.

Source

domingo, 24 de enero de 2016

A Conversation with James Reinders

As Chief Evangelist of Intel Software Products, James Reinders spends most of his working hours thinking about and promoting parallel programming. He’s essentially a professor at large, attuning himself to the needs of software developers with an interest in parallel programming so he can offer guidance on techniques, ways of learning, and ways to “think parallel” – all with a strong Intel bent, naturally.

As Intel moved from a multicore paradigm to a manycore one with the introduction of Xeon Phi in 2010, Reinders parallel programming evangelizing went into overdrive. In the next half-decade, Reinders and Intel colleague Jim Jeffers co-authored two books focused on demonstrating the computational potential of Phi’s 60+ cores: High Performance Parallelism Pearls volume 1 and 2. With the second-generation Phi, Knights Landing, on-deck for general availability in 2016, we spoke with Reinders about the implications of Intel’s design choices for Knights Landing, what that means for compatibility and performance and what the user community can do to get ready for the first self-hosted manycore Xeon. Read the first half of our in-depth interview below.

HPCwire: How are the various communities and stakeholders preparing for Knights Landing? Can you talk about the challenges relating to porting and exploiting parallelism?

James Reinders: One of the things that distinguishes Xeon Phi is it’s not challenging to port to at all. Being on a coprocessor or PCI card requires a lot of considerations because of the limitations in the size of memory and having to stage your algorithms and so forth. Anytime you are trying to target something that sits on a PCI card, you have a challenge, and we really felt that with Xeon Phi, but one of the huge design principles behind Xeon Phi that we’ve delivered very well on is there is no porting effort per se to Xeon Phi because it essentially looks like a very high-core count Xeon. So the porting is the easy part for Knights Landing since it will be a processor and not sitting on a coprocessor card — unless you design to buy it that way.

As a processor, we’ve gotten rid of what I would say is the number one headache with Xeon Phi, which is the coprocessor, and you’re not left with a porting challenge, you’re left with a challenge of scaling your application. You’re going to face that with any processor or any compute device of any sort. So that’s why we spent so much energy focused on evangelist work, teaching and code modernization. The real challenge for the entire industry for parallel programming is finding and exploiting parallelism, regardless of what compute device you want to use. And I think with Xeon Phi what we’ve done is eliminate the porting issues and purely made it an issue of parallel programming.

HPCwire: Is one potential downside of the manycore processor approach in contrast with the accelerator or coprocessor paradigm that there are no full-strength cores to handle the parts of the code that don’t parallelize?

Reinders: You’re referring to Amdahl’s law, where the part of your program that’s serial is going to have a performance challenge. So you get bottlenecks around that. Anytime you have a system that has something highly parallel in it and you use that to speed up your parallel code, when you fall back to doing serial code, you’ve got a challenge. On Knights Corner, because it was a coprocessor, you try to divide your program between the coprocessor that’s highly parallel and your host, which is probably a very capable Xeon. So it is helpful to have a very capable host processor in that case. You’re not going to want to run something fast, accelerate it and have a weak processor coupled with it. For Knights Landing, we have much stronger serial performance than Knights Corner — and that’s on purpose.

If you take a look at Knights Corner, we have 61 cores and the performance difference between a Knights Corner core and a Xeon core is give or take 10X. Some people might tell you it’s 12 or 14X; it depends on the application — but it’s pretty severe. That means you really want to avoid having a lot of serial code run on the Knights Corner. It was pretty bad gap, owing to Amdahl’s effect. A well-parallelized program worked great; one that had serial regions had trouble.

On Knights Landing, we’ve reduced that to about a 3X difference. Of course, the only way to reduce this to a 1X is to become a Xeon. But that’s not the point of Xeon Phi, the point is to scale higher. But the fact that we’re at 3X, we’re seeing really good results with that, meaning that a system built with just Knights Landing as processors works pretty darn well.

HPCwire: Sounds like a balancing act.

Reinders: When you step back and look at computer architecture, there’s a lot of fun knobs you can turn when you are designing a machine and that’s what we as engineers do: we’re turning knobs. There are two main ones. One is big versus little cores, so when you go to a littler core, you can have more of them and you can scale further. But if you make them bigger, you can’t scale as much but you can handle a wider variety of code. We’ve turned that – that’s one knob.

Another knob you can turn is compatibility. If you take a look at a GPU design, including Intel’s GPUs, one of the design things you do is require a lot of the parallelism is to be done in lock-step, meaning the individual processing capabilities cannot do different code; they have to run exactly the same code at the same time. That has its pros and cons too. So for Xeon and Xeon Phi, we’ve made a very tight relationship between them in terms of compatibility. That’s our design decision. It has a lot of advantages and gives us the ability for Xeon Phi to scale higher than Xeon but to require that you are doing parallel programming. If you go and try to program our GPUs, you will find you don’t have that capability and are much more restricted in the programs you can run, and that gives the GPU certain capabilities that are useful for graphics units.

Compatibility with a processor also means an enormous amount of flexibility — which provides a large degree of preservation for code investment. Your code can keep working; you can decide how much to invest for performance, but you don’t have to go make the change in it just because you changed hardware generations.

HPCwire: Could you provide examples of codes that are best suited for Knights Landing and those that are not as well-suited?

Reinders: The one thing about Knights Landing is that it’s highly-parallel, so the Amdahl’s effect becomes a key consideration. So if your program is not parallel or not spending a significant amount of time doing things in parallel, then Knights Landing is not likely to be interesting.

There is an exception to that due to the aggregate bandwidth on Xeon Phi being higher than on Xeon, so we have seen some examples of codes that lean pretty high on bandwidth that see benefits on Xeon Phi even though that they aren’t as parallel as you might think. Because if your processor is waiting for bandwidth, feeding it more bandwidth can be helpful. Because aggregate bandwidth is high on Xeon Phi – it always has been – and you add in the high-bandwidth memory on Knights Landing, there are some applications that are a little less parallel than you’d expect that can get a boost on Knights Landing, but for the most part you are looking at programs that are parallel. So in the HPC domain, everything — that’s the easy part. Everything is a good target on Knights Landing but that’s simply because the HPC world has been parallel for so long that to be a successful code in HPC you need to be parallel. Outside of HPC, it’s less clear. There are certainly things in technical computing that might be outside what people call traditional HPC, and Knights Landing looks very good on the ones that are parallel there, including big data problems and machine learning. Now whether you consider these to be HPC, to me it’s kind of fuzzy.

HPCwire: Speaking of machine learning – do you expect the Knights Landing will get traction for neural networks?

Reinders: It’s quite a good device for the different neural nets both the training and the usage of them. Knights Landing in particular has some great attributes there. Because it’s not a coprocessor, we can talk about having large amounts of memory on it, which can be a huge advantage to many science problems and machine learning as well. That’s going to be an interesting thing to understand how to properly represent because you can choose your benchmarks carefully to fit in a small or select amount of memory, but a lot of times, with users, if their programs haven’t been as well conditioned, it would take effort if it’s even possible to condition an algorithm or application to run in too tight of a piece of memory. When you’re talking about a processor, like Knights Landing, that has a large amount of memory capability, you can build machines with an appropriate size of memory to fit your application, you’re not straddled by what happens to fit on a coprocessor code, which with KNC was a challenge for us sometimes. That constraint of more limited memory definitely limits some of the applications or algorithms you can run, including machine learning.

 

Source

lunes, 23 de junio de 2014

Las tres especias que colaboran a alargar la vida

Tener una vida larga y saludable sería posible gracias a las diferentes propiedades del jengibre, el ajo y la cúrcuma. Estas especias dan sabor a la comida pero también pueden ser buenas para envejecer con una salud de hierro.

 

Jengibre

El jengibre es conocido por sus propiedades contra las náuseas y casi cualquier problema digestivo. En el arte culinario se utiliza a menudo para cocinar mariscos y evitar así las posibles intoxicaciones con los mismos. También contiene geraniol, conocido por combatir de forma feroz el cáncer.

Esta especia tiene propiedades antiinflamatorias, lo que permite aliviar el dolor, prevenir los coágulos de sangre e inhibir los dolores de cabeza y las migrañas fuertes. En la medicina china el té de jengibre se utiliza para mantener la vitalidad con el paso de los años.

Ajo

El ajo es muy utilizado en la cocina italiana para abrir el apetito al comenzar una de sus tan conocidas comilonas. La alicina, un ingrediente activo del ajo, previene la arteriosclerosis y la obstrucción coronaria, la tiempo que reduce los coágulos de sangre y el colesterol.

Por si fuera poco, estimula la glándula pituitaria, regula el azúcar en sangre y puede prevenir el cáncer. Además, tiene propiedades antibacteriales muy útiles para tratar infecciones leves.

Cúrcuma

La cúrcuma es el ingrediente principal de muchas salsas picantes. Su principal producto químico es la curcumina, que disminuye las posibilidades de contraer enfermedades neurodegenerativas. También se han hecho estudios que muestran su efectividad en retrasar los signos del Alzheimer, por lo que se podría utilizar en un medicamento preventivo. En ese estudio se veía que la cúrcuma reducía el número de placas amiloides, cuya acumulación provoca la enfermedad.

¿Utilizas a menudo alguna de estas 3 especias que te alargarán la vida? ¿Qué propiedades conocías del jengibre, el ajo y la cúrcuma? ¿Cuál es tu favorita? Cuentanos tu experiencia con estas 3 especias y cómo las utilizas en tu día a día, especialmente qué recetas haces con ellas y cuál es la que te resulta más sabrosa. 

 

Fuente

domingo, 9 de febrero de 2014

Rusia rechaza las acusaciones de trampa en patinaje en Sochi 2014

El diario deportivo francés L'Equipe publicó el viernes las supuestas declaraciones de un "eminente entrenador ruso", cubierto por el anonimato, sobre un "trueque con Estados Unidos"

Rusia se mostró enojada tras el rumor, publicado el viernes por el diario francés L'Equipe, de un acuerdo con Estados Unidos para garantizar la victoria del país anfitrión en la prueba de patinaje artístico por equipos.

"No son más que tonterías y habladurías", declaró el director general de la Federación rusa de Patinaje Artístico Valentin Piseyev, citado por la agencia R-Sport.

El diario deportivo francés publicó el viernes las supuestas declaraciones de un "eminente entrenador ruso", cubierto por el anonimato, sobre un "trueque con Estados Unidos".

Ese acuerdo consistiría en que los estadounidenses ayudarían a los rusos a obtener el oro en la nueva prueba por equipos, cuyo título se decidirá el domingo por la noche, a cambio de que los anfitriones permitan al dúo Meryl Davis-Charlie White convertirse en los primeros campeones olímpicos en la modalidad de danza.

"Si tienen pruebas que las muestren y dejen de hablar. Ya pasamos por esto en Salt Lake City. Nadie será campeón de otra manera que patinando sobre el hielo y, sobre todo, no por presiones de la prensa", dijo Piseyev.

El ministro de Deportes ruso Vitaly Mutko rechazó comentar "tales estupideces".

La Federación Estadounidense, por su parte, desmintió "categóricamente" los rumores publicados por L'Equipe, que calificó de "falsos".

"No hay ninguna 'ayuda' entre países", dijo la Federación en un comunicado.

 

 

Fuente: el-nacional.com

Los inmigrantes que no aprendan inglés se quedarán sin ayudas

El Gobierno británico anuncia que quienes no tengan un nivel de idioma mínimo tendrán que ir a clases si no quieren ver reducidas sus prestaciones

El ministro británico del Tesoro, George Osborne, anunció ayer que el Gobierno solamente garantizará las ayudas sociales a los inmigrantes que hablen inglés. Quienes no sean capaces de hacerlo deberán ir a clases hasta obtener un nivel suficiente para evitar ver reducidas sus prestaciones. Con esta medida se pretenden evitar datos como los de las estadísticas oficiales, que revelan que alrededor de 100.000 parados residentes en Reino Unido tienen un inglés peor que el de un niño de 9 años de edad.

El Gobierno aportará 100 millones de libras para impartir estas clases de inglés, con las que se pretende que todos los desempleados obtengan un nivel 2 de idioma (Precisamente el nivel de un niño de 9 años). A la medida le acompañan otras, como que la prestación por desempleo solo se podrá cobrar una semana después de haber perdido el trabajo -y no tres días después, como se puede hacer actualmente- o que los desempleados tendrán que pasarse a firmar una vez cada semana en vez de una vez cada dos semanas por la oficina de búsqueda de empleo. Además, los padres solteros desempleados tendrán que volver al trabajo una vez que el menor de sus hijos cumpla tres años.

Con este tipo de normas los conservadores pretenden cumplir dos objetivos. El primero, naturalmente económico, es el de cumplir con el recorte pactado el pasado mes de marzo con el que pretenden reducir en 11.500 millones de libras (13.600 millones de euros) el gasto presupuestario. Casi la mitad de este recorte afectará al gasto en gestión de los departamentos ministeriales, mientras que la otra parte se traducirá en recortes del gasto público, como se pretende con estas medidas.

Otro de los objetivos podría ser el de contrarrestar las políticas del partido nacionalista UKIP, cuya campaña está siendo dirigida en contra de la población inmigrante, para atraer el voto de cierto sector de población que verdaderamente piensa que parte del problema económico viene de la comunidad extranjera en Reino Unido. Desde el Gobierno se ha dicho que los futuros gobernantes deberán prepararse para llevar a cabo mayores restricciones a los derechos de los extranjeros que quieran cobrar prestaciones. George Osborne, sin ir más lejos, consideró que Reino Unido está "atado" por la legislación europea para seguir haciendo ajustes, pero que se debe ir más lejos en este tipo de regulaciones.

 

 

Fuente

miércoles, 29 de mayo de 2013

Feria de Universidades del Colegio San Gabriel mostró opciones de estudio superior a los próximos bachilleres


En el polideportivo del Colegio se realizó la Feria de Universidades dirigida a informar a los estudiantes sobre las posibilidades que tienen para escoger una carrera profesional y la entidad superior en donde estudiar. La Feria se llevó a cabo los días 19 y 20 de enero con la presencia de universidades, institutos de intercambio, instituciones militares, del IECE y la SENESCYT.

El Padre Rolando Calle, Rector del colegio, destacó la importancia educativa que tiene el evento sobre todo como un medio de información para los estudiantes ahora que tienen un reto con el bachillerato unificado. Agradeció la asistencia como cada año de los planteles educativos y les invitó a mejorar la calidad educativa ecuatoriana. Elizabeth Morales, Jefa del Departamento de Psicología y Bienestar Estudiantil del Colegio agradeció a los participantes tanto a las entidades informantes como a los estudiantes. Señaló que "esta es una actividad para servicio de los estudiantes de segundo y tercero de bachillerato a fin de que tengan más información y apertura sobre las universidades".

Los estudiantes en su recorrido por los diferentes stands conocieron la oferta educativa de 18 universidades nacionales como la Universidad San Francisco de Quito, la Universidad Internacional, Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial (UTE), SEK, Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Escuela Politécnica del Ejército, de universidades internacionales como la Universidad de Belgrano (Argentina) y Universidad de Stanford (EE.UU.). Los institutos superiores les mostraron su oferta especialmente en lo relacionado a idiomas e intercambios. Las instituciones militares como la Escuela Superior de Policía y la Escuela Superior Militar Eloy Alfaro mostraron sus actividades y ofertas. Dos entidades públicas relacionadas con la Feria estuvieron presentes, el IECE para mostrar su sistema de financiación de carreras y la SENESCYT para informar sobre el Sistema  Nacional de Nivelación y Admisión (SNNA).

Los principales beneficiarios de esta Feria fueron los estudiantes. Además de recibir información escrita y oral de cada universidad tuvieron la oportunidad de hacerse una prueba de aptitud para conocer sus fortalezas al visitar la UTE.  Angelo Flores del Liceo Iberoamericano (Sur de Quito) indicó que la Feria "ayuda mucho a conocer las universidades y las carreras a seguir". Mientras que para Iván Benitez, del tercero de bachillerato Colegio San Gabriel "es un panorama bastante cercano de lo que se podría esperar de las universidades. Es enriquecedor porque antes no estábamos seguros de las posibilidades que ofrecen las universidades para optar por lo que mejor nos parezca. Me gustó más la aclaraciópn del crédito educativo del IECE".
La Feria tuvo eco en el ámbito estudiantil por la masiva asistencia de futuros bachilleres y de sus padres de familia. También se interesaron los medios de comunicación que la calificaron como un espacio "para poner en vitrina la oferta universitaria que tiene la ciudad" (http://www.noticiasquito.gob.ec Agencia Pública de Noticias de Quito 25 ene 2012); "Feria de Universidades despierta el interés de estudiantes y sus padres" (http://www.hoy.com.ec publicado el 21 de enero de 2012); y, "Un encuentro entre colegio y universidad" (Revista LIDERES,  23 enero 2012). 

http://www.csgabriel.edu.ec/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=183:feria-de-universidades