observation
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Iran says it will launch an observation satellite 'in the coming days'
Iran is set to become the latest country to launch an observation satellite, according to the country's national space agency. The satellite, named Zafar (which means victory in Farsi), began development three years ago. It will be launched by a Simorgh rocket 329 miles above the Earth, and will make 15 orbits daily, collecting imagery to help with the study of natural disasters and agriculture.
The Daily Grind: Has an MMO ever helped you in real life?
I celebrated my fourth year of working at Massively on the first of October by completely forgetting it happened, like most work anniversaries. That doesn't mean it's not important, though. Working at Massively is a huge way that playing Final Fantasy XI wound up changing my life further on down the road, because now I work at home and get to write silly articles with Star Wars: The Old Republic screenshots serving as header images. Of course, MMOs have changed my life in other ways just as surely. I've made friends, learned about other places, and found a lot of personal fulfillment in between looking for internet dragons to kill. So what about you guys? Has an MMO ever helped you in real life? Yes, I know, we can all cite horror stories where an MMO made us stay up for three days straight when we didn't want to, but let's be positive here. Has it made your life better? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Russia's RadioAstron telescope finally set to launch, blanket space with its radio eye
Considering all the space nostalgia we've been swimming in recently, it's somewhat appropriate that a Cold War-era telescope is gearing up to make its maiden voyage, after more than three decades of development (and delays). The Russian mission, known as RadioAstron, will finally become a reality on Monday, when a radio telescope launches from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome before soaring into orbit some 350,000 kilometers away from the Earth. At just ten meters in width, the craft's antenna is small in comparison to other radio 'scopes, but its reach can be dramatically expanded when combined with signals from those on the ground. This technique, called interferometry, will effectively create the largest telescope ever built, covering an area nearly 30 times the Earth's diameter and allowing RadioAstron to capture interstellar images in 10,000 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. There remains, however, one major hurdle -- because the spacecraft collects data at about 144 megabits per second, it must constantly transfer information to antennas on the ground. Problem is, there's only one antenna capable of receiving RadioAstron's signals and, unless others are constructed soon, a healthy chunk of its observations could be lost. How do you say "buzz-kill" in Russian?
Shocker! Gamer behavior is actually quite predictable
Isn't it curious how you always crack open a beer before settling in for some GTA? Or how you tend to put an anxious hand over your wallet when logging onto PSN? No soldier, it is not curious. Not at all. But this is: Researchers at North Carolina State University claim they've found a way to predict your in-game behavior with "up to 80 percent accuracy." After analyzing the decision-making of 14,000 World of Warcraft players, they noticed that different players prefer different types of achievements. These preferred achievements clump together into statistically significant groups, known as "cliques", even if they have nothing obvious in common. So a WoW player who likes to improve their unarmed combat skills also, for some psychological reason, tends to want points for world travel. What's more, the researchers believe that clique-spotting can be exploited outside the rather specific world of WoW, in which case their method could prove lucrative to game designers, online retailers and pretty much anyone with an interest in predicting your next move. Want to know more? Then we predict you'll click the PR after the break.
KDDI concocts snooping mobile phones, line managers rub hands with glee
Sci-fi movies often present us with omniscient villains who are able to track the most minute actions of their underlings and foes. Rarely do we get a glimpse into their surveillance systems, but you have to imagine that some of the more rudimentary "employee evaluation" hardware will not be too far off from KDDI's latest. The Japanese cellphone giant has unveiled a new system, built around accelerometers, that can detect the difference between a cleaner scrubbing or sweeping a floor and merely walking along it. Based on new analytical software, stored remotely, this should provide not only accurate positional information about workers, but also a detailed breakdown of their activities. The benefits touted include "central monitoring, "salesforce optimisation," and improvements in employee efficiency. We're guessing privacy concerns were filed away in a collateral damage folder somewhere.
Amateur astronomers: Log your sessions with Observation 1.1 for iPhone
Being proper geeks, a lot of us here at TUAW are amateur astronomers (we won't count Mel Martin, who is so incredibly good at astrophotography that he should be considered a professional). Although we've talked about numerous "planetarium" apps such as Pocket Universe, Star Walk, Distant Suns, and SkyVoyager, these apps simply show you what's going to be visible in the night sky at some specific point in time or show information about deep sky objects. A new iPhone app from Water-Powered Ideas, Observation [US$4.99, iTunes Link] is designed to do something completely different. It lets you determine whether or not it's going to be worth taking the scope out tonight through forecasts from Atilla Danko's great Clear Sky Chart website, and then provides a way to log your observing sessions with your iPhone. When you launch Observation, the app will ask if it can use your current location. When you tap the OK button, the app creates a list of "Nearby Charts." These are observing locations that have been entered into the Clear Sky Chart site. Once a chart has been chosen, the forecasted observing conditions at the site are displayed at the present time and for the next 18 hours. To flip through the hourly conditions, you simply swipe left or right. The conditions show the general sky conditions with a weather icon, the current or forecasted temperature, the wind velocity, the humidity, and information on transparency of the sky and seeing. Transparency refers to how clear the atmosphere is (i.e., no smoke, smog, clouds, or dust would mean the sky is very transparent), while seeing describes how still the air is (very still air means excellent seeing).
Breakfast Topic: Up All Night
It's tempting to get immersed in the world of Azeroth; perhaps too immersed. As a natural night owl, I've found myself (on several occasions) seeing the night through -- dawn falls in WoW slightly earlier than outside my window, the cities start filling up and a new day begins.I don't recommend this behaviour, of course -- as I've found, one all-nighter begets another -- but it's interesting from an observer's point of view. The world is a different place in the small hours -- I use this time to grind popular spots, or level alts in deserted zones. PvP dries up, there are no raids, and you can almost hear the continents sleeping.The breakfast topic part: How does this compare to the American servers? In Europe, we're generally at most one hour distant from the server time, so while there's something of a staggered night, there's a definite "quiet period". With more timezones to span, however, do the US servers ever get quiet?
