Very soon we're going to need thoughtful and impactful legislation on AI that properly weighs both the huge promise (and already existing utility) and the huge potential harms to many areas of human endeavor and society
Doesn't feel like our political system is up to that task...
Preliminary assessment, but dreadful
Wow the transparent background of those last images turned out to be not ideal, but at least it looks cool (sorry..)
Figure 2. Calculated optical properties of our dielectric-metal-dielectric (DMD) structure, our dual-band selective reflectors (DBSRs), and reference distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) with different numbers of layers. (a) Calculated T and R spectra of the DMD structure (Ta2O5 40 nm/Ag 23 nm/Ta2O5 40 nm). (b, c) Calculated (b) T and (c) R spectra of our DBSRs, from 1 to 5 pairs. One pair corresponds to SiO2 108 nm/Ta2O5 112 nm. (d) Calculated R spectra of DBRs, from 1 to 5 pairs. One pair represents SiO2 134 nm/Ta2O5 94 nm. (e, f) Calculated (e) T and (f) R spectra of the integrated photonic structure, where the DMD is placed on top of a DBSR with different numbers of pairs. There is an 80-nm-thick SiO2 intermediate layer as an optical spacer between the DMD and the DBSR.
Figure 3. Measured optical properties with and without a thermal-emissive layer (300-ΞΌm-thick PDMS) on the DBSR/DMD stack (Ta2O5 40 nm/Ag 23 nm/Ta2O5 40 nm/SiO2 80 nm/Ta2O5 112 nm/SiO2 108 nm/Ta2O5 112 nm/SiO2 108 nm/substrate). (a-c) Measured (a) transmittance, (b) reflectance, and (c) emissivity of the DBSR/DMD stack with and without the PDMS layer.
Figure 4. Outdoor temperature experiment. (a) Depiction of our outdoor experiment setup: four polystyrene boxes with a square hole on the top, painted black on the inside to mimic a vehicle. Each sample (glass, glass/PDMS, glass/DBSR (2-pair)/DMD, glass/DBSR (2-pair)/DMD/PDMS) was placed directly beneath the hole of each box, and a low-density polyethylene film was placed over the hole to minimize convection. An air temperature sensor was placed inside the box, avoiding direct sunlight, and suspended in air. An ambient temperature sensor was placed under a polystyrene foam to avoid direct sunlight. All four samples were measured simultaneously. (b, c) Measured air temperatures (b) and solar irradiance (c) of the four samples and the ambient temperature on October 10, 2023, at KAIST, in Daejeon, South Korea (36.27Β°N/127.36Β°E). Our cool window (glass/DBSR/DMD/PDMS) shows a temperature up to 3.8 Β°C lower than the glass sample, and 4.5 Β°C lower than the glass/DBSR/DMD without the PDMS layer. (d) Calculated net cooling power of the four samples as a function of the window temperature, including incident solar radiation and radiative and nonradiative cooling. (e) Calculated solar absorption in both the cool window, and inside the box (Psun defined as 715 W/m2 Γ (1 β reflectance of the cool window)). (f) Calculated net radiative thermal flux, Prad β Patm, where Prad represents the thermal radiation from the cooler and Patm represents the atmospheric radiation absorbed by the cool window; this was calculated using our gradient atmospheric model19. Note that in (f), sunlight is not included.
4/ The authors on this paper are Yeonghoon Jin, Seungwon Kim, Tanuj Kumar, me, and Kyoungsik Yu at KAIST
Stay tuned for more (hopefully) clever approaches to reduce energy use and create healthier and more-sustainable windows for cars and buildings
3/ The "cool window" coating is a structure with just 8 layers that is highly reflective in the UV and NIR, blocking all bands of solar radiation that don't overlap with the visible. The transitions from transparent to reflective are designed to be very sharp, to block as much sunlight as possible
2/ The vision is to have car windows that don't let the car get too hot in the bright summer sun, with an experimental temperature reduction (here) of about 4 degrees C
This is accomplished by reflecting a large fraction of sunlight and simultaneously thermally emitting in the mid infrared
Figure 1. Optical design and properties of our photonic structure. (a) Schematic of the layered structure. (b) Transmittance (T) and reflectance (R) spectra of an ideal heat-rejection window. The red background is the solar spectrum (AM1.5). (c) Comparison of the solar-spectrum-weighted visible transmittance (Tvis, 400β680 nm) and IR reflectance (RIR, 680β2500 nm) between our photonic structure and previous works. (d) A photo of our photonic structure, fabricated on a 4-inch glass, which shows its high visible transparency. (e, f) Calculated (e) and measured (f) R and T spectra. (g) Calculated (left) and measured (right) angle-dependent R spectra. The input light was assumed to be unpolarized.
1/ New preprint: "Cool windows: simultaneously engineering high visible transparency and strong solar rejection", led by Yeonghoon Jin arxiv.org/abs/2603.03771 π‘π§ͺ
The goal was to design window films that are highly transparent across the visible but reduce solar heating as much as possible
If not for geopolitical competition, there could be levers. But not in the world we live in..
Surprised to hear about reddit; I thought that was the whole point (it's right there in the website name. though I guess it's not called wroteit ...)
Good analysis and reporting on the Anthropic/DoD/DoW/OpenAI thing www.understandingai.org/p/the-pentag...
Comes from Timothy Lee's excellent and measured newsletter (to which I subscribe, but this post is freely available anyway)
Always a bit disappointing when a proposal gets the highest possible evaluation but still not awarded..
Fortunately this one was very small, so not much harm done
Any Wiley editors here? Do you know why the decision was made to not ask for suggested reviewers?
I am going to write this up in excruciating detail on my Substack on Friday, but here's my working outline of the argument for now.
SCOTUS, tariffs, IEEPA, and the legislative veto: we're all looking for the guy who did this...
blog.mattglassman.net/the-court-th...
For the big quantum centers, the COA list for each proposal is huge, and then there are like 15 center proposals going in
I can easily imagine it being very hard to find people to review these unless you go for international reviewers, and even then
I suspect that it's an issue for big centers
National Science Board meeting starts in 20 minsβI'll try to follow along and do some live coverage.
Open session will discuss merit review and changes to agency management/decision-making.
Is there any headline that ends in a question mark that doesn't follow Betteridge's law?
I did not know this was a thing
Another aspect is if something happens to the network, it can be duplicated and the user base can easily move over
Is there an econ term for something valuable, but that can't be realistically bought/sold because the moment it is sold, it loses a ton of value (due to the value being from authenticity / credibility / independence)
That's what we need an open social network to be, and bluesky is a good shot at it
I think in some cases it's actually quite hard, but it's a problem worth commiting time and resources to solve
Unfortunately the incentives may not be aligned
Well, it took 10 months, but I'm glad the Supreme Court agrees
I would like to make congress vote now about whether this law shluld remain as is..
This would be both very helpful to verify correctness, and would enable eventual fair distribution of $ that accrues to the companies making models, back to various primary sources
Without that mechanism, we might eventually lose swaths of papers, journalism, open-source code, commentary, etc
Every output could use a toggle or secondary output where you get 100s of citations that trace back where everything came from, including (as best as possible) the knowledge that's baked into the LLM via training
Maybe this can be adversarial, with secondary agents figuring out attributions
LLM-based models/agents need much better functionality to explicitly credit their knowledge/thinking/code/etc
I know it's far from trivial for something baked into the model vs explicitly accessed via a search call, but I wish more time and attention was spent on figuring this out
On one hand, yes. On the other:
One of my students got a FINESST grant in astrophysics in the most-recent cycle, and that $ arrived okay, but I don't know anything beyond that
I'd like to rebalance, but that just does not seem to be in the cards
It's a combination of the chaos at the federal level and an expanding range of university responsibilities due to becoming more senior + senior folks retiring...
...but, over the last year, I've done way less science and mentorship than I would've want to, and way more admin/budgeting/proposals
