Alexandre Storelli

Science

Are Aerospike Engines Better Than Traditional Rocket Engines? (Tim Dodd, Everyday Astronaut)

Ok, so you can’t really fire a vacuum optimized engine at sea level… and this, really, is where aerospikes come in. The idea behind aerospikes is you allow the ambient air pressure to actually form the walls containing the flow of the exhaust so it’s always in nearly

Business & Economy

Théorie des choix publics (Wikipedia)

La théorie des choix publics est un courant économique qui décrit le rôle de l'État et le comportement des électeurs, politiques et fonctionnaires. Elle entend ainsi appliquer la théorie économique à la science politique. Le texte fondateur de ce courant est The Calculus of Consent [https://en.wikipedia.

Society

Les marques vont-elles disparaître et s’effacer de l’espace public ? (Usbek et Rica)

Crise de la consommation, réflexes citoyens exacerbés, nouveaux modes d’achat en vrac... Les signes d’une baisse de l’engouement pour les marques et le monde marchand sont tangibles. Jusqu'à leur disparition ? Après une première tribune [https://usbeketrica.com/article/marques-remplacer-politiques-publiques] autour des marques et des politiques

Society

« La Silicon Valley ne donne plus de pouvoir aux gens, elle les déresponsabilise » (Roger McNamee, Les Échos)

Il est l'un des « early investors » de Facebook et a prodigué pendant des années des conseils à Mark Zuckerberg - c'est notamment lui qui lui a suggéré d'engager Sheryl Sandberg. Roger McNamee est aujourd'hui activiste et vient de publier « Facebook, la catastrophe

Business & Economy

Pourquoi les géants des technologies veulent absolument nous vendre des lunettes connectées (Le Figaro)

Amazon a présenté mercredi des lunettes équipées d’Alexa, son assistant vocal. Facebook, Apple et d’autres entreprises du secteur préparent elles aussi leur monture connectée. (...) Malgré ces succès relatifs, l’industrie des nouvelles technologies persiste. Outre Echo Frames, d’autres entreprises travaillent actuellement à la production et la vente

Technical

Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction (OpenAI)

We’ve observed agents discovering progressively more complex tool use while playing a simple game of hide-and-seek. Through training in our new simulated hide-and-seek environment, agents build a series of six distinct strategies and counterstrategies, some of which we did not know our environment supported. The self-supervised emergent complexity in

Management

40 Favorite Interview Questions from Some of the Sharpest Folks We Know (First Round)

When you’re scaling quickly, moving at warp speed, and sitting on several hiring panels, interviewing can seem like a task you just need to get through. But it’s worth pausing to remember that the decision to hire someone is an expensive and far-reaching one. And since you’re

Science

Some people are able to control their acoustic reflex to mute sounds around them

Loud sounds can harm our ears, especially if the noise appears all of a sudden. It's because the so-called acoustic reflex [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_reflex] has not enough time to take effect. A car manufacturer has studied this phenomenon because drivers got ear injuries after

Business & Economy

The Black Hole Engulfing the World's Bond Markets (Bloomberg)

There’s a multitrillion-dollar black hole growing at the heart of the world’s financial markets. Negative-yielding debt -- bonds worth less, not more, if held to maturity -- is spreading to more corners of the bond universe, destroying potential returns for investors and turning the system as we know

Society

Le vrai visage de la reconnaissance faciale (La Quadrature)

La Quadrature du Net est contre la reconnaissance faciale, d’accord : mais pourquoi ? Dès qu’on aborde le sujet en public, on voit se dessiner deux attitudes opposées. D’un côté, le solide bon sens qui ne voit pas pourquoi on se priverait de la possibilité d’identifier efficacement les

Science

Breaking max efficiency of solar cells by activating 2 electrons with 1 photon (MIT news)

In any conventional silicon-based solar cell, there is an absolute limit on overall efficiency, based partly on the fact that each photon of light can only knock loose a single electron, even if that photon carried twice the energy needed to do so. But now, researchers have demonstrated a method

Science

Engineers create synthetic, sound-silencing structure that blocks 94% of sounds (Eurekalert)

Boston University researchers, Xin Zhang, a professor at the College of Engineering, and Reza Ghaffarivardavagh, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, released a paper in Physical Review B demonstrating it's possible to silence noise using an open, ringlike structure, created to mathematically perfect specifications,

Science

Lewis–Mogridge position: traffic expands to meet the available road space

The Lewis–Mogridge position, named after David Lewis and Martin J. H. Mogridge, was formulated in 1990 and observes that as more roads are built, more traffic consequently fills these roads. Speed gains from some new roads can disappear within months, if not weeks. Sometimes, new roads help to reduce

Society

If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home? (NY Times)

It is hard to think about climate change in relation to our own  behavior. We are small, our effects are microscopically incremental and we mean no harm. The effects of climate change are inconceivably enormous and awful — and for the most part still unrealized. You can’t see the face

Science

About cookies, Skinner boxes and the addictive Candy Crush

A few days ago, near my office, there was a promotional event for some random brand of cookies. You could get a box for free, but only if you picked a winning ball in the mouth of a dragon statue. I lost, but a friend shared its cookies. While crunching

Advertising

Advertising as a major source of human dissatisfaction: Cross-national evidence on one million Europeans (Vox)

Although the negative impact of conspicuous consumption has been discussed for more than a century, the link between advertising and individual is not well understood. This column uses longitudinal data for 27 countries in Europe linking change in life satisfaction to variation in advertising spend. The results show a large

Society

Huntington vs Fukuyama : Retour sur le choc des civilisations (Contrepoints)

Peut-on sortir de l’opposition entre un universalisme occidental, aveugle à la richesse variée des cultures, et la dissolution de l’universel dans un relativisme multiculturel qui finit par tout justifier ? Ce débat n’est pas nouveau, il avait déjà opposé il y a quelques années deux universitaires américains, Samuel

Business & Economy

Routing Fee Economics in the Lightning Network (BitMEX)

BitMEX Research examines the market dynamics of Lightning network routing fees and the financial incentives for Lightning node operators to provide liquidity. We identify the interrelationship and balance between Lightning routing fees and investment returns for channel liquidity providers, as a major challenge for the network, rather than the computer

Technical

Life of a binary (Kishu Agarwal)

Almost every one of you must have written a program, compiled it and then ran it to see the fruits of your hard labour. It feels good to finally see your program working, isn’t it? But to make all of this work, we have someone else to thankful too.

Science

Multi-armed bandit

In probability theory, the multi-armed bandit problem is a problem in which a fixed limited set of resources must be allocated between competing (alternative) choices in a way that maximizes their expected gain, when each choice's properties are only partially known at the time of allocation, and may

Society

Acrasie, l'intime désaccord (Tech Trash, 2018)

Depuis quelques temps, nous avons pris l’habitude de blâmer les géants du numérique pour tous les maux de la terre. Serait-ce de leur faute si nos données personnelles sont revendues et utilisées contre notre gré ? Est-ce à cause d’eux que nous devenons de vraies loques humaines, incapables de

Technical

Fixing the Internet for Real Time Applications (Riot Games, 2015)

League of Legends is not a game of seconds, but of milliseconds. In day-to-day life, two seconds fly by unnoticed—you took two seconds reading that! In-game, however, a two-second stun can feel like an absolute eternity. In any single match of LoL, thousands of decisions made in milliseconds dictate

Society

Aéroports, de l’espace public à l’espace privé (2013)

C’est un lent grignotage. Dans les bureaux de poste, les gares, les aéroports, sur les plans d’aménagement urbain, au centre-ville comme à la périphérie, une même contrainte enserre insensiblement les usagers des espaces publics : le passage imposé au travers d’espaces marchands. Pour les promoteurs de cette métamorphose,

Technical

Design concepts for Formula 1

Formula 1 cars are fast. That is taken as read. But exactly how fast they are is perhaps not something people dwell on too often. (...) The manipulation of air around a car is the single biggest performance differentiator in F1 - and collectively the teams employ hundreds of people and

Society

« La fragmentation de la société française est sans précédent » (Jérôme Fourquet)

(...) Quand on regarde historiquement, le catholicisme et le communisme avaient en commun d'offrir une transcendance, un horizon positif qui vaut la peine de lutter, de se sacrifier pour lui. Dans une société de consommation et d'individualisme, on touche du doigt le déficit de transcendance qui permettait