upstart writes:Monday's collision avoidance maneuver steered the International Space Station away from a presumed Earth-imaging satellite launched in 2020:
The Moon or Bust, Says NASA, After Successful Test Flightupstart writes:Heat shield sustained more damage than expected, but this shouldn't discourage astronauts:
guest reader writes:The results of the great DB debate on The Register were announced. Although it was a close-run race, and RDBMS was well ahead at several points during the week before a late surge for graph DBs yesterday. Over 2,000 readers voted. This debate is a part of the current spotlight on databases.Our first contributor, arguing FOR the motion, was Andy Pavlo, associate professor of databaseology at Carnegie Mellon University. Pavlo's starting point on Monday was that graph DBMSs are "fundamentally flawed and, for most applications, inferior to relational DBMSs."Jim Webber, Neo4j's chief scientist and a professor of computer science at Newcastle University, arguing AGAINST, said in his rebuttal that he could not back the idea that "relational can do anything" and rejected the assertion that graph databases cannot properly support views and migrations.Then, on Wednesday, Pavlo threw down the gauntlet, stating that abandoning the relational database model would be akin to "reinventing the wheel." He also doubled down on a public wager he'd previously made that graph databases won't overtake relational databases in 2030 by marketshare. He has promised that if he loses, Pavlo will replace his official CMU photo with one of him wearing a shirt that says "Graph Databases Are #1."Webber then countered this in his Thursday argument, noting that the pending standard for graphs, GQL, is overseen by the same ISO committee that delivered SQL. If SQL extensions were enough to solve the graph problem, the committee wouldn't have bothered itself, he seemed to be saying. Instead, it decided graphs were different enough to warrant a full query language.Webber also mentioned: In late 2010, I visited former colleagues at the University of Sydney, Australia. I gave a talk on graph databases and ended it by lightheartedly saying something like, "This technology category is going to catch on. You're going to ignore it for now, but in about a decade you will become interested and start telling us that we've done it all wrong."Several papers from CIDR 2023 were cited in the discussion.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
hubie writes:Study suggests that judgmental forecasting of trends in time-series data, such as weekly sales data, is lower when the information is displayed in bar chart format as opposed to a line graph or point graph:
upstart writes:Roman Telescope Will Do in Months What Would Take Hubble a Lifetime:NASA is still a few years away from launching the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, but a new study explores what this groundbreaking space observatory will be able to do. Unlike the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, which zero in on small patches of the sky, the Roman Telescope will be designed to take a wider view of the cosmos. According to the researchers, it would take Hubble decades to see what Roman will be able to see in a few months.The Roman Telescope passed a critical design review in 2021 and is currently under construction at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center with the aim of launching it aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in 2027. When complete, it will have two instruments: a coronagraph for visualizing exoplanets and a wide-field camera with a 300.8-megapixel resolution. It's the latter that will allow the Roman Telescope, which will use a 2.4-meter mirror similar to Hubble, to perform both wide and deep sky surveys.[...] "Roman will take around 100,000 pictures every year," said Jeffrey Kruk, a research astrophysicist at Goddard. "Given Roman's larger field of view, it would take longer than our lifetimes even for powerful telescopes like Hubble or Webb to cover as much sky." Specifically, the study says it would take Hubble 85 years to do what Roman will do in 63 days. However, Roman won't be ideal for precision observations of specific objects. Webb and Hubble will still be vital for that kind of work, but Roman can help nail down observational targets that could solve long-standing mysteries about galactic evolution.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
A couple of unrelated Zoom stories submitted by users:Porn Zoom bomb forces cancellation of Fed's Waller eventAn Anonymous Coward writes:https://www.reuters.com/world/us/feds-waller-virtual-event-canceled-after-zoom-hijack-2023-03-02/
After Nearly a Decade in Development, Japan's New Rocket Fails in Debutupstart writes:Japan's science minister said the failure was "extremely regrettable: