June 2014

The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds

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The novel “The Prefect” by Alastair Reynolds was published for the first time in 2007. It was later republished as “Aurora Rising”. It’s Part of Revelation Space series.

Tom Dreyfus is perhaps the best field Prefect of Panoply, the police force that protects the Glitter Band, formed by ten thousand habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone. A routine assignment highlights a flaw in the voting system that regulates the democracy in the Glitter Band so an update is quickly prepared and Thalia Ng, one of the Dreyfus’s assistants, is assigned the task to propagate it to all the habitats. To be safe, she go in person to install the update on some habitats but at some point something goes wrong.

The destruction of a habitat is an exceptional event and Tom Dreyfus has to conduct the investigation. The solution seems easy, as everything suggests that the perpetrator is the Captain of an Ultra starship who, after a commercial transaction gone bad, used his starship to destroy the habitat. The Ultra independently handle the issue but the Captain, when is about to die, swears he’s innocence. Something doesn’t add up and Dreyfus investigates more deeply but someone tries to stop him in any way.

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In a test performed on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at the Royal Society in London, a software called Eugene Goostman passed the Turing test. Chatting with a number of judges, 33% of them have mistaken the program for a human being, specifically a 13 year old Ukrainian boy. Its creators gave him a fictitious past to be able to answer personal questions in a consistent manner.

An image of the star HR 4796A and the dust ring around it taken by SPHERE (Image ESO/J.-L. Beuzit et al./SPHERE Consortium)

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SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch), a new instruments that combines different advanced techniques to directly photograph planets in other solar systems, has been activated for its test phase. At the end of 2013 scientists verified that it worked in Europe and they shipped it to Chile to be installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.