Posts

May 02, 2013

4:45 PM | Adobe Exploring Mobile Lightroom for RAW Editing

Now this is really interesting. Adobe--whose MAX conference is going on this weekend--revealed on an online photography show that it is working on an iOS version of its RAW image processing software Lightroom. Apppearing on Scott Kelby's The Grid, Adobe Group Product Manager Tom Hogarty demoed an early internet app that could read and process RAW files from a Canon 5D Mark III, "developing" it using tools from Lightroom's Basic Development panel (eg. Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, […]

4:05 PM | Link o' the day: A flashback

I ran across this recently. Apparently, Larry Loucks passed away back in 2006. Computer Business Review, June 23, 1995: IBM SHIFTS EMPHASIS OF WORK ON MICROKERNEL. I've got no idea what "Instead, it has been prototyped further down in the kernel, where performance gains of up to 1,000 times have apparently been achieved" is supposed to mean, and the IBM microkernel was hardly a clean-room effort; it was based on the Mach kernel from CMU. But still, I was there! That's where I spent a […]

4:00 PM | Worklog: Arduino-Controlled Pantry LED Lighting

I have a pantry that isn’t particularly well lit. In fact, it would be safe to say that it’s very poorly lit. It’s deep and narrow, which makes it really hard to see the stuff in the back and even harder to reach back there. Over the years, we’ve tried adding those cheap stick on LED lights to the underside of the shelves—you know, the ones that turn on automatically when they detect light--but the pantry is so dark that those lights don’t turn on reliably. Even when they do turn […]

3:00 PM | Getting the most out of Windows 8 features – File History

In the last post we took a look at Family Safety in Windows 8, the first in a series of articles helping you to make the most of all the new features in Windows 8. For those interested in providing an added layer of security for their children when on the PC and browsing the [...]

2:00 PM | How Astronauts Steer The ISS in Space

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10:29 AM | HEA STEM Workshop: “Rethinking The First Year Computing Curriculum”

In the context of recent (and ongoing) curriculum and qualifications reform for computing education in UK schools, I am hosting a one-day Higher Education Academy workshop in Cardiff in May entitled: Rethinking The First Year Computing Curriculum. This workshop is being held under the auspices of the HEA Computing discipline area, as part of the […]

8:43 AM | Blind Sensor Calibration in Sparse Recovery Using Convex Optimization and Analysis Based Blind Compressive Sensing

Within the past week, we saw two different hardware implementation of compressive sensing in the image/video realm ( Compressive Light Field Photography Using Overcomplete Dictionaries And Optimized Projections, Compressive Sensing by Larry Carin ( compressive hyperspectral camera and Compressive video, Coded aperture compressive temporal imaging also featured on this OSA spotlight on Optics). All this is fine, but deep down one of the most important issue when building hardware […]

3:20 AM | (Guest post) A Call to Action: A Student’s Perspective on Gender Diversity in the Carleton College Computer Science Department

Note: This is a guest post by Alex Voorhees ’13, a Computer Science major and Educational Studies concentrator at Carleton. The post is an assignment for EDUC 395: Senior Seminar. For this assignment, the students write and publish an editorial on some aspect of the seminar’s topic, which this year is Gender, Sexuality, and Schooling. [...]

May 01, 2013

11:00 PM | The Rules of Terror in Horror Movies

When people write about the great directors of our modern era, they often inexplicably leave out people who direct horror films. Yet it often takes an incredibly skilled filmmaker to make a great scary movie. All of the elements, such as the cinematography, pacing music, and editing have to come together and work like a well-oiled machine in the best scary movies.It may have seemed odd that a comedy writer, Carl Gottlieb, was picked to craft the screenplay for Jaws, but as Gottlieb explains, […]

8:37 PM | CSjob: Research Fellow in Compressive Sensing, London

Petros just sent me the following: "....Igor, There is a new opening on the intersection of compressive sensing and civil engineering at City University London (http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AGJ516/research-fellow-in-compressive-sensing/). Can you please advertise it on Nuit Blanche? It is a very promising and exciting project! Thanks, Petros..." Sure Petros, it looks quite interesting indeed!. Here is what the job announcement says: "...Research Fellow in Compressive […]

8:33 PM | Inserting the result of a BLAST into a Database using XSLT.

Here is the XML output of a BLAST:<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE BlastOutput PUBLIC "-//NCBI//NCBI BlastOutput/EN" "NCBI_BlastOutput.dtd"> <BlastOutput> <BlastOutput_program>tblastn</BlastOutput_program> <BlastOutput_version>TBLASTN 2.2.27+</BlastOutput_version> <BlastOutput_reference>Stephen F. Altschul, Thomas L. Madden, Alejandro A. Sch&auml;ffer, Jinghui Z hang, Zheng Zhang, Webb

8:21 PM | Consultation on the Review of ICT and Computer Science Education in Wales

Computer science touches upon all three of my education priorities: literacy, numeracy and bridging the gap. It equips learners with the problem-solving skills so important in life and work. The value of computational thinking, problem-solving skills and information literacy is huge, across all subjects in the curriculum. I therefore believe that every child should have [...]

7:00 PM | The One-Way Trip to the Moon That Could Have Preceded Apollo in 1965

Every discussion of a manned mission to Mars inevitably touches on the practicality of a one-way, no-comin'-back trip. Sending a lone astronaut, or a small team, on a trip to a planet roughly 50 million miles away (when the orbits of Earth and Mars are relatively aligned) becomes much more viable when you don't have the carry all of the fuel they'd need to get back. Private spaceflight project Mars One is now moving forward with this idea, and hopes to establish a settlement on Mars in the year […]

6:09 PM | Calories Burned Playing Exergames in Obese & Normal Weight Children (study)

What is already known about this subject Active video games (AVGs) are being marketed as exercise tools. AVG play can result in light-to-moderate intensity physical activity. What this study... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

6:00 PM | Bertrand Piccard Set to Fly Across the US on Solar Power

In the next few days, Bertrand Piccard will leave San Francisco on an airplane headed to New York. That's a long flight--five hours or so, on your typical 747--but he won't arrive until sometime in June or July. The plane Piccard is flying, dubbed Solar Impulse, only travels at about 50 miles per hour. It's also entirely solar powered, which will make the cross-country flight a historic milestone. Piccard and his partner André Borschberg have spent the better part of a decade designing Solar […]

5:00 PM | Look at DARPA's Robust Robotic Hand

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4:30 PM | The World's Smallest Movie

IBM research has produced a 242 frame stop-motion film featuring animated atoms. That's right, the team arranged atoms and carbon monoxide molecules into position using a needle with an electric current, and shot images using a two-ton tunneling microscope that magnifies atoms by 100 million times. Frames took 10 days of 18 hour shifts to capture, each. The exercise was conducted to spread awareness of science, and the lessons learned from it will be used to explore the use of small groups of […]

3:31 PM | A Boy and His Atom

Some researchers at IBM are so good at playing with atoms, they decided to make a movie (called A Boy and His Atom), by moving atoms. Cool stuff. Computer science connections: implications for storage. Personal connection: the spouse of the scientist leading the group who made the video is a friend from high school.

3:00 PM | Tabletop Tutor: Civilization Building Board Games

I rarely choose a board game based on game mechanics. In my recent board game bestiary, I sorted games roughly by gameplay mechanics, but in reality, I’m not a fan of any particular mechanic. As with video games, I tend to choose board games by theme and immersion. So you won’t find many abstract games in my collection, nor will you find games that excel as “pure” examples of mechanics.Instead, I tend to gravitate towards themes. My game collection is littered with dungeon space […]

12:04 PM | “Closer to Truth”

Two years ago, when I attended the FQXi conference on a ship from Norway to Denmark, I (along with many other conference participants) was interviewed by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, who produces a late-night TV program called “Closer to Truth.” I’m pleased to announce (hat tip: Sean Carroll) that four videos from my interview are finally [...]

6:40 AM | Tested: Centrifugal vs. Masticating Juicers

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1:00 AM | Tested: Replacing My Magazine Subscriptions with Next Issue

I like reading magazines. I like reading magazines a lot. It's my baby bear's porridge of content consumption--a perfect distribution of content formats that's not too shallow or requires too much time investment to digest. The mix of short form "front of book" stories, long form features, illustration, and photography is just right. Plus, coming from a magazine background, I really appreciate the craft that goes into designing and committing to print a publication that people hold in their […]

12:32 AM | Recognizing numbers

I was playing around with SymPy, a symbolic math package for Python, and ran across nsimplify. It takes a floating point number and tries to simplify it: as a fraction with a small denominator, square root of a small integer,…Read more ›

April 30, 2013

10:03 PM | The Beagle’s Biological Voyage Continued

When Charles Darwin took his historic voyage aboard the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836, “big data” was measured in pages. On his travels, the young naturalist produced at least 20 field notebooks, zoological and geological diaries, a catalogue of the thousands of specimens he brought back and a personal journal that would later be [...]

6:55 PM | 70 Years of Buckminster Fuller's Tesselated Worldview

One of the best gags in Aaron Sorkin's West Wing played out when the White House staff dedicated a single day dealing with the small organizations that were ignored the other 364. One of those groups, the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality, petitioned the government to ditch Mercator maps in schools in favor of the Peters Projection map. Why? Because the Mercator map is distorted--we all know Greenland isn't that big--and the organization argues that size is associated with […]

6:29 PM | Richard Feynman Biographical Comic Out Today

There have been many books written about Richard Feynman, but as far as I know, there's only been one biography published in comic form. I picked up a copy of Feynman this morning after a recommendation from Adam, and it was all I could do to put it down and write this post.Adam says, "I've read almost all the books on Feynman and I LOVE THIS ONE. It really teases at something more than just a description of him. You actually feel like you're getting a glimpse of both how incredibly brilliant […]

5:00 PM | Why Some Websites Restrict Password Length

Web security experts have said many times that a longer password is better security--so long as you're using different passwords on different sites. Imayankeedoodledandy would be harder to crack than yank33, even without numbers or symbols. But sometimes we can't make longer passwords because, with little explanation, different websites have different restrictions in place that govern what can and can't go into a password. Ars Technica asked a few such companies to explain their password […]

4:00 PM | What Google's Self-Driving Car Sees

There's an image floating around tech blogs today from a tweet showing an image of what appears to be 3D point cloud data from one of Google's self-driving cars. The image shows a third-person perspective of the car parked at a stoplight, with waves of point data radiating around it identifying signs, trees, pedestrians, and other traffic obstacles. This kind of imagery isn't anything new, though. We know that Google's autnomous cars perceive objects using those bulky sensor devices mounted to […]

3:31 PM | Nuit Blanche in Review (April 2013)

Here is what happened since the last Nuit Blanche in Review (March 2013). When adding the three feeds together, Nuit Blanche has a combined readership through RSS of about 2500. In light of the upcoming shutdown of Google Reader, I pointed to John Cook's crowdsourced answer in one of the traditional around the webs in 78 hours. Those "around the webs in 78 hours" posts are a compilation of other's blogs items of interest. It really is a blogroll of some kind, except more lively. I […]

3:29 PM | The Best Android Smartphone for Your Network (April 2013)

The next-generation Android phones are upon us, and anyone that’s been itching for an upgrade should be sitting at attention. It’s going to be a tough decision between top devices from the likes HTC and Samsung, but let’s take a closer look at what makes the most sense on each network. This is your chance to get a phone you’re going to be happy with for the next year or two, so you’ll want to cover all your bases.Photo credit: Flickr user learnkids2003 via Creative CommonsThis month […]

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