I admit it. Once in a while, I wake up after having a dream with a re-occurring theme of algorithms, technology, and programming. It happened again this morning, inspiring me to take a look at the Wolfram Mathematica website.
Here are a few on-line seminars I might take a look at soon:
"To give a broad overview of the major new features in Mathematica 8, including free-form linguistic input and Wolfram|Alpha integration, probability and statistics, finance, control systems, graphs and networks, improved image processing, wavelet analysis, C code generation, and more, using example-driven material."
FYI: For those of you who are curious to know more about my technology dreams, I plan to devote a few posts about them in the future. Here's a link to a post I wrote after waking up from a dream about haptic interfaces:
"marker/music is an interactive sound and music map created by Darren Solomon, the students and faculty of Northern State University, and members of the community of Aberdeen, South Dakota. From October 18th - 22nd, 2010, the group shot over 70 videos in the area, from which 12 were chosen to be embedded in a custom Google map. The project was inspired by Darren's inbflat.net, and is intended to explore the concept by producing the entire project locally in a single community, rather than through internet-based crowdsourcing." -marker/music website
I'm glad I decided to glance at Twitter today and find a tweet with a link to Seb LeeDesilse's Creatively Digital website. If you are interested in learning more about HTML5, Canvas, the iPad, multi-touch, etc, the site might be worth taking your time to explore. Here is the link: Multi-touch game controller in JavaScript HTML5 for iPad (Seb Lee-Delisle, Creatively Digital, 4/15/11)
Seb's post includes the following video, plus sample code:
About Seb Lee-Delisle: "Seb is a digital media consultant and founding partner at award-winning agency Plug-in Media. He specialises in programming creative visual effects and interfaces for games, physics, motion detection, 3D and visual effects (like particle systems). His work has pushed the boundaries of what is possible both on and off the web, and won a BAFTA for the Plug-in Media project Big and Small for the BBC."
"He lectures and runs training courses world-wide and speaks at conferences worldwide such as iDesign, FMX, FITC, Droidcon, Adobe MAX and many others. He blogs at sebleedelisle.com and tweets at @seb_ly."
The video wall below streams 4,500 videos through Fusion-io's NAND flash card. It can take care of 1 million transactions per second, the equivalent of 6 gigabytes of throughput per second, according to a recent Computerworld post by Lucas Mearian.
SOMEWHAT RELATED Driving Data Warehousing with ioMemory Fusion-io Whitepaper 1/11/11 Transcription: Fusion-io CEO David Flynn on Enabling a New Class of Cloud Computing Apps Bert Latamore, Wikibon, 4/8/11 "We're talking about a fundamental new building-block. So it impacts and will impact everything in the entire data center. In the database world it typically means that a database server can do about 10X the throughput, for the same server. And those queries are answered 30%-40% faster. So it means faster page loads, more throughput per server. So Answers.com retrofitted their MySQL scale-out database tier and saw 9X the throughput per server. What they chose to do was to shrink the database farm four-to-one. So they got a 75% consolidation, and with that remaining one-out-of-four servers they were still getting more than twice the throughput they had before." - David Flynn
An interesting post by Nathan Yau, of Flowing Data, crossed my path today. I anticipated something about interesting information visualizations, but to my surprise, I had a chance to view a couple of videos of.... folk dancers! Nathan shared information about about Algo-rythmics, a project created by researchers from Sapientia University (Romania) that blends art, culture, and technology to enhance computer programming education:
Before viewing the videos below, take a moment to read the abstract from a research paper written by some of the people behind the Algo-rythmics project:
"Over the last decades more and more research has analysed relatively new or rediscovered teaching–learning concepts like blended, hybrid, multi-sensory or technologically enhanced learning. This increased interest in these educational forms can be explained by new exciting discoveries in brain research and cognitive psychology, as well as by the accelerated integration of technology (computers, intranets, internet, etc.) in education. We have investigated how the educationally valuable outcomes of these trends could be implemented in computer-programming education and in what ways this process could be catalysed by arts (dance, music, rhythm, theatrical role-playing). We present a theoretical basis for technologically and artistically enhanced multi-sensory teaching–learning strategies. This work focuses particularly on how dance can be involved in computer science classes."
"In the case of each algorithm we chose such implementation version that fits best with the characteristics of the corresponding folk dance. After students have understood the key features of the algorithm the teacher should discuss with them the possibilities the algorithm can be optimized." AlgoRythmics (Also see the Alog-rythmics Facebook page)
FYI: There will be additional algorithm concepts presented through folk dances in the near future on the AlgoRythmic's YouTube channel.
Enjoy!
Insert-sort with Romanian Folk Dance
Bubble Sort with Hungarian ("Csango") Folk Dance
Credits (as listed on the AlgoRythmics YouTube Channel)