Michael Conover: Information Visualization For Large-Scale Data Workflows

Motion capture- you never know when I may need to do one of The Rock’s Baywatch stunts/ better safe than sorry.

So, our physics teacher has the strange idea of motivating his students by letting each of us present a physical phenomenal we find interesting to our classmates in a 5-minutes-presentation. And now I need something that is interesting for everyone - even people that usually don't care for physics -, but has interesting facts for someone who's interested in it, too (preferably with an easy experiment). You don't happen to have any ideas, do you?

First of all, your professor is awesome for taking the time to do this. Of the top of my mind, the best one I have is Chladni figures.

Basically take a flat metal plate, fix it at the center and spray some fine sand particles on it.

Using a violin bow, gently excite any edge of the plate to magically witness these beautiful normal mode patterns ( known as Chladni patterns/figures ) forming on the plate.

Also notice that by pinching the plate at different points, the pattern obtained changes.

There is a whole lot of physics that goes behind such a simple phenomenon and I dare say we understand it completely. There are lots of questions on these figures that we have no answer for!

Hope this helps with your presentation. Have a good one!

Gif source video: Steve Mould

https://vimeo.com/175247441

Polish priest blessing a newly opened “Bitcoin embassy.” Warsaw, 2014.

LASER SOCKS!

Game developed by Glen Chiaccchieri where players lose life bar when opponent’s feet is hit with a laser from a pointer, and is a proof-of-concept implementation of the computing concept ‘Hypercard in the Room’:

In the video above two people are playing Laser Socks, a game I invented in an afternoon using a research programming system, common household items, and a couple lines of code.

Players try to point a laser pointer at their opponent’s socks while dodging their opponent’s laser. Whenever they score a hit, the health meter closest to their opponent’s play area fills up with blue light. Whoever gets their opponent’s meter to fill up first wins.

In August 2015, my research group (The Communications Design Group or CDG) had a game jam — an event where participants create games together over the course of a few days. The theme was to make hybrid physical/digital games using a prototype research system Bret Victor and Robert Ochshorn had made called Hypercard in the World. This system was like an operating system for an entire room — it connected cameras, projectors, computers, databases, and laser pointers throughout the lab to let people write programs that would magically add projected graphics and interactivity to physical objects. The point of the jam was to see what playful things you could make with this kind of system. We ended up making more than a dozen new and diverse games.

I made Laser Socks, a game about jumping around and shooting a laser pointer at an opponent’s feet. It was fun, ridiculous, and simple to make. In some ways, Laser Socks became one of the highlight demonstrations of what could be done if there was a medium of expression that integrated dynamic computational elements into the physical world.

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Machine Learning and Big Data Know it Wasn’t You Who Just Swiped Your Credit Card

by Jungwoo Ryoo, The Conversation

You’re sitting at home minding your own business when you get a call from your credit card’s fraud detection unit asking if you’ve just made a purchase at a department store in your city. It wasn’t you who bought expensive electronics using your credit card – in fact, it’s been in your pocket all afternoon. So how did the bank know to flag this single purchase as most likely fraudulent?

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