Archive for the ‘Academia’ Category
Singing Fingers iPad Application
Singing Fingers from jay silver on Vimeo.
LINKS:
Singing Fingers
MIT
Jay Silver
Vimeo
Design Boom
Flylyf
Crib Candy
LuminAR
ITP Spring Show 2010 (via Rocketboom, Motherboard TV)
Global Bicycle & Automobile Production, 1950 To Present
Universal Health Care Around The World: Infographic
LINKS:
Chartsbin
The Discreet Window, Intelligent Blinds For Home/Office
The Discreet Window from Ishac Bertran on Vimeo.
LINKS:
Ishac Bertran
Vimeo
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design
Information Aesthetics
Vectroave
Trendhunter
Yanko Designs
Detroit Hoop Dream: DIY Basketball Project
Average Age for First Sexual Experience by Country
ARTICLE: Leaf Veins the Future of Water/Electricity Distribution Networks
FIRST 3 PARAGRAPHS:
A team of biophysicists at Rockefeller University recently published a paper in Physical Review Letters about a new way to design distribution networks based on the veins that carry water and nutrients in most tree leaves. This is a great example of biomimicry! Evolution by natural selection maybe be blind, but it has had billions of years of trial-and-error to figure out efficient and robust ways to do things. The interconnecting vein loops in leaves are a good example of that, and we can learn from them.
“Operations researchers have long believed that the best distribution networks for many scenarios look like trees, with a succession of branches stemming from a central stalk and then branches from those branches and so on, to the desired destinations. But this kind of network is vulnerable: If it is severed at any place, the network is cut in two and cargo will fail to reach any point “downstream” of the break.”
A good example of that can be seen on the two pictures in this post. The big dots are damage in the network. In the pic on top, you can see that the flow isn’t stopped, and can go everywhere in the network. In the second pic, the flow is stopped everywhere downstream of the damage point.
LINKS:
Treehugger
Science Daily
Rockefeller University
Physical Review Letters
Biomimicry Institute (Blog)
The Mathematics of a Hollywood Scene
From the Article:
“Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical pattern that describes the human attention span. The pattern was derived by scientists at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1990s who studied the attention spans of subjects performing hundreds of trials. The team then converted the measurements of their attention spans into wave forms using a mathematical technique known as the Fourier transform.”
LINKS:
PhysOrg
Popular Science
New Scientist
Telegraph
James Cutting
“Attention & the Evolution of Hollywood Film” (PDF)
