Let’s put Belgium on the map: International Scratch Day 2012 @ Antwerp

This is a free workshop for kids who want to step into the wonderful world of programming, creativity and computational thinking. For more information please visit http://day.scratch.mit.edu/event/593

Tags: kids, programming, scratch

“Making Musical Apps – Real-time audio synthesis on Android and iOS” couldn’t be more timely: I have started to play with Pd (Pure Data) recently and was wondering whether I could transfer my knowledge of Pd to other environments, such as my Android-powered smartphone. Written by Peter Brinkmann, the creator of the fantastic libpd library, this is the definitive introduction. For me it served not only as a guide to Pd on Android but also as a basic tutorial for development in Android (the book also includes a very short primer for Pd for beginners). Before this book I had not created any Android app at all and with the help of the book I found myself compiling and running sample music and sound apps on my Android phone in a few hours. What else can one ask for? More Pd and libpd knowledge would definitely not hurt but it would probably book to at least 300 – 400 pages. Besides, there are excellent and freely available resources for designing sound systems using Pd, and the book provides pointers to them.

In other words, if you want to build Pd powered applications using libpd for iPhone, iPad or Android phones and tablets, and are in need of a very quick guide to get you up to speed, then look no further. But also keep in mind that Pd system is a very sophisticated sound processing environment which requires dedication to master all of its aspects and details. Nevertheless, once you interactively design your sound application on the desktop, this book includes the necessary material to port your application to other devices. And for the impatient hackers out there, it also includes detailed explanations of RjDj (iOS) and ScenePlayer (Android) systems (and PdDroidParty and HTML based pd-webkit-droid) which help you run your Pd patches on respective devices without writing a single line of Objective C or Java code.

In addition to the sample apps that come with libpd (freely available from its GitHub repository), you can also get the source code of the sample applications and Pd patches described in the book from https://github.com/nettoyeurny/Making-Musical-Apps (which can serve as a solid starting point for your future projects). And if you ever need some technical help after debugging your libpd based app, be assured that the forum at http://noisepages.com/groups/pd-everywhere/forum/ is very responsive.

Tags: Android, iOS, iPad, iPhone, java, libpd, Pd, Pure Data

Can you understand the modern world you live in without having any idea about the following terms and the concepts they convey: ‘inflation’, ‘unemployment’, ‘advertisement’, ‘capitalism’, ‘liberalism’, ‘democracy’, ‘civil rights’, ‘energy’? In order to think about some field, to understand some aspects of our daily lives, and to communicate about them to the others, we need the terms describing them. Just like the terms given in the first sentence of this paragraph, the terms that became a part of our daily communication, we need terms and concepts to understand how our mind works in the modern world and what kind of pitfalls we face while we’re trying make thousands of decisions and form ideas every day.

So it is time that we learn about ‘anchoring effects’, ‘narrow framing’, ‘excessive coherence’, ‘endowment effect’, ‘planning fallacy’, ‘the illusion of validity’, and many other aspects of decision making and thinking, so that we can understand the processes we encounter every day much better.
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From their exciting web page:

“The International Space Apps Challenge team has collected these challenges from throughout NASA and our international partners to serve as an inspiration for projects that could be created. Our goal is to provide a platform for people interested in space exploration to get together to work on amazing projects together, and we encourage you to come up with your own projects and submit them for inclusion on this list on the Challenge Submission page.”

I’m happy to see that Istanbul was one of the selected locations.

Some of the challenges are:

Fragile Oasis: Map-a-Difference
Visualize the “All-too-Common Astronomy/Solar System Misconceptions”
Aurora Layer for Google Earth
Dark Skies App
Handheld Hardware for Citizen Science
NASA Planetary Data System Interface
Create Semantic Data Descriptor File
HTML5 App to access NASA Earth Observations website
Suborbital Payload for Citizen Science (Pressurized)
MathTrax Challenges
A New Command and Control Protocol for CubeSats

Tags: apps, challenge, codeathon, nasa, space