For under £10, you can put together a microcontroller development platform, ready to program directly from your PC over USB using free Arduino software. Once programmed, your microcontroller will run autonomously, untethered from your PC, powered by as small a battery power supply as a single 1.5V AAA or 3V CR2032 coin cell. You can have it interact with its environment using dozens of low-cost sensors and motors. Everything you need to explore the exciting world of embedded systems is available to you, typically for less than a day pass on the London underground.
A homebrew Arduino Nano microcontroller development kit for under £12 (including optional OLED display)
If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to the Computing Series: Software as a Force Multiplier, Sections 1-3.
“Everything” you need for ultra-fast desktop search
1. Everything(tm) is an ultra-fast desktop search utility that can scan through hundreds of thousands of files in milliseconds using a pre-built and real-time updated index.
“Everything” brings order to information growing at scale (documents, photographs, source code, spreadsheets, etc.), and tames the problem of proliferating folder trees.
Everything is a fast desktop search utility that can index 1 million files in less than 1 minute, and generate search queries in milliseconds.
We’ve all been in the scenario of searching through electronic documents for a document you know you prepared three, maybe four weeks prior… maybe it was longer… and now you can’t remember where you saved it… or in what format: was it a quickly written text file, a word document, a few paragraphs within One Note, on a desktop post-it note, or did you email yourself from your phone?… After trying different Windows searches in various recently used folders and looking through Word, Excel, and PDF files, and trying to remember possible filenames to search for, at some point you prepare mentally for the moment when you will give up the search and attempt to redo the missing work, salvaging as much of it as you can remember.
The general problem of wasted effort locating information we know we have, occurs more often than we’d like to admit. With “Everything“, it can be better.
“Any [one] can make things bigger, more complex, … It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.” – Ernst F. Schumacher, 1973, from “Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered”1
At First Glance
Forth2 is a remarkable computer language born in 1968 that exemplifies the low-fat computing ethos of its inventor Charles ‘Chuck’ Moore (b.1938), for whom simplicity and minimalism were central themes of his life’s work.3 Forth was the first in a series of revolutionary ideas in computing practice4, followed by a simple VLSI design environment written entirely in Forth (OKAD5) and which Chuck used to design Forth-in-hardware chips6 culminating in the GA-144, a 144-core low-power (0.4uW standby power, 7 picojoules per instruction), high-performance (1.4 nanoseconds per instruction, or 700 MIPS per core) parallel computer on a single chip. Continue reading this article…
OKAD was built on top of OK, which was Chuck Moore’s One Kilobyte operating system. OKAD2 was built within ColorForth and benefited from 10 years of Chuck Moore’s experience designing chips. ↩
The history is interesting: 1) Jeff Fox’s history, 2) Chuck Moore’s history↩
Building a fully analog electronic piano using only resistors, capacitors, and transistors, is an insightful experiment in electronic sound generation from first principles. I designed and built a 13-key analog piano in early 2019 using discrete through-hole components on a breadboard powered off a 9V DC battery. The design creates 13 astable multivibrator oscillator circuits, each able to be tuned to a given note frequency in the C5 to C6 range. The outputs of the oscillators are collected (mixed) to create a polyphonic analog audio signal that is amplified and run through an 8-ohm speaker. The device fits into an 11x25cm footprint. Check out how it sounds! (To hear the explanation of how it works, start at the beginning.)
Electronics, computing, and applied mathematics are gateway subjects to modern technology.
For young learners, we believe that electronics provides an ideal entry point. It is practical, with manipulables. It is easy to see cause and effect. With the right equipment and approach, exploring electronics can begin for children as early as 3 years old.
There are many tangible benefits for young learners getting started in electronics:
fine motor skill development,
an intuition for how technological things work at a component level,
the integration of technology into the palette for imagination and creativity,
improved self-confidence,
strengthening a growth mindset,
building resilience,
raising the threshold of frustration,
better dexterity,
stronger focus.
A three year old wiring his first circuit and the joy at seeing the LED, which he selected, light up!
*New!* (29 Aug 2020) – Turtle Logo v1.8 (portable) is available! Developer kit with source code included. Suitable from ages 3 years to adult. (970 lines of Forth code).
1. Inspiring the next generation of technology builders.
A challenge facing parents and teachers is how to help children develop ‘builder’ relationships with technology rather than being limited to the passive consumption of content created by others. The consensus on what’s important for older kids and adults is clear: coding. This enables children to participate in the creation of their own technological “micro-worlds” — environments rich in educational potential.[14]
This autumn, spurred by having our own young children (one aged 4 years, the other 16 months), we began an experiment, the result of which is a Turtle Logo program for Windows computers (freely downloadable) that is simple enough to be accessible for children from 3 years and older, while providing an extensible platform that can grow with the child.
The long-term goal is to enable children to express their creativity, artistry, and natural ‘builder’ impulses using coding, computer graphics, and robotics as readily as the previous generation could using paints, brushes, and building blocks.
Turtle Logo – Inspiring the next generation of technology builders.
Updated: 2014-11-23 MetaMoji Note: A worthy digital replacement to Pencil & Notebook for creating freehand diagrams on Windows and Android.
Pencil & Notebook are hard to beat when diagrams, equations, and words are desired in roughly equal measure, which is common when working as an engineer, mathematician, or product designer. To be sure, there are good digital tools for subsets of these (example LaTeX), but not when all three are combined. But now there’s a new suite of digital freehand tools that are almost good enough to set aside the notebook and pencil permanently. The core of this toolkit is a vector-based graphics canvas (software) and an ultra-precise stylus (hardware).
Example of Freehand Digital Pencil, using Adobe Ideas. Courtesy of Simon Raper, Drunks and Lampposts
If you use Apple iOS, you may already be using Adobe Ideas, which does the job brilliantly and is free (see this excellent article by Simon Raper). [1] But Adobe has no plans to release this to either Windows RT or Android, so for the rest of us, that’s a show-stopper, until now, with MetaMoji…
Duelling with pistols. If you were the one issuing the challenge, your dilemma was that custom dictated that your adversary be allowed to shoot first. Only then, if you were still able to shoot, would you be permitted to seek “satisfaction”.
How much of an advantage does the first shooter really have? In this article, we build a simple probability model, and implement a numerical model in a few lines of R code.
Two gentleman face off in the snow. Convention dictates the challenged shoots first.
19-21.Oct.2015 (Paris, France) 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Science & Advanced Analytics (DSAA) will consist of two main tracks, Research and Applications. The Research Track is aimed at collecting contributions related to theoretical foundations of Data Science and Data Analytics. The Applications Track is aimed at collecting contributions related to applications of Data Science and Data Analytics in real life scenarios.
Digital & Web Analytics | Predictive Analytics | Big Data Summits
14-15.May.2014 (London, UK)
At the Bishopsgate Conference Centre in London for this year’s Analytics Innovation Summit.
Booking.com: Data Science
6.Dec.2013 (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
At Booking.com’s head office in Amsterdam, one of the leading players in the eTravel space. The Booking team has a raft of interesting problems in front of them, a bunch of smart, capable data scientists, and a real appetite for applying statistical / machine learning techniques to unlock the next level of benefits. A refreshing visit!
Silicon Milkroundabout 6.0: Analytics
16.Nov, 2013 (London, UK)
At Silicon Milkroundabout 6.0 this weekend. Key question: To what extent are predictive analytics technologies at the heart of the next generation of startups?
(Location: The Old Truman Brewery, 81 Brick Lane, London E1 6QL)
Update:
There are several promising startups in UK’s East End (Silicon Valley lite). The interesting ones (to my mind) were in retail analytics, peer-to-peer lending, even a novel education startup attempting to exploit machine learning techniques. Although the recruitment atmosphere detracts somewhat, SMR is a useful way to assess the next batch of promising start-ups.
23-24.Oct, 2013 (London, UK)
At the Predictive Analytics World Conference for at least part of the Conference, schedule permitting. The programme can be found here: PAW 2013 Programme
Advanced Analytics | Big Data | Hadoop | Social Media | Digital Innovation
30.Apr-1.May, 2013 (London, UK)
At the Advanced Analytics Innovation Summit. This year’s summits are being held at the Lancaster London Hotel, London, UK. (PDF Programme)
(Online Programmes) Advanced Analytics | Big Data | Hadoop | Social Media | Digital Innovation
Crowd-Source Analytics & Entrepreneurship
9.Mar.2013 (London, UK)
At London Business School discussing the application of advanced data discovery algorithms for a new venture crowd-sourcing business concept.
SAP F&R User Conference
18-19.Sep,2012 (Dresden, Germany)
At the SAP Forecasting & Replenishment User Conference in Dresden, Germany, at the Maritim Hotel & International Congress Centre. This Conference is well attended by senior technical staff from SAF (Simulation, Analysis, and Forecasting) group, which has now become SAP’s Centre of Excellence based out of Schweiz, Switzerland after being acquired by SAP in 2009/2010.
Stats: 1,089,379 article views since 2010 (Aug '24 update)
Dear Readers:
Welcome to the conversation! We publish long-form pieces as well as a curated collection of spotlighted articles covering a broader range of topics. Notifications for new long-form articles are through the feeds (you can join below). We love hearing from you. Feel free to leave your thoughts in comments, or use the contact information to reach us!
Reading List…
Looking for the best long-form articles on this site? Below is a curated list by the main topics covered.
