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Education & Academic

Wolfram Summer Schools and Summer Camps

Imagine people from all around the world, young and old, neuroscientists and quantum physicists, Arduino hackers and music composers, gathered with Stephen Wolfram and his team in one place to discover new science and technology. That’s the Wolfram Science Summer School, which for the last decade or so has been my favorite time of the year. When it was founded in 2003, the school’s focus was on Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, but its scope has expanded to include what is now called Wolfram Science. Stephen Wolfram explained in a blog post last year how this school is like entrepreneurship science. It’s not about doing the same old stuff, as you might get in a typical academic environment.
Computation & Analysis

Build Your Own Weather Station in a Snap with the Wolfram Cloud!

Recently Stephen Wolfram announced the Wolfram Data Drop, which is a great new tool to upload any type of data from any type of device. I'll show how you can use the Wolfram Data Drop with a weather station you build using some basic hardware and a few lines of code. Once completed, your device will take temperature measurements every second for 60 seconds, and upload their average value to the Wolfram Data Drop every minute. This will give you 60 data points per hour and 1,440 data points per day. With this data you can use Wolfram Programming Cloud to understand how the temperature changes over time. You can find the exact times in a given day when the temperature was the highest or lowest, when the temperature changed the fastest, and maybe even use the data to make predictions! Can you beat your local weather station and make a prediction that is better?
Computation & Analysis

New in the Wolfram Language: TimelinePlot

A few years ago we created a timeline of the history of systematic data and computable knowledge, which you can look at online. I wrote the code that placed events along the timeline, and then our graphic designers did the real work in deciding where to put the labels, choosing fonts and colors, and doing all the other things that go into creating a production-quality poster. Fast-forward a bit, and last year we added NumberLinePlot to the Wolfram Language to visualize points, intervals, and inequalities. Once people started seeing the number lines, we began getting requests for similar plots, but with dates and times, so we decided it was time to tackle TimelinePlot.
Education & Academic

Wolfram Demonstrations Project: 10,000 Apps Strong

Today we're excited to announce that the Wolfram Demonstrations Project has crossed the 10,000 Demonstrations mark and is now supporting the latest versions of the Wolfram Language and CDF Player. Launched in 2007, the Demonstrations Project is the largest open web repository of peer-reviewed interactive knowledge apps. With examples ranging from elementary math to medical image processing, the site fulfills a need for professionally vetted, sophisticated, and easy-to-use resources for students, educators, publishers, and anyone looking to communicate technical concepts with graphic clarity.
Announcements & Events

The Wolfram Data Drop Is Live!

Where should data from the Internet of Things go? We’ve got great technology in the Wolfram Language for interpreting, visualizing, analyzing, querying and otherwise doing interesting things with it. But the question is, how should the data from all those connected devices and everything else actually get to where good things can be done with […]

Best of Blog

Find Waldo Faster

Martin Handford can spend weeks creating a single Where's Waldo puzzle hiding a tiny red and white striped character wearing Lennon glasses and a bobble hat among an ocean of cartoon figures that are immersed in amusing activities. Finding Waldo is the puzzle's objective, so hiding him well, perhaps, is even more challenging. Martin once said, "As I work my way through a picture, I add Wally when I come to what I feel is a good place to hide him." Aware of this, Ben Blatt from Slate magazine wondered if it's possible "to master Where's Waldo by mapping Handford's patterns?" Ben devised a simple trick to speed up a Waldo search. In a sense, it's the same observation that allowed Jon McLoone to write an algorithm that can beat a human in a Rock-Paper-Scissors game. As Jon puts it, "we can rely on the fact that humans are not very good at being random."
Education & Academic

Why Alan Turing Has Already Won, No Matter How The Imitation Game Does at the Oscars

When I was invited to join the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee in 2008 by Professor Barry Cooper to prepare for the Alan Turing Year in 2012, I would have never imagined that just a few years later, Turing's life and work would have gained sufficient public attention to become the subject of a Hollywood-style feature film, nor that said movie would go on to earn eight Oscar nominations.