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And the Winners Are…

The Wolfram Demonstrations Challenge has run its course, and you have participated in droves. It's time to pick the winners. We do things our own way at Wolfram Research. We don't pull slips of paper from a hat or ping-pong balls from a barrel for prize drawings. We write Mathematica programs to tell us who the winners are. Of course. I wrote the program, but not wanting to expose myself to accusations of improperly influencing my laptop, I didn't run it myself. Stephen Wolfram did and sent me the results. And the winners are...
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Products

Mathematica Q&A: Sow, Reap, and Parallel Programming

Got questions about Mathematica? The Wolfram Blog has answers! We'll regularly answer selected questions from users around the web. You can submit your question directly to the Q&A Team using this form. This week's question comes from Patrick, a student: How can I use Sow & Reap across parallel kernels? Before we answer this question, a review of the useful functions Sow and Reap is in order. Sow and Reap are used together to build up a list of results during a computation. Sow[expr] puts expr aside to be collected later. Reap collects these and returns a list: The first part of the list is the regular result of the computation. The second part is everything that was “sown”. Sow and Reap are ideally suited to situations in which you don't know in advance how many results you will get. For example, suppose that you want to find simple initial conditions that lead to "interesting" results in Conway's game of life, the famous two-dimensional cellular automaton:
Andrew Moylan, Technical Content Specialist, Technical Communication and Strategy Group
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Announcing the Wolfram Demonstrations Challenge

As a long-time developer at Wolfram Research, I can attest that the job requires superhuman discipline and self-control. Those who lack fortitude are soon undone by the irresistible functionality we build into Mathematica and spend their days exploring the esoteric topics they've always wondered about instead of building more great technology. The situation has recently gotten worse.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Best of Blog

Mathematica Q&A: Plotting Trig Functions in Degrees

Got a question about Mathematica? The Wolfram Blog has answers! We'll regularly answer selected questions from users around the web. You can submit your question directly to the Q&A Team using this form. This week's question comes from Brian, who is a part-time math teacher: How do you plot trigonometric functions in degrees instead of radians? Trigonometric functions in Mathematica such as Sin[x] and Cos[x] take x to be given in radians:
Andrew Moylan, Technical Content Specialist, Technical Communication and Strategy Group
Announcements & Events

Launching a New Era in Large-Scale Systems Modeling

Over the past 25 years, we’ve been fortunate enough to make a mark in all sorts of areas of science and technology. Today I’m excited to announce that we’re in a position to tackle another major area: large-scale systems modeling. It’s a huge and important area, long central to engineering, and increasingly central to fields like […]

Stephen Wolfram
Education & Academic

Explore the Computational Universe at NKS Summer School 2011

There's still time to apply to NKS Summer School 2011, a complex systems research school based on Stephen Wolfram's seminal tract on the subject, A New Kind of Science (NKS), published in 2002. The first NKS Summer School was held soon after the book's publication, and, this summer, Wolfram Research will host its 9th annual program, centered on doing research on the topics and methods introduced by the book. The 2011 NKS Summer School is being held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA from June 27 through July 15, 2011. The concepts introduced in NKS have already made significant contributions to research and technological innovation.
Abigail Nussey, Special Projects Technical Project Manager, Special Projects
Education & Academic

Built to Last: Understanding Earthquake Engineering

Last week, the world was shocked by the news of massive earthquakes and devastating tsunamis in Japan. The event is still unfolding and could become one of the most tragic natural disasters in recent history. Scientific understanding and modeling of complicated physical phenomena and engineering based on such analysis is imperative to prevent unnecessary loss of life from natural disasters. In this post, we'll explore the science behind earthquakes to better understand why they happen and how we prepare for them. Note: The dynamic examples in this post were built using Mathematica. Download the Computable Document Format (CDF) file provided to interact with the simulations and further explore the topics. First, let's start with locations. The following visualization is created from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) database of earthquakes that occurred between 1973 and early 2011 whose magnitudes were over 5. As you can clearly see, the epicenters are concentrated in narrow areas, usually on the boundaries of tectonic plates. In particular, there are severe seismic activities around the Pacific, namely the "Ring of Fire". Unfortunately, Japan is sitting right in the middle of this highly active area.
Yu-Sung Chang, Technical Communication & Strategy Group
Leading Edge

The Distance between “Zero” and “Hero”: Exploring Synonym Chains with Mathematica

There is an old word game where you try to get from one word to another through connections with other words. For example, you might get from “cold” to “stationary” via the word “frozen”, since “cold” and “frozen” are synonyms and “frozen” and “stationary” are synonyms, albeit for different meanings of the word “frozen”. I thought of this game when I started to learn the new graph theory functions in Mathematica 8. We can think of the words in the English language as the vertices of one large graph and the synonym connections between them as the graph edges. If you do that, it looks like this: So let's see if we can generally solve this synonym chain problem.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
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