Bellow is a short video, “The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D” which makes you wonder at the size of the universe.
September 25, 2009
August 28, 2009
Robotic Hand Video
Check out this amazing high speed robot hand demonstrating it’s ability to throw and catch, spin a pen, tie knots, dribble a ping-pong ball and use tools designed for humans:
Then, if you liked that, check out Hizook – The Robotics News Portal, for robotics information, articles and videos.
August 14, 2009
Cosmic Time
Nice non-technical documentary:
Cosmic Time – A documentary about time. (runtime: 1 hour) (T3)
No background knowledge is required, and the video offers an interesting introduction to some physics concepts.
August 7, 2009
Free Stanford Engineering Courses
“For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world.” It just so happens that three of the courses currently available are on areas of artificial intelligence:
There is lots of other good stuff as well, for example I have been watching a great course on Linear Dynamical Systems. Each of the courses is a set of 20 75 minute lectures (that’s a total of 25 hours per course), so there is a LOT of material here. All of the lectures I have watched so far have been well presented, and expertly explained, so this really is a great source of information. Check out the main page here.
July 29, 2009
The Linguists
‘The Linguists’ is a one hour documentary about two linguists travelling the world documenting dying languages. “Like modern-day explorers, the two academics featured in The Linguists travel to forgotten places around the globe to unearth rare treasures—in this case, endangered languages.” I found the video on Babelgum:
The Linguists – (run-time: 1 hour and 4 minutes)
It’s a great documentation, especially for anyone with interests in linguistics, cultural studies, anthropology or even something like knowledge representation theory. Also, the colours in lots of the tribal footage are really cool, especially in the parts shot in India. You should totally watch it.
July 24, 2009
Arithmetic, Population and Energy
Bellow is a link to a recording of a lecture titled “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” given by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, Professor Emeritus from the department of physics at The University of Colorado, which has been uploaded under the title: “The Most Important Video You’ll Ever See”, and even though that might not be the case, this video is certainly worth watching:
Arithmetic, Population and Energy by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett (run-time: approx 80 mins, consists of 8 parts)
In the lecture Dr. Bartlett argues that “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”.
July 5, 2009
The Devious Logic of Metaphors
Yesterday I watched another interesting Microsoft Research Lecture:
The Devious Logic of Metaphors by Leroy Searle
The talk covers the problems of metaphors, both philosophical and literary, as well as discussing the diffuculties metaphors pose in the field of artificial intelligence. Leroy Searle uses several poems as sources of examples over the course of the talk, and ends with some analysis of The Tempest. As before with Microsoft Reaserch Lectures, I had to watch this talk in an internet explorer tab in order for it to work.
July 2, 2009
Video Lecture Search Engine
A little while ago I attempted to use the ‘custom search engine’ feature on Google to create a tool specifically for finding free on-line talks and lectures, focusing mainly on academic subjects. It’s ‘kind of works’ at the moment, and currently searches around 30 sites. Here’s the link:
I will try to improve it over the next few days or so; refining and expanding the sites it searches etc. In the mean time, search away!
Also, I might try to compile some kind of list of other good custom search engines out there, and then post that up here too, so if you know any, let me know.
July 1, 2009
The Next Generation of Neural Networks
I recently watched ‘The Next Generation of Neural Networks‘, a Google Tech Talk given by Geoffrey Hinton in late 2007, and although it is nearly 2 years old, which is fairly old in this kind of field, I still found it extremely interesting and exciting.
I then went and checked out Geoffrey Hinton’s homepage, which has lots of interesting content, and I found this image, which shows 2500 English words layed out in 2D space in accordance with some machine learned word feature vectors, (if you are wondering what ‘word feature vectors’ are, they are discussed in the above video).This image is a pretty cool example of some of the neural netwrok techniques, for example, look at the clustering of countries, months and names at the top (in three distinct patches), nice!
June 28, 2009
The Drunkard’s Walk
Below is the link to a talk on randomness by physicist Leonard Mlodinow, which mainly focuses on the contents of his book of the same name:
“The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives” (runtime 56:57)Â (T3)
(For some reason the talk didn’t seem to work for me in firefox, so I had to switch to IE, (well, an IE tab), so if you are having issues getting the video to play this might be one possible solution.) The talk is interesting, and includes many real life examples. It concludes with some discussion of the Monty Hall problem and a seemingly paradoxical ‘two children’ puzzle.
The talk is accompanied by slides, which can be synced with the video.
Like Dust Thrown 
