Miscellaneous Multimedia

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Videos

Design

• 
  Design and the Elastic Mind, a Charlie Rose interview with Paula Antonelli, curator of the MoMA exhibit of the same name. On charlierose.com.
• Treating Design as Art, by Paula Antonelli, at the TED conference, Jan 17, 2008.

• 
  Powers of Ten, a film by Charles and Ray Eames. A wonderful journey through the very small and the very large. A classic film. Can also be viewed on line here.

Visualization

Nature by Numbers

A movie illustrating Fibonacci series, and the golden ratio, among other mathematical concepts. The movie is made by Eterea Studios

"The animation begins by presenting a series of numbers. This is a very famous and recognized sequence since many centuries ago in the Western World thanks to Leonardo of Pisa, a thirteenth century Italian mathematician, also called Fibonacci. So it is known as Fibonacci Sequence, even although it had been described much earlier by Indian mathematicians."

Prefuse

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A wmv movie on the different features and easy programmability of Prefuse.

Robotics

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  BigDog: A video of BigDog, the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. More videos can be found at www.bostondynamics.com

History of Computers

• 
  Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine

• 
  History of Apple Computers

• History of computing: A quick overview of the history of computers, mentioning Zuse, Ibm, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniack, Steve Jobs.

• The history of Computers, Part I

• History of computers, 1939 to present

• Computer History: A nice coverage, starting with Babbage, and mentioning Atanasof, Colossus, Zuse, Eniac, Apple I, IBM, Altair, Radio Shack TRS80.

• 
  When computers were human, by David Grier. First 45 minutes provide nice coverage of the human side of computing.

Excerpt from http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7999.html:

Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term "computer" referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology.

Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother's casual remark, "I wish I'd used my calculus," hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world.

• 
  YouTube's Selection of Computer History videos. Great stuff!

Various Presentations

• 
  Presentations (flash movies) of the history and examples of data visualizations for Kahn Institute workshop.
• Movie for Presentation of the Major, Oct 08
• SigmaXi Cloud Computing presentation, Spring 2010

Tools

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• downloadyoutubevideos.com: reliable system to download YouTube videos
• How to make a screencast for your Web site from webdesignerdepot.com ( cached copy)