So, after a long absence from the beauty of blogging, I return! This time to chat about my wild and crazy adventures at at Wolfram Science Summer School.
The school is a 3 week program based out of Bentley University, Boston, and appears to have collected quite an international group of 60+ students to learn about, and work on projects, relating to the concepts of Wolfram Science. The basis of which is that simple systems, or computer programs, can demonstrate complex behaviour, ergo, sometimes to understand complexity the trick is to understand the simplicity behind that.
Much of the program is based around Mathematica, a maths program designed for all sorts of analysis. Not being a programmer myself I'm a bit nervous about the whole thing, but I'm pretty hopeful that I'll be able to pick up enough to be able to do what I need to do.
During the program we pick a project to do, and aside from my usual scicomm I'm thinking about doing something either related to data collected during our Arctic field work, that or to do with damming the Mekong, just because I already have a lot written about the Mekong.
From brief chats with some of the other people here they seem to be working at a much higher theoretical level than myself, what with most of my research being based on real world interactions at a very human level. But on the other hand, I get to play with robots in the Arctic.. sooo.. we've all got our strengths.
So far, nothing too much to report, the program begins tomorrow (10am, sleepy heads!) but we do know that Mr. Wolfram himself is roaming these halls, so thinking caps on!
And Friday, that's going to be 4th of July, should be good fun!
The school is a 3 week program based out of Bentley University, Boston, and appears to have collected quite an international group of 60+ students to learn about, and work on projects, relating to the concepts of Wolfram Science. The basis of which is that simple systems, or computer programs, can demonstrate complex behaviour, ergo, sometimes to understand complexity the trick is to understand the simplicity behind that.
Much of the program is based around Mathematica, a maths program designed for all sorts of analysis. Not being a programmer myself I'm a bit nervous about the whole thing, but I'm pretty hopeful that I'll be able to pick up enough to be able to do what I need to do.
During the program we pick a project to do, and aside from my usual scicomm I'm thinking about doing something either related to data collected during our Arctic field work, that or to do with damming the Mekong, just because I already have a lot written about the Mekong.
From brief chats with some of the other people here they seem to be working at a much higher theoretical level than myself, what with most of my research being based on real world interactions at a very human level. But on the other hand, I get to play with robots in the Arctic.. sooo.. we've all got our strengths.
So far, nothing too much to report, the program begins tomorrow (10am, sleepy heads!) but we do know that Mr. Wolfram himself is roaming these halls, so thinking caps on!
And Friday, that's going to be 4th of July, should be good fun!
In celebration of the upcoming 4th of July
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