Towers of Hanoi with Onion Rings

The Coral and Maple labs will occasionally go out to lunch together. Not that long ago, we all ate at Red Robin where they have ketchup smotherable onion rings that we ordered. Each onion on the skewer gets progressively larger and, as we are computer scientists, we immediately thought about the Towers of Hanoi. Our server kindly gave us two additional skewers and after a few odd looks, we were solving the problem.



We need to reinact the solution as we were all hungry and wanted to eat more than perform recursive moves. Keep an eye peeled for our next computer science canonical example in food.

iPod Hearing Loss

This semester at UMBC, the CSEE Department is offering a class called "Topics in Signal Processing: Digital Signal Processing for Speech and Hearing Disorders." Being that some of the research in the Coral Lab centers on language learning (involving speech processing) and that body of work, in general, relies on noise-free input, this class has made me consider not only a noisy environment, but also noise that can be introduced during language comprehension and processing. Ironically, in the course, we study technologies and techniques that can restore or improve hearing (e.g. cochlear implants) using some of the same engineering that can cause hearing loss (e.g. abuse of standard speakers).

On a college campus, it's a rare day to not see those little white bud headphones presumably attached to one of the myriad iPod models. Recently a lawsuit was filed against Apple Computer, Inc. asserting the device does not adequate limit sound intensity and can lead to hearing loss. The best I could find on technical iPod specifications and advice was that the frequency response is between 20Hz and 20,000Hz and that unknown experts are warning about the dangers of prolonged, high intensity iPod listening. There is more to come...

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Dated -- 25 January 2005

A post via email to the CORAL Mailing List:

According to a post on Slashdot, "New Scientist is reporting that UK
researchers have created a computer (story) that can learn rock, paper, scissors (research site) by observing humans. CogVis uses visual information to recognize events and objects in addition to learning by observing."