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Introduction
According to Wikipedia, multimedia is media that uses multiple forms of information content and information processing (e.g. text, audio, graphics, animation, video, interactivity) to inform or entertain the (user) audience. Multimedia also refers to the use of (but not limited to) electronic media to store and experience multimedia content. In fine art it is a synonym for traditional mixed media as well as technological new media (ArtLex, NWD). Rich media is also a synonym for multimedia. Here at TEWM, we are passionate about both technology and multimedia and will keep you informed in the latest technological inventions as they become available. Become a Sponsor!
Graphic Design
New pages on how to design a Web page with impact. General Graphic Design Index page.
General Graphic Design Basics
Clarity in web page design, Colour, Contrast, Readabilty, Effective text, Imagery, Attention Map, The Brain's Strengths
Page layout
Layout for web page design, Containment, Alignment, Grouping, Rhythm and repetition, Logical order
Visual techniques
3D Effects in graphic design for the web, Logo design, Text-based logos, Favourite logos
Case studies
Artorg: Worked example, Case study: Business Improvement Network, Case study: Foruse
You can get a general idea of the Web design process by accesscing the Detailed Design Process Index. Subjects covered are: Web Design Process Overview, Attention Map, Design like no-one's watching, The Design Spectrum, Don't Decorate, Communicate!, Golden Rule of web design, Pursuit of the Original, Simplicity in web design, Think Then Do, and Work smart, not clever
Web Design
One of the greatest mediums of multimedia is Web site design and construction. We will take a very holistic approach to Web design and will provide you with tutorials and links to Web development tools. You will also be provided with a very comprehensive list of links to learn HTML as well as advanced programming links. We use Dreamweaver, and Fireworks and so will provide a series of tutorials on using these applications. Finally, one of the greatest needs, but often the most overlooked components of Web design is "accessibility." One of the best pages to start using is: Web Design: Rules to Code By This page is a great resource for the beginning a well as the seasoned developer.
Browsers also double as development tools if the proper add-ons are used and The Firefox Tutorial is a good place to begin. More browsers can be found at the Web Resources page, but by far one of the best pages on this site is Web Design: Rules to Code By We adapted this page from an excellent book, and then went out and searched for the best sites that could be used to explain the specific topic in more detail. We often take things for granted when using the Web, but for some a simple task as reading maybe a major handicap to overcome. For such people, W3C has been promoting accessibility guidelines. Here are a few pages to start with:
For those interested only in the "Design" component then we suggest a great page of links on Comprehensive Web Design Tutorial Links as well as: Web Design: Rules to Code By, Ten Steps to a More User Friendly Web Site, and The Golden Rule of Web Site Building. See more pages in the right sidebar.
Links to tools used in Web development can be found at:
Audio and Home Recording
You might be aware of the war now raging in consumer electronics between the HD DVD and Blu-ray formats to become the next-generation optical disc for packaged-media distribution. Both offer much greater storage capacity than DVD (15 and 25 GB per layer, respectively, compared with 4.7 GB per layer for DVD), which seems like plenty for today's media content. But if we've learned anything about media-storage capacity, it's that there's no such thing as “plenty” — at least not for long. Read more...
Computer Technology and Tools
Please do not get the wrong idea. We are opposed to pirating software and remain committed to paying artists for their work. But we also believe that when you purchase media content-whether it is a song a movie, or a TV show--you should have complete freedom to play it on all of your devices as many times as you'd like. Below you will find links on the philosophy of computers, tools to optimize the performance of your comuter, and tools that will allow you to move around legally any digital media that you have purchased.
Computer Technology
Computer Tools
Speed Demon
With microprocessor clock speeds now in excess of 3 GHz, what can we expect in the future? Once again, IBM is leading the way. In collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology, the company has demonstrated a prototype silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor able to operate at a record-setting speed of 500 GHz (see Fig. 1). That speed is made possible by cooling the device to 4.5° Kelvin (-451° Fahrenheit). At room temperature, the transistor achieves a speed of 350 GHz, which is still two orders of magnitude above common clock speeds today. Read more...
 Great company to deal with, and excellent high-end products.
Rise of the Web's Social Network
Since its beginning, the web has often been used as a tool to meet new people, but in recent years the interaction between web-users has grown dramatically, spawning a new generation of networking sites. Read more... A more scholary paper is Besser's The Information SuperHighway: Social and Cultural Impact, The Wired Family and L33t.
The Digital Negative (DNG) Specification
The Digital Negative (DNG) specification provides a solution to a growing problem in digital photography workflow's. Raw file formats are becoming increasingly popular for photographers because they offer increased flexibility, quality, and control compared to traditional JPEG and TIFF formats. Unlike JPEG and TIFF, however, there is no standard file format specification for raw files. Almost every camera has a different raw
format, and the specifications for these formats are not publicly available. As a result, a variety of software applications cannot read every raw format, and using these raw files as a long-term archive is a risky proposition. Read more...
Maximizing Image Quality
The quality of an image is determined by many things: Illumination, lens and camera parameters. In the following text, we are going to take a look at how to set camera parameters for optimal image quality. Read more...
How Color Cameras Work
Read more...
Transistorless Computing
Mar 10, 2006 1:16 PM
Electronic Musician
A lot of information about computational nanotechnology has appeared on my desktop in recent months, some of which could be relevant to electronic musicians in the future. As I've said many times, any advance in computer technology has the potential to benefit those who use computers and other digital devices to make music. For example, see "Tech Page: NanoRAM" in the July 2005 issue of EM and "Tech Page: Blast from the Past" in the January 2006 issue.
HP Labs (www.hpl.hp.com) is working on some interesting nanotech projects, including a technology called crossbar computing. The ultimate goal of this project is nothing less than the replacement of the transistor, the most basic element of computing for the past 50 years. During that time, the number of transistors on a silicon chip has risen from one to nearly one billion, but Moore's Law can't continue to be upheld forever with conventional semiconductors. It is generally believed that transistors within a silicon chip won't function once they are reduced in size below about 10 nanometers (nm; billionths of a meter), which corresponds to approximately 30 atoms. So alternatives must be found if we want more powerful processors.
Three scientists working in HP Labs' Quantum Science Research (QRS) group in Palo Alto, California, recently published a paper in the Journal of Applied Physics describing a transistor alternative called a crossbar latch. Nanowires measuring only 30 nm (100 atoms) in diameter are arranged in a crosshatch pattern, with one layer of parallel wires on top of and perpendicular to another layer of parallel wires, forming a rectilinear grid of intersections.
Sandwiched between the wires is a layer of material that is only a few atoms thick. This bistable material (meaning it has two stable states, allowing it to conduct more or less electricity) is electrically switchable, allowing its polarity at each intersection to be reversed independently with the appropriate application of voltages to the wires. As a result, the material at each intersection can store a data bit.
FIG. 1: In this artist's conception, criss-crossing nanowires are connected at each intersection by a single molecule that can be switched from one state to another, facilitating data storage and processing logic.
The crossbar-latch concept was patented in 2003, but the QRS team published the results of an actual demonstration in 2005. The demo consisted of a single latch, with one signal wire crossing two control wires and molecular-scale, electronically switchable "devices" at the intersections (see Fig. 1). The latch was able to perform the NOT operation and restore signal levels to their ideal voltages, which will allow many latches to be chained together to perform complex computational tasks. Previous experiments had demonstrated molecular-scale data storage as well as the AND and OR operations, but the addition of the NOT operation completes the basic operational palette for general-purpose computing at the nanoscale.
The simple crosshatch pattern makes manufacturing relatively straightforward, especially compared with conventional microelectronic devices, and it can be constructed using a wide variety of materials and processes, providing great flexibility. In addition, a single geometry can be used for memory, processing logic, and interconnection, making the crossbar concept highly adaptable. Manufacturing costs can be kept relatively low using chemical self-assembly, but that inevitably produces defects and irregularities in the size of nanoscale components. Another concern is the presence of random fluctuations in such small structures, especially at room temperature and above. Fortunately, the grid structure allows chip architects to easily design around those flaws using massive redundancy and other techniques. It will be years before crossbar latches find their way into mainstream devices, but they could form the basis of true molecular computing, allowing Moore's Law to survive another 50 years. This technology offers the potential for processors thousands of times more powerful than today's, which should be sweet harmony to any electronic musician's ears.
Small Technology. Big Applications
ZettaCore
Electronic Musician
Electronic musicians are familiar with some of the prefixes that indicate data-storage capacity. For example, the maximum amount of RAM in the original IBM PC was a whopping 640 kilobytes (thousands or 103 bytes). Today, of course, RAM is measured in megabytes (106 bytes) and gigabytes (109 bytes), and hard drives and RAID arrays are now available with one or more terabytes (1012 bytes) of capacity.If we learn anything from history, it should be that the need for storage capacity inevitably increases over time, and new prefixes must be added to the vernacular once in a while. So what comes after terabytes? The next step is petabytes (1015), followed by exabytes (1018), zettabytes (1021), and yottabytes (1024). Who could possibly use so much memory? That's what they asked about the original IBM PC, and look how far we've come since then.One company that understands this better than most is ZettaCore (www.zettacore.com), a startup based in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 2001 by scientists from the University of California at Riverside and North Carolina State University, ZettaCore is developing molecular memory — that is, digital memory using individual molecules to store bits of data. This approach has the potential to create memory devices that are far smaller, with far greater density, and that use far less power than conventional semiconductor technology can achieve.The molecules used in ZettaCore's research are called multiporphyrin nanostructures. They consist of several hundred atoms and measure only a few nanometers in size. Data is represented by removing or adding a few electrons and then detecting the molecule's charge state, which consumes much less power than conventional memory.The molecules are designed to exhibit certain well-defined charge states called oxidation potentials, which are the energy levels required to remove one or more electrons. ZettaCore has designed molecules with up to eight oxidation potentials, allowing as many as three data bits to be stored in a single memory location.Another critical property of ZettaCore's molecules is chemical self-assembly, which causes them to attach only to the desired materials, such as silicon or gold. In addition, they automatically pack tightly together and align themselves to operate as intended. That allows the use of equipment and techniques that are already common in the semiconductor industry; the molecules are applied to entire wafers, but they adhere only to the exposed surfaces they are designed for.As with most solid-state memory, individual memory locations are arranged in a 2-D array (see Fig. 1). Each location contains between a few thousand and a million molecules, depending on the required size of the memory elements. This high degree of scalability is made possible by the fact that the properties of the molecules remain constant, even at very small sizes, unlike conventional semiconductor memory. The presence of many molecules at each location provides high signal-to-noise characteristics and redundancy-based defect tolerance.ZettaCore's initial efforts are targeted at the DRAM and SRAM market, but the potential of this technology goes way beyond that — for example, solving the problem of long-term archival storage, which is especially important for musicians and other digital-media artists. The capacity of optical discs and other current forms of storage is quickly being outstripped by the ever-larger files generated by these artists. And who can say how long those storage solutions will survive or when they will become obsolete? Molecular memory devices with zettabytes or yottabytes of capacity and an unlimited lifespan could keep all the music in the world safe and available for the foreseeable future. ZettaCore's molecular-memory prototypes are nowhere near that capacity yet, but the way these things progress, it might not be long before they are.
Before getting into the actual technology that is being created at the ZettaCorp labs, it would help to have a basic understanding of the common terms used to describe their technology. The following are from the ZettaCore Web site. How big is a molecule?A molecule is a very small structure built out of a fairly small number of atoms. For instance, one water molecule is two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen – H20! ZettaCore’s molecules have a few hundred atoms. And they are very small. Each molecule we use is about 1 nanometer in size. That’s 100,000 times smaller than the width of one strand of your hair. Said another way, in a single drop of water there are over a billion times a billion molecules.Inside of every molecule there are atoms and inside the atoms are protons, neutrons and electrons. Our technology works by removing or adding a very few electrons from the whole molecule and then detecting the charge state of the molecule. We have designed molecules especially for this purpose. And the process is stable, reproducible and reversible.Smaller is better.A key difference between ZettaCore™ memory and conventional memory is that as the size of a memory element becomes smaller in a conventional memory technology, the properties of semiconductor or polymer materials change in undesirable ways. In our molecules, on the other hand, the properties remain the same. This allows scaling to very small size elements.Our molecules are also designed to assemble automatically in the right place in an electronic circuit. This allows the molecules to attach only to a particular type of surface (silicon, gold or other metals), to pack tightly on that surface, and to align properly on the surface for electronic operation. Because of this chemical self-assembly, our molecular memory chips can be manufactured using equipment and processes common in the semiconductor industry.The future is getting more powerful.So, we’re talking about specially-designed molecules that can store and utilize much more data than typical semiconductors. They can be scaled to very small sizes. They use less power. And they can be programmed to assemble themselves during the manufacturing process.That’s a huge leap forward in technology. Stemming from really tiny stuff. ZettaCore molecular memory is based on the properties of specially-designed molecules. We use these molecules to store information by adding or removing electrons and then detecting the charge state of the molecule. The molecules, called multi-porphyrin nanostructures, can be oxidized and reduced (electrons removed or replaced) in a way that is stable, reproducible, and reversible. In this way, molecules can be used as reliable memory locations for electronic devices. In many ways, each molecule acts like an individual capacitor device, similar to a conventional capacitor, but storing only a few electrons of charge that are accessible only at specific, quantized voltage levels. The key difference between ZettaCore memory and conventional memory is that as the size of a memory element becomes smaller, the properties of semiconductor or polymer materials change in undesirable ways, while the properties of our molecular capacitors remain the same. This allows scaling to very small size elements.We design molecules to have the properties needed for a particular application. The most important property is the oxidation potentials – the energy required to remove one or more electrons. This energy is a quantum mechanical property of the whole molecule and is typically between 100 and 200 mV for each electron removed. For each molecule we design the value is exact and doesn’t vary. We have designed molecules with up to eight oxidation states, meaning we can remove up to eight electrons and detect the resulting state of the molecules using distinct, discrete voltages. Using multi-state molecular capacitors with quantized energy states, we can reliably store more than one bit of information in a single memory location. Simplified diagram of ZettaCore molecules in a memory array.Another property we design into our molecules is chemical self-assembly. This allows the molecules to attach only to a particular type of surface (for example, gold, silicon, various metals and oxides), to pack tightly on that surface, and to align properly on the surface for electronic operation. Because of chemical self-assembly, ZettaCore molecular memory chips can be manufactured using equipment and processes common in the semiconductor industry. Molecules are applied to an entire wafer by spraying or dipping and attach only to those exposed surfaces they are designed for. Unattached molecules are simply washed away from the other surfaces.The diagram above shows the basic concepts of ZettaCore molecular memory. An individual molecule is shown in the lower left corner. This molecule has four states, so it stores two bits of information. Using chemical self-assembly techniques, the molecules are applied to all of the memory elements of an array. At each location in the array there may be between a few thousand and a million molecules (depending on the size of memory elements and the type of device structures being used). This provides excellent signal to noise characteristics and defect tolerance through redundancy. The failure of any single molecule will not affect the operation of a memory element.The array is connected to custom-designed I/O circuits (not shown) fabricated using conventional logic that read and write the array.
The ability to integrate ZettaCore molecular technology with state-of-the-art semiconductor technology allows accelerated development of hybrid chips that leverage both the advantages of molecular storage and the substantial capital investment in the semiconductor manufacturing industry.
Duo-Core Like Chip Properties By INTELligent Brain
Cognitive control, or executive control, refers to a set of neural cognitive processes typically involved in the execution of complex tasks and most often associated with activity of prefrontal cortex. Capacities that are frequently included under the rubric of cognitive control include attention, conflict detection, working memory maintenance, working memory manipulation, and task-switching or dual-task performance, among others. Cognitive control is thought to be especially important in situations where tasks are novel or unlearned. The connection between cognitive control and prefrontal cortex is well-established. Importantly, prefrontal cortex is characterized by a significant level of connectivity to many other brain regions. Read more....
GENESIS
GENESIS (short for GEneral NEural SImulation System) is a general purpose simulation platform that was developed to support the simulation of neural systems ranging from subcellular components and biochemical reactions to complex models of single neurons, simulations of large networks, and systems-level models. GENESIS has provided the basis for laboratory courses in neural simulation at Caltech, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Crete, Trieste, Bangalore, and Obidos short courses in Computational Neuroscience, and at least 49 universities of which we are aware. Most current GENESIS applications involve realistic simulations of biological neural systems. Although the software can also model more abstract networks, other simulators are more suitable for back propagation and similar connectionist modeling.
A downloadable version of the second edition of a practical introduction to the interdisciplinary field of computational neuroscience through the use of the GENESIS simulator (http://www.genesis-sim.org/GENESIS/). It is designed to be a step-by-step tutorial for professionals, researchers and students working in fields ranging from neuroscience to bioengineering, medicine, artificial neural networks and the cognitive sciences.
Download the GENESIS and PGENESIS distributions Be sure to read the installation procedures, and check to see what platform you may use GENESIS on.
View the GENESIS Neural Modeling Tutorials
The Book of GENESIS in PDF format
Introduction to Computational Neuroscience
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