Fountain of hype

Fountain rainbows.

We present the first measurements of radiance spectra of rainbows. The bows on two sunny days (3 and 6 June 2008) were produced by the fountain in the Parque de las Ciencias, Granada, Spain, that consists of a rectangular perimeter of 40 spray nozzles. Optical thickness of the spray from each nozzle was approximately 0.5. Spectral purity of the primary bow was highest for orange and blue, reach...

Fountain Codes

Fountain codes are record-breaking sparse-graph codes for channels with erasures – such as the internet, where files are transmitted in multiple small packets, each of which is either received without error or not received. Standard file-transfer protocols simply chop a file up into K packet-sized pieces, then repeatedly transmit each packet until it is successfully received. A back-channel is ...

Piṅgala’s Fountain

Piṅgala is a mathematician (c. 300 BCE) who authored Chandah. śāstra (the science of Sanskrit metres). This is a brief note on a mathematical art project completed at the Chennai Mathematical Institute to honour Piṅgala who was responsible for the discovery of binary expansion of numbers in the context of enumeration of metres, and of the binomial coefficients which were later made explicit by ...

The hype of MOOCs

Visualizing Ecosystems of Hype

The emergence of new technologies is relentless. While there are many studies that have examined the transformative value, impact, and adoption, our understanding of the underlying ecosystem that shapes the emergence of these new technologies is surprisingly limited. Motivated by the call for pursuing contemporary information systems (IS) research that captures market realities and provides pra...