“A very long time ago, I was curious how to detect the strength of the bass and treble in music, in order to synchronize some graphical effects. I had no idea how to do such a thing, so I tried to figure it out, but I didn’t get very far. Eventually I learned that I [...]

Microsoft has published a scientific research paper ([PDF] Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from Single Depth Images (Microsoft Research)) detailing how Microsoft Kinect’s body tracking algorithm works. There is also a video (Kinect Research (youtube.com)) to go along with it. Also, I came across a separate article (Kinect’s AI breakthrough explained (I-Programmer.info)) which summaries [...]

“Yesterday the Census Bureau announced the new apportionment of the 435 representatives to states based on the 2010 census. Illinois lost one representative. Texas gains four. Not only do these affect the makeup of the House of Representatives but also the Electoral College that chooses the president. Since 1940 the apportionment is not done by [...]

A new, extremely fast sorting algorithm has been created for GPUs (CUDA-capable only) by researchers at the University of Virginia. This new algorithm is capable of sorting at a rate of one billion (integer) keys per second using a GPU. Normally CPUs aren’t as efficient as CPUs for these types of algorithms (for sorting), but [...]