Metaphors
are amazing, they are creative, artistic and clear. Comparing radioactive decay
to making popcorns helps us to understand the phenomenon. However, science is science, and it requires experiments,
practice, observation, analysis and DATA!
Therefore, we took a step further and study exactly the similarity between radioactive decay and popcorns making. To what extent is the process of making popcorn similar to the phenomenon of radioactive decay? |
The objective is to design, program and construct a mobile app that analyses instantaneously the “popping sounds” and elaborates the frequency with which kernels pop. This application enables us to create the Exponential decay graphics, as well as the Poisson distribution immediately at the same time as each popcorn is flourishing!
Our purpose is to present scientific data of the simply process of making popcorns, in order to compare it to the available data of radioactive decay.
STEP BY STEP
"In the beginning we wanted to take the sound of the popping corn through the microphone of an android device and have an app processing all the data and visualizing it. We soon encountered problems in setting up a development environment for android apps and decided to simplify by having our program running on a Laptop. |
The biggest challenge then was detecting every single kernel popping by the sound it makes. We first started searching the internet for a sound library but the ones we found were either very buggy or were not providing the functions we would need in order to archive our goal. We then programmed our own sound recognition routines using “Processing” for Java. |
Which turned out to be kind of tricky as we needed to filter out other environmental sounds as well as having the ability to recognize one single as a single one but in the same time recognize several pops that come very fast in a row as the exact same amount of pops. Here we experimented to get the optimal parameters. This being said, the algorithm still has some potential even though the results of the final tests showed us that it´s doing a very good job so far. In the end we still had time to make the program look fancier and implement some nice graphics to have a cooler presentation."
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