The geography of creative people in Germany

It has been argued that creativity is an important source of regional growth. This paper investigates the geography of people in creative occupation in Germany. The population share of the Creative Class as well as of bohemians and artists is relatively high in larger cities, but smaller places and rural regions may also have a considerable proportion of people with a creative job. While ethnical and cultural diversity and a high level of public supply in health care and education can explain the distribution of creative people, employment opportunities seem to play only a minor role. A high share of creative occupations seems to be conducive to regional growth; however, the exact nature of this relationship is still unclear

The design and implementation of a notional machine for teaching introductory programming

Comprehension of programming and programs is known to be a difficult task for many beginning students, with many computing courses showing significant drop out and failure rates. In this paper, we present a new notional machine design and implementation to help with understanding of programming and its dynamics for beginning learners. The notional machine offers an abstraction of the physical machine designed for comprehension and learning purposes. We introduce the notional machine and describe an implementation in BlueJ

The State Of Play: A Notional Machine for Learning Programming

Comprehension of programming and programs is known to be a difficult task for many beginning students, with many computing courses showing significant drop out and failure rates. In this paper, we present a new notional machine de- sign and implementation to help with understanding of pro- gramming and its dynamics for beginning learners. The no- tional machine offers an abstraction of the physical machine designed for comprehension and learning purposes. We in- troduce the notional machine and a graphical notation for its representation. We also present Novis, an implementation of a dynamic real-time visualiser of this notional machine, integrated into BlueJ

Autofocus for digital Fresnel holograms by use of a Fresnelet-sparsity criterion

We propose a robust autofocus method for reconstructing digital Fresnel holograms. The numerical reconstruction involves simulating the propagation of a complex wave front to the appropriate distance. Since the latter value is difficult to determine manually, it is desirable to rely on an automatic procedure for finding the optimal distance to achieve high-quality reconstructions. Our algorithm maximizes a sharpness metric related to the sparsity of the signal’s expansion in distance-dependent waveletlike Fresnelet bases. We show results from simulations and experimental situations that confirm its applicability