FAX MACHINE

[TATIANA MARCELA PEREZ]

Tengo una inquietud, cuando se trata el tema de "Image Representation
Colour by Numbers" se habla del Fax este no es tan conocido por los niños de ahora, se podría remplazar el termino Fax por impresora? o no funcionaria igual?
Gracias!

[Paul Black]

Talvez puede hablar de TV.

[Tim Bell]

Sorry to switch to English...

I think the question is about using faxes as an example for run-length encoding (RLE), and the concern that children won't be familiar with them.

I think old black and white TVs may have used them, but currently the main use would be for the coefficients in JPEG. However, for young students, JPEG is a bit tricky (it involves cosines and transforms for a start)!

We use RLE as a warm up to other compression methods, and so the way we "sell" it is to say it's a simple system that works on black and white images, like the old fax machines, and then we explore the limitations e.g. it's only black and white. It still illustrates a lot of points about compression, and a key thing is that Unplugged isn't intended to teach exactly how something works, but to teach principles e.g. that by finding patterns compression can makes things smaller (but not always e.g. a checkerboard pattern for RLE expands the representation).

There's a version of this for older students in our Field Guide (http://csfieldguide.org.nz/CompressionCoding.html) which takes this kind of approach more explicitly. (We're releasing a new version in the next day or so, so the URL may change - just look for the compression chapter).

cheers,

tim

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[Andrew Davidson]

On Wednesday, February 3, 2016 at 10:53:49 AM UTC-8, Tim Bell wrote:

Sorry to switch to English...

I think the question is about using faxes as an example for run-length encoding (RLE), and the concern that children won't be familiar with them.

I don’t see one on faxes in here: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheFineBros, but these are thoughtful and priceless — kids, teens, people reacting to outdated technology!

• Andrew Davidson
 ada...@uw.edu
 Human-Centered Design & Engineering
 University of Washington
 hcde.uw.edu/davidson