Heidi's concert in Berkeley

I attended Heidi's concert, this Saturday night in Berekeley. It's held as part of the Trinity Chamber Music Series, and was set in a small, intimate church (that could seat maybe 50 people).

She would first explain the piece, the composer, the context, the mood for about a couple of minutes, then play the piece.

Here's the program:

• Piano Sonata No. 32 - Haydn
• Prelude, Chorale and Fugue - Franck
• Arabesques on Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz - Schulz Evler
• 12 Preludes Book 2 - Debussy

I particularly like her piece on Franck's Prelude, Chorale, Fugue, which was a very intimate and sensitive portrayal of his spiritual journey. There's a part in the piece, which I think was the chorale, which was my favorite.

There was a wonderful after-party that was kindly hosted by Heidi's husband's coworker and his family.

New light sensor technology

Using solar cell technology, Japanese researchers in Rohm and government institutes have prototyped light sensors that are 100x more sensitive than existing tech like CCD or CMOS. Instead they are using CIGS. This totally makes sense, since efforts in solar cells is to maximize the energy collected from the light sources (namely, the Sun).

In theory, if the performance is that much better, you can take multiple signal points and average them out to reduce noise, and it’ll still be way faster than a regular CCD I think.

So, how does this affect me? Digital camera will take sharper pictures under lower light conditions, since the exposure time of each shot will be much shorter. This is help you take better pictures, but also help machine vision for suboptimal light conditions.

And from a Science perspective, microscopes will be able to take images more quickly. This is important for imaging enhancing technique that require high volume of images, deconvolution, and signal averaging, and other tricks to get by optical limitations. link