Continued Bloggings from the World of Leron
Coming to Terms With a Wired Age, Part 2 - New York Times:
IT seems you can never have too many words to describe the loud, incessant use of cellphones. In my last column I played with new terminology for a wired (and wireless) age, and in the weeks since then my mailbox has been filled with your suggestions. Cellulitis, you say, or narcellism, or cellbotics.
As it relates to my glowscarf project, I especially like “Narcellism”…
I’ve uploaded some new photos of the progress I’ve made with the glowscarf — including the hacked detector module, with fiber optic output (seen in the video above). Pix can be viewed here:
So a new startup called Click.tv is about to launch. And they’re working with the same basic ideas we’re working on for ITP Research: Video Comments and Re-imagining the Remote.
the main functionality will include: the ability for the creator and those who watch the video to add annotations anywhere in the stream, and others later to click on those annotations and jump right to that point in the video.
via TechCrunch
It’s cool to see some movement in this direction in the web 2.0 world. The click.tv people have addressed some of the issues we’ve discussed slightly differently. It seems there are ‘channels’ of comments which can be enabled or disabled. While this is interesting, it seems to be more appropriate for a moderated type environment (at least that’s what their demo shows). That said, they’ve addressed the situation with a nice clean UI and some interesting navigation elements.
In an attempt to understand more fully cell phone behavior, and what our expressions our cell phones enable us to make, I’ve come across some interesting bits of research:
From this article, it seems Motorola commissioned a study called On the Mobile. One interesting (if obvious) finding:
Women see their cell phone as a means of expression and social communication, while males tend to use it as an interactive toy. Some men view the cell phone as a status symbol - competing with other males for the most high tech toy and even using the cell phone to seduce the opposite sex. The study found two types of cell phone users- “innies,” who use their phones discreetly, and “outies,” who are louder and less concerned with the people around them.
Here’s the latest on the progress of the glowscarf. Some photots of the knitted scarf along with first attempts at lighting it using fiber optics…
For my final project I am going to work with scene detection on pre-recorded video. I intend to explore not just cut or shot detection, but scene detection (or at the very least an approximation of it). More simply, I also intend to explore commercial detection techniques, in order to mark and remove commercials from recordings of television broadcasts.
My goal is to generate a list of timestamps for the in/out markers of scenes (or commercial breaks), which can then be used for a variety of purposes
This really surprised me:
Apple® today introduced Boot Camp, public beta software that enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP. Available as a download beginning today, Boot Camp allows users with a Microsoft Windows XP installation disc to install Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac®, and once installation is complete, users can restart their computer to run either Mac OS® X or Windows XP. Boot Camp will be a feature in “Leopard,” Apple’s next major release of Mac OS X, that will be previewed at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in August.
If there were ever a reason to switch, here it is…