Media Technology

The past few days I’ve been downloading streaming audio of lectures and talks given by interesting and intelligent people™, converting them to MP3 format and putting them on my iPod. The process is still a little slow — usually I stream the audio using RealPlayer and use Applescript and Wiretap to automatically capture to disk, then trim using Quicktime Pro and convert to MP3 using iTunes. However, I’m pleased with the end result.

I’m still looking for good sources of audio talks, and welcome suggestions & links. Here are the three I’ve most enjoyed so far:

• WGBH Forum Network: A large archive of free public lectures (some audio only, some audio + video), hosted by Boston’s public TV/Radio network. I’m especially enjoying the MIT series of talks by Nobel Prize winners.
• World Affairs Council of Northern California: Interesting talks on a wide variety of global topics. I often listen to this on my local public radio (KQED).
• National Press Club: The NPC holds luncheon talks by people ranging from Donald Rumsfeld to Wynton Marsalis. Archives hosted by National Public Radio.

FusedSpace is hosting a design contest for “innovative ideas that, by means of existing technology, can change or improve our current relationship with physical public space or that can otherwise bring about innovations in the public domain.” (Where by public domain they mean in the sense of common space, not in the intellectual property sense.) Props to Corante and Eric Nehrlich for the link.

Years ago, Steve Mann made Cool Site of the Day with his Wearable Wireless Webcam. Now, almost a decade later, you can order the DejaView CamWear Model 100 hat or glasses-mounted camera, which continually records a 30-second buffer of video so you can push a button and start recording from before you even know you wanted to. Price will be $399, available “in January” (so they’d better hurry!)

I don’t expect this first-generation product to make a big splash, but I do believe in the vision of always-ready wearable cameras and microphones with this sort of record-30-seconds-into-the-past kind of feature. The story is somewhat compelling for consumers (“when your baby makes that great smile, you can capture it and grab the best frame as a picture”) but even more so for industry and inspection, where you’re more concerned with documenting an event than with the artistry of the video.

Rob Galbraith’s Digital Photography Insights has a great article about National Geographic’s first cover story shot entirely in digital. (Props to Haberlach for the link.)

Digital had many of the advantages I’d expect: less equipment to get lost, easy backups, ability to review pictures on-site, and easier remote collaborative editing. The disadvantages were more surprising to me, and included having to deal with brightness differences on different screens, inability to edit on a large horizontal surface like a light-table, and poor contrast compared to slides when showing photos to a large group.

I recently came across two programs for helping transfer large files via instant messenger or email. I see both these systems as gap-bridgers — they bridge between the spontaneity of email/IM and the robust and recipient-controlled download you get with Web browsers. Since the Internet abhors a gap, I’ve no doubt this difference in functionality will go away in the near future, especially as Web-based protocols are further integrated into the OS and file systems.

• DropLoad (http://dropload.com/) is a donation-ware website where you can upload a file (using the web-browser upload) and indicate an email address you want the file “sent” to. That recipient then gets sent a random-hash URL to the uploaded file. Files are deleted after 48 hours or once they are downloaded, whichever comes first.
• HFS (http://www.rejetto.com/hfs/guide/) is a webserver where you can drag & drop files onto the server and get a new URL for the file automatically put in your clipboard. You can also create “virtual folders” that are essentially directories on the webpage. I’ve not tried this one, but it feels like a more lightweight (and potentially temporary) approach to what WebDav or shared file systems do.

I got a new cellphone back on December 5th, swapping out my T-Mobile Sidekick for an AT&T Treo 600 (both good phones, but AT&T has much better coverage in my area). I also signed up to transfer my T-mobile number over to my new phone.

Twenty-six days and about 8 hours on hold with technical support later and I’m still waiting for my number to be transferred. The problem is a classic multi-system gridlock. AT&T sent a request for number transfer to T-mobile through Telcordia, an intermediary that handles number portability communication between the various telcos. They then sent a follow-up with more information, but the follow-up arrived at T-mobile before the main request arrived. This wedged T-mobile’s system and caused both requests to be dropped. Now T-mobile is asking AT&T to cancel and resubmit the request, because they can’t get their side unwedged. Unfortunately, AT&T’s system can’t cancel requests that are awaiting a response. Gridlock.

There’s no one person to blame here. T-mobile’s system clearly shouldn’t have gotten wedged so easily, Telcordia shouldn’t have delivered messages out of order, and AT&T shouldn’t have sat on the request for three weeks when they thought the ball wasn’t in their court. Most importantly, both telcos need more staff to cut through the hour+ hold times.

At long last I’ve gotten the problem escalated at AT&T, thanks to a dedicated number mobility group member named Andrea who was willing to wait through T-mobile’s hold time and patch me into the call. They now say it’ll be another 48-72 hours, which will bring them just under the 30-day return policy on my new phone. Here’s hoping…

Update: And 29 days after purchase, my new phone finally takes calls! (And there was much rejoicing.) FYI, you can cut to the head of AT&T’s customer support queue by dialing 1-888-799-1305 and selecting 3G and English. This is the priority queue used by AT&T stores, though customers can also use it. (Thanks to Nelson and Vyruz Reaper for the number.)

Last night I finally got around to watching Microsoft’s Comdex presentation, specifically the section where Susan Dumais shows off her new search technology “Stuff I’ve Seen.” (Search for “switch gears” at the bottom of the transcript or go to 1:07:50 on the video.)

Most of Stuff I’ve Seen is concentrating on the problem of quickly indexing and searching your entire hard drive, regardless of media format. (I sometimes jokingly refer to projects like this as YAPIM, or Yet Another Project Invoking Memex, my own thesis work fitting that description as well.) However, the part that interests me most is what they’re calling implicit query. As CNET describes the Comdex demo:

In demonstrating Implicit Query, Dumais began to type an e-mail asking a colleague about a set of slides for an upcoming conference. Before the message was complete, the program — which appears in a window on the side of the screen — pulled up e-mails, slide decks and Word documents containing the name of the conference and the future recipient. Each hit came with a brief summary of the internal content, date, the type of software the file was written in, and its potential relevance, among other information.

This is the same functionality that in my PhD I call Just-In-Time Information Retrieval, and is the main focus of the Remembrance Agent software I developed. It can be incredibly powerful (I use it regularly to suggest email discussions related to my blog entries, for example) and I hope Dumais pursues it. It looks like she’s still in early stages with the concept though, and and more importantly the current interface is still designed for explicit query — far too intrusive for something that runs all the time in the background. By contrast, Autonomy has had an actual product in this area for over three years, though I’d say the interface is still the real trickiness for this kind of application. Still, as is often the case one of the more interesting aspects of Microsoft doing something is that it’s Microsoft doing it. If implicit query makes it into a future version of the OS (and if MS doesn’t screw it up they way they did with that annoying paperclip) that’ll be quite interesting.

References

• Remarks by Bill Gates, COMDEX Las Vegas 2003 (Bill Gates, Microsoft, 16 November 2003) [Video available in Windows Media Format, OSX users need to install WMP 9, Linux users are as usual shut out]
• Microsoft aims for search on its own terms (Michael Kanellos, CNET, 24 November 2003)
• Stuff I’ve Seen: A System for Personal Information Retrieval and Re-Use (Susan Dumais et. al., ACM SIGIR’03 Conference, 28 July 2003)
• Autonomy’s Active Knowledge Page
• The Remembrance Agent (code and papers from my thesis work — runs as a plug-in for Emacs)

Back in July there was a big scandal over DARPA’s funding of a futures market where people bet on things like whether Arafat will be assassinated or when the US will pull out of Iraq. The project was canceled, and also became the straw that forced John Poindexter’s resignation. Now the Guardian reports that San Diego-based Net Exchange, the company that was implementing the project, is going ahead and launching it without government support or involvement. Given the previous uproar, Net Exchange is being understandably quiet about the whole thing.

Personally I’d be happy to see them try this out. As I said before, the U.S. Government shouldn’t be involved in something as shady as gallows gambling, but as a private experiment the whole thing intrigues me and I don’t have a problem with seeing where it goes. My guess is it will wind up being an interesting past-time for armchair analysts, but like most markets will fluctuate far too much to provide any real security data. The only real danger I see is if the stakes get high (unlikely) and attract corruption — unlike sports gambling or its Wall-Street counterpart, Middle-East politics has neither conflict-of-interest nor insider-trading laws. The more likely danger is simple lack of interest, the risk all seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time Internet projects face.

References

• Future’s bright for terror betting (Gary Younge, The Guardian, 18 November 2003)

Just in case anyone was still in doubt that Apple’s iPod is going to slowly grow into a universal portable media server, Apple has just announced several new iPod accessories, including a voice recorder (microphone to turn the iPod into a dictaphone) and media reader (accepts various media cards and slurps the data onto the hard drive for later retrieval). The iPod isn’t the first hard-drive based MP3 player to offer these extras (Archos has had one for a while), but Apple goes one step further with automatic synchronization of recorded audio and stored pictures with iTunes and iPhoto respectively. Now if they can just add Bluetooth the iPod will be well on its way to becoming the personal server it’s destined to become.

I just got my first automated blog-comment spam, attached to my post about artificial diamonds (I’ve since deleted it). Interestingly enough, the spam wasn’t meant for me or my readers but for Google — it was just random snatches of English peppered with the word “jewelry” and links to http://jewelry.lstor.com/, which produces more random phrases. No doubt the idea is to raise the pagerank of some real page that will go there later.

Wonder if this is what they mean when all those spammers keep telling me they can raise my Google ranking?