Scammers target digital camera buyers

In preparation for my trip to New York in a couple of weeks I have been looking for a new camera that would enable me to shoot in “raw” format. After much deliberation I decided to stay with Panasonic, since I have been quite pleased with the results I obtained from the Panasonic FZ20. The latest Panasonic 12X super zoom, the Panasonic FZ-8, looks like it will fill the bill nicely so I began the search for a decent online price. The camera retails for $349 but my web search yielded a seller offering the camera for only $229 +shipping. The website looked like a regular shopping site and offered the usual secure transaction payment options so I went ahead and ordered the camera. I noticed that their prices for SD Memory Cards and auxiliary batteries were outrageous though so I just ordered the camera. Sunday afternoon I was awakened from my nap by a phone call from the camera vendor, http://www.thedigitalnerds.com/, telling me I obviously had forgotten to order any accessories for my nice new camera. I told the salesman I didn’t forget. I just wasn’t going to pay their prices for memory cards and batteries as I could obtain them elsewhere for a fraction of the price. He then proceeded to try to persuade me to buy extended warranty for something like $124 (for a $229 camera) and I told him I usually upgrade cameras before they ever wear out so I wasn’t interested. I asked if the camera had been shipped and he insisted that it had been shipped out right away. So I thanked him for checking with me and hung up. I got into work this morning and their was an email from DigitalNerds telling me that “unfortunately” the camera was out of stock for at least 6 to 8 weeks so my order was cancelled. (Interesting since the website said it was In stock and would ship in 2-3 days) They also told me not to place the order again.

So, I reran my search and this time I came up with a vendor, http://www.wisetronics.com/, offering the camera for $224. I didn’t want to go through all the hassle so I called their toll-free number this time to place my order over the phone. I began by asking if they would sell the camera alone for the price advertised. They asked me why I asked and as I explained my first attempt at ordering the camera, I noticed there wasn’t any background noise and looked down at my phone and found they had hung up on me. I also noticed their auxiliary batteries for the camera were priced at a whopping $143 each.

Not to be derailed from my goal, I went down the list of vendors to the third lowest vendor, http://www.stop4camera.com/, who offered the camera for $248. Once more I called them and explained that I wanted just the camera. I also noticed background noise that sounded like the person answering the phone was at home. I asked about it and the “salesman” said some guys behind him were just talking. He claimed he could sell me just the camera – no problem – but he would need to call me back in ten minutes - ???? Of course, no call back ever came.

All of these vendors are listed through a web portal, http://www.lowpricedigital.com/ prominently advertised as a sponsored link at the top of the Google results page. This afternoon, I see that both The Digital Nerds and Wisetronics have upped their price for the Panasonic to $299 (A price available from Amazon and just about everybody else.) Now the third dealer on the list, http://www.digitalsuperdeals.com/, is offering the camera for $229 (and the auxiliary high-capacity battery is offered for $149.99! This web portal and all of its so-called merchant links appears to be a huge scam operation attempting to lure people in with low camera prices so they can fleece them for exorbitantly priced accessories.

Finally, I noticed a Google sidebar sponsored link for B&H Professional Photography Supply had the camera listed for $269. Their spare batteries were only $27 and I got a couple of 2 Gb SD Memory Cards for only $26 each. Their shipping was only $6.95 (Everyone else was quoting from $15 - $20 for 5- 7 day shipping) I requested 3 – 5 day shipping for only $5 more. They were thoroughly professional and even spent quite a bit of time answering my questions about shooting in raw format, Panasonic vs. Canon, Super Zoom vs. DSLR, noise reduction strategies, etc. I got great service and still a good buy without getting taken to the cleaners for the extras.

Neutron diffraction offers non-destructive artifact analysis

I was doing some research on an image of a "killed" Greek helmet that I photographed at the Walters Art Museum several years ago and came across this article about a relatively new non-destructive technique for analyzing artifacts to see if they are a true antiquity or have been "tampered with".

"Neutron diffraction, an established diagnostic tool for materials analysis and non-destructive testing of engineering components, can also be used to characterise archaeological artefacts and museum objects. The phase and microstructural information obtained – without damaging an object of value – can help answer questions of authenticity, as recent investigations of 16th-century silver/copper coins and an obviously repaired 7th-century BC Greek bronze helmet show.

Neutron diffraction is a rather new diagnostic tool for studying archaeological materials. Neutrons easily penetrate through thick coatings or corrosion layers and provide information from the bulk rather than from surface areas; sampling techniques such as coring or even powdering for analysis some portion of a museum object can therefore be avoided. The large neutron beams generally used illuminate a considerable volume portion of the object and, as a result, average and representative structural information is obtained – the problems associated with the si0ngle-spot analysis of many conventional archaeometric techniques are therefore avoided. Neutron diffraction provides information on the mineral and metal phase compositions or corrosion products in objects, on the crystal structures of the constituent phases and on the microstructures. In the material sciences it is widely used for volume
texture analysis, i.e. determination of the orientations of the crystallites in polycrystalline material. Many
processes such as primary crystallisation or plastic deformations impose a characteristic texture on the
material which means that, for example, details of the production method may be imprinted in the
microstructure. Mapping grain orientation distributions – a technique called texture analysis –
reveals the creation and deformation history of an object. The crystallite distribution can be displayed
via ‘pole figures’, 2D projections of the spatial orientation distribution function that are obtained by
recording diffraction patterns for a multitude of sample orientations. The structure and texture
information can therefore provide clues on the type of material and the manufacturing techniques used
by the ancient craftsmen. " - Genuine or fake? Neutron diffraction for non-destructive testing of museum objects , Isis 2003 Science Highlights.

As for the helmet they analyzed, they discovered the nose piece had been replaced and, like the helmet I photographed at the Walters, had been ritually "killed".

"It was the custom for victorious Greek cities to dedicate tropaia, ‘trophies’ of armour from the defeated, in the sanctuary of one of the gods. When the trophy collapsed from age or when the sanctuary became too full the armour was buried, but first it was ‘killed’ as part of the process of offering it to the gods: the cheekpieces were bent
back and the noseguard turned up to render the helmet useless in this world. The finder of the helmet – probably in the 19th century and in order to sell it – straightened out the cheekpieces, which cracked at the edges and left a clear fold-line running across each of them. It is also clear that the noseguard had come off altogether, probably during
similar cosmetic straightening by the finder, for there is a clear overlapping join at the bridge of the nose."

I wonder if the Romans had any special rituals for disposing of war trophies?

Content "wraps" to replace blanket advertising

I do hope the networks make some headway in changing their advertising methods. I don't know if they qualify for "content wraps" but I, for one, find the new "Me and My Gang" ad music video I've seen on the Western Channel and the "I wanna be a rock star" video with scenes from The Tudors quite enjoyable. I would definitely vote for more of those over the interminable BowFlex and Nutrisystems ads that saturate the advertising time on a number of the satellite channels.

"ABC and the four other big broadcast networks are working on methods to hold the attention of TV viewers throughout the commercial breaks that interrupt the shows they want to see.

That is becoming increasingly important for two reasons. One is that more viewers are watching shows delayed rather than live, using TiVo and other DVRs. Research indicates those viewers are more likely to fast-forward through spots than those who watch live TV.

The other reason the networks need viewers to keep watching ads is that Nielsen Media Research, the ratings arbiter, intends soon to begin measuring viewership of commercials as well as programs.

One way that many networks hope to engage viewers during commercial breaks is by wedging original content into the blocks of advertising time, so that viewers will anticipate seeing something fun if they sit through a few ads.

Fox Broadcasting, for instance, tried out a series of clips for two weeks last month about an animated character named Oleg, a New York cab driver, who popped up in eight-second vignettes during commercial breaks in series like “24.” CW has been running “content wraps,” which mix sponsor products into program snippets.

Some experiments involve the cast of the shows in which the commercials appear, serving as hosts for the breaks. That is a throwback to an era when “cast commercials” proliferated with the stars of series like “I Love Lucy,” “The Beverly Hillbillies” and even “The Flintstones.”

Yahoo communications center with calendar looks promising!

Friday, I was attempting to set up an account for a developer's sandbox that required me to use one of my alternate email addresses. When I went into my Yahoo account to check for the confirmation email, I noticed Yahoo had rolled out a beta of a new communications interface that included a calendar program. I thought I would poke around the calendar system a bit and liked what I saw - task lists, recurring appointments, reminders, calendar sharing, public, private, and busy times only event settings - all with a very familiar (Outlookish) looking interface, AND an intellisync tool that you could install to not only update your PDA but update the Yahoo calendar from your preferred local client automatically. In other words, you just continue using your own client if you wish, and have the intellisync keep your yahoo calendar (that is shared at whatever level you wish) automatically updated sort of like a virtual PDA for the world. It apparently works with Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, Lotus Organizer 6.0 (yay for my admin people!), Act! 2000 and 6.0, and both Palm and Pocket PC handhelds. It appears to be a much more "ready for prime time" tool than Google's calendar at present.

Yahoo beta-testing integrated email and calendaring system

Friday, I was attempting to set up an account for a developer's sandbox that required me to use one of my alternate email addresses. When I went into my Yahoo account to check for the confirmation email, I noticed Yahoo had rolled out a beta of a new communications interface that included a calendar program. I thought I would poke around the calendar system a bit and liked what I saw - task lists, recurring appointments, reminders, calendar sharing, public, private, and busy times only event settings - all with a very familiar (Outlookish) looking interface, AND an intellisync tool that you could install to not only update your PDA but update the Yahoo calendar from your preferred local client automatically. In other words, you just continue using your own client if you wish, and have the intellisync keep your yahoo calendar (that is shared at whatever level you wish) automatically updated sort of like a virtual PDA for the world. It apparently works with Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, Lotus Organizer 6.0 (yay for my admin people!), Act! 2000 and 6.0, and both Palm and Pocket PC handhelds. It appears to be a much more "ready for prime time" tool than Google's calendar at present.

Adjusting color with human language commands

This is a terrific development. Hopefully, the technology will be transferred to image editing programs like Photoshop. I would rather tell Photoshop to make the yellow brighter than to hassle selecting all of the yellow in the image then tweaking the hue, saturation, tint, contrast, etc.



Kevin Rivoli for the Xerox Corporation

"Adjusting color on printers should be simpler," Geoffrey Woolfe says.

To the human eye, that flower in the photo is reddish orange, that sky is light blue, that sun shines brilliant yellow.

But when software tells a printer to reproduce that image, it uses a long, unwieldy set of numbers and letters to describe those colors — and a totally different set of characters to describe shades that are a tad lighter, or a bit darker, or a whole lot brighter. The upshot is that most laymen would have to attend the computer equivalent of Berlitz to learn how to get the shades they want.

But if Xerox has its way, that will not be true much longer. This week the company introduced the software equivalent of a translator that can turn plain color speech into fluent computerese. Type the command, “Make the sun a brighter yellow,” and the printer will read, “Go with color CIELAB[88, -3, 64].”

“You shouldn’t have to be a color expert to make the sky a deeper blue or add a bit of yellow to a sunset,” said Geoffrey Woolfe, a principal scientist in the Xerox Innovation Group, who is based in Webster, N.Y., near Rochester. “So we’re providing that middle layer that turns plain speech into mathematical code.”

Color experts are already impressed. “They’ve taken common words and modifiers and transformed them into mathematical directions,” said Roy S. Berns, a professor of color science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which has just inaugurated a doctoral program in color science.

There are still problems to be ironed out, of course. For now, the software does not differentiate between colors in different parts of an image — in other words, it can tell the printer to make all the blues darker, but it cannot yet tell it to darken the sky but lighten the ocean and leave the blue dress alone. And it is still working on a lexicon of languages — after all, a “brighter” color to one person is a “crisper” color to another and a “sharper” color to a third.

“To understand what someone means when he says the pinks need to be brighter, the software must know what pink means and what brighter means.” Professor Berns said. “And there are individual, cultural and regional differences in the way people use those words.”

Mr. Woolfe readily acknowledges the problems, and he concedes that the product is a couple of years away from commercialization. He envisions the final version as having the capability to learn. Say particular users keep typing, “no, darker” when they ask for chartreuse. “The machine will respond with a color chart that shows what it views as chartreuse, and then will let the user show what he means by the word,” Mr. Woolfe said. If it turns out the user thinks chartreuse is forest green, the software will act accordingly from then on..."

Related

More on Color Language Research (xerox.com)

Trying to edit Wikipedia a frustrating process

Lately, I have been working with an arts foundation down in Oija, California that asked me to create an educational history website using historical figures created by artist/historian George S. Stuart as the basis for articles featured there. I was so impressed with the quality of the figures and the meticulous research that goes into their creation that I obtained permission from the foundation's photographer to upload 200X300pixel versions of the images to Wikicommons so they could be used to illustrate biographies in Wikipedia. The photographer, Mr. Peter D'Aprix, granted full rights for their use with the only requirement being attribution and share-alike for any derivatives.

However, when I attempted to include them in some of the biographical articles, I quickly discovered an apparent bias against the inclusion of contemporary art that is not widely known. This resulted in removal of the images within hours of inclusion. A guideline was posted to my talk page pointing out that external links to .com sources are not permitted (I had linked the artist's name to his website). I was not aware of this restriction so I removed the link and added the image back to the article. Then, I was told by another editor that he thought the images did not add anything to the article since the article already had pictures of contemporary portraits. I was aware of the contemporary portraits but many of them were highly stylized and did not provide a life-like representation like the figural images did. I added information about the year and age the portrait figure represented, consistent with the captions provided under the other portraits but again the other editor blew my edits away. I questioned his apparent censorship expressed by his rationale that the art was not widely known so had no basis for inclusion and told him I thought the internet was a place anyone could exercise their creativity without obtaining elitist-recognized status before their work could be placed before the public. But, apparently not, at least not on Wikipedia. I requested a third-party opinion and hoped my viewpoint would be shared by other editors. However, some responses to my request referred to the figures as "dolls" as did the editor I was having problems with. Despite the other reasons that were offered, I think the bias against what are perceived as "dolls" as an art form (Mr. Stuart would shudder at the description of his art form as "dolls") is the real nub of the issue. Art is ultimately in the eye of the beholder but apparently some of these editors don't wish to offer anyone else the chance to make that personal decision.

After reading a number of other contentious posts between editors arguing over points of view, relevance, etc. I realized that although Wikipedia sounds inviting (anyone can edit!) the reality is it is an environment frought with self-appointed experts who fiercely defend their fiefdoms and, in some cases, their extremely inflexible mindsets.

New standalone DVD recorders offer ease of use to the video conversion process

I was reading a review by David Pogue about a new standalone DVD recording unit from Sony and it reminded me to comment on my quite positive experience I have had with an even less expensive unit from Go-Video. First, David's review in a nutshell:

"we insist upon upgrading our recording technologies every few years, each time orphaning millions of disks, reels and cassettes in older formats. All over the world, VHS and camcorder tapes from the 1980s and ’90s are slowly turning to dust. And it’s becoming harder and harder to find the equipment you need to play back some of those videos.

Even the DVD will one day turn out to have been a temporary format, but at least it has advantages over tapes. The video quality is terrific. You can skip around without rewinding or fast-forwarding. And homemade DVDs may last 100 years, if you believe the vendors of those gold-coated blanks.

Now, the technologically savvy computer nut thinks nothing of connecting an old camcorder or VCR to a well-equipped Mac or PC; hitting Play; waiting two hours for each tape to transfer in real time; editing and touching up the result on the computer screen; and then waiting another two hours for the resulting video burn onto a DVD.

But in Sony’s opinion (and many other people’s), this is much too laborious, expensive and time-consuming. Enter the Sony DVDirect VRD-MC3, a $218 box that converts old (and new) videotapes into shiny new DVDs with an emphasis on two extremely important attributes: simplicity and reproduction quality.

Under the hood of the cleanly designed, black-and-white plastic case (12.7 by 4.9 by 10.6 inches) is a DVD burner that accepts almost any format of blank disc: DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and dual-layer (extra-capacity) versions of each. (There is one exception: the DVDirect doesn’t accept the dual-layer DVD-RW variety.)"

I have had a similarly positive experience with a Go Video DVD recorder that I bought on sale for only $69. I had been in the market for a DVD recorder since my Dish Network DVR started reaching its capacity and, try as I might, I couldn't find anything on it I didn't want to keep!

Just before Christmas, I saw an ad from a local discount store offering a GoVideo DVD recorder for $89 with $20 rebate (and I am meticulous about sending in my rebate coupons!) I was a little dubious about quality but I remembered we had a GoVideo VCR/DVD recorder combo unit in our technology lab at work that seemed to work well so I thought I would give it a try. After all, $69 is not much to risk if I wasn't satisfied with the results.

But, I have been pleasantly surprised with the quality of the recording (selectable from HQ (1 hr per DVD) to 2 hr, 4 hr, and 6 hr/DVD recording settings) and the editing features that enable me to rename the titles, schedule a selectable range of chapter marking intervals, select the index image for the title segment, and finalize the disk - all from the remote control. It, too has both S-Video connections as well as RCA ( the standard yellow, white and red connectors). Only the purely automatic scanning feature to establish channel reception tripped me up. Unlike many other video devices I have owned in the past, the GoVideo DVD recorder did not have a switch for Channel 3 or Channel 4 reception. You had to select the AutoScan function from the audio/video menu option under the Setup menu for the device to detect a video signal coming in on channel 3 from my Dish DVR and lock onto it.

I wish the Dish DVR would let me connect a DVD recorder to the USB outlet and (to use David Pogue's expression) slurp content from the DVR directly without having to go back through the playback process but the DISH USB has been programmed to accept only the proprietary (and quite spendy) "Pocket Dish" device.

I found a website that discusses how to disassemble the DVR and connect it to a computer to download the data from it but it is a violation of Dish's equipment lease agreement and besides, I'm more of a software kind of gal than a hardware technician. Although I have actually installed hard drives, sound systems, extra memory, internal network cards, CD-Rom drives, etc. my hands always tremble because I find it very nerve wracking.

Adobe to take Photoshop online |

I see Google docs has got some Google competitors a bit jumpy! I just returned from a conference on Instructional Technology where a presenter discussed the use of Google docs as an alternative to installing and maintaining a wiki. Perhaps Adobe has good reason to be nervous!

Tech News on ZDNet: "Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe Systems plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months, the company's chief executive said Tuesday.

The online service is part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com.

Chizen said Adobe laid the foundation for a hosted Photoshop product with Adobe Remix, a Web-based video-editing tool it offers through the PhotoBucket media-sharing site.

Like Adobe Remix, the hosted Photoshop service is set to be free and marketed as an entry-level version of Adobe's more sophisticated image-editing tools, including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Chizen envisions revenue from the Photoshop service coming from online advertising.

'That is new (for Adobe). It's something we are sensitive to because we are watching folks like Google do it in different categories, and we want to make sure that we are there before they are, in areas of our franchises,' Chizen said.

Chizen described the introduction of Adobe Remix and the forthcoming hosted Photoshop as part of a larger move toward integrating hosted services into the company's product mix."

Windows VISTA features defnitely worth waiting for

I'm at the Instructional Technologies Strategies Conference in Portland, Oregon right now and enjoyed an excellent (and entertaining) preconference workshop on Windows VISTA yesterday presented by New York Times columnist David Pogue. I'd read a lot of rather negative press about the new operating system but hadn't really had a chance to explore its features. With David's help I was able to do that yesterday (we were all provided with a Vista-equipped laptop to use for the session by one of the conference supporters).

Some of the things I found most helpful about the new OS:

Search and Rescue - Users of workstations with ever increasing data storage capacities have begun to flounder in their local sea of data as much as they do in the oceans of data on the internet. So, Microsoft has taken one of the best developments of the Web 2.0 revolultion, folksonomy, and incorporated it into VISTA. A user now has the ability to tag documents to facilitate location and retrieval of data.

Along with this immensely useful feature, Microsoft incorporated a powerful search function that allows users to not only search file names, tags, and types but looks within document contents. It even offers a natural language search capability, although this feature is not enabled by default. You can tell a VISTA workstation to "find emails from Robin yesterday" and it will automatically understand the application, sender and date parameters of the search.

David demonstrated how much more quickly you can click the equivalent of the Start button (it's not called start anymore) and type "calc" into the search field to launch the calculator than to select Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Calculator. I found myself using this feature almost intuitively as soon as he demonstrated it.

ALLOW or DENY - Despite the impression given by the currently running ad from Apple, the Security system built into VISTA was not as intrusive as I feared. When I turned on the laptop and initiated a connection to the hotel wireless system I was cautioned that the system was not secured (someting XP already did) then asked if the system was public or private. This new addition is actually quite welcome. If you select public, like you should when using any publicly provided hotspot, VISTA prevents your network activity from being seen by other users of the public service. David pointed out that you no longer have to worry about fellow coffee drinkers at Starbucks scanning your data or harvesting your passwords while you work away oblivious to their clandestine activities. You can also save the public setting for hotspot connections that you use regularly.

Windows VISTA also provides a built-in phishing filter. If you click on a link in an email message that is bogus, VISTA checks a database of known phishing sites and does not launch the linked webpage if it determines the site to be among the offenders.

VISTA also has parental controls that may seem Big Brotherish but will be welcomed by millions of concerned parents. The administrator account can enter a list of either forbidden websites or a list of approved websites by user of the system so as children grow, their parental filter can be adjusted accordingly. To accompany this feature VISTA provides a detailed logging system that can be activated to track the user activity. A parent can see not only which sites were visited but which sites the child attempted to access that were blocked (and perhaps have a meaningful discussion about them). VISTA even offers the parent the ability to monitor game usage. Not only can a parent specify that only games of a certain ESRB rating level can be played but individual game content can be filtered such as graphic violence, nudity, etc. The parent can even dictate that files cannot be downloaded (this may be a good security practice for the very young but would be too extremely limiting for adolescents).

Grouping and Stacking - David demonstrated another really useful feature called grouping and stacking. You can now group data by parameter into temporary folders with a few simple clicks. For example, if you have tagged a number of documents with a particular project name or keyword, you can instantly group them into a folder to use for batching operations. Music buffs could group music by genre or artist and instantly create temporary playlists.

Enhanced graphic tools - I was particularly excited by a new feature in graphics management. Whenever you edit an image in VISTA, it automatically creates a shadow document of the original image. Unlike Photoshop's revert to last saved feature, VISTA retains a copy of the original unedited document that can be retrieved at any time. I had been performing this type of file management for some time by always creating two copies of any downloaded images, placing one set in a folder marked original. VISTA now does it transparently. Very nice!

Well, it's time to get dressed for breakfast and prepare myself for another of David's workshops today on digital photography. I'll continue this discourse later this evening.

Web-based database system opens up Baltic museum collections

I see some of the museums in the Baltic states are banding together to create a public database of their collections. I wonder if they'll allow non-commerical use of the images for teaching and education, though.

More and more museums are providing online access to their collections, making it possible to visit great cultural and historic treasures from the comfort of your home or office. The key to simple use is well-structured information, data access and site architecture. The EUREKA E! 2918 ONLINE CATALOGUE project has developed a cost-effective and easily configurable database system, simplifying access to almost any type of museum collection.

This web-based approach was developed to widen and deepen cooperation between museums in the Baltic States by improving functionality and ease-of-use, enhancing research, education and training. The system is already providing Internet access to museum collections in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia for European and world citizens. The resulting open-architecture system will be marketed worldwide.

Robotics comes to the home front

Well, this holiday season I took a leap into robotics to actually save me time and perspiration with one of the more boring domestic chores, vacuuming. My husband and I were wandering around Sears and I lingered a while in the vacuum section since the old Kirby my husband found for me years ago weighs a bunch and as I grow older I find it more and more of a struggle to pack the old beast upstairs or from one room to another. As I walked past all the latest models I started daydreaming about the robotic vacuums I had heard about but thought to myself I would not find one of those in Sears. Lo and behold I turned a corner and there stacked up against a pillar was a shipment of Roombas - a robotic vacuum from iRobot. I was astounded to actually see one and the sales representative happily took out the rather battered looking demo and set it to the task of cleaning the rug. As I watched it swirling about, it's dirt detection light flashing like a miniature K-mart blue light special I resolved to give the little guy a try. So I shelled out the $299 (I took the more expensive Scheduler model that lets me program the time of its cleaning routines) and packed it home.

I followed the manual's recommendation to observe the Roomba in its first task to see if it had problems with any particular obstacle in the room or caught on rug fringe or draperies and found that it did have problems with some of my bedroom furniture with curved feet. However, they supply you with "virtual walls" to help the Roomba skirt these kinds of obstacles. The Roomba comes with two virtual wall units but I think I need two more so will try to snag a couple of them up on Ebay for less than the usual retail price of $29.95 each. My experiment with the Roomba in the living room went very well as did my trial in the kitchen and dining room. I thought to myself what I would really like is a Roomba that scrubs kitchen floors. I went up on the iRobot website and was thrilled to see that the Scooba does just that! I have resolved to get one of those too.

I now have worked the Roomba into my daily routine. I have it clean the living room one day then the kitchen and dining room the next day. When I rearrange the furniture in the bedroom I will add it to the Roomba queue. On Saturday I set the Roomba to the task of vacuuming my home office.

Overall, I'm very pleased with this technological inroad into the domestic front and I doubt that my Roomba will instigate any plots against me with my home theater system or my steam cleaner. I see that iRobot now offers a "Create-a-bot" programmable model for any budding robotics wannabees. Now that's what I call an interactive educational experience:

iRobot Unveils Programmable Robot

Developers and Students Can Now Create Useful Robots Quickly and Easily

2007 INTERNATIONAL CES, LAS VEGAS, Jan. 8, 2007 – iRobot Corp. (NASDAQ: IRBT) today unveiled iRobot® Create™, an affordable, programmable robot designed for aspiring roboticists, advanced high-school and college students, and serious robot developers. Create comes pre-assembled, so developers can design new robots without having to build a mobile robot from scratch. The latest robot is available at www.irobot.com and pricing starts at $129.99.

“Innovators dream of creating useful robots, but they often get bogged down with designing a mobile platform that works,” said Helen Greiner, co-founder and chairman of iRobot. “iRobot Create fills a need in the robot industry for a standard, durable hardware platform on which to rapidly develop new, innovative mobile robots.”

Create is based on the core technology of iRobot Roomba®, the vacuuming robot that is cleaning millions of homes worldwide, and is compatible with Roomba’s rechargeable batteries, remote control and other accessories.

With Create, developers can now begin designing new robot applications out of the box. This new platform provides access to robot sensors and actuators via an open interface. Create also features standard connections for electronics and threaded mounting holes that allow users to secure their inventions to the robot, streamlining the integration of third-party electronics such as sensors, cameras, arms and wireless connections.

A variety of methods and programming languages can be used to control Create. Beginners can observe the robot’s behavior in one of ten demonstration modes, or they can program the robot directly by downloading short scripts with any basic terminal program. More advanced users can write programs for completely autonomous robot behavior in C or C++ using the iRobot Command Module. Developers can also create custom software and interact with Create using a variety of methods including Microsoft Robotics Studio, a Windows-based development toolkit.

ReplayTV Returns (and It’s Not Just a Rerun) - New York Times

This definitely has potential! At present I cannot transfer my Dish satellite DVR recordings to my iPod because they equipped it with a proprietary USB connection that will only talk to their own pocket Dish. I also have no way to increase the capacity of the DISH DVR either. At $100 for the software and only $20 per year subscription thereafter, their price point is right too.

ReplayTV Returns (and It’s Not Just a Rerun) - New York Times: "The new incarnation of Replay requires a computer with Windows XP, a Pentium 4 chip that is 1.3 gigahertz or faster, and a fast graphics card with 128 megabytes of video RAM. You also need a video tuner card, which lets the computer receive TV signals from cable, satellite or over the air. (The Replay software is included with some Hauppauge tuner cards.)

As with the old Replay, the new version shows two weeks of TV listings as a grid, or you can search by title, director, actor, genre or special categories like “season premieres.” All navigation can be done by keyboard or with a remote control (not included).

For $100, you get the software and the first year’s subscription; the annual fee is $20 thereafter. The company plans to offer a free 30-day trial through www.replaytv.com starting today. "

For France, Video Games Are as Artful as Cinema - New York Times

I agree with the culture minister of France that video games do reflect substantial creativity and can reflect cultural value. I'm not sure I'd give a creative award to Donkey Kong, however. There are many other games with truly breathtaking graphics and far more intricate game play, often based on historical events, that would be much better candidates.

New York Times: "France is proud of its contribution to culture in such forms as existentialism, Impressionism and auteur films. Now the French culture minister wants to add Donkey Kong to his country’s pantheon of high art.

“Call me the minister of video games if you want — I am proud of this,” the minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, said in an interview last month. “People have looked down on video games for far too long, overlooking their great creativity and cultural value.”

Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres is seeking to have video games recognized as a cultural industry eligible for tax breaks, similar to French cinema.

In March, he pinned medals from the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres — a prize awarded to acknowledge cultural accomplishments — on three prominent video game designers, including Shigeru Miyamoto, the Japanese creator of Donkey Kong. The game, popularized in the 1980s, stars an Italian plumber called Mario.

Video game creators should receive a tax break of 20 percent, up to a ceiling of 500,000 euros, Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres says.

“Video games are not a mere commercial product,” he insisted. “They are a form of artistic expression involving creation from script writers, designers and directors.”"

Mississippi State Develops Effective Campus-wide Podcasting System on a Shoestring

I'm at the national Educause Conference in Dallas, Texas, right now and of course I am looking for innovative web-based applications that we could implement to provide campus-wide services in a number of areas including e-portfolio development, learning object repositories, content publishing and collaboration, etc.

I went to an excellent presentation this afternoon given by the IT group at Mississippi State about their lowcost, automated podcasting system using existing polycom output routed through a relatively inexpensive device (about $350 per lectern) called a Barix instreamer that converts all audio produced during a class presentation to an MP3 format. The MS group wrote a web-based front end for faculty login and input of metadata as well as an automated RSS output that automatically publishes the file to the web through links into their CMS system (they use WebCT but it would probably adapt just as well to Blackboard. The MS folks sounded like they would be willing to share their software if we were interested in developing the service here. I couldn't hardly believe that they built the entire system and rolled it out campus-wide in less than three weeks!

A Chip That Can Transfer Data Using Laser Light

With this new technology, maybe those of us living in more remote locations will finally get high-speed internet at a reasonable cost!

New York Times: "Researchers plan to announce on Monday that they have created a silicon-based chip that can produce laser beams. The advance will make it possible to use laser light rather than wires to send data between chips, removing the most significant bottleneck in computer design.

As a result, chip makers may be able to put the high-speed data communications industry on the same curve of increased processing speed and diminishing costs — the phenomenon known as Moore’s law — that has driven the computer industry for the last four decades.

The development is a result of research at Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Commercializing the new technology may not happen before the end of the decade, but the prospect of being able to place hundreds or thousands of data-carrying light beams on standard industry chips is certain to shake up both the communications and computer industries.

Lasers are already used to transmit high volumes of computer data over longer distances — for example, between offices, cities and across oceans — using fiber optic cables. But in computer chips, data moves at great speed over the wires inside, then slows to a snail’s pace when it is sent chip-to-chip inside a computer.

With the barrier removed, computer designers will be able to rethink computers, packing chips more densely both in home systems and in giant data centers. Moreover, the laser-silicon chips — composed of a spider’s web of laser light in addition to metal wires — portend a vastly more powerful and less expensive national computing infrastructure. For a few dollars apiece, such chips could transmit data at 100 times the speed of laser-based communications equipment, called optical transceivers, that typically cost several thousand dollars."

Where oh where has the RSS Link gone on Google?

I am working on a php driven website that displays information about historical figures contained in a Filemaker Pro database. One of the features desired on this website is a list of links to other resources on the web about the figure that is selected. I created a table to contain the links with various fields to relate the links to the figures individually and by group but as the compilation of links would be quite time consuming, I decided that it would be better to embed an RSS feed generated by one of the search engines based on a specifically defined search criteria instead. This would automatically update itself as new resources appear on the web.

I had used a Google-search generated RSS feed in the past so when I went up on Google and performed a search and looked for the RSS feed link I was baffled when I couldn’t find it anymore. Thinking it was just late in the day and I was just somehow overlooking the link, I called JQ and we both hunted all over for it. JQ finally found an article indicating that the feature was removed some time ago. Apparently, Google (and Yahoo) both decided that they didn’t want you to be able to easily create this time saving feature – I’m assuming it’s because RSS feeds do not contain advertising. So, JQ and I set about searching for a work around.

JQ found a blogpost about a tool developed by Ben Hammersley called Google to RSS. I found a tool developed by ResearchBuzz that will create a feed from several different search engines including special science and math search engines called Kebberfegg. Kebberfegg is a tool to help you generate large sets of keyword-based RSS feeds at one time..

With one search you can generate an RSS feed for:

Scientific and Medical: Hubmed, CiteuLike, Connotea, CounsellingResource.com

Multimedia: BigFeeder, Del.icio.us Audio, Del.icio.us Video, BlogDigger Audio, BlogDigger Video and Image, Buzznet, Flickr, Blinkx TV

News: BBC, NewsisFree, FeedsFarm, Google News, IceRocket News, NewsTrove News, RocketNews, Topix.net, FindArticles, Wired, Findory, Yahoo News, MSN News

Press Release Wires: MarketWire and PRWeb via FeedFindings, PR Newswire via Google News, Business Wire via Google News

Tags and Site Submissions: Digg, Del.Icio.Us, IceRocket Tags, Technorati Tags, RawSugar, Ma.gnolia

Technology: PHPDeveloper, Etamp

Web Search Engines: MSN, IceRocket

Weblog Search Engines: Blogdigger, Daypop, Feedster, Google Blog, IceRocket Blog, Findory Blog, RocketNews Blog, Blogpulse, Yahoo Blog Search, Sphere

Other: 43 Places

I decided to use the tool from ResearchBuzz then take the feed it generates and paste it into RSS to Javascript's tool:

http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/p/138.html

and paste the resulting snippet of code in a text field in my database. Then I assigned a Php variable to that text field and call it within my PhP page. Too bad I can't rely on people to have the newest browsers that can display RSS feeds directly but I think that would be too optimistic at this point.

3D Photo Tourism Project Showcased at SIGGRAPH

Several months ago I was contacted by researchers working on an immersive 3D Photo Tourism project at the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington.

"A central goal of image-based rendering is to evoke a visceral sense of presence based on a collection of photographs of a scene. The last several years have seen signicant progress towards this goal through view synthesis methods in the research community and in commercial products such as panorama tools. One of the dreams
is that these approaches will one day allow virtual tourism of the world's interesting and important sites.

During this same time, digital photography, together with the Internet, have combined to enable sharing of photographs on a truly massive scale. For example, a Google image search on “Notre Dame Cathedral” returns over 15,000 photos, capturing the scene from myriad viewpoints, levels of detail, lighting conditions, seasons, decades, and so forth. Unfortunately, the proliferation of shared photographs has outpaced the technology for browsing such
collections, as tools like Google (www.google.com) and Flickr (www.ickr.com) return pages and pages of thumbnails that the user must comb through.

We present a system for browsing and organizing large photo collections of popular sites which exploits the common 3D geometry of the underlying scene. Our approach is based on
computing, from the images themselves, the photographers' locations and orientations, along with a sparse 3D geometric representation of the scene, using a state-of-the-art image-based modeling system. Our system handles large collections of unorganized photographs
taken by different cameras in widely different conditions.

We show how the inferred camera and scene information enables the following capabilities:

Scene visualization. Fly around popular world sites in 3D by morphing between photos.

Object-based photo browsing. Show me more images that contain this object or part of the scene.

Where was I? Tell me where I was when I took this picture.

What am I looking at? Tell me about objects visible in this image by transferring annotations from similar images." - Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D

The researchers requested permission to use some of my pictures of Trevi Fountain for a demonstration of their new system for creating an interactive environment for visual exploration of historical sites that have been photographed from many different angles at various times of the year by many different people. The demonstration was presented at Siggraph. You can view the system at:

http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/

I recommend watching the longer movie which explains the interactive features more in depth. I found it to be a fascinating learning environment and feel honored to have had some of my images selected for inclusion in such a cutting edge project. It really motivates me to continue to build my online archive for educational use.

Weighing a Switch to a Mac

I thought this comparison of the new Mac Intel-based platform with existing native Windows machines a thoughtful evaluation but was somewhat disturbed by the "switching experience" case study the article included.

New York Times: "The physical designs of Apple’s desktop and notebook computers are often innovative. The iMac, for example, is a space-saving desktop unit with an all-in-one enclosure that conceals the computer’s components behind the monitor. And the MacBook, a new notebook with a glossy screen, includes a new keyboard layout. This week, the company introduced the Mac Pro, a line of desktops replacing the Power Mac, completing its transition to Intel chips.

But while Apple’s selection covers much ground, it is less diverse than what is available from companies like Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sony and Lenovo. For example, Apple does not offer ultraportable notebooks, a tablet design or as wide a choice in processor types and speeds. And when it comes to pricing, Apple no longer offers notebooks in the sub-$1,000 range, or desktop units in the sub-$500 range, as do other makers.

Consideration should also be given to the compatibility of any devices like printers, external hard drives and cellphones that may be connected to a computer. In some instances, only Windows may be supported."

The Switching Experience

Danielle Wang, 26, of Austin, Tex., bought her first Mac six weeks ago. She took the advice of a friend and decided to buy a MacBook to replace her Windows-based laptop, a Sony Vaio, which she said had been stolen.

Early in the transition, Ms. Wang said, it took time to get used to the Mac interface; the menus, the location of buttons and other items were different. “It was difficult,” she said. “The first three days, I was constantly thinking about returning it.”

Ms. Wang uses the MacBook mainly for applications like e-mail, Web browsing, digital music, games and instant messaging; so far, she has not encountered problems finding Mac software, and she still maintains access to Windows-based computers for other programs she prefers to use at home.

In comparing the MacBook and the Vaio, she said the graphics were clearer on the Sony.

“The Sony Vaio is more lively,” she said. But she prefers the look and design of the MacBook."

What I find primarily disturbing about this particular case study is that essentially Ms. Wang opted for a Mac for esthetic reasons not because of product functionality. It reminds me of Steve Jobs boast at Mac World several years ago when the I-Mac was introduced with its unusual shape and color combinations. He essentially said it didn't matter how powerful the machine really is but that it looks "cool". I would like to think computer users are not that shallow.

New Navigation systems do more than point the way

I found this article in the New York Times describing the latest developments in navigation systems very interesting. I had read that digital cameras would be coming out with built in GPS systems to record the location of photos. This article says navigation systems based on GPS are incorporating cameras so you can snap a picture of a location with no fixed address and your navigation system can then return you to that same place at a future time if you need to go there again.

"The iCN 750 from Navman not only lets users show photos but shoot them — and use them as a navigation aid. Press a button and it shoots a digital picture of the road ahead (it can detach quickly from its suction-cup bracket to shoot other views or even shoot outside the car). There is no zoom, and the camera’s 1.3-megapixel resolution is more like a camera phone’s than a digital camera’s. But the point is not image detail: it is the G.P.S. geocode data the Navman adds to each photo as a record of where it was shot. Store the image on the Navman’s hard drive and it shows a user on a map where it was shot or can navigate back there, which is especially useful for spots that have no street address. Navman users can share their geocoded Navpix via www.navman.com/navpix library, and use tools there to add location codes to other photos."

As someone who loves to travel abroad I was also very pleased to note the new language bank feauture:

"

These navigation systems also work abroad. The satellite network these systems use for positioning is available worldwide, and most cars have lighter sockets. Travelers will need new digital maps, of course, but the major manufacturers have them for Europe, at least, and sometimes other places.

Garmin’s nüvi 350 and 360 do even more for European travelers, with a world travel clock and foreign currency and measurement converters built in, and language and travel guides available on plug-in SD cards. The language guides, using data from Oxford University Press, include word and phrase banks and bilingual dictionaries for nine languages and dialects (including American and British English, European and Brazilian Portuguese, and European and Latin American Spanish) and will even demonstrate how words are pronounced.

The travel guides, with data from Marco Polo, include information on tourist attractions and reviews of restaurants for all of Western Europe or any of five European regions."

TiVo Is Watching When You Don’t Watch, and It Tattles

I thought it would only be a matter of time before DVR providers started capitalizing on datamining the information stored on all those Digital Video Recorders like Tivo that are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in the homes of the viewing public.

This article also mentions efforts to tailor ads to the viewer's interest profile as noted by the types of programming the viewer chooses to record - sort of like Amazon's personal suggestions based on past purchase history. This may not be a bad thing if it means I won't have to sit through the deluge of Bowflex, Levitra, or Enzyte ads any more. My DVR is presently over half full of such educational programs as "The Crusades: The Crescent and the Cross", "The First Chinese Emperor", "Rome: Engineering an Empire", HBO's "Rome" miniseries (which I can erase when my new DVD First Season set arrives August 16), OPB's "The Madness of Henry VIII", and "Command Decisions: Alesia".

I wonder if they have a way to tell if the DVR controller is a woman or a man?

New York Times: "AS the advertising and television industries debate how to measure viewers of shows watched on digital video recorders, the pioneering maker of the recorders, TiVo, is getting into the argument. It is starting a research division to sell data about how its 4.4 million users watch commercials — or, more often, skip them.

The service is based on an analysis of the second-by-second viewing patterns of a nightly sample of 20,000 TiVo users, whose recorders report back to TiVo on what was watched and when.

On average, TiVo has found that its users spend nearly half of their television time watching programs recorded earlier. And viewers of those recorded shows skip about 70 percent of the commercials, said Todd Juenger, TiVo’s vice president for audience research.

But TiVo says that at a more detailed level there are wide variations in the numbers. The new research service, which is intended mainly for advertisers, could help them understand how to get more people to watch recorded commercials, like changing the content of ads or running them during certain kinds of programming.

For example, one study for a consumer packaged goods company, which Mr. Juenger declined to identify, found that commercials featuring animal characters, when shown on animal-related programs, were skipped less often than usual."

Blurb's print on demand model offers low cost, no editing option

I've kept my eye on the "print-on-demand" developments for quite a while so found blurb.com's latest venture interesting. I downloaded the Booksmart software and, after a quick tour of the features, and a few minutes using the software, I found it to have good potential.

Although it appeals to the person looking for a way to produce a highly personalized gift, I think it would also provide the means for communities to acquire truly unique library offerings that reflect the diverse characters and interests of their inhabitants.

New York Times: "The print-on-demand business is gradually moving toward the center of the marketplace. What began as a way for publishers to reduce their inventory and stop wasting paper is becoming a tool for anyone who needs a bound document. Short-run presses can turn out books economically in small quantities or singly, and new software simplifies the process of designing a book.

As the technology becomes simpler, the market is expanding beyond the earliest adopters, the aspiring authors. The first companies like AuthorHouse, Xlibris, iUniverse and others pushed themselves as new models of publishing, with an eye on shaking up the dusty book business. They aimed at authors looking for someone to edit a manuscript, lay out the book and bring it to market.

The newer ventures also produce bound books, but they do not offer the same hand-holding or the same drive for the best-seller list. Blurb’s product will appeal to people searching for a publisher, but its business is aimed at anyone who needs a professional-looking book, from architects with plans to present to clients, to travelers looking to immortalize a trip.

Blurb.com’s design software, which is still in beta testing, comes with a number of templates for different genres like cookbooks, photo collections and poetry books. Once one is chosen, it automatically lays out the page and lets the designer fill in the photographs and text by cutting and pasting. If the designer wants to tweak some details of the template — say, the position of a page number or a background color — the changes affect all the pages.

The software is markedly easier to use — although less capable — than InDesign from Adobe or Quark XPress, professional publishing packages that cost around $700. It is also free because Blurb expects to make money from printing the book. Prices start at $29.95 for books of 1 tto 40 pages and rise to $79.95 for books of 301 to 440 pages."

Downloading Service to Allow Film Watching on TV Screens - New York Times

Downloading Service to Allow Film Watching on TV Screens - New York Times: "The movie industry has been experimenting with ways to rent and sell downloaded movies, but these efforts have been hampered because the movies generally had to be watched on computer screens. The new service allows the movies to be seen on any television set connected to a DVD player.

“People like to watch movies in their living rooms, and this solves their problem,” said Curt Marvis, chief executive of CinemaNow, which is offering the download-to-DVD service. The studios participating include Sony, Disney, Universal, MGM and Lions Gate, which is a major shareholder in CinemaNow.

CinemaNow has been selling downloaded movies since April from these and some other studios, but the movies were restricted to computer viewing, and the downloads included only the film. The new offering also includes the bonus material on DVD discs, like filmmakers’ commentary and extra scenes.

The picture quality of the discs made through the downloading will not be as high as those on commercial DVD’s because the files need to be compressed to reduce the downloading time. Even so, it will take about three hours to download and burn a movie, hardly allowing for impulse purchases.

Mr. Marvis said users would not be inconvenienced by the time. “I was testing the service over the weekend with my family,” he said. “We picked out a movie to see, launched the service, cooked dinner, ate and by the time we washed and put away the dishes, there was the movie.”

And the studios are not yet allowing new releases to be sold in a form that can be copied to DVD’s. Initially, CinemaNow will offer about 100 older titles, including “Scent of a Woman,” “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” and “Barbershop.” Prices will be about $9 to $15, the same as the films sold in versions that could be downloaded only to computers.

Mr. Marvis said the response to the initial offering had been tepid."

I guess response would be tepid! Why would I pay as much as $15 to wait three hours to download a movie (even with its extra features), that has less than optimum quality, then have to burn it to a DVD that I have paid for???!!! Unless you take extra effort to create a menu, you would also not have the interactive selection capabilities of a DVD either! Come on movie moguls! You can do better than that!!!

SirLook offers free webpage "Live Help" service

Today, I noticed that a company is offering a free online chat support service that can be pasted into any number of websites. Years ago I used to use a similar service called “Human Click” with my tech support website here at the college. It worked quite well but like many good things that start out as an open source project, the service was eventually acquired by a group of capitalists that started charging for the service so I discontinued using it.

I was naturally skeptical about this new service but I read through the user agreement and saw no blatant gotchas. I signed up for the service and was pleased to see that the chat interface is even free from glaring advertisements – just a simple statement Powered by SirLook. It is a totally web-based service so there is nothing to install on the client side and you can load the script on as many web pages as you wish. When you login to their chat management site, you have a window that lists any chat requests by URL of the website where the request was initiated so one person can respond to multiple sites. You can customize the interface and include as many visitor questions to the chat request dialog box as you wish, archive sessions, track visitors, build a library of canned responses for frequently asked questions, and refer visitors to your own contact forms. The full list of features can be seen here:

http://www.sirlook.com/live/features.php

I am testing the service on my Roman Times educational history site. You can try it out by clicking on the Roman Times link below.

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Emharrsch/romanwonders.html

Jobs out to sell downloadable movies for $9.99

This time I think Jobs has let the success of iTunes go to his head. I, for one, am not willing to spend $9.99 for a downloadable movie when I can order pay-per-view for $3.99, video-on-demand for $4.99, and sale DVDs for less than $7. You better reconsider your price point Steven!

New York Times: "Consumers have been willing to spend 99 cents to buy Shakira's 'Hips Don't Lie' or $1.99 for an episode of 'Desperate Housewives' from iTunes.

Now Steven P. Jobs is betting they will also pay $9.99 to download 'The Godfather' to play on their iPods.

For weeks, Apple Computer has been talking with executives at all the major studios — including the Walt Disney Company, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers and Universal Studios — about adding movies to its popular iTunes music store, several people involved in the negotiations said."

New FujiFilm FinePix F30 low light camera a technological miracle!

My new Fujifilm FinePix F30 low-light photography camera arrived yesterday and I tested it out. I turned the lights off in my office, had the blinds closed (the room was quite dark) and took a picture of a vase of roses I have on my desk. The picture looked like I had taken it with a flash. I used the “museum” shooting mode setting (one of the presets) which automatically suppresses the flash and turns off all of the audible sounds of shutter, etc. It automatically adjusted itself to an ISO of 3200 and an aperture setting of 2.8 with a shutter speed of 1/15 and I had zoomed to about 2X. Normally, hand holding at 1/15 second is pretty risky, even with my Panasonic FZ20 and its advanced image stabilization system. But the Fujifilm has an even more advanced image stabilization system and the shot was impressive.

Shooting with its intelligent flash is even better (when you’re permitted). I took a picture of the same vase of roses using the totally automatic setting and the resulting image was evenly exposed (foreground and background), the ISO adjusted automatically to 800, the shutter speed adjusted to 1/90, and I got an aperture setting of F4.

Another thing I like about this camera is the ability to switch from a displayed menu back to shooting mode by just touching the shutter. It also has a one touch Macro mode and a power save LCD adjustment that lets you change from standard LCD viewing to fine detail LCD viewing. Among its preset shooting modes is an underwater setting that I hope to use for aquarium pictures. Although I won’t be physically underwater, I will be shooting through glass at fish underwater so I’m hoping this setting will help to correct the color balance that is usually skewed a bit because of the tint of the glass and the water. It also has a special flower setting that is designed to capture true vivid flower petal colors, a text setting for taking clearer shots of letters, and a color mode menu option that lets you switch from standard contrast and color saturation to F-chrome with contrast and color saturation set to high for landscapes and flowers – sort of like in the old days when you would use Kodachrome film for better color capture instead of Ektachrome that often had a slightly bluish cast to it but was available in faster film speeds.

The camera also has a custom white balance mode where you can take a picture of a white sheet of paper in the existing ambient light and it will autoadjust the white balance setting accordingly. The battery is also recharged inside the camera by way of a very petite AC charger and, in fact, the camera itself fits in the palm of my hand so I can pack it right in the same case as my large Leica lens 12X zoom Panasonic FZ20 so I don’t have to add one more bag to sling over my shoulder. I hope to give it a real field trial over at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art next door before I go up to the Maryhill Museum of Art in Goldendale, Washington for a scheduled shoot in August.

Online Video Editing prompting people to switch to still camera video snippets

I found the following article very interesting. I knew that online video editing would soon follow online still image editing and online "photostory" editing but I was intrigued to note the observation that people are tending to switch from camcorders to still cameras capable of recording short video snippets. If you've ever paid close attention to professionally produced video or viewed it frame by frame you will note that it is usually a collage of short video segments switching scenes frequently. People seem to be catching onto this technique and like the more interesting results created by combining short snippets.

New York Times: "While sites like YouTube and Veoh have lately become popular for allowing users to share their self-produced videos, Jumpcut (www.jumpcut.com) is part of a new class of sites that also offer simple tools for stringing together video clips and then adding soundtracks, titles, transitions and unusual visual effects.

All of the sites, which include Jumpcut, Eyespot, Grouper and VideoEgg, have been introduced within the last year. This summer, they will be joined by another site, Motionbox, based in New York.

Their shared objective, the founders of the sites say, is to reduce the complexity of video editing and to reduce the cost to zero.

'We wanted to make video editing over the Internet faster than desktop editing,' said Jim Kaskade, co-founder and chief executive of Eyespot, based in San Diego. 'We think it will broaden the base of people who are creative, but may not have thought they were, by creating this tool kit for them. Editing video is eventually going to be as simple as sending e-mail.'"

All of the sites, except Grouper, require that video clips be uploaded to their servers before they can be manipulated. That can take a long time, and there are limits to the size of the files that can be sent. (For Jumpcut, the limit is 50 megabytes per clip.)

Users of Grouper (www.grouper.com) must first download a free piece of Windows-only software that works in tandem with the Web site. It permits users to trim and rearrange clips on their computer and upload only the finished product, in compressed form.

The sites make possible new kinds of collaborative editing. A group of parents attending a school play can upload all their video, and then edit a single version of the play that makes use of the best shots.

Many of the earliest users of the online editing services report two changes in the way they capture and assemble video. First, they tend not to use their camcorders as much, because the tendency with a camcorder is to record long, meandering stretches of birthday parties and parades, which are time-consuming to import to a computer and edit. Instead, they record more impressionistic scenes of a few seconds or a few minutes, using a digital still camera or a cellphone.

Second, even if they have experience using more powerful, PC-based editing software, they find themselves using the online services more often when they are working with the shorter snippets — and trying to assemble them quickly for a grandparent in a distant city."

Digital Camera Superheroes

New York Times: "THE SEE-IN-THE-DARK CAM Life is filled with beautiful scenes bathed in natural light — but most cameras muff the job either by blurring the shot (because the shutter must remain open a long time) or by nuking the whole affair with a flash.

Not the Fujifilm FinePix F30 (6.1 megapixels, $400). This camera's sensor is eight times as light-sensitive as most pocket cams. To put it in geek terms, its ISO (light-sensitivity) range goes to 3200 — a first for a consumer camera.

You can turn off the flash and still get amazingly clear, colorful, well-lighted shots, even at twilight, by firelight or indoors. At the highest ISO settings, a few digital colored speckles creep in, but only on shots you'd otherwise have missed.

As a bonus, this camera is an industry leader in battery life (500 shots); the electronics are quick; and the "intelligent flash" attempts to throttle back as necessary to avoid turning your friends' faces into overblasted bleached blobs. There's no eyepiece viewfinder but otherwise, this camera is a photographic knockout."

I was so excited about this camera that would be a perfect companion camera to my Panasonic DMC-FZ20 that I ordered one. I love my Panasonic's Leica lens and 12X zoom but when I am shooting pictures inside museums that are often poorly lit, even the Panasonic's ISO 400 setting is not enough. I also noticed in researching the Fuji camera on other websites that it has garnered a number of awards for innovation and technical excellence. I can hardly wait to try it out! I'm planning a photography shoot up at the Maryhill Museum of Art the second week of August so it should be a perfect opportunity to give it a real workout.

Why Web 2.0 will end your privacy

bit-tech.net : "So Murdoch knows everything about MySpace. The financial gurus at Yahoo know all about your personal thoughts, pictures and bookmarks. The guys at Google know everything about your search habits, and you can bet they want to link 'em up to your email and calendar and whatever else you end up using online. How much is that data worth? With marketing spends online going ever upwards, as more and more of the world 'logs on', you can bet that it's only going to get more and more valuable.

And where it's valuable, it will be bought and sold. Our social networks, searching habits, visual identifiers and personal preferences will be mercilessly sold to anyone who wants to get their hands on our particular demographic. And when your photos, your files, your email and your friends are all online, you'll have to be online - and thanks to net everywhere, like the Google San Francisco project, you'll always be able to be online. And as long as you're online, they can market to you.

When the Web 2.0 bubble bursts - when the massive buyouts are done, the millionaires are made and the sites we love today are in the hands of big business - the innovation will grind to a halt, and what's left will be the endless grinding of the marketeering machine.

But hey - at least you'll be closer to your friends. And you'll have free photo hosting, too."

I think this prediction is far too dour. Social computing, like any activity requiring interaction between two or more persons, by definition requires the loss of at least some of your privacy. But I think I would rather focus on the benefits to individuals and the facilitation of creativity than obssess over who may be able to profit from the knowledge of my individual preferences based on my public communications.

As someone who has worked in marketing in previous careers, I am acutely aware of the value of knowing what a customer wants. But as a customer, don't you think I would rather have someone offer me something related to my needs or interests instead of watching countless hours of commercials for products like Bowflex, Cialis, or Lexus automobiles (I find their ridiculous ads during the holidays particularly irritating - as if the average wife could afford to go out and SURPRISE her husband with a $50,000 car for a gift)? I may be a bit strange but I actually appreciate the targeted suggestions of books and movies I receive from Amazon based on my search and purchase history.

I also think the warning that our beloved Web 2.0 services will become stagnant pools of data without the benefit of future innovation is relatively baseless as well. The PC industry has always been user driven and I think the large media companies realize the continuing need to improve their users' experiences to keep them coming back to the wellspring. Articles have already appeared discusing the fact that these same media companies expect users to be a valuable source of creative content in the future. So I doubt that services such as Flickr and YouTube that facilitate content creation and sharing will become viewed as simply a drain on corporate profits.

The Shorter, Faster, Cruder, Tinier TV Show - New York Times

I found this article interesting in that it provides helpful insight into producing material for small display devices like cellphones and iPods. I'm in the process of writing a script for my first Podguide and plan to use some of the "Ken Burns" still image panning techniques so it will be interesting to see if slow image panning will be as effective on the small screen as it was on the large screen.

New York Times: "Shooting a show for a cellphone presents all kinds of technical problems for people used to conventional television production. That day in the Warner Brothers offices, I was already familiar with the drill about to follow, one that a producer described to me dourly as 'filming to the phone.' To be intelligible on screens sometimes smaller than 2 inches by 2 inches, most shots must be close-ups. Producers also have to limit zooming, panning and quick movement, which can blur because of slow streaming rates and because cellphones often deliver only 15 frames of video per second, compared with 30 frames per second on regular television."

Interns? No Bloggers Need Apply

Since I have worked in the private sector in several previous careers, I am well aware of tight-lipped corporate policies about sharing your work life with outsiders. But this article makes several important points about young bloggers' tendencies to "bare all" and what the employment consquences might be for doing so.


New York Times: "ON the first day of his internship last year, Andrew McDonald created a Web site for himself. It never occurred to him that his bosses might not like his naming it after the company and writing in it about what went on in their office.

For Mr. McDonald, the Web log he created, 'I'm a Comedy Central Intern,' was merely a way to keep his friends apprised of his activities and to practice his humor writing. For Comedy Central, it was a corporate no-no — especially after it was mentioned on Gawker.com, the gossip Web site, attracting thousands of new readers.

'Not even a newborn puppy on a pink cloud is as cute as a secret work blog!' chirped Gawker, giddily providing the link to its audience.

But Comedy Central disagreed, asking him to change the name (He did, to 'I'm an Intern in New York') and to stop revealing how its brand of comedic sausage is stuffed.

'They said they figured something like this would happen eventually because blogs had become so popular,' said Mr. McDonald, now 23, who kept his internship. 'It caught them off guard. They didn't really like that.'

This is the time of year when thousands of interns and new employees pour into the workplace from college campuses, many bringing with them an innocence and nonchalance about workplace rules and corporate culture.

Most experienced employees know: Thou Shalt Not Blab About the Company's Internal Business. But the line between what is public and what is private is increasingly fuzzy for young people comfortable with broadcasting nearly every aspect of their lives on the Web, posting pictures of their grandmother at graduation next to one of them eating whipped cream off a woman's belly. For them, shifting from a like-minded audience of peers to an intergenerational, hierarchical workplace can be jarring."

I am a staunch supporter of blogging because I believe blogs represent an important information sharing medium but I have never thought it ethical to divulge sensitive work-related information to the public at large. Although some of the bloggers in this article point to the importance of their blogs as a primary communication device for their families and close friends, they should keep in mind that a public blog is just that - public. Would they want their mistakes or lapses in judgment at work exposed to public scrutiny?

Of course I must admit I am a bit at a loss for understanding this new breed of bloggers that want to share every intimate detail about their lives anyway. Perhaps discretion is just something that a person learns to develop over time, unfortunately ,usually after being burned seriously first.

One-Button Data Backup in a Tiny Package - New York Times

One-Button Data Backup in a Tiny Package - New York Times: Hmmm...This looks promising. Now if I could just get users to store all their data under My documents! Otherwise even a 100 gigabyte version may not be large enough.

"The OneTouch III is less than an inch thick and 5.2 inches long. A 60-gigabyte version of the drive is available at www.maxtor.com and elsewhere online for $150, and a 100-gigabyte version for $200.

The drive comes with an instruction booklet and a U.S.B. cable. For PC users, setup is simple: Maxtor has included a full user's manual and backup software on the disk itself, which is preformatted using the Windows NT file system. Once you plug it in, the installation system asks for a few basic facts about your computer. When you're ready to back up, simply press the glowing white button on the front. (Mac users will have to reformat the drive.)

The drive has a built-in encryption program for protecting data, as well as software that will keep data on a PC and on the drive in sync. "

Can TV's and PC's Live Together Happily Ever After? - New York Times

New York Times: "David G. Sanderson, who heads the media consulting practice at Bain & Company, offers four reasons most people won't be downloading their favorite shows onto their TV's any time soon: limitations in broadband infrastructure, the degree of readiness among electronics makers to provide a product with mass appeal, the behavior of consumers and the agenda of the players in the TV ecosystem.

Mr. Sanderson's first two points — basically whether the Internet-based network and devices are ready for prime-time — are where most of the action is and where things could change if businesses keep investing and innovating. Still, for now, there are logjams associated with delivering large quantities of video over the Web and the unresolved 'net neutrality' debate over whether heavy users should pay more to telecommunications carriers for the large amount of bandwidth they use.

His second two points — about consumer behavior and the entrenched players — are actually more complex. The consumer question boils down to whether enough people want to give up access to the dozens or hundreds of channels they pay for through their cable providers to buy programs over the Internet. And that is closely related to his point about the industry structure, which is a function of the willingness of cable networks to risk giving up their guaranteed monthly subscription fees in favor of a free-wheeling Internet alternative.

'The reality is that I don't think you're going to see the current cable offering — hundreds of linear channels — replicated on the Internet,' Glenn A. Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, told me recently. 'One reason is the Internet isn't physically capable of handling that volume, but obviously, with a lot of money and time, that can be alleviated. But the second thing is that we actually provide a very important economic function in the TV distribution chain."

CABLE networks are not about to jeopardize the millions they receive from guaranteed subscription fees each month — and it is probably no coincidence that the versions of TV programs sold through iTunes or Google Video are inferior in picture quality to what is offered by cable companies (while the growing popularity of high-definition TV shows that viewers want higher quality). Even Sharp's new Japanese TV, the Internet Aquos, only accesses online video material from a closed-circuit service, and displays it at inferior quality."

As for the public being unwilling to give up the hundreds of channels it receives by subscription to obtain programming from the internet, I think industry analysts may be mistaken or overlooking the potential for a successful hybrid of the two. Instead of asking consumers to pay for numbers of channels (usually ridiculously overstated because they are counting a bunch of shopping channels and other "no cost to them" offerings), providers should offer subscriptions to thematic content libraries.

For example, at present I pay about $85 per month for Dish Network's Top 180 channel pack, local channels, PBS, and HBO/Cinemax including DVR and monthly magazine. Of those more than 180 channels, I watch less than 20, and its not unusual to cruise the guide and find nothing I want to watch at all. I don't listen to the myriad of music channels listed, I don't care to watch sports, and I could care less about home shopping channels or glorified advertising channels.

However, I would happily pay a subscription fee to have access to all programs in the libraries of the Discovery Channel, The History and History International Channels, BBC Channel 4, Canadian History Television, National Geographic, and PBS (both local and East Coast). I would continue to subscribe to HBO for new programming but be willing to pay an extra fee to have access to all existing programs in the HBO archives as well.

I would continue subscribing to local channels for local news and network offerings and would want to continue to subscribe to a news tier that contains CNN and Headline News. Then I would like to be able to pay for programs "a la carte" like you do with iTunes for the occasional program I may wish to see that may appear on a channel I don't currently subscribe to.

I think hybrid arrangements like this may actually result in more revenue opportunities for the providers while resulting in more satisfied customers.

Curiosoft Learning Games examined

I noticed that participants in a K-12 technology summit being held soon at Portland State University would be introduced to learning software from Curiosoft. I hadn't ever seen their software so I checked out their website and downloaded some of their demos. I selected the version for ages 8+. My initial reaction was that these games with their rather primitive animation would not satisfy any eight-year-olds I know who are already playing very graphically sophisticated video games by that age. Although they do include some educational information, I think they are just too basic for ages beyond about 5 - 6. I was also confused why the Jr. Vet demo required the child to engage in an "asteroids"-type arcade game when they selected the antibiotic to clean an animal's wound. It's as if the game developers decided they had better introduce a familiar shooter-style activity to keep the child interested. I realize it has been said that shooters improve eye-hand coordination but the activity seemed totally out of place in the scenario presented.

Then I downloaded one of their "genius" thinking game demos, Think Like Einstein. The trainer level allows you to work with celestial bodies and experiment with moving them around to observe the effect they have on a light beam that you are trying to deflect into a capture box . More objects are introduced as the game progresses although, in the trainer level, the objects are not placed into particularly challenging arrangements. I also didn't take the time to figure out what changed if you put a bowtie on an asteroid. This introduction of an object totally out of context seemed rather strange. I think it would have been more realistic to have piles of different minerals that you could add to an asteroid that the child could then observe changed its behavior. Maybe that would not be fanciful enough. I did like the game's objective to emphasize the observation of cause and effect. I am still doubtful about the use of the game above the age of about 6 however.