I’ve been watching, and attempting to record, the defensive behavior of the common Barn Swallow. When they feel one of the nests is in danger, all of the swallows take to the air and dive and swoop and make noise. The goal is to confuse the predator and then to scare it away with "attacks" consisting of fast fly bys with screeches at the moment when the bird is closest to the predator.
The video captures a few of these dives and starting at 00:55s you can see a pass in slow motion. This is followed by another pass in slow motion and then still frames.
Every year for the past who knows how long, I’ve had a sports ritual when it comes to the Superbowl game. I set my VCR … TiVo … DVR to record from just about 30 minutes before the game’s kick-off and get about 4 hours worth. During the game, I typically go do something or watch a movie. If I am really curious, I tune in the game after about 2 hours to see when it is going to end. At the end or shortly there after, I check the score, the winners, the losers, and then the highlights reel. My goal is all of this lat bit is to be somewhat less of a noob the next day at work.
Once the game is over, I rewind the tape or jump to the start of the TiVo / DVR and start fast forwarding at 16X to find the commercials. I watch each one and hope there is something truly funny. The Budweiser frogs were funning in the beginning … not so much any more. “Cat Herder” was a good one. Even Apple did a nice one 24 years ago.
I no longer have a TV so I had a moment of panic that this year, I’d miss out. Then I realized, my old habits were so 20th century. I’m sure, within about 15 minutes of air time, each commercial will find its way onto YouTube just like the frogs, the cats, and the apple !
Mr Antonio at the Washington Post recently wrote of the political debates “televised” on YouTube. The format for the debate was people posting video questions on YouTube and Anderson Cooper selecting a set of those questions, airing them and then getting candidates’ responses. He outlined five myths about the experiment. He makes good points with good examples an all of them. Interesting to my concern was #5 …
5.”Anyone can participate in this debate.”
That quote is from David Bohrman of CNN, which tirelessly promoted the event. Truth is, not everyone can. There’s a rarely discussed digital divide in America. In Charleston, 40 to 45 percent of the population subscribes to a high-speed Internet service, about the same as the national average. In a state where half of the primary voters are black, a study released last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that broadband use among blacks, though rising, continues to lag behind whites and English-speaking Latinos. In many parts of the country, particularly rural areas and poor inner cities, access to high-speed Internet is not the norm. In fact, less than half a mile from the Citadel, the site of last week’s debate, sits the Cooper River Courts public housing project, where owning a computer and subscribing to the Internet are considered luxuries.
This Serves as another example where we must be careful that we not take the Internet for granted. As soon as we make the Internet a prerequisite for participation in society, we create a class strata. It comes back to “those who have forgetting about those who have not.”
About 18 months ago, while contemplating a career “side step”, I proposed some ideas for “just in time education”. The premise is that, today, most people don’t have the time for formal all-day and multi-day training models and often need “just enough” to get started. Also, there is a lot of need for “point specific” education – when you are in the middle of a task and need to know how to do a specific part of the task that you have never done before.
The idea is not new and I don’t take credit for it. One example to demonstrated the value was a simple “setup your home wireless security” video. It was not more than 3 minutes long. Another example was “building a Google Maps application”. Again, the instruction was under 10 minutes.
The idea never took off at my company. But, it does seem to have a live on the internet. LessonBites has come up with an interesting business model for the idea …
LessonBites provides a marketplace for instructors to sell their lessons using internet-based video. LessonBites provides lessons in bite sizes (like individual tracks of a CD) so you can learn what you want. The price of each video is 99 cents.
The product model is the same as “just in time education”. What is interesting is the business model. At 99c a lesson, the price might be right for personal training.
I’m not keen on their solution to piracy but I’m sure they felt they needed to do something.The quality of? some videos is not what I would expect and there appears to be some bandwidth issues. The value wil only come from volume of lessons.
Of course, YouTube and other sites may have made this business model moot. Of course, “content” is still the big issue. There is more “how to” videos for bad things then generally useful things <uh oh>. If you are looking for “how to” videos, here is a “top 10 list” of places to start.
I stand fast with my technological point of view that no solution will succeed without having an established interface. I tend to leave some of Bill Gate’s creations out of the mix because monopolies don’t play by the same rules as the rest of the world. I’ll also eliminate very small niche software. These tend to do a very specific task and have a very specific audience. The down side of a niche product is it it can easily be replaced. For that reason, I’ll leave these out as well.
The interfaces can take on any number of implementations. Lotus 123 supports macros. Photoshop supports plugins. Google Maps has its a JavaScript API. MySQL can be accessed using PHP interfaces. IBM Lotus Connections uses REST. Other products leverage RSS, Atom, and publish AJAX and REST mechanisms. Continue reading ‘Software interfaces are sexy’ »
Every year for the past who knows how long, I’ve had a sports ritual when it comes to the Superbowl game. I set my VCR … TiVo … DVR to record from just about 30 minutes before the game’s kick-off and get about 4 hours worth. During the game, I typically go do something or watch a movie. If I am really curious, I tune in the game after about 2 hours to see when it is going to end. At the end or shortly there after, I check the score, the winners, the losers, and then the highlights reel. My goal is all of this lat bit is to be somewhat less of a noob the next day at work.
