Red Centre Way Memes

iPhone accuracy

2009-10-14T11:21:00.003+10:30

We ran some field tests in darwin with Bill Wade at CDU and noted there were discrepant readings across our various GPS sensors; iPhone 3GS, Garmin 60CS, Garmin 60CSX, and a bolt-on GPS toggle for a mid-range digital SLR camera.

I discussed this last week with an ongoing supporter of our project, Andy Roberts from NT Land Information Services, and was able to get very accurate survey point readings on our street to 'calibrate' the accuracy of our GPS sensing units. Armed with blueprints of points, accurate down to the centimetre level, my son and I went out and crunched the numbers across the Garmin 60CSx and the iPhone 3GS.
Cutting to the chase; we were able to get below 3 metres with the Garmin. The iPhone averaged out around 20 meters, got as accurate as 10 and twice was about 50 meters out [12 readings]. With the Garmin there is an Average function that allows one to leave the unit reading, over time, to sharpen its focus and we achieved around <3 metres after a 3 min sit. I don't think the iPhone has this higher end 'average' function ability to 'read over time'. All things considered the iPhone does a pretty good job, the GPS transceiver is tiny from the pics I've web sourced, this is its 1st iteration [and will either get better next version and/or someone will offer an accurate GPS bolt on]. Now if they offered this bolt-on as Wi-Fi connected it would be ideal, fingers crossed.
The other thing to be aware of is the manufacturers guarantee which goes something like this for Garmin; for 95% of the time it will get you within 10 metres radius, for 4.5% of the time you'll get within 30 metres and for 0.5% of the time you may be as much as 300 metres out. Nice waiver eh?
Another option we intend to interrogate is reverse geocoding the route entirely; that is lay the route out along the roads and tracks depicted on the map photographs, without having to log the route with a GPS navigator first.
As is mentioned in earlier posts, 60 to 78% of Australia, depending who you talk to, is without 3G signals. Here in the Alice, surrounded by a desert the size of Europe... we loose our 3G connectivity 10 to 15Km out. Hence our work and research on a system that will overlay Augmented Reality information to the outback/remote tourist or professional.

As well as the tests we ran in The Alice here's a London based scenario that backs up the conclusions we have come to. Remember also that the iPhone is gaining extra location fix position information from cell phone towers.

I've just started testing the fidelity of the iPhone GPS in outback locations [no 3G signal ergo no cell phone tower triangulation assists.] Early results are confusing!!

You tube

Purple line is route taken White line is iPhone GPS track Cycle computer indicated total distance travelled as 3.56 miles, iPhone track indicated 3.4 miles

We are obviously in the early days of mobile phone AR. How do you see it developing?

2009-10-09T23:03:00.000+10:30

Rob Manson and Alex Young from BuildAR had this to say, great description, my bold words emphasis.

"Well, I’m working on a broader research project on Pervasive Computing and I think this is a core part of that evolution. The interfaces are still quite clunky and having to hold up and wave around your phone is still quite a clumsy experience.

I think quite soon we’ll see more immersive display devices start to spread. I’m running a session on this at Web Directions South and we use this underlying theory to inform most of our business/product strategy development.

Basically the distance between the network and the user is collapsing. The distance between the display and the user is collapsing. And the distance between the physical interface (e.g. think of gestures) and the user is also shrinking. This means our overall experience of space and even who we are is changing.

This all seems a bit futuristic, but glasses with displays built-into them should start to spread quite soon, all powered by mobile devices. And there’ll be even more interesting options too. Just think how quickly iPhones and Bluetooth headsets have become common everyday objects.

The opposite side of this is the spread of wireless digital cameras.

Combine the two and you open the door to rich and immersive Augmented Reality where you can shift your perspective constantly and freely.

I think this is the start of something really fascinating!"

Taken from an interview listed on the Sydney Powerhouse museum's joint project. Read full article here.

Traveling iClass

2009-10-08T13:21:00.004+10:30

The new breed of mobile phones such as iPhone 3GS & Android have three base characteristics that set them apart from their lessors:

Sensor Supported

Vison via camera and camcorder
Audio via microphone
Gravity/acceleration via accelerometers
Touch via the GUI
Electromagnetic - everything from GPS signals, WiFi transceivers, BluTooth, Cell Phone signals to Compass bearingsLocation-Aware

And this section is evolving rapidly as large companies and home coders alike apply 'collective intelligence' to assess what the market wants, and how to go about providing it.
Also I envisage a new breed of sensor apps coming online as wired and wireless sensor 'bolt-ons' are connected to the phones to provide perception across say temperature, microscopy, smell and even taste

Internet Connected

Within a given 3G signal umbrella you can source the web.

Location Aware

Via GPS signal processing and cell Phone triangulation

I'd been trying to get a suitable acronym from SS, IC and LA. Lassic, Ssicla and finally iClass appears out of the mix...

just like the dyslexic guy who walked into a bra... and said Ouch!. It was an iron bar.

Albert gives the nod to memestreme

2009-10-08T00:24:00.000+10:30

Couldn't resist it!
http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php

BuildAR and Layar heads up.

2009-10-07T18:47:00.015+10:30

With reference to the next blog down, we discussed potential VET training and employment outcomes for "Geo-Locative Media Studies". Given that most job descriptions making use of such training don't currently exist my blog entry may appear a trifle tenuous, but read on. I mentioned Layar which is:
"Layar Reality Browser adds 3D to its Platform {Oct 6 09}
Layar announced the addition of 3D capabilities to its augmented reality browser platform. With 3D, developers can tag real-life objects with 3D text, place 3D objects in real-world space, and create multi-sensory experiences. The addition of 3D enables Layar developers to create more realistic and immersive augmented reality experiences for mobile devices.
More information at www.layar.com/3D
Layar is GLOBAL. With lots of content layers for everyone. All the news is on the blog and in thepress section.":

Anyway Stop the Press, contemplate some emergent VET job opportunities and cop an optic on this Aussie start up BuildAR.
"Click here for the full blog transcript of the excerpt provided below.

"On Saturday night at our (very rainy) Common Ground meetup in Sydney, Rob Manson and Alex Young from BuildAR demonstrated the first version of their augmented reality mobile toolkit using images from the Powerhouse’s geocoded photographs in the Commons on Flickr.
This work riffs around the early mashup from Paul Hagon where he combined the historic photos with Google’s Street View; and the ABC’s Sydney Sidetracks project.
But then makes it mobile – replacing the Street View with the actual view through the camera of your mobile phone.

I asked Rob a few questions -
F&N – What is this Augmented Reality thing you’ve built? What does it do?
The first service is BuildAR and it is a service built upon the Mobile Reality Browser called Layar.
Layar uses the GPS on your mobile to work out where in the world you are, then it uses the digital compass to work out which direction you’re facing (e.g. your orientation). From this it can build a model of the objects and places around you. Then as you hold up your mobile and pan around, it can overlay information on the live video from your camera that you see to highlight where these objects and places are.
BuildAR let’s you quickly and easily add, search and manage your own collection of Points of Interest (POIs) to create your own Augmented Reality layer. You can do this via a standard PC web browser, or you can do it via your mobile phone. You can create a free personal account and get started straight away creating your own private POIs or you can make public POIs that other people can view too. All it takes is a few clicks and they are shared or published in real-time.
You can also use the service to create fully branded and customised layers."
Follow the links for more info, very interesting. Coupled? entangled? with the research scurrying apace at Microsoft's PhotoSynth labs, Washington Universities CrowdFlow [similar to an app from Georgia university which uses live cctv data to populate virtual landscapes with real-time demographics {and google algorithms to auto blur faces and license plates }] and Sameer Agarwal's 'Building Rome in a day' project [machine driven suction of pics from public sites to auto compose 3D VR scapes], to name but a few, it is just getting a whole lot easier to envisage GeoLocative career options for our erstwhile student population.
Consider how many times, from what angles and from what altitudes our very own iconic Ayers Rock has been photographed... In may ways it will be easier to attain VR/AR 'models' from the timeless terrain of our sunburnt centre. The unsealed roads are about the only things that traverse the terrain on a decade by decade time line as floods, termite mounds etc urge road deviations.
The 'granularity' [the volume and density of media available for a given coordinate] of most of the locations along the Red Centre Way will be much less than say the roof of the Cistine Chapel, and it will be a while before google street view arrives, but the research efforts and innitiatives above are talking about building Rome and Dubrovnic models from 50,000 pics, in a day. I'd say right now there's going to be a heluva lot of pics from the Red Centre online.
And this brings us back to memestreme; its great having 3D models of the outback, now the scene without a meme is becoming set: all we need to do now is lay stories and ideas onto this magnificent backdrop. Bring it on.
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Click here for the fascinating "ABC Innovation's Sidetracks" info page & you'll be able to read about;
ABC Innovation has launched their Sydney Sidetracks project.

This is a lovely experiment in developing a mobile heritage application which takes some of the archives of ABC TV and Radio and combines them with static imagery and research from the cultural heritage partners – Powerhouse Museum, State Library of NSW, National Film & Sound Archives, Museum of Contemporary Art, the City of Sydney Archives, and the Dictionary of Sydney.

ABC have sensibly hedged their bets so the diverse content is available as an interactive website with a simple map interface, and as a multi-platform mobile Java application.

Whilst the mobile application is not yet location-aware, it does provide a simulation of the potential experience that awaits in a future version. The phone version can be ‘sideloaded‘ to a huge range of different devices. Being out and about with the content changes your experience of it greatly but suffice to say, mobile is still in a very immature phase – with significant usability issues to be overcome. Partially to get around these, a whole lot of the ABC Archives content can be downloaded, separately, to your phone to be accessed as podcasts.

Copyright conundrums [R]

2009-10-05T00:39:00.000+10:30

During the Mobilizethis09 conference run by Bill Wade in Darwin last week the question of; "What is 'legal media content' these days?"... when, as part of our Uni studies and daily life we want to use Web 2.0 mashups to get our points across.

Great question, still no clear answer. The following three articles attest to the fact that change is afoot and will hopefully provide a good overview of what the current state of play is for; copyright, copyleft, digital commons, patent rights, IP etc. All that 'stuff' we're used to thinking of as belonging to someone is now more or less dead in the water unless its being viewed and freely altered over the grid. This is what I refer to in later posts as memes [ideas with attitude] that culturally evolve as they are replicated, with variation, on the grid.

Its mid 2007 and I've been in touch with ABC radio national and asked them if it was okay to use whole or excerpted bits of their Radio national program podcasts. I made 4 inconclusive phone calls asking if I could use their content and I never really thought the question was clearly answered until the 5th call. I explained again how I wanted to populate an Augmented Reality tour with some ABC/rn content, pointed him to the 2007-2008 blog and continued to describe what we were doing. Finally he said "Are you going to on-sell this?" - "No", "Then go ahead and use whatever you want and please don't alter the ABC metadata". That was it, leave the meta intact and don't make money off it.

Other places like ted.com and youtube expect you to share, alter and evolve their content. So long as their content is being viewed and/or morphed, they are doing good business. Economics 101 in the weightless economy.

Anyway, the following 3 ABC/rn podcasts make for excellent listening, I have listed them in what I consider the priority order. The Alfred Deakin lecture is by three gents who really know what they are talking about, and although this was broadcast Dec 2007, its a really nice piece of work.

TASTE:
Alfred Deakin Innovation Lecture 29 December 2007
Are we missing out on the full benefits of science and technology because of outdated ideas about copyright and patenting? Could the key to feeding the world be locked up in a company fridge somewhere? Open-source software has transformed the internet, underpinning the phenomenal growth of Google, Ebay and YouTube. What can science learn from this revolution? In our rush to protect intellectual property, have we damaged our capacity to deliver solutions for the critical issues of the 21st century?
In this lecture, John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons at Harvard Law School, will describe how existing social and legal infrastructures are choking science, and how we can create new ways to share research. Brian Fitzgerald, Head of the Law School at Queensland University of Technology, will discuss the success of open source in the information technology world, and the lessons for other fields of science.
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This is a great overview of Advertising, and how it is dragging itself, kicking and screaming, into digital paradise. Three wonderful speaker and the 1st Professor Veran from Murdoch Uni WA, well worth listening to.
TASTE:
The changing face of advertising
A look at the way in which the Australian advertising industry is adapting to the challenges of the modern age of communication.(This program was first broadcast on 11 October 2007)
Antony Funnell: Welcome to another edition of the Media Report on ABC Radio National ... I'm Antony Funnell. Today's highlight program looks at future trends in advertising.
Like journalism, the industry is much disparaged...and we often overlook its importance in terms of underpinning the viability of much of the media we consume.
That is -- in blunt terms -- without the revenue generated by advertising there'd be very little to watch, hear or read (leaving public broadcasting aside of course).
So, today on the program, we'll look again at the way the advertising industry is adapting to the rapidly changing media environment of the 21st century.
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Internet Piracy Oct 2009
TASTE:
Oscar McLaren: The copyright industries say their enemies are everywhere, from multi-billion dollar internet companies to the millions of people around the world who pirate films and music on the net.
But also in the cross-hairs is a growing band of mash-up and remix artists and everyday computer users for whom the internet has sparked a wave of creativity.
Around the world, some say the copyright industry's war is already lost. At a conference in Canberra earlier this year, here's Harvard University's Professor Lawrence Lessig.
Lawrence Lessig: We have to recognise we can't kill this form of creativity, we're only going to criminalise it. There's no way we can stop our kids from engaging in this form of creativity, we can only drive their creativity underground. We can't make them passive, the way at least I was growing up, we can only make them pirates. And the question we have to ask is, Is that any good?
Oscar McLaren: Today, Background Briefing explores this question. Hello, I'm Oscar McLaren on ABC Radio National.
The battle is really about how copyright law should adapt in an age when everyone can be a pirate.
Should it crack down on every download of a film or song? Should it stop every unauthorised remix? Should it stand aside? Or should it find another way of regulating intellectual property.
There are enormous corporate interests involved on all sides, and the laws are complex. But at their most basic level they're meant to encourage creative people to produce work and release it to the public.
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What would a VET Certificate IV Geo-Locative Unit look like?

2009-09-18T10:44:00.019+09:30

With help from Simon Lismann at AFLF we have been researching how we may go about designing a unit of study that would serve as an Intro to Geo-Locative media work. Our final report will go into sufficient detail but at this stage we are looking at drawing on competencies and skills taken from the following 3 VET study areas: New Media Studies, Surveying and Spatial Imaging all of which have their own established VET course structures etc. We would then add the research from this project to complete a more fleshed out [possible/potential] curriculum offering in Geo-Locative Media Studies.

Now the thing about making up a media unit from a composite skills checklist drawn from Surveying, Spatial Imaging and New Media curricula is that there is no readily apparent occupational skeleton, as it were, to hang these skills on.

Surveyors do roads, buildings and home improvement schedules. Spatial Imagers, great sounding job description, are linked in one way or another to cartographers, helping enhance the veracity of all sorts of maps.

New Media graduates do, well, web-pages, graphic art and shit hot personal stationary.

So, where does that leave students schooled in the amorphous arts of Geo-Locative Multimedia? The answer if feel, is hat it places them firmly astride the Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality stremes.

As I mentioned in a recent blog post, I feel that AR and VR are, if not non identical twins, then defiantly siblings. They represent the Yin and Yang of digitally altered states of reality, really. And I feel they are both about to take off, big time.

The 2009 Aug 22 edition of New Scientist ran a great article called 'Welcome to Appland'. The article that has a lot of information about the current and next wave of mobile phones that are different by way of the fact that they are:
Location Aware, Sensor Supported and Internet Connected.
“What is clear is that Apps are set to become an ever greater part of our lives. As the technology of handsets improves, the next wave of apps will join up the real and the virtual worlds even more. Many will be based on ‘Augmented Reality’, which involves overlaying computer graphics on a view of the real world captured through the phones camera. In the Android marketplace, apps such a Wkitude and Layar already use the handsets video camera, directional sensors, location information and internet connection to allow users to look “through” their phones to see a virtually augmented building or landscape. Once developer tap into the full capabilities of the latest version of the iPhone a flood of similar apps is likely to emerge in Apple’s App store, says Blair McIntyre of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, an authority on Augmented Reality” New Scientist, 22 Aug 2009 “Welcome to Appland” pps 32 to 36
One…”cannot deny that the iPhone has changed things for everybody. Variously described as the Jesus phone, a concierge, a Swiss army knife or, somewhat disturbingly, a fingertip secretary, the iPhone is currently the centre of the App world. “the truly revolutionary thing that Steve Jobs managed to do with the iPhone was to persuade cellphone network operators to loosen their grip on what phones could do. One of the consequences of this coup was the birth of the App store, which Apple alone controlled” “Apple made it easy for anybody with programming know-how to create an App… Lured by the promise of riches , developers from large software houses to bedroom enthusiasts have created a massive market for Apps, virtually overnight” ibid

A VET Geo-Locative unit/s would blend Surveying, Spatial Imaging, New-Media with an introduction to AR and VR.

Surveying, spatial imaging and work with hand-held GPS devices and their laptop/workstation software will help nail down modelling of topographical reality accurately.

The next bit is attaching information to the real world. Geo-spatial and socio-spatial metatagging assists/ensures that media assets have the correct digital attributes to be locked onto reality [geo-located]. And at this point one can see how the duality of the AR-VR similarities can come into play. AR is difficult to 'model' with existing 2D software. [How best do you 'show' someone how AR works in the real world?] We can dump associated content into a web-site, like a layer on Google Earth, or custom build web sites or Flash animations from say Aerial photos to give us a 2D rendered model.
In our 07/08 AFLF 'Pancultural-e' project we produced a web-based model in order to demonstrate the nature of our Augmented reality Outback trial. The model that really got people to sit up however, was when we rendered our AR tour into Second Life. In 'pancultural-e' we did a VR tour of the historic overland telegraph Station in Alice Springs.

Its a smallish reserve and so it wasn't all that difficult to build [render] the 6 or 8 buildings onto an Island in 2L. [deserts are hard to come by in 2L], the buildings went up and it looked really cool. [Here's a nighttime screen grab from the partially completed Telegraph Station, building not finished were 'parked' in the air]

When all building, landscapes and animals were finished however we hit something of a hurdle. We had a couple of gig of tagged and massaged relevant multimedia that we'd used for the VR tour and the idea was just to 'place' it in the virtual buildings, along the trails etc and make it 'Interactive'. At least it sounded simple I guess. Then as your Avatar cruises through, say ,the Telegraph Operations room and sees a flat panel display with a bunch of content menus, to get the media flavour of your choice, you select and savour the 'meme' of your choice.

But according to our guy from NZ whom we had contracted to render the 2L Telegraph Station, attaching the information onto the virtual environment was 'a bit tricky'. We managed to get some interactive media up there but not nearly as much as we would have liked. For the demonstration of how our AR worked though VR was the most , really good looking virtual environment but not much capacity for a user to interact with any of the memes [media].

We need to research if it has gotten easier to place interactive media around structures and landscapes in 2L as I'm sure the demand for this has to be on the up. And it is precisely here where I see future work happening; mirroring interactive AR media into VR environments, getting your media production buck to bang twice.

Now just to get the generation of virtual landscapes in a technically real perspective, cop an optic on the following vodcast about Photosynth. As fantastic as this demo is, it is technology from 2007. After you've watched the movie consider how many times, and from how many angles, seasons and weather conditions Ayers Rock has been uploaded to share sites.

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Media corral

2009-09-08T15:33:00.003+09:30

I don't know about other bloggers but I get hassles inserting audio excerpts into a blog, going back in it to edit text, then finding it won't publish as half the code supporting the media has dropped off the radar. My attempted fix will be to put a bunch of media into this one spot and link to it from text in previous and future blogs. See how it goes anyway;
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Serious Games. I don't know what 'reality' category to put this in, it isn't AR or VR, maybe Game Scenario Reality. For example. see how society can inform itself by enlisting 7000 volunteers to game role play : http://www.superstructgame.org/. Then consider that this game was written and run in 2007, listen then imagine how much further we can take this with iClass phones, great example of 'collective intelligence'.
'Serious Games' or 'Games for Good' have a greater purpose than just entertainment - they're being used to help us understand and solve current problems as well as to identify future threats.
Noah Falstein: Serious games are a new enough thing and a nebulous enough thing that people are still arguing about definitions, but the one that I find most accurate I think is - a game or something that uses game techniques and technology, for a purpose beyond entertainment. So it may well be entertaining. Many of the serious games are fun as well, but its main purpose is not the entertainment, but rather something else, often teaching or some sort of instruction, sometimes something like research or persuasion, there are quite a few different uses for them.
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Download mp3 here
http://www.archive.org/details/www.abc.net.au_rnGamesforGood/
Download PDF transcript with clickable links here [right click '83kb' hyperlink]
http://www.archive.org/details/www.abc.net.au_rnSeriousgames.pdf/
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New Media Horizons PDF 09 Report
http://www.archive.org/details/www.nmh.orgnewmediahorizons09report/
Grab this report, its well worth a read, and as well a saying whats wired now it suggests adoption timelines for emerging tech, apps and wares.
From phones to smartbooks, mobile devices with access to the Internet now make it possible to do all kinds of activities for work, study, and socializing — wherever one happens to be. In recent years, mobile phones have evolved to include innovative interfaces, GPS and wifi capability, and support for third-party applications. Small mobile Internet devices including netbooks and smartbooks offer another way to stay connected and work on the go: smaller than laptops but larger than mobile phones, these devices are compact and powerful.
Placed on the far horizon for Australia and New Zealand last year because of slow adoption rate and low availability of bandwidth, mobiles are moving toward adoption more quickly thanks to reduced costs for bandwidth and new plans that offer alternatives to hefty overage charges. Bandwidth and coverage is still a concern for consumers, however, and outside of urban centers, finding a signal is often difficult. In many cases, while students may own mobile Internet devices, the cost and availability of bandwidth prevents them from taking advantage of the full range of applications available to them.
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The Internet of things
http://www.archive.org/details.php?identifier=ABC_rnAustraliaTheInternetofThings
"Imagine your toaster has an inbuilt computer and it can speak to your fridge. Now imagine your fridge talking to the computer at your local shopping centre. All without your involvement. More and more everyday objects are becoming internet connected. So are we about to witness a new phase for the internet? An internet where objects, not people, communicate: "
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Do you read me HAL?
"Robots are among us. They might be on their way in to childcare and aged care as silicon carers too. Will the 'digital natives' born today be more comfortable with that prospect? And, many thousands have now been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, with billions being invested in the development of fully autonomous killing agents. Will they fight fairly? Could they be more ethical and humane than humans? Over a series of shows, Natasha Mitchell speaks to leading roboticists and thinkers about the brave new now."
Link for audio download
http://www.archive.org/details/www.abc.net.au_rnAustraliaDoyoureadmeHAL_Robotwars_moralmachinesandsiliconthatcares/
Audio Media player
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PDF transcript with clickable links download
http://www.archive.org/details/www.abc.net.au_rnDoyoureadmeHAL_Robotwars_moralmachinesandsilicon.pdf/
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The coming 'Singularity… or not?
"Next month,[Oct 09] thinkers worldwide will gather at the Singularity Summit [http://www.singularitysummit.com/] in New York, and you can see from the speakers that the scene is a curious mix of transhumanists (who want to use technological knowledge to live forever...and forever), futurists (who contemplate the possibilities of what might happen if we did), technologists and computer scientists (who could potentially make it happen), philosophers of mind (what will happen to our minds if we do?), and perhaps a few lifestyle evangelists thrown into the mix.
Here's how the conference describes the concept:
"The Singularity represents an "event horizon" in the predictability of human technological development past which present models of the future may cease to give reliable answers, following the creation of strong AI or the enhancement of human intelligence".
Futurist Ray Kurzweil writes:
"What, then, is the Singularity? It's a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian or dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the Singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future. To truly understand it inherently changes one's view of life in general and one's own particular life"." ABC Radio National's 'All in the Mind' presented by Natsha Mitchell [http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2009/2686321.htm] with the programs blog on this subject at: {http://blogs.abc.net.au/allinthemind/2009/09/what-on-earth-is-the-singularity.html#comments}
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PDF Audio transcript download with clickable links
http://www.archive.org/details/www.abc.net.au_rnThecomingofthesingularityaudiotranscript.pdf/
PDF Audio transcript download of ABC's Natasha Mitchell 'All in the mind' blog with clickable links
http://www.archive.org/details/www.abc.net.au_rnThecomingofthesingularityaudiotranscript.pdf/

www.ted.com Ray Kurzweil's vodcast where he explains the math of how he came to his conclusion.
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The Tribe has spoken…
Seth Godin describes himself as an agent of change. He's also an author who's curious about the way we live our lives. His latest book is called Tribes. And his theory is that the internet and modern communication technology have made it easier for people to make meaningful groupings. He describes a tribe as a group that shares a culture and a mission and he says the world has entered a new age of tribalism.
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ABC PDF podcast transcript with clickable links
http://www.archive.org/details/www.abc.net.au_rnTheTribehasspoken....pdf

Virtual Reality and Out of Body Experiences

2009-09-02T19:49:00.003+09:30

Although our 'memestreme RCW' project is creating an Augmented Reality AR app running on an iPhone, research into the field necessarily encompasses exploration of what's going down in the Virtual Reality VR camp. AR and VR have much in common and many of the techniques, interfaces, user experiences and content styles overlap, and as we found out last year, both can serve to image each others realities.
In last years project [http://pancultural-e.blogspot.com] where we constructed a proof of concept AR tour of the Alice Springs Telegraph Station ASTS, it was challenging to model our reports so that people could readily understand and visualise how our AR app was operating from the end users perspective.

So we built a structural analogue of the ASTS in the Virtual Reality confines of SecondLife 2L and programmed it so that as folk entered into the proximity of a space or object that had supporting media attached to it, they were given the option of playing that media. Apart from 'flying' in 2L, most of what you can do in 2L can be modeled across into AR applications. That being said cop an optic below on some of the research thats going on in some medical and neurological establishments exploring the the vaguaries of that which we call 'Out of Body Experiences'. Due to the nature of the enquires, and their stunning results, computer game designers are closely watching developments, as its seems there may well be profitable and engaging research spinoffs that can be picked up to enhance, big time, the user experience, read on.

Hurt my Avatar and I feel pain.
[New Scientist 15 August 2009 page 15]
The dream of many computer game designers has come one step closer to reality with the demonstration of a technique that allows people to identify more fully with a virtual body or avatar. It builds on previous research in which neuroscientists gave subjects the sensation that they were having an "out of body experience", and tricked people into experiencing the sensation that their avatar was being touched.
In the latest experiment, a camera filming each subjects back produced an image that was projected through a head-mounted display to generate a virtual body 2 metres in front of them. Repeated stroking of the participants back, combined with the site of the doppelganger being stroked, created the sensation that their virtual body was being touched (PLos ONE, DOI: 10.1.371/journal.pone.0006488).
Vibrating pads with flashing lights were positioned on the subjects' backs, so that they saw flashes on their virtual bodies at the same time as the vibrating pads on the real bodies were activated. The two did not always coincide, and when participants were asked to indicate at which point on their virtual body they felt the vibrations, some reported that the vibrations were at the site where the flash appeared, rather than where the pad was activated. The system could potentially help people get a feel for prosthetic limbs.

Out of Body Experience ABC Radio Nationals' Science Show with Robin Williams 18/04/09
Here is the 9 min segment broadcast earlier this year by ABC/rn this March. Naomi Fowler interviews BBC journalist Valentine Low who was sent to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm to meet a bunch of neuroscientists. So, as well as pushing the envelope to uncover if these OBEs' can be integrated into computer realities of the living, there is also the lingering unanswered scientific question of all those folks who are resuscitated in hospital after having technically died. You've probably heard the stories from those that were pronounced clinically dead on the table but were still able to witness their trauma surgeon rushing around knocking over equipment say in their rush to breathe life back into the patient. Now here's the deal; no blood flow in the body, non in the brain, flatline on the ECG as well so no neuronal activity. So how come such minutely accurate reports of operating room views and events emerge from some of these resuscitated patients when their brain is flatlined and they are dead? The implication is that some form of sensory absorption is occurring, in the 'mind', as the patient is say, looking down from 2 metres above the operating table , and obviously being remembered/recorded in unnerving detail. Dude, where and what is the storage medium when this is happening? Yeah, I know its a little off track, but its part of the interview. FYI the cybernetic OBE stuff is at the beginning of the show.
Go here to read the transcript and/or download the podcast:
http://www.archive.org/details.php?identifier=Outofbodyexperience_1
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Seriously though, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are twins or siblings at least. Both are examples of powerful cybernetic augmentations/amplifications of our human sentient and sensory capacity. AR superimposes 'just in time' information as a result of its sensing of our physical geospatial environment. VR does the same in a digital analogue of some real or totally fictitious reality e.g Second Life and a Full Immersion gaming simulation.] We are even extending this down to real nano levels, check out this stunning tour of the Allosphere from www.ted.com, where scientists walk inside a huge sphere that is an extension of various high-end imaging technologies such as scanning tunneling electron microscopes, and study such small scale phenomena as protein folding, electron spins etc from the perspective of a nanoscale human observer. Fantastic Voyage.
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Augmented Realities a personal introspective retrospective

2009-09-02T19:44:00.000+09:30

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Our ‘Memestreme RCW’ project, funded by AFLF, is an iPhone 3GS based ‘Augmented Reality’ AR application. The following brief history of AR may assist in your understanding of following articles in this our 2009 project blog.
Augmented Reality, AR as the name suggests is reality that’s augmented, Mechanically, I guess the first killer app was the telescope; check this out Galileo, this little app doesn't change your reality but it certainly enhances it, hope you can find a use for it, and don’t mention heliocentricity in your regular chats with the Pope. These days AR is more or less exclusively computer based and I’ll pull in a definition from Wikipedia at the end of this rant.
In 1990 Boeing Aerospace were experimenting with video-enabled goggles for their airframe electricians. As electricians worked on sections of fuselage cabling, the correct wiring configuration was displayed on their heads-up display, this AR display thus aiding [augmenting] their personal technical know-how and paper based wiring diagrams. The project was a success, wiring confusion/mistakes was all but eliminated, but due to the overall clumsiness of the hardware and software, relatively poor computer processor speeds and the sheer cost of the equipment the research results were archived and the equipment cannibalized for other projects.
Fast forward to 1992 when ‘The Lawnmower Man’ hits the movie screen with an AR techno-drama that turns a simple man into a genius, and in true Hollywood style, the augmented brain power of this computer-assisted-simpleton scenario catapults our unwitting dude into a demonic nerd with attitude bent on World Domination, I can’t spoil the ending cos he dies. Notwithstanding, the high-end graphics, AR sensory suit and body harness used on set gave a leading edge view of how much more scientifically mainstream AR systems had improved and become.
A personal pivotal moment in AR interest arrived for me in June 2002 in a Jumbo jet. I was on my way to deliver a presentation at the Calgary 2002 WIPCE conference ‘Towards a pedagogy of the distressed’ discussing the praxis and technologies I’d found useful delivering ITC competencies to Indigenous adults in remote regions of Central Australia. Anyhow, I’d bought the April 2002 edition of ‘Scientific American’ [Click here to download] to read in-flight. I just remember excitedly reading the article on AR [Augmented Reality: A New Way of of Seeing] 4 or 5 times; and had some form of epiphany, Brave New World and Big Brother be damned, this was hot [and I've spent much time since then following developments].
The necessary technological infrastructure was in place, evolving sure but existent, the web was evolving potently and there was so much information out there that wanted to be free! It was just a fantastic article on the shape of AR to come, I feel its still a ground breaking article and well worth a read, given where we up to technically in 02 i.e. :
No Web 2.0 apps [ flickr, blogs, twitter etc] in 2002;
    ✓    google announced a major partnership with AOL to offer google search to 34 million customers using CompuServe, Netscape and AOL.com,
    ✓    weak high-end mobile phones [“these days nearly everyone uses a mobile phone. The little devices have become far more than just a telephone. They can take photos, and even receive moving images.”]
    ✓    packet switched radio apps such as home based Wi-Fi routers were expensive yet available and maturing apace,
    ✓    GPS hand-helds were emerging into the marketplace after successful residencies within science, industry and of course the military [Garmin: “From the time our first GPS handhelds supported the Coalition forces in the Gulf War…”] .
Things were so exciting it was just like an All Bran New Day.
The 02 SciAm article quite accurately envisaged the environment in metropolitan cities today, a really neat piece of informed scientific speculation, in case you missed it above; [Click here to download]

Back to the present though, and the 3 key determinants factors, I feel, for both Virtual and Augmented Realities are: Location-Aware, Sensor-supported & Internet-connected LSI capability. The ‘sensor-supported’ determinant is a little difficult to get your head around as, of the 3, this is the one that is not mandatory. One may pull down a heap of interesting and relevant augmentations via Geo-locatives and Internet-connected capacity alone, but if we take a closer look at what is becoming available its just a matter of time until we see 'bolt-on' sensory accoutrements for the well heeled mobile aficionado.

Consider ‘Appland’,a name coined by New Scientist, [22 Aug 09 pps 32 to 36 ] In the online repositories of mobile phone companies there is a bewildering plethora of Apps currently available to you, coded by large industrial houses and bedroom code-cutters alike [user generated], and you can have any of them for a couple of bucks each via Google Android or iPhone.
And what is it that you want today? You’ve played with the streetmaps, as you were really lost that time, audio-sampled songs from the radio for auto location in iTunes just to see if it worked, wasted hours playing jelly car and even shown off your virtual Zippo lighter [very lickable eye candy but not very useful].

The thing is, as a nurse you may want a way to use you iPhone as a thermometer, as a fossiker of semi-precious stones you would love a handy way to optically gauge the refractive index of this quartz [or is it a gem?] in your hand, or as a marine biologist, a handy way to sense and record the salinity of the pond you are on would be ideal right now. ‘Sensory bolt-ons’ are set to change the way we do a lot of things. For the record I'm just running an FM transmitter and stereo microphone bolt ons.
To more fully mesh with our wildly divergent personal needs, and because thousands if not millions of folk are writing Apps as we speak, AR and VR applications are emerging, evolving really, with mechanisms that sense the environment around us in weird and wonderful ways. Running such sensors presents you with enhanced informed choices based on the inputs of its sensory mechanisms, and the nature of its user. This is where fuzzy logic and indeed AI systems are starting to kick in, and its going to be a helluva ride. I've already seen the iPhone referred to as 'the Jesus phone' and this user generated wave is going to goldly blow where no app has been before. at $3 a pop.

Augmented Reality is an available fact of life now then for any citizen residing in a 'mature' telecommunications location, and with the cash to buy a relatively inexpensive readily available 3G phone.

Its just a bit of a bummer then that I live in the Alice.

As you can't possibly see from the image, there is a tiny 12 Km radius of 3G coverage around our fair Town. While we are at it I may as well throw in a whinge to Telstra as my broadband speed drops down to dial-up speed as soon as the Alice kids get home from school, that was nice, but I digress. We have written the iPhone application primarily for remote areas where the signal strength of the 3G network is zilch. In this first iPhone iteration we have an augmented reality application running on the latest iPhone 3GS. What makes our project internationally unique however is that it operates without that 3G 'cloak of confidence' supplied to the majority of our fair Nations denizens living in places with a rich telecommunications infrastructure; we provide rich customised spatially relevant media to you and your iPhone when you are at work or play in the 3G barren outback.
And there are a few screenshots of the memestreme RCW iPhone a few posts down from this.

Confessions from speculative fiction tragic;

2009-09-02T19:26:00.001+09:30

A flight of fancy.
Confessions from speculative fiction tragic;
Tuesday July 16th 2017. It had been a good day for Big Al our 55 year old protagonist from Wisconsin, all was well in his home town of Fennimore. His company ‘The Lawnmower Man” had just landed a fat contract, his work team were reliable and he was now well due for that trip to Central Australia’s Red Heart that he’d dreamt about for ages.
He’d ‘done’ the Great barrier reef “Taste” tour but man most of the coral was bleached to monochrome or smashed to pieces by the extraordinary wind and wave battering thrown Northern Australia's’ way now that climate change was picking up speed. Ocean acidification wasn’t helping the coral either. Climate refugees were also arriving in ever greater throngs to Australia's Northern beaches and he’d heard some rumors of frustrated hungry mobs looting shops in Cairns.

No, he’d stick with the Alice and its unique geographical legacy; it wasn’t overly troubled by whacky coastal weather; tsunamis, cyclones and sea rise situations hardly affected the Alice and a town with only 12 sets of traffic lights was mighty appealing, in a quaint sort of way.

He donned his ‘sense-suit’ settled into his multi-purpose recliner 'modded' for Augmented Reality simulations and taken his augmentation med 20 mins ago [a weak mix of Rohypnol, Pentothal and Psyilocibin]. He felt relaxed and easy as he prepared to ‘let go’ his real self and transfer his cognitive identity into his Avatar. Avatar Transitions were becoming easier with every psy-ware trip he’d made, much as the experience with those old computer generated “Magic Eye” prints that were around back then. His avatar body came up on his goggles and as objects touched ‘his’ avatar his chair made corresponding contact simulations, in a willing semi-hypnotic consensual transaction Big Al senses quiescently drifted into cyberspace. Once you got the hang of it it became second nature… ‘Wetware’ jacks were emerging but he couldn’t yet reconcile himself having to undergo 3 hours of Neurogenic surgery to interface with the machine 1 on 1. With similar laudable resolve he always ‘traveled’ sans cod-piece preferring the gravitas laden embrace of his wife and soul-mate these last 35 years, Lois.

With his ‘auto-cue’ prepped to jolt him back to reality in 90 mins he set sail, rocketed off actually, for the vistas of the NT’s Red Centre Way. Morphing the rocket into a late model humvee from an altitude of about 2Km he achieved a leisurely 200KPH touchdown along the larapinta Drive Highway. He’d set his NT entry time for sunrise and the Western Macs looked brilliant in the soft glow. A quick jet-pack detour to the summit of Mount Gillen left him geographically orientated with the caterpillar like procession of these ancient ranges heading Westerly. In a typically unreal time he was at Simsons Gap heritage precinct. A new ‘scent of spinnifex’ was available from Odourphonics and the chipset in his recliner dutifully mixed the requisite chemicals and flash burned them to give him a pungent yet stimulating synthetic approximation. A desert art painting took his fancy and he bought this also. Stroking the virtual Bearded Dragon lizard lounging on the rock didn't feel so real, the sense glove wasn't all it was cracked up to be... he should have shelled out that bit extra for the latest 'sense-suit', when he got back maybe.
Some time later as he stood in awe on the Western rim of Gosse’s Bluff he heard the familiar ‘re-entry’ primer-phonics signaling the sessions close, 3 minutes later he emerged into the late evening of Fennimore Wisconsin. The enjoyable ‘Taste’ tour was so impressive he’d even booked the “Full Regular Reality Tour” from the rim of Gosse’s Bluff. A short drive to Madison airport tomorrow and he and Lois were on their way, really.

Developmental & User Experience Overview from SecretLab Inc.

2009-08-24T18:54:00.004+09:30

Red Centre Guide

Hi everyone! My nameʼs Jon Manning, and Iʼm a developer on the Red Center Way Memestreme application for the iPhone. Weʼve been working on the application for several months now, and things are just now coming together to form this exciting and useful application!

The Red Centre Guide is an iPhone application designed for people visiting the Red Centre Way of Australia, and beyond ultimately. The idea behind it is that travellers, equipped with an iPhone, will be able to travel to various points of interest in the desert and receive information on the places theyʼre visiting: text, photos, diagrams, videos, and audio. This is made possible by the GPS built into recent iPhones - the phone knows where you are, and how far away interesting places are. The advanced media abilities of the iPhone make it a perfect device for showing location-based media.

The goals of this application are to create an enriching experience for people travelling in the Red Centre, and to push the limits of whatʼs possible with providing geographically relevant data to users. Weʼre particularly interested in seeing whatʼs possible if we also focus on scientists and other occupations working in the ﬁeld, collecting useful information on their iPhones and expanding the content available in the Guide.

When designing this application, weʼve been careful to take into account several factors important to a driver in the desert. The application is designed to require the least amount of attention from the user while driving, and to deliver the majority of its information without any interaction.

We are grateful to the Australian Flexible Learning Framework, and especially our contact Fred Richardson, for giving us the opportunity to work on this exciting project. Weʼre expecting the application to be ready for ﬁeld testing soon, and weʼre looking forward to showing the world! In the meantime, here are some preliminary screenshots! Secret Lab is a software development company based in Hobart, Tasmania. We began as a collection of students at the University of Tasmania, and have grown to be one of the most recognised iPhone developers in Australia. The three main developers in Secret Lab

have all received accolades from the ,Apple University Consortium Appleʼs academic representative organisation in Australia. You can ﬁnd out more information about us at

http://secretlab.com.au!

Georeferenced 'continuous media'

2009-07-04T16:53:00.003+09:30

Georeferenced 'continuous media' is another way of saying that this audio or video you have your attention on has been referenced to include some spatial information about where it describes or where it was captured.

There is heaps of stuff emerging now that can accomplish this. The problem is that no one yet knows which 'format' will eventually percolate to the top to become deigned as the application of 'best practice'. Notwithstanding, here's some applications and techniques that are currently jumping up and down saying "pick me!"

Annodex Industrial strength.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Annodex is a digital media format developed by CSIRO to provide annotation and indexing of continuous media, such as audio and video. It is based on the Ogg container format, with an XML language called CMML (Continuous Media Markup Language) providing additional metadata. It is intended to create a Continuous Media Web (CMWeb), whereby continuous media can be manipulated in a similar manner to text media on the World Wide Web, including searching and dynamic

Overview

While Web search engines are solving the problem of wading through large sets of textual documents for finding a bit of required information, there is currently no standardised way on the Web for finding clips in time-continuous documents such as audio and video. There is not even a way to address temporal offsets into such files and surf away from clips or link into clips using URIs.The CMWeb project is enabling the searching and surfing of clips of audio and video, providing solutions both to the consumer market and the professional market. Just like the World Wide Web, this technology gains its full economic potential only when available to everybody on the Internet. And also just like the World Wide Web, it is opening up new areas of research and new applications for our existing research into information extraction and delivery.

Of note here is that Annodex is Drupal friendly; once an Institution or organisation commences construction of georeferenced media a powerful multimedia database will be needed to build and streme customised content on the fly. In our Memestreme project situation for example we can imagine that ultimately some org or other will be building instantly customised Red Centre Way Augmented reality tours for any given visiting Pancultural-e demographic.
"Hello, I'm Naurelle a 48 year old married professional with family in tow botanist from South Africa, interested in flora, fauna and geology and I want to buy one of your iPhone Augmented Reality tours [memestreme] for stage one of the Red Centre Way"...
"Greetings my good man, I'm Shameless, a single-ish 29 year old larger lout from Manchester who is interested in Traditional Mythology, meteorology and Rally Driving, do you have an AR tour to suit?"

Deep geotagging of videos – Motionbox Idiot proof, web 2.0 friendly.
This link helps by visualizing the enabling of separate editable data channels that run in the background as the movie plays. The question then becomes 'can our hardware and software be adjusted to parse the geo-locative information contained therein?'

Motionbox, slightly different video sharing site, and one I really like, have introduced their planned “Deep Tagging” of videos. What the allows could be quite revolutionary. There are two ways that this works, as present. A drop down box under the video screen area, that allows a user to jump to segments of the video (useful for chapter style navigation), and a timeline section showing at-a-glance, with thumbnails, the deep tags within the video. Tags can also overlap over the same parts of the video. From a geospatial perspective this could be really powerful: A montage of nice bars in your town, each location being both geotagged and descriptive. A geoRSS feed of videos and parts of videos for an area. Links within the video to a map…

Videos can be located – not only that, but within the video, parts can also be located. Feed wise, to be able to grab a feed showing what videos, and parts of videos are around your area (like flickr photos) would be great. Where are there movies (or deep, hidden sections of a movie) that are tagged “London”. What parts of the world are people interested in.
I’ve made a little example from my recent trip to the Grindelwald area of Swiss Alps.

From the ICT centre at CSIRO

Continuous Media Web - Comparison to existing technologies

Comparison to existing technologies

1. How does the CMWeb technology differ from MPEG-21?

MPEG-21 is building an open framework for multimedia delivery and consumption. It thus focuses on addressing how to generically describe a set of content documents (called a "digital item") that belong together from a semantic point of view, including all the information necessary to provide services on these digital items. As an example, consider a music CD album. When it is turned into a "digital item", the album gets described in an XML document that contains references to the cover image, the text on the CD cover, the text on an accompagnying brochure, references to a set of audio files that contain the songs on the CD, ratings of the album, rights associated with the album, information on the different encoding formats in which the music can be retrieved, different bitrates that can be supported when downloading etc. This description supports everything that you would want to do with a digital CD album: it allows you to manage it as an entity, describe it with meta data, exchange it with others, and collect it as an entity.

In comparison, the CMWeb is focusing on a much smaller task. It looks only at time-continuous data files, it allows to create meta information for clips of that data file, and it allows to incorporate this meta information in a time-synchronous manner into the bitstream. Its only aim is to integrate time-continuous data files into the existing World Wide Web by making clips accessible through URIs and searchable through textual search engines. So, the music CD example would be represented in the CMWeb as one large audio file on a Web server that consists of a concatenation of the songs of that album and has some XML markup interspersed into it at the relevant points where a new song starts. There will be textual meta information in the bitstream that describes the different songs allowing them to be searched through a Web search engine. This is considered as one Web resource. There may be hyperlinks in that file to other Web resources that represent the cover image and the accompagnying brochure, but they are not part of the Web resource. Therefore, it is not possible to describe the kind of entity that is represented in an MPEG-21 digital item through the CMWeb. But by focusing squarely on time-continuous data files only, by providing a markup language that is similar to HTML, by enabling the time-synchronous storage of that markup in the media bitstream and by extending the URI linking scheme to address clips of time-continuous data files, we can leverage of existing Web infrastructure. We expect that Annodex media will become part of the formats that MPEG-21 digital items can hold.

2. How does the CMWeb technology differ from MPEG-7?

MPEG-7 is an open framework for describing multimedia content. It provides a large set of description schemes to create markup in XML format. MPEG-7's markup is not restricted to textual information only - in fact it is tailored to allow for the description of audio-visual content with low-level image and audio features as extracted through signal processing methods. It also has basically no resemblance to HTML as it was not built with a particular aim on Web applications only.

Instead, the CMWeb technology provides for a HTML-like textual markup of time-continuous data files in its markup language CMML. It provides for an inclusion of its markup into the time-continuous data stream in its Annodex file format, which is not provided for in MPEG-7. It provides for the URI addressing of clips of time-continuous data files through an extension of the URI fragment addressing scheme. However, annotations created in MPEG-7 may be referenced from inside an Annodex format bitstream, and some may even be included directly into the CMML of an Annodex format bitstream through the "meta" and "desc" tags.

Project Deliverables Memestreme Red Centre Way

2009-06-18T15:26:00.001+09:30

Project Deliverable 1
Construct, for the delivery of a geo-referencing focused series of workshops at certificate level 4: Training plan, assessment rubric and evidence of M-Standards collaboration with the AFLF: Learning Objects Repository Network [LORN]

For this part of the project, the brief from Associate Professor Bill Wade, the CDU Project Manager is to document content and competencies that may be added to the Certificate IV Training Package in Interactive Multimedia, and to devise Rubrics for such content and competencies whereby the nature and quality of completed student work can be analysed and recorded. Due to the current paucity of geolocatively orientated content in this area we will be looking closely at the use and application of geolocative technologies and techniques in the education domain, and more specifically as it may be applied in the above training package.
Work with the AFLF's 'Standards Expert Group' to explore the principles, practice and procedure of embedding geolocative information into files other than photographic. After the relatively easy task of adding geolocative coordinates into the EXIF portion of a jpg file one can drop that photo onto, say, google earth and it will attach itself to that specific location. We will be researching what is needed to extend this capacity into the realms of Audio, Text, Animation and Video file formats.

Project Deliverable 2
Demonstrate a sample Augmented Reality application that geo-references the Red Centre Way and a [to be] specified Top End topographic region. The interface and functionality of this program will be centred around the needs of an English speaking tourist.

Project Deliverable 3
Demonstrate a sample Augmented Reality application that geo-references the Red Centre Way and a [to be] specified Top End topographic region. The interface and functionality of this program, and the associated media capturing equipment, will be designed to productively augment the data capture capacity of a field operative working in geographically remote regions.

ANY suggestions, comments or insights regarding current research or emerging practice that you know of would be sincerely welcomed at this email address:

Replace the " -at- " with " @ "
memestreme-at-gmail.com

IMP's

2009-06-18T15:06:00.005+09:30

Interactive Meme Pedagogies.

I would like to float the idea of using a partially prepared meme as the starting point for a student to commence work on say a Cert IV multimedia project. It works like this:

[1] A student, or group are given the keys to a blog [username and password] that has a selection of prepared multimedia residing in it.

[2] Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to breath some digital life into this meme.

[3] Both the trainer and the trainee develop assessment rubrics for the moderation [marking] of this work.

This model is not "Learn This", it's "Lets see how you can grow/evolve/mutate/steer this given meme."

In the "Chimeric Memes" blog I present a meme to you as an example of how I would, at this time, present the meme theme to a student, as a piece of work for Cert IV Interactive Multimedia. And I want you to imagine how such a learning object could flourish in the memestreme.

Life [being talked about, replicated, transacted etc] and Death [being ignored] in the Metaverse. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said 'There is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.'

We need to have a look at this Meme concept

That being said, I would now like to briefly explore the concept of Memes; what they are and how we may fuse them into current pedagogical approaches.

Universal Darwinism

If there's something thats copied, with variation, and its selected for, then you MUST get design appearing out of Knowhere... you can't stop it!

Susan Blackmore emphasized the word "must" in this sentence

The principle applies to anything that is copied with variation and selection.

Richard Dawkins in his 1976 best seller "The Selfish Gene" applied this to the construct of 'Language', an inaugural cultural meme if ever there was one.

Any information that is varied and selected will produce design.

Look around you, we copy so much from one another, Oscar Wilde said that "imitation is the most sincere form of flattery". It's also, ipso facto, self-selecting - with chinese whisper like variation.

I want to bring it across to students interacting with a memestreme.

i.e. Here's seeds of multimedia about Simpsons gap that I have placed in a blog. here's the username and password. Go and grow it...imitate it, expand on it, induce others to critique it.

Ancient Greek mimeme, shortened to meme; "That which is imitated."

Developing Rubrics for Memes

2009-06-16T12:45:00.003+09:30

Now its relatively easy to imagine competencies related to creating 'mashups' and deploying multimedia content to blog stremes. In essence these competencies form the 'Lingua Franca' of the Internet. To interact with any degree of sufficiency on the Net one needs to be able to splash media from one place to another and to generate ones own multimedia and splash it around as you see fit, or as far as your skills let you see fit.

Recalling from the previous post that a student could be given the keys to a blog, [username and password] and asked to "Go and grow that meme".

The meme I present in my next post "Chimeric Memes" is as a model for this pedagogical approach. It is basically a primer: What's in a meme Dorris? It discusses and describes this entity known as meme, and attempting to live more, it asks for your [1] attention, [2] consideration, and [3] redistribution. The more it is intereacted with the more 'life' it will burn and earn.

For the purposes of the 2009 Emerging Technologies project though, the memes I intend to present to students as 'self contained learning vestibules' will all be Points On A Landscape. Rather than ask a student to grow a blog about a thing we require the student to go and grow a meme about a place; a geo-referenced place.

The Red Centre Way has 11 primary points along its 400 odd Km loop. As well as georeferencing these 11 points the project will also supply some sample Augmented Reality content for each of these points.

So; when a user is at Simpsons Gap there is some media made available to augment their physical experience of being located at Simpsons Gap... Streaming this kind of content around though is not a 'one size fits all' model. The visiting Dutch Geologist, the professionally dominant Japanese wife [leading the hubby and two kids around] and the 11 year old boy scout on an interstate trip will all require differing content if the meme is to successfully Augment their physical visit.
Ultimately there will be a precisely tagged pool of media content that is available to be drawn up on the fly to suit a users demographic. Variable Demographic Targeting, similar to the ads conversing with Tom Cruise in the subway on the set of "The Minority Report".

Speculation aside, given this divergent demographic, one way we could add potential engagement succor to the concept of growing a meme is to allow the student to describe their own target demographic and grow the meme from that particular unique perspective.

For example: I'm going to write about Simpsons Gap in the WWII epoch, as the wife of a soldier, We've just had a picnic there and an American Pilot we met there told us that Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbor...

I'm a male 19 year old successful Indigenous ringer on horseback in 1932, on my way to Town after a months work at Undoolya Station, I might get into Town about 2 hours before the Indigenous curfew comes down at 6PM...

I've just helicoptered into the Gap to contemplate the vagaries of planting a wind farm near here, my native tongue is Mandarin and I would like some info about land boundaries, mineral deposits, water catchments and the top 3 construction businesses in the Town...

I'm a tree-hugger from South Park Colarado, I want to do the 'Mount Sonder at sunrise' portion of the Larapinta trail walk, rock climb on Mount Conner and find out if there's an Irish Pub in town...

In situations like this, where a student has exercised creative construction latitude, then in this pedagogy, they may also contribute to the construction of a Rubric that can be used to assess the piece of work. The Lecturer would have their own Institutionally developed Rubric weighted at say 60% and the student has the option of being marked totally by this rubric, or by putting in the extra yards and developing a meme-rubric indicating personally derived criteria to apply in examining the meme, [40%].

Lets consider our humble meme. Like a virus its neither living or dead, it needs traffic to survive. Its basic nature is inert unless folk are using and reusing its content.
I am just developing this approach and I want to float some ideas about how to assess and appraise the evolutionary work a student may have brought to a given meme.

I have the notion that the amount of traffic a student meme blog generates is one factor.

A meme can be considered as a self contained packet of cultural information.

Chimeric Memes

2009-06-16T12:42:00.027+09:30

Chimera

[Biology] 'A DNA molecule with sequences derived from two or more different organisms, formed by laboratory manipulation'.

Virus Neither dead nor alive. On its own it has just the capacity to sit there. It basically has two life streams, it can exist in a Symbiotic arrangement with a genestreme whereby the host and the virus get along famously. As a Parasite it beomes detrimental to the system it inhabits. [and there is the case of viruses just sitting there by the billions in our "Junk DNA" doing nothing currently discernible.] But the point is, it is not at that moment metabolising anything.

In all cases though the virus can be potentially immortal by existing in a condition in which it has the potential to replicate and or evolve.

The meaning of life, the metaverse and everything

There are 3 fundamental biological requirements for a thing to be described as alive.

[1] Containment All the packets, all the codes, all the cellular machinery needs to be contained in some type of vehicle. A cell, a strand of DNA, a strand of RNA, an ameoba, a viral packet.

[2] Metabolism This entity needs to be able to metabolise nutrient so that it has the capacity to sustain itself

[3] Hereditary It finally has to be capable of being acted upon by the forces of evolution. Whether it changes or not is another question.

As a hypothesis I argue that a multimedia meme, lets say a 'seed' aggregation of geo-referenced multimedia relating to Simpsons Gap, can be considered as a chimeric meme, [an evolving packet of cultural information] and that Mainstream marking and assessment techniques could be adjusted to allow students the heuristic advantages this style of growth orientated, collaborative learning allows. A meme can be considered [culturally,cognitively and digitally ] alive and capable of replication and evolution.

Containment; it’s housed in a blog, say, and capable of being transported [and transformed/evolved] through a cultural system [Internet] via Web 2.0.
Capable of metabolism [interacting constructively with existent information from it’s user and their readers], replication [copied to and used in other web 2.0 platforms].
And subject to [cultural] evolutionary forces [the 'seed', via its user and her audience, has the capacity to attract and repulse other information, transforming itself in the process.]

Given suitable creative student interaction with the content it can become a useful, and therefore ‘evolving' packet of cultural information. Just like some of the clips on youtube that go viral, and spawn spinoffs.

Taste-Full

Now just as a example, a first try for me really, here's how I'd go about inducing someone into my discussion on the life and times of a meme.

First I'll provide some short 'Taste' as like an executive summary, then provide deeper information should the reader feel so motivated in the form of "Full", access to the entirety of the seed.

What’s in a meme Dorris?

Listen to this 1 min excerpt from Robyn Williams of ABC Radio National as he describes a meme that went viral in his high school days in England:

TASTE

Two loose Chimney Flue's Latrec!

FULL

Now here is the podcast in its full 30 minutes play time

FULLERMEME 1 Susan Blackmore Video

Sue Blackmore on Memes and Temes.[video coming soon, heres the link to ted.com]

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html

FULLERMEME 2- Textual Description of a Meme

About Memes

The term meme (it's pronounced like dream or cream) was coined by Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. As examples he suggested “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches”.

Memes are habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information that is copied from person to person. Memes, like genes, are replicators. That is, they are information that is copied with variation and selection. Because only some of the variants survive, memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Memes are copied by imitation, teaching and other methods, and they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be copied again. Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes.

The word “meme” has recently been included in the Oxford English Dictionary where it is defined as follows “meme (mi:m), n. Biol. (shortened from mimeme ... that which is imitated, after GENE n.) “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation”.

According to memetics, our minds and cultures are designed by natural selection acting on memes, just as organisms are designed by natural selection acting on genes. A central question for memetics is therefore ‘why has this meme survived?’. Some succeed because they are genuinely useful to us, while others use a variety of tricks to get themselves copied. From the point of view of the “selfish memes” all that matters is replication, regardless of the effect on either us or our genes.

Some memes are almost entirely exploitative, or viral, in nature, including chain letters and e-mail viruses. These consist of a “copy-me” instruction backed up with threats and promises. Religions have a similar structure and this is why Dawkins refers to them as ‘viruses of the mind’. Many religions threaten hell and damnation, promise heaven or salvation, and insist that their followers pass on their beliefs to others. This ensures the survival of the memeplex. Other viral memes include alternative therapies that don’t work, and new age fads and cults. Relatively harmless memes include children’s games, urban legends and popular songs, all of which can spread like infections.

At the other end of the spectrum memes survive because of their value to us. The most valuable of memeplexes include all of the arts and sports, transport and communications systems, political and monetary systems, literature and science.

Memetics has been used to provide new explanations of human evolution, including theories of altruism, the origins of language and consciousness, and the evolution of the large human brain. The Internet can be seen as a vast realm of memes, growing rapidly by the process of memetic evolution and not under human control.

The field of memetics is still a new and controversial science, with many critics, and many difficulties to be resolved.

FULLERMEME 3- Science Fiction

'SNOWCRASH' Neal Stephenson Publication date, June 1992.

Hiro Protagonist; freelance hacker who helped cut the code for the 'Metaverse' which is basically a 'Second Life' app. He's in the metaverse on his way into the virtual bar of 'The Black Sun' and fortunately decides against accepting and watching the 'Snowcrash' virus...[like watching snow on the screen of an old cathode ray TV] which turns folk into religious zealots, of a 'religion' fashioned by a media tycoon. The 'Hypercard', is/was a really clever old Mac program, which back in the 90's allowed one to dump all sorts of multimedia into a single file, a perfect repository to drop one of our current memes into.

Hiro realizes that the guy has noticed him and is staring back, looking him up and down, paying particular attention to the swords. A grin spreads across the black-and-white guy's face. It is a satisfied grin. A grin of recognition. The grin of a man who knows something Hiro doesn't. The black-and-white guy has been standing with his arms folded across his chest, like a man who is bored, who's been waiting for something, and now his arms drop to his sides, swing loosely at the shoulders, like an athlete limbering up. He steps as close as he can and leans forward; he's so tall that the only thing behind him is empty black sky, torn with the glowing vapor trails of passing animercials.

"Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow Crash?"

A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention.

Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of getting that information. It's probably nothing.

The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would be normal in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you can't sell drugs in the Metaverse, because you can't get high by looking at something.

The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called Snow Crash before. That's not unusual -- a thousand new drugs get invented each year, and each of them sells under half a dozen brand names.

But a "snow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash -- a bug -- at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. Hiro has seen it happen a million times. But it's a very peculiar name for a drug.

The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. He has an utterly calm, stolid presence. It's like talking to an asteroid. Which would be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of sense. Hiro's trying to read some clues in the guy's face, but the closer he looks, the more his shifty black-and-white avatar seems to break up into jittering, hard-edged pixels. It's like putting his nose against the glass of a busted TV. It makes his teeth hurt.

"Excuse me," Hiro says. "What did you say?"

"You want to try some Snow Crash?"

He has a crisp accent that Hiro can't quite place. His audio is as bad as his video. Hiro can hear cars going past the guy in the background. He must be goggled in from a public terminal alongside some freeway. "I don't get this," Hiro says. "What is Snow Crash?"

"It's a drug, asshole," the guy says. "What do you think?"

"Wait a minute. This is a new one on me," Hiro says. "You honestly think I'm going to give you some money here? And then what do I do, wait for you to mail me the stuff?"

"I said try, not buy," the guy says. "You don't have to give me any money. Free sample. And you don't have to wait for no mail. You can have it now." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard.

It looks like a business card. The hypercard is an avatar of sorts. It is used in the Metaverse to represent a chunk of data. It might be text, audio, video, a still image, or any other information that can be represented digitally.

Think of a baseball card, which carries a picture, some text, and some numerical data. A baseball hypercard could contain a highlight film of the player in action, shown in perfect high-def television; a complete biography, read by the player himself, in stereo digital sound; and a complete statistical database along with specialized software to help you look up the numbers you want.

A hypercard can carry a virtually infinite amount of information. For all Hiro knows, this hypercard might contain all the books in the Library of Congress, or every episode of Hawaii Five-O that was ever filmed, or the complete recordings of Jimi Hendrix, or the 1950 Census.

Or -- more likely -- a wide variety of nasty computer viruses. If Hiro reaches out and takes the hypercard, then the data it represents will be transferred from this guy's system into Hiro's computer. Hiro, naturally, wouldn't touch it under any circumstances, any more than you would take a free syringe from a stranger in Times Square and jab it into your neck.

And it doesn't make sense anyway. "That's a hypercard. I thought you said Snow Crash was a drug," Hiro says, now totally nonplussed.

"It is," the guy says. "Try it."

"Does it fuck up your brain?" Hiro says. "Or your computer?"

"Both. Neither. What's the difference?"

Hiro finally realizes that he has just wasted sixty seconds of his life having a meaningless conversation with a paranoid schizophrenic. He turns around and goes into The Black Sun.

AND LATER

Hiro Protagonist talks to a ‘Gargoyle’ who explains how a meme virus works…

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

"You're the guy who's working with Juanita, right?" Hiro says.

"Or she's working with me. Or something like that"

"She said she wanted me to meet you."

For several seconds Lagos is frozen. He's ransacking more data. Hiro wants to throw a bucket of water on him.

"Makes sense," he says. "You're as familiar with the Metaverse as anyone. Freelance hacker -- that's exactly right"

"Exactly right for what? No one wants freelance hackers anymore."

"The corporate assembly-line hackers are suckers for infection. They're going to go down by the thousands, just like Sennacherib's army before the walls of Jerusalem," Lagos says.

"Infection? Sennacherib?"

"And you can defend yourself in Reality, too -- that'll be good if you ever go up against Raven. Remember, his knives are as sharp as a molecule. They'll go through a bulletproof jacket like lingerie."

"Raven?"

"You'll probably see him tonight. Don't mess with him."

"Okay," Hiro says. "I'll look out for him."

"That's not what I said," Lagos says. "I said, don't mess with him."

"Why not?"

"It's a dangerous world," Lagos says. "Getting more dangerous all the time. So we don't want to upset the balance of terror. Just think about the Cold War."

"Yup." All Hiro wants to do now is walk away and never see this guy again, but he won't wind up the conversation.

"You're a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about, too."

"Deep structures?"

"Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?"

"Sure."

"You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them -- the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells -- your bioware selfmodifies -- the software becomes part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable -- all hackers are vulnerable -- to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."

"What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?"

"Just don't stare into any bitmaps. Anyone try to show you a raw bitmap lately? Like, in the Metaverse?"

Interesting. "Not to me personally, but now that you mention it, this Brandy came up to my friend --"

"A cult prostitute of Asherah. Trying to spread the disease. Which is synonymous with evil. Sound melodramatic? Not really. You know, to the Mesopotamians, there was no independent concept of evil. Just disease and ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?"

Hiro walks away, the same way he walks away from psychotic street people who follow him down the street.

"It tells you that evil is a virus!" Lagos calls after him. "Don't let the nam-shub into your operating system!"

Juanita's working with this alien?

Blunt Force Trauma play for a solid hour, segueing from one song into the next with no chink or crevice in the wall of noise. All a part of the aesthetic. When the music stops, their set is over. For the first time, Hiro can hear the exaltation of the crowd. It's a blast of high-pitched noise that he feels in his head, ringing his ears.

Meme Rubrics Revisited.

2009-06-16T12:15:00.000+09:30

As we have seen in the previous 3 posts there exists beneficial heuristic reasons for setting up, at least some learning, to be centered around a learners engagement with a given Meme.

10-Palm Valley

2009-06-11T14:52:00.001+09:30

This blog entry demonstrates how this beta version of google blogger can georeference blogs onto a landscape.

Click the Palm Valley link below to auto open google earth zoomong in to that wonderful Red Cabbage Palm laden oasis in Central Australia.

The History of the Internet

2009-06-11T13:30:00.002+09:30

Here's a nice 5 min cartoon that shows the history of the internet that puts the key Internet date at 1957.

I like because it uses a rudimentary set of moving symbols and crisp audio commentary to competently describe the evolution of the Internet.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Collaboration squared and an impending 'Singularity' -R

2009-06-05T17:37:00.003+09:30

In 1984 I had hungrily devoured every word of William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' trilogy and contemplated what a "mass consensual hallucination" AKA cyberspace [he invented this word], would become to look like.

"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. … Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding."
William Gibson;'Nueromancer' and 'Burning Chrome.

I witnessed a real collaboration/communication driven paradigm shift in the 90's at a college I was working at back then. Email was made available to the entire staff base in one fell swoop. Over that next year as staff got used to the presence of it all one could see that the way of doing business [and friends and jokes] had changed irrevocably.

It was hard to think back then that in another 15 years or so we would be on the cusp of omnipresent ubiquitous computing. What was unforeseen I feel was the rate and pace of change, exponential.

So there are two themes I wish to talk about here, and mainly I must confess, to just marvel at human ingenuity. In broader therms though I see exploration of these topics as giving a more rounded approach to and understanding of hi-tech evolution.

The first being Collaboration and I feel Howard Rheingold [The rise and rise of collaboration], speaking at www.ted.com gives a really good presentation on how it's set to change our lives irrevocably, again. And its worth noting that as this blog goes to press 5/6/09 that Google Wave has just become public, leveraged collaboration notched up once again.

The second part of this blog:

[1] Science Fiction [though I prefer Speculative Fiction], and Science Fact. Both call up a future that may exist by attempting prescience based on their understanding of life, the universe and everything. So have a listen to the podcast, Janice McAdam and watch the vodcast, Ray Kurzweil and I hope you enjoy synthesizing these memes.

In the Red Corner is Ray Kurzweil, scientist, futurist and all round nice guy who provides a compelling case for fruition of his imagined event "Singularity", and man if it comes it will be a ripper. In the Blue Corner Janice McAdam from Sydney has degrees in physics and children's literature and calls herself a 'lapsed physicist'. Today she talks about the genre of science fiction as a prediction into the future.

Janice McAdam from ABC radio national podcast;

Ray Kurzweil sourced from ted.com

Download Janice McAdam; Can Science Fiction predict the future?
http://www.ourmedia.org/media/science-fiction-prediction-future-0
Download Ray Kurzweil

Download Howard Rheingold; The Rise and Rise of Collaboration.
http://ourmedia.org/node/185773
Or go and search directly at www.ted.com

Download Ray Kurzweil; How technology's accelerating power will transform us
http://ourmedia.org/node/204307

Workshop [free] Software Resources -R

2009-06-04T13:11:00.005+09:30

Freeware
Irfanview Picture editor and plugins [Windows]
http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm

Download and install the latest Irfanview[4.23] plugins with EXIF capacity.
http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm

Audacity audio editor [Windows and Mac, Linux?]
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

GPSPhotoLinker - 1.6.1 [Mac only]
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24820

Microsoft PhotoStory
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/PhotoStory/default.mspx

Copyright and Copy left Issues. -R

2009-06-04T12:12:00.003+09:30

In a project such as ours where we need to mix and meld different multimedia streams into themed 'mashups', one of the main antagonists to creativity is having to dance across various copyright legalities. A perturbance for individual bloggers and an absolute minefield for educational institutions. When an axe falls it can be very heavy...

'Information wants to be free' of course, but how do we realistically dialogue with issues of Patent Rights and Intellectual Property. Historically it can be argued that patent rights have done more to restrain innovation than industrial espionage. The Wright Brothers for example patented the bloody aeroplane! As a consequence no aeronautics happened apart from what the Bros did. Come WW1 and the President cancelled the entire patent system for aeronautical R&D. The contemporary consequence being that the likes of Boeing, Lockheed Martin etc rose to positions of global prominence. This is a fascinating lecture.

Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures, Melbourne 29 December 2007

"Are we missing out on the full benefits of science and technology because of outdated ideas about copyright and patenting? Could the key to feeding the world be locked up in a company fridge somewhere? Open-source software has transformed the internet, underpinning the phenomenal growth of Google, Ebay and YouTube. What can science learn from this revolution? In our rush to protect intellectual property, have we damaged our capacity to deliver solutions for the critical issues of the 21st century?
In this lecture, John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons at Harvard Law School, will describe how existing social and legal infrastructures are choking science, and how we can create new ways to share research. Brian Fitzgerald, Head of the Law School at Queensland University of Technology, will discuss the success of open source in the information technology world, and the lessons for other fields of science." [source abc.net.au/rn]

To download the file stremed above please visit ourmedia.org at:
http://www.ourmedia.org/media/alfred-deakin-innovation-lectures-melbourne-2007

The Numerati -R

2009-06-03T15:56:00.021+09:30

Alphabet soup gives way to binary soup.

So far we've looked at how the info soup, which we are dumplings in, has morphed along with its supporting technologies to become more human/personally centered, ubiquitous and user friendly.

Advertisers, employers, teachers and so on can 'push' pertinent content to a users stationary or mobile location.

I remember watching some show about 5 years ago when this guy was saying that 50% of the jobs that will exist in 10 years time have not been invented yet.

The explosion in online activity and networking has seen a corresponding explosion in data collection and analysis. But according to Steve Baker, a senior writer for BusinessWeek, it's only in very recent times that we've started to see the development of an elite class of people who've begun to take data management – and sometimes manipulation – to an entirely new level. He calls them the Numerati.

People and organisations have been collecting data for millennia, how many of us there are, and why we vote the way we do, what we like to eat, all of that sort of thing.

Computers of course have made it possible to gather that data on a once-unimaginable scale. Though as any good pollster will tell you, having data and knowing how to use it are two very different things.

Now the explosion in online activity and networking has seen a corresponding explosion in data collection and analysis.

[Source ABC radio national's Future tense - streme the podcast below or download from ABC/rn :http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2009/2578378.htm]

Listen to the podcast below for an interesting take on how, who and why.

And to further explain and describe the trend have a look at the www.ted.com video from Jonathon Harris in 2007, we're seeing commercial examples of Harris's 'Universe' program in the mainstream now.
Jonathon Harris and "The Web's Secret Stories" from that wonderful site www.ted.com.

Its from platforms such as Harris's 'Univese' program [see video] that we can see aspects of what is termed the 'Semantic Web' emerging, here massive data sets are agglomerated and manipulated in real time.

The Changing face of advertising. - R

2009-06-03T13:57:00.010+09:30

Now we've looked at how the global print media is nervously adjusting to emerging procedures and products lets have a look at advertising. One way or another the majority of media we consume is supported by advertising. Like the print media producers we looked at in the previous blog the Advertising industry are positioning themselves to take ADvantage of the internet and mobile computing.

In the radio and TV era the model was saturation. Listen to or watch this station and we will saturate your personal attention with our sponsors ads. Sure we can hit the 'mute' button on the TV or pre-record the video so that we can fast-forward through the ads, conversely heaps of us don't feel violated sitting in front of a program that feeds 15 mins per hour of repetitive pulp at us. Kids seemingly zone out when the ads are on yet appear to have deep affinity with the Golden Arches whenever we drive by...

Anyway the very nature of advertising is in the process of flux, we are changing from a one size fits all saturation model [Exposure to] to the paradigm of Interaction with. In the podcast below Professor Veron refers to these ads as 'telescopic'. If the tag line is interesting we can click to go deeper. Each click, each step is essentially a logic gate that is drawing us down ever closer to an actual product or service on offer that we might be interested in paying for.

The process is similar to the way you are corralled into the Department you need when you phone say Telstra about your broadband service. Each question you answer ["press one if you are a residential customer"] gets you closer to the actual part you wish to Interact with, without having to bother humans.

And as Digital Radio is launched around Australia in July 09 listeners will have some basic control of and therefore interaction with the digital radio stream they are 'interacting' with. On a digital radio service songs can, for example, be paused or rewound.

Download this audio resource at ourmedia.org:
http://www.ourmedia.org/media/changing-face-advertising

Read all about it! - R

2009-06-01T10:30:00.022+09:30

Welcome along.

Our 'memestreme' project hangs in that relatively new camp of IT studies: 'New Media' NM.

Some of the workshop content we are constructing to augment the uptake of skills, knowledge and attitudes needed to operate in this sphere include the history of NM's evolution, its Global 'state of play', what's in the pipeline now... and excitingly, a bit of SF- speculative fiction on how we may look and feel as residents in that amorphous and resoulutely emerging future Matrix.

Right now with the advent of mobile computing and ubiquitous interconnectivity we are awash with new prototypes for a human 'being' and a human 'doing'. Follow the memestreme blog as we explore current NM adopted standards, nascent wannabes and possible futures.

News.

Have you ever wondered why TV and radio news is there on every comm channel you may hone in on... and it's basically free? TV soaps, documentaries, movies, cartoons etc are bought by the station, repackaged to include advertising and on-sold to you and I. News just hangs there, basically free.

This is about to change and one area where we can see tremors of uncertainty, as new News gathering and redistribution practices percolate to the user defined pedestal of 'best practice', is in that 19th century bastion of redistributed intel; the Newspaper. Lets start here.

The entire edifice that is the News Print behemoth is trying desperately to make out the writing on the wall. [Watch the video Saving Newspapers: The Musical, hot off the press from a gaggle of young reporters in a mainstream Boston news copy room] Newspaper sales are steady... downwards, and in these economically depressed times the incidence of classified advertising has plummeted to new lows further eroding user generated profits. Like General Motors, News Papers per se are desperate to re-invent themselves and there are some really interesting approaches happening, including some that would ultimately have us reading News from a position of Informed Consensual arrangement. Read all about it!

Have a go at this ABC/rn podcast "Read all about it!", there are 3 explorations of how you and I may be moving from the current 'one size fits all' News model [all the News we see fit to print] to a model of News based personalization driven by informed collaboration/consumption and brought about by the wonders of internet based interconnectedness.

Download file copy at ourmedia.org:
http://ourmedia.org/node/198411

Links to orgs discussed in the Audio blog:

Spot.Us

The Printed Blog

EveryBlock