Finally got around and purchased an action video camera. Had to return the first one and buy another one. These are the lessons I learned in the process.
The first one I got was Looxcie LX2. Its amazon page was relatively short yet I did see that it could capture at most 480p videos and went for it anyway, thinking that ... well, that it might still work out. Smaller videos might actually be a better thing..... or so I thought. Besides, it boases of a nice smartphone application that you could use with the camera.
Wrong I was. Not only video quality was bad pixelwise, the encoding ... I am guessing implemented in software, was very poor. During abrupt scene changes ... which by definition are frequent in wearable settings ... the frame would go berserk for about a second during which boxes in various places on the screen would display junk. Completely unsuable.
Also, the feature that made my mind -- the 30s clip feature, where it would dump into the file the LAST 30 seconds of the buffer when you press a button --- would only work when configured from smartphone, which takes Bluetooth pairing, connection inside the application ... all amounting to 30-60s preparation before you can use the feature. Note that after that you have to walk around with your smartphone.
Returned the thing. Got Contour ROAM2 for only 30% on top of the price of the first one (I know, I know, the price is so low only becuase the company went bust recently ... not gloating or anything...). Did not get it yet, but I already know all the features, which I can now list in full, having learned my lesson:
(1) anything below 1920x1050 is junk. Other names for it are 1080p or Full HD. You will still get blurry transisions on abrupt changes, but very brief and not very obvious.
(2) several kinds of mounts would be nice
(3) rotating lens! is a major feature. This way you can adjust your horizon properly, even if you mounted it awry.
(4) some way to tell where you are aiming. Contour shoots a lazer line for aiming.
(5) resilience to elements. Contour is waterproof. Does not mean that you can swim with it but at least I can carry it in the rain without warrying too much.
Yep. I have my first wearable camera now.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Stupid Glass and the Real Google Policy
Heard about the "do not be evil" policy in Google? Given the Google Glass, the actual policy seems to be the one from the Phineas and Ferb -- "That's a google, googles don't do much, you know..."
Meet Google Class:
Basically, you have a small monitor stuck just above your eye line. And you get a camera and a button near your temple. That's all. Are you happy with the device? Lots of people seem to be happy. Lots of people hurry to state that this is a new mode of computing altogether. Is it really?
Meet Augmented Reality:
AR is simple in principle. Video is local, metadata is provided by a remote service over the network and is mapped onto the video as a faint overlay.
Google Class could be a new mode of computing if it made the whole eye socket of the glasses, or possibly both, into a monitor and project overlay over it. Only then the Glass would actually be fun to have and use. Otherwise, like I said, it is just a tiny screen glued to the tip of your baseball cap.
Meet Google Class:
Basically, you have a small monitor stuck just above your eye line. And you get a camera and a button near your temple. That's all. Are you happy with the device? Lots of people seem to be happy. Lots of people hurry to state that this is a new mode of computing altogether. Is it really?
Meet Augmented Reality:
AR is simple in principle. Video is local, metadata is provided by a remote service over the network and is mapped onto the video as a faint overlay.
Google Class could be a new mode of computing if it made the whole eye socket of the glasses, or possibly both, into a monitor and project overlay over it. Only then the Glass would actually be fun to have and use. Otherwise, like I said, it is just a tiny screen glued to the tip of your baseball cap.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
True Social Collaboration
Now sure how you the reader define online social collaboration, but this is pretty much how it is done today. Using the old western cliche ... there is only two kinds a' people -- those who are in line for collaboration and those who are let into the ant farm and are already collaboratin'.
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Twitter #hashtag Algorithm Has to Be Reverse-Engineered .. Now
I think I finally got Twitter #hashtags. Based on the visual below which I took from here and digested into this brief analysis.
I think there are 2 problems, both internal to Twitter:
(1) their marketing people are bad at visualizations -- for example, the same bottleneck in the chart above is used twice thus complicating understanding -- stopping short of stating a deliberate intent to confuse the reader; I know that visualizations are hard, but this is Twitter and this is a very simple topic -- how hard can it be?
(2) Twitter marketing is completely decoupled from its technical department. It looks like the marketing is a bunch of slogan writers (read: dreamers) while the technical department works on their algorithms in complete isolation. Many important conditions for your tweet to show up in a hashtag stream have been discussed before -- none of them are shown in the chart.
Also about the chart, what does "ARE YOU GOING TO USE PROMOTED PRODUCTS TO SURFACE YOUR MESSAGE ON TWITTER" mean? Am I stupid? Have I missed some meeting on social media terminology? Note that this is not the only example of bogus terminology on the chart -- just look at it closely.
You know what? After this chart I got a BAD ITCH to reverse engineer the #hashtag algorithm. This has been done before -- the crawling, I mean. Since Twitter is wide open I can just traverse a bunch of hashtags ... and separately people and see who shows up and who does not.
Maybe then I will get an idea why most of the tweets that show up in #googlemapsapi #gis are either stupid exclamations or completely irrelevant (adding value?) posts. For example, today in #gis I saw a post of some student who got an E (not A!) in geography ... I guess we're talking middle or high school.
Back to work.
I think there are 2 problems, both internal to Twitter:
(1) their marketing people are bad at visualizations -- for example, the same bottleneck in the chart above is used twice thus complicating understanding -- stopping short of stating a deliberate intent to confuse the reader; I know that visualizations are hard, but this is Twitter and this is a very simple topic -- how hard can it be?
(2) Twitter marketing is completely decoupled from its technical department. It looks like the marketing is a bunch of slogan writers (read: dreamers) while the technical department works on their algorithms in complete isolation. Many important conditions for your tweet to show up in a hashtag stream have been discussed before -- none of them are shown in the chart.
Also about the chart, what does "ARE YOU GOING TO USE PROMOTED PRODUCTS TO SURFACE YOUR MESSAGE ON TWITTER" mean? Am I stupid? Have I missed some meeting on social media terminology? Note that this is not the only example of bogus terminology on the chart -- just look at it closely.
You know what? After this chart I got a BAD ITCH to reverse engineer the #hashtag algorithm. This has been done before -- the crawling, I mean. Since Twitter is wide open I can just traverse a bunch of hashtags ... and separately people and see who shows up and who does not.
Maybe then I will get an idea why most of the tweets that show up in #googlemapsapi #gis are either stupid exclamations or completely irrelevant (adding value?) posts. For example, today in #gis I saw a post of some student who got an E (not A!) in geography ... I guess we're talking middle or high school.
Back to work.
The Ultimate ThinkTank: An Operation Manual
A think tank is not judged by the net volume of thinking but rather by the size of the tank in which the thinking takes place.
Listening to Economist: the Audio Edition, noticed that they refer to think tanks all the time. Here's what you need to build the ultimate think tank.
(1) Get a topic. If no other think tank in your country/regions does that, pick that. Example: A Think Tank on "Using Notebooks in Classrooms by TAs".
(2) Get a spokesperson. An academic guy would be nice. If not, get a politician. If not, get a sportsman. If not, ... well, you will need a bigger tank.
(3) Acquire a tank to think it. Do not drape its inside -- it will cancel the echo. You need echo to work. A trashed military tank is a nice echo chamber.
(4) Get a proper weapon. A well-known newspaper makes a nice sturdy barrel. If not, get a column in a well known online newspaper. If not, get a blog, but you will have to work at blogs.
(5) You are ready. Make regular announcements based on whatever bounces off the walls of your tank at the time and wait for a major outlet like Economist to tackle a specific topic on which your tank does the thinking.
What Exactly is TEDx?
Have known about TED for a long time now. Coming across its specific talks all the time. For example, as part of the Problem Based Learning (PBL) process the famous "Marshmallow" talk by Tom Wujec on team building is shown in class. We actually get students to build the towers, just like in the video, using spaghetti and marshmallows. I do not actually get the central idea of the talk, to be honest.
TED decided to grow up recently (might be a couple of years back, actually), in the franchise manner. There are now TEDx events which have nothing to do with the organizers of he TED itself.
You need a license to be able to host a TEDx event, but it looks like it is easy to get those -- just look at the criteria listed at the TED's website. Not difficult to adhere to their rules either. Basically, anyone can get a license. Once you get one, you also get access to lots of videos of the main TED talks, their experience (advices?, know-how?), etc.
Ideas Worth Spreading is TED's main product -- in fact, it is right next to the logo. Really bold slogan! But again, I have nothing against the TED itself, which obviously delivers on this promise.
By problem is with the TEDx events. Those are also supposed to spread the ideas which are worth the spreading, right?
Now, I decided to right this blog just now, when I saw the whole bunch of Japanese TEDx messages in my Google+ stream:
They are there for a reason -- because a couple of months ago I looked into it and even contacted TEDxTokyo directly. More about this later on.
Now, whose ideas are TEDxFukuoka and TEDxTokyo spreading? I did not forget about TEDxSapporo, but left it out because it does not touch me directly. TEDxFukuoka touches me directly because I live nearby and TEDxTokyo is in this because I contacted them and got no reply.
Now, let's see who is behind the two events. The above pages will not tell you that directly, but you can go to the main TED page and search there. It actually gives you details on who's in charge of each event. I could not find TEDxTokyo but I found the person in charge of TEDxFukuoka -- Joe Okubo. If you trust the page, TEDxFukuoka is his full-time employment. The page also says that his credit rating is +4225 across the entire TED space.
Now, if you are an academic person, you should know the concept of CFP -- Call for Papers. One might think that TEDx events would have a similar concept -- a CFI -- Call for Ideas. But NO. You will be surprised that you can only register at TEDx as a participant which means you are on the listening side. TEDxTokyo at the bottom of this page actually thanks some unknown community about the proposals on who to invite for talks. So, it sounds like there is a Nobel-like panel of specialists (?) who ... I would guess ... go through all the thinkable sources of information to pick current ideas which are worth spreading? At least with the Nobel panel we know the people... and the candidates. In TEDx* cases we are completely in the dark about he entire process.
You know what I think? I think they just pick arbitrary people. I looked at the list of talks for this year and confirmed that much of it is garbage -- from the viewpoint of the "ideas worth spreading". This explains why I got no reply when I sent an email -- in Japanese -- to the authors@* contact email at TEDxTokyo website, with the neatly explained idea and even a PDF file with a fully written paper on it. I do know for a fact that the idea is neat, fundamental in nature, versatile in applications including everyday life, and generally "worth spreading".
The lack of reply makes me think that the "business model" behind TEDx events is similar to the algorithms used by Twitter to decide whether or not your tweets are worthy or including in a hashtag stream -- their tech support also chooses the convenient strategy of not replying to emails.
I will write more on this interesting business model later. I am also seriously thinking about organizing an online community under the title "ideas wroth shredding" -- whose sole purpose will be to rummage through each TEDxTokyo or TEDxFukuoka event, and rip to shreds talks which deserve the ripping.
TED decided to grow up recently (might be a couple of years back, actually), in the franchise manner. There are now TEDx events which have nothing to do with the organizers of he TED itself.
You need a license to be able to host a TEDx event, but it looks like it is easy to get those -- just look at the criteria listed at the TED's website. Not difficult to adhere to their rules either. Basically, anyone can get a license. Once you get one, you also get access to lots of videos of the main TED talks, their experience (advices?, know-how?), etc.
Ideas Worth Spreading is TED's main product -- in fact, it is right next to the logo. Really bold slogan! But again, I have nothing against the TED itself, which obviously delivers on this promise.
By problem is with the TEDx events. Those are also supposed to spread the ideas which are worth the spreading, right?
Now, I decided to right this blog just now, when I saw the whole bunch of Japanese TEDx messages in my Google+ stream:
They are there for a reason -- because a couple of months ago I looked into it and even contacted TEDxTokyo directly. More about this later on.
Now, whose ideas are TEDxFukuoka and TEDxTokyo spreading? I did not forget about TEDxSapporo, but left it out because it does not touch me directly. TEDxFukuoka touches me directly because I live nearby and TEDxTokyo is in this because I contacted them and got no reply.
Now, let's see who is behind the two events. The above pages will not tell you that directly, but you can go to the main TED page and search there. It actually gives you details on who's in charge of each event. I could not find TEDxTokyo but I found the person in charge of TEDxFukuoka -- Joe Okubo. If you trust the page, TEDxFukuoka is his full-time employment. The page also says that his credit rating is +4225 across the entire TED space.
Now, if you are an academic person, you should know the concept of CFP -- Call for Papers. One might think that TEDx events would have a similar concept -- a CFI -- Call for Ideas. But NO. You will be surprised that you can only register at TEDx as a participant which means you are on the listening side. TEDxTokyo at the bottom of this page actually thanks some unknown community about the proposals on who to invite for talks. So, it sounds like there is a Nobel-like panel of specialists (?) who ... I would guess ... go through all the thinkable sources of information to pick current ideas which are worth spreading? At least with the Nobel panel we know the people... and the candidates. In TEDx* cases we are completely in the dark about he entire process.
You know what I think? I think they just pick arbitrary people. I looked at the list of talks for this year and confirmed that much of it is garbage -- from the viewpoint of the "ideas worth spreading". This explains why I got no reply when I sent an email -- in Japanese -- to the authors@* contact email at TEDxTokyo website, with the neatly explained idea and even a PDF file with a fully written paper on it. I do know for a fact that the idea is neat, fundamental in nature, versatile in applications including everyday life, and generally "worth spreading".
The lack of reply makes me think that the "business model" behind TEDx events is similar to the algorithms used by Twitter to decide whether or not your tweets are worthy or including in a hashtag stream -- their tech support also chooses the convenient strategy of not replying to emails.
I will write more on this interesting business model later. I am also seriously thinking about organizing an online community under the title "ideas wroth shredding" -- whose sole purpose will be to rummage through each TEDxTokyo or TEDxFukuoka event, and rip to shreds talks which deserve the ripping.
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