Working at the Global Humanitarian Forum today, providing the live streams, was fun as some interesting conversations took place.
Among the people present we had Micheline Calmy Rey, Kofi Annan, the writer of the wikonomics book (which I have as an audio book and haven’t finished yet), Nik Gowing, and a few more interesting people.
Whilst I was working I didn’t have time to listen to the discussions that were taking place but they ranged from new media and communication to providing funds for organisations and the aspects to be taken into account, managing displacement, demographic dynamics and many more topics.
We’ll be streaming quite a few more lives during the course of tomorrow so if you’re interested in humanitarian subjects visit Global Humanitarian Forum for more information. The live streams can be found by following the Launch Live video link provided on the site.
The free flow of information has been greatly facilitated by the development of modern tools such as the smartphone, more common laptops and data plans. As a result of all these tools the control of public opinion has become more of a challenge.
It’s easy to block sites, but the problem is you need to be more aware of the communications systems than the users themselves. In particular I’m thinking of Iran, and another revolution before it. People are now saying that twitter is a great revolutionary tool to get information from one person to another quickly.
Of course this might be true but there’s a more interesting trend in progress today. This trend is how modern telecommunications tools such as the mobile phone and laptop are affecting social change. In particular think of the printing press and the role it has spread, the role of coded radio messages as well.
Today it’s up to the World Wide Web and it’s backbone the Internet to provide a cheap, easy to hide telecommunications platform by which to keep the people informed about what is happening. Remember Thomas from the Unbearable Lightness of Being. He wrote that article and never agreed to a retraction.
Now you don’t need mainstream media or even a physical copy of what you’re trying to distribute. Radiowaves carry these messages almost simultaneously to thousands, even millions of people at once. As a result controlling public opinion is a major challenge. Every website that has a mobile interface has potential as a revolutionary tool. Today it’s twitter, because the site is not blocked by totalitarian states yet, but if that site is blocked then you’ve got other sites that could be used. Plurk, Jaiku and Orkut are examples of websites that have a mobile interface.
The simpler the mobile website interface the more accessible the information becomes. Herein lies the real revolution. It’s platform agnostic. It’s that ability to create, share and distribute information on the move that is most interesting because it has built in redundancy. Within minutes of one service being blocked a clone can be put up. How do you want to stop the free flow of information in such circumstances? By being flavour of the month twitter, just like facebook, google and youtube may be blocked. The platform style however will remain and this is the most interesting aspect of the new era in electronic conversation.
The Worldcommunity grid is a datagrid style project where almost half a million people are offering computer cycles to help advance scientific research in a number of fields such as health, nutrition and more. One of the most recent projects to be added to the collection is the one for Influenza. If you so chose you can help speed up the process of finding a solution to the influenza problem.
Two or three weeks ago they said that it may take up to four months to find a solution to the Swine Flu virus. Now take into account the WHO’s effort to get a number of research labs to work in collaboration against the SARS virus and it’s interesting. Apparently it took four days to learn everything there was to know about the nature of the virus but not how to cure it.
That’s where the World Community grid Influenza project comes in. The more computers are used to run models to see which are the best solutions to research the quicker we may have a way of dealing with this new virus.
The project is free and here are the projects you can currently help with;
Help Fight Childhood Cancer
Influenza Antiviral Drug Search
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2
FightAIDS@Home
Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2
Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together
Help Conquer Cancer
Nutritious Rice for the World
The Clean Energy Project
Whilst in Switzerland people stand in the streets as they watch the cows go up the mountains and come back down the Spanish enjoy a more extreme version with the same species. I was in the same street as the bulls were running up and down whilst in Spain and this was a fun experience.
I watched as the locals stood in the street chatting. One guy was dancing as he chatted to one group of girls whilst to my right some more girls were having a conversation. On the balcony close to the pharmacy I could see the staff in their white coats watching the activities from a safe vantage point. Further down the street a daughter was holding a four year old child. The child was watching what was going below.
A group of men started to pay attention, then a few more were spotted running up the street closely followed by a few bulls. One of these bulls was very powerfully built, with yellowish hair on it’s back. It was powerfully built. Now those that had been chatting were paying attention. Some of them climbed up the rejas whilst others climbed up the wooden devices that had been placed there to allow people to escape to safety. The bulls passed and a guy in an orange suit was chasing the bulls with a stick. One bull slipped and suddenly the guy in the orange t-shirt had a bull behind him. He dodged it in time.
It’s at this moment that a few people clapped at the prowess of this particular runner’s actions. They were having fun. The people went back to chatting waiting for when the bulls would come back the same way in a short while.
This was just one of the vantage points. In another street you could see lots of cages. They weren’t there to keep the bulls in. In fact these cages were designed so that a grown person could fit through the bars. As the bulls would come running down the street so they would run through the bars, to safety.
Some of the younger men were more daring. One in particular, with a pink sweater was going towards the bulls, waving this object at the bull and getting it to charge him. At the last minute he would dodge out of the way of the bull. He did this quite a few times, keeping the bulls active.
At this point it was amusing to see the locals. Some of the cages were designed so that wooden planks could be put across the top. Chairs had been placed there so that the locals could watch the activities comfortably. They were eating sunflower seeds and throwing the shells down. As a result some of those below would get the occasional shell falling on them.
The whole show was fun. I filmed these activities and I’ve started editing that footage to provide you with some fun video of a typically Spanish form of entertainment. This event had been going on for a week and it gave me a new appreciation of Spanish culture. If you’re close to a town as this event is taking place you should definitely take the time to watch it.
The octopus fell from my mouth during a dive and I watched as the regulator freeflowed air. I tried to grab it but didn’t get it on the first try. I didn’t panic. I went back to take hold of the regulator attached to the tank on my back but that wasn’t needed. I was able to get hold once more of the other regulator and waited for the water to be gone from my mouth before breathing in again. This happened about 45 minutes into a dive.
That had been the fourth and final dive in Spain. I had visited three different divesites on two different dives. The last time I had dived was by Portland harbour in Dorset England and this was in June of 2001. The biggest change was the visibility. In the Mediterranean you see quite a bit further and rather than doing wreck dives you explore the geology of the waters around where the cliffs were. You see quite a few boulders covered in sea grass, a few patches of sand and several schools of fish.
What makes diving around Moraira, Spain different from England is that visibility is much better, and you’re wearing a wet suit. The water is a comfortable 17 degrees. You get an opportunity to swim through rock arches and dive over and around other boulders. You change depth varying from 14 meters in some places to 7 or 8 in other places. For the first two dives the water was calm but you could still feel the surge as waves came in and out from the rocks. Occasionally we would arrive to underwater caverns and caves. Swim into the cave low and then swim out higher. As you rotate your body and look up you see urchins, sea anonemes and the occasional antennas sticking out from a single crustacean. In one case a fishing net was draped around a rock.
For the second day of diving the waters were rougher and the water was filled with sediment so visibility was not as good as on the first day. When you swam in certain areas you would feel a stronger surge. When the surge was against you it’d be an opportunity to stop. When the surge went the way we wanted to go we swam forward. As we took on the second dive the surge was strong. It meant we were using a little more air. We did see schools of fish on this dive, swimming up to them and crossing through. I was now looking around more because I was feeling more comfortable. I was trying to move my arms less, to control my buoyancy better and to glide more. This was only my fourteenth dive in four years.
On the last dive between the surge, the duration of the dive and the cooler waters I was down to fifty bars and quite quickly I was down to 20 bars. That’s when the instructor provided me with the octopus. That’s the backup regulator. I breathed from that one for the rest of the dive. It was a new sensation for me. On all my other dives I had always had enough air to reach the surface with air to spare in the tank. That’s when I found myself without the regulator to breath from for a few seconds. No panic though. It was just a matter of being methodical, knowing exactly what to do.
By the time I arrived to the surface from that last dive though I was tired. I inflated the BCD and swam back to the boat. Once there I took off the weight belt and rested holding onto the rope of the Rigid inflatable boat (RIB). Once I was back on board the boat I was tired. Finally I had the opportunity to dive, having waited years for this chance.
A few years ago when studying in the South West of England I had worked on an underwater documentary for Dorset as part of my HND and as a result had established some friendships with two of the scuba centers based there. In fact a friend was going to lend me a dry suit and all the equipment I would need to dive. If it hadn’t been for a change of plan I would have spent the summer diving around that area.
Now all these years later my parents bought a house close to Moraira and diving is affordable once more so I’m going to take advantage of this opportunity. I am in the process of purchasing all the equipment I need to go diving more frequently. It’s an activity I enjoy and the only thing that had been holding me back was the price of accommodation. As I grow more comfortable underwater I will purchase an underwater housing for my camera and start taking some underwater video.
If you’re learning about editing but don’t want to spend much money then Quicktime pro is a cheap and easy straight cut editor. It’s quick and easy to use.
With the short cut apple+c apple+N and apple+v you have a very simple editor. Using J to play backwards, k to pause and L to play normally you control how the video plays. With the I key for marking in points and the O key for out points you’ve got everything you need.
Find a video clip that is recognised by Quicktime and play the video. Find the footage you want to keep with the J,K,L keys and mark your in and out points. Once this is done cut the video with apple+C and open a new player with apple+n. Paste the video segment in your new player and you’ve got the first shot. Repeat this process with the source video and you’ve got a simple straight cuts editor.
There was some footage I wanted to process quickly, without opening finalcut pro and it worked fine. It’s more intuitive than imovie (for me at least) and it’s very affordable.
Minsh is launching tomorrow and I will be meeting with them to record an interview with them about the website. They’re university students who did this as one of their projects.
Minsh is a 3d virtual environment in which twitter users are represented as fish swimming in the ocean. Each fish is a different twitter user. I saw this project in pre alpha and it’s an interesting idea.
Tomorrow I will see how it’s evolved and I hope to have a video up by Friday lunchtime which will help you understand what the website is about.
Satellite television broadcasting is an interesting field to looik into, especially now that there are thousands of channels available on a multitude of satellites. Over the past two days I have been learning about the Nanox HDTV recording device.
What I like about using the Nanox receiver is the ability to see stream information, what format is being broadcast as well as resolution. What’s interesting is that some satellite channels are broadcasting at full HD quality whilst others are broadcasting at no more than 576*352 for example. You get the bit rate information too.
Now that I’ve lost most people here’s the part I like. You can attach any USB hard disk to the device and record programs off the television. This is particularly interesting if there’s a documentary you intended to watch but weren’t around to watch it. It can record two simultaneous streams at once.
TRP files are a compressed file format that are ideal for storage. They’re not recognised by quicktime but if you download mpeg streamclip then you can convert this file format to any file format you desire.
If you record a number of files with the satellite receiver with mpeg streamclip you can batch encode a number of files at once. This means that a spare computer can do the rendering without you having to be there.
If there is an EPG available for the channel you are watching you can schedule the receiver to record the program. In other situations you can start a recording and it will ask whether to stop recording at the end of the scheduled program. If there is no EPG the process is manual to start a recording but you can select how long you want to record for. It’s a shame that you need to go into the menu to set the record duration however.
