As part of the FourStarters relaunch we decided to broaden what we blog about, so here is a post that really has to be put in a new category to make sense on our blog.

I consume a lot of media. Books, music, news, internet radio, audio and video podcasts, movies, and most importantly: television series. I know that at least Reinier shares this interest in TV series with me (just ask him about Firefly and he won’t shut up) so I decided to give a write-up of one of the series that has kept me busy the last few weeks.

Life on Mars

Life on Mars is a 16 episode (2 seasons) BBC drama about Sam Tyler (played by John Simm), a Detective Chief Inspector for the Manchester Metropolitan Police, who has an accident and wakes up in 1973. The big question is if he is in a coma and dreaming it, if he is dead, or if he travelled through time.

Back in 1973 he joins the force as a detective inspector and finds that he has trouble fitting in. His boss, Gene Hunt (played by Philip Glenister) is an alcoholic, racist, sexist, homophobe that never learned to do an investigation by the book. This makes stuff very interesting for the viewer with Sam and Gene often either punching each other or co-punching another. Not to mention the weird hair cuts and cloths to add to the effect of the viewer wondering wether Sam really ended up on Mars.

(more…)

I already did a small review of the new Nokia N95 last week, but today I will be going into some more detail about what makes the N95 “tick”. The first day I had my N95, I played around trying to get Jaiku working over GPRS, and then I installed Fring to be able to use Skype over the Wifi. Obviously all this tinkering quickly drained the battery so here is a more detailed overview of “what computers have become”.

Battery Life (+)

One complaint of some reviewers is the battery life of the N95, but both I and another N95 owner noticed that this is probably only an issue in the first week because this is when you are playing around with all the functions. Once you start using the phone as a phone, and only occasionally use the display/video/GPS/wifi capabilities, the battery life is actually very acceptable. For me, even when using a lot of wifi, the battery life ranges from 1 to 1.5 days .

GPS (+/-)

The built-in GPS receiver is what sets the N95 apart from the other Nokia N-series phones. Unfortunately the GPS receiver is of really bad quality, and the antenna is located in the keypad, so for reception you will have to slide open the screen. In the first days I couldn’t manage to get a fix, but I recently noticed that if you stand still under a blue sky, it is able to make a fix on your position within a minute or two. This isn’t quite quick enough to solve my GPS issue, but it is fun.

Amazingly though, once you do have a fix, it really manages to keep track of your position. Even in places (half inside a building for example) where you would not get an initial fix at all. I did notice some inaccuracy here and there but in the end it does it’s job. The software provided is pretty detailed and uses internet (wifi, GPRS, UMTS or other) to download your maps. I manually zoomed in to the London area once and that was enough to never again run out of cached maps. A nice addition is the built-in search engine for finding interesting places (hotels, restaurants, etc) in your current area.

(more…)

This weekend I got a Sony Vaio which came with a pre-installed version of Windows Vista Home Edition. Windows Media Center is part of it, so I took it for a spin. I’m not a big fan of Windows Vista, but I must admit: the Media Center interface is not bad at all. Recording your favorite TV show and showing off your holiday pictures is quite easy.

However, people don’t buy a Media Center to enjoy the interface. According to Microsoft, people buy such equipment because they want an enhanced entertainment experience. A friend of mine who actually owns a Media Center agreed with that.

Yet this very same friend has spend days - if not weeks - installing and maintaining his Media Center. Over the last months he had issues with its sound card, hard disk, network connections and so on (it’s not even home made - it’s a proper Acer Media Center). As if this is not inconvenient enough already, he also has to deal with a buzzing machine in his living room whenever he wishes to watch TV, play music or see holiday pictures. All together that’s not exactly my idea of an enhanced entertainment experience.

Even if it would work flawlessly, I still don’t get it. The simple fact that I have to turn on a Media Center - which takes forever, a receiver and a TV to just listen to music doesn’t appeal to me at all. Considering that a decent Media Center setup will set you back several thousands of Euro’s, I’m wondering: what’s Windows Media Center’s right to exist?

I had a quick look at the Apple TV just before I went to The Netherlands for a short holiday. Set aside the big selling points of the Apple TV (Music, Series, Movies) there are two major features that I have to note.

1. The interface (above) looks a lot like Front Row, but then better. And this is what excites me: is Front Row in Leopard going to be like this? I sure hope so, and I think it actually might because Apple announced a major Front Row update at WWDC2006.
2. The guys from TWiT noted that Podcasts are in the main menu on the Apple TV. In other words this means that videopodcasters can now literally compete with mainstream TV. I think we will be seeing new HD vodcasts that are encoded with the special Apple TV Quicktime export soon.

Yesterday I attended a research colloquium at university from an external speaker. Lynda Hardman of CWI talked about “Presenting Knowledge on the Semantic Web”.

She covered three interesting topics dealing with media and metadata which were quite interesting. We —the audience— didn’t make it easy for her, but I do feel that a lot of interaction took place and stuff was learned.

Vox Populi

The first project she showed us was a project called Vox Populi from Stefano Bocconi, which is an automated video composer which uses rhetorical metadata to automatically create documentaries supporting a point of view.

A possible schematic of reasoning:

In the example they interviewed people in New York after 9/11 (Interview with America) and asked them their opinions about the situation and about the looming war with Afghanistan. After cutting up the interviews and annotating them on semantic/rhetoric value they could automatically script edits either supporting war, opposing it, or providing a balanced view (full details in the paper).

This is a technically very interesting concept and the montage shown was quite convincing. Don’t take my word for it, you can try it out yourself.

Objections Interesting as it may be from an academic point of view, I have a lot of ethical concerns when faced with this project. If it sees deployment a tool such as this will only accelerate the current media culture of immediacy, imbalance and balkanization we are seeing right now.
Furthermore the opinions of the participants are grossly distorted. Their stories are cut to a mixable resolution discarding any overarching message and those cuts are used to support or detract from arbitrary points of view. I honestly don’t know who would agree with this treatment.

Vox Populi fits in well with the soundbyte-ization of culture while I think more insight may be gained from longer fragments, more balanced views and more thinking not less. In the process as it is shown the original video is reduced to a set of parameters to be consumed by a mathematical optimizer. That means most of the context, coherence, nuance and insight is lost.
What you then get out of the system is an aggregate of the stripped fragments which has a new set of values instilled upon it (like any documentary would) but which has only been directed by a set of input parameters working on the few dimensions of information distilled from the cuts.

Dystopia Talking with Oliver about this project we took it a bit further and discussed what would happen if the rhetorical annotation of the video could be automated and unleashed on the full dutch video archives.

Dutch Institute and Archive for Audiovisual Media:

Not only does Vox Populi pick content based on rhetorical value but it also tries to pick fragments which a specific viewer will feel affect and authority for. This means that if you have enough well-annotated content you could make a personalized messages for each viewer with content optimalized for their experience and persuasion.

The media landscape will be completely fragmented and people will be shown video for manipulative purposes by those in power —in power over the media.

P.S. Be sure to read that Wikipedia reference which says that the Vox Populi […] semper insaniae proxima sit (is always close to insanity).

E-culture

We got a quick demo of a collections browser for various collections of cultural objects. It displays metadata information about objects and relations between them and makes it possible to search for objects in the catalogue.

The comparison with Amazon was made which may be silly at first glance but solves how you can tackle a lot of the similar problems these collections are faced with succesfully. I am not convinced that each institution in the world has to come up with their own clever user experience silos.

Wouldn’t it be best for all involved if they would create nicely interlinked and Search Engine Optimized pages for each object in their collection and let the big search engines index that? Or am I being too naive?

NewsML

Lastly a standard for the exchange of newsworthy information: NewsML was treated very briefly.

I don’t know too much about this technology but the above description is awfully reminiscent of the Atom Syndication Format which is already widely understood and used to exchange news.

It still would be nice to have an exchange of ideas to foster goodwill and prevent stuff from getting duplicated. There might be advantages to using Atom/REST as the carrier medium of NewsML data. In any case the internet as a whole benefits strongly form more collaboration and less institutionalized strife.