The holidays have been over for a while now and life has picked up again with a ruthless schedule. Here’s a quick schedule update from us to tell you what is keeping us busy at the moment and where you can expect us the coming year. If I forget something, I’m sure that the rest will add it themselves.

Reinier

Reinier is currently finalizing all arrangements to be able to launch his startup Tipit.to. To say that this consumes a lot of his time is an understatement.

Cristiano

Cristiano used to be our top blogger but he is currently directing more time to his studies. He is currently busy writing academic prose with the hopes of graduating sometime in the future.

Martijn

Martijn has also focused a lot of his attention back to his studies but he (and we) also came to the realization that blogging is not his thing. That is why we decided to part on amicable terms. We wish Martijn well for the future.

Eelke

Eelke has settled into Berlin and is feeling quite at home from what I understand. He has produced some great movie clips on his own blog in the past days. Eelke is pursuing work in the Berlin area, so if you want to hire a great designer there, you should look him up (his new professional site should be up soon).

Alper

I am undergoing numerous changes in my life with a graduation due this Friday, a change of jobs and a new house. In this new life a lot of my time is spent working on experience and promotion for Tipit.to or doing web projects for Boost Company. I do have more bandwidth available and will be putting up a professional site soon.

Events

And to finish this update here is a slightly annotated event schedule for the rest of this year. You can always track us on Upcoming, browse through my contacts for the other Four Starters members. You should be able to find most of us on Dopplr as well (my profile).

PICNIC (25/9 — 28/9) is going on right now. Something of an overhyped event it is hard not to be influenced by it. Reinier is going tomorrow to take a masterclass in pitching from Boris and then onto pitch for a jury. This Friday is a meeting on portable social networks (upcoming) which I’m debating not going to.

FOWA (upcoming) Ryan Carson’s visit to Amsterdam was a great appetizer for the real event in London next month. Cristiano will attend the event and report back for us.

The future of GOOGLE (upcoming) This event should at least be interesting where Dutch ‘pundits’ are going to ruminate about the future of Google. I am positively influenced because it is at Info.nl.

Wikimedia (upcoming) The Dutch Wikimedia conference should be interesting and I plan to attend.

Barcamp Berlin (upcoming) Barcamps are among my favorite events and this promises to be a great one. Because of the subsequent Web2.0Expo event international attendance should be at a peak level. Now just to hope that the venue is big enough to hold all of us. This should be no problem in Berlin, right? Eelke and myself will definitely attend this.

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin (upcoming) Big multi-day conference for everybody into the web scene in Europe. This promises to be jam packed and very interesting with the barcamp preceding it and the web2open event at the same time. Reinier and myself will attend.

BrightLive (upcoming) Obligatory Dutch technojam event. I hope this year sports an improvement with some less commerce and some more substance but still I will probably go.

LeWeb3 (upcoming) is always controversial but I don’t really know if it’s worth attending.

Chaos Communication Congres (site) always looks like a great event to close off the year.

What do you think about these events, any of them must see or must avoid? If you happen to visit any of these events and we’re there drop by and say hello.

I have been known to claim that aside from the Cryptography and Artificial Intelligence fields, the net effect on the state of Computer Science as contributed by the academic world is effectively zero. For example, there are hundreds of User Interface Design faculties all around the world (such as My Alma Mater!) and yet the frontrunner in modern Computer-related design doesn’t get any of their UI knowhow from any sort of academic influence. They do not participate in research programs. That’s very odd.

An example has come along to test this observation. If you so happen to be a technogeek or a programmer, you must have been hiding under a very large rock if you haven’t seen this amazing “Content aware image resizing” demo: (If you’re impatient, jump to the middle and end of the video. The shiny stuff really starts when there’s 3:25 left on the clock).

Clearly this reeks of academic involvement. It’s actually mostly an in-house development from MERL, The United States R&D branch of Mitsubishi. However, for arguments sake, let’s say this WAS in fact developed entirely in the research department of some university or other.

Normally this would be PhD material, if you’re lucky enough to find an open minded professor. However, no amount of forward-thinking in a professor is going to allow you to present that one 5 minute demo along with a software program as a thesis for a PhD, eventhough clearly they speak entirely for themselves and is vastly more worthy of PhD status than most actual PhD theses. In other words, in order to turn this brilliant piece of software engineering into an actual CS PhD, the unfortunate authors would have to bunker down for 6 months to write an enormous paper. In CS terms, 6 months is a virtual eternity.

Instead, they released a youtube video. Effects:

• over 300,000 views, presumably focused primarily around programmers and tech people. I have yet to see a research paper other than the one about the RSA asymmetric encryption algorithm that has generated this much attention in CS. That’s crypto which I already excluded from this observation.
• One of the two authors got instantly hired by Adobe because they want this stuff in their next photoshop release.

From photoshop this technology will see exposure far exceeding the 300k viewers it’s already received. I wouldn’t be surprised if content-aware image resizing shows up in FireFox next year. Give it another year or so to trickle down to the rest of the population, which gives us the sum total of 2 years for a completely new piece of technology to become as standard as bread and butter in the CS world.

All by writing some software, crafting a shiny demo, and posting it on youtube.

Even if this was a university effort and there had been a large thesis to go with this video, the thesis part would be unneccessary and wouldn’t have added anything. The authors would have been better off going their own way.

I can’t prove it, by my instincts, and vast amounts of recent Computer Science history, tell me that this pattern repeats for virtually every CS improvement (outside of Crypto and AI) ever. So, for those of you still making the mistake of getting a CS degree:

If you have balls, quit the moment you have a good idea. Universities are not capable of nurturing it anyway.

I graduated from university recently and having spent some seven odd years at that venerable institution, I have collected some baggage which I need to express but which I also feel would help educators to improve themselves.

I think the word is catharsis.

Due to an administrative mixup and some human errors (both not completely my fault), I still have to follow one course: in4012tu Speech and Language Processing. This isn’t too much of a pain because languages are completely my thing and it gives me an excuses to pretend that I am a student for two more months.

One risk is that I stand the chance of being the gunner in this class. It is really easy to ignore the mantra: Learn, not teach.

Recording

One idea that I have concerns recording lectures. Our lectures have to be given in English if somebody in the hall requests it. This is very much to the chagrin of most our lecturers. Teachers at DUT have to lecture Masters courses in English but most of them hardly relish this opportunity to improve their language skills.

One of the overlooked advantages of lecturing in English is that it greatly increases your reach, not only to those one or two international students in the lecture hall, but to the entire world.

Seeing as all major conferences are already being recorded to be publicized after the fact, wouldn’t it be completely trivial for an university to do the same with lectures? And even if it wasn’t provided by university, I think anybody with a Macbook could easily tape themselves with the builtin iSight. Last weekend I did an impromptu video shoot and had it uploaded to YouTube within minutes.

The quality of the material, though not optimal, would be wholly acceptable for anybody interested in learning the stuff. With some extra effort the lecturer could also sync his slides to the video stream in a custom application (Slideshare + YouTube mashup anybody?) to provide a better viewing experience.

I can think of a great number of advantages but here’s one to start you off:
Giving a lecture is an important and time consuming activity and as such also should be worth recording for future reference. The value of creating a personal video archive of yourself telling interesting stuff should be directly evident to everybody. Publishing that video on a personal blog would further increase your value as a teacher/scholar. You could show the world that you are a valuable and interesting person and build a global following.
Just think what this would do for your next job interview or your chances of getting tenure.

Why would you not do this? One real reason could be the university’s intellectual property stance. Is a lecturer allowed to record his own lecture and do cool stuff with it? I have no clue but it seems worth a try.

Hyperspeed

Second point is the speed at which most lectures are given. This is not completely to my taste. I hope this isn’t representative of the speed at which university students absorb information because if so, then the innovation position of the Netherlands is in deep shit indeed.

Hyperspeed is a feature. After my graduation talk some people told me that not only had I started off too fast but that I also was accelerating during the course of my presentation. This was in part because I was nervous but mostly just because I had a lot to say and a limited amount of time in which to say it.

There are excellent speakers who have also learned to pace themselves very well and use rhythm and silence for maximum effect and information conveyance (see some at TED). This can work for expert communicators but in most cases going too slow is definitely a bug and runs the risk of putting me and the rest of your audience to sleep.

There are also speakers who go really fast and don’t effect less because of it. One of the best lectures I attended at university was given by Charl Botha and in my memory it stands out like a visual TGV ride.

I definitely think I can improve on my presenting and pacing but speed per se will probably not be one of the first things to be improved. Next time you see me present, just “Prepare for ludicrous speed”.

A suggested improvement to speedup lectures: have everybody watch all the slides in advance and make mental notes about stuff that isn’t clear. Have the lecturer go through the slides at high speed only stopping for questions. Use the rest of the time to do non-sleep inducing stuff.

Next Tuesday I have my final graduation presentation. I handed in the report to the committee this Wednesday and I finished most of my deck today. It’s going to be fun, and hard and stressful and soon it will all be over.

This is one of those all changing shifts in life around which we concepted this blog. All four of us are starting something and ending other things and we are trying to make the best decisions in doing both.

Readers of this blog are invited to the presentation (Upcoming) and to the subsequent congratulatory drinks. Be kind and drop a comment here if you plan to attend.

Next week is also the planned official launch of Four Starters with the much anticipated new layout.

On another note, Reboot 9 emerged today and I registered it immediately. It runs 31st of May to 1st of June this year and I cannot recommend it enough. I am very much looking forward to expanding my mind with new concepts and meeting again with old friends. They also have a new site (click on the image).

It looks like flight prices are the same all over. I’ll ask around a bit next week to see what other people are doing and then book my flight and hostel for the week. I’ll probably fly in on the 29th and fly out on the 3rd because I like to spend a couple of extra days in Copenhagen.

A long time ago, when I was still a little squirt, I was just as stubborn as I am today, but somewhat less sure of the notion that the status quo is not a lofty goal to aspire to. Of course, now, I know better - the life blood of the entrepreneur is to know that there is always a better way, of course.

Fortunately, there was the notion of ‘homework’ to help me to understand this notion early on. In The Netherlands, starting at my first year VWO (For the americans in the audience: That’s Junior High), homework became annoying. Very annoying. There was lots of it, parents got mad if you didn’t do it, teachers assumed you were an idiot with nothing better to do. And yet… it was boring and hardly effective.

Then, two years later, I moved to the United States, where I enrolled as a freshman (that’s 3rd year VWO/HAVO/MAVO for the cheeseheads), homework grew from an annoyance to a full blown nightmare: Whereas in the Netherlands (at least at my school) your grade was principally decided by test results, in America, at just about every high school, direct grading of homework is such a large part of the final grade that even just skipping half is more than enough to get you an F.

Thus my cynicism about what passes for ‘didactics’ at mainstream education, whether in the Netherlands or (perhaps especially) in the United States, arose primarily due to homework.

This article by Alfie Kohn pretty much kills homework as an academic tool. Scratch that; it utterly obliterates it. So why don’t schools and universities fix this? In theory they ought to like academic research proving a point, don’t they?

Homework’s only function, seemingly, is to allow the thinking man to come to this important conclusion as soon as reasonably possible:

Never let your schooling interfere with your education. — Mark Twain

There’s got to be an easier way to impress this little gem on impressionable minds then homework. The problem is in the word itself: learning dressed up as a work, as a chore. That’s retarded. The human psyche is fundamentally instilled with curiosity and the desire to learn. The moment learning becomes work, you’ve failed completely.

For an encore, allow me to draw a connection to presentations. It is often said that all presentations sell something, but I assert that a significant amount of presentations also try to teach something; even if only the notion that your product is better than everything else.

So, give people the tools to learn: Give a live demonstration, take a 5 minute break and let people tinker with your product or your idea. Don’t spell it out, manipulate the curiosity of the audience and steer them towards the conclusion. I’ll leave the specifics over to more capable teachers than I, as this idea is the essence of the teachings of Presentation Zen - which, I might add, generally teaches you presenting by showing you good presentations, and urging you to experiment with techniques. No homework. Just nifty tricks you try because you think it’ll be fun!

As I recently moved to London to finish my Master thesis, I had to leave my entire network of friends behind. I used the first couple of weeks to find a room and settle down, but after that I wanted to get to know some people here. Unfortunately there was no-one really interesting to talk to at Imperial College as I do educational software and the rest of the department is into Visual Image Processing.

Lucky for me I was able to attend BarCampLondon2 in the beginning of February. It was my first BarCamp and the experience was brilliant. I was amazed of the quality of most of the presentations and met quite some nice people. This was when I noticed that all these social web tools available these days make it really easy to network. So the next thing I went to was the GirlGeekDinner (with Melinda) at which I again met some new people.

At this moment, I use a few tools to get around in London, and it wouldn’t have been this easy without them. Here are some of the tools I use:

• Upcoming feed for London in iCal for finding interesting events
• Twitter to stay in touch with people I met at BarCampLondon2
  • Tip: Direct mobile messages with Twitter can actually serve as a free SMS provider
• Plazes to find open hotspots and locations that attract people

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.