Ratchet Up

Death Rattle Music

Gizmodo has been running a competition for mashup music based on the sounds of crashing Hitachi hard-drives. The company was kind enough to provide customers with audio files of the actual death rattles—all for diagnostic purposes, of course. Which led to the obvious hijinx. Here's the winner:

Good: Tuhin Mehta and El Hardo Disko Morte. Plus Sex Drive.

>> Check it out: this is something of a test / demo of how you find an audio file on Odeo, then copy the code to put the player right into your own blog page.

>> Oh, wanna play a little Pong? [via Boing Boing]

>> Or perhaps McDonald's Videogame?

MemoryMiner

MemoryMiner is an extraordinary new program, a profound reinvention of the photo scrapbook. It's just out, but already it's a nuanced, way-smart program with a clean, inventive design. There's no better introduction to it than watching their short Quicktime demo—an absolute must. If you want to learn more, you can listen to an interview with MemoryMiner's, John Fox.

I have studied the history of photography for over 30 years now, and if this program continues to develop and finds its uses and users, I'm predicting that it will go down as a key transformative moment in the evolution of photography. It's a brilliant application of digital/database logic to photography as personal history and storytelling. I'm gettin' it.

Whonu?

ho knew that after years of having Google as my browser start page that I'd make a change? Anyway, I'm now migrated to whonu.

This thing is a great implementation of an interface to the whole world of web info. Including, of course, Google. [You still can't beat Google, but your can integrate it and go beyond it by adding other info access tools.]

This is actually a very simple, friendly and attractive interface. But it's still a first date, and you'll have to ask some awkward questions to get started.

BTW, there's a new magazine out called Podcast User. With all the information available on the web about this, and a ton of books flooding the market, I'm not sure there's space for a magazine. But fans devour everything. You can check out their first edition in PDF.

Hey, Let's Share Net Movies With Del.icio.us

Who? Us. He's how. If you are a registered [free, and spam free] user of the social bookmarking system Del.icio.us, all you have to do is to tag an interesting film as “camsfilm”. That's an easily remembered acronym for Cinema And Media Studies FILM.

I'm hoping that we can use our collective discovery power to share some of the best movies on the web. I guess it's not in the spirit of open source to suggest what you should include, but generally I'd love to avoid the wacky “Friday humor” kind of things that circulate so freely. I'd love this to be a place where students could find examples of smart, excellent, perhaps experiemental films they can learn from. Or films that are emblematic of web trends, like the best of remix, or perhaps political, activist films. Anyway, anyone who has visited this blog more than once—and you're in the minority—will probably have the right sensibility.

If you're not a Del.icio.us type—and I highly recommend it—you can still subscribe to the CAMSFILM feed, or just check it out, here.

The End of the Internet?

Jeff Chester's short but dead-on article in The Nation lays out plans by telephone and cable companies to take control of the internet. Our media ecology is every bit as important as our natural ecology, and worth defending:

“The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out. [...]

To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation's communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight.”

This way to the whole article.

Face Recognition Technology From Riya

eople “are taking more photos than ever. We don’t wait to capture just that right moment; we can capture EVERY moment. Our photo histories are larger and more complex. We share these photos in new ways, by email, by cell phones and on the Internet.

However, with these growing photo sets comes a growing mess. We’ve moved our photos from stacks of shoeboxes to our hard drives, where we have a bigger, more complicated mess to sort through to find the photos we want to send.

These photos are your stories, your moments and your experiences.The Riya vision is to make it easier for people to tell their stories with their pictures. Our photo search helps you do this.

Riya is more than photo search. Our goal is to help you find every photo of yourself on the web. We want to help you recover every moment, every place you’ve been and all of the people you’ve met along the way. We want to give you the tools to discover your future, every place you want to go and meet new friends. We will be successful when we can find every digital photo in the world. [...]

Computer vision can be described as the study of methods which can be used for allowing computers to ”understand“ images, or multidimensional data in general.

Over 30 years of research has gone into the study of Computer Vision, but it is still a field largely in its infancy. The largest contributing factor to this slow advancement is that the process that extracts 3-D information from 2-D images is much more complex than the flipside science, Computer Graphics. A computer has an easier time translating 3-D information into 2-D imaging.

In addition to the overall complexity, the lack of consumer application of the process slows down progress of development...until now.

Face recognition has been heavily studied within the field of Computer Vision over the past decade. The difficulties of face recognition lie in the inherent variation of facial characteristics and the environment of image acquisition. The following summarizes the major variations in the images of a single individual:

• 3D poses, image scaling, and view point
• Changes in the actual faces: closing of the eyes, wearing glasses,facial expression, facial hair, aging, make-up, and perspiration
• Partial occlusion
• Light source strength, direction, and distribution

Most of the existing face recognition systems to date usually impose restrictions to avoid those difficulties on the imaging situation, such as well-controlled environments or near-frontal, well-aligned images.

However, how many digital photos do you have that are shot straight-on in well-controlled environments? Exactly. That is why our team has been working so hard at getting the balance just right in achieving highest level of accuracy with the highest level of recognition possible.”

[Riya]