ibys.org kit arrives

Originally uploaded by MikeBlogs

You little ripper.
From little things big things grow.
Might be humble assciate member now, but watch this space…

Wondering what all the fuss is about?
Wander over to:
http://ibys.org
And take a peek.

Join us if you dare.
Fang – Mike Seyfang

• Slides and audio of Nancy White’s excellent keynote from the #lt2009 segment of her recent Aussie tour.
• Dave (LifeKludger) wallace tinkers with the audio and extracts a network ’shout out’ from Nancy
• I ask twitter where are the ‘birthday’ videos that were produced during the keynote, Nancy answers. [  NancyWhite @fang Here are 2 of the intra-keynote birthday vids. Using one's community! http://bit.ly/4qazxg and http://bit.ly/7egGEy #lt2009 ]
  
• My (rough) ReMix of two Professors – Lawrence Lessig and Tanya Monro.

A time and space shifted conversation in the emerging ‘vulgar’ language of text, image, audio and video ReMix – Kapish

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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#lt2009, remix, mashup, video, language, transdisciplinary

In the first instance we will teach everybody how to set up and use:

1. reader.google.com
2. wordpress.com

These skills are needed by people looking to obtain part-time work helping update various blogs and podcasts which are springing up around the University.

If you are attending a workshop for the first time, it would be great if you could create accounts in advance for each of these two services (an existing gmail account can be used to login to google reader, a wordpress.com account and blog can be created for free). Make sure you write down the links, usernames and passwords and bring them with you to the workshop.

Bring a laptop, netbook, iPhone or whatever you can get your hands on and be prepared to share. We want to make sure everybody gets a chance to try something new each week.

Over time I plan to split into streams depending on interest:

• Podcasts (and the dark art of audio recording live events)
• Video and other fancy hi-production effort stuff (slideshares, mashups whatever…)
• Networking – of the online / social type. (growing connections thru RSS, facebook, myspace, twitter, … )
• You tell me

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Fang – Mike Seyfang

It took a great deal of self-control to swim toward some sharks while snorkelling on a recent trip to Noumea.

I love to windsurf, but find myself constantly on the look-out for fins or dark shadows lurking ‘neath my tiny, sinkable craft, assuming that when I see one I will be in grave danger. Sure, there have been two fatal attacks within 5km of my favourite sailing spot (if you draw lines between the two attack locations and then between where I launch and turn around it makes a nice ‘X’).

I blame the media’s obsession with statistically unlikely attacks, that film ‘JAWS’ and a bunch of sensationalism.

Take last weekend for example. There were a lot of sharks about according to fishermen. One friend of mine had a crab net taken by a 2m “white pointer” (layman’s identification) and managed to get some video and photos (updates coming soon). A young spearfisherman was unlucky to be bitten by a 2m bronze whaler off Normanville in South Australia. He arrived at the emergency department to a gaggle of frenzied media, and managed to smile for the cameras.

Here is the type of sensationalist crap we have to put up with on telly, newspapers and now on the web:

Here is a picture of the young man on his way into hospital”

And here is the shark my mate saw while out fishing the day before.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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Over the past few weeks I have been re-mixing some key messages from organisers of the event with highlights from some of last year’s presentations and an interview or two with some invited speakers for this year. They are all shorter than 10mins and are designed to give you some insight into why this event is a great catalyst for innovation – giving rise to several successful funding bids and collaborations.

Have a listen to:

• Call for participants (give an idea of the type of people we are seeking)
• Photonics talk (quite technical but lead to successful funding and potentially great outcomes)
• Andrew Jefford (keynote presenter sneak preview)
• Marketing talk (fascinating stuff which also lead to further research)
• Visual technologies (behind scenes ‘look’ at surveillance cameras and emerging video technology)

Fang – Mike Seyfang

I know I can set up FinalCut Pro to import the
footage, change the duration of each clip to 1:40 then paste the three
together and export to quicktime .mov. Trouble is it will be fiddly to
match frame size rate etc, then take ages to render and export. A quick
google search suggests QuickTimePro can do the trick via some clever
copy/pastery in QuickTime player.

Here is the secret:

• You need to have QuickTimePro (and Flip4mac to deal with the .wmv encoding).
• Open the first .wmv file and drag the start/stop handles of quicktime player to select 1:40 of footage
• Edit->Trim to selection then save as ‘OneMinute40.mov’ as self contained movie
• Drag start/stop handles to select all 1:40 of OneMinute40.mov
• In the first .wmv window, Edit->Select ALL, copy
• In the OneMinute40.mov window Edit->Add to selection & scale
• Window->show movie properties and delete all unwanted tracks (except the newly pasted movie)
• Quick as a flash you have compressed one hour to one minute fourty seconds
• File->Export (I’m exporting to quicktime .mov, original size, 25fps, Jpeg compressor). This is the slowest step at about 10 minutes to render each minute of final output.
• To join my 3 x 1:40 clips into one 5 min .mov I’m just pasting from one QuickTime Player window to the end of the movie in the other.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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boys and their toys!

Originally uploaded by mandyseyfang

This ‘Vocal Delay’ apparatus was made for Jamie by one of his band mates. It was used to great effect in recent gigs by ‘breakable things on the bookshelf’ – the latest band to grace our rehearsal room and the streets of Adelaide.

The ‘kludging’ of an old PC CD-ROM box is a great example of ‘Maker‘ culture, something of which lifekludger would be proud.

Imagine a world in which makers ‘kludged’ devices for livers using components from suppliers with funding provided by givers.

You may say I’m a dreamer…

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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Trouble is, I’m having a tough time finding data (especially historical) on e/mail usage. In addition to displaying e/mail messages sent on Gary’s COUNTer, I would love to be able to produce a chart showing the number of mailboxes on the planet each year since e/mail began. (Along with something like the average number of e/mail messages sent per day for each of the same years).

Fortunately for me, Gary’s blog post references some interesting data sources that have inspired me to make a second attempt to track down those elusive figures. I would be thrilled if y’all could help me with this. Here is a re-cap of what I have discovered to date:

My growing list of sources on delicious.

Looking thru Gary’s references we can add:

(I plan to work thru some of these to see if they have e/mail history stats)

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of
  2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill
  annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Any additional data sources, charts, suggestions welcome.

If somebody can find me charts like those above going back to Ray Tomlinson’s early e/mail back in the 1970’s I will open my cellar and send you a nice bottle of wine.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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UPDATE: (some definitions)

Transdisciplinary – What sets transdisciplinary studies apart is a particular emphasis on engagement, investigation, and participation in addressing present-day issues and problems in a manner that explicitly destabilizes disciplinary boundaries while respecting disciplinary expertise.

Design Thinking – is a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result. See also “thoughts by Tim Brown“.

While travelling to the city on the tram today, this TED talk video offered the framework of ‘Design Thinking’ as a way to co about innovating solutions to big questions. Having spent much of last night producing and publishing this podcast on ‘Transdisciplinarity’ (and the past five years immersed in the world of ‘social media’ or ‘Web2.0’) I saw some important connections between, and opportunites for blending, the philosophies of ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Trans-disciplinary Scientific Research).

Let me being by listing some of the connection points and recurring themes:

• Prototypes – playing around with possibilities by constructing quick, cheap prototypes of things. Central to my work in Proof of Concept (PoC) projects which seek to promote innovation through iteration.
• Play – a key ingredient in emergent behaviour, playing around with stuff leads to interesting possibilities and great questions.
• Build in order to think – closely connected with play and curiosity driven research.
• Diverge to create choices over Converge to make choices
• Expand – pure reductionist thinking and methods have served us well in the scientific method and will continute to do so. While we are busy learning more and more about less and less, we should take time out to expand our horizons from time to time.
• Design is too important to leave in the hands of a ‘priesthood of designers’ working on an ever shrinking canvas and smaller questions.
• Embrace complexity – we will need to do this as we get together to look at big questions. (it has been suggested elsewhere that we would do well to educate future generations more about statistics than calculus).
• Work at the boundaries – one of the key tenets of Transdisciplinarity is to step outside the comfort zone of a single discipline, go beyond collaboration with other disciplines by working at the boundaries. Warning: will expose one to risk and possibly the need to develop new language. (worth it).
• Embrace Risk – learn to fail cheaply and often.
• Open Co-operation – pass it forward, share.
• Culture of active participation – over passive consumption.
• The renaissance scholar and modern science.
• Swim up-stream and be counter-cultural.
• Trans-disciplinary does not replace traditional research – is an added component.
• Embrace ambiguity, human complexity, exploratory, interpretive, participatory culture.
• Immersive and experiential, community based, lifelong learning, perspective broadening.
• Tension between agility and rigour.
• Speed the Process of Innovation through prototypes, enabling more breakthrough.
• Exploit opposing ideas and constraints.
• Balance desirability with technical feasibility and economic viability.

These are the elements Dave (LifeKludger) Wallace and I have been trying to combine in our vision for LifeKludger – ‘an ecosystem for enriching human life’. It might be easier to suggest how some of the elements of ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Transdisciplinary Science’ may be combined in the context of a research institute at a University (since I am currently involved with several at the University of Adelaide).

Before I attempt to articulate this lofty concoction, give me some time to go back and re-listen to the inspiring material, update my list of elements and get back to you in a new blog post. Meanwhile, as always, I value (nay covet) your comments to help me as I think out loud.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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Note to self: Keep an eye on the #CDBQ twitter hastag mentioned by Tim Brown in his TED Talk. Also possibly related: abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor

While distributed approaches to realtime updates like RSSCloud and pubsubhubbub be architecturally superior and more scalable than centralised serivces like twitter, I kinda doubt it. My optimism for the potential of distributed publishing platforms (like old-school blogs, rss feeds and aggregators) dampens each time some new fangled central service like myspace, facebook or twitter comes along. Anyone else noticed how hard it is to get a discussion going in the blogs these days? Find yourself tweeting every time you publish a blog post??

While I doubt that blogging regularly and subscribing widely will ever be as fruitful as it once was, I’m looking forward to see what these new realtime extensions bring to that experience – which has served me well for over five years now. While we wait here are some of my thoughts from my earlier post today:

My RSS feed now realtime tks to wordpress.com for implementing rsscloud

September 15, 2009 by mseyfang

After a couple of false starts, I finally managed to get myself on a tour of the Roseworthy campus of the University of Adelaide. Yesterday was open day for the campus so I threw my camera into the car and took the (very scenic) route, out to the campus with a view to grabbing some shots while on one of the organised tours.

While waiting for our group to form near the Science Hub, I took a peek at some of the back-issues of ‘Believe it? (or not) on display. You may well have seen these in local Adelaide paper, the Advertiser. Once enough people for a tour had gathered, we headed off to various displays by research groups based at the campus. The first couple were mainly examples of posters and various documentation designed to show the diverse range of opportunities on offer to future students. Not visually stimulating, and I must say that my concentration level was directly proportional to the enthusiasm of the person in each room who addressed our little group.

Soon, we found ourselves at the library which was both visually interesting and provided a stimulus for some interesting questions and answers concerning the projected growth of animal science books and the internet. We then moved from the library to the residential quarters where I decided not to take photos out of respect for the people currently living there who may not want their personal effects published here. I observed a sharp increase in attention from some of the younger members of our group who may well end up as future residents themselves.

The next display was a real treat for the senses, both visual and those related to smell!! Here we saw how effluent from piggeries can be harnessed in interesting ways to reclaim water, fertilise crops and extract fuels like bio-diesel and methane. Our host from SARDI was extremely enthusiastic and engaging, keeping the entire group inside the pungent facility for quite some time.

Un-deterred by howling winds and spots of rain, we trekked out to the site of construction for the new Vet School which has really started to take shape now that the ground-work is done. I have taken several photos of the site since my first visit for the ‘Sod-turning’ ceremony that marked the start of building. Follow this link to watch this growing collection.

By now it was past closing time for the day so we got to see the dis-mantling of a few more displays related to both animal science and agriculture. After stopping back at the science hub to help with packup and vocabulary lesson (what on earth is a ‘bunting’ I wondered) I had to rush back to get Mandy off to the airport.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Well, that same tent (and bulky but thermally inadequate sleeping bags) and two swags made it out to Mt Remarkable last weekend. That would be father’s day weekend. After a quick trip to snowy’s camping store to replace missing gas connections for our old lamp and stove (at approximately the cost of a motel room for a night) we loaded up the subaru and headed north – to the Melrose ‘bush camp’ at the base of Mt Remarkable in the southern Flinders Ranges.

We arrived just after dark to find the park office closed with a note suggesting we could set up camp and fix up payment in the morning – which we did. After setting up the tent and swags and a hopeless attempt at building a fire without much wood I discovered my father’s day present – a folding table with chairs built in (probably costing equivalent of two or three night’s motel room accommodation).

Now, my hatred for all things IKEA and any overly complex contraption is legendary. This monstrosity has to be seen to be believed. My body language and hasty snatch of the useless instructions said it all. Mum’s feelings were crushed, Ms 16 retired to the car declaring ‘Im not sleeping in that swag’, and Mr 19 was left in charge of sorting out the contraption-feckery. You can see how simple it is to erect by clicking on the small image sequence below and choosing ‘all sizes’ to get the full-size original picture:

(Take a moment to view the full-size version of the image from my flickr site – then think about how easy it is to pack away by ‘*SIMPLY* reversing installation procedure!!!)

To everybody’s credit, we had a laugh, re-grouped and after a chilly night arose with a plan:

• Collect a decent amount of fire-wood before dark
• Get out and have a walk thru some of the nearby trails (like Alligator gorge)
• Take some photos of old stone ruins

Turns out the plan was a good one and we got back to camp with plenty of firewood, enough daylight remaining to get prepared for dinner in time for a quick pub-crawl thru Melrose. We downed a few pints, staggered back to camp and got our fire going to settle in to a night where preparing and eating food was the major attraction. It really was wonderful and reminds me how distracting our gadget filled lives can be – while we say family is a priority we each spend a heck of a lot of our finite attention connecting with other stuff/people.

The second night was much milder, and the fire kept enough heat to do brekkie next morning – father’s day. Twas lovely to have my beans, toast and cup o tea lovingly served while seated at my oh-so comfy table with built in chairs. And THIS home-made card really touched me:

As the card suggests, I got some nice photos, some of which I will share below (others can be found by clicking one of them and looking around my flickr pages). So a big THANK YOU to my wonderful family for putting up with this grumpy old bastard for all these years and for softening me up with your generous gift of time and wonderful individualities.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

For several years now, I have had the privilege of helping Dave shape a vision for a way to harness the social web in order to enrich human life. It goes something like this:

Earlier today Dave released this most excellent blog post which illustrates the idea in action.

You will see the story of a Maker being backed by a Giver to help a Liver (a paralyzed woman who lives in Croatia) – with the end result being empowerment and enriched lives for everyone.

We are hoping this will stimulate people like you to update the LifeKludger wiki with examples of similar scenarios or ideas for future possibilities.

So, if you are a Maker – with a talent or desire to hack devices, let us know what floats your boat and how you could help.

Or, if you are a Liver facing a specific barrier or with an idea for a Kludge that you cannot organise on your own – put something on the wiki to flag your need.

Maybe you just want to help and have some spare cash – that would make you a Giver, see if you can find a project or idea that you would like to sponsor, or register the type of thing you would like to support.

It could be that you are a Supplier of goods that present barriers to some groups of people. Do the right thing and contribute some of your product so that some Makers can hack a kludge to enable a Liver to make meaningful use of your product.

Set aside some time NEXT WEEK to:

1. Think about ways to harness YOUR social networks to connect with Livers, Givers, Makers and Suppliers.
2. Add something to the LifeKludger wiki (even if its just to help us format and structure the damn thing. Or even to fill out glaring holes such as my lame definition of Suppliers).
3. Share your ideas through your social networks and recruit others to join this worthy cause.

Thanks

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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