Learning with the Fang

I have an irrational fear of sharks.

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

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

I have been helping out with the Wine2030 BlueSky summit and would like any of my readers who are interested in the Australian wine industry to join me either online or possibly in person next Tuesday. Here’s the deal – if you have ideas on how academic research in any discipline could possibly enhance any aspect of the wine industry and would like to spend a day working hard with a bunch of very smart people with a view to sharing those ideas then please get in touch with me.

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

So, you just read the excellent introduction to Google’s new Social Search by rww but can’t wait to try it out for yourself. You belt over to labs.google.com, opt into the Social Search experiment, do a vanity search but there is no ‘Social’ link when you expand + Options! Making sure you have logged in with your google account, you notice the familiar green arrows next to the top couple of results and the ‘more from SearchWiki’ at the bottom of the results list.

That was my first experience with Google’s new Social Search unleashed today. After a fair bit of hunting and pecking it turns out there is a conflict between the old ‘SearchWiki’ experiment (pretty sure I opted in as a google labs experiment way back) and the new ‘SocialSearch’ experiment which can be worked around by disabling ‘SearchWiki’ in my http://www.google.com/preferences page.

Select “Hide the ability to share, promote, remove, comment, or add your own results” option under “SearchWiki” at the bottom of your google preferences page.

Having disabled SearchWiki a new search for my own surname yielded the usual gratifying result along with a link to ‘Social’ once I expanded the +Options. Marvellous – key members of my social network have been talking about me – and it’s easy to figure out what they have said. It also turns out that I was involved in some rather fruity dialogue with someone we shall call ‘Nick’ via comments on a blog post back in 2006.

That, my friends, is a perfect example of why we need to be careful with what we say online. Things previously ‘hidden’ will come to light in new and interesting ways as technology evolves. And I, for one, can’t wait!!! Bring on face recognition in flickr I say.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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I have just been handed 3×1 hour .wmv files of about 900MB, containing
some very slow 640×480 footage of a glass extrusion recorded to miniDV
tape. The plan is to turn into 5 minutes of fast moving extrusion
goodness.

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

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

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

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang