michael.cervieri.com » technology

Focus? That’s so Old School

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:06:15 +0000

Wired talks with two professional photographers about their positive experiences using Lytro’s new light field cameras. Unlike traditional digital cameras, Lytro’s lenses capture the entire light field instead of a single plane.

The upshot, as Lytro explains it:

Since you’ll capture the color, intensity, and direction of all the light, you can experience the first major light field capability – focusing after the fact. Focus and re-focus, anywhere in the picture. You can refocus your pictures at anytime, after the fact.

And focusing after the fact, means no auto-focus motor. No auto-focus motor means no shutter delay.

And no shutter delay means, in theory, no missing your shot.

Lytro’s wording is important here: you can experience the first major light field capability.

In his interview with Wired, photographer Stephen Boxall thinks the technology could eventually be integrated into 3D movies.

3D images could be rendered in real-time to an audience, and the audience’s eyes could be tracked using motion-sensing and facial recognition technology to determine where each person is looking at the film onscreen.

“Now you are able to look around the head of your favorite movie star to see what’s happening behind them whilst having the scene refocus wherever you look,” Boxall says.

Lytro explains its science here. An image gallery is here. The cameras are scheduled for release in early 2012 with prices ranging from $399-$499.

Image: Jason Bradley, See Lions Soaking in the Sun via Lytro. Select the image to play with its focusing.

Western Surveillance Technology & Repressive Regimes

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:21:05 +0000

In a longread, the Washington Post explores how Western surveillance technology that listens in on cell phone calls, monitors Internet activity, takes pictures of people while they use their computers and otherwise tracks people while it hacks their digital devices, ends up in the hands of the world’s most repressive regimes.

Via the Washington Post:

Northern Virginia technology entrepreneur Jerry Lucas hosted his first trade show for makers of surveillance gear at the McLean Hilton in May 2002. Thirty-five people attended.

Nine years later, Lucas holds five events annually across the world, drawing hundreds of vendors and thousands of potential buyers for an industry that he estimates sells $5 billion of the latest tracking, monitoring and eavesdropping technology each year. Along the way these events have earned an evocative nickname: The Wiretappers’ Ball.

The products of what Lucas calls the “lawful intercept” industry are developed mainly in Western nations such as the United States but are sold throughout the world with few restrictions. This burgeoning trade has alarmed human rights activists and privacy advocates, who call for greater regulation because the technology has ended up in the hands of repressive governments such as those of Syria, Iran and China…

…But the overwhelming U.S. government response has been to engage in the event not as a potential regulator, but as a customer.

The list of attendees for this year’s U.S. Wiretappers’ Ball, held in October at the North Bethesda Marriott Hotel and Conference Center, included more than 20 federal agencies, Lucas said. Representatives of 43 countries also were there, he said, as were many people from state and local law enforcement agencies. Journalists and members of the public were excluded.

H/T: @AnupKaphle

Life and Code

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:04:24 +0000

If you’re a journalist learning to code, follow Lisa Williams’ excellent Life and Code.

lifeandcode:

This is a list of resources you can use to begin to write your own programs. I focus mostly on free resources that are available to anybody online. I will be adding to this over time. If you’d like to know about new additions, subscribe to this blog (or follow us on Tumblr). If you have additions…

This post includes resources for various programming languages (such as Javascript, Ruby and Python), where to find answers online, how to set up a development environment (ie., your sandbox) among other links to tutorials, tips and tricks.

Great stuff!

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project

Monkey See, Monkey Do: Shakespeare Style

Michael Cervieri — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:42:37 +0000

Just two weeks ago we were impressed with Jesse Anderson’s announcement that he’d written an application that mimicked a million monkeys typing and it had successfully written Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint.

Now fast forward and Anderson claims his digital primates have successfully recreated all of Shakespeare’s works.

Via Anderson:

The monkeys accomplished their goal of recreating all 38 works of Shakespeare. The last work, The Taming Of The Shrew, was completed at 2 AM PST on October 6, 2011. This is the first time every work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced. Furthermore, this is the largest work ever randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere. This page shows what day each work of Shakespeare was completed on.

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project.

A $35 Tablet?

Michael Cervieri — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:49:20 +0000

Via the BBC:

India has launched what it says is the world’s cheapest touch-screen tablet computer, priced at just $35 (£23).

Costing a fraction of Apple’s iPad, the subsidised Aakash is aimed at students.

It supports web browsing and video conferencing, has a three-hour battery life and two USB ports, but questions remain over how it will perform.

Officials hope the computer will give digital access to students in small towns and villages across India, which lags behind its rivals in connectivity.

At the launch in the Indian capital, Delhi, Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal handed out 500 Aakash (meaning sky) tablets to students who will trial them.

He said the government planned to buy 100,000 of the tablets. It hopes to distribute 10 million of the devices to students over the next few years.

“The rich have access to the digital world, the poor and ordinary have been excluded. Aakash will end that digital divide,” Mr Sibal said.

Sounds good. Almost too good.

As the article goes on to note, similar efforts to bring low-priced computers to the poor have failed because the products have either been shoddy, or mass production never actually materialized.

The Continued Search for Pixel-Perfect Fluid Layouts

Michael Cervieri — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 18:38:53 +0000

Ever since content first appeared in a Web browser designers have sought pixel-perfect control over its layout. Basically, many strive for the detailed layouts they can achieve in print.

Adobe, with its print and Web legacies, is trying to accelerate that process by working with WebKit, an open source browser engine used by Safari, Chrome and countless others, and its community, and the W3C, the international Web standards body.

In particular, it’s promoting CSS Regions and CSS Exclusions.

Via ReadWriteWeb:

CSS Regions is a module that builds on the column-based layout options now available in CSS3 to enable front-end developers to flow text across different columns (or “regions”) on a page. This allows for more dynamic page designs, which can shapeshift to fit different devices and device orientations on-the-fly…

…Another improvement to CSS proposed by Adobe is called Exclusions, which lets developers flow text into a non-rectangluar shape, or to wrap it around graphics on the screen, much like what’s been possible in desktop publishing for decades.

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project.

Laying Cable

Michael Cervieri — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:27:46 +0000

If I’m here and you’re there, and there are great patches of water between us, how does the Internet get information from me to you? Submarine cables, of course.

TeleGeography, a US telecommunications research firm, launched an interactive map that depicts 188 active and planned submarine cable systems and their landing stations.

Selecting a cable gives you information such as its length, who owns it and its capacity.

A global information transmission issue has been — and continues to be — that while there’s a lot of east-west redundancy, north-south infrastructure — and in particular southern hemisphere connectivity — continues to lag.

For example, eastern Africa just recently received a high speed transmission line, and in 2008 cut cables in and around the Suez Canal knocked large swaths of the Middle East offline.

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project.

Technological Innovation: A Publisher’s Dilemma

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:43:00 +0000

The news yesterday that newspaper giant Tribune Company is developing a tablet makes me wonder where and how publishers should technologically innovate.

The Tribune plans to offer subscribers free — or highly subsidized — tablets that will reportedly be built by Samsung. Many think the effort is already doomed for failure.

The plan reminds me of a recent Adweek article about the publishing industry’s ongoing woes with Content Management Systems. In it, Erin Griffith catalogues how BusinessWeek spent upwards of $20 million trying to create a social networking layer on top of its proprietary CMS; how Salon.com — which launched in the 90s — is still using the home-rolled CMS it used in the 90s but is reportedly migrating to WordPress; how Time, Inc. has worked on a home-brewed CMS for seven years but will probably abandon it; and how AOL spent three years trying to create a proprietary CMS before ditching the effort, buying Blogsmith for about $5 million and now trying to migrate to the Huffington Post’s highly customized version of Moveable Type.

Griffith writes:

Add a marketplace crowded with content-management options, tight budgets, and a string of media mergers—and the corresponding change in personnel—and the result is that these troublesome tools are being plied in a cultural clusterfuck. The result is a growing number of bloated, tangled CMS platforms reviled by the editors that publish on them, and the IT teams that maintain them.

That’s just the tip of the Content Management iceberg and doesn’t even begin to touch on the difficulties of creating a friction free workflow for multiple platforms (Web, print, mobile, tablet). In hindsight, it’s easy to say publishers shouldn’t have rolled their own. But with foresight does it make sense for Tribune to get into the tablet game?

The short answer is no, but that’s not to say news organizations should ignore in-house technical innovation.

Instead, it’s to ask how and where they should allocate resources in the pursuit of technological innovation.

Part of the answer is remembering the core product, journalism, and then investing time and resources into technologies that enhance it.

For example, technologists from the New York Times and ProPublica collaborated to create Document Cloud, a Web-based platform that allows organizations to analyze large data dumps across multiple documents.

Document Cloud, in turn, uses Open Calais, a Web service developed by Thompson Reuters that layers semantic metadata over content.

These are innovative technological investments in the service of a publishers’ core news and information product.

Meanwhile, Tribune ramains in bankruptcy, is laying off editorial staff and is plowing human and financial capital into a product that will compete with the iPad, Kindle and other market leaders.

From this corner of the Internet, it seems an investment gone wrong. From another corner, Markus Pettersson, head of reader relations and social media at Göteborgs-Posten, writes that Tribune is “afraid, clueless and [has] lost track of what is [its] core product: journalism. It tells everyone including your readers and ad buyers that you have business ADHD, and cannot be relied on to focus on developing your core product: journalism.”

Agreed, and thinking we’ll be writing something very similar to Griffith’s Adweek CMS article a few years down the line. At that point in time, it will be Tribune as the poster boy for tech investment gone wrong.

Some might remember when ESPN tried to create a branded phone. Steve Jobs’ response at the time, “Your phone is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard.”

ESPN, it’s reported, lost $135 million on the venture.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Experiments in Social Commerce

Michael Cervieri — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:05:16 +0000

In an experiment in social commerce, Jonathan Stark lets you download a picture of his Starbucks card and use it to purchase your own coffee.

Stark, a mobile applications consultant, explains:

You can download this picture of my Starbucks card to your phone and buy coffee at Starbucks with it. Seriously. My card gets charged, you don’t. Details are here.

If you’re feeling generous, you can also add money to my Starbucks card by doing this and enjoy some serious good karma.

Jonathan’s Card is an experiment in social sharing of physical goods using digital currency on mobile phones. I stumbled on the idea while doing research for a blog post about Broadcasting Mobile Currency.

Stark set up a Twitter account (@jonathanscard) so you can check out how much money is on the card at any given time. And has created APIs should other developers want to build on top of what he’s created.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

The New York Times launches beta620

Michael Cervieri — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 23:05:09 +0000

The New York Times launches beta620, a labs site to experiment and demonstrate what’s going on behind the scenes.

Via beta620:

At The New York Times, our software engineers, journalists, product managers and designers are constantly striving to create new and innovative ways to present news and information and interact with our readers. Yet it’s often difficult to try out new inventions on the world’s largest newspaper Web site. That’s why we created beta620, a new home for experimental projects from Times developers — and a place for anyone to suggest and collaborate on new ideas and new products.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.