Another bit of creativity
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Here’s another bit of fantastic art that I stumbled upon (yes, I should really be working, but look what I’m doing instead!). It’s a little stop-motion animation about.. a healthy lifestyle, I suppose… and about friendship between cakes and vegetables.. Just what we need in January!
“Sweet Dreams” (2007) from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.
Mental note to self…
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 | leisure, photography | No Comments
… to get creative! I stumbled upon the work of Jason Lee, who has an on-going project of photographing his daughters. His work is fantastically creative and it just reminds me that it’s time to get out there and experiment. So I thought I’d post one of my latest experiments to evidence that experimenting is indeed lots of fun.
I find that I easily get stuck in a rut once I get an idea (such as the HDR shots) and fail to actually have fun with the camera. Even the subjects I consider for my shots become somewhat uniform (sorry to all the people I’ve ever dragged into churches to just look at the light and then discard the resulting pictures because I’ve already got a dozen others exactly like that).
This series of not-particularly-serious pictures were taken by mum and me on our little getaway in Portugal.
Something about being on the ocean at the end of summer made us run arond and jump with joy (and occasionally contract ourselves …mmm.. myself into quite obscure poses). Hope you enjoy these. (Click pictures for full view)
How to cook a Jackalope - or teaching grandparents to use the internet
Saturday, January 24th, 2009 | learning, leisure, reflection | 1 Comment
Having been neglecting my web-presence for altogether too long, I’m now back with a tale of (almost) first time computer use. For Christmas I gave my grandad my old laptop, which - although it’s not spring chicken - is a jolly decent machine and was mostly written off because I so wanted a Mac instead. The laptop was freshly installed with a Russian version of Windows XP, Outlook express set up to receive mail from grandad’s email address, virus protection installed (all the while trying to keep my grandma from bursting into the room and ruining the surprise), and the whole thing was wrapped up (more or less) neatly and shoved under the Christmas tree along with another couple of thousand presents (in my family it takes hours to get through the whole heap - although we’re not that many - and the oohs and aahs take up most of the night).
It was not their first computer - in fact they’ve been getting family write-offs for a while, and my grandma is quite attached to her own laptop which she uses exclusively for running a vintage version of MultiLex (a German-Russian dictionary). Grandad was quite fond of his email, but due to the fact that they have a modem connection (!!) and that his old machine would benefit from being upgraded with a hand crank, email was not speedy. Especially for receiving photos or other large-ish files. When he came to my mum’s place this Christmas, he brought the sad remains of the old laptop with him lamenting that a visiting toddler had broken it. I was quite grateful to the little terrorist for putting this piece of by now rather brittle plastic out of it’s misery and removing all discussion about whether it could be somehow revitalised.
In other words, my grandad was quite chuffed when he received my old well-loved (read: scratched and missing a couple of keys) machine on Christmas eve. From then on he was hooked. The fast (ish) internet and a computer that actually computes made for a whole new experience for him. Every morning by the time his lazy granddaughter (i.e. me) would get out of bed, he’d have accumulated a list of questions to be asked and problems to be solved. He would read his email from his surprisingly wide (i.e. existant) list of electronic correspondents (granted, his email was quite extensively fed by my mum forwarding him all sort of silly jokes) and surfing the web.
It was interesting to observe what a person who’d never really been on the web would do with it. Conclusion was - mostly nothing unless you show them something. My grandparents could in the beginning simply not imagine what to do with the web. They knew it’s out there, but had no concrete applications for it in mind - apart from email that it. Instant letters - that’s something that’s easy to grasp. So we started feeding them with ideas of what to use this technology for. I showed grandad that he could get the television programme online (oh, happy days for him and less happy for everybody else, since the tv’s on too much of the time already!!) - that was something useful. Then I set him up with an iGoogle front page to his browser where he could get a daily joke and the BBC news in Russian. News in the Russian-speaking-only community who do not have access to the internet is somewhat a lop-sided affair in that you get a very specific angle on everything. Therefore adding a BBC angle to their access to information was quite exciting.
That’s where the Jackalope comes in to the picture. My mum brought a bit of game from a hunt she’d been to - a hare and a pheasant - and my grandma was charged with preparing the hare for human consumption on New Year’s eve. We also (not so gently) hinted that recipes could be found online. And so it came about that for the next 4 days we talked about nothing but cooking hare (we generally don’t do much but eat in the holidays anyway, but this was a special kind of eating, thus requiring more discussion). Eventually mum and I proposed that if we combined the pheasant and the hare and maybe even found a bit of venison that we’d have excellent jackalope stew to wow the guests. Grandma disagreed because the internet had told her otherwise and besides, she’d like to actually taste every ingredient rather than just mix it all up.
Jackalope being dispensed with, how did the older generation fare on the web? Surprisingly well - it is not difficult to understand the basic affordances of the web: quick access to almost limitless amounts of information on almost anything. But there were also some interesting hickups in their web-exploration. Firstly I’ve discovered that it’s not obvious what ‘the internet’ is. I found myself explaining why the email client was not ‘the internet’, how it was just an application that received information through the web. Also it was necessary to explain what a browser is - in terms of a window through which you can look for stuff on the web, again, not ‘the internet’ itself. All these metafors were proving necessary to better be able to explain how certain things happen (for example I confused grandad by logging on to the web-mail client that goes with his email account - why was his post in multiple places and why did the same content look different??) Also, it’s not obvious how it works - as in: clicking on the blue underlined words takes you somewhere. On first seeing a google search result they did not immediately realise that all those items took them through to different pages each containing some information - they were so interested to find all these snippets of information there to be had, that they didn’t even notice that they were incomplete at first. Once we got past that hurdle and they saw how to get to the full items of information we immediately faced a new challenge.
That’s something the Jackalope experience showed very clearly: that we well-wandered-webbies have some extraordinarily strong filters installed in our heads that permit us to disregard most of the rubbish that we’re presented with on the web. With all the talk of information literacy and information overload, it didn’t really permeate into my brain until I saw what a lack of such filters does to people’s internet experience. I imagine it’s a bit like hearing every single conversation in a crowded room or like hearing all the discrete noises in traffic - it’s a pandemonium of impressions. Once we had entered ‘hare recipe’ into Google and got a set of results, she started from the top and proceeded downwards indiscriminately. She had none of the feel for what a good website might look like and what’s definitely rubbish. Already from the result output I could clearly plot my strategy for which sites I’d visit and which ones I’d avoid. They started from the top left corner. Once we’d learned to click through to the actual web-pages behind Google, the problem repeated itself. Random Russian websites do contain a very large proportion of random Russian sheit. Such is life, and we’re used to it. But someone who reads from the top left corner will have to wade through oceans of it before the actual jackalope recipe appears. Inevitably I had to leave them to it to get their skills through practice after having explained the concept of large quantities of unwanted material surrounding the actually useful information - and introduced them to the scroll wheel.
There the (lengthy - sorry!) story ends. I believe it’s only really by practice and gradual understanding or ‘feel’ for the internet that you can acquire these oh-so-necssary filters of ours and start imagining new uses for the technology. I just have this nagging wish that I’d have video-taped it all - it’s not that often that I come across people who have never seen spam - and who patiently try to understand what the internet is all about despite their first meeting with all the rubbish that it throws at them. We did have hare on New Year’s eve in the end - and quite a few teeth were almost broken on all the lead that was still embedded in it. I still think that Jackalope would have been tastier - but there were no recipies on the web for cooking sucha beast.
How about this for excitement?
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments
I’m just having a little chucke over the set of ‘exciting posters’ that the OCR examination board offers in connection with the launch of the new A-level history specification. How’s the Black Death for excitement? My thoughts drift to the anti-motivational posters so abundant on the web these days - makes me feel like adding a big black frame and writing ‘Fail!’ under the ‘Black Blotches - Black Death’ slogan. Apaprently this is one of a set of ‘thought-provoking and interesting posters’ that will ‘give a glimpse of the type of thinking and analytical skills that students will need to employ in order to investigate different sources’. Granted, this is probably a brilliant idea - it’s just that the advertisement is a tinge morbid. Oh, well, I suppose history is grim in places - and if you were living in, say, 1604, you’d be quite excited at the prospect of the possibility of potentially not getting the plague.
Web favourites
Sunday, August 31st, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments
I’ve decided to do a little series on my favourite stuff on the web. Those types of funny and creative things that the web makes possible and that remind me about why the Internet is definitely up there with sliced bread and chocolate milkshakes.
The first one in the series is ‘Where the hell is Matt’. Matt was just (and for all I know still is) a regular guy who went traveling. A travel buddy gave him the idea to record ‘that funny dance’ that Matt used to do and record it on camera. So he did. And he recorded the dance everywhere he went. He put together a video with the little dance sequences, which attracted so much attention, that some guys at StrideGum decided that they wanted to pay him to keep travelling and keep dancing. The result has been more funny and strangely inspirational videos with Matt and his funny dancing. He sure manages to lift my spirits whenever it’s required. I hope he can lift yours too - not possible without the internet!
The original video is here - and below is the latest addition. This time masses of people join in the silly dance. Enjoy!
Inspirational use of technology
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 | reflection, tools | No Comments
I just came upon this in David Pogue’s blog - and just wanted to share an inspirational use of technology with my readers. Here’s something that makes you believe that technology is good for something after all. For something really useful and profound (which probably, to my dismay, by definition excludes StumbleUpon). Here’s a pair of people being really creative and seeking alternative solutions to big problems.
My wife and I discovered Dragon NaturallySpeaking about 8 years ago, and have been using it successfully ever since– not for dictation, but as a communication aid. My wife is deaf; her hearing loss began about 25 years ago (we are in our late 60’s) and she has become a skillful lip reader to compensate. That works pretty well in face-to-face communication, but is not helpful in many other situations, such as when we are driving; when I drive, I give her a side view, which isn’t clear enough.
I’ve made brackets to hold a laptop both in our car and motor home. I use a lapel mike to speak; NaturallySpeaking transcribes what I say. She reads what I’m saying, and then responds by voice. When we got this working, it was the first time in 15 years that we could converse on the road. We are now using version 9, having upgraded several times, and based on your report, we will watch for version 11!
Well done!
About happiness
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 | Uncategorized, events, leisure | No Comments
I’ve been browsing talks on TED this weekend. There is an awful lot of inspirational material to be had there on a lot of different topics. I watch the talks and I try to glean some tricks on public speaking from the good speakers - along with some ‘what-not-to-dos’ from the not-so-good speakers. This time I’ve looked at TED’s happiness stream. These are talks about… well, what makes us happy. I especially liked this one, on how we synthesize happiness.
In my family we’ve got a saying: all that happens is for the best. So the worst thing that happens to you is also the best thing that could possibly happen. And you know what’s good about that saying? You can never prove it wrong. How crushed I was when I was not allowed to read Psychology at Copenhagen Univeristy - and how happy am I now looking at it in retrospect, from my PhD desk at Oxford University! Who knows what would have happened if I’d got plan A to work? Answer is: we’ll never know - and truth is: we don’t want to know!
This talk is about something similar - it explores how we build happiness out of even hopelessly inferior situations to those of plan A. In my case plan B turned out to be exciting - but what if it doesn’t? Turns out, we’re still going to be happy - genuinely happy! And it turns out that giving us the choice between plan A and plan B isn’t always to our benefit - but we stubbornly believe that it is. We don’t always do what’s best for us.
Same blog - new space
Thursday, August 21st, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Welcome to my new location. I’ve moved my blog over from Wordpress.com to here, on my own domain, in order to satisfy my curiosity about how people all across the world find my posts. Here I’ll be able to get more detailed visitor statistics, so I’m hoping that I’ll still have some visitors to count. So please update your bookmarks, RSS feeds etc. - and welcome! 
The joys of transcription
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 | tools | No Comments
Oh yes, it’s that time again. First time I did it in the park under a tree. Second time I did it on a yacht in between some Croatian islands in the hot hours of the afternoon. This year, I’m stuck in my office (and thus have access to the web) and am therefore sharing a couple of my favourite tools for transcription. (Yes, i really mean it, the interviews for last year’s M.Sc dissertation were indeed transcribed on a yacht. It was quite nice actually, especially because I was limited to however long the battery would last on my laptop, which was about 1.5 to 2 hours, and then had to wait for next time we were in harbour and I could charge it up - thus giving a semblance of productivity while reducing the guilt factor.)
Surprisingly few people I’ve talked to are aware of the tools that are freely available to reduce the pain of transcription - as much as you can possibly reduce such a thing. There are two tools that I currently use - for different purposes. I have no foot pedal or other specialised equipment - if you do, this may not be relevant to your needs.
The first tool I use is Transcriber, which is good for well.. your bread-and-butter getting from sound to text. It’s open source, so free to use, and has several useful features. Firstly it gives you a visual representation of the sound file along which your pointer moves, so that you can actually see when someone starts talking. That’s very useful for orienting yourself on a micro level and helps you to chunk up the recording more precisely. The chunking up is a second useful feature. Each time you press Enter, Transcriber inserts a break point in the transcript - and you can move between the break points by using arrow keys. I use break points for every turn in the interview, so that I can quickly jump between questions and answers for example. The programme also allows you to create any number of speakers and to assign a speaker to each turn as you go along - very useful when you’ve got 3 kids talking all at the same time (in case you actually manage to distinguish what any of them are saying). Finally, Transcriber allows you to alt+arrow a second or so in each direction of your current position - useful for hearing that elusive word again and again.
I am aware that there are loads of similar products out there to be had, but I’ve tried quite a few of them and never found one just as easy to use and having the features that I want (obviously this is a matter of preference, I’m just stating mine). There are certain draw backs to Transcriber - such as having to export and tidy up your trancsript when you’ve got to the (sweet) end of the recording. Since you’re typing in to Transcriber and not into your word editor of choice, you’ll need to export the transcript to HTML, copy and paste it over, and then spend some time formatting. Another quirk I’ve found is that when I convert my WMA files to MP3 (since Transcriber is somewhat limited on formats) i need to convert it in mono, or it’s going to sound scratchy in Transcriber. But I’d say it’s worth it - once you’ve got it set up, it does save you an awful lot of time - and it’s free.
The second tool that I’m currently using is a Mac-only tool called Global Transcribe which aids transcription of both audio and video by letting you play back your media in VLC player and use a global shortcut to stop and start your file from anywhere. It lacks all the visual tricks and segmenting that I like in Transcriber, so I don’t use it for primary transcription. I have, on the other hand, got a job where we’ve outsourced the transcription. Here I need to listen through the interviews and read through the transcription to pick up on any mistakes the transcriber may have made (where it was impossible for her to pick up technical vocab for example, but which makes instant sense to me). That’s where Global Transcribe comes in handy - I open the transcription up in Word and the sound file in VLC and then occasionally stop it (while being tabbed into Word, thus the global shortcut thing) to correct an error. Very efficient and a great time saver - and again: for free.
The same company do other free transcription tools, both for Mac and Windows, but I haven’t found them as useful as Transcriber - try them out, see what you think. I hope this has been helpful fome someone out there!
Twitter in 1935??
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 | Web 2.0 | No Comments
I seem to have developed some sort of gleeful antipathy to Twitter. A sort of ‘love to hate’ relationship. Well here’s the latest spoils of StumbleUpon. It brought up this little blog post on a 1935 version of a messaging system. It’s a sort of vending machine-looking piece of communication apparatus to be put up on street corners or popular meeting places. The ‘meeter’ can scribble a message on a band of paper, pop in a coin, and the message will then be prominently displayed in the machine’s window for the ‘meetee’ to find. I.e. “Sorry matey, you were 10 minutes late and I have more important things to do than stand around in the rain waitning for you.” Matey then turns up, to find that he’s missed you by exactly 2 and a half minutes.
Yes, granted, it makes even less sense than Twitter, since you can be pretty sure that the right person is definitely not going to see your message (at least until the point where these messaging machines become so well integrated into the meeting-culture that you would actually expect people to look at them). But still, a wry smile of satisfaction from me over yet another piece of Twitter mockery.