phyllostachys 71: Minute Tech 56 Show Transcript

56 - Are Videos the Best Communications Medium?

Good day to you all, this is Alex Landefeld with episode 56 of the Minute Tech podcast -

coming to you for Saturday and Sunday, December 22nd and 23rd, 2007

On this tech podcast about the broader meanings of technology, we'll mention:

- The Sun is Coming Back and LED is Beginning to Shine;
- Are Videos the Best Communications Medium?
- Lawrence Lessig describes the Remix Generation.

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Minute Tech podcast is brought to you in part by:

Larry Tolbert's Sunday Morning Taiji - learning tai chi and qi gong 9:30 am every Sunday morning at the Dunamis Baptist Church, in Wilkinsburg, PA. "Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji" - e-mail leonardtolbert-[at]-hotmail-[dot]-com for more info.

And:

Ravelings by Carol. Pittsburgh-region classes in needle-craft - encompassing crochet, embroidery, knitting, & tatting, as well as an associated lace collection. For more information, contact Carol at carolb207-[at]-alltel-[dot]-net.

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Tech News:

Yesterday was the winter solstice! At 1:08 am of December 22nd, 2007, winter began for the Earth's Northern Hemisphere and Summer began for Earth's Southern Hemisphere. Surfers Village Global Surfing News provides us with the following question and answer about the Winter solstice and Christmas:

"So why is the solstice on December 21st and Christmas held on December 25th?
The New Testament specified no date for the birth of Jesus, so about 366 C.E., the Roman empire state church selected December 25th--the Roman calendar's Solstice--which was already a traditional "God's Birthday" across the empire for the many religions it contained. Having Jesus born on the Solstice also lent him credibility. It helped convert pagans to Christianity, since the new god was a version of their old god (Mithris, Saturn, Mordoc, Horus, Sol, Apollo, Osiris, etc .) Of course, this similarity to other gods of light and eternal life is truer than most Christians realize."
It's Winter Solstice today - the World's Greatest Holiday
LED lighting - where are we going with it? If you look in your local lighting store, you'll see that LED replacements for incandescent or compact fluorescents just aren't there. Christopher Palmieri reports for BusinessWeek that Laura Peak of Osram Sylvania has developed an LED products that OS calls the DOT-it, which is a small round set of three LED bulbs designed with a sticky strip on back for putting anywhere you need bright accessible lighting: in your car, your closet, your boat or your attic storage closet. The magic of LED is that the equivalent set of LED's to a 60-Watt incandescent bulb draws only 2-4 watts of juice...but the LED's are currently too costly due to the higher cost of producing them. As manufacturing and design costs come down, LED's will make more sense. As Peach says, "The price of LEDs is cut in half every eighteen months," she says. "In two years, we'll be there."
Check out LEDLights.com to see just how costly these lighting alternatives can be...but also to see the descriptions. If I could light my house with 2.5 watts per fixture, that'd be totally awesome. Next I'll be looking at NanoSolar's technology for my roof.
Also, go to Gardeners.com to see a good display of indoor and outdoor battery-operated and solar LED lighting.

Tech Question: Are Videos the Best Communications Medium?

As I said in a previous show, when I think the word podcast, I think of an audio-only show which I listen to on my iPod Shuffle. But, when Alex Lindsay of Pixelcorps.com talks about podcasts, he's talking strictly about video. The group at Pixelcorps.com has struck on the fact that producing video with today's camera and software technology is very easy, and with a little bit of training one can produce near-professional quality programming....which is exactly what Pixelcorps.com is training its staff and membership to do. Sure, you can watch television to see how NBC or Fox puts together shows, using their astronomical budgets....or you can go to OnNetworks.com or Revision3.com to see some of Pixelcorps.com's shows. These are extremely high-quality digital video episodic shows, all coming to you via the internet onto your computer.

Video, or moving pictures, can tell very big stories, as we've seen in film since Charlie Chaplin hung from a clock tower to the time that Anakin Skywalker had his unfortunate fight with his teacher Obi Wan down by the molten lava. Do you think that Mr. Chaplin actually hung from a clock tower? Do you think that the molten lava was really hot?

The word video implies moving pictures distributed via digital tape, television or computer, and in fact, wikipedia describes video as "the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion. " This, therefore is different from the original idea of capturing and processing images on a continuous strand of film in a film camera, which was the origin of the cinema film industry between the 1880's and the 1920's. But whether it was continuously hand-cranked film or modern digital images recorded to Flash RAM memory sticks, moving pictures still need to be doctored frame by frame to render special effects, to fool the viewing public into believing that a clock tower is hundreds of feet up, that giant ants are really giant, and that hot lava is really having an effect on that Jedi-gone-bad.

Where will video take us next? Is Video really the best communications medium, even with the ability to recreate special effects superbly on your PC or Mac? Or is there a better communications medium?

Podcasting - Blogging News:

Yesterday, I downloaded video of Lawrence Lessig's presentation at Northeastern University Free Culture Forum, in which he talks about the freedom of writing and creating by remixing the work of others. Lessig shows a series of remixed media/video stories, retellings of various stories using remixed video and audio.

Paraphrasing Lessig:
"Anybody with a 1500 dollar computer can write in this way, changing what the television networks or newspapers spit out to us, that is becoming not the NYT democracy but the blog democracy....not the few speaking to the many but increasingly peer-to-peer, this is changing what writing is, it's writing for the 21st century, it's the same activity that has gone on since the time that pencils were first spread to the people..."

You can find these video's referenced at the bottom of the Wikipedia article about Lessig, by searching in iTunes for "Lessig" (Lessig1 and Lessig2 show up as the first two listings), or by clicking this link in the Minute Tech podcast Show Transcript.

Thats all for today on Minute Tech podcast.
you can reach me at minutetech@gmail.com -
and my blog is at minutetech.blogspot.com

"Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji"

- The Sun is Coming Back and LED is Beginning to Shine;
- Are Videos the Best Communications Medium?
- Lawrence Lessig describes the Remix Generation.

Go to the Minute Tech iWeb page to subscribe or listen to this podcast: Minute Tech.

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