Progress report Aug 26-08

Memestreme 2008 Progress Report. Hitting the ground running with GPS and rfid tech.

IAD students Minnie, Jackie and Naurelle have been out in the field, creek really, getting across all things GPS.  We've laid in waypoints and routes on the Garmin eTrex HC and tested the ASUS Virtual Tour Logger.  So that we can plot our routes onto Google Earth we've been transcribing the GIS data into a spreadsheet on the laptop and inputting the manually.

Parks and Wildlife staff Aaron Kopp, Donald Turner Graeme Horne and Dylan Wesley Cole are building the media data sets we'll be using with the NECS rfid Learning table

This involves preparing mp3 audio, jpg photos, text, video and PowerPoint presentation, caching them into discrete media presentations [multimedia slideshows] and editing them with the rfid tech so that the tags trigger specific media slideshows. By selecting the rfid tag next to an item in the museum [embedded in a laminated A4 info sheet] and swiping the sheet across the tag reader at the base of the large screen display additional media information is made available to the user.

The actual Virtual Guded tour has been completed and we are now collaboratively 'fine tuning' the accompanying media. This involves ensuring the metatagging is suitable, there's a little bit of mp3 editing with Audacity to be done, and we are still testing what is the best style of map to use. Were using 3 different maps in our field testing;

1. some beautiful high quality maps generously supplied by Andy Roberts at NT Dept. Lands Planning and Infrastructure 
   
2. PDF visitor  handout maps
   
3. google earth
   

Surprisingly we get excellent GIS accuracy with a PDF copy of the NT Parks and Wildlife Services Telegraph Station visitor handout sheet. Which reminds me of the zillions that NASA spent in the early 1960's developing ballpoint pens for their astronauts in zero gravity... while the soviets used pencils.
Notwithstanding, the lands and Planning maps seem to offer the best user experience [clarity and accuracy, but this is a collaborative project and we'll advise you when a firm decision has been made.

Where was JFK when I got shot?

OR: 'Placing the 1872 Completion of the Australian Overland Telegraph Line in historical context.

Please use the comments area to add YOUR recollection of histori

cal events either side of the 1872 date, for example;

1908 Henry Ford's first Model T motor car rolls of the production line in Dearborn Michigan ushering in another epoch of mass production [remember the Colt 45?].

1746 Wired Monks

1844 May 24, Morse sends a telegram from Washington to Baltimore, the 1st message...'What hath God wrought! [He died July 1872, 7 weeks before Charles Todd connected the final piece of line, Aug 26 1872]

1857 16th August completion of the first transatlantic cable, Queen Victoria sends a telegram to president Buchanan.
1859 The solar superstorm of 1859 was the fiercest ever recorded. A

uroras filled the sky as far South as the Caribbean, magnetic compasses went haywire and telegraph systems failed....

1861 US East West overland telegraph line completed

1872 Brigham Young is arrested for polygamy (28 wives).
1872 July 2, Samuel Morse [the father of open source software?] dies about 7 weeks before Charles Todd completes link for the Aussie overland telegraph line Aug 26 1872.

1873 Eadweard Muybridge, yep the spelling is correct, settled a bet on whether the hoofs of a horse galloping are ever all in the air at once. Wagers aside, collaborating with John D. Isaacs, the resultant photographic apparatus ushered in the very start of that Leviathan we've all come to love, motion pictures.

1873 Jesse James and James Younger gang's 1st train robbery (Adair Iowa) 

Mike Smith Archaeologist-environmental historian on Central Australia around 1870 [www.abc.net.au/rn] 

If you can add  to this article [Use Comments please] by suggesting important events that happened in this general milieu it will be appreciated.

3 Iterations: Global Communications

History doesn't repeat itself [but it rhymes sometimes], and contrary to my own expectations, I'm really enjoying the history behind this technological marvel of it's day.  Several recent books about history of the telegraph rollout: 'The Victorian Internet' [Global], and Alice Thompson's 'The singing line', about the Oz rollout. [she's the Great great grand daughter of Charles Todd and, appropriately enough, now works for the London Daily Telegraph.

So, lets start with a potted history of global communications first 3 iterations, and as our "memestreme" Flexible Learning Framework steps into second gear cop an optic on this for starters...

Iteration 1 has got to be the wire that stretched around the world, the Telegraph.

Time: August 1872

Location: Central Mt Stuart, 220Km North of Alice, and according to the best cartographers of the day, this put him at the Mountain closest to our geographical centre.

The Man: Charles Todd

Iteration 2 for my money is the World Wide Web.

Time:  according to Kevin Kelly in 07 it’s age was about 5000 days old.

Location: A nexus near you

The man/kind of: Tim Berners-Lee was the Internet ? so maybe no one individually, and a whole bunch of humans collectively.

Iteration 3: The ‘semantic web’ and various other epithets

Time: Nowish

Location: Any computer connected to the net and/or a 3G network plus a variety of mobiles; iPhone, Blackberry or similar PDA’s

The mankind: The mankind
Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Flexible Learning Framworks Project Start

Pancultural-e Blog

 

Well, the wait is over, everything is coming together for our ‘Memestreme’ project, so… where to start?

 

Metro/Urban Prelude The two modes of operation for our product]

I’m of the opinion that the July 11 iPhone launch will usher in a new interconnected, location specific ITC epoch. Location sensing WiFi 3G hand-helds with high processing capacity making use of push technologies to sync data with minimal IP traffic will change the urban/metro connectivity landscape.

A great marketing innovation from iPhone was to provide a commercial website  mechanism to allow end-users/geeks/nerds to develop then upload their own apps, using the open Source Development Kit code[SDK]. This [free] completely web based business mechanism allows new uploaded apps for all to trial, and as best applications percolate to the top of the user chain, evolution and entropy reign.  Hence, user voted successful widgets are then marketed from the site so that the developers themselves get around 70% of sales revenue,Apple takes 10% and the rest goes to the website operators. This new-ish marketing paradigm [ask yourself where the factory outlet for eBay is located] is sure to spawn so beautiful tools, toys and trinkets.

Be aware though that the majority of these electronic appliances [laptops, mobile phones, PSPS, digital TV receivers, Digital Radios,  Bluetooth devices etc] will need to be fully or partially bathed in the plethora of electromagnetic frequencies that bounce around our metro urban landscapes. Out in remote areas we have weak GPS signals and expensive sat-nav services.  We’re going for the low cost remote service.

In Remote areas no one can hear you beam [unless your prepared to fork out $10 a minute for sat-nav coms, plus prohibitively expensive units to talk on and extra ‘extras’ to transact with fax, email GIS data and the like.

Off the beaten track though, where our ‘Memestreme’ Virtual Tourism project runs Metro tele-communications tech will have minimal influence. 3G, WiFi, WiMax, Phone landlines and such will hold no sway in the great Australian outback. Sure, sometime in the future, satellites may one day be able to up/download digital media content wherever one is on the planet.  Until then though the tech we are developing will be one of the only available and affordable ways to allow for user interaction with remote locations off the beaten track.

After the Glossary below read on for a concise overview of the project objectives.

Glossary:

CoA	Commonwealth of Australia [Who will own copyright of our final products]
Framework	The Flexible Learning Framework. [Who fund/disseminate our learning]
Cyberspace	Events and Info portrayed in online environments
Meat space	Events enacted in the physical world [normal reality]
PDA-GPS	Hand-held media player able to sense its location on the earths surface
Geo-reference	A set of math and map coordinates that fix a point on the earths surface
rfid	Radio Frequency Identification Tags that transact wirelessly with computers
Second Life	A Virtual environment that models real life existence
Avatar	The GUI persona one uses to experience existence in a virtual world
Mutual reality	The capacity for multiple avatars to interact in an online environment
Augmented reality	Basically, a PDA-GPS unit that continuously computes your location and then provides you with on-screen information relevant to that Geo-reference
Cloud Computing	This is where our personal or corporate data are housed on server farms or other non-local hard drives. In this way we have a wealth of data available aad rather than access it from our limited space personal hard drive, we connect over IP or WiFiand pull it of internet based servers.  For example, people make a 2nd email account and upload  aafew gig of faamil piics and movies .up there’ to store it.
Push computing	This tech is designed to reduce the amount of IP traffic a hand-held has to download [mainly] to synch with other interdependent machines. Small streams of data are pushed over IP to all your computing devices to

 

 

Objective One; Virtual Guide Tourist Mode

A Virtual Guided tour from Snow Kenna park in the Alice CBD meanders along the 4Km NT Parks and Wildlife signed “Riverside walk” track along the banks of the Todd River into the Telegraph Station and then from point to point along the historic buildings in the Telegraph Station compound.

 

Objective Two: Virtual Guide Science Mode

A field operatives utilization of the same technology.  Where we’re targeting Tourist organizations, Town Councils, Mining Exploration companies, Geological surveys, Traditional owners, Ecologists etc who would need to make recurrent trips into given areas to report, record, analyse and act on the various facets of their data sets.

The way we see this happening is envisaged into four linear sequences:

[1] A new trip to say the Davenport ranges is made by a Parks and Wildlife ranger to report on a variety of circumstances; weed ingress, bush fire damage, feral pest infestations. Similar to the way we log in points along a tourist route, the ranger logs point all along the trail from start to finish.  This in itself serves as the road map for subsequent field trips. And as the Geo-referencing is accurate to about 6 meters it also doubles as a very clever way to stop folk getting lost out in the harsh and unforgiving wilderness. Back to method 1…

Evidence is plotted against some of these points [accurate to 6 metres] which can include inexpensive cameras that also log the GIS coordinates, mp3 audio ‘reports’ that can be recorded onsite to describe some aspect of the territory, video can also be laid in to further describe geo-features that are relevant and of course text can be inserted. At tours end yuo press a button and the tour is finished.

[2] Once back at HQ this trip is loaded into a multimedia database containing all the media about the trio, and it is time stamped. This interfaces with the standard GIS topographical maps so this other layer of info is included in the tour.

[3] Some time later a Ranger re-visits the logged trip and updates the journey, perhaps adding new log points of significance, taking photos and videos from the same Geo-referenced points to show any changes that have occurred over time and adding audio and text to amend info and append info.

[4] Back at HQ these extra ‘layers’ of information are superimposed into the existing database utility to gradually build up a time based  description of , in this case, of how a land is healing.

 

Objective Three: Second Lifeâ [2L] Reflection Mode.

Text, Audio [mp3], Photos [jpg] and Video [mp4] are the composite products of the above two objectives. Each logged point will make available multimedia information that will add value to each geographic coordinate. Team member Georgina Nou has researched and liaised with an island owner in 2L to construct a virtual representation of the Alice Springs Telegraph Station tour.  Virtual Buildings are being constructed that will allow 2L users to enter and viewing screens and objects are enabled so that users can watch videos, listen to audio clips, call up teal-time maps, see commercial promos and generally interact with our media and get a virtual taste of the physical tour.

 

Objective Four: Giving it up for the CoA and the Framework

At projects end we transfer copyright ownership of the project deliverables to the Commonwealth of Australia on a Share 2 license arrangement [LINK to License information].  Our Innovations project is then made available across the Frameworks National Training Network and in the Commonwealth of Australia’s archives. [Where we fervently hope it will be of use to others engaging in this line of research]

Modelling the project for use and view on the networks’ creates something of an artistic and technical challenge: how do we ‘model’ our media to represent a meat space Augmented Reality tour and a cyberspace virtual reality tour?

Meat Space Tour

e.g A GPS synched software program [LINK INFO Virtual Guide from New England Computer Solutions] provides a compass and/or a map to guide to steer a user along successive points on the tour.  At each grid reference point media information pertinent to each GPS coordinate is made available to the user on the PDA screen. [To augment their experience and knowledge of that exact spot on the Worlds surface].

 

So how can we model this to provide an accurate representation of a users experience? After careful consideration we have come up with this idea, and whilst not set in stone, Richard Waring , who manages the tele-conferencing operations from CDU Alice Springs and myself can collaborate to better explain the practical applicationnof the technology.

 

Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization.

Yochai Benkler has been called "the leading intellectual of the information age." He proposes that volunteer-based projects such as Wikipedia and Linux are the next stage of human organization and... Read full bio »

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Northern Territory E-learning Innovations Success!

The Innovations project I submitted on behalf of the Institute For Aboriginal Development [IAD] and NT Parks and Wildlife [P&W] has been accepted.
Over the next 3 months IAD and P&W will collaborate to bring two 'Augmented Reality' virtual tourism guides to publication.
IAD will fashion an Alice Springs CBD tour and P&W will work on their Alice Springs Telegraph Station virtual tour.
End users will ramble around either of the above venues with an ASUS PDA that senses a users location to within 3 metres. Information specific to that location will be set to display as the user nears designated points on the tour.

Metcalfe's law

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²). First formulated by Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe's law explains many of the network effects of communication technologies and networks such as the Internet, social networking, and the World Wide Web. It is related to the fact that the number of unique connections in a network of a number of nodes (n) can be expressed mathematically as n(n-1)/2, which follows n² asymptotically.

The law has often been illustrated using the example of fax machines: a single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines inthe network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases. [It can also be argued that the FIRST person to buy a Fax machine was an idiot as there was no other bugger around to fax to]

In fact, Metcalfe's law measures the potential number of contacts, i.e. the technological side of a network. However the social utility of a network depends upon the number of nodes in contact. For instance, if Chinese and Non-Chinese users don't understand each other, the utility of a network of users that speak the other language is at zero, and the law has to be calculated for the two networks separately.

Citizens Media and Web 3.0

Bloggers and Mash, New Scientist mag 15 Mar 08

When everybody can be a journalist or a film maker, what happens to the media?... Were finding out right now says Dan Gilmour.

August 2007 the I-35 Bridge across the Mississippi river in Minneapolis collapses. December 2004 the Boxing Day Tsunami sweeps around the Pacific Rim. London Bus bombs etc. Events like these trip the Global Media into a reporting frenzy. Reporting of such events these days goes well beyond the gaggle of newspaper, radio and TV reporters. Scores of non-journalistscreating content [photos, videos etc] and sharing it across the globe and with large media organisations such as reuters, BBC, ABC and so forth. also join in

This phenomenon goes by many names but the one I prefer is Citizens Media. People who used to consume media now create it, publish it and comment on it. More than 100 Million people have started blogs; millions more publish video and pictures on the web, write and edit Wikipedia entries, create Mashups, post comments on mainstream media sites and so on.

As digital gear becomes more powerful, ubiquitous and affordable, the tools of media creation are increasingly in everyone’s hands. [new-media]Consumers are becoming creators. Creators are becoming collaborators. People talk about the ‘read-write web’. “The most important constituency of Journalism is what I like to call the former audience, the folk who once passively consumed media but can now actively participate in its creation”. So this is not only just passively reading news on the web, but commenting on it via blogs, focus groups etc. This [real-time] interaction is the difference as we move from exposure to media to interaction with media.

"The tools of citizens journalism:
Blogs
The most prominent feature of the read-write web is blogging. 10's of millions of people have started these online journals, assisted by free and easy to use online tools such as Google's Blogger. [IAD platform of choice for Cert 1 IT students]. To answer a common question: Most blogs are not journalism, and some are. The best journalistic blogs have appeared in niche areas, such as technology, and have won large audiences coveted by advertisers" The important thing to remeber is that blogs are only as useful as their comments. It's a collaborative, peer reviewed space: This aint about protecting your privacy as much as publishing your passions: get as many folk to link/comment as possible. [see metcalf's law]
Media Sharing
The likes of Flikr and youtube have heralded a revolution in visual media. They have given everybody easy-to-use, low cost venues to publish their creations.
Digital Images
Digital still and video camera are nearly ubiquitous, but the real shift is in the migration of the camera to the mobile phone. With the connection of phones to networks, they have become powerful tools for sharing what we see. Most of the canonical images of the 2005 London bombings were taken by amateurs, including the famous grainy, green tinged image of a man exiting from a smoky underground train with a cloth over his mouth.
Mashups
Mashups take data or services from more than one place and combine them. Online software such as "Wayfaring" makes them easy to create. One notable mashup is the Tinisian prison map project which mashes together maps and information from political activists to highlight human rights issues. Another kind of mashup combines media; one of the most popular pieces of political satire is a brilliantly edited mashup by Sweedish film maker Johan Soderberg showing GW Bush and Tony Blair singing "Endless Love" to one another.
RSS
Standing for Really Simple Syndication, RSS is a file format that allows you to subscribe to many different "feeds" such as blogs and news and have them delivered to your aggregator on your computer or phone. Blogging software automatically converts blogs into RSS to make them easily accessible by others.
Wiki's
The most famous "User generated" site is Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that now has more than 2 million articles in English. Wikis can be written and edited by anyone, and when they work well they become authoritative repositories of shared knowledge.
For the radio podcast excerpts below:
You need the shockwave flash plugin to cop an ear on this. Anywho, the top selection is a researcher explaining how he would like ABC radio national to open up their media archives. Its gonna happen.
The second one is a great Podcast excerpt from ABCrn's Media Report. Basically talking about the shift in attitudes and copy that Pommie Journo's are now affording we the Oz public. No longer are we all called Bruce, etc, actually seems there's more of an appreciation about just how lucky this country is. So, a big thing in the Pommie gutter press [News of the World, Daily Express etc], and the high end [Guardian, Time etc] is Oz animal stories, from Steve Irwin to errant kangaroos. The second story is about 2 erstwhile pomms on a cricket tour of Oz. On the way from one test to another they run over and stun a kangaroo, have a listen, its a hoot.

Propriocentrics: Creating tech marvels out of a $50 Wii Remote

Convergence widgets
I see the location sensing component of the Wii remote as one of the functions of our future palm sized media players; PDA/3G/GPS/IP/WiFi/TV.

A PDA with the graphics performance delivered by the chip architecture in the Sony Playstation Portable [PSP], the user interface and connectivity of the iPhone, the personal location sensing capacity of a Nintendo Wii type remote and the Geo location sensing that GPS and 3G bring, will enable a unit with these bundled attributes ready to seamlessly absorb what is now technically available to be stremed.

Sony PSP have released a Linux based programmable interface so that Astronomers, Robotocists, climate modellers etc can pout their unit to other tasks.
iPhone has already been cracked and again is being used for unintended purposes, though Apple are slower to jump onto the open source collaborative model. Nintendo Wii [largest gaming unit sales in the US above Xbox and Playstation] seem likely to embrace the 'emergent consequences' of whatever uses the Wii remote will be put to. [Science, Gaming, Location Specific-On demand Content services]
The great thing about Second Life is that it is easy to conceptualise and model how such 'live connectivity aides' work for our personal avatar, and by extension, how we of the meat space can leverage our reality via them.

Collaboration ,Photon Blockade and Entanglement

I'm just experimenting in this blog with memes that I have come across. Until I hear back from www.abc.net.au/rn I can't upload short segments taken from abc podcast but I live in hope. To get started though have a go at this, if anything describes the benefits that are emergent from cooperation watch below to catch Howard Rehingold's vodcast on the rise of collaboration from www.ted.com.
[there's another ripper embedded in last weeks science show, the blind mens socks riddle, hope to bring it to you sometime but if your interested just go and listen to the entire incredible podcast at : http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/

I'd like to include 'tasters' from ABC radio National that are whole chunks of information taken straight from their original podcasts. As such any ABC/rn stuff you hear would be unmodified by me, and I would use only selected contextualised chunks. [a full segment in grammatical and intellectual terms]
The concept I want to develop for passing this media around to my friends and collaborators is what I call taste-full.
I give you guys a taste, and provide a link to the full podcast. Be aware though that downloadable podcasts are currently only kept on their server for 4 weeks after broadcast.

Right then, I think there's a charming symmetry between and among the following 3 memes and I'd be happy to discuss this with any of you that have the time to listen to them:
The Rise od Collaboration, Howard Rheingold
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/216
Solid Light, Andrew Greentree. http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/ssw_20080315.mp3
Entanglement primer.
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/ssw_20080315.mp3

bye for now

Virtual Earth: Lawler @ Microsoft

This ties in nicely with how we are developing our Augmented reality tours. This and the preceding post [J Haris, metaverse weaver] allow the reader to explore in greater depth the ways in which we can express ourselves with Web 2.0 tech.


Cool tools to enhance our projected propriocentricity.

J Harris, verse weaver

Hi, have a go at this, I am intrigued [but] not sure whether to be frightened, petrified or reaching for my soma.

Creative Commons/Digital Commons

Learnscope 08
Just getting my head around the new-ish direction the 08 funding application is moving towards. One aspect that will require some careful consideration is that the Commonwealth funding body will assume copyright over the deliverables. We've been toying with the idea to split our project into two distinct parts, a commercial section and a common [free to air] section but this may need a re-think.
Underpinning this is Web 2.0. It's all about social networking and online collaboration. Trouble is it's a minefield out there in terms of what we want to use, and what we can legally use.
Learnscope 08 will drill down into the Digital Commons and Creative Commons, share info legally, and learn about transacting in this realm.
We're also about generating $'s for IAD so in 08 we'll be looking at ways of distributing memes on a pay per view basis. This will be Online from our web, and with location sensing media players [PDA/GPS, NextG mob Ph's, Bluetooth, WiMax etc] we'll be researching how to garner payments from "new media" distribution.
So, back to the commons, cop an optic on this Youtube vodcast from the Creative Commons.

So Long Pancultural-e

Howdy the Alic-e Memestreme

An Ainslie dreamscape.
The overall theme for 08 is the generation on an evolving entity, namely Pancultural-e Alic-e [PAlic-e].
PAlic-e will skip and grow along the songlines of the "New Media" domains: Blogs, Wikis, Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, the Digital and Creative Commons, PayPal, 2nd Life, Online Education. PAlic-e is off and running on web two point zero. Or as 'Neuromancer' author Will Gibson put it "Count Zero Interrupt"

Ainslie Laughter at Dawn ,

There's someting spooky about Virtual Tourism...
We've all heard the refrain "Doe's art imitate nature or does nature imitate art?" The answer is 42, and to get back to my original point, there we were last week, GPS enabled PDA in hand tripping across the Alice Springs Overland Telegraph Station historical reserve [ASTS]. The Virtual Tourism guide software has the real-time map called up, my next point on the tour is marked as a green dot on the map, I'm the red one. Now this GPS is so sensitive [+- 3 to 4 metres] that, God Like, your able to watch yourself walking across the face of the earth as you draw ever nearer to the next tour point. [approaching this point a bunch of 'new media' is triggered onto your player to Augment your reality]. In terms of this capacity to get feedback on what we may be doing in the real world [Meat Space] or Cyber Space: 'Propriocentricity'

David Levine in a presentation at the 2007 Learnscope conference discussed this term. The terms current usage describes the feedback one experiences from internal tissue, muscle and neurons. It gives one tactile, time and location specific feedback about where a part of the body is.

In cyber space and meat space there are a wealth of tools that serve to perform this function. Raised cones set into a pavement inform blind folk they are approaching a crossing, audio signals at traffic lights cue one in, Nintendo Wii remote control units allow you to perfect your golf swing, decapitation etc, 2^nd life avatars and GPS devices also serve this function. I feel it will be the marriage of this feedback coupled with instant communication/collaboration that will define the boundries of how we commence to work with each other

Google Earth Alic-e ans 2nd Life
Here comes the spooky bit. Georgina Nou brought this up at the learnscope 07 show and tell, namely that as one fritters about in/on a 2nd life Island media/intel/info gets triggered for your consideration as you lope into the radius of a hotspot.

Now this is precisely what gives when one is wondering around in Augmented Reality with a whizz bang IAD Virtual Tourism PDA/GPS handset. You walk up to something, within a pre-defined user hotspot] and up pops some media/intel/info.
Now, who's emulating who? What's imitating what? and did I leave the oven on? Oscar Wilde said imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. This is more like cross pollination.

So, that'll do for now, has Babel got anything to do with Babylon?