This is good.
I’m particularly impressed with the high quality of camera-work and editing on display here. I found it using something called Google Reader Play, which is a slideshow of interesting movies and videos, and a good way to waste a Friday afternoon.
The people who made the video are called Britanick and they have made many more.
This quality of production is available to anyone.
Michael Jennings used the term ‘unaugmented‘ to refer to the frightening prospect of leaving the house without an iPhone. I have an Android phone and know what he means. I usually use it to navigate to wherever I’m going.
In the novel Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge describes a near-future world in which people wear contact lenses that can overlay displays onto reality. This virtual-reality world that exists within and is composited onto the real-world is called augmented reality. In Rainbows End, people are in constant communication, receive information from all sorts of sources, and can choose between a variety of overlays on the real world that anyone can create for information or entertainment, including elaborate multiplayer games. Vinge also imagines the economic consequences of the technology. The world is awash with information and careers are built on selecting and filtering it. If you want information fast, money will buy the efforts of anyone and everyone, gathering and sifting anonymously on the network. Meanwhile, entertainment companies vie for the greatest audience shares and compete with school projects that involve creating multimedia augmented reality shared experience extravaganzas. Do you want your local high street themed like Middle-earth or Caprica?
There are a few bits of hardware that would make this sort of technology work particularly well: a wearable input device such as one that detects small finger movements or whispered voice commands for control; a wearable display such as glasses or contact lenses that can either emit an image or transmit light from the real world; and some apparatus for detecting where you are and where you are looking to some considerable accuracy.
But we are already starting to see applications that might be part of this Rainbows End future. Google Maps on a phone with GPS is a good start. Yelp adds the ability to find interesting things nearby, with user reviews and photos. Foursquare, Gowalla and BrightKite combine location with other social networking features and game aspects like rewards which can businesses can interact with. All of these are ways of gathering and sharing information, and they have open APIs that mean information can be combined in novel ways by third parties creating new applications, sometimes called mashups.
There are pure games, like Pac Manhattan, Zombies Run and ARhrrrr. There is even a real model helicopter that can fly in augmented reality.
Layar is particularly interesting. It overlays 3D graphics onto an image from the phone’s camera. It uses the phone’s GPS to know where you are, and the phone’s gyroscopes and compass to know where you’re looking. Pick from dozens of layers to overlay onto the real-world image. Mostly these are labels providing information about the real world so you can, for example, look through your phone and see nearby places that have Wikipedia articles or user reviews. Some layers put 3D objects into the real world for games, art or information.
A lot of these apps, web sites and services will come and go, but it’s starting to look very much like a large number of people in the tech industry have read Rainbows End and are setting out to make it come true.
I am trying out my new pay as you go O2 Mobile Broadband USB stick. After a few teething troubles (it turns out that a double blink of a green LED means there is no signal, and the steel framed building my flat is in is not good for mobile phone signals) it seems to work very well. On the train it is much better at coping with varying coverage than my T-Mobile G1 phone is. The phone seems to take a very long time to re-establish a connection when it is lost; the 3G modem is quick at this and happily switches between 3G, EDGE and GPRS without too much complaining.
I chose the O2 PAYG one because it has weekly and daily top-up options. I’m likely to be using it very irregularly. £2 for 500MB for a day seems fair enough when I want to check my mail while away, although it really is ridiculously expensive when you think about it, it’s better than paying £15 a month when months might go by without me using it at all.
Now it is time to get off the train. More later, perhaps.
Update: The USB modem only cost £20 and is a Huawei E160. It can do HSDPA but not the fastest 7.2Mbps speeds. But it seems fast enough. There doesn’t seem to be anything special abot these modems: they work on Macs and Linux without special software so there may be alternatives to the O2 Connection Manager software for Windows. And presumably netbooks that have integrated 3G and a SIM card slot can be made to work easily.
My wife bought a Guiness calendar because she likes the artwork. On the back of the calendar is the web address drinkaware.co.uk and below that the text:
This product is intended for purchase and enjoyment to people of legal purchase age for alcohol beverages. Always drink responsibly.
My goodness.
The closest I’ve got to traditional publishing is getting my articles in the company internal newsletter. This happened today.
Being edited is a weird experience. I’m reading my own words, but occasionally I see something I would never write. I haven’t been done any kind of disservice, this time round at least. But for some reason the newsletter is laid out like a paper newsletter even though it’s only distributed as a PDF. Which means space constraints. There may even be some kind of editorial style imposed. Anyway, I am reading my supposed own words, and occasionally exclaim something like, “I’ve *never* used the word ‘tremendous’!”. It’s not necessarily a bad word, it’s just not one I ever say or write. So seeing it under my byline is…weird.
There are word count limits that I know about in advance, so I find myself unable to elaborate, or having elaborated, have to cut out whole swathes of my arguments to get the word count down. And then there is editorial feedback. “Could you remove the bit about eliminating project managers?” Well, I suppose I could tone it down a bit, but I want to be a bit controversial, otherwise what’s the point of saying anything?
Here’s something I could immediately tell I hadn’t written, without being able to put my finger on why:
Raymond argues that the role of project managers as resource allocators becomes obsolete in the bazaar because personal motivation becomes the key instigator in ensuring that the best possible code is produced.
I think “key instigator” is a phrase I would never use. “Best possible code” doesn’t sound like me either. Here’s what I actually wrote:
Raymond argues that project managers are not needed in the bazaar because motivation comes for free and marshalling of resources happens automatically in its free market in reputation.
To be honest, I think the edited version is probably better. I think I am sometimes so concerned about not talking down to my audience that I don’t explain myself properly, and end up using turns of phrase that leave them going, “huh?” But it is also a failure because the “free market” aspect of allowing developers to choose which problems to work on has been lost in the translation. I really need another couple of hundred words to explain it.
So it’s a huge difference from blogging, where I can say what I want, how I want to say it. Presumably real writers for real publications have the same sorts of experience.
Does the editing make the article better? Perhaps it does. Perhaps it makes for a more readable, bite-sized, less rambly article. Perhaps it is good that I was prevented from writing, “we should throw away project management” and alienating all the project managers I work with…
Perhaps all this is also true of the differences between radio, with its producers and scripts, and podcasting.
I just caught part of a TV show called UK Border Force. Immigration officials arrest a man they think suspicious. A bystander gets indignant and starts yelling “this man is not a criminal”. The bystander is detained and rants and raves a bit, saying entirely understandable things like “people are trying to make a life better for themselves” and “I’m not a criminal, I’m only talking about rights”.
He ends up getting arrested for “obstruction” for his trouble.
An immigration official later talks about how the other onlookers reacted. Some of them applauded the immigration officials, others apparently “thought that it was morally wrong.”
She concludes, “but we’re here to do a job, so we do what we’re told.”
You can’t reason with authority.
Update: It gets better. Later in the same episode, immigration officials raid a spring onion farm where illegal immigrants from India are working. One of them actually says, “They are being paid £135 for a 40 hour week, which I reckon is about £3.75 an hour, which is a couple of pounds below the national minimum wage.” Another one says, “It’s horrible coming out to a job like this, where you see they’re working long hours for little money in conditions you wouldn’t want to keep animals in really. They’re not criminals. They’re here because they want to better their lives. We understand why they do it. If I had to feed my kids I’d do exactly the same thing.” The immigrants are duly shipped back to India. Well done! Okay, the barn they work in is not heated and the roof is a bit leaky, but they have a microwave and a radio and it’s not *that* bad. There is some concern that because they work for their accommodation and get driven to work in a van that this is forced labour, but I don’t find this convincing. The immigrants themselves say that they are doing this because they are poor back home. Shipping them back to India out of sight might make the socialists feel better but it ain’t helping no-one.
Eric Raymond has a good post about the cause of rising unemployment in the USA. He describes two of his unemployed friends as “marginally employable” for various reasons, including:
He’s black, which makes him a EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] lawsuit risk — and if you don’t know how much that hurts his chances, you haven’t been anywhere near a small or medium-sized business in the last 30 years.
And all the interesting things happen at the margins:
These are the people who go to the wall when the cost of employing someone gets too high. We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.
Meanwhile, Tim Worstall has noticed that the cost of employing women is about to increase in Europe. Some women’s “rights” committee has voted to let women have lots more paid maternity leave.
Increase the (potential) cost to employers of hiring women of child bearing age and you’ll both reduce the number they’re willing to hire and the wages they’re willing to offer them.
Once you understand that costs drive behaviour, and that tiny changes in costs cause big changes in behaviour at the margins, all this becomes pretty obvious.
Update: Jonathan Pearce comments on the same Eric Raymond article.
Big Media announces a Big Party announcing its Big Slogans. I heard about this from my wife who was listening to the radio, just as I was watching Brian Micklethwait talking about how Big Parties like to use slogans instead of ideas (about 2m20s in). He also talks about how the Internet might make small parties more successful, because they don’t need Big Media any more.
In Waterstones, in the corner of a display of mostly leftist political books “chosen by the booksellers of this store”, is Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with ‘climate change’ turning out toi be the most costly scientific blunder in history?
What could it all mean?
