I have a good feeling about this movie, something says to me in the same vein as Contact & Gravity. And what a great director to have in control.
Month: December 2013
Removing the mass from media
I was listening to Framerate 152. And they mentioned a story written by Tim Wu… Netflix’s War on Mass Culture Binge-viewing was just the beginning. Netflix has a plan to rewire our entire culture.
So I had a read of the whole thing on my kindle via instapaper and it was intriguing.
It starts to answer the question about what happens everyone sees something different. One of the same questions I want to research with Perceptive Media. But I find myself thinking so what? This all sounds like normal life? So what? Hardly breaking new ground. Then I stop and remember… My world isn’t mainstream yet.
If modern American popular culture was built on a central pillar of mainstream entertainment flanked by smaller subcultures, what stands to replace it is a very different infrastructure, one comprising islands of fandom. With no standard daily cultural diet, we’ll tilt even more from a country united by shows like “I Love Lucy” or “Friends” toward one where people claim more personalized allegiances, such as to the particular bunch of viewers who are obsessed with “Game of Thrones” or who somehow find Ricky Gervais unfailingly hysterical, as opposed to painfully offensive.
The baby-boomer intellectuals who lament the erosion of shared values are right: Something will be lost in the transition. At the water cooler or wedding reception or cocktail party or kid’s soccer game, conversations that were once a venue for mutual experiences will become even more strained as chatter about last night’s overtime thriller or “Seinfeld” shenanigans is replaced by grasping for common ground. (“Have you heard of ‘The Defenders’? Yeah? What episode are you on?”) At a deeper level, a country already polarized by the echo chambers of ideologically driven journalism and social media will find itself with even less to agree on.
And there are those who laugh at me when I couldn’t remember the names of the 4 Beatles members or when I don’t know who the guy is playing the guitar on the closing for London Olympics 2012 ceremony. Well laugh all you like but theres going to be even more of us soon and you may be one them sooner than you imagine.
Now I know this might seem like a reason to be fearful for the future, I mean what about social collusion?
But it’s not all cause for dismay. Community lost can be community gained, and as mass culture weakens, it creates openings for the cohorts that can otherwise get crowded out. When you meet someone with the same particular passions and sensibility, the sense of connection can be profound. Smaller communities of fans, forged from shared perspectives, offer a more genuine sense of belonging than a national identity born of geographical happenstance.
Tim Wu then goes off on one about how this is the grounding of America, which is a logical argument. Netflix is simply understood where the future is heading and hitched its self to the future.
Purpose of blogging it was as a clear sign for those who laugh and make fun. One day its going to happen to you too…
Chromefastic
I bought 2 chromecasts for me and my parents. The chromecast for me was to cover those couple times when I can’t get something to play on xbmc. And I won’t lie I want to hack around with it too.
For my parents its a serious gift because I know the chromebook they have is useful but they don’t really make use of the streaming media feature which I think they may actually like in the end. The idea of having to watch stuff on a small screen is never going to go down well my parents but to relive strictly again on HDMI channel 2 won’t be so bad. Even if they use it one in a while its not a bad buy.
Hopefully they will make use of it like how there finally making use of the chromebook.
So I fired mine up and was up and running in 5mins tops. The setup is simple and quick and while I was waiting for updates to download, I put the chromecast apps on my laptop, tablet and phone.
Its a elegant device and the standby screens are just as beautiful. Can’t wait to see more support but right now it feels a lot like the various xbmc browser extent ions which allow you send xbmc a URL. Of course some URLs xbmc can’t playback because their encrypted while deals have been done to make it work with the chromecast. Also up till recently xbmc remote URL throwers were somewhat buggy. Yaste solved this and much more.
Chromecast has cross over appeal and may be too cheap not to just have plugged into a HDMI input?
To answer the question I had, ages ago. Yes the Chromecast works in the uk without any modifications. It also worked on my Linux PC running chrome and my rooted tablet running CyanogenMod.
So threes nothing stopping you getting one or more… 🙂
Raspberry Pi’s for the godchildren?
Its a tricky one…
I like to buy presents of my godchildren which matter. Its tricky because you don’t want to buy something boring but educational. When I was young my godparents would get me Lego, Chemistry sets and ultimately Technical Lego. This certainly helped my creativity develop.
So whats the modern equivalent of Lego? Something you can buy more of and add to?
Well I thought Raspberry Pi. Yeah, no brainer right?!
But here’s my issue.
I have 2 male godchildren (4 and 6) and 1 female (7).
My natural thought was to get one for the 6yr old, specially because his dad is technical and the child has already shown an amazing comfort with computers. The other male is too young and frankly more interested in super-heroes. So why not the older female?
I don’t know… (and I feel like I’ve had this debate before, so excuse me if you’ve heard it before).
I also didn’t want to buy her pink stuff but she loves it so much. Along while ago I bought her some pink lego and she seemed quite happy with that. Although to be fair I’ve never actually seen play with them. Me being a melding godfather decided one year to buy her a mini telescope, hoping it will foster a little more science in her life. Of course this nothing against the parents, I love them to bits. But my understanding of what a godfather does is to do whats best for the child regardless of how much it drives the parents insane.
So back to the point, why have I not bought her a Raspberry Pi? Is this nasty sexism which I don’t know about? Absolutely not!
I guess I balanced it all in my mind and decided it would be a little unfair to force something like this on her at this stage. Instead I bought her some more Lego but the friends subsection.
What would you do? Am I doing down the godfather title by not giving her what might be good for her? She has godmothers, maybe its the godmothers who gives her what she wants and the godfather who makes the difficult decisions. And I don’t mean that in a sexist way, the godmothers should be making the difficult decisions for the boys, while the godfathers are buying stuff he wants?
Who knows but I am certainly thinking for her birthday, I should find something which crosses over and brings out her geeky side.
Any tips on what, are very welcomed.
I’m hoping the likes of Jasmine Cox, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Rosie Campbell, Rebecca Gregory-Clarke, etc. Can offer some advice on this? I can’t be the only one wondering about this….?
A couple of things people have sent me recently
Been a little quiet recently, mainly due to the season of partying and ending up ill with the flu…
Anyway I’m back…
Ok silly and funny… Thanks Tim Dobson.
Just so Tragic! Thanks Martinrue
Forgot who sent this to me but its a interesting one… How much eye contact, depends on your aim I guess.
Consequence or Inception of connecting people
I saw the below tweet and felt like it needed to be not just retweeted but also blogged…
Help this teacher make a great point to her students about the consequences of social network use. Please RT widely
It says…
I want to illustrate to my junior high students (grade 7-9) how fast a photo can be shared on the internet. Please “Like” and “Share” this image to help me teach caution and discernment to the students in my classes.
Although a great idea and I’m not against teaching and eduction, but its worth pointing out the incredible power this also brings to each and everyone of us. Empowerment should also be taught in the same lesson. Never has there been a way to connect a mass audience at such low cost and such speed. The inception of the internet and social media is a great thing too. And its too easy to teach the negative. The internet and social media isn’t something which should be feared, rather taught how to responsibly participate in.
Amazon missing pigeon post?
Forgot to blog about Amazon prime air earlier this week. Amazon plans to deliver some goods via drones/octocopters.
Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is testing unmanned drones to deliver goods to customers, Chief Executive Jeff Bezos says.
The drones, called Octocopters, could deliver packages weighing up to 2.3kg to customers within 30 minutes of them placing the order, he said.
Theres a million reasons why its not going to happen in the next few years but the thing which I believe Amazon have missed is Pigeon post.
Pigeon posts packet switching network is a lot more efficient and could scale way beyond Amazon’s idea of one Octocopter per package. If your going to do it, do it with scale in mind Bezos!
As Nathan Rae posted to tech news today…
Imagine Vanilla Sky on Perceptive Media
There is an example of Perceptive Media which I like to use. Its a bit of a messy example because I’m usually trying to avoid spoiling the plot of Vanilla Sky or Open your eyes. I used it at TedXBristol, to explain why perceptive media can be so incredible. Of course there is spoilers below.
I remember when I watched Vanilla Sky for the first time, there was a scene which seemed to give me chills or something like a deja vu. I felt like I knew the scene so well, like I’d been there or seen it before. How is this possible? A film I’ve never seen before and a place I’ve never been before? Well in the film you are led to believe they are using parts of Tom Cruises memory to make him feel comfortable with whats going on.
One such scene is a image from his memory. An image of the Bob Dylan album – Free wheelin.
That image comes from flicking through my fathers LP collection when young. I’m not even sure if he still has it or not but something somewhere in my brain is that image. When I saw that image again build up in a similar way, something triggered my brains pulses to say you have seen this before. I call it a deja vu but I’m not certain what it is. Something pulled that image out of my memory and front and center in my mind.
There is something about Vanilla Sky and ultimately Open your eyes which seems to trigger memories beyond just mine.
It was amazing to hear Jason Silva on London Real talking about Vanilla Sky. Although Jason is an excitable character, his observations about storytelling and the affect of the movie is spot on.
Great storyteller can do amazing things.
They craft magic, the surreal and the impossible in our minds through simply words, images or sound. They weave a world which is for a brief moment believable.
Its a little bit of cold reading, great communication skills, excellent storytelling and a number of other things. Perceptive Media enables the great storytellers to do what they do best but on a broadcast sized audience.
Linked data on youtube?
I thought I’d try writing some RDF/Turtle as I see it on youtube.
<http://youtu.be/jP6kzKygaOs> dc:title "Jason Silva on London Real talks about Vanilla Sky"; dc:publisher "London Real"; dc:subject [ dc:subject "Vanilla Sky" dc:type "Film" imdb:homepage <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259711/> tmdb:homepage <http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1903-vanilla-sky> ] cities:city "London".
Kind of reminds me of when people started hacking Triples into Flickr by using Machine tags. Still its interesting to see Youtube adding the ability to add a triple in a nice clean way (if its a well used ontology of course)
Those old race fears come back to haunt online dating
I’ve been meaning to write about race and dating for a while. Originally I was going to write for Singleblackmale but I’m not really bringing anything new to the party except my own thoughts.
Racism is not gone, not by a long shot. In the online world the xenophobia runs riot.
If you need evidence of this, I’d point you at the now classic OkCupid’s Trend about Race Affects The Messages You Get. Then a more recently thanks to Tim Dobson, some more uncomfortable racial preferences.
Its worth pointing out that like most online dating data, we (not just me) grab on to it in lei of anything else. The last one Are you Interested? Could be seen as a poor/bad attempt to get their name out in an already crowded field. To be honest I had only heard of Are you interested? In passing and never actually tried it or installed it. I was surprised they hadn’t gone for rui.com instead.
Despite an increase in interracial marriages and birth of multiracial babies, one study revealed that racism is still a factor when looking for love online.Kevin Lewis, a sociologist at University of California San Diego, analyzed messages sent by over 120,000 users on dating site, OkCupid, finding racial prejudice affects dating decisions. According to Lewis’ research, all users falling within the site’s five largest racial categories (black, white, Asian, Latino, Indian) were more likely to initiate contact with users from their same racial background.“Most men (except black men) are unlikely to initiate contact with black women, all men (including Asian men) are unlikely to reply to Asian women, and although women from all racial backgrounds tend to initiate contact with men from the same background, women from all racial backgrounds also disproportionately reply to white men,”
Now you can pretend or not acknowledge these facts but trust me as someone who has emailed quite a few people in the past, there is something about the replies you don’t get. That silence even when you connect really well on many levels. Of course its not simply one kind of person, it just happens if your males and black, you will get less replies.
This is why I find the data really interesting as its response rates. You can craft an algorithm which connects people in what ever way but their reply rate will say so much more.
However saying all this, something else is at play…
Lewis also found that people were more willing to reply to a user of a different race after that person initiated contact. Furthermore, they were more likely to start a conversation with a user of a different race after that interaction.Lewis said one qualifying factor for this could be simple preemptive discrimination. In other words, users are less likely to initiate contact with a person of another race because they’re not sure that person will be interested in them.“Part of the reason site users, and especially minority site users, do not express interest in individuals from a different racial background is because they anticipate — based on a lifetime of experiences with racism — that individuals from a different background will not be interested in them.”
The data were reading from the dating sites is the instant reply rates. As I was saying no one likes being rejected specially on the grounds of race, theres a self censorship or lack of confidence to put yourself through the pain again. However if you do its more likely to work out better than you imagined.
So although the reply rates are bad for certain races such as black people, and it seems hopeless sometimes. I would urge people to keep going. Its a bit of a numbers game and this is once again another reason why the free online dating sites win out over the top of paid dating sites. You need time and its no fun sinking more and more money and your attention into something which isn’t going well.
Keep going…!