Giving the iPhone to students…

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/technology/21iphone.html

At least four institutions — the University of Maryland, Oklahoma Christian University, Abilene Christian and Freed-Hardeman — have announced that they will give the devices to some or all of their students this fall.

Digital image alteration, revisionist history

In the NYT: I was there. Just ask Photoshop. Williams, Alex. Aug 17, 2008.

As image-editing software grows in sophistication and ubiquity, alterations go far beyond removing red-eye and whitening teeth. They include substituting head shots to achieve the best combination of smiles, deleting problematic personalities or adding family members who were unable to attend important events, performing virtual liposuction or hair restoration, even reanimating the dead. Revisionist history, it seems, can be practiced by just about anyone.

This article could be paired with the previous post to illustrate two opposing affordances of digital tech (esp. at the consumer level). The previous post deals with challenging official narratives, where this story involves altering (photoshopping) our own histories.

[[[Could be used in 391 for Nov 19, visual culture

Here is a related story, also from NYT: Photography as a weapon. Morris, E. Aug 11, 2008.

Blogging during the streaming of the democratic debate

I’m currently typing this as I’m staring at the nbc peacock-turned-loading wheel symbol that tells me to “wait for a few minutes and if we’re not back, just wait longer.”

I don’t have cable. It’s expensive and Comcast, the only provider, clearly mistreats their subscribers. Plus TV would be a serious distraction. Instead I get wireless “broadband” from a different anti-consumer company, ATT (my only other choice). So I planned to watch the debate on MSNBC’s website. At first it was all good. I had to sit through one ad at the start, but I can handle that. After the ad, for 5 minutes the debate streamed beautifully, so then I got a little adventurous and clicked the full-screen button. Then, as if by some miracle, the picture got bigger, the resolution was decent, and the stream didn’t degrade.

I watched full-screen, live, streaming video for about 10 minutes. Clinton and Obama were even talking back and forth about specific issues regarding health care policy and not about Brian Williams’ empty horse race fluff.

It felt like I was peering into some glorious future. I was timid, but I dare not look away.

Then the video started to break up and the audio began to stutter. Quick as a flash I minimized, but to no avail. The audio began chirping. So I closed out and went back again. Watched another ad and got back to the debate. 5 minutes went by, and it started to break up again. I closed out, went back, watched ad. This ritual repeated every 5 to 10 minutes, but each time, somehow the ad managed to come through no problem.

Now I’m just watching the peacock twirl. In the middle of an Obama rebuttal, the stream just dried up, his movements slowed to crawl, and then … nothing. Ridiculous. There is no good reason why we shouldn’t be able to get decent broadband in this country. Is this the ISPs fault? Most likely. Is it the FCCs fault? Right again. Is it MSNBC’s fault? Not sure. Is it the consumers’ fault, as firms like Comcast and ATT would suggest, for “hogging bandwidth?” No it is not.

We need to get this problem fixed, because if we let the regulators and the providers continue to hold hands all the way to the bank, our service will never improve.

Wow, now its back. But the aspect ratio is off, the picture is stretched. The candidates heads look a little wide; Tim Russert’s takes up the entire window. : )

Photosynth demo: Hyperlinking pictures

This demo of a microsoft project called photosynth is pretty neat stuff. A sort of “collective intelligence” and “meta-data” approach to dealing with images, a category of information in which search and combination techniques seem to lag behind other categories (such as words).