A very small percent of professors are using books they have written and I have been a professor for many years and have never been offered a kickback and or heard of anyone getting such an offer.
Given all that complexity, the raw feed is surprisingly glitch free -- there were hardly any break-ups during the TdF -- but the video quality of NBC's Olympic stream on the Web was pretty bad. There is a lot of room for improvement in the network.
For the TdF production, NBC pay-per-view took the live feed from French TV and added intelligent, well coordinated commentary, producing an informative, entertaining presentation. Contrast that with the Olympics where they streamed the feed without commentary, popped in commercials at seemingly arbitrary points and only made the stream available to subscribers to selected cable TV channels.
I think they can and will do better than their Olympic coverage. For a start, can't they negotiate for more control over the feed from French TV? If an NBC producer could select cameras and coordinate that with the announcer, could we not get the level of integration we see in coverage of NFL, NBA and other events?
Some control could be further decentralized -- to the viewer. Some graphics are tied to the video stream. For example, a shot of a small group of cyclists might be showing the lead group or a group behind the peloton. But, as the BBC demonstrated during the Olympics, the user can control other graphics like the season and current-game statistics of a basketball player.
I don't know how the responsibilities and subcontracts will eventually be divided or how far decentralization of control will be pushed, but for sure we will see change by 2020 when NBC's Olympic contract expires. Technology -- cameras, communication links, compression, caching, end-user equipment, etc -- will have improved, there will be more competition and a larger portion of the audience will be on the Internet.
I gave up because your comments and pedantic "sic"s seemed more ad hominem than constructive, so I just figured I'd sign off with a few "sic"s of my own.
That is the download speed test from my house (as reported by Seedtest.net) -- so it was not a constraint. I got around 2.3 Mb/s when going through an English proxy.
it is producted by the French, and NBC is one of many many broadcasters present there who add a bit of their own flavour to that coverage and use it
I meant "produced" in the sense that they contract for the feed then do with it what they will -- add commentary, decide when to cut to commercials, whatever -- the stuff I talked about in the post. The "producer" of a movie does not operate the camera. You sound like a grammar-Nazi kind of person.
As to his idea that they have 'deleted their archive', that is somewhat laughable - removing it from public access
is very very different from deleting it, something I can assure him has not happened.
Duh.
The internet streaming is a very very small part of the whole process
Let's revisit that statement in 2020.
Does he really think the NBS was responsible the Olympics venue planning and operation?
Well here in Germany everyone who owns a TV has to pay around 17€ per month to fund a consortium of public-service broadcasters.
That sounds like the British license fee of £145.50 per year for a color TV and £49.00 for a black and white TV. We have no such fees in the US, but the cheapest cable subscription would be more than 17€ per month.
I bet NBC would have gone for it -- more people seeing their ads -- but the satellite and cable companies, including their parent company Comcast, probably forced them to do it. Based on the $29 they charged for the Tour de France, I doubt that your $10-20 would be enough.
Plagiarism and its detection is a small part of the more general problem of grading and giving meaningful feedback on assignments in which there is no "correct" answer. We have no way to scale that through automation and peer grading and feedback have limitations. This may limit the range of classes that can be taught successfully online.
Questions like: Is the Internet service symmetric? How many fiberhoods will Kansas City be divided into? Local channels are included in the television coverage, but which other channels will be included? Will there be bandwidth caps? Will the subscriptions be month-to-month? How good a job will they do integrating the Nexus 7 controller with the TV set? What will be the uptake and response to the fiberhood rollout plan?
And the Big One -- what will be the impact on the ISP industry if Google can make money and succeed at these prices?
Three recent cases have shown that common sense may be creeping into the intellectual property situation -- this case, Apple's loss to Samsung and the Oracle v. Google case. The judges in the three cases minced no words -- see http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/07/is-intellectual-property-situation.html
It is interesting that the guy who is down on robo grading is from Harvard. I can see a future in which cash-strapped public universities increase class sizes using robo graders, while Harvard students get actual discussion with a professor. Like the rush to online courses, which is more pronounced in public than private universities, this would widen the growing gap between elite and average schools.
mikejuk asked "Is this just a reaction to the Stanford experiment in running courses?"
There are significant differences -- MIT's courses are geared to self study while Stanford's are tied to the on-campus class and schedule. MIT is also developing an open source delivery platform and certification will be done for a small fee by an independent organization. See: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2011/12/mits-online-classes-will-be-different.html.
It would could make textbooks more dynamic and update more often. I would also like the ability to mix & match among text books to create a custom text book
Their modular approach is a step in that direction -- they let the professor select the modules they want to include in their course. They also have optional supplementary material like primary papers, social impact essays, data analysis. But, as you said, including stuff from other publishers would mean copyright clearance. Module repositories like Merlot and open journals also help with that.
Wikis and other web sites can also be changed by anyone with permission -- is that a bug or a feature?
Print text books are also revised every two or three years in order to sell new editions, reflect new scholarship, and incorporate new pedagogy.
Does it bother you that the work of those fellas Watson and Crick was added to the biology 101 textbook you used when you were a boy?
A revision history could also be kept.
The Nature biology book has a lot of info filled images and figures with rich captions -- they are worthwhile.
They are shooting for all formats and will allow you to print all you want.
Syria was off the Net for 28 hours. Did they disconnect because of world wide revulsion at the YouTube video showing the tortured and mutilated body of 13-year old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb? Did they reconnect because they realized that it was a futile effort? Was it the cost to the economy, the "dictator's dilemma?" See http://cis471.blogspot.com/2011/06/net-is-back-up-in-syria-why-did-they.html for discussion.
A colleague in Turkey just sent me this message:
"I am using google search engine here so I do not know what the article refers to.
I am also using google earth."
It is clear that urban slums are terrible places. It is also clear that the landless rural poor vote with their feet and move to those slums. Improving the quality of rural life might be a way out.
Many people have been working to bring Internet connectivity to rural areas of developing nations with this goal in mind. Social innovators like Grameen Bank have also focused on the rural poor. We will hopefully invent sustainable means of bringing electric power to villages.
Perhaps we can one day solve the urban slum problem by solving the rural poverty problem.
The issues raised here apply to medical instruments in general. For example a Holter Monitor is a portable ECG recorder that one can wear for a few days. But, unlike an exercise monitor, a Holter monitor has to be federally approved before it can be sold, data formats are proprietary, and data must be analyzed using the manufacturer's software.
I would be curious to know how much an insurance company is billed for physician time and data analysis service when a patient wears a Holter monitor for a few days. Wouldn't it be nice if we could own our own medical instruments and the data they generated?
It was 10 characters or 110 bits per second. You could read a lot faster than it could print and it only did upper case.
The Teletype was fully mechanical, so you could really understand how it worked and even repair it yourself. They sold cool, reasonably priced tool kits and parts were available.
Anderson Jacobson just packaged a standard Teletype with an accoustical coupler in a huge fiberglass case with casters. I had one of those and got four fixed units on stands to install in the public library in Venice, CA. Teletypes were common timesharing terminals -- we had a room full of them at SDC that were tied into the Q-32 timesharing system.
Slashdot Mirror
A very small percent of professors are using books they have written and I have been a professor for many years and have never been offered a kickback and or heard of anyone getting such an offer.
Yes, but it actually works
Why do you say the Raspberry Pi does not work? I am interested in getting Scratch running on it.
PPS -- they work with Euro media France (http://www.euromedia-france.com/), which actually runs the cameras, helicopters, etc. For detail on that, check out: http://www.cyclingtips.com.au/2012/07/eyes-in-the-sky-how-the-tour-de-france-is-broadcast-to-the-world/.
PS -- the Olympic video feed was not from French TV, but from Olympic Broadcasting Services (http://www.obs.es/hostbroadcasterrole.html)
Given all that complexity, the raw feed is surprisingly glitch free -- there were hardly any break-ups during the TdF -- but the video quality of NBC's Olympic stream on the Web was pretty bad. There is a lot of room for improvement in the network.
For the TdF production, NBC pay-per-view took the live feed from French TV and added intelligent, well coordinated commentary, producing an informative, entertaining presentation. Contrast that with the Olympics where they streamed the feed without commentary, popped in commercials at seemingly arbitrary points and only made the stream available to subscribers to selected cable TV channels.
I think they can and will do better than their Olympic coverage. For a start, can't they negotiate for more control over the feed from French TV? If an NBC producer could select cameras and coordinate that with the announcer, could we not get the level of integration we see in coverage of NFL, NBA and other events?
Some control could be further decentralized -- to the viewer. Some graphics are tied to the video stream. For example, a shot of a small group of cyclists might be showing the lead group or a group behind the peloton. But, as the BBC demonstrated during the Olympics, the user can control other graphics like the season and current-game statistics of a basketball player.
I don't know how the responsibilities and subcontracts will eventually be divided or how far decentralization of control will be pushed, but for sure we will see change by 2020 when NBC's Olympic contract expires. Technology -- cameras, communication links, compression, caching, end-user equipment, etc -- will have improved, there will be more competition and a larger portion of the audience will be on the Internet.
I gave up because your comments and pedantic "sic"s seemed more ad hominem than constructive, so I just figured I'd sign off with a few "sic"s of my own.
That is the download speed test from my house (as reported by Seedtest.net) -- so it was not a constraint. I got around 2.3 Mb/s when going through an English proxy.
it is producted by the French, and NBC is one of many many broadcasters present there who add a bit of their own flavour to that coverage and use it
(sic)
(I feel like the slashdot community's changed a lot since I first joined and HEY, GIVE OFF MY LAWN!)
(sic) I am not interested in keeping this up -- sorry for pissing on your lawn -- I'll give off now.
it is producted by the French, and NBC is one of many many broadcasters present there who add a bit of their own flavour to that coverage and use it
I meant "produced" in the sense that they contract for the feed then do with it what they will -- add commentary, decide when to cut to commercials, whatever -- the stuff I talked about in the post. The "producer" of a movie does not operate the camera. You sound like a grammar-Nazi kind of person.
As to his idea that they have 'deleted their archive', that is somewhat laughable - removing it from public access is very very different from deleting it, something I can assure him has not happened.
Duh.
The internet streaming is a very very small part of the whole process
Let's revisit that statement in 2020.
Does he really think the NBS was responsible the Olympics venue planning and operation?
I'll give you that one -- I misspoke.
Well here in Germany everyone who owns a TV has to pay around 17€ per month to fund a consortium of public-service broadcasters.
That sounds like the British license fee of £145.50 per year for a color TV and £49.00 for a black and white TV. We have no such fees in the US, but the cheapest cable subscription would be more than 17€ per month.
I bet NBC would have gone for it -- more people seeing their ads -- but the satellite and cable companies, including their parent company Comcast, probably forced them to do it. Based on the $29 they charged for the Tour de France, I doubt that your $10-20 would be enough.
Plagiarism and its detection is a small part of the more general problem of grading and giving meaningful feedback on assignments in which there is no "correct" answer. We have no way to scale that through automation and peer grading and feedback have limitations. This may limit the range of classes that can be taught successfully online.
Questions like: Is the Internet service symmetric? How many fiberhoods will Kansas City be divided into? Local channels are included in the television coverage, but which other channels will be included? Will there be bandwidth caps? Will the subscriptions be month-to-month? How good a job will they do integrating the Nexus 7 controller with the TV set? What will be the uptake and response to the fiberhood rollout plan?
And the Big One -- what will be the impact on the ISP industry if Google can make money and succeed at these prices?
(http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/07/google-unveils-gigabit-innovation-in.html)
That's the Telecom Law of 1996, not 1966
Sorry about that! Of course, it is 1996 -- just a typo.
Three recent cases have shown that common sense may be creeping into the intellectual property situation -- this case, Apple's loss to Samsung and the Oracle v. Google case. The judges in the three cases minced no words -- see http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/07/is-intellectual-property-situation.html
It is interesting that the guy who is down on robo grading is from Harvard. I can see a future in which cash-strapped public universities increase class sizes using robo graders, while Harvard students get actual discussion with a professor. Like the rush to online courses, which is more pronounced in public than private universities, this would widen the growing gap between elite and average schools.
mikejuk asked "Is this just a reaction to the Stanford experiment in running courses?"
There are significant differences -- MIT's courses are geared to self study while Stanford's are tied to the on-campus class and schedule. MIT is also developing an open source delivery platform and certification will be done for a small fee by an independent organization. See: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2011/12/mits-online-classes-will-be-different.html.
It would could make textbooks more dynamic and update more often. I would also like the ability to mix & match among text books to create a custom text book
Their modular approach is a step in that direction -- they let the professor select the modules they want to include in their course. They also have optional supplementary material like primary papers, social impact essays, data analysis. But, as you said, including stuff from other publishers would mean copyright clearance. Module repositories like Merlot and open journals also help with that.
Wikis and other web sites can also be changed by anyone with permission -- is that a bug or a feature? Print text books are also revised every two or three years in order to sell new editions, reflect new scholarship, and incorporate new pedagogy. Does it bother you that the work of those fellas Watson and Crick was added to the biology 101 textbook you used when you were a boy? A revision history could also be kept.
The Nature biology book has a lot of info filled images and figures with rich captions -- they are worthwhile. They are shooting for all formats and will allow you to print all you want.
Syria was off the Net for 28 hours. Did they disconnect because of world wide revulsion at the YouTube video showing the tortured and mutilated body of 13-year old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb? Did they reconnect because they realized that it was a futile effort? Was it the cost to the economy, the "dictator's dilemma?" See http://cis471.blogspot.com/2011/06/net-is-back-up-in-syria-why-did-they.html for discussion.
A colleague in Turkey just sent me this message: "I am using google search engine here so I do not know what the article refers to. I am also using google earth."
Many people have been working to bring Internet connectivity to rural areas of developing nations with this goal in mind. Social innovators like Grameen Bank have also focused on the rural poor. We will hopefully invent sustainable means of bringing electric power to villages.
Perhaps we can one day solve the urban slum problem by solving the rural poverty problem.
I would be curious to know how much an insurance company is billed for physician time and data analysis service when a patient wears a Holter monitor for a few days. Wouldn't it be nice if we could own our own medical instruments and the data they generated?
.
It was 10 characters or 110 bits per second. You could read a lot faster than it could print and it only did upper case.
The Teletype was fully mechanical, so you could really understand how it worked and even repair it yourself. They sold cool, reasonably priced tool kits and parts were available.
Anderson Jacobson just packaged a standard Teletype with an accoustical coupler in a huge fiberglass case with casters. I had one of those and got four fixed units on stands to install in the public library in Venice, CA. Teletypes were common timesharing terminals -- we had a room full of them at SDC that were tied into the Q-32 timesharing system.
Larry