Amazing Hacked Photos

Worth100

There are lots of examples of photographs that have been hacked to put the head of one person on the body of another. Usually you can tell.

Worth100 is a web site dedicated to professional artists who can do wonders with photoshop. Today I received several images, shown below that are both comical but also a testimony what you can do in this area.

VistaPrint

VistaPrint

For several years (maybe 5-7) I have used a web-based service for printing business cards. VistaPrint offers a fully automated authoring, management and ordering web site where you can produce beautiful cards. They have a rather aggressive sales strategy where they offer "free" business cards -- followed by an active "upselling" experience. In any case, they are pretty good and I recommend them.

Here are some samples of cards that I have created in the past.

Technology Review: Hyperlinking Reality via Phones

Technology Review: Hyperlinking Reality via Phones

"Nokia researchers are working on a system that allows physical objects to be identified and connected to the Internet through mobile-phone screens.

"A Nokia research project could one day make it easier to navigate the real world by superimposing virtual information on an image of your surroundings. The new software, called Mobile Augmented Reality Applications (MARA), is designed to identify objects viewed on the screen of a camera phone.

"The Nokia research team has demonstrated a prototype phone equipped with MARA software and the appropriate hardware: a global positioning system (GPS), an accelerometer, and a compass. The souped-up phone is able to identify restaurants, hotels, and landmarks and provide Web links and basic information about these objects on the phone's screen. In addition, says David Murphy, an engineer at Nokia Research Center, in Helsinki, Finland, who works on the project, the system can also be used to find nearby friends who have phones with GPS and the appropriate software."

Reverse address geocoding

Geonames reverse address geocoding

What is that? You know about typing an address and having Google Maps show you where the address is? Well, the reverse of that is looking at a Google Map and having a program tell you the street address. This Google Maps mashup allows you to navigate around a map and when you have found the place you want, click on the map and it will tell you the street address that corresponds to the place -- or at least one street address since many times there are multiple ways of looking at a point on a map.

Reverse address geocoding is just one of the many things done at www.geonames.org.

Hello, traditional TV Networks...?

From: Harry Forsdick
Date: Oct 27, 2006 3:55 AM
Subject: Hello, traditional TV Networks...?
To: Friends

I ran across something yesterday on CNet that I think is very appealing and answers the questions many people are asking about Video on the Web, such as "I don't understand the appeal of 2-3 minute snippets of video. Who is going to watch that stuff?"

Well, check out:

http://www.cnettv.com/9710-1_53-24285.html

With NBC already downsizing their news department, and CBS, and ABC not far behind, I thinking this example shows how people will want to get their multisegment TV shows in the future. Like everything else on the Internet, instead of a small number of nightly news shows, or weekly magazine shows ( e.g., 60 Minutes), this approach allows hundreds of thousands of people to participate in collecting and ordering multiple 2-3 minutes segments together into a half hour or hour show.

And furthermore, with the index on the right side of the screen, the viewer gets to decide what s/he wants to see.

This is why YouTube is worth $1.6Billion to Google. Like the Blog world, these compilations will produce a lot of junk, but there will be the standouts that get widely read because they contain superior content -- or selection of content from the millions of 2-3 minute video segments produced each day and hosted by the GTubes on the Internet. In addition there will be a lot of compilations that have appeal to smaller, focused audiences.

So, although I can imagine the major networks will start making use of this, I can also see millions of the following multisegment shows available on the Internet:

• This Week in Lexington: Highlights from various (Board of Selectmen, School Committee, Carey Lecture Series, High School Football game) town public meetings and events.
• Watch Your Baby Grow: Monthly advice for new parents including segments on the audience's actual kids as they grow up.
• (A smaller audience) Smith Family 2006 Year in Review: A month by month set of slide shows and video clips.
• ...
  

As important as the ability to string together multiple short clips (which, after all is how most news shows are structured) is the preservation of the structure of compilation, and the ability for the viewer to choose what is viewed: remember the promise of Interactive TV? Well, I think this is an example of what we were talking about.

I don't know enough about YouTube to understand whether there is already such a facility in that system. In any case, I think you will see Google starting to make use of these sorts of ideas with GTube.

Procrastination & Hoarding

Hoarding and Clutter

For the past week or so, I have been unable to work on two projects which I need to get done in order to move on. I have trouble understanding why I am doing this.

This reminds me of another problem issue I have: hanging on to things that I might need someday which is usually called hoarding. This association caused me to remember a wonderful radio program I heard (and saved, naturally) from The Infinite Mind. I don't think I am as far gone as some of the people described on that program -- but I can understand all of the feelings those people talk about. In any case, I offer this excellent, hour-long discussion of Hoarding and Clutter.

Now, I am going to look for something to handle my procrastination problem. I may or may not be successful, but at least it postpones having to work on the boring projects that need to get done :-)

The Boston Harborwalk

The Boston Harborwalk

This is something new to me. It is a walking tour of the Boston waterfront. It isn't complete yet, but it is a great idea. It goes from Deer Island in the North to the Kennedy Library in the south. There is a downloadable Audio Guide of the central Boston part of the walk. The website identifies all of the sites along this route. Clearly a multi-day activity (as in it would take a week to do it if you traveled the entire distance).

9/11 Serendipity

I received this as part of a message this morning:

3 bedroom House for Rent- Belmont, MA We are taking a year-long sabbatical from summer '07 through summer '08 and would like to rent our house to a wonderful family or couple. 8 rooms: 3 br, 2 1/2 baths; kid-quiet, friendly neighborhood; excellent school district, close to playgrounds, library, 1 mile from Belmont Center. For further information, please contact Audrey Ades.

Always a dreamer, I got curious about what this person did to be able to take a year-long sabbatical. So, I started searching the web to see what I could find out. It didn't take long for me to discover that Audrey Ades was a therapist working in Boston. Since this was not an academic position, I still wondered if the word "sabbatical" was being used to refer to a leave of absense from an academic job, so I looked further -- as in the next listing on Google. It was a reference from the Johns Hopkins Magazine which said:

Paul and his wife of 10 years, Audrey Ades, adopted their son from Korea last May.

Interesting, so I clicked on the link and discovered that there was a lot more to this Google reference than I initially realized -- because Paul Friedman had died on 9/11.

Suddenly, this story took a left turn into 9/11. Not that I should be surprised, but I realized the profound effect 9/11 still has on our national psyche. I forgot about finding the academic connection to sabbatical, who the "we" in the original article referred to, but rather proceeded to find out more information about Paul Friedman, who he was, how he died. There is also a nice article on the Remember: September 11, 2001 web site

I wonder how long we will continue to run across these connections. I suspect for the rest of my life, and then some. Like the Sinking of the Titanic, Pearl Harbor and ... 9/11.

Have a wonderful sabbatical, Audrey.

Canon SD800 IS

For a long time I have wanted to purchase a small camera I could have with me all of the time. I used to own a Canon S100, one of the first such cameras. This week, I purchased, for the same price, a Canon SD800 IS -- which is smaller, has a longer zoom, wider wide angle, image stabilization, and 7Mpixels.

It is a beautiful camera with lots of automatic features as well as the ability to control most everything manually.

Canon SD800 IS
Review
Fan Web Site
Amazon

Natural Language Searching

A couple of interesting articles:

• Powerset: The search engine that would outdo Google
• Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend
• Why Search Sucks & You Won't Fix It The Way You Think

It's always fun to try to spot the next winner. This article is an advanced peak at a company claiming to be able to put more language understanding into searching. This of course is a better way of asking and answering questions than any of the viable search engines of today -- but, many people have tried to do this before and failed for a variety of reasons.

If these guys can actually:

• understand questions without limiting themselves to a specific domain
• understand web sites without limiting themselves to a specific domain
• do this quickly

then, they have a winner. Otherwise, it's more of the same hype and failures.

Deval Patrick and the National Democratic Victory

Yesterday was a glorious day for the Town of Lexington, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States of America!

As I said the day after the Primary election, and I will say again, it is wonderful this morning to finally be able to feel good about the government officials who were chosen to lead our state and country.

Deval Patrick's victory was indeed, as Sen. Kennedy said, "a shot heard 'round the world" although when Kennedy referred to the "shot heard 'round the world" starting at Concord's Old North Bridge, I could feel a collective discomfort fill the room of Lexingtonians we were watching the returns with...

I have been watching Deval Patrick ever since my son signed on as one of his first paid campaign organizers in early 2005. When he came to Lexington on the day he announced his candidacy he was careful about his answers to questions because he admitted that he hadn't thought through many of the issues. As the campaign went on, he learned more about the issues and applied his values and instincts to coming up with stands on the issues. I believe Deval Patrick represents the good values that we all seek -- honesty, humility, openness and most importantly, a positiveness towards government which he views as people doing good things for each other.

In last night's acceptance speech, I listened attentively to his comments about the Governor acting on behalf of all of the citizens of the Commonwealth -- not just the Democrats and not just the people who voted for him -- all people. His actions during the campaign when he matured his positions on the issues facing the Commonwealth makes me believe him when he says his administration will listen to inputs from all sides, and make decisions based on this information and the set of values he showed us during the campaign.

I thought Kerry Healy's concession speech was excellent. She was gracious, and kind -- a side of her which, if she had shown during the campaign, would have made this a much closer election.

Nation-wide, there was a clear message sent to Washington: Americans are very unhappy with the way our country is being governed. Mid-term elections usually result in a similar erosion of the President's party in Congress. And this year was no exception. We will probably hear from the Bush administration that this normal erosion is a clear victory for their cause. But that is wrong. There was a significant impact of that dissatisfaction yesterday and the results will be a Congress more representative of the people. Congress will no longer be a rubber stamp for the President, and that is good. I believe that the Democrats realize we now need to cause some positive action. I urge you to read and consider the newly written 6 point action plan which reflects long held Democratic Party principles. You can find this at http://www.democrats.org/agenda.html.

Speaking of rubber stamps, many have complained that with a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Legislature, there will be no checks and balances in State government. I think there is another way of looking at this: with a responsible Governor such as Deval Patrick in office and an active Legislature which is on the same page as the Governor, rather than having the two branches of Government fighting each other, as we have had in the last 4 years, we are about to have both bodies of Government working towards the same goals.

People who voted against Deval Patrick and feel that it has been a good idea to have this form of antagonistic checks and balances, need to admit that a majority of the Commonwealth disagrees with you.

Looking at the Lexington Results:

( http://tinyurl.com/t9cvv)

an amazing 70% of the registered voters participated in the election. I wonder how much of this was due to interest in the election and how much due to the Get Out The Vote efforts by both parties.

In the Governor's race, twice as many people voted for Patrick as for Healy. But it wasn't four times as many: bi-Partisanship is alive and well in Lexington.

Audio Tours

TravelBrains - Travel adventures that leave you smarter!

We have enjoyed a variety of audio tours you can play in your car as you travel through an area. When we went to Gettsyburg, we purchased one of the best tours that even today our boys refer to fondly -- mostly because of the enthusiastic narrator, Wayne Motts.

Sources for tours of this type are listed above.

Global Warming's Dramatic Sea Level Impact

Flood Maps:

What will happen if the impact of Global Warming is as dire as some predict. In particular, there are some that say that the impact of global warming will be that the massive Greenland ice shelf will melt. If this were to happen, sea levels around the world would rise -- how much? Perhaps 7 meters, 14 meters, 28 meters: depending on the severity of the impact, these are all numbers being talked about.

When I first hear of this, I wondered what the impact would be on the area where I live (Boston, MA, USA). What better way to display this information than on a map. So, I looked around the web and found this web site, which is an application of GoogleMaps with image overlays. You can select the severity of the flood and then see how the sea level would change for any area in the world. Pretty scary...

Digital Enlargements

Printing Dogmas Graf Photography - Digital Imaging articles

Many purists say that you need an image at 300 dpi in order to print photo quality images. This guy shows that this is not necessarily true: he is shown holding a 20x30 inch print of a tiger that was printed from a 3 MPixel jpeg image.

Good Articles I read today

A Web Site to Call Your Own - New York Times

The Real Animal House By Chris Miller - Books - Review - New York Times

Pictures, With Map and Pushpin Included - New York Times

Widgetbox › Flickr photo map : powered by mapsack.com web widget review

Solving Hard Infrastructure Problems

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The $200 Billion Lunch

This is an excellent example where technologists knew the right solution to a problem that may now get solved because of a crisis: and solved not because of leadership by the US but by the leadership of China. There are many other examples:

• The threat of global warming induced rising water levels
• The ill-conceived process of funding and developing electronic voting machines
• Security on the Internet
• Internet and eMail protocols that allow spoofing
• Homeland security of shipping ports
• Bird flu and other potential global pandemics
  

The usual reason for not solving these problems is that it would cost too much. I believe that may not always be the most significant reason. Frequently these solutions lack a strong advocate with the leadership and power to take us in the right direction. Quite often solutions could occur on an incremental basis incurring much less cost by being part of normal replacement investments.

Of course other times, it does require massive Government investment. But many of the items above are hard problems that aren't as "easy" as building weapon systems and so the collective product of our elected officials punt and spend massive amounts on money on the easy projects.

Introduction

Hello,

For quite a number of years I have written entries in various blogs that I have created. The topics of these snippets have included, observations about the Internet as it has developed, neat applications that I have discovered, fine art on the web that has interested me, travelogs, photography, other hobbies and new ideas I have about computers and networks.

Recently, I find that as I read or watch the news, more and more I have comments about the articles I encounter. Other times, I think of non-technical stuff that I would like to write down and get other people's reactions. Perhaps it is my age, perhaps it is the polarization of the political world we are in, perhaps something else -- but in any case, it makes me feel better if I get a chance to write about what I am thinking.

In any case, I have created this blog as a place to capture all of these ideas.

The title of this Blog comes from a segment of Edward R. Murrow's early television show where people would get a chance to present their thoughts. I like the phrase because it captures the sense that in writing down ideas, I acknowledge that in everything I say, there is part of it based not on certainty but belief -- i.e., sometimes you need to proceed based on a belief, not something that is totally provable.

If you would like to comment on what I have written, there is a link on each article for this. You can also subscribe to an email feed of these articles by sending a blank message to thisibelieve@googlegroups.com . You cannot post messages to this group. you will receive notification when I create a new entry in the blog.

I hope you enjoy these writings and give me feedback on them.