Netflix' vision of their company and the future of television

Check out the Netflix Long Term View document for investors. It is interesting because it reveals their vision of the company and for the future of television in general.

As to the vision of the company, they say they are a "movie and TV series network." Note that they see themselves as a "network" -- will Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and the BBC become the new television networks?

But, they are not just a network, they are a "TV series network." That is a testament to their success producing multi-episode series for Internet distribution. People like to watch TV without commercials. They also like watching two, three or maybe all the episodes in one sitting. They like watching TV on phones, tablets, PCs or television sets whenever they want to.

Creators also like the artistic freedom and financial security of the Netflix format. They have the freedom to craft a long story. We can think of the Netflix series "House of Cards" as a 661 minute story, to be watched in one or several sittings. The 13 episodes vary from 46 to 56 minutes in length -- the writers are not constrained by time slots and commercial breaks. They could have created more or fewer episodes if they that was the best way to tell the story.

For more on a creator's view of Netflix, watch Kevin Spacey's excellent 2013 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture 2013 (below). Spacey, who produced and starred in "House of Cards," says he pitched it to the TV networks and cable companies, but he went with Netflix because they gave him total creative control, funded 26 episodes up front and did not request a pilot episode. He feels that pilots are an expensive, misleading digression. He is producing very long stories with evolving characters, and trying to cram that into a single TV pilot or a two hour movie is impossible.

How about the Netflix vision of the future of television?

They sum it up saying that "While Internet TV is only a small percent of video viewing today, it will keep growing because:"

• The Internet is getting faster, more reliable and more available;
• Smart TV sales are increasing and eventually every TV will have Wifi and apps;
• Smart TV adapters are getting better and cheaper;
• Tablet and smartphone viewing is increasing;
• Internet TV apps are improving through competition and frequent updates;
• Streaming will be the leading source for 4k/UHD video;
• Internet video advertising is becoming more personalized and relevant;
• TV Everywhere provides a smooth economic transition for existing networks;
• New entrants like Netflix are innovating rapidly and driving improvements.

Do you like "binging" on a commercial free TV series? (I just finished "Orange is the New Black"). Do you agree with Netflix' reasons for the future growth of IPTV? Are they enough to overcome the power of the incumbents?

Check out Kevin Spacey's lecture:

Reflection by entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly

This post is a bit unusual for me, but it fits because the Internet is the product of business and entrepreneurship as much or more than it is of research and education.

O'Reilly Media is one of earliest Internet companies. O'Reilly started as a technical writer then began publishing books on the Unix operating system. By the time the Web appeared, the company was publishing Internet and programming books and they built the first commercial Web site, which was later sold to AOL. Today O'Reilly Media is a profitable group of enterprises with nearly 500 employees and collective revenues approaching $200 million.

Founder Tim O'Reilly has written a longish blog post in which he recounts the history of the company and talks about what he did right and what he did wrong. He modestly features six key mistakes and the lessons he learned from them, but there is a lot on what he did right as well.

Recommended reading for those interested in tech business and management.

MOOCs, BOOCs, DOCCs and SPOCs

If you do not agree that we are in the midst of an explosion in educational innovation, check this blog post by Daniel Hickey.

We all know that MOOC is a massive open online course, but do you know what a BOOC is? A DOCC? A SPOC?

The post contains links to examples of links to each. (Well, no links to SPOCs).

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Update 9/17/2013

+Mark Vickers added OLAs to the acronym list, but OLAs -- OnLine Activities -- sound a lot like learning modules, which I and many others (most successfully the Khan Academy) have used for years.

Experience casting tabs

The other day, I posted a note on my experience with the Chromecast radio. Today, I will talk about experience with video.

My Chromecast works well when showing video from a cast-enabled site like YouTube or casting a Chrome browser tab with still images in it, but poorly when casting a tab with streaming video. (Note that "to cast" is becoming a word, like "to google" or "podcast").

The first thing I tried was casting a tab in which I was surfing the Web and stepping through a Google Docs presentation. The TV image was shifted a little bit to the left, cutting off a few pixels; there was a noticeable, but sub-second, delay in updating the TV screen and data compression made small text difficult to read. The performance was imperfect, but generally satisfactory. (PDF documents do not work because they are handled outside the browser).

As you see below, the CPU load was seldom over 50% of capacity and usually less than 30%, but that was enough to turn the fan on. (My laptop was plugged in).

Next, I went to the CommonCraft Web site and watched a video that played in a 579 by 294 pixel widow. I picked Commoncraft because they make simple teaching videos with little movement on the screen. As you see below, the CPU load increased, but I was able to watch an entire video, which started at the arrow point:

For my final test, I watched a video of the Daily Show in a 512 by 288 pixel window. This is faster-changing video than Commoncraft's. At first, the video played satisfactorily, but CPU use quickly moved up to the vicinity of 100% and the the audio and video degraded severely. The audio went before the video, but the program was un-watchable.

It should be noted that I ran these test using a three-year old Dell Precision M4400 laptop with a 3.06 Ghz core duo CPU with 8 GB of memory running 64-bit Windows, connected to an old 802.11a/g Wifi network. The results would have been better with a newer, faster laptop or an 802.11n network.

The bottom line is that, given my computer and network, tab-casting is fine for PowerPoint presentations and Web surfing, but it is not up to streaming video in a window, much less streaming full-screen video. That is the bad news. The good news is that this is Chromecast version 1.0. Redesign and Moore's will take care of the performance problems soon enough.

For more on variables that can affect tab-casting quality, see this Google help page.

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Update 9/16/2013

+Zarthan South pointed out that my laptop lacks Google's minimum CPU for casting video tabs. With Windows 7, one should have a Core i3 or equivalent for standard quality video casting (http://bit.ly/17E3agi). My laptop is fast enough to cast stills like Web pages and slide presentations, which is quite useful. Note also that RAM utilization was around 3GB while running these tests.

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Update 10/22/2013

K. J. Kim has found that switching to the developer channel a Chromebook significantly improved video tab casting.  That shows that Google is continuing to improve the Chromebook.

I love my Chromecast, but the radio is kind of lame.

I ordered a Chromecast right after they came out, but Amazon back ordered mine. It came a few days ago.

I plugged it in to my TV set, ran the setup and discovered that it could not connect to my home WiFi network. After fooling around with the base station position and antenna and using Google's short HDMI extender cable to move the Chromecast to the side a bit and change its orientation, I eventually established a weak (2 bar) connection.

I used Metageek's inSSIDer software running on my laptop to see the signal strength on the clearest 2.4 Ghz channel available in my TV room and, as you see here, it varied from -50 to -60db.

That is not a terrific signal, but I have a Roku box plugged into the same TV set and neither it or my laptop or my wife's iPad have difficulty connecting to the WiFi network from that room.

I looked online for radio sensitivity specs, and discovered that the folks at Tom's Hardware have speculated that the Chromecast uses an AzureWave AW-NH387 with 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth and FM radios. (If that is the case, I wonder if Google has plans for the Bluetooth and FM radios).

They came to that conclusion based on this photograph from Google's FCC Chromecast application:

(If you want to have some geek fun and see how they tested the device, check Google's report to the FCC).

Google's tests show that the Chromecast and its power supply satisfy FCC noise requirements, but I am still in the dark on the sensitivity of the radio.

Is there some way to get finer grained feedback on connection strength than the ill-defined "number of bars?" It would be nice if there were better specs so we could compare devices and guess ahead of time whether they would work in our locations. For now, I can only conclude that the radios in my laptop, my wife's iPad and our Roku box are better than the Chromecast radio. (By the way, a couple years ago, I found that the radio in my wife's iPad was weaker than my laptop radio).

Lest I end on a sour note, you should know that I love the Chromecast and expect to find Chromecasts connected to and built into many future TVs and boxes like my Roku. Chromecast radios will improve with time and I will upgrade my lame WiFi network to 802.11n. I won't be surprised if one day we find all sorts of "Chromecasts" plugged into formerly dumb, disconnected things like heaters, air conditioners, washing machines, etc.

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Update 9/12/2013

Google decided to place the Chromecast antenna inside the dongle case, which means it has to zig around chips and is constrained by the size of the case, so your WiFi reception will depend upon the location and orientation of the dongle itself. Luckily, I was able to get my Chromecast to connect to my home network by fiddling with its orientation and getting it away from the TV set using Google's short HDMI extender, but I was flying blind.

Anyone who has adjusted the rabbit ears on an analog TV set knows that reception varies with the orientation and position of the antenna -- you see the picture improve or get worse as you move the antenna. Unfortunately, the Chromecast gives you no feedback as you move it around.

If you succeed in connecting, Google displays the "strength" of the connection using "bars" like on your cell phone. But those bars are a course, undefined measure of signal strength and they are not shown while you are adjusting the position of the Chromecast.

Google should let you monitor connection strength as you move the Chromecast around. The familiar bars would not be good enough -- you need something more precise like, say, a two digit number or a graphic meter of some sort. The user would not have to know what the meter was displaying, just that it increased or decreased with signal strength.

The dongle would need to be mounted on a swivel that mechanically constrained it once you found the optimal orientation.

Another alternative would be to use an external antenna something like this:

It seems that Google tried to emulate Apple with the Chromecast. It comes in a really nice box and all the user has to do is plug and play -- let's not bother them with details like signal strength and adjusting the antenna position. That is great when it works, frustrating when it doesn't.

Google and edX combine their strengths to form mooc.org

In previous posts, I've said universities and university systems (like mine) could host open source MOOC platforms from Google and MIT edX, allowing faculty and others to experiment with innovative educational technology -- to develop focused instructional modules to supplement their own courses or complete MOOCs.

Better yet, I've suggested that Google could offer a hosted service where individuals could do the same without support of their university -- a "YouTube" for MOOCs and modular teaching material.

It looks like we are moving in the direction of the second suggestion. Google and edX announce today that they will be collaborating on MOOC.org.

The service is slated to be available in mid 2014, and it sounds as though a lot of the details (including revenue sources) are yet to be decided, but open software, open data and collaboration are clear values of this non-profit entity.

You can read more in a Google blog post and an MIT press release. Here are a couple of quotes from each along with some parenthesized comments:

Google blog post

We support the development of a diverse education ecosystem, as learning expands in the online world. Part of that means that educational institutions should easily be able to bring their content online and manage their relationships with their students. (I hope they support individual teachers, students and non-academics who want to develop teaching material in addition to supporting educational institutions).

Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. (It sounds as though the edX and Google platforms will be combined. Some time ago, Stanford also rolled their MOOC effort into edX. Perhaps competition from Udacity and Coursera has been a factor in driving this consolidation.)

edX press release:

In collaboration with Google, edX will build out and operate MOOC.org, a new site for non-xConsortium universities, institutions, businesses, governments and teachers to build and host their courses for a global audience. (This sounds like "EdX for the rest of us" -- those who cannot afford edX fees and are not at elite universities).

Google shares our mission to improve learning both on-campus and online. Working with Google's world-class engineers and technology will enable us to advance online, on-campus and blended learning experiences faster and more effectively than ever before ... This new site for online learning will provide a platform for colleges, universities, businesses and individuals around the world to produce high-quality online and blended courses. MOOC.org will be built on Google infrastructure. (It sounds like Google is bringing their Hangout, Live Stream, YouTube, Plus, etc. infrastructure to the party).

The devil is, no doubt, in the details, but this combination of MIT's educational expertise and reputation, Google's vast infrastructure and the lofty goals of both organizations might turn out to be revolutionary.

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Update 9/18/2013

Mooc.org announced that they would be offering certified multi-course sequences as well as single courses. Do you think that this sort of thing might become more important than a traditional college degree in the job market? If so, for what sorts of jobs?

While I am glad to see them move in this direction, I also hope they make room for creating and discovering sub-course modules on focused topics. (I am a long-time modular teaching material nut).

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Update 11/4/2013

Stanford, which had committed to the edX platform some time ago, has announced additional support.
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Uppdate 12/1/2013

There is a discussion of this post on Slashdot.
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Update 12/16/2013

EdX drops plans to match students with potential employers. In a failed trial -- they tried to match 868 high-performing students with job openings and none got a job -- they ran into competition from traditional headhunters and codified hiring criteria in HR departments. They are considering other revenue generating options like licensing courses to universities and other types of organization (sounds a bit like the shift toward vocational training at Udacity) and hosting and supporting their open source course delivery platform. If they were to pursue the latter option, how would that impact their collaboration with Google at Mooc.org?

Reflections on teaching a freshman composition MOOC at Georgia Tech

Karen Head has written a series of blog posts on a Freshman Composition MOOC she and her Georgia Tech colleagues (a team of 19) taught using the Coursera platform with support from the Gates Foundation. (The course name, composition, reflects the legacy of a course catalog -- this was a course on written, visual and oral communication).

Anyone thinking of teaching a MOOC (in any subject area) should read these columns. They are an open minded presentation -- the good and the bad. One is left with the feeling that today's Coursera platform is not up to the task of teaching a MOOC on a topic that requires substantive, subjective feedback on student work. That's the bad news. The good news is that we are at the start of a period of innovation and Dr Head and her colleagues learned a lot from the experience that will improve their classroom teaching. She says she is glad she engaged in the process, stating that "It is important, I think, to be part of things rather than only yelling from the sidelines (no matter which side you support)."

The following are quotes from the blog posts, with a few parenthetical remarks I added. (I hope I found all the posts).

Here a MOOC, There a MOOC: But Will It Work for Freshman Composition?
January 24, 2013

I am no Luddite. However, I will admit to some reservations about whether a MOOC is the ideal platform for teaching writing. I have argued passionately for keeping composition classes small. Ultimately, I decided to pilot this MOOC because I am open to the possibilities, but I prefer to discover firsthand whether it works.

A representative from Coursera (the platform we must use) contacted recipients of the Gates MOOC grants asking all the recipients to form a collaborative led by a Coursera representative to discuss course design. While the explicit message was one of helpfulness, the implicit message felt intrusive and seemed more about Coursera’s desire to ensure a certain continuity of experience for its users. Since Coursera is a business, I can understand its desire for such consistency. However, ours is a nonprofit project. This creates an obvious tension. (Like the "suits" -- network executives -- who sensor and tamper with creative decisions in a movie or television production).

Of MOOCs and Mousetraps
February 21, 2013

From the beginning we have had logistical issues getting a large group together on a regular basis. After only three meetings, we decided to break into two main subgroups: one focusing on curricular decisions and the other on technical ones.

Collaboration is an important element, and since my last post, the instructional designers of three other MOOCs devoted to introductory composition have joined us to create a consortium to discuss best practices. Those MOOCs will also be offered this spring. Our discussions have highlighted our biggest challenge—finding an experienced MOOC instructional designer, or at least a platform specialist.

Sweating the Details of a MOOC in Progress
April 3, 2013

Our consortium’s members collectively decided to add intention statements to our syllabi, stating that our courses are not equivalent to a semester-long college-composition course. The main reason for that decision is not that we believe our courses have inferior content but that there is simply no way to adequately evaluate the writing of thousands of students—something we would need to be able to do to certify their work.

My first video, which advertises the course, took more than an hour to record. It will run approximately three minutes in edited form.

Massive Open Online Adventure -- Teaching a MOOC is not for the faint-hearted (or the untenured)
April 29, 2013

[machine-grading technologies] remain unable to provide substantive evaluation, and I recommend that those who want to learn more on the subject look into the extensive research done by Les Perelman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While it hasn't been smooth sailing, I still see this as an important adventure. I already see the potential for MOOCs to provide certain supplemental content for my traditional classes, freeing me to do more of the work that only I can do with students. This form of a hybrid classroom excites me very much.

Inside a MOOC in Progress
June 21, 2013

It is exciting to see students forming communities within the discussion forums, to help one another with questions about content or technology. Our more ambitious students have developed study guides. Some self-identified writing-and-communication instructors have formed their own forum, to consider how they can use our course to teach their own students.

The most rewarding aspect of the course is the weekly “Hangout” session, live-streamed using Google Air.

... students (with limited and expensive Internet access) have complained about not being able to complete in-video quizzes when they download the lecture videos. (Those of us with experience of the Internet in developing nations would have predicted this).

My limited ability to make key pedagogical choices is the most frustrating aspect of teaching a MOOC. Because of the way the Coursera platform is constructed, such wide-ranging decisions have been hard-coded into the software—decisions that seem to have no educational rationale and that thwart the intent of our course. (The restrictions she describes regard problems with peer review).

Lessons Learned From a Freshman-Composition MOOC
September 6, 2013, 11:58 am

If we define success by the raw numbers, then I would probably say No, the course was not a success ... only 238 students received a completion certificate—meaning that they completed all assignments and received satisfactory scores.

... if we define success by lessons learned in designing and presenting the course, I would say Yes, it was a success. From a pedagogical perspective, nobody on our team will ever approach course design in the same way. We are especially interested in integrating new technologies into our traditional classes for a more hybrid approach.

With that said, I don’t think any of us (writing and communication instructors) would rush to teach another MOOC soon.

If we define success by a true and complete “open” course, I would say No, the course was not a success. I have major concerns about access and privacy in a MOOC format. In many situations, “free” simply isn’t free.

Our MOOC has ended, but a larger, more positive conversation is just beginning.

(Earlier posts about MOOCs).

Nature study: Gaming improves multi-tasking skills in older subjects

As Socrates, Doug Engelbart and many others have noted, we shape our tools, then they shape us. Writing was a useful invention, but our memory has suffered from it. Calculators are handy tools, but my students are not so great at doing arithmetic in their heads.

Like any other medium, the Internet is changing our cognitive abilities. We remember fewer phone numbers now that we have smart phones and when online we read quickly, superficially and carelessly, focusing our attention on the upper left hand portion of the screen. Our attention spans have been reduced and there is evidence that multitasking is inefficient.

But, it is not all bad news. Anyone who has watched a child construct 3-D worlds in Mindcrafter knows that they are masters at storing mental models of complex structures and navigating through them. There have also been studies showing that video game players are faster at making some kinds of decisions than non-gamers. (I bet basketball point guards, baseball players and football quarterbacks are great video game players).

A team of researchers led by Adam Gazzaley at UC San Francisco has just published a study showing improved cognitive ability in older people after practicing with a specially designed video game called NeuroRacer.

Playing the game helped older people multitask by improving their working memory and sustained attention. As their skills increased, so did activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is associated with cognitive control, in a manner that correlated with improvements in sustained-attention tasks. Activity also increased in a neural network linking the prefrontal cortex with the back of the brain.

The study was published in Nature and you can hear a podcast on it here and see a video summary here.

Studies like this one strike me as rather "brittle" -- focused on narrow abilities from which it hard to generalize, but the research is just beginning.

Surveying the (changing) experience of our students

I teach a class on digital literacy in the Internet era, and the backgrounds and digital experience of my students change every year. (See the Beloit College Mindset List for general changes in student backgrounds).

As such, I start the term with a student background survey, which serves three purposes 1) I use the survey results to assign the students to study groups 2) to let the students see how their background compares with others and 3) to provide an example of an Internet-based service -- online survey processing -- which we can discuss in class.

You can see this term's survey results here. (I've omitted the answers to open-ended question like what is your major (they vary considerably), what audio, video or image editor do you use (most answer "none" to all three) and what is your relevant work experience).

I would appreciate suggestions for changes to my survey -- what else would be useful and informative to know?

Do you conduct a similar survey? If so, what do you ask?

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Update 9/8/2013

Thirty three freshmen, one sophomore, seven juniors and fourteen seniors completed the survey. Their majors were:

It's not easy to leave Godaddy

A few years ago, I started a blog for old athletes. It has been dormant for a while, but I hope to restart activity on it some day, so I have hung on to the domain name oldathlete.com.

It was about to expire, and I decided to move it from Godaddy to Hover.com.

It turns out that to do that, you have to turn off domain locking and jump through a few other hoops. I jumped through the hoops, but when I tried to unlock the domain, I got this dialog box on the Gogdaddy site:

No problem, I just clicked the off radio button, but as you see, the option to save that setting turned off.

Its not easy to get out of Godaddy's roach motel.

San Jose State and Udacity release results for summer pilot courses

San Jose State University (SJSU) and Udacity have run two rounds of trial online courses. The pass rates in the first round were poor, but a press release from SJSU and a blog post from Udacity report improvement in the second trial, which was run this summer.

As you see, the pass rates were better in the summer than the spring for every class and the online students in two of the summer classes had higher pass rates than on-campus students.

Both Udacity and SJSU say they are "encouraged" by these results, but there were differences between the terms that confound the data and make it difficult to explain, say, the improvement in elementary statistics or the poor results in entry level math. The three courses that had been offered in the spring were revised, but the numbers of students in the classes and their backgrounds and motivations were also substantially different.

For example, the spring classes were relatively small and the students were all trying to earn credit. In the summer, there were more students and their motivations varied, as shown here:

This is not surprising. I have noted earlier that college credit motivates relatively few MOOC students and, in fact, non-credit students may turn out to be the most important audience for and customers of online classes.

The results of this trial are far from definitive, but this is a time of rapid innovation and such experiments are to be encouraged.

Speaking of innovation, I cannot bring myself to conclude this note without pointing out that "passing with a grade of C" seems like a poor metric for "success" in a course. That is the traditional university criteria, but the Internet gives us the ability to break courses into fine-grained modules and to provide more precise, informative measures of success.
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Update 9/12/2013

San Jose State has released a report on the Udacity experiment entitled "Preliminary Summary SJSU+ Augmented Online Learning Environment." The report author is not the preliminary investigator for the study, Elaine D. Collins, but was written "for" her by consultants at the RP Group.

It is reviewed in two posts:

1. Chronicle of Higher Education, "Few Surprises in NSF Report on San Jose State U. Test of Udacity Courses article"

2. Inside Higher Ed, "After weeks of delays, San Jose State U. releases research report on online courses"
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Update 11/18/2013

The academic senate at San Jose State is considering a resolution to restrict the power of the administration to unilaterally enter into course contracts -- to keep control with the academic departments.

The Academic Senate is expected to vote on Monday on a proposed policy that would forbid the university to sign contracts with outside technology providers without the approval of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in whatever department would be affected.

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Update 11/25/2013

The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed two leaders on opposite sides of the MOOC debate at San Jose State and they discover common ground. Anti-MOOC professor Peter Hadreas learned that pro-MOOC professor Khosrow Ghadiri has been using MOOC material to run a flipped class -- not merely having students enroll in a MOOC -- and that it is very labor intensive, taking 80 hours per week. They agree that pedagogical innovation and experiments are good things.

I also noted that one of the professors is an engineer and one is a philosopher. Can you guess which is which? Which do you think spends 80 hours per week on his teaching?

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Update 12/13/2013

Georgia Tech designs its Udacity pilot to avoid failure. They distance the themselves from Udacity's debacle at San Jose State University.
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Update 12/18/2013

San Jose State will resume their testing of the material developed for three online courses -- Elementary Statistics, Introduction to Programming and General Psychology in the spring semester. Enrollment will be capped at 70 students for the statistics class, 150 students for the programming course and 35 students for the general psychology class. At least half of the seats for programming and statistics will go to SJSU students and the rest will go to CSU students on other campuses. The course will use SJSU's LMS, Canvas. This sounds like a traditional online class using the material that was developed for the Udacity trial.
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Update 2/2/2014

In the fall of 2012, students in two traditional sections of an introductory electrical-engineering course earned passing grades at rates of 57 percent and 74 percent, respectively. In an experimental third section, which was “flipped” to incorporate the MIT videos, the pass rate was 95 percent, but they did not adhere strictly to the MIT material.

In the spring of 2013 they also ran three sections, one of which used edX content. In the traditional sections, students passed at rates of 79 percent and 82 percent. In the experimental section, the pass rate was 87 percent.

The spring experimental section followed the MIT curriculum than did the fall 2012 section -- they covered more material.

The professor, Khosrow Ghadiri (mentioned above), said the pass rates of the spring-2013 trial should not be compared with those of the fall-2012 trial because the students learned different material and took different examinations. In the fall, he used the MIT content to help teach his own syllabus. In the spring, he used the MIT professor’s content and learning objectives.

Al Jazeera bucks the IPTV cord-cutting trend

We hear criticism of US TV news. Local news tends to feature a lot of "if it bleeds, it leads" stories about crime and police chases. National cable news is highly partisan. Network news is redundant and sound-bite driven.

Al Jazeera has started a new cable offering, Al Jazeera America, which they say will present serious, in-depth news from a global perspective. That sounds pretty good to me. (For more on their coverage philosophy, plans and staff, check this recent OnTheMedia podcast and transcript).

But, it turns out that the cable/satellite companies strong-armed them into dropping their Internet-streaming news service in return for being carried:

So, folks who want Al Jazeera news are now forced to get it as part of an expensive bundle on satellite or cable. As a cord cutter, I am out of luck.

Technology imitates art -- why Google switched to Web encryption (https)

I was struck by a cool exchange while listening to a This Week in Google podcast. The topic was security and privacy and the exchange was between hosts Jeff Jarvis and Leo Laporte and their guest Matt Cutts, a Google engineer.

The exchange (1 min, 10 sec) began with Jarvis asking Cutts what led to Google's deciding to use encryption (HTTPS) for Web requests.

It turns out that Cutts had the authority to pursue the change on his own. He decided to switch to HTPPS after reading Cory Doctrow's Little Brother. He was also influenced by Chinese hackers having attacked Google in 2009.

This is a cool example fiction influencing the real world -- reminiscent of the role the StarTrek communicator played in the development of the flip phone.

Of course the Star Trek communicator is not the only example of life imitating life -- Star Trek also featured touch screen tablets long before the iPad came out.

I don't know if the iPad designers were thinking about Star Trek tablets, but they certainly had seen Knowledge Navigator a widely viewed concept video produced by Apple's higher education group. (The Knowledge Navigator video is preceded by a one-minute introduction).

As you see, this video depicts a tablet with voice recognition and considerable "intelligence." What will Siri and Google Now be like in twenty years?

Going back to the early 1800s, the Jaquard loom, which was controlled by punch cards, was capable of automatically weaving intricate tapestries like the one shown here:

Charles Babbage was familiar with the Jaquard loom and owned one of the Jaquard portraits. That led to his automating of computation in his Analytical Engine -- the precursor to our programmable computers.




Can you think of other examples where art has inspired invention or scientific discovery?

Sixty Minutes segment -- say goodbye to anonymity

Scott McNealy (1999), then Sun Microsystems CEO: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

Eric Schmidt (2009), then Google CEO: “If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

CBS Sixty Minutes (8/25/2013): "Say goodbye to anonymity."

With all the security flap surrounding Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, I posted a note on face recognition. I have updated that post several times, and the latest update seems worth an independent blog post:

Last night CBS Sixty Minutes broadcasted this segment on face recognition.



The video and a transcript are online and the segment tag line, "say goodbye to anonymity," reveals the editorial slant.

Think of all the people you have identified and who have identified you in Facebook or Google Plus photographs. They are a database against which to run a facial recognition algorithm and once they have recognized a face, they can match it to the profile of interests, demographic data, likes and dislikes of that person.

Sixty Minutes emphasized commercial applications -- receiving a discount coupon for your favorite beverage seconds after you walk into a restaurant or seeing personalized ads at the mall.

They also mentioned the database of photographs of criminals the FBI is ammassing. By next year they expect to be able to search by face as well as fingerprint and DNA.

The Web site includes a video segment titled "Facebook and the FBI," which was not broadcast.



The FBI representative says all the right things, but these days government credibility is not all that high. As Bruce Schneier points out in this Atlantic Monthly article, the government is relying on industry to do its surveillance.

Does any of this worry you? How long until Google or Facebook gets a court order demanding to know where you were yesterday afternoon?

Apple patents the ability to disable mobile cameras and connectivity

Apple has a patent that would let police or others turn off mobile cameras and wireless communication.

I am not a constitutional scholar, but don't we have a right to record the acts of police in public places? To capture images like these:

The photos show police using dogs and fire hoses during civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, beating Rodney King, killing of Kelly Thomas and using pepper spray at Occupy Wall Street.

While the patent does use "covert police or government operations" as an example of an application, it also mentions legitimate applications, for example, stopping cameras in a locker room or other place where one has a reasonable expectation of privacy.

As is the case with many technologies, we should control its use, not its existence.

ACLU summary of NSA surveillance actiivty

I have not posted anything on Edward Snowden or the activity of the NSA, because so many others are doing so; however, I have found a relatively concise summary of the NSA surveillance activity with links to many supporting resources. It is a good way to catch up with the story.

Note that it was published by the American Civil Liberties Union, so focuses on violation of privacy guarantees. I would love to see a similar summary with supporting resources that is focused on positive outcomes as a result of NSA surveillance.

Google Chromecast delay -- production or legal or hardball?

It may have been a data input error or perhaps Amazon has been hacked, but I received an email on August 8 saying the Google Chromecast I had ordered on July 27 would be delivered in mid October.

I checked the Amazon Web site, and, sure enough they were now saying it "usually ships in 2-3 months:"

As we noted last week, the first production run sold out in a few days, and, at the time I placed my order, they said it would ship in 3-4 weeks:

On August 3, they seemed to be on schedule:

This is a simple electronic device -- why are they having so much trouble?  Why did the shipping date slip?  Are they poor production planners?  Having trouble getting parts?  Having legal problems? Playing hardball with Amazon?

If it is legal problems, it may be a trademark conflict with Chromecast.com, a Web development company.  Here is their Web site:

Note the link to legal information near the bottom of the screen.  Follow the link and you will see a lot of legal information.  There is also some very faint black-on-blue text at the bottom of the page.  It is illegible on my display, but here is what it says:

© 2013 Chromecast Inc. All rights reserved. Chromecast, Chromecast Digital Media, chromeTone, The rADium LDAP suite, and project|aurora, are trademarks of Chromecast Inc. and may not be used without written permission.

Did Google forget to get that written permission? If so, the can always change the name to "Metro."

Perhaps they are just playing hardball with Amazon.  It turns out the Google Play Web site still says the Chromecast ships in 2-3 weeks.  If they cut Amazon's quota to induce people like me to cancel their Amazon orders and order from the Google Play Store, they may gain a few sales, but, as a Google customer, that strikes me as doing evil.

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Update 8/9/2013

At first I thought my Amazon delivery date may have been an error, but a day later, Google is still promising 2-3 weeks for shipping, Amazon 2-3 months and Best Buy is just out of stock period:

This pisses me off a bit and must also rankle Amazon.  At $35, there cannot be much (any?) profit in a Chromecast, so it seems foolish.  I guess Google wants me to cancel my Amazon order, but I'll wait till Amazon ships it in October.

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Update 8/10/2013

Amazon sent out an email saying "customers who placed orders prior to August 7 should receive their orders in the coming weeks and into mid-September." The expected ship date for new orders remains 2-3 months.

The largest data center in Los Angeles sells for $437.5 million or $660 per square foot

From the outside, One Wilshire looks like an ordinary office building.  About a third of the building is occupied by offices, but the rest is an Internet exchange point and data center -- full of routers and servers belonging to about 300 voice and data service providers. It is the key US hub for connection to Asian undersea cables. That makes it some of the most expensive real estate in the world,  It just sold for $437.5 million.

Conduits rising from the pavement give a clue that this is not an ordinary office building.

LA Times photo

Moving inside, we see the "meet me room," where networks exchange data. This is one of twelve images in an exhibit by the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

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If you like lurking inside large data centers, check this photo tour of a Google data center.  Here s a sample image:

The Syncom satellites and Arthur C. Clarke

The LA Times ran a cool article on the development of the Syncomm satellites. Syncom 1 failed, but Syncom 2, which was launched 50 years ago on July 26, 1963, succeded in transmitting voice and image-only TV, and President Kennedy used it for a call to the Prime Minister of Nigeria in August 1963. Syncom 3, which launched August 19, 1964 was used to telecast the 1964 Olympic Games.

The Times article describes the three Syncom engineers, shown below, and their project.

The Times article relates the trouble they had selling the project, but in retrospect, it ended up being a very small investment that launched an industry and re-shaped global culture. (It was similar to the Internet in that respect). The article also contains an interactive graphic showing the satellites currently in orbit.

My only criticism of the article is that it gives the impression that the lead engineer, Harold Rosen, was the first to conceive of a geostationary communication satellite. That concept was suggested by others and fleshed out and popularized as a communication tool by the famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in a 1945 letter to the editor and subsequent article in Wireless World Magazine. This graph, from Clarke's article, shows the equilibrium altitude for a geosynchronous satellite:

So, in addition to reading the LA Times article, I'd recommend checking these out:

• Facsimile of Clarke's letter to the editor on peacetime uses of V2 rockets after the war.
• OCR version of Clarke's October 1945 article Extra-Terrestrial Relays.
• Facsimile of Clarke's October 1945 article Extra-Terrestrial Relays.

Time flies -- the Earth now has a fiber-optic nervous system that far outstrips communication satellite capacity. That would have been hard to predict in 1963, but if you think Arthur C. Clarke would have been surprised, read his book on the cabling of The Earth, How the World Was One.

Chromecast blunders -- does Google need a few MBAs?

Google's new Chromecast, a device for streaming video on a TV set, might turn out to be terrific, but they have bungled the marketing and production.

I was on the Yet Another Tech Show podcast Wednesday and, based on what they had read, all the panelists agreed that Google's new Chromecast was a terrific product at a no-brainer price.  So, being a cord cutter, I ordered one.

After I placed my order, I learned that I had missed the deadline for a three-month Netflix credit premium. I was satisfied with the purchase at first, but now I am somewhat pissed at Google for giving all those folks who ordered a few days earlier a better deal.

It also turned out that Google blew the production planning -- my Chromecast is expected to ship in three or four weeks.

I came across a tweet saying that nearly 250,000 people had ordered them before the Netflix promotion was pulled -- who plans logistics and production?

I had to wait, but it will be worth waiting for, right? I hope so, but astute blogger Bob Cringley suspects that the Google demo overstated the capability of the Chromecast and when I checked the customer reviews on Amazon, I found that, while most are favorable, there is some dissent.  Some folks could not get it to work, experienced poor quality audio or video or discovered that they needed a second port to power the device if they had an older TV with pre-version 1.4 HDMI ports.

I didn't cancel my order -- I still hope to love the thing, but I can't help wondering if Google, with all their PhD engineers and scientists couldn't use a few more folks with MBAs in production management and marketing. Remember the Nexus Q?

Review of online coverage of the 2013 Tour de France from NBC and ITV4 (UK)

I watched the Tour de France online again this year. (My reporting on the Tour from last year). In order to compare NBC's coverage in the US with that of French ITV4, I subscribed to NBC's US coverage ($29) and also watched ITV4 via an English proxy server. Both used the same video feed, but differed in several ways -- lets's look at some of the main differences.

Video players and interaction

The NBC player ran in its own Silverlight window as shown here:

Zooming in on the controls, we see (from left to right) that the user can share a link on Facebook, Twitter, etc., adjust the speaker volume, rewind 15 seconds with a single click, see how far behind the live stream they are on the timeline, jump to the live stream, reveal running commentary (tweets) and links to highlight videos and go full screen.

I preferred to leave the running commentary and links to highlights hidden, but here is a screen shot with them revealed:

NBC used what seemed to be the same player in the 2012 Tour de France, and you can see a more complete description here.

The NBC experience was far better and more interactive than that of ITV4. ITV4 emulated watching TV, merely displaying a live video stream inside a Web page. As you see in this screen shot, the user could only stop/watch the live stream, adjust the volume or toggle between full screen and windowed mode.

NBC clearly has a better, interactive video player.  It may be that ITV4 just streamed the live stream because there was a large fee for the right to archive it.

Streaming performance

My laptop has 8GB of memory and a solid state drive and my cable service is typically 15 Gbps, but my three year old CPU/graphic controller is not up to the task of watching full screen video on a TV set, so I did most of my watching on the laptop screen.

When I tried to go to full screen on a TV set, the CPU fell steadily behind, whether I was watching NBC or ITV4 or using Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer.  NBC would begin at its maximum speed of 2.5 Mbps, but it would automatically step down to 350 Kbps, then start dropping frames.   ITV4 did not display their speeds, but they seemed to be about the same and the results were also the same.

This is a temporary issue.  A fast laptop would probably be able to keep up with either and future versions of the player software will be more efficient.

Current status presentation

As shown here, ITV4 provided a nice race status display below the video window. Scrolling down further, you saw the overall standings and standings within categories like mountain climbing and sprinting.  It was convenient and easy to access.

Since the NBC player runs in a separate window, one had to open the video player and a Web browser side by side, as shown here, to achieve the same functionality.

Aligning and sizing the two windows was a bit of a bother.  Since one could scroll down and see pretty much the same current status information on both, I'll give ITV4 the edge in convenience.

Ancillary content and archives

NBC had a lot more ancillary content than ITV4.  They had more prepared material and, since they archived the video, a much richer selection of replays.  Ancillary content was organized as shown in the tabs below.  For example, the Track tab showed the positions of the groups of riders on the course on a Google map.  

NBC easily wins the archive comparison. They saved preview videos and full stage replays for each stage along with 213 stage highlight videos and 37 historical and human interest "tour extra" videos. ITV4 archived only a three minute highlight of each stage and ten short tour extras.  

That is the good news on NBC. The bad news is that they deleted last year's archive shortly after the race and will probably do the same this year. The BBC and NBC also deleted their 2012 Olympic archives.

Amazon taught us the value of "long tail" content years ago, but these guys don't get it. The cost of keeping an event archive online is very small and they are erasing history.

I guess it comes down to money -- couldn't they cover the the costs with ads or access fees? Perhaps the problem lies with the Tour organizers.  I assume NBC had to pay a fee for the right to archive the live stream, which was used to provide the ancillary material and the interactive player described above.  If that is the case, the Tour should keep the archives online.

Advertising

ITV4 drove me nuts with commercials.  (Since I cut the cord a few years ago, I have really come to hate commercials).  You see the same ads every time you load their Web site.  I was surprised to see that the Nintendo Wii was a major sponsor in Europe, but I really got tired of seeing the same stupid ad.

But, that was minor compared to their commercial breaks during slow times in the race.  I counted one time -- they ran nine straight commercials without a stop, which seemed interminable.  (Since both NBC and ITV4 share a video stream, NBC cut to historical or informative videos during the long commercial breaks).

NBC had fewer ads.  Like ITV4, they played two commercials when you first came to the site.  One was a Microsoft ad favorably comparing a Surface tablet to an iPad.  It made the Surface look good, but, after seeing the same ad over and over, it became an irritant.

NBC also had banner ads above the video screen at times, but they were less obtrusive and frequently turned off.  I hardly noticed them, which also makes me wonder how effective they are.

The ads were much easier to take on NBC, but they were irritating, especially so in view of the fact that NBC charged $29 for the event.

That's my summary of the experience.  It is clear that both the technology and the business model are evolving, but the bottom line for me is that I prefer to pay NBC $29 to reduce the number of commercials and to get interactivity and archiving.  Being able to pause, have breakfast and resume where I had left off was enough to sell me.