Television: “ tremendous advances during the first part of this century…”

I love reading about tremendous advances.

“The story of television, though equally as interesting, is not nearly as well known as that of wireless, possibly because in this age of scientific achievement people are inclined to take every new wonder as a matter of course.”

“Television, as a form of public entertainment, is yet many years away, not just “around the corner” as the popular press has been saying for some time.”

“Many great strides have been made in the last five or six decades but the obstacles to be overcome are still many and formidable, and until at least some of these difficulties are conquered television will remain in the hands of the research engineers.”

“The early demonstrations were followed by a transmission from London to New York, and from London to the liner Berengaria (http://www.bairdtelevision.com/ ) in mid ocean, on which occasion the wireless operator had the distinction of being the first man to see his fiancée by wireless.”

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I wonder how many would see these sentences and think they could be from an article in the Swinburne College magazine – “Open Door”, November 1935?



The writer, Alec H Clyne, in his article entitled “Television: its development and present state” proposes that he will “deal with the more outstanding developments in television made up to the present time, and to outline some of the systems now in the hands of the research engineers, with their attendant difficulties”. He concludes with “…”I have endeavoured to deal with the optical side of television, chiefly for the non technical reader.”

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Now for the present:


Future CD's to be a digital Aladdin's cave
Story by David Adams
Imagine being able to put your entire DVD collection on a single disc. And not just your collection, but also that of your family, friends and neighbours … the contents, in fact, of as many as 200,000 DVDs.

It sounds a stretch of imagination, but this is the aim of Professor Min Gu and his team at Swinburne University of Technology’s Centre for Micro-Photonics.

They are three years into a fiveyear project that is looking at how nanotechnology – particularly the use of nanoscopic particles – can be used to exponentially increase the amount of information contained on a single disc.

Their ultimate aim is to be able to include as much as a petabyte (PB) – 1015 or one quadrillion bytes – of data on a single disc, an amount 20,000 times greater than the amount of data currently able to be stored on a Blu-ray Disc, which is a high-density optical disc format. “The idea is to incorporate nanostructured material and to increase the data capacity without necessarily increasing the size of the CD or DVD disc,” says Professor Gu, who is director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics and leading the $1 million project.

From “Swinburne Magazine” March 2008

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Here are two perfect illustrations of the ever present theme at Swinburne – technology, research and explanation

-73 years apart?

So You Want to Be a Blogging Star?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/technology/personaltech/20basics.html?em&ex=1206676800&en=9d3733b8625e0d92&ei=5087%0A

Here is something of a primer for the bloggers among us.

Some of the paragraph headings:

Don’t expect to get rich.

Write about what you want to write about, in your own voice.

Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule.

Just post it already!

Keep a regular rhythm.

Join the community, such as it is.
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There are some good links to famous and successful (?) bloggers: http://www.blogmaverick.com/http://www.blogmaverick.com/

Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking

Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/technology/23digi.html?ex=1221883200&en=6282d3c9731ebd9c&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=TE-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M038-OP-0308-L1&WT.mc_ev=click&mkt=TE-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M038-OP-0308-L1



I came across this item in the New York Times. The fact that it speaks of the premise that I espouse incessantly, of course made it alluring for me. I itch to pass it on to all those out there who are doomsayers or want to reinvent (and you spend), reinvent (you spend) like a snake oil merchant.

Here are snippets:

"The weight of legacy is underestimated, according to John Staudenmaier, editor of the journal Technology and Culture, because innovation is so often portrayed as a bold break with the past. A few stories of technological achievement fit that mold, like the Manhattan Project, but they are rare indeed."


"…But the old technology or business often finds a sustainable, profitable life. Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways. A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media."

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I think the points made are worth bearing in mind as we consider our strategies for our library future. It is the business of conducting our library operations that is paramount, not the latest technology and who is using or not using what.

Youth have too much time on their hands and too much money

“…there is one fault in the present system of bringing up [children] ..is the fact that there is too much ease, pleasure and sport and youth has too much money…and too many opportunities to gratify their desire for pleasure….they would be more skilled …and succeed in business, if life was not so easy for them and they did not have so many opportunities for wasting time in material pleasures.
To those who want to get on in life and want to be successful, concentrate your ambitions and ability on the better things in life, which are infinitely more important than the frivolous things that appeal so readily to youth in this country.”*





* Sydney Myer
Governing Director of the Myer Emporium

Extract from an address to Swinburne students in the 1931 June edition of Open Door, the College Magazine

Who would have thought to call the anthropologist in to find out what students in libraries (really) want?

I came across this survey through a Google alert. I glanced at it to see if my colleagues who are deeply into this kind of information may be interested.

After a quick look, even I was interested in some of the points made about students, especially about those millennial ones, who are supposed to be a cohort, as opposed to being individuals.

The premise of the (yet another) survey of library users is that an anthropologist was called in to undertake some of the research. The chapter headings include: “Library design and ethnography”, “Then and now: how today’s students differ”, “The Mommy model of service”.

A particularly interesting chapter focuses on “student-centred “ – Google lists 13,000 results for Student- Centred- Universities. "…consequently to be truly student-centred, we must be cognizant of the high-level student trends, BUT truly fluent in the local campus situation." ( P83)

Here is a link to the survey document: http://www.alastore.ala.org/SiteSolution.taf?_sn=catalog2&_pn=product_detail&_op=2434


I have an electronic copy of the paper on file.

Unfaithful - not loyal - shifting

I really, really want to denote progressive thinking, as in, continuing to progress with Web 2.0. But I cannot stop returning to “plus ca change…”. Web 2.0 has taught me new tricks and methodologies with the internet and now I am the guru in my life outside Swinburne with nearly everyone in my ken, even my two sisters who are both IT experts. One was in computers in 1965 when they were the size of a large room.
I am a genius almost, or at least really clever, because I am au fait with the “communication-with-the-world and outer space aspect of the web – blogs, flickr, you tube and you name it. To them I have defied their view of me as a sound interpreter of most things modern as new/repackaged versions of the old ways – but with bells on. However, I am becoming a bit of a pariah among my family and friends in dealing with blogs and facebook (the latter I just did the 23 things exercise as I had to).

Where is my well- and often- espoused scepticism?

As Kath would say …I have 3 things to say, or she says something like that:

1 I have forgotten or am now ignoring a lot of what I learnt about the 23 things I had no interest in – google docs, Facebook, LibraryThing, RSS feeds. I admire my colleagues’ testing of the tools we have learnt about - Library 2.0, or why I’m not running off to join the cult just yet; Wikis: Not all that wiki

2 I am feeling like I am about to jilt 23 things. Like many quick relationships, I got a tremendous, and I repeat, tremendous boost out of my new-found knowledge through 23 t and I loved participating with my colleagues in the first flushes of action. I also loved the aura I had, around my family, etc. when I dropped words like blog (for heavens sake) and flickr. Admittedly I sounded like a bit of a spruiker, just as friends and family hyperbolize like sales people/ keep pestering me to get Foxtel to open up a whole new world. I say I do not want or need Foxtel's World Movies or Ovation and to watch more Television. They say I would love it. They seem to ignore that I can watch TV on our old 25 year old model (2nd TV for a program not liked by one of us) and can watch old movies late at night or on the DVD player if desired and I like going to the cinema to watch new movies. We have never recorded TV programs, because we did not bother to find out how, but mainly because we would not find time to watch the recorded TV program which was considered a bit like yesterday's newspaper. While Foxtel is not new, I feel the same lack of interest in new phenomena such as 20/20 cricket or new AFL teams in Western Sydney, coffee chains or popular romantic movies – The Enchanted.
I did love Once and I am so proud to see the song from that movie won the Academy award. I felt like a winner with the actual winners.

3 I see that there are millions, if not billions of people who do not need Web 2.0 and millions of these come to Libraries and get what they want, as librarians have been assisting people do this forever, pre and post Web 2.0.

Kluster: People who do online networking get it.

http://kluster.com/


Can Swinburne streak ahead with a similar forum and radicalise the "suggestion box"?

We know that rewards concentrate the minds of our students and staff. Kaufman's program of rewards is based on using a tokens-voting system to determine the best idea worth "prototyping".
There is a plethora of items on the internet about Kluster. We would be wise to keep a very close watching brief on Kluster and Kaufman.

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Some excerpts from the launch of Kluster:

"We are going to allow all the people out there that have new ideas, or thoughts on how to improve something, or expertise on developing concepts to finally realize their potential."

"Every new idea will meet its skeptics. Radical concepts, however, often take a greater amount of time to justify and coax critics onto its side - and Kluster was no exception….. A normal response is, “But, that’s not how this kind of thing is usually done.” Of course this isn’t how it’s usually done! That’s why it’s effective, exciting, and worth while. If this were normal, we wouldn’t be here."

"Ultimately, Kluster is about connecting people and busting open the vacuum so often used in the idea development and evolution process. "We are going to allow all the people out there that have new ideas, or thoughts on how to improve something, or expertise on developing concepts to finally realize their potential. We are breaking down the usual barriers to consumer influence and entrepreneurship"

Ben Kaufman at the launch of Kluster.

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From the "Without Thought" website: http://withoutthought.wordpress.com/

"Watt next?

2008 looks set to be the year of the ‘WE’. Today, Tech Crunch announced the launch of a new online product called Kluster. Kluster is designed to help companies take advantage of a sea of on-line talent and may have a solution to one of the chief concerns bugging democratization; ‘What’s in it for me?’. Kluster appears to have an answer to that quandary with a currency system referred to as ‘Watts’. Tech Crunch quotes CEO Ben Kaufman

“Our Watt system is like a currency. You get a certain amount of Watts. As you do more things you get more Watts. Instead of voting on ideas, you invest your Watts in concepts you like.”

"You have the better brand, the brand built by the people," Kaufman said. "The power of community is the best protection of an idea."