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Our World, Slowed Down 100 Times [VIDEO]

12 Feb

Come with us into a world where everything is slowed down more than 100 times. Thanks to an expert videographer and editor named Tom Guilmette and a Vision Research Phantom Flex camera, we get a peek into an alternative universe — the same one we inhabit, but where the temporal element has been distorted in a variety of ways.

According to Guilmette on his Vimeo site:

“I was working a gig in Vegas with a brand new Phantom Flex high speed digital cinema camera. I had to try it out. In fact, I never did go to bed that night. I opened up a wormhole shooting at 2,564 frames per second.”

Most video ambles by at somewhere between 24 and 30 frames per second when it’s shot and viewed, but when you play back this 2,564 frame-per-second video at the usual speed of 24 or 30fps, things are slowed down so much, you can see things you’d never be able to detect in real time.

I’m always amazed at the way extreme slow motion techniques can turn everyday occurrences into mind-bending art. Beyond that, I’m impressed with the way Guilmette makes his video so entertaining with convincing sound effects, music and sharp editing, further playing with speed differences to create an astonishing timescape.

Want to shoot one of these yourself? Get yourself a Phantom Flex camera, available for rental for $3000 a day.

More About: Digital Cinema, Slow Motion, Tom Guilmette, trending, video, Vision Research Phantom Flex camera

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Where and What Is U.S. Trading Internationally?

11 Feb

The Commerce Department reported today that U.S. trade rebounded strongly in 2010. The following charts detail who we’re trading with, and what we’re trading.

 
 

NASA Considers Space Station Family Portrait

11 Feb

NASA is considering a plan to snap a photo of the International Space Station at its most crowded. The agency hasn’t made a decision yet — but maybe enough public support can convince them to take the most mind-blowing space photo of the Space Shuttle era.

During the final flight of the Space Shuttle Discovery, planned for late February or early March, the International Space Station will play host to a record number of spacecraft. Five new visitors from space agencies all over the world will be docked at the ISS, making the space station the heaviest and largest it has ever been.

This flight will the the one and only chance to capture this cosmic conference on film, before the shuttle is retired for good.

NASA officials are investigating a scheme in which one of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft would undock from the ISS to take the family portrait.

This historic photo op may require an in-flight game of musical chairs. The most reasonable plan, NASA officials decided in a meeting at Johnson Spaceflight Center, is for the Soyuz to undock, swing around the ISS so that the crew within can snap a photo, and then redock, requiring a dual-docking procedure to fit both the Soyuz and Discovery. Several different flight plans are being considered, and each one would give a slightly different view of the ISS.

The spacecraft that would gather to say cheese would hail from all over the world, including Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle-2, Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle-2 (named Johannes Kepler), the Italian-built Permanent Multipurpose Module (named Leonardo), the ExPrESS Logistics Carrier-4 and the Shuttle Discovery.

The procedure would be inconvenient, taking a total of 15 hours and possibly removing crew members from their posts at important moments. But the resulting photo would be one for the ages, and a fitting farewell to the Shuttle.

This wouldn’t be the first time a Soyuz has played photographer for a space station. In 1995, a Soyuz undocked from the Mir space station to photograph the undocking of the Space Shuttle Atlantis (above).

Image: Nikolai Budarin, Russian Space Research Institute, NASA

Via nasaspaceflight.com

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Terrific Visualization of Digital Information Explosion

11 Feb

Here’s an amazing graphic that appeared in today’s Washington Post depicting how digital information has grown exploded over the past two decades. It’s better viewed on a large monitor from this link on the Post website. And here’s the accompanying Post article. The underlying data come from a new study by Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez of the University of Southern California, which is entitled, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” It appears in the latest issue of Science but is not available without a subscription.

 
 

Facebook Pages Upgrade to Business Class

11 Feb

Facebook Pages Upgrade to Business Class

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Yesterday Facebook rolled out what amounts to one of the biggest overhauls of the pages offering ever. I for one think the update is a major upgrade for businesses and brands using pages, but I know that app makers, custom page designers and people that have been using their personal page for business use are scrambling today.

Facebook pages upgrade

The new Facebook Pages look

You can find more about the upgrade for Facebook pages here. While all pages will be automatically upgraded by March 1st, page admins need to activate the upgrade as it is rolling out across the network. You can see the status of your pages here.

You might also want to grab the Pages Manual put out by Facebook.

The overarching change in my mind is what feels like a move to separate the business and personal profiles. While you still need to have a personal profile to create pages the two are no longer linked in the way that used to be. (More on that)

From an aesthetics point of view, I think the page looks cleaner as well.

And now for some of the most important feature updates.

iframe Tabs for pages

While most of the coverage and whining about the pages change will focus on the design, the most significant change may be the fact that developers can now create tabs using iframe instead of the Static FBML app or FBML code. (Although since the tabs moved to the left sidebar they aren’t really tabs anymore.)

There will be a ton of scrambling over this in the FB developer world as iframe allows for a great deal of flexibility for delivering content from your own pages and blogs as it basically goes out and grabs content designated in the frame. Most people may be familiar with this kind of code from embedding a YouTube video. It will also allow for things like lead capture and display of dynamic content without having to fumble around with all of Facebook’s mark-up.

It will however take a little bit of learning for the casual do it yourselfer, but I suspect services such as Faceit Pages or ShortStack to jump all over this. (More on this to come)

To get started you enable iframes by editing the Facebook Integration settings on the Developer App

iframe in Facebook tabs

Facebook further claims they are depreciating the FBML language and the static FBML app will go away in March, but all existing FBML will continue to work. Pretty big bummer for those folks that have written lots of FBML apps. (I would also go add a couple installations of the Static FBML app before March 10th to cover your bases as who knows what will happen down the road and you won’t be able to add it after that date.)

There are restrictions to iframe use and Facebook made some significant changes to Platform Policies, so make sure you understand these restrictions.

Look and feel

Tabs (or do we call them apps since they aren’t really tabs anymore) have moved from the top of the page to the left sidebar. This seems to be causing some of the loudest objections, but I think it’s just a matter of getting used to it and I prefer it.

  • The photo stream has move to the top in the ribbon fashion that was added to personal pages a few months ago. Again, I think I like this look and it certainly makes images a prominent feature. It appears that the default images are the covers for albums.
  • Page admins can now be publicly displayed on the page by selecting edit info > featured.
  • The profile picture size for Pages has been adjusted from 200 x 600 to 180 x 540.
  • The editing function is much more logical and housed in one place rather than hidden under several rocks as before.

Operation

One of the biggest business changes is the fact that you can use Facebook as a Page admin instead of just as your personal profile. So if I like another page I can choose to comment there as Duct Tape Marketing or as John Jantsch. If you admin several pages you can select who you want to comment as. I think this has major implications for brands. You can flip back and forth and choose your identity through the Account tab in the upper right corner.

You can now use your Page identity to interact with other pages

One point that has a lot of folks up in arms is that the wall posts are no longer served in chronological order. Under the everyone tab posts are being served up in a what Facebook calls “relevant” manner. Not sure about this one sticking around as Facebook is now using some algorithm to determine which posts go to the top and my guess is some page admins aren’t going to like the fact that they don’t control the order of the content on the Wall.

  • You can now choose in permissions > settings to get email (or sms) notifications when someone comments or posts on your wall or any of about 100 other things.
  • You can prefilter profanity by selected a setting in manage permissions.
  • You can choose up to five featured “likes” (other pages) to keep in rotation on your page.

As is often the case with Facebook changes some will stick, some will go, and some will evolve, but on the whole, I Like!

 
 

Software Calculates Appearance Of The Average Woman in 41 Countries

10 Feb


What does an average French woman look like? Here’s your answer and a whole lot more, where thousands of faces have been averaged into a composite face for each of 41 different countries.

Face Research created the software, asking its user to define a dozen points on a face, and then it’s possible to determine an average face when comparing two photos or thousands.

Although the photos used for these composites are not available for our recreation, the site offers a smaller group of faces with which you can experiment, or lets you upload your own for custom averaging.

In this project, it’s not clear how many subjects were averaged together for each nationality, but the result is remarkable, with all the faces beaming with nearly perfect symmetry and blemish-free skin. Take a look at a gallery of the various nationalities:


Face Research, Group 1





Face Research, Group 2





Face Research, Group 3





Face Research, Group 4




[via Photoxels]

More About: average woman, Face Research, gallery, software, websites

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Video: JIRA with an IT Consultant

10 Feb

Today we hosted a webinar with Gregory Kneller, IT Consultant, who helps companies arrange effective collaboration on projects and tasks. This is a fantastic overview to JIRA and its numerous use cases!

Gregory walked us through his use of JIRA for general business purposes. He uses JIRA for sharing project documents, tracking work, time and user roles as well as for business intelligence. Gregory covered his implementation approach and user training. He also explains how JIRA has helped pave the agile road towards BPMS.

While providing a concrete example of helping BPS Bavaria Property Services GmbH, Gregory detaied his customization of some JIRA fields to help non-IT business users. I found it especially clever and useful to change 'Project' to 'Department', 'Assignee' to 'Responsible', 'Reporter' to 'Customer' and 'Watchers' to 'Stakeholders.' In this example, these custom fields made more sense for this user.

Watch the video now to learn more about JIRA and some other tips for making it work for your particular use case:





For past webinars, please hop on over to Atlassian TV where you can sort videos by products and categories. For upcoming webinars, please visit our events page. If you would like to be in our webinar series, please contact us.

 
 

The Social Media World Before Twitter And Facebook [Infographic]

10 Feb

A world without Twitter or Facebook seems distant and almost non existent. Yet still there was a time, long ago (hrmm..), when they didn’t exist. As a matter of fact, Facebook didn’t even exist 8 years ago and Twitter even less. So, if you feel like you’ve been using Twitter or Facebook for ages, well then you’re wrong. Some say Social Media was invented at the same time as the Internet was. The reason why is because at that point we all got a forum where we could interact with people all around the world. However, the real term Social Media really started way later. There are literally hundreds of social networking services on the Internet today, and many that you have never heard of.

You might not know it, but there were actually a few successful social networking services before Twitter and Facebook even though when reading their names you might not recognize them at all. Some of us used the Internet purely to look up information and send files back and forth. Some even used chat rooms and message services like ICQ or AOL Instant Messanger.

But mostly, we never touched the social networking world or even came close to it before Facebook and Twitter. You will be surprised to know that there were actually quite a few services that you would file under the category of Social Networking Services. The whole thing started with an email, and it is on that road that we will soon come to Facebook and Twitter. Watch the whole pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter world unfold in front of your eyes with this awesome infographic designed and created by Online Schools. Interesting indeed!

The History Before Facebook TwitterThe History Before Facebook TwitterThe History Before Facebook TwitterThe History Before Facebook Twitter

 

Star Wars: A New Hope Retold In 32 Icons

10 Feb

There are many ways to explain the story of Star Wars, and no matter how you tell it, people are always going to be fascinated by the science fiction world. I think I have seen everything from YouTube clips of clueless people trying to tell the story of Star Wars, to complete pocket comic books retelling it. I always enjoy the way people see this huge adventure differently. The characters seem to have their own individual lives in a galaxy far far away, for real that is. It’s a great way to escape reality every once in a while, and I think we will be laughing one day when we have droids of our own and compare them to C-3PO and R2-D2. It’s completely beyond me, by the way, how thin that guy (Anthony Daniels) who played C-3PO must have been back then.

So how many ways can you come up with to retell the Star Wars story, any episode that is? I think until today, I could come up with quite a few, but never did it occur to me that you could completely retell it in small icons that make the story even more interesting. It’s almost like checking out a timeline, but with a whole different aspect to it.

Designer Wayne Dorrington is a master of the icons, and the force is strong with him. He designed and created this awesome Star Wars: A New Hope retold in icons, and you can be sure it’s going to be about the coolest thing you have seen all week. Now to all of you Star Wars fans out there, this is what a real fan does. Now it’s up to you to come up with something that is better. Brilliant!

A New Hope Retold In Icons

 
 

Introducing iframe Tabs for Pages

10 Feb

Today we announced major updates to Facebook Pages to help Page admins manage communications, express their brands, and increase engagement. As part of these changes, we are also updating the model for building apps on Pages.

Using iframes in Page Tabs

Many useful applications have been built for Facebook Pages like BandPage for artists to share their music with fans and Shop Now to help Pages sell merchandise on Facebook. As of today, you can build your Page Tab apps using iframes rather than FBML. This means you can now build apps that run across Facebook (including Pages and Canvas applications) using the same simple, standards-based web programming model (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS). In addition, you can easily integrate social plugins and the Graph API within your tab.

How to Add an iframe Page Tab

Enable iframes by editing the Facebook Integration settings on the Developer App:

Specify a Tab Name and a Tab URL that is loaded when the user selects your Tab on a given Facebook Page. Finally, to add the app to a Page, an admin of the Facebook Page must navigate to your app's Profile Page and select "Add to my Page.” You can see step by step instructions in our guide.

Updated signed_request

When a user lands on the Facebook Page, she will see your Page Tab added in the left-hand menu. When a user selects your app in the left-hand menu, the app will receive the signed_request parameter with one additional parameter, page, a JSON array which contains the ‘id’ of the Facebook Page your Tab is hosted within, a boolean (‘liked’) indicating whether or not a user has liked the Page, and a boolean (‘admin’) indicating whether or not the user is an ‘admin’ of the Page along with the user info array. If a user has authorized your application, the signed request will also contain an access token and the user id for the current viewing user so you can personalize your application for them.

In addition, your application will also receive a string parameter called app_data as part of signed_request if an app_data parameter was set in the original query string in the URL your tab is loaded on. For the Shop Now link above, that could look like this: "http://www.facebook.com/MollySimsOfficial?v=app_135607783795&app_data=any_string_here". You can use that to customize the content you render if you control the generation of the link.

{
   "algorithm":"HMAC-SHA256",
   "expires":1297328400,
   "issued_at":1297322606,
   "oauth_token":"OAUTH_TOKEN",
   "app_data":"any_string_here",
   "page":{
      "id":119132324783475,
      "liked":true,
      "admin":true
   },
   "user":{
      "country":"us",
      "locale":"en_US"
   },
   "user_id":"USER_ID"
}

Policy Revisions

We’ve also revised our Platform and Page policies to ensure that apps on Page Tabs maintain a high quality user experience and do not share information between Pages.

FBML Roadmap

With our recent launch of Requests and the support for iframe on Pages Tabs, we are now ready to move forward with our previously announced plans to deprecate FBML and FBJS as a primary technology for building apps on Facebook. On March 11, 2011, you will no longer be able to create new FBML apps and Pages will no longer be able to add the Static FBML app. While all existing apps on Pages using FBML or the Static FBML app will continue to work, we strongly recommend that these apps transition to iframes as soon as possible. Lastly, we want to be clear that our deprecation of FBML does not impact XFBML, such as the tags that support social plugins.

We are excited to see the new types of apps you build using iframes in Page Tabs. Please leave any comments or questions below.