Cool.

One question - is it possible to download a presentation to play offline at

my convenience? If so, how? Save-to-disk produced an 8kb file for one
presentation, which seems a tad small for the content shown.


>>> Wirt Atmar <[log in to unmask]> 21/04/2005 05:59:30 >>>
For the last several years, we've been working on a mechanism to distribute

very high-quality lectures and presentations worldwide at telephone modem

speeds. We're just weeks away from releasing the product suite of a player and a

matching authoring tool.


We call the process QCShow, and it's a direct offshoot of QCTerm, although

over its evolution, the player has evolved from a terminal-like device using

telnet as its primary connection protocol to something much more like a browser

using http as its only communication mechanism.

I think that QCShow has the capacity to become a big deal, at least in a

small way. While we designed the process primarily for long-distance education,

the number of commercial applications for the process seem to be relatively

unlimited.


For the past two years, I've been attending scientific and engineering

conferences, places where information-dense lectures are common, and recording

talks. The QCShow process only requires that I tap into the auditorium's sound

system and record the lectures on my PC, as they are given. I then gather up

copies of the authors' PowerPoint slides and integrate the two once I return home,

enormously compressing the resulting sound and image files to approximately 5%

their original
sizes. As with every new product, we must be the first users, but with the

intention to make the process so simple and so inexpensive that anyone can do it.

One of the conferences that I attended last fall was the NASA Institute of

Advanced Concepts annual fellows meetings, where its grantees gave talks on

their progress-to-date. NIAC is NASA's little-known "skunk works," and they fund

some very cool ideas. Because of your obvious interest in technology, I

thought that this conference might be of special interest to this group. The

lectures are available at:

     http://aics-research.com/lectures/niac04/


If you only have time to watch a few of them, let me recommend Anthony

Colozza's presentation on his design for solid-state aircraft (machines that mimic

living birds) which may some day fly through the atmospheres of Venus, Earth

and Mars, and Robert Hoyt's talk on space tethers (a mechanism to dramatically

reduce the size of earth-based rockets for the same effective lift capacity).

Equally interesting, but a little more technical, are Gerald Jackson's talk on

the design of a real anti-matter spacecraft propulsion system and Dava

Newman's presentation outlining a paint-on astronaut's spacesuit for the exploration

of Mars.

To view the talks, you will first have to download a (currently Windows-only)

player from:

     http://aics-research.com/qcshow/


A Mac/Linux version of the client player will follow within a year.

The Player was designed to be useful in classroom settings. The intent is to

allow a teacher in a junior college in northern Idaho to team-teach with the

best astrophysicist in the world by instantly starting, stopping and cueing the

presentation wherever he felt that the lecture needed clarification or to

reinforce a point he wishes made.

The Player's controls are mapped onto the PC's keyboard:

     SPACE BAR pauses/resumes the presentation
     ARROW KEYS advance or retard the slides
     PAGE UP/DOWN do the same
     HOME/END do as they suggest
     LETTER "I" presents an information display
     ESC quits the lecture

During the past two years, I've recorded ten scientific conferences, covering

subjects in planetary exploration, astrobiology, anthropology, evolution,

ecology and the like, for a total of approximately 130 hours of truly

high-quality material, from among the best scientists in the world. A dozen of these

talks can be seen at:

     http://aics-research.com/lectures/public-lectures.html


We've described these talks as "public lectures" because these particular

talks require little background knowledge. They're basically self-explanatory,

jargon-free and are quite interesting on their own. Nonetheless, all of the

talks, "public" and not, were recorded while live and on-stage, while being

presented to audiences of 50 to 700 other scientists. You might argue that some of

the audio tracks are not perfect, but you can hear the talks in this medium

far better than you could if you had been a member of the original audience,

and you can certainly see the slides enormously better. BTW, the newest of these

talks is the bottom-right one: Geoff Marcy's talk on the search for alien

life, which he gave just a few weeks ago to the Aspen Center for Physics. I think

a fair number of people on this list would enjoy this talk.

Consider the Player to be just another web browser. If you're sitting behind

a proxy server in your organization, you will have to set in the proxy

server's address before you can access the lectures. To do this, once the Player is

running, right-click on the screen and set in the proxy server's address. Once

done, you should be cooking with high-grade petroleum distillate.

Wirt Atmar

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *

"This e-mail message is intended only for the addressee(s)
 and contains information which may be confidential. If

 you are not the intended recipient please advise the
 sender by return email, do not use or disclose the
 contents, and delete the message and any attachments
 from your system. Unless specifically indicated, this
 email does not constitute formal advice or commitment
 by the sender or UniSuper Limited (ABN 54 006 027 121) or its

subsidiaries.
UniSuper Management Pty Ltd (AFSL No: 235907)

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *