A few weeks ago Mark Wonsil suggested that I if weren't paying any attention
while I was driving, it would be because I was reading a book on the origin
of life on one knee while eating an enchilada on the other. Because of a
confluence of events, that  comment being one, I decided to put a new lecture
up on our small 918 on the origin of life. Actually, I started it right after
Mark made his comment, but I've just now had the time to finish it.

I stole the lecture from Andrew Pohorille at NASA Ames Research Center. The
original lecture, along with several others, is available at:

     http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/ltc/astrobio/

The lectures use a combination of RealPlayer video and html-based slides.

One of the things I very much want to make QCTerm useful for is
distance-learning, especially over great distances and with very
low-bandwidth connections. I tend to believe that broadband is going to come
to hinterland very much more slowly than the people in the high-tech city
centers believe it is. Because of this belief, I have been working in my
spare time to make QCTerm a slide player, and again I want to convey my
sincere appreciation to the people at Neil Harvey & Associates in South
Africa for letting me use their machine. They're allowing me to work this out
so that anywhere on the planet will now appear to be "local".

Presenting slides in front of an audience is a very familiar idiom to
virtually every scientist. They do it constantly from their first days in
graduate school and it tends to be a very effective way to present
information to a large number of people. Moreover, a great many scientists
tend to be "hams." Some people become very good at this and simply do a
bang-up job.

I choose Andrew Pohorille's talk for several reasons: (i) I really like the
talk. I've listened to it a dozen times now and haven't gotten tired of it
yet. Although he starts out a high-school level, talking about the origin of
life as a detective story, he rapidly moves the quality of discussion up to
that suitable for graduate students or of a colleague in a related field. And
(ii) the talk is probably public domain, and if it's not, it's not in NASA's
nature to sue people. However, Andrew is Polish, so you may have to listen a
little harder than usual to understand him. That is one more aspect that
every young scientist rapidly gets used to: carefully listening to every
imaginable accent in the world; that's just characteristic of modern science.

If you look at the original NASA presentation, you'll see that the quality of
the sound is terrible. I cleaned it up as much as I could. You'll also notice
that you will require a fair bandwidth to keep up with the presentation.

However, under QCTerm, a 56K PPP modem will download the material approx.
twice as fast as it is being consumed. Presumably a 28.8 modem would
therefore be capable of working, although it might be dicey. It should work,
but I've never tested it at that slow a speed.

If you want to see the presentation, use version 0.90 of QCTerm and telnet to
209.181.113.217. Signon as:

     :hello <yourname>,demo.qcterm

Once on, type "b" to get into BASIC and then: >run origins

The script that drives the slides downloads from our little 918 will be using
telnet. The process is meant to be as simple and as obvious as we can
possibly make it. While the script is written in BASIC/V, all that means is
that it could be written in *any* language that you prefer. The blobs (sound
and images) are downloaded from our contracted websever at Qwest in
Minneapolis, via HTTP (although that could be done as well by FTP, if you
wish).

The design criteria in all of this are twofold: we want people, especially
university and corporate people, to be able to put these kinds of talks
together using nothing more than the PC on their desk, and secondly, we
certainly don't want to increase the "production costs" of putting these
kinds of internet-based lectures together to be much more than 10% over that
that it would have cost a lecturer to put his talk together originally
(meaning primarily labor content put forward by the lecturer, not real
dollars). In contrast, the lectures you see on public TV are enormously
expensive to put together, running hundreds of thousands of dollars per
hour's worth of content. A great many classrooms now also have miniature
television studios high up in the back of the room, but even recording a
lecture in this format costs hundreds of dollars per hour.

I want to try to eliminate these costs, as much as possible, so that bright
young teacher in Missoula, MT can put together an interesting lecture while
sitting in his cramped little office, and have it watched by a bright young
student in Mali.

Flash 5 is the primary competitor to this kind of usage, and by far and away
the very best Flash 5 presentation I've ever yet seen is at:

     www.becominghuman.org

You'll notice an extensive use of pans, fades, blends and zooms in the
documentary that appears at the site. QCTerm too can perform pans at the
moment, and will soon be capable of fades and blends. Zooms are in QCTerm's
future, but they're not much more difficult computationally than fades.
However, all of these things raise the "production costs" of putting these
sorts of slide shows together, and I'm not sure how much they will be used by
ordinary people in universities and corporations.

The Becoming Human series is done extremely well, by a professional
production staff, in very much the same manner that PBS creates its
documentaries. It's clear that they want to create the same feel as a TV
documentary, but I don't think that that's necessary. I'm just satisfied with
a slide show. I don't think most ordinary people would know how to go about
putting such a documentary together.

However, that is one of the things I would very much appreciate hearing any
opinions on, if you have the time.

There are several fundamental similarities to Flash 5 and QCTerm. They both
must first download enough material to get going, and then download the
remainder in the background, silently. And they are both just slide players
[all of the other image processing (pans, fades, etc.) is done locally, under
the command of a script]. However, there are some differences too. Flash 5
cannot seem to run much longer than about 3 minutes without its sound getting
significantly out of synch, while QCTerm has no fundamental limits. Secondly,
because QCTerm remains a terminal, it is enormously more suited for
question-and-answer sessions with the viewer than is a web-based service.

At the moment, only the PAUSE button on your keyboard works with QCTerm, but
sometime in the near future, the HOME, END, PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN keys will
also operate, allowing you to high-speed search the slides or repeat what you
just heard.

Any opinions you might have would be greatly appreciated.

Wirt Atmar

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