Get Involved with Tech tAUk!

Posted on August 30, 2010 by Douglas Bell

It’s hard to believe that Tech tAUk started off as a brand-new ATV show less than ten months ago — since then we’ve risen to prominence as one of ATV’s most advanced shows. We were recognized last Spring with awards for Best Show Intro Sequence, Best Website Content, and biggest of all, Best New Show. But if you thought our episodes last year were good, then look out, because we’ve just started.

We’ve got lots of exciting plans to make Tech tAUk better than ever this year. And we want your help.

We want to recruit a lot of students to contribute to Tech tAUk this year, and we’ve got lots of opportunities to get involved with the show. Here’s a quick peek at all the opportunities:

Interested in working on a television crew?
We’re looking for Camera Operators, Tech Directors, Set Managers, Sound Operators, Video Editors, Motion Graphics artists, and much more! And if you have no experience with these roles, don’t worry, we’ll train you and give you some great hands-on experience working on one of ATV’s highest production-value shows.

Interested in sharing your experience and passion with technology?
We want to bring many more voices and perspectives onto Tech tAUk this year. If you’ve done some cool stuff in the tech realm, or want to share your expertise and insights, we’d love to invite you to contribute to the show. Are you really into video games? Or perhaps you really like hacking or modding cool stuff? No matter what you’re interested in, we can certainly find a place for you as an on-camera contributor to Tech tAUk.

Don’t want to be on-camera? We’re also looking for researchers, who help us find the tech stories and topics that make it into our scripts. We also are welcoming anyone who would like to be a contributor to our Tech tAUk blog, which we are going to be making much heavier use of this year, and will be actively promoting on the show. If you really like to write about tech, this is a great opportunity to expose yourself to a growing audience.

Interested in producing freelance viral videos?
We’re starting a new initiative this year on Tech tAUk to provide support and promotion to students producing viral videos. If you’ve had ideas for getting your 15 minutes of fame on YouTube, but have been lacking in access to equipment, editing tools, or simply need help finding an audience, we invite you to participate in our Viral Videos Initiative. We’ll help you bring your ideas to life, and will then actively promote your videos on our show, on our website, and on our YouTube channel, exposing you to a growing audience of students.

I’m interested in joining, what should I do?
We are having a Tech tAUk Interest Meeting/Training this Saturday, September 4, 3:30-5:00 PM. The meeting will take place at the ATV studio in Mary Graydon Center 256, and anyone interested in participating is invited to attend.

Or, if you want more information about joining ATV in general (including information about Tech tAUk, as well as ATV’s other shows and departments), come to ATV’s General Interest Meeting on Tuesday, August 31, at 7:00 PM.

If you have any questions, please e-mail Co-Producers Douglas Bell and Josh Feldman. Thanks for your interest; we’re looking forward to an awesome 2010-11 season of Tech tAUk!

Posted in Show Info | Leave a comment

Is Facebook Getting Desperate?

Posted on August 27, 2010 by jfeldman

Look, Zuckerberg. I get it. You’re not happy with the movie coming out about you in October. But is trademarking really the path you want to go down right now?

When it comes to trademarks, Facebook is proving to be a bully. It is going after Teachbook in court for using a similar name, and already forced Placebook to change its name. But that is only half the story.

It is not just the word “book” at the end of a company or product name that Facebook might object to. If it has its way, the word “Face” at the beginning of a name might also bring out its lawyers. In fact, Facebook is currently trying to register the word “Face” as a trademark.

Yes, Facebook does not want people borrowing either half of their compound word because… because…

I have no idea. I would think it’s obvious that these other sites are not Facebook. Facebook is the second-most visited website on the entire internet, and over half a billion people have Facebook accounts. So what’s the big deal if smaller websites

If Facebook is trademarking “Face,” does this mean they’re going to sue Apple over their FaceTime video call iPhone technology? It would be a truly ironic position for Apple, which has sued multiple companies in the past for using the word “pod” in the names of their devices.

But Facebook is most likely going to focus its efforts on sites like fellow social neworking site Facechipz, online video chat room FaceFlow, gaming discussion forum Facepunch, and the completely unknown social networking site Facespace.

And that’s just what I found in five minutes on Google.

Posted in On the Web | Leave a comment

What to Expect When You’re Expecting: Apple Edition

Posted on August 26, 2010 by jfeldman

Yesterday Apple announced they would be holding an event on September 1, but didn’t give much detail on what would be discussed. They did say it would be a musical event, and the invites came with this picture:

Tech experts predict the main focus would be on the iPod, given that at around the same time last year and the year before that, Apple’s announcements were mostly about new iPod technology. The iPhone 4 features a front-facing camera, so it’s possible Apple will announce this feature for the new iPod Touch.

MacRumors.com found leaked pictures of, supposedly, the new iPod Touch. They confirm that the iPod has a front-facing camera, which would allow the user to engage in FaceTime chats (video calls) with their friends. They also found that in the new iPod Touch, you can connect on FaceTime not just through phone numbers, but e-mail addresses as well.

But all this information leads me to a very important question: how similar does Apple want the iPhone and iPod Touch to be? So far, it seems like the sole difference between the two is that you can’t call people on the iPod Touch. Except for FaceTime. Actually, come to think of it, the only real difference between the iPhone and iPod Touch is that one of them lets you dial numbers to talk to someone and the other doesn’t.

On the other hand, there is a Skype app available for the iPod Touch. So I’m not really sure what the big differences are here.

But enough of this tangent, let’s get back to Apple’s big event. Some think Apple will take the opportunity to announce the iTV, a new technology from Apple that would take the place of your cable box and allow you to not only watch your favorite TV shows for a dollar, but could stream iTunes music and run applications on the same operating system that powers the iPhone 4. Basically, you’ll be able to switch between watching TV, music, and apps right on the big screen. It’s an update from Apple’s present system Apple TV.

There’s just one problem: Apple might get sued over the name.

Apple is no stranger to lawsuits over names and such. Cisco had the “iPhone” before they did, but Apple won out in the end after coming to an agreement. This time, the battle will be between iTV and ITV.

ITV is a British television network that is known for being a British television network that is NOT the BBC. ITV has vowed to challenge Apple if they try to refer to their next version of Apple TV as “iTV.”

Oh, and then there’s that other problem: competition from Google.

The technological giant is releasing Google TV this fall, and truth be told, it looks a lot more impressive than what Apple’s working on. Google creates a whole new technical interface on your TV screen that lets you seamlessly switch between watching shows, browsing the web, and playing apps. If you aren’t sure what channel a program you’re looking for is on, you can find it easily with an on-screen Google search. And if the program in question isn’t on at the moment, you can search for a show and then automatically get it recorded for later on.

The other cool thing about Google TV is its picture-in-picture feature. You can keep watching your favorite TV show while checking your e-mail, going on Twitter, or using an app. The apps, by the way, are the same ones you’d find on an Android phone.

The key difference between iTV and Google TV is time. Google TV lets you watch TV as it happens, while Apple iTV lets you rent shows from the iTunes Store.

However, one area where Apple has the advantage is precisely where the iTunes Store is concerned. Like many of you, I download music and movies directly from iTunes, and it gets stored on my computer. The issue here is that we can’t buy as many movies as we want, because our computers only have so much disk space.

That’s why one new innovation Apple may be announcing next week is a cloud-based “server farm” where your iTunes purchases are stored. Instead of saving the files on your network, they’re saved on this huge server owned by Apple and you can access them whenever you want.

The long shot item Apple might bring up during this event is the iPhone. This year has not exactly been a good press year for the iPhone, from the Gizmodo incident to the reception problems to the light leakage in the as-yet-unreleased white iPhones. However, Apple might have some iPhone news for fans next week. One thing I hope they talk about if the iPhone is featured is what their plans are for improving these problematic phones. They should use the opportunity to explain when they’re going to fix the white iPhones.

Now, the longest of long shots here would be if Apple finally announces the Verizon iPhone. It has been a long long long road of speculation in tech circles when Apple would decide that a lot of Verizon customers want to get an iPhone without leaving their current cell phone plan.

A lot of people writing about this now are suggesting the Verizon iPhone will be available by January 2011. If that’s the case, next week’s event would be a perfect opportunity to make the official announcement. Once Tech tAUk returns to the airwaves and the Verizon iPhone is officially announced, we’ll be talking about this issue a lot.

You’ve got to give Apple credit. They know how to hype. It doesn’t matter what happens after the product is released, they can hype it. We’ll see if next week’s event will give us enough to be excited about.

Posted in From the Apple Tree, The Rumor Mill | Leave a comment

Virtual Reality Being Used for Social Experimentation

Posted on August 25, 2010 by jfeldman

We all knew virtual reality was coming, it’s been imagined for decades on TV and in film. There are first-person shooters in arcades that are a sort of virtual reality. But now an experiment at Barcelona University is using VR as an experiment in sociology and human empathy.

The idea behind the test is to get people to see the life experiences of others from a first-person point of view to elicit a reaction from them. The subjects of the tests were all men, and when they put on the VR glasses, they witnessed a series of events from the point of view of a young girl.

Then, in the middle of the experiment, they get a little shock.

The volunteer is shown a view hovering above the scene instead of acting as the girl. The previously affectionate woman inexplicably lashes out, slapping the girl twice on the face.

The idea is that having previously been the girl, the volunteer feels the shock of what has happened more personally.

The idea is to make people more understanding of racism and abuse in contemporary society. Mel Slater, one of the project’s researchers (and not a relative of JetBlue flight attendant and hero/idiot Steven Slater), told the BBC that they hope people subjecting themselves to these tests “understand what it is like to experience abuse in different ways.”

A similar experiment is being conducted over in England, but its similarities to a controversial test from the 60s are making a few people uneasy.

Back in 1961, a top Nazi offical was on trial in Jerusalem for war crimes. Yale Professor of Psychology Stanley Milgram was interested in how so many Nazi soldiers could have inflicted so much pain on human beings without losing some inner sense of morality.

Milgram organized a test in which people were put in the position of inflicting pain upon complete strangers. What Milgram did not tell them was that the subjects were really actors and that they were not really undergoing pain at all. The “teacher” would be required to give the subject, the “learner,” an electric shock every time they answered a question incorrectly. For each successive wrong answer, the shock levels would be increased. The actors were trained to increase the level of their suffering as the supposed shock got more powerful.

When the teachers felt uneasy about continuing, they were pressured to keep shocking to ensure the experiment would work. A lot of the teachers just refused outright to go any further when they felt the pain was too much for the subject to handle.

To his surprise, Milgram found that 65% of the teachers were willing to go to the maximum shock level, even if they personally felt it was wrong. He believed that people’s sense of obedience to authority figures overrode their personal morals, and that they believe by following the orders of others, they are not responsible for what arises as a result of their servile actions.

His experiment was attacked for questionable ethics and he was accused of putting undue emotional stress on the participants, but most of the people who were involved said they were happy to participate.

Now that experiment is being duplicated with a slight twist: the people being tortured aren’t real.

The subjects in this test wore virtual reality helmets and were instructed to give electric shocks to the VR person in the room with them. Even though the person wasn’t real, the researchers noticed the emotional reactions of many subjects. They concluded that while their responses were not nearly as gut-wrenching as those in the 60s who believed they were torturing real people, they clearly had a visceral reaction to their own actions.

The results of these studies might seem surprising to some, given the popular idea that technology has desensitized us to violence. For years, parents’ groups have argued that violent video games can drive children to a life of violence. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that the experiments did not feature any young people.

Does this mean experiments like these in the future will give us very different results? Probably. Especially if we’re on Grand Theft Auto 16 by then.

Posted in Beyond the Virtual Border, Invention and Innovation | Leave a comment

Apple’s Head App Guy Made Some Really Disgusting Apps

Posted on August 21, 2010 by jfeldman

If you design apps for a living, you know there’s a strict vetting process. Apple doesn’t just let any random developer offer their apps in the iTunes Store (especially the porn ones). They have someone go through all the submissions and filter out the inappropriate ones.

And by inappropriate, I am NOT referring to the fart apps. Yes, there are in fact dozens of iTunes Store apps created for the sole purpose of generating fart sounds. Last year, the developers of Pull My Finger and iFart got into a legal skirmish over use of the tagline “pull my finger.”

But I digress. Apple does have people going through a list of proposed apps and picking out the appropriate ones. The guy in charge of it is a man named Philip Shoemaker. Mr. Shoemaker is Apple’s App Store Director.

Hey, would you like to know a fun fact about Philip Shoemaker? He actually makes his own apps. According to Wired Magazine, Shoemaker created several iTunes Store applications through the company GrayNoodle.

If you go to GrayNoodle’s website, you’ll find a complete list of all the apps they’ve made. There’s one called MoneyTimer, which tells you if you’re wasting time and money on an event or meeting or something else. 101 Cocktails provides you with recipes for 101 of the best cocktail drinks.

My favorite app of theirs is Biz Poetry. Its official description on the website reads as follows:

This is an important tool for every meeting. Now you can look like a brainiac in any meeting. Just plug in the name of the project and give a shake. Out will fly the words of wisdom that only the smartest can understand!

In other words, it’s a way of sounding smart without actually knowing what it is you’re talking about. They also offer Med Poetry, which is the same thing except with medical terms.

But the apps that have gotten people’s attention in recent weeks are AnimalFarts and iWiz. I won’t describe either of these apps, because I’m sure you can guess what their respective functions are.

This would be silly and slightly disturbing if it was some random dude churning these out for Apple, but this is being made by a company where Apple’s head app guy works. A spokesperson for Apple claims that these apps were all approved before he joined the company, and that his background in app development was the very reason they hired him in the first place.

Wired quotes an app developer whose Me So Holy app was rejected last year as accusing Apple of hypocrisy. On the one hand, they launched a crusade to purge the App Store of porn, because parents complained it showed “objectionable material.” But some other parents could just as easily say all the farting apps contain objectionable material as well.

I guess what I’m saying is this: Apple, you put parental controls on computers for a reason. You don’t need to ban stuff from the App Store because it’s morally objectionable.

You guys removed the iMussolini app because it was, you know, full of speeches by a ruthless dictator. So by banning the porn apps, you are making scantily clad women just as bad as Mussolini.

(Not really, I just wanted to end this post dramatically.)

Posted in From the Apple Tree | Leave a comment