Where was JFK when I got shot?

OR: 'Placing the 1872 Completion of the Australian Overland Telegraph Line in historical context.

Please use the comments area to add YOUR recollection of histori

cal events either side of the 1872 date, for example;

1908 Henry Ford's first Model T motor car rolls of the production line in Dearborn Michigan ushering in another epoch of mass production [remember the Colt 45?].

1746 Wired Monks

1844 May 24, Morse sends a telegram from Washington to Baltimore, the 1st message...'What hath God wrought! [He died July 1872, 7 weeks before Charles Todd connected the final piece of line, Aug 26 1872]

1857 16th August completion of the first transatlantic cable, Queen Victoria sends a telegram to president Buchanan.
1859 The solar superstorm of 1859 was the fiercest ever recorded. A

uroras filled the sky as far South as the Caribbean, magnetic compasses went haywire and telegraph systems failed....

1861 US East West overland telegraph line completed

1872 Brigham Young is arrested for polygamy (28 wives).
1872 July 2, Samuel Morse [the father of open source software?] dies about 7 weeks before Charles Todd completes link for the Aussie overland telegraph line Aug 26 1872.

1873 Eadweard Muybridge, yep the spelling is correct, settled a bet on whether the hoofs of a horse galloping are ever all in the air at once. Wagers aside, collaborating with John D. Isaacs, the resultant photographic apparatus ushered in the very start of that Leviathan we've all come to love, motion pictures. [Here's a great link to his work from a really good online Gallery; Artsy. Well worth a look]

1873 Jesse James and James Younger gang's 1st train robbery (Adair Iowa) 

Mike Smith Archaeologist-environmental historian on Central Australia around 1870 [www.abc.net.au/rn] 

If you can add  to this article [Use Comments please] by suggesting important events that happened in this general milieu it will be appreciated.

3 Iterations: Global Communications

History doesn't repeat itself [but it rhymes sometimes], and contrary to my own expectations, I'm really enjoying the history behind this technological marvel of it's day.  Several recent books about history of the telegraph rollout: 'The Victorian Internet' [Global], and Alice Thompson's 'The singing line', about the Oz rollout. [she's the Great great grand daughter of Charles Todd and, appropriately enough, now works for the London Daily Telegraph.

So, lets start with a potted history of global communications first 3 iterations, and as our "memestreme" Flexible Learning Framework steps into second gear cop an optic on this for starters...

Iteration 1 has got to be the wire that stretched around the world, the Telegraph.

Time: August 1872

Location: Central Mt Stuart, 220Km North of Alice, and according to the best cartographers of the day, this put him at the Mountain closest to our geographical centre.

The Man: Charles Todd

Iteration 2 for my money is the World Wide Web.

Time:  according to Kevin Kelly in 07 it’s age was about 5000 days old.

Location: A nexus near you

The man/kind of: Tim Berners-Lee was the Internet ? so maybe no one individually, and a whole bunch of humans collectively.

Iteration 3: The ‘semantic web’ and various other epithets

Time: Nowish

Location: Any computer connected to the net and/or a 3G network plus a variety of mobiles; iPhone, Blackberry or similar PDA’s

The mankind: The mankind
Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Flexible Learning Framworks Project Start

Pancultural-e Blog

 

Well, the wait is over, everything is coming together for our ‘Memestreme’ project, so… where to start?

 

Metro/Urban Prelude The two modes of operation for our product]

I’m of the opinion that the July 11 iPhone launch will usher in a new interconnected, location specific ITC epoch. Location sensing WiFi 3G hand-helds with high processing capacity making use of push technologies to sync data with minimal IP traffic will change the urban/metro connectivity landscape.

A great marketing innovation from iPhone was to provide a commercial website  mechanism to allow end-users/geeks/nerds to develop then upload their own apps, using the open Source Development Kit code[SDK]. This [free] completely web based business mechanism allows new uploaded apps for all to trial, and as best applications percolate to the top of the user chain, evolution and entropy reign.  Hence, user voted successful widgets are then marketed from the site so that the developers themselves get around 70% of sales revenue,Apple takes 10% and the rest goes to the website operators. This new-ish marketing paradigm [ask yourself where the factory outlet for eBay is located] is sure to spawn so beautiful tools, toys and trinkets.

Be aware though that the majority of these electronic appliances [laptops, mobile phones, PSPS, digital TV receivers, Digital Radios,  Bluetooth devices etc] will need to be fully or partially bathed in the plethora of electromagnetic frequencies that bounce around our metro urban landscapes. Out in remote areas we have weak GPS signals and expensive sat-nav services.  We’re going for the low cost remote service.

In Remote areas no one can hear you beam [unless your prepared to fork out $10 a minute for sat-nav coms, plus prohibitively expensive units to talk on and extra ‘extras’ to transact with fax, email GIS data and the like.

Off the beaten track though, where our ‘Memestreme’ Virtual Tourism project runs Metro tele-communications tech will have minimal influence. 3G, WiFi, WiMax, Phone landlines and such will hold no sway in the great Australian outback. Sure, sometime in the future, satellites may one day be able to up/download digital media content wherever one is on the planet.  Until then though the tech we are developing will be one of the only available and affordable ways to allow for user interaction with remote locations off the beaten track.

After the Glossary below read on for a concise overview of the project objectives.

Glossary:

CoA	Commonwealth of Australia [Who will own copyright of our final products]
Framework	The Flexible Learning Framework. [Who fund/disseminate our learning]
Cyberspace	Events and Info portrayed in online environments
Meat space	Events enacted in the physical world [normal reality]
PDA-GPS	Hand-held media player able to sense its location on the earths surface
Geo-reference	A set of math and map coordinates that fix a point on the earths surface
rfid	Radio Frequency Identification Tags that transact wirelessly with computers
Second Life	A Virtual environment that models real life existence
Avatar	The GUI persona one uses to experience existence in a virtual world
Mutual reality	The capacity for multiple avatars to interact in an online environment
Augmented reality	Basically, a PDA-GPS unit that continuously computes your location and then provides you with on-screen information relevant to that Geo-reference
Cloud Computing	This is where our personal or corporate data are housed on server farms or other non-local hard drives. In this way we have a wealth of data available aad rather than access it from our limited space personal hard drive, we connect over IP or WiFiand pull it of internet based servers.  For example, people make a 2nd email account and upload  aafew gig of faamil piics and movies .up there’ to store it.
Push computing	This tech is designed to reduce the amount of IP traffic a hand-held has to download [mainly] to synch with other interdependent machines. Small streams of data are pushed over IP to all your computing devices to

 

 

Objective One; Virtual Guide Tourist Mode

A Virtual Guided tour from Snow Kenna park in the Alice CBD meanders along the 4Km NT Parks and Wildlife signed “Riverside walk” track along the banks of the Todd River into the Telegraph Station and then from point to point along the historic buildings in the Telegraph Station compound.

 

Objective Two: Virtual Guide Science Mode

A field operatives utilization of the same technology.  Where we’re targeting Tourist organizations, Town Councils, Mining Exploration companies, Geological surveys, Traditional owners, Ecologists etc who would need to make recurrent trips into given areas to report, record, analyse and act on the various facets of their data sets.

The way we see this happening is envisaged into four linear sequences:

[1] A new trip to say the Davenport ranges is made by a Parks and Wildlife ranger to report on a variety of circumstances; weed ingress, bush fire damage, feral pest infestations. Similar to the way we log in points along a tourist route, the ranger logs point all along the trail from start to finish.  This in itself serves as the road map for subsequent field trips. And as the Geo-referencing is accurate to about 6 meters it also doubles as a very clever way to stop folk getting lost out in the harsh and unforgiving wilderness. Back to method 1…

Evidence is plotted against some of these points [accurate to 6 metres] which can include inexpensive cameras that also log the GIS coordinates, mp3 audio ‘reports’ that can be recorded onsite to describe some aspect of the territory, video can also be laid in to further describe geo-features that are relevant and of course text can be inserted. At tours end yuo press a button and the tour is finished.

[2] Once back at HQ this trip is loaded into a multimedia database containing all the media about the trio, and it is time stamped. This interfaces with the standard GIS topographical maps so this other layer of info is included in the tour.

[3] Some time later a Ranger re-visits the logged trip and updates the journey, perhaps adding new log points of significance, taking photos and videos from the same Geo-referenced points to show any changes that have occurred over time and adding audio and text to amend info and append info.

[4] Back at HQ these extra ‘layers’ of information are superimposed into the existing database utility to gradually build up a time based  description of , in this case, of how a land is healing.

 

Objective Three: Second Lifeâ [2L] Reflection Mode.

Text, Audio [mp3], Photos [jpg] and Video [mp4] are the composite products of the above two objectives. Each logged point will make available multimedia information that will add value to each geographic coordinate. Team member Georgina Nou has researched and liaised with an island owner in 2L to construct a virtual representation of the Alice Springs Telegraph Station tour.  Virtual Buildings are being constructed that will allow 2L users to enter and viewing screens and objects are enabled so that users can watch videos, listen to audio clips, call up teal-time maps, see commercial promos and generally interact with our media and get a virtual taste of the physical tour.

 

Objective Four: Giving it up for the CoA and the Framework

At projects end we transfer copyright ownership of the project deliverables to the Commonwealth of Australia on a Share 2 license arrangement [LINK to License information].  Our Innovations project is then made available across the Frameworks National Training Network and in the Commonwealth of Australia’s archives. [Where we fervently hope it will be of use to others engaging in this line of research]

Modelling the project for use and view on the networks’ creates something of an artistic and technical challenge: how do we ‘model’ our media to represent a meat space Augmented Reality tour and a cyberspace virtual reality tour?

Meat Space Tour

e.g A GPS synched software program [LINK INFO Virtual Guide from New England Computer Solutions] provides a compass and/or a map to guide to steer a user along successive points on the tour.  At each grid reference point media information pertinent to each GPS coordinate is made available to the user on the PDA screen. [To augment their experience and knowledge of that exact spot on the Worlds surface].

 

So how can we model this to provide an accurate representation of a users experience? After careful consideration we have come up with this idea, and whilst not set in stone, Richard Waring , who manages the tele-conferencing operations from CDU Alice Springs and myself can collaborate to better explain the practical applicationnof the technology.

 

Northern Territory E-learning Innovations Success!

The Innovations project I submitted on behalf of the Institute For Aboriginal Development [IAD] and NT Parks and Wildlife [P&W] has been accepted.
Over the next 3 months IAD and P&W will collaborate to bring two 'Augmented Reality' virtual tourism guides to publication.
IAD will fashion an Alice Springs CBD tour and P&W will work on their Alice Springs Telegraph Station virtual tour.
End users will ramble around either of the above venues with an ASUS PDA that senses a users location to within 3 metres. Information specific to that location will be set to display as the user nears designated points on the tour.

Metcalfe's law

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²). First formulated by Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe's law explains many of the network effects of communication technologies and networks such as the Internet, social networking, and the World Wide Web. It is related to the fact that the number of unique connections in a network of a number of nodes (n) can be expressed mathematically as n(n-1)/2, which follows n² asymptotically.

The law has often been illustrated using the example of fax machines: a single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines inthe network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases. [It can also be argued that the FIRST person to buy a Fax machine was an idiot as there was no other bugger around to fax to]

In fact, Metcalfe's law measures the potential number of contacts, i.e. the technological side of a network. However the social utility of a network depends upon the number of nodes in contact. For instance, if Chinese and Non-Chinese users don't understand each other, the utility of a network of users that speak the other language is at zero, and the law has to be calculated for the two networks separately.

So Long Pancultural-e

Howdy the Alic-e Memestreme

An Ainslie dreamscape.
The overall theme for 08 is the generation on an evolving entity, namely Pancultural-e Alic-e [PAlic-e].
PAlic-e will skip and grow along the songlines of the "New Media" domains: Blogs, Wikis, Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, the Digital and Creative Commons, PayPal, 2nd Life, Online Education. PAlic-e is off and running on web two point zero. Or as 'Neuromancer' author Will Gibson put it "Count Zero Interrupt"

Ainslie Laughter at Dawn ,

There's someting spooky about Virtual Tourism...
We've all heard the refrain "Doe's art imitate nature or does nature imitate art?" The answer is 42, and to get back to my original point, there we were last week, GPS enabled PDA in hand tripping across the Alice Springs Overland Telegraph Station historical reserve [ASTS]. The Virtual Tourism guide software has the real-time map called up, my next point on the tour is marked as a green dot on the map, I'm the red one. Now this GPS is so sensitive [+- 3 to 4 metres] that, God Like, your able to watch yourself walking across the face of the earth as you draw ever nearer to the next tour point. [approaching this point a bunch of 'new media' is triggered onto your player to Augment your reality]. In terms of this capacity to get feedback on what we may be doing in the real world [Meat Space] or Cyber Space: 'Propriocentricity'

David Levine in a presentation at the 2007 Learnscope conference discussed this term. The terms current usage describes the feedback one experiences from internal tissue, muscle and neurons. It gives one tactile, time and location specific feedback about where a part of the body is.

In cyber space and meat space there are a wealth of tools that serve to perform this function. Raised cones set into a pavement inform blind folk they are approaching a crossing, audio signals at traffic lights cue one in, Nintendo Wii remote control units allow you to perfect your golf swing, decapitation etc, 2^nd life avatars and GPS devices also serve this function. I feel it will be the marriage of this feedback coupled with instant communication/collaboration that will define the boundries of how we commence to work with each other

Google Earth Alic-e ans 2nd Life
Here comes the spooky bit. Georgina Nou brought this up at the learnscope 07 show and tell, namely that as one fritters about in/on a 2nd life Island media/intel/info gets triggered for your consideration as you lope into the radius of a hotspot.

Now this is precisely what gives when one is wondering around in Augmented Reality with a whizz bang IAD Virtual Tourism PDA/GPS handset. You walk up to something, within a pre-defined user hotspot] and up pops some media/intel/info.
Now, who's emulating who? What's imitating what? and did I leave the oven on? Oscar Wilde said imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. This is more like cross pollination.

So, that'll do for now, has Babel got anything to do with Babylon?

PanculturaLea-rnscope

Caterpillar Dreaming
September 28 we got the go ahead to downloaded the [PDA/GPS] Virtual Guide software from New England Computer Solutions. We're looking forward to working with Marcus Ragus [M-Learning Learnscope] to test/trial this version build. It's great promoting collaborative learning and social networking tools and practice for students. It's delightful to observe socially shy students metamorphose into a digitally virtual extroverts!

Finally! Multimedia skills are increasingly being seen as valuable for situations other than employment. Alongside the Pancultural-e project I've some great Indigenous adult students completing their Cert 1 in IT. There's something a little surreal watching learners have heaps of [heuristic] fun using Google Chat to talk with each other, even though they are sat in the same room. It reminds me of a Spike Milligan sketch I say 30 years ago: a lonely bedraggled prisoner is tapping a code on a water pipe to communicate with a fellow prisoner. We're told he's been building up the relationship over many years. The camera pans out and we see his fellow prisoner, in the same cell tapping back to him. Well, at least for me, thats why I found it funny....




Anyway, to get back to social networking and collaboration software, yeah its a great empowerment option for students. Its even better when it works for me. Over the fiercely collaborative Learnscope network we scored a huge win when Georgina put us on to Marcus Ragus in Tasmania, gotta go....more later
Marcus has been a godsend. A [visionary] proponent of Mobile learning for over 3 years now, Marcus and his current project collaborators Daniel and Andrew [New England Computer Solutions] are helping to deliver us, so that we know we have arrived. Marcus has kindly set up for an opportunity for the Pancultural-e team to to assist in testing the "Virtual Guide" software application generated by Daniel and Andrew. It's early days yet but we've a team who are intimately familiar interpreting the archetypal, mythical, religious and geographic significance of traditional Aboriginal art. In something of a quantum leap we are now all learning how to create digital dreaming tracks, for others, on portable media devices, which in turn fix their position in the world from a roving band of 12 satellites in low earth orbit. Gotta go again...
Podcast Training
We have a new Learnscoper on the block! Mel Fox is a young and eager new recruit at IAD. Mel comes to us after a 5 year stint at Westpac and is comfortable and confident with matters IT. A 2 min intro to the Mac podcast software [iLife 06] and Mel was up and running [me too as I raced over to her desk to subvert any noisy incoming phone calls!]
The issue were faced with now is that we've half a dozen IAD Learnscope 'poddies'. After a little collaboration we've decided, purely as a market research tool for the Showcase :) to let them all have their 15 megabytes of fame. And just for your consideration , below, we've tacked on a Chinese audio MP3 [Introducing The Dreamtime]after Mel's Language narration. We'd appreciate any feedback from viewers who can understand Mandarin.