Potato I have

The latest Economist Technology Quarterly (free access for the moment) has a brief status on video search. Searching the image itself is very difficult, but there is a lot of activity in searching associated text: the closed captions, the audio portion (via speech recognition), and human or machine produced video metadata.

IBM has a test version of a more sophisticated analysis/retrieval engine called Marvel; after manually tagging 1-5% of a set of video content, the system learns to recognize the rest — this is a huge reduction of the expensive, error-prone human tagging effort. IBM’s web has good detail on the project. From those pages I learned about MPEG-7, which is a video metadata (rather than encoding) standard.

The ETQ acknowledges that business models are lacking, but singles out Critical Mention as one that is working; they offer web-based search and alert (”reputation management”) services for TV news. I see in the news last week that they now have a licensing agreement with AP (Associated Press) Digital.

Since it looks like metadata is playing a big role in video search, it should be interesting to see which producers/consumers are doing the tagging, and where the analysis and search logic resides. The big search engines are an obvious home, fancy services like CM are another, but why shouldn’t I also have something to find stuff on my computer or LAN?

It’s hard to post about the differences of living in France and in the US, endlessly fascinating though they may be to me: whenever I write something, I’m entirely preoccupied with how it’s being received by other Americans. I wish things weren’t so charged between the two countries. So I post with a disclaimer that if I seem provocative or defensive it’s not necessarily intentional, and dive right in…

Paul Krugman’s latest Op-Ed piece covers the part of living in France that fits me like a glove: that of economic choices. He reminds us that France is actually more productive than the US (this shocked me when I first heard it a few years ago), and then argues that the main difference in the economies is one of policy decisions. He mentions health care, schools, and significantly more vacation (personally this is ten weeks rather than four), but really the list is much longer. These things are expensive I guess, but I know the taxes I pay, I know the services I receive, and I’m very happy with the equation.

Krugman closes:

American conservatives despise European welfare states like France. Yet many of them stress the importance of “family values.” And whatever else you may say about French economic policies, they seem extremely supportive of the family as an institution.

So that is being provocative, and I already hear the “Yeah, but…”s, but it seems a shame that it’s impossible to imagine the current US administration even acknowledging that some of these things might work better elsewhere, let alone in France, let alone considering what might possibly translate to the American situation.

One of the American conservative complaints, I think, would be that it’s the government deciding, not the individual, and so that’s not a real choice. Referring to some recent research on differences in working hours (I think it is this study), Krugman says

[European] government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff - to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family - the kind of deal an individual would find hard to negotiate.

This touches an interesting shift in attitude about governments for me over the last several years. None is perfect, certainly not the French one, but at the end of the day I have (to pick just one specific item) ten weeks of vacation with my family and friends. The research above suggests this is primarily due to regulation, and from my viewpoint it’s highly consistent with the priorities of most French people. On the other hand, I know plenty of Americans who would like to see that shift in priorities in their own lives, but it’s very hard to do. Not impossible–very little is truly impossible in America–just highly unlikely.

I found a fine article about Miyazaki by Margaret Talbot, one of the few people to manage to interview him. Along the way, I discovered the New America Foundation, which looks like a place where I could seriously spend a lot of time reading; check out the list of the best articles of 2005. Its Board of Directors is chaired by James Fallows. And from its mission:

Now, more than ever, our nation needs a robust public debate, one that does justice to the complex challenges and opportunities of this unfolding era. […] The purpose of the New America Foundation is to bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation’s public discourse. Relying on a venture capital approach, the Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum.

The Talbot article was originally published in the New Yorker, but they seem to have very perishable links.

It’s been out for six months in France, but we three just finally saw the new Miyazaki film, Le Chateau Ambulant (Howl’s Moving Castle, Hauru No Ugoku Shiro) on Saturday. It’s the fifth Miyazaki title we’ve seen; if anyone knows of anything as wonderful as his films, please do share. The things sticking with me right now include: the collapsing of age through the shifting presentation of Sophie (somehow cubist for me); the crumbling, petering-out of the castle going up the mountain; the hilariously diminished Witch of the Waste (Sorcière des Landes); the green sticky ooze of pouting; the interdependence of the cursed.

Before seeing Miyazaki, but as an adult, I saw several animated films that I liked, that impressed me with their production qualities, that gave me a good laugh. But none that I wanted to watch more than once or twice, certainly none that left me moved and preoccupied in the way his more complex films do. And I’m delighted that they also captivate our five-year-old daughter, as they have much that I want to pass on to her: stories that are beautiful and magical and optimistic, in which the physical world is prominent, that show that how people treat each other and their world is important, with heroines who are real and imperfect and strong. Stories that will grow with her, cartoons that are not very cartoonish.

Today I showed my daughter a picture of the man who makes all these movies we love so much, and she spontaneously said “Thank you, Miyazaki!” I repeated after her, and said a silent prayer that his latest is not his last — he’s a huge part of our shared story world.

France was late to the internet, partly due to an already established online services network called Minitel. But lately it seems they’ve become quite a leader, at least in high-bandwidth offerings. My DSL provider’s plan is 30€/month and includes a connection of up to 20Mbit (in practice I get about 10Mbit), a VoIP solution that has free unlimited calls in France and is about 1.80€/hour to California, and >200 TV channels (>80 free, including the new digital-over-airwaves channels). The satellite content providers are now delivering over DSL too. Stability and service are not rock-solid — and they’ve been downright nightmarish for some — but I’ve had a pretty good experience overall. Connection-only, high-bandwidth (20Mbit) offerings are about 15€/month, from multiple providers.

My provider has been aggressive with new services, and I especially like this free one; it’s based on the free and open-source (GNU GPL) VLC media player project, and means I can stream video from any computer on my LAN (Mac and PCs for me, but most OSes are supported) to my TV without any additional hardware. No computer in the living room. DVDs, mpgs, etc all presented as playlists which can be selected with the TV remote. Well, any multimedia can be streamed, but video is the interesting one for me.

I’ve found PersonalWiki a good way to keep a lot of information that was previously distributed in text files, outlook, jabber histories, etc. It’s a single, low-friction, hypertext place, with lots of good search capabilities, and my implementation is based on a free and open solution with a great support community (MoinMoin).

Now that I’ve got MultipleDesktops working smoothly for simple things using Subversion, the obvious question is can I use it to keep my PersonalWiki synchronized across machines as well?

Yes, and I’m rather happy with the result; see this experience paper for details (a wiki page at MoinMoin itself).