Web. Software. Web2.0. Obama. Re-start: Musical Events. Last December, a friend and I went to a release party for Mary J. Blige’s “Growing Pains” album. Near huge screens showing Blige videos, a d.j. was playing records on two turntables. The d.j.’s eyes, however, were trained on an Apple MacBook on a shelf above them. As a succession of Blige songs faded from one into the next, the d.j. never changed the records. My friend asked, “Is there a new Mary medley I don’t know about?” The answer was no. A laptop, though, is different. Acts I’ve seen using both laptops and traditional instruments onstage in the past year include Björk, Radiohead, and Erykah Badu. One band that uses laptops is Battles, from Brooklyn, consisting of two guitar players, a bassist, and a drummer—the traditional rock lineup.
In August, I sat down with the group’s two guitarists, Tyondai Braxton and Ian Williams, at the Roebling Tea Room, in Williamsburg. “Laptops are fine,” Williams said, guardedly. Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk. After recording last week's interview, I was left with a 36-minute MP3 and a profound feeling of dread. You see, I hate transcribing audio. I used to transcribe interviews in high school, and it's always tedious, taking upwards of eight times the length of the clip itself. Bracing for a good four or five hours of rewinding and writing and rewinding, I remembered that this is The Future! So, instead, I tossed the job over to the global anonymous workforce at Amazon Mechanical Turk instead. The result: my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40. This is a fraction of the cost/time of any other transcription service online, including the Turk-driven Casting Words, though you potentially sacrifice some quality.
In my experience, though, there were virtually no errors. Here's how to do it yourself, with no programming knowledge required. Step 1: Prepare your audio. Name the files sequentially. Step 2: Design your HIT template. Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely.
In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
I think about that conversation a lot these days. Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. Technology is Great, but Are We Forgetting to Live? - ReadWriteW. Imagine you're at a concert where your favorite band is playing for the last time. Or you're watching President Obama get sworn into office. Or maybe you're just sitting around with your family under the Christmas tree watching your children open gifts. What are you doing in all those scenarios? If you're like most people today, you're probably recording it with some sort of technological gadgetry, be it a smartphone, digital camera, or camcorder.
You might also be sharing the moment with others across the web via Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed. Our Recorded Lives Thanks to technology, we never have to forget any experience of our lives. And yes, that's great. A great example of people missing the moment With technology having progressed to the point where it's nearly effortless to use, we've begun to integrate it into our lives in ways that have never been done before. Forgetting to Live When Should You Disconnect? "Stop trying to live your own life vicariously. T9 inventor now brings us Swype – simply slide to type - Newlaun. September 10, 2008 by mohsin You may not know who Cliff Kushler is, he is the inventor of the T9 Keyboard technology, and he has now come with another revolutionary technology to make our texting even easier. The new technology called Swype is as simple as tapping on your touch screen phone and sliding your finger or the stylus to all the alphabets of a word and lifting after each word is done.
A built-in 65,000-word dictionary corrects obvious and even creative spelling errors. Obviously, a word menu pops up if there are alternative options to a sequence of moves. A slight nudge upwards at the words will capitalize those words, and a wiggle will allow for double letter entry. The Swype technology was developed with the team focused on Windows Mobile (Smartphone’s) the tablet version of XP and Vista, and Surface.