[bcab] Re: Alexandra Palace mash up

Gordon,
 
    Try the following link:
http://scriptingenabled.org/
 
 
    I gather things are still a little up in the air, as Chris Heilman is
still looking for sponsorship and a location for the event. If it gets off
the ground, which I sincerely hope it does, it will be well worth attending.
 
Léonie.

  _____  

From: bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Gordon Keen
Sent: 26 June 2008 12:33
To: bcab@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bcab] Alexandra Palace mash up


Can anyone point me to a link for the *scripting enabled* project mentioned
in the following report from the BBC web site?bcab@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 


news_logo.gif
Hacking and mashing at the Palace





By Ewan Spence


The ingredients for Mashed are simple.

Bring the best web developers from around the United Kingdom; mix them
together with new web tools, applications and services; then leave them for
a whole weekend to see what they will come up with.

The United Kingdom has a strong community of programmers and web developers,
and this annual event organised by the BBC Backstage team brings them
alongside the latest technologies from leading internet companies including
Microsoft, Yahoo and O'Reilly.

The core principle of the Mashed event was for the attendees to "make
something cool".

With close to fifty hacks presented on Sunday afternoon, there was a lot of
creativity on show.

Individuals gathered around tables, claimed corners of the West Hall,
throwing out ideas and suggestions for hacks that they could plan, develop,
test and be ready to present just twenty four hours later to everyone in the
hall.

While the term hacking has a perceived darker edge, the developer community
regards hacking as something more pure, where people simply do things with
programs and to hardware that might not be their intended use, but provide
useful results.

Internet companies are making it much easier for their data to be hacked and
used for new purposes by developers.

Signal change

The opening of the event was focused on sessions and seminars from the
companies attending.

Pamela Clark from NASA presented ANTS technology - the Autonomous
Nanotechnology Swarm - which is likely to be designed into future probes to
Mars and beyond.

Microsoft brought along speakers from their Robotics Team, as well as the
Multimaps team, while Yahoo talked about their FireEagle tools and how it
can be used.

Perhaps the most popular sessions was on how to program interactive
television services. Introducing the programmers to the relatively new
language of MHEG was well received, and a number of developers were itching
to test out what they could do to make an interactive service.

To aid this, for the first time since 1956, Alexandra Palace broadcast a TV
signal (albeit with just enough range to fill the hall).

A full DVB-T multiplex broadcasting a number of channels, as well as the
back-end systems that control the interactive TV services was available to
the attendees eager to prototype ideas that previously were limited to
computer screens.

One highly regarded use, given the "best hack of the event" award, was from
the Northender team.

Pulling in a number of programs on the web, they were able to create
automatic translation software for live television by reading digital
subtitles into a computer, translating these to a foreign language and
passing the results through a speech synthesizer.

The demo of Eastenders into rather robotic German proved the concept, but
the emotional scenes from Walford took on a surreal air with the monotone
computer voice.

Sideways shift

Team Bob took a similar route to Northenders by reading in digital
subtitles, but then analysed them for key words and phrases that were then
digitally painted onto the cards carried by Bob Dylan in the classic
"Subterranean Blues" video.

Carbon Goggles took on the task of showing the amount of carbon footprint
various pieces of technology produce.

"Global warming would be much easier to solve if you could see carbon
dioxide," said Jim Purbrick.

"We've put two ideas together by overlaying real world carbon emission data
from AMEE [an aggregation platform that measures and tracks the world's
energy usage] on to objects in Second Life"

The goggles are worn in the virtual world of Second Life, and as you look
around, a transparent sphere illustrating the relative amounts of carbon
used by each object can be seen, allowing for instant comparisons of
objects, and perhaps a better understanding of the energy choices we make in
the real world.

Mashed continues to prove both that the community spirit is alive and well
in the UK web scene, but also that many of the new ideas that can shape the
internet in the 21st century are not necessarily going to come from large
companies, who sometimes are not in a position to push technological
boundaries.

Individuals can find that edge, sometimes with amusing effect (such as the
Social Flight Simulator to demonstrate data that airlines could provide) to
practical uses (receiving an alert whenever your favourite TV has a new
episode available on the iPlayer), to the potential to genuinely change
lives (the Scripting Enabled Crew hacked together an audio search system for
blind users of the BBC).

Alexandra Palace broadcast the first UK TV signals back in 1936, which
heralded a revolution in media and communication.

To see it and the BBC continuing to be associated with the hacking of new
technology is marvellous.

By developing the ecosystem around these tools and providing more data to
them, the BBC is helping to build up value and trust in them, and the
resulting projects from the developers both at Mashed, and throughout the
year, are both cool and useful. And that should be encouraged.




Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/7470057.stm

Published: 2008/06/24 08:41:15 GMT

© BBC MMVIII




This sounds like something that should be encouraged.


Regards


G


From glorious Devon, England

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