From the monthly archives: November 2011
This is super cool! (Thanks Mary!). Look at the feathers!
From YouTube:
Full HD High Speed Movie — 1000 fps
Eagleowl
Photron Full HD High Speed Camera SA2
for more High Speed Movies see http://hs-movies.de
Wow – dedication! This is a cool stop-action music video that took almost 2 years to make!
From PetaPixel:
Want to see what pure dedication looks like? This music video for the song “In Your Arms” by Kina Grannis is a stop-motion animation done with a background composed of jelly beans. It’s a crazy project that required 22 months, 1,357 hours, 30 people, and 288,000 jelly beans. They could have used CGI, of course, but each frame was carefully created by hand and photographed with a still camera. It’s even more mind-blowing given this fact: none of it was done with a green screen.
Here’s an interesting behind-the-scenes look into how it was made:
I think MOST pictures are cool! But if you need another opinion, check Xerox:
From Gizmodo:
Amazing. Xerox research labs have developed a computer program that tells you if your pictures are good or bad. In fact, it’s capable of detecting if the photo has that magical, intangible quality that makes an image special. It works.
At least looking at their examples, which were obtained using an alpha version of their software, it seems it works great.
You can easily see the difference. The images on the left side are beautiful, strikingly pretty or dramatic. They have that something. They attract your eye instantly. The images of the right side are not that good. It’s not that they are poorly made or blurry or have extremely bad compositions. They are… ok. They are flat, just one snoozer, blah and yawner after the other.
That’s exactly what Xerox wanted to do, according to their labs people, their Aesthetic Image Search program is “trying to learn what makes an image special, and makes photo enthusiasts mark it as high quality.”
Computer critics
Their critic software doesn’t work with any photos. It is specialized in different subjects, like beaches, portraits, skies or flowers. The algorithm uses different parameters to evaluate the photos according to that subject matter, drawing conclusions that seem quite accurate most of the time.
I’m sure that some people will not agree with some of the judgements. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. But it’s true that the Xerox critic art makes an excellent job at picking the remarkable stuff against the blah stuff.
I wonder what would happen if you feed it some apparently mundane photo like this Cindy Sherman, which was sold for $3.89 million. Or this bland Andreas Gursky’s landscape, sold for $4.3 million. Would the algorithm say they are awesome or that they suck? Would it love Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz? Would Henri Cartier-Bresson confuse it or would it recognize the beauty of his work?
Perhaps the better question could be another: if you give this software a few rolls of Cartier-Bresson’s photos, would it be able to distinguish what are the amazing ones, the ones that Henri picked himself in his lab, from the bad ones, the ones that were never published or printed?
Maybe if it ever achieves that we would be closer to create machines with a soul, computers that are not only smart but could appreciate beauty in the same way humans do. [Open Xerox—Thanks Oscar!]
How was your Thanksgiving last week? Ours was wonderful! So blessed!!
I hope your turkey dinner turned out better than this households:
This is really cool! I have been watching this company for about six months and they have announced availability and pricing of their fist camera in early 2012. The cool part of the pictures this camera takes can’t really be described as well as shown, so please take a look at these pictures in their gallery.
Click on the picture below and then click on any part of the picture that opens up to refocus – wild!
Lytro camera lets you focus after you shoot | ZDNet UK.
A small Californian start-up company plans to launch a “light field” camera that will let you refocus images after you have taken them. Users will be able to shift between having a sharp foreground and a blurry background, or vice versa, or having everything sharp. The Lytro camera — which the company says will be competitively priced and fit in your pocket — will also be capable of creating 3-D images. Although the idea is aimed at consumers, it will find many professional uses, especially in scientific, medical and surveillance applications.
Real Estate – this is a look at the trends and differences between the boomer generations!
From ColdwellBanker:
The infographic below represents data collected from a survey of Coldwell Banker real estate brokers and agents regarding Baby Boomer real estate trends. Specifically, the survey sought to understand how the economy is impacting Baby Boomers’ real estate decisions and how real estate trends differ between older and younger members of the Baby Boomer generation.
Click to enlarge:
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This is cool to be able to see where your Twitter followers are from. I was quite surprised by mine:
62% of my followers are from #United States, 8% from #United Kingdom & 8% from #New York. ME. Where are yours?
From Mashable:
Name: TweepsMap
Quick Pitch: TweepsMap provides a visual, interactive map of your Twitter followers by country, state or city.
Genius Idea: Measures the effectiveness of Twitter campaigns by analyzing the locations of your followers.
Knowing where your Twitter followers are located can not only feed your curiosity, but it can also help you measure the success of your social campaigns. To do this, TweepsMap links to your Twitter account, analyzes your followers and provides a map or chart that shows where they’re located by country, state or city.
Launched in October, the tool helps Twitter users learn if their campaign is successful in a targeted region. For example, if your Twitter campaign is targeted toward Chicago residents, TweepsMap helps you see how many of your followers are actually located in Chicago.
“One of the most important aspects of a campaign is to measure location to see where your followers are and if they are engaged or not,” says Samir Al-Battran, founder of TweepsMap. “TweepsMap helps you learn whether you need to adjust your campaign to reach your targeted audience.”
After authorizing the TweepsMap API, it generates a color-coded map with Twitter birds spread across it to show the number of followers in that specific location — red birds represent the largest number of followers, and yellow represents the second largest number.
Check out a TweepsMap of Mashable‘s 2.5+ million users:
The map shows that most of Mashable‘s followers are located in the United States, South America, the United Kingdom and India. TweepsMap also provides the percentages of Mashable‘s followers in three top locations – “44% of mashable’s followers are from #United States, 7% from #United Kingdom & 4% from #New York”.
Users can use the TweepsMap widget to display their own statistics on any website or blog.
“For individual users, TweepsMap is a fun tool to check out the distribution of their followers and share them on Twitter,” says Al-Battran. “For larger organizations, the goal of TweepsMap is to help them measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.”
TweepsMap does not automatically tweet results without the users permission or store personal Twitter account information.
One of the challenges with TweepsMap is that less than 10% of Twitter users do not add accurate locations on their Twitter accounts, says Al-Battran. Most users only add their country or state instead of their residing city. That’s why most of the Twitter birds on the TweetsMap represent the number of followers in a country rather than in a city.
The site now has about daily 1,000 users and Al-Battran plans to expand TweepsMap by launching premium services in the future for larger Twitter accounts.
Where are your Twitter followers located?
