Category Archives: Reading

Does ‘seam carving’ generalize?

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During a recent Charlie Rose interview with Peter Chernin, the subject of media formats came up, which reminded me of an earlier question I raised, “What is the natural unit of written collaboration?” When I mused upon this question it was in the context of documents and written content. I hadn’t really thought about so-called rich media (interactive) content.

So, what is the natural unit of such content?

Mr. Chernin remarked that the movie, the hour-long drama and the half-hour comedy are all resilient forms of content–and he would hope so given his responsibilities at News Corp. He also sees new forms emerging–all shorts, if you will: five, ten and 15 minute segments, depending on one’s context (e.g. watch on your smart phone while waiting for public transportation).

I recall the following quote from Mr. Chernin: “In a world of infinite choice, mediocrity is death.” (More quotes are captured here, for example.) Or, aim to stand out. Speaking of short films and excellence, Pixar’s Presto, which plays before WALL-E, is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a movie theater.

Anyway, back to new forms of interactive content… Content reuse is something I build software to promote based on conversations with customers. During this interview, I couldn’t help but to think that there is a real opportunity here for software to support the production of variously sized shorts from full originals in such a way as to retain, if not amplify, the essence of the first edition.

Enter seam carving.

I found a seam carving implementation by Mike Swanson called Seamonster. This led me to a paper by seam carving’s creators, Dr. Shai Avidan and Dr. Ariel Shamir: Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing.

As the author’s note, without additional “higher level cues.” seam carving doesn’t work on all images. Nevertheless, the relatively straightforward nature of seam carving causes me to wonder if similar techniques can be applied to video, audio and even text.

This later work describes video application of seam carving. It appears, upon first glance, that a key to application is what Avidan and Shamir call energy criteria (e.g. the notion of forward energy in a video context).

What are the key energy criteria for audio files? What are the key energy criteria for documents? What artifacts should be anticipated when applying seam carving to various media and how can they be mitigated, if not avoided altogether?

I need to investigate seam carving in more detail. All resource pointers are much appreciated.

The Myths of Innovation

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Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation is a refreshingly unpretentious read–one that I accomplished straightaway in an afternoon (off).

Here are my takeaways–all quotes are Scott’s unless explicitly noted otherwise:

  • Innovation as an accumulation of smaller insights…connecting pieces…realizing picture (puzzle); therefore, take action to enable insights to occur more freely.
  • Work passionately and take breaks to let the mind wander and the allow the subconscious to work on our behalf.
  • Epiphany as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems
  • “It is an achievement to find a great idea, but it is a greater one to successfully use it to improve the world.”
  • “The secret tragedy of innovators is that their desire to improve the world is rarely matched by support from the people they hope to help.”
  • “The greater the potential of an idea, the harder it is to find anyone willing to try it.”
  • “Innovative idea are rarely rejected on their merits; they’re rejected because of how they make people feel.”
  • Is your desire to find new ideas to conquer greater than your desire to protect the success you already have?
  • “Wise innovators–driven by passion more than ego–initiate partnerships, collaborations, and humble studies of the past, raising their odds against the timeless challenges of innovation.”
  • Imagination > Knowledge > Information
  • I’ve put knowledge above information for some time know, but Albert Einstein’s belief that “imagination is more important than knowledge” (stated on page 83) captured my attention.
  • How can content-centric applications do a better job of capturing the user’s imagination, let alone increate the knowledge derivative?
  • “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” -Linus Pauling
  • Does this sound like your team? “Ideas flow between people easily and in large volumes. Conversations are vibrant with questions and suggestions, prototypes and demos happen regularly, and people commit to finding and fighting for good ideas.” If not, why?
    • Actually commit reminds me of something U2 bassist Adam Clayton said while being interviewed on the How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb DVD. His comments are captured here, although I recall them to be slightly different on the DVD.
    • A group of people, a team or a band, has to commit before any real business can take place. Too often I see groups form for one reason or another without mutual commitment, and typically it’s just a matter of time until they disband, leaving some frustrated and others numb.
  • “Successful innovators compare their ambitions to their capital.”
  • “Sorting out the meaning and impact of innovations is more complex than the task of making the innovations themselves.”
    • “What problems does this innovation solve? Whose problems are they?”
    • “What problems does this innovation create? Whose problems are they?”

    Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

    A fire has started, indeed

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    I just finished watching Charlie Rose’s interview of Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos on PBS. Most of the conversation focused on Kindle: Amazon’s Wireless Reading Device, an amazing new device that embodies a vision to improve the act of reading. Kindle was the chosen product name specifically because it means to start a fire. The creative fires surrounding authoring, publishing and reading are certainly stoked by the arrival of this device.

    Charlie Rose has got to be one of the best connected persons in the world.

    Part of his paradigm–appropriate given his profession–is that questions are important. So, Charlie asked Jeff what question the Kindle seeks to answer. Jeff replied something as follows: “How can the act of reading be improved? How can a the essence of a book be improved?”

    Q: What is the most important aspect of a book? A: It disappears. That is, when you start to read a long form, well written text, you enter the world of the author. Paper and ink fade away; the book disappears.

    Jeff went on to say that you “can’t ‘out book’ a book.” There are aspects of books that cannot be improved upon. So Kindle doesn’t attempt to outshine such qualities of books but rather focuses on what physical books cannot do.

    Nearly 90,000 books today can be delivered to Kindle, which can store up to 200 books, yet weighs less than the average book at slightly more than 10 ounces. I probably own more books than I can pack into a Kindle, but I assure you that I can’t carry my personal library either! :-)

    Jeff expects devices like Kindle to become platforms for experimentation, and he very quickly remarked that most experiments will fail. However, experimentation benefits everyone by uncovering the unforeseen challenges, creating new choices, lowering access barriers, etc.

    I appreciate that Kindle has been under development for the past three years. Kindle represents a bet by Amazon’s leadership that all of the required technology would be commercially available in time for today’s public launch (e.g. the paper-like display, 10 years in the lab). It’s a fine example of calculating risk-taking as well as, what appears to be the reasonable expectation of a rewarding commercial future.

    Stuff and information

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    Paul Graham’s essay last month, “Stuff,” really resonates with me. I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes and go read it. Good, isn’t it?!

    Stuff appears to be a key contributing factor to the commoditization–er, evaporation–of my time. In fact, I can effectively replace “stuff” with “information” in Paul’s essay and feel equally downtrodden. I’m overwhelmed with information, probably just like you are.

    To paraphrase and personalize some of Paul’s points:

    • Information has gotten a lot cheaper, but my attitude toward it hasn’t changed correspondingly. I overvalue information.
    • Once I’ve accumulated a certain amount of information, it starts to own me rather than the other way around.
    • A cluttered room [or computer file system or feed aggregator or ...] is literally exhausting.
    • Another way to resist acquiring information is to think of the overall cost of owning [or even just managing] it. The purchase price [or initial download, even free] is just the beginning. I’m going to have to think about the thing for years–perhaps even for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.

    I’m known to be a packrat, which has certainly saved me and others in the past. However, the burden that comes with this mountain of information (stuff) is wearing. Techniques I’ve described before end up involved more about paying in time lost than in real value gained (i.e. organization for no apparent long-term benefit).

    Earlier this week I was meeting with several EMC colleagues to discuss the whole REST/POX/SOAP/RPC/SOA/ROA(/DOA) thing. During this candid discussion–a good subject for another post–someone remarked, and I’m paraphrasing, “Forget about organization; focus on good search. Organization is an intractable problem, and one that no one is willing to pay for to solve properly.” This gave me pause…so, how do I leverage search on the web and on my desktop? Has search truly replaced navigation for me? If not, why?

    Back to Paul’s essay and the realization that I may overvalue information, I got to thinking about physical books, digital books and links to books online. Paper is pleasant to hold and read, but it can burn and consumes shelf space. PDFs are fine on a big display, but they require software to read (albeit free) and additional electronic storage themselves–not to mention that they’re fixed/frozen, not dynamic/living, in nature. Links consume far less storage then documents on my hard drive–even nothing when placed into del.icio.us–but they can break or become useful when my ISP decides to disappear. When I go offline, how do I access a particular document given only a link? When I’m away from my computer, PDA, smart phone, etc. how do I read my softcopy document? When I’m away from my home library and a nearby book seller, how do I thumb through a certain chapter for that particular key phrase or figure?

    Given all my questions, I need something empirical to help me to change my ways. Ironically, it seems like more data could help my information overload. :-)

    The kind of data I’m currently envisioning represents the number of browse, read and write related actions upon sets of electronic documents. For example, if I navigate to a folder that contains two documents but do nothing more, then each document gets a +1 in the browse column. If I navigate here again and open one of the documents, both documents get another +1 for browse and the opened document gets a +1 in the read column, too. If I edit the open document and save my changes, then that document also receives a +1 in the write column.

    I say “columns” to represent this metadata due to my leverage of a useful Windows Explorer add-in (i.e. shell namespace extension), Folder Size for Windows, which presents a new Folder Size column within the main file system navigator:

     

    On the other hand, I’m not sure that adding three columns of numbers would be terribly useful.

    Fortunately there are lots of ways to project this kind of information. I circulated Visual Literacy’s A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods amongst my colleagues at work back in May and it garnered a fair bit of praise and admiration. More recently, Jeff Atwood blogged more generally about catalogs of data visualization. For example, maybe I could apply Crazy Egg‘s ”heat map” concept.

    Perhaps I’m simply over-engineering the whole thing.

    Taking a step back and returning to Paul’s essay, the following paragraph may represent the simplest way to my information tranquility:

    A friend of mine cured herself of a clothes buying habit by asking herself before she bought anything “Am I going to wear this all the time?” If she couldn’t convince herself that something she was thinking of buying would become one of those few things she wore all the time, she wouldn’t buy it. I think that would work for any kind of purchase. Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this be something I use constantly? Or is it just something nice? Or worse still, a mere bargain?

    I’ve successfully applied this practice to physical books and music CD’s–I’m a sucker for both–but I’ve got a long way to go where general downloading and filing is concerned.

    Update 8/24/2007: Not that TreeMaps are necessarily ideal, but I ran across a TreeMap-based disk drive content visualization software for Windows and MacOS recently: SequoiaView (Windows) and Disk Inventory X (MacOS).