By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Content-Aware Image Reduction
Traditionally, there were two ways to reduce the size of images. You could either crop them, or you could shrink them (aka 'scaling' them). Each has its disadvantages - when you crop photos, you may cut bits you want to keep, and when you shrink photos, you make the big bits smaller. This video introduces you to 'retargeting', a technique that allows you to keep the things you want to be big, but to just move them closer together. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Much Is That Standard in the Window, the One with the Lovely Tale?
More on the disputes surrounding efforts to make Microsoft's OOXML an ISO standard - "Groklaw says there has been more pressure by Microsoft in Denmark and there are rumours about irregularities in Norway and Hungary." I've seen similar stuff on other standard bodies. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. SchoolTube
I had some fun over lunch puttering through SchoolTube, a new service - "student produced and teacher approved" - allowing schools to upload videos. They're heavily into promotion mode right now (not surprisingly). The video reproduction is OK, but the site layout design is really bad - it looks like it was tested on Internet Explorer only. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. My Plan to Fix NCLB
I went to summer camp for four years in a row in my early teens, two years as a camper and two more years as a counselor. I'm sure not all camps are the same, but the one I went to, Camp Opemikon, taught me a lot. So I have a lot of sympathy with Gary Stager's proposal to fix NCLB - instead of hiring unaccountable and unqualified private contractors to teach after-school classes, send kids to summer camp. "Isn't it time to end the soft bigotry of low expectations and give every child a chance at summer camp?" he asks. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Dartmouth Produces Video Podcasts
A bit chatty, but nonetheless a useful account of how video recordings are produced at Dartmouth. One comment struck me, that there will always be a need for a camera operator. This doesn't strike me as true. I remember when I did videoconferencing in the 1990s at Assiniboine the camera could be voice activated and could also follow an infrared sensor worn by the speaker. As well, it seems to me, hand gestures could be used (assuming the patent trolls ever license the technology) to zoom and point the camera. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Can XML Be Efficient? W3C Thinks So
You have to wonder about the W3C sometimes. It took two years (a "W3C minute") to respond to the concern that XML files take too long (and use up too much processor power) to parse. It's a legitimate complaint - if you've tried to access my site and found it stalled, it's because Edu_RSS, which reads RSS, is parsing XML files. So what's the W3C's response? Binary XML. Not surprisingly, it hasn't been greeted with enthusiasm. Because it means that we would have to compress and decompress XML files, and then still parse them. In the meantime, I look at things like JSON, where the data comes in a package that needs no parsing at all. More...