No offense, but it might clear things up a bit if you fixed the sidebar on this website. Under the “Contributors” heading.

My name was mispelled a different way in every single occurance in my high school yearbook. My name was mispelled in a personalized Speigel Ident bracelet in elementary school, a present from my best pen pal. My name has been mispelled in newspapers. I’m used to it.

Plenty of Real based systems seem to suffer from ever-weakening servers, thus delivering a really pleasant gap and jerk filled experience. Places like MIT or Princeton, which you’d figure could afford decent servers, still nonetheless have their older streams play back terribly, presumably the result of general infrastructure neglect.

The Kavli style download of a standard format file avoids all these issues.
There is a reason why hoi polloi mostly love podcasting, once they have learned about it, while you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who is not a whore who has anything good to say about streaming, whether via Real, Windows Media, QT or Flash.

I mean, honestly, are we now so dim-witted that we are incapable of downloading a separate PDF and stepping through that as we listen to a talk, or incapable of hitting the Next button on a sequence of pages ala the way Kavli does it?

At the professional level, one of the things I love about the possibility of podcasting is that it offers a way to reduce the penalties on people who don’t/can’t travel. I’ve got small kids, and have cut way back on my conference attendance (i.e. don’t expect any big CV travelogues from me). Seattle is also a bit out of the way, so other scientists are less likely to just drop in, like they are at Caltech, Harvard, etc. Podcasting is a good opportunity to stay in the loop. Lots of conferences are posting PDFs of the speakers slides, and these are tremendously helpful as well. In my ideal world, I could flip through the PDF while listening to the podcast (with little “beeps” like they had with filmstrips back in the day).

(1)
For SOME scientific talks. I listen to a large number of talks on my iPod and there have been very few where I have felt missing visuals to be a problem. Someone like Sean for example (suckup, suckup) going on about missing mass and dark energy is very easy to understand without the visuals.
I’d go so far as to say that the visuals are very important to colleagues, who care about the precise new details in this talk, but of minor importance to interested outsiders.

And remember science is much bigger than just astronomy. Math is basically hopeless via podcast; though visuals migh help a little, it’s much more useful (IMHO) to go through a paper or book at one’s own pace. Similarly for some types of theoretical physics. On the other hand discussions of new experiments can work very well (I thoroughly enjoyed a talk on the ICE_CUBE neutrino observatory). A lot of biology works very well with just sound, though some systems biology needs the pictures. Cognitive science works well, likewise a lot of archeology, as long as it is conceptual rather than detailed reports of a specific dig.

(2) Of all the people in world podcasting science, by FAR the most clueful are the Kavli institute. Anyone not following their examples is being a fool. Among other things they
- have good, searchable, browsable web pages
- good podcast feeds
- use standard (non-proprietary) formats (H264, AAC)
- have a very sensible way to handle video.
Specifically they catch a video frame every 10 seconds (I think) without any expensive human processing, and dump that into the AAC stream. This gives a file that is not significantly larger, that is playable on audio-only devices, but that will display an updated frame every so often on devices that have any (even limited) video capability, like say an iPod nano. The every ten seconds capture gets you the slides/blackboard/whatever, and the lack of motion is not something you’re going to miss except in some very specialized cases like playback of an animation (in which case the animation will generally be available on the web page for that specific talk along with the slides, the audio/video in various formats and so on).
Really very very impressive.

Compare to the extremely crappy jobs done by, for example, Perimeter or CalTech or MIT (lousy search, lousy browsing, streaming only Real format) and you have to wonder WTF is going on in these supposed hotbeds of smart technophiles.

One of the big issues in determining whether someone “makes it” in a field or not is their resiliancy, particularly if you’re an outsider. The thick skinned have an easier time brushing off the various struggles one faces in navigating through a sub-culture that is not completely your own. What this allows one to do is to keep on doing excellent work without getting too demoralized or pissed off to move forward. This is not the same as not speaking up when the situation demands, but means sometimes conserving one’s energies for the big fights. I’m not saying that you’re “too outraged” or that Clifton is not outraged enough — it’s just that temperments vary and not getting worked up about small stuff has little bearing on whether someone would fight the larger fights that matter. To essentially equate his finding the original post funny with a failure to appreciate the civil rights struggle of the 60′s and 70′s seems ungenerous and counterproductive.

Look, for lots of women “cunt” is an incredibly loaded word. For me, I could care less, and I’m just going to get irritated if someone tries to scold me into feeling a level of outrage that I just don’t have (though I won’t let it be said at work if it’s bugging people, the same way I took down the pictures in response to your comments). My ability to say “cunt cunt cunt cunt” without a flicker in my heart rate says squat about my appreciation for the fact that my path has been vastly easier than women of my parents’ generation. I may be post-feminist in a lot of ways, but the way I live my life and the fights I take on embody feminism, without my having to mimic a particular form of it.

(Sorry Hmmmm — lots of cross posting so I missed the back and forth with Adam….I’ll leave this for posterity)

However, it’s not like I am an expert on US race relations, nor claim to be; I’m a white man from the UK.

I’m not scolding Clifton for not being offended. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t offended.

I’m scolding Clifton for forgeting the bigger picture.

And just to put it out there…I’m black, I have a Ph.D in physics, and I consider myself to be very successful. I’d be the last guy to have a chip on my shoulder. That’s not what this is about.

Let me try to explain….

My mother still to this day tells stories about how she wanted to go to college, but was denied access. We, as a nation, have progressed mightly since then because a lot of people sacrificed and fought for that progress. In truth, all of the opportunites that I have had, that were denied to the generation before me, are due those “civil-rights warriors”…..For them I’m thankful.

It one looks at the rest of the world or looks at history it’s clear that our modern progressive tolerant society doesn’t have to exist (it may not even be a global minimum). As I alluded to in my last post; the people who lived in that “other” society arent even dead yet. So if I have to be one of those pesky PC police to help keep our modern progressive tolerant society from regressing….than that’s what I’ll do.

Do you understand….it’s in my interest.

There are to many bad things in our recent history…..it’s not really funny.

And shame on you Clifton Moore…don’t forget that your opportunity exists, in part, because people fought against these things.