Monday, September 23, 2002

Check out Google's news service. http://news.google.com/ Everything is done algorithmically by machines, so it seems a bit disjointed in places. They are following about 4000 sources and a big feature is that you can trace the history of a story as it unfolds. I prefer looking at a small number of sources with good editors, but this will be interesting to follow. 12:39:53 PM     Apparently there was a golden age of amateur television building that ran from 1928 until 1932. Most of the experimenters were ham radio operators and the mechanisms were electromechanical involving spinning disks (hmm .. CDs and DVDs involve spinning discs too:) A bit of searching turns up several mechanical television pages. Most of them are fan pages, but a few dedicated folks actually build hardware. An excellent example is Peter Yanczer http://pyanczer.home.mindspring.com/Tour/tv_build.html who offers a detailed look at his handiwork. If you want to give it a try he also will furnish you with the pieces that are difficult to fabricate. This looks like a lot of fun, but there are too many things to do. Many of the early designs used "Nipkow disks," named in honor of a German scientist who patented a workable electromechanical television scheme in 1884 http://pyanczer.home.mindspring.com/Tour/yourdisk.html It isn't clear when his design was first realized, but more searching turned up a Scientific American reference from October 1902 that says an unnamed Belgian engineer successfully implemented a means to "see electrically through long distances" - it goes on to describe Nipkow's device. So TV may be 100 years old this year! In any event this appears to be a great area to search for interesting tidbits of inventions and schemes that did not quite make the cut. John Logie Baird was a major player. Of course the Philo Fransworth story is sufficiently interesting that several books and documentaries have been done on the subject. For a quick look at how current electronic color television work give this site a visit http://www.howstuffworks.com/tv.htm Before going off to other things, you may want a quick course on cable TV http://www.howstuffworks.com/cable-tv.htm 5:52:29 AM     Some time ago MIT announced OpenCourseWare - the intention of putting MIT online with no fees. I haven't heard much until this BBC report (as noted in ./) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2270648.stm I'm a bit skeptical as there are enormous costs in doing something like this as most experiences with online education show that a simple recycling of existing material doesn't work. Still - I wish them well and hope this works. Here is MIT's link http://web.mit.edu/ocw/ Cornell has a free offering called Cybertower - it is on a small scale (almost like a series of public lectures with discussions) and probably represents an experiment http://cybertower.cornell.edu/index.html Still - this is a far better use of the web than selling coffee mugs. Online educations will never be a substitute for direct contact, but they can be fantastic for enrichment (an excellent mechanism for engaging alumni) and reaching the masses who, for want of time, money and location, can't have the experience of being there. 5:51:59 AM

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