Low Hanging Fruit

Downloading Online Video (and Audio)

2007-04-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

In this era of legal wrangling its hard to get a straight answer to this question--what are we allowed to download off of the internet?--but downloading videos does NOT require any fancy software or hacking anymore. Its just sitting there, often with a search engine and a download button.

For example, a search for Zimbardo on Google Video yields this low-hanging fruit:

Discovering Psychology: The Power Of The Situation with Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8673118115997325318&q=zimbardo

Click on the download button and you are offered the options (Windows/Mac or Video iPod/Sony PSP) and its yours for excerpting in PPT files in your next class. Moreover, last November Colleges received an explicit exception to the DMCA, which had forbid circumventing copyright protection--translation, excerpting any audiovisual material in the classroom--so its is now officially approved by the Copyright Office and the Library of Congress.

1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.

Because google now OWNS youtube they return youtube results when you search at

http://video.google.com

You get many of the original movies from the Stanford Prison Experiment as well here, when you search for Zimbardo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KXy8CLqgk4

To download these you would just have to drop that URL into one of many online sites.

http://www.dubayou.com/mytube.php

This site looks suspicious because it lacks ANY fancy graphic design or advertising (what a sad standard of legitimacy!) but many other sites are basically doing the same thing that this MyTube started. I know many students use:

http://www.ripzor.com/youtuberipper.html

Youtube's file format is flash video, and you may need a .flv player to watch the download, but the site offers you an excellent player, and a converter if you want to change it back to a .mov or .avi

BUT are we ALLOWED? You will probably not get a direct answer to this question, not even from a lawyer, as the answer still depends upon the content's own complicated copyright status. SULAIR now provides a way of determining the copyright status of books, but there is no equivalent for online videos. Many homemade videos, which had Warner music on them, were recently approved by Warner, and other Music companies are following suit when there is no obvious downstream revenue stolen.

But because Google is reputable, we can get SOME IDEA of what is allowed just by using their site. A search for Darwin brings up MANY TV broadcast shows, like Charlie Rose's Interview with Watson and Wilson (a high quality version of which can be downloaded for 0.99: but what about the low-quality one we are viewing without paying?)

http://video.google.com/url?docid=-6927851714963534233&esrc=sr2&ev=v&q=Darwin&vidurl=http://video.google.com/videoplay%3Fdocid%3D-6927851714963534233%26q%3DDarwin&usg=AL29H20ww6Hxp4u3blzJ0sF81HYgeB2LTA

You can download for free Stanford Experts on Climate Change and Carbon Trading (Stephen Schneider and Thomas Heller)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2226061573523196174&q=Schneider+Climate

Closer to home, Stanford has its very own iTunes service. Academic iTunes can be connected to Coursework, so you can password protect it to stream content for your classes. Public iTunes streams campus events, classes and other lectures, and you can even have your own classes taped and streamed (with the appropriate releases). They just reorganized and made much more friendly this Public iTunes site, and it would be worth revisiting it if you have not in some time:

http://itunes.stanford.edu/ (Please don't use Firefox: Apple hasn't got that working yet.)

It will open up iTunes on your computer and show you what's available from Stanford in 10 major categories.

I find in Stanford >> Science and Technology >> Environmental Science: Audio many talks, including one by Paul and Anne Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily, entitled: "Nature's Economy, Population, Consumption and Sustainability" (1:37)

Available for Download (just push the button GET)

There are literally MILLIONS of videos online for download. Let me know what you find.

Surveys Online

2007-03-23T11:12:00.000-07:00

Three may not be a magic number, but if three people independently ask for help with surveys, you can be pretty sure that there are many people who want to make surveys.

The problem with surveys is that there are TOO MANY ways to do them. (In this regard, think of all the Calendaring systems: Meetingmaker, Outlook, iCal, Palm Calendars, Sundial, Google and Yahoo Calendars, even your Fridge--all work well, but not well with EACH OTHER, and you need everyone you know to use the same Calendar to really benefit.) Surveys are more useful, when they are all done in the same way, so that you can change them without learning a new piece of software, and you can analyze the results in the same way--even compare the results--without trying to move between all the different survey tools you are using. With this caveat--its not worth having yet another survey tool if you already have a whole workflow in place for your teaching and research--I am going to recommend a survey tool, which might become your ONE survey tool.

Zoomerang (http://www.zoomerang.com)

Anyone can get a free account and survey up the 50 people with any one survey, creating address books of the respondents you email it to, etc. You can even analyze the results online with some helpful tools (though not export the data in a spreadsheet) so it is an excellent tool to give to students, who want to make small surveys for an assignment, or even a tool for you to survey them. Creating a survey takes minutes: you just go online, pick the type of questions (multiple choice, yes/no, open answer, closed answers, but with follow ups, etc.), create the options, and publish it to a list of emails, or to a web address online. This is a screenshot of how the surveys look when complete.

For $99 a quarter (3 months) or $350 a year you can have a full fledged account, (which can even be branded with Human Biology or your lab logo) and has no limit on the number of respondents, nor limits on exporting the data. You can't share your account, so everyone in Humbio can't use one account, but this doesn't mean you can't delegate a graduate student to set these up for you. Its just that more than one person cannot be doing this at the same time--literally, the interface wiil not allow two different people to log on to it at the same time with the same account and password. I wrote them to ask about this and educational pricing, and I am linking this to the complete letter so you can read the details yourself

Zotero

2007-03-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

This will no doubt be only the first of several posts on Zotero, as it is both simple to use and has room to grow, if you explore all of its possiblities.

A free plug-in for Firefox that helps you to manage your online research, I first used it last Fall when trying to create documentation to help Medical School faculty and students comply with the General Counsel's advice on copyright law. In the past many of us may have created pdfs of articles that we use in our teaching and research, as it has always been difficult to find reliable and static links to the online articles, which Stanford pays a subscription for affiliates to use. This situation has improved, not only because online journals now regularly provide static links to the page, and tools for exporting references in a variety of formats, but also because Zotero can automatically capture these links and references into a virtual searchable rolodex. Huh?

I will tell you how to download the plug-in at the bottom of this post, but take a look at it first, so you know what you are being offered:

This is a Screen Shot of an article in Nature on Neanderthal DNA

The Green arrow points to the button you click to save articles--and this includes the long-awaited STATIC LINK, the REFERENCE, and an ATTACHMENT, which is basically a stripped down html version of the page. What more could you need? Tools for searching your saved items, libraries for cataloguing them for different projects, and so on and so forth. This tool was made for you, not made for someone in business, and partly adaptable to your research. There are also tabs for taking notes, and more. I leave you to play with this yourself, on an article of your choice.

The Red arrow points to the logo of Zotero in the corner, which is what you click on to open and shut this plugin for Firefox. It will be there after you download it.

In case you don't yet have Firefox (most cross-platform compatible at the moment, so mac and pc alike are good), you will need to download it at:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

There is a link to help you find plugins too, but just google Zotera to find the plug in. You may have to "allow" it to be installed--a yellow bar at the top of the screen will say that firefox is blocking the install and you can just click on it and allow. You may also have to restart the browser to get it working but that is pretty much it. click on the zotero logo in the bottom right corner, and navigate through lane library, or wherever else you do online research. Play with it and send me your questions!

moth@stanford.edu

More about those fruit

2007-03-01T10:23:00.001-08:00

1) More about gapminder:

Google has a subscription service, so you can subscribe to and search gapminder charts.

A year ago this month Hans Rosling presented the story of gapminder's origin at TED (Technology Entertainment Design) in Monterey. The difficulties of his students "seeing" the global phenomena they studied will no doubt be familiar to you.

Many Eyes is a similar service developed in San Francisco, so many of the visualizations are of more local phenomena, like student enrollments at UC Berkeley since 1983. The dataset is there, but also two different ways of visualizing it.

a) By School and Department over time
b) By accumulative enrollments over this timespan, comparing the gender of the enrollees to each School and Department.

You can easily focus in or modify any visualization directly on the webapge, so that many of the commenters will do this and then ask about parts of the dataset not apparent in the original visualization. For example, the inversion of the gender ratio of law students in the past 20 years.

2) More about The protein database. It is possible to export the 3D data of the proteins from this database, and many other databases of cellular processes, and make animations illustrating biological processes. The most sophisticated of these that I have found was made at Harvard: an animation of the workings inside a cell. But there are dozens of similar animations on Discover programs and such, and Alison pointed me to a source of less detailed and dramatic, but in many ways easier to understand animations of biological processes, that are also available online for viewing.

3)I mentioned the Purple Medical Blog.

Science Blogs is an aggregator of blogs and probably the best place to start if you have not found a blog yet that speaks to you.

4)Last time I mentioned Remote Desktop, and its worth underscoring that you can't get onto a computer remotely if its turned OFF. Sounds ridiculous, but in fact there are many things your computer CANNOT do when they are off, including important update and virus scanning functions vital to the health of your computer. Although a computer pulls a passive load of power when it is asleep, it is relatively efficient if your computer is not the sort whose fan never stops humming. I leave mine ON and schedule updates, including virus and SpySweeper
definitions to download at 2am. Then you can set them to do their scans at 2:30am and not worry about your computer being taken over during lunch or still running in the morning when you arrive.

IMPORTANT: you must PASSWORD LOCK your computer if you leave it on, as this will maintain security, particularly if it is in an accessible place, while you are gone.

On a PC, right-click the desktop and choose Properties from the context sensitive menu. In the Screen Saver Tab, click the check box for "On Resume, password protect" and the number of minutes (long enough that it doesn't keep interrupting you!)
On a Mac, the equivalent check box is in the Security pane of System Preferences (half way down). You still need to go back to the Screen Saver Pane and select one and the time until it starts automatically.

What are Low-Hanging Fruit?

2007-02-27T14:58:00.000-08:00

Low-hanging fruit are there for the picking.

Want to view (nearly) any protein in 3D?

1) Go to http://www.pdb.org
2)SEARCH p53
3)Click on the image of the first result
4)Under the enlarged thumbnail, choose KING (all the java applets are worth testing though)
5)Enjoy!

Want to graph (many) UN Statistics since 1960?
1)Go to http://www.gapminder.org
2)Click on the Gapminder tool icon
3)Change the bottom axis to Physicians per 1000 people
4)Press PLAY and watch (most of) the populations of the world drift uward and to the right, towards more life and physicians

Want to know the pros and cons of video games?
1) Go to Purple Medical Blog
2) Read the summary of the The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the 21st Century
3) Or SKIP AHEAD to the February 2007 Archives of Surgery abstract and FULL TEXT
4) In January they posted a link to a less favourable study of these games: VIDEO GAMES: DO VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES MESS WITH YOUR KID'S BRAIN?
5) Which links to the Radiological Society of North America pub

Want to Remotely Connect to your PC from another PC or a MAC?
1)On a PC go to START/Programs/Accessories/Communcations/Remote Desktop Connection
2) You need to know the name of the PC or your IP.

To find the name you can right-click My Computer and choose properties from the context sensitive window to open the System. Select the tab with Computer Name.
Alternately, you can use your IP Address. Huh?

How do I find my IP Address? Right-click on the Network Places icon (also on your desktop), choose properties and select the Local Area Connection and right-click on it and select Properties. This will open a pane with Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as one of the options. Select it and click OK, and you get your IP address.
OR, select START/Run (the lowest choice of all) and type CMD in the field. This opens a command interface where you can type "ipconfig /all"(without the quotes) and get all the info about your computer, including the IP address for both your ethernet and Wireless. RIGHT IT DOWN ON PAPER and exit the command line interface by just typing EXIT

3) Type in the Name or IP Address of the Computer you wish to access with Remote Desktop and press Connect.
4)Log on to Remote Computer as if you were sitting in front of it!
5)You can do this same thing on a MAC using a tool called Remote Desktop Connection, dowloadable for free from www.mactopia.com AND pre-installed as an option on most mac-versions of Microsoft Office (its an option at the bottom of the installer you might have missed!)