Les Automates Jaquet-Droz
"Réalisé principalement par Pierre Jaquet-Droz, l'Ecrivain est le plus compliqué des trois mécanismes. Assis devant un pupitre, l'automate tient une plume d'oie qu’il trempe dans l'encrier, puis il la secoue légèrement avant de commencer de dessiner les lettres sur le papier. Grâce à un mécanisme annexe, ses yeux suivent son travail. L'Ecrivain est capable de tracer un texte de 40 signes au maximum, répartis sur quatre lignes. La principale invention de son mécanisme est le système de programmation par disque, qui lui permet d'écrire des textes suivis sans intervention extérieure. Il est également possible de lui faire écrire n'importe quelle phrase, lettre par lettre."
(Musée d'art et d'histoire de Neuchâtel)
[A robotic draftsman which is able to write through following a programmable sequence of letters.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Machines replace humans: heavy metal robot 3-piece
"I'm impressed with Compressorhead - the three-piece robot band (three and a half if you count the little robot who drives one of the cymbals). I went to their website to see if I could discern the origins of the project, DIY, corporate, academic, or whatever and couldn't really find anything on the makers. Then I tracked down the drummer. Stickboy was created by Robocross Machines and a whimsical roboticist named Frank Barnes. ... Reminds me of the Survival Research Labs robot machines, built for public performance and disturbance."
(Maxwell Schnurer, 5 January 2013, Life of refinement)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Plural Eyes: sync software for dual-system and multi-camera audio
"PluralEyes is a product that can save you a lot of time, especially if you have good clear audio recorded with each camera. If there is too much redundancy in the audio tracks (concert) or a lot of echo in some of the tracks (Church) you may find that PluralEyes will only be able to match a part of the sequence, leaving clips on the timeline that need to be manually synced. When this happens you can try locking the clips that were successfully synced, then exporting the sequence once again in hopes that PluralEyes will find a match for the unlocked clips, but I personally haven't had too much luck with that process.
The biggest issue I have with any type of automated software is that if it's not 100% accurate, you learn not to fully trust it and rightfully so. When you have multiple tracks to sync and potentially hundreds of clips, it becomes a daunting task to have to go through the entire edit - once for each track you were trying to sync, just to make sure that all the clips are in their proper position. It may be just as quick (or as time consuming) to sync up your clips manually as it is to use automated software that might have to be re-run a few times before finally coming close - only to force you to manually go through your piece clip by clip and track-by-track to check its accuracy.
PluralEyes can save you tons of editing time, but it's really important to have good clear audio with each track you want to sync. On the first few projects that I used PluralEyes for CS5 with I was pretty disappointed with the results. I even delayed this review until I had more experience with the software. Now that I have learned not to expect 100% accuracy I have stopped 're-syncing' and 're-syncing' in hopes of achieving it. I let PluralEyes do most of the grunt work, then I go through and just manually sync up the small percentage of clips it missed. It's pretty easy to do since most of my footage is shot in chronological order so I know that clip C will need to go somewhere between clips B and D.
Part of my high expectations with this software was due to the many demo videos I have seen, not just from PluralEyes, but also from other reviewers. Their videos often show PluralEyes successfully syncing up just a few clips, so when I started to test the software with more involved edits it was aggravating to discover a percentage of clips that weren't synced. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why and trying to re-sync these projects, which in-turn wasted more time. Once I got over my high expectations I become much more productive. PluralEyes can truly save you hours of editing time, especially once you learn that itis sometimes quicker to manually sync the small percentage of clips that the software misses than it is to fiddle around with re-syncing using different settings."
(Ron Risman, March 2010, Cameratown.com)
Fig.1 Justin Davey http://www.mountstudios.co.uk/
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
SmartGate: New Zealand & Australia passport control self-processing
"SmartGate gives some travellers the option to self-process through passport control. It uses the data in the e-Passport and face recognition technology to perform the customs and immigration checks that are usually conducted by a Customs officer.
An e-Passport has a microchip embedded in a hard plastic page and an international e-Passport symbol on the front cover. The microchip contains the same personal information that is on the photo page of the e-Passport, including an electronic copy of your photograph."
(Aotearoa New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Jacquard loom: automation through stored programmes
"In consequence of the Industrial Revolution, the late 18th century had witnessed a considerable expansion in the automation of processes that had once been the preserve of small groups of highly skilled workers employed in so-called 'cottage industries'. The textile industry was one sphere were industrialisation had rendered obsolete such skills. Whereas, prior to the development of mechanical looms and weaving machines, lengths of fabric had to be woven slowly by hand, the advent of powered tools for carrying out this task meant that quantities of fabric could be mass-produced at a far quicker rate than previously, thereby reducing its expense. There was one area, however, where the new machines could not compete with skilled manual workers: in the generation of cloth containing anything other than a plain (or at best extremely simple) woven pattern. The Jacquard Loom provided a solution to this problem so that, with it in use, extremely intricate patterns and pictures could be automatically woven into cloth at much the same rate as a plain length of fabric could be generated. The key idea behind Jacquard's loom was to control the action of the weaving process by interfacing the behaviour of the loom to an encoding of the pattern to be reproduced. In order to do this Jacquard arranged for the pattern to be depicted as a groups of holes 'punched' into a sequence of pasteboard card. Each card contained the same number of rows and columns, the presence or absence of a hole was detected mechanically and used to determine the actions of the loom. By combining a 'tape' of cards together the Jacquard loom was able to weave (and reproduce) patterns of great complexity, e.g. a surviving example is a black and white silk portrait of Jacquard woven under the control of a 10,000 card 'program'."
(Paul E. Dunne, University of Liverpool)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
