Green Screen Technology Gets Improved with LEDs

Green Screen is a cool way to composition in the background for motion graphics in films. But LED panels -- that use the same technology as video game engines -- place a realistic-looking world behind the actors, in a giant leap forward in special effects tech.

The result is a huge improvement, as green screens actually have drawbacks. Removing the green screen is never as quick as VFX artists would hope, and it also casts green light over the set and the actors. Even green-screen substitutes, like projecting an image onto a screen behind the actor, fail to dynamically respond to camera movements the way they would in the real world. ILM's solution fixes a lot of those problems. 

It also led to creative breakthroughs in which the old Hollywood order of making a TV show or movie -- wherein VFX came last -- was suddenly reversed. Now, artists such Charmaine Chan work alongside actors, set designers, and other crew members during filming. That collaboration means this technology doesn't just eliminate a screen -- it eliminates a creative barrier. As a compositor for venerable visual-effects house Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), Charmaine Chan has worked on films like The Last Jedi, assembling various digital elements into a beautiful, seamless image. While working on The Mandalorian, one of the first shows to use ILM's upgrade for the green screen, she saw some huge advances.

Here's a video to see how the improved approach works...

Intellectual Capitalism is moving... and expanding

Intellectual Capitalism is a repository for all things that embody the interests and spirit of Bluedog. We believe an intellectual capitalist pursues freedom of choice -- and what counts is freedom in the marketplace, in the home, in one's thoughts.

In 2020, Intellectual Capitalism will evolve as the repository of information for those who intersect with the interests of Bluedog -- consultants and entrepreneurs, those who serve in the government marketing arena, and anyone with an interest in managing and orchestrating your organization's communications.

This means Intellect Capitalism will continue to be a place for anyone who have an interest in the craft of corporate communications, the application of technology, and the fun of business.

www.intellectualcapitalism.com

Achieving Simplicity in a Complex System

Mumbai is one of the largest cities in the world and an average working professional leaves home pretty early in the day to take the local train to commute to the work. Each day approximately 4,000 dabbawallahs deliver almost 250,000 home-cooked meals (for late breakfast and lunch) from the kitchens of suburban wives and mothers direct to workers in “the world’s most ingenious meal distribution system.”

The foot soldiers are Dabbawallahs, who pick up the home-cooked lunches in the suburbs, hop on trains, and deliver them, on foot or bike, to office workers in Mumbai. Later on, they pick up and bring back the same empty tiffins (the name for the metal containers used).

The tiffins consist of several stacked aluminum boxes with a carry-handle. Each container carries individual portions that separate curry dishes, bread, rice, desserts, and more. This means multiple courses. Tiffins come in several different compartments so as to separate starter, mains, and dessert. The tiffin serves to keep food in its original shape - no bruised fruit or mashed roti. The tiffin’s handle is at the top, keeping everything upright when being carried. Home-cooked meals are economical and can be more healthy.

While the system seems very complicated, it is the coming together of many elements, including the railway system in Mumbai. The dabbawallah rely on the train to deliver the lunch boxes around the city. Stefan Thomke, the Harvard Business School professor studied the system: “[the railway] sort of helps them in unexpected ways. It synchronizes the system because in Mumbai the railway is one of the few things that always runs on time. It forces the entire organization to run according to a rhythm.”

Another example of how simplicity aids the dabbawallah system is  the labeling of the tiffins. There’s very little information coded on the boxes. “For example, there’s no return address,” says Thomke, “but these boxes have to go back to the person who gave them to you.”  The simple color coding system acts as an identification system for the destination and recipient and origin of the tiffin.

The Dabbawala Association has been in business for over last 125 years. In 1998, Forbes Magazine recognized its reliability to match the Six Sigma standard. This means that the dabbawalas make less than 1 mistake in every 6 million deliveries. Be it a Steve Jobs or Picasso, all the great artists always had a penchant for simplicity. Value and efficiency is maintained by  keeping to basics. The process is very lean and uncomplicated. And the customer is the most important cog in this machine.

Read more here

Want a Better Way to Do Things? Start Fresh with Zero Based Design

Want to achieve radical changes in your business? Have you become distracted from long-term goals? Are you too busy putting out fires to look past short-term tactics? Perhaps it is time to consider a shake-up

Zero-based design (ZBD)encourages people to cast aside assumptions to expand the scope of discovery. It comes from the term “zero-based budgeting,” an accounting principle that implies every line item in a budget is to be reevaluated on an annual basis, under the assumption that nothing should be sacrosanct.

The name was first coined by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick in their 2013 book, The Business Solution to Poverty. The authors delineated their methodology for building a business from a frugal, grass-roots “Zero Point,” that grew to deliver economic value on a societal scale.

While ZBD has evolved since 2013, a few activities stay central to its approach:

• Defining the Zero Point: More than a fictitious “blank slate,” the Zero Point is the suite of capabilities, systems, and processes you would keep if you were to rebuild your business all over again.
• Designing the North Star: A clearly articulated and accepted description of the ideal target state is given for the business, its people, and their customers.

With ZBD, it is necessary that the North Star is visionary. It frames the ambition for business and informs the roadmap of labor required to succeed in this best target state. It helps to elevate the thinking within the business and stimulate the proper designing and activity within the short and medium term.

ZBD starts with an observation, then looks for the simplest and most likely explanation. As a result, it can appear foreign to those familiar with the traditional inductive or deductive thinking that permeates business management. It some ways, it resembles the Lean (Toyota) Method for problem-solving.

For example, ZBD practitioners tend to observe human behavior and distill the most likely insights from what they have witnessed. Abductive reasoning is a form of logical inference which starts with an observation or set of observations then seeks to find the simplest and most likely explanation for the observations, and the resulting insights, then inspire designers to generate game-changing ideas and then pose the question “how might we” rather than ask “why can’t we.” Such priming questions are crucial, as they foster the belief that innovative outcomes are achievable and that we can overcome obstacles that would otherwise be considered insurmountable.

What is Kubernetes?

The rise of technology called containers, popularized by the company Docker, has helped spread virtualization of apps by simplifying building VM images for deployment. This approach lets a developer package their app or micro service with everything needed to run, so it works the same way the development sandbox as it does in Amazon's or Microsoft's cloud. While Docker's containers provide the tools for making code portable, developers needed a way to coordinate these containers to work with each other across servers and clouds, at massive scales — and Kubernetes, an open-source software project that started at Google, is the most popular approach. It has exploded in popularity, now being used by at more than 54% of the Fortune 500.

Kubernetes (an ancient Greek word for "pilot.”) was started by a group of Google engineers based on an internal project to help manage the search giant's massive infrastructure, but it is now an independent open source project that anyone can use or contribute to — and it has grown faster than the creators ever imagined. In a nutshell, Kubernetes helps developers run their applications at massive scales, taking advantage of lessons learned at Google. Because Kubernetes is open source, the code can be used, downloaded, or modified by anyone for free.

Just in the last year, we've seen some major acquisitions that signal how seriously tech giants are now taking Kubernetes: IBM spent $34 billion to purchase Red Hat; VMware's acquired Heptio. Both these moves have a lot to do with Kubernetes.

There are three typical ways of using Kubernetes: most popular is to run it from a major cloud provider like Amazon, Microsoft or Google, all of whom offer hosted Kubernetes services. Or, enterprises can buy a customized, fine-tuned version of Kubernetes from a company like VMware's Heptio to install on its own servers. The third way is to just download and run the free project and create an environment in a hosted private cloud or datacenter.

Kubernetes is able to manage all these clusters at once, and keep the code running continuously even as it organizes and re-organizes these containers on the fly. The end result is that developers can build, test, host and run large-scale applications on the cloud, with the Kubernetes software doing much to keep everything running smoothly.

As an added benefit, Kubernetes users get one more key advantage from all of this: Because Kubernetes runs on just about any kind of server, and most of the major cloud platforms, it's easier for users to take their application and move it from one to the other, or just write their software to run on multiple clouds at once.

Read more here...

Why Service Containers are the Future of SOA

For many developers, using the cloud to design and test apps makes sense when they must develop a business application that reaches many via the internet. They need to host it somewhere. The cloud is a utility. If a developer finds that, today, Azure is the most useful, they will deploy with them. If AWS offers something they need or has better terms, they will switch over to them. If the cloud is a utility, then we all want that ability to switch between systems.

Containers offer that. With the benefits of agility, elasticity, and automation of container technology will provide new capabilities to developers supporting web and mobile apps. Containers enable developers to craft environments to spin up new instances, free of constraints and tool conflicts. Keeping web services in containers means developers can also collaborate with system administrators by sharing updates for changes, linking, and testing.

The nexus of container implementation is a cloud orchestration layer for provisioning the infrastructure required to support containers. This enables live migration and monitoring of service resources after the migration. Because containers reduce complexity via abstractions, they remove the underlying infrastructure dependencies. This ability to standardize service architecture with managed distribution and service orientation ensures that containers will lead the way to the uptake of SOA principles.

Read more here...

White Roof = Lower Temperature

Can light-colored rooftops and roads really curb carbon emissions and combat global climate change? The idea has been around for years, but now, a new study by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that is the first to use a global model to study the question has found that implementing cool roofs and cool pavements in cities around the world can not only help cities stay cooler, they can also cool the world, with the potential of canceling the heating effect of up to two years of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.

“Cool roofs are one of the quickest and lowest cost ways we can reduce our global carbon emissions and begin the hard work of slowing climate change,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “By demonstrating the benefits of cool roofs on our facilities, the federal government can lead the nation toward more sustainable building practices, while reducing the federal carbon footprint and saving money for taxpayers.”

Read more...

Deconstructing the Xerox - Apple Myth

In the aftermath of the Apple patent lawsuit, there's a lot of misinformation making its way around the inter-web. This is a detailed deconstruction of the "Steve Jobs Stole Xerox's Secrets" myth may help readers understand the complexities, spanning decades. A salient chunk:

Here is the first complicating fact about the Jobs visit. In the legend of Xerox PARC, Jobs stole the personal computer from Xerox. But the striking thing about Jobs's instructions to Hovey is that he didn't want to reproduce what he saw at PARC. "You know, there were disputes around the number of buttons—three buttons, two buttons, one-button mouse," Hovey went on. "The mouse at Xerox had three buttons. But we came around to the fact that learning to mouse is a feat in and of itself, and to make it as simple as possible, with just one button, was pretty important."

So was what Jobs took from Xerox the idea of the mouse? Not quite, because Xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. The PARC researchers got it from the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute, fifteen minutes away on the other side of the university campus. Engelbart dreamed up the idea of moving the cursor around the screen with a stand-alone mechanical "animal" back in the mid- nineteen-sixties. His mouse was a bulky, rectangular affair, with what looked like steel roller-skate wheels. If you lined up Engelbart's mouse, Xerox's mouse, and Apple's mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept.

The same is true of the graphical user interface that so captured Jobs's imagination. Xerox PARC's innovation had been to replace the traditional computer command line with onscreen icons. But when you clicked on an icon you got a pop-up menu: this was the intermediary between the user's intention and the computer's response. Jobs's software team took the graphical interface a giant step further. It emphasized "direct manipulation." If you wanted to make a window bigger, you just pulled on its corner and made it bigger; if you wanted to move a window across the screen, you just grabbed it and moved it. The Apple designers also invented the menu bar, the pull-down menu, and the trash can—all features that radically simplified the original Xerox PARC idea.

The difference between direct and indirect manipulation—between three buttons and one button, three hundred dollars and fifteen dollars, and a roller ball supported by ball bearings and a free-rolling ball—is not trivial. It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox PARC had in mind, and something that's appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind. PARC was building a personal computer. Apple wanted to build a popular computer.

- Posted by Tom/Bluedog

Augmenting Reality As the Ultimate Knowledge Management Tool

Hands-free means more than just phone calls while jogging, or sipping your latte while reading your iPad. Other ways of merging multiple data sources based on your geo location (i.e., context-aware mapping of information) are emerging. As usual, Google is out in front with Information Architecture. So what does Google's Glass look like? Well, press photos show a spare-looking frame that sits above the wearer's right eye -- not terribly fashionable, meant more like a HUD (heads up display) found in military-style helmets, some automobiles, and in many computer games. This interesting info graphic gives a better idea of what the functionality is, since you won't be winning any fashion awards for the pre-production prototype. Unlike other systems, Google's doesn't overlay data completely in front of the wearer's entire field of vision. Instead, datagrams appear only in one’s peripheral vision -- relevant to what the wearing is looking at. Of course, the Project Glass video is a marketing effort as much as a look at the product -- which, after all, doesn't exist yet. But opening eyes to the possibility of augmented information displays is certainly a way to motivate the competition. You've got such data mashups on the iPhone already. One example is WorkSnug, an iOS app that helps you locate a place to work. It identifies Wi-Fi hotspots and potential workplaces -– from coffee shops to professional rent-a-desk office space. Combining social media (user reviews cover power provision, atmosphere, noise levels and even the quality of the coffee), this is a cool way to find what you need on the go. It's clear that the future promises the continued blending of technology and the eye (such as Google’s project glass) and other amazing emerging optical technologies on the very near horizon. Graphic from Zenni Optical.

Techie post - useful HTML5 reference

This is a really clever way to summarize HTML5. Note, the table shows the 100+ elements currently in the HTML5 working draft and a couple of proposed elements. When the "V" in Model-View-Controller should work well with mobile clients, widespread (and muli-vendor) browsers, and perhaps event TVs. Is HTML5 the final nail in the Flash coffin? I don't like predicting, but I do like open standards.

This fellow collects some interesting web apps that leverage the standard (use a modern browser, natch).

EDIT: Link updated to different version, courtesy of Robert Mening, Web developer & designer from Sweden, Malmö.