Review of ‘Living room TV is 'making a comeback', says Ofcom’

As the Ofcom said 91% of adults watched their main TV set once a week - up from 88% in 2002 - but their attention may be distracted. It doesn’t mean the popularity of TV is recovered. More and more people tend to use laptops and mobile devices, when they are watching TV. Marshall McLuhan pointed that television as a cool media which is low in information intensity and high in audience participation. It is a one-way broadcast. When people receive the information, they usually feel tired and weary. For this reason, they would like to be able to watch TV whilst using smartphones and tablets. Such as texting friends, playing games, using social network, even watching other content shows. It is still hard to increase the attention of audiences, even though many TV programs have the text-message interactive sessions, for example, the “America Idol” incorporated interviews with judges and text-message voting.

Meanwhile, television won’t transform into ‘hot media’, due to the interference of text-message. It’s needed to use a variety of sensory analysis, interpretation by audience. TV communication only can be a auxiliary function which can not instead of chatting online. In my opinion, in order to improve the audience’s attention, it is still should focus on the content of television program.

BBC News :Living room TV is 'making a comeback', says Ofcom

                       Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23521277

The comment of living room TV

Living room TV is 'making a comeback', says Ofcom

It is like the Fragmentalism and Unification question. It is said in the article UK families are more likely to watch TV together now than they have been in over a decade.  Family members are being brought together just as they were in the 1950s when a TV was likely to be a home's only screen. Yes, it's pretty sure that in nowadays the family member will sit together in the living room in many families. But this kind of situation can really be a proof to demonstrate that the family is unified? For some  part, I don't think so, and it's a kind of fragmentalism. It is also mentioned in the article that many people is the tv multi-tasked audience which means that many people, especially the young person, use the smartphone to chat and tweet while watching the tv programme. They sit together, that's for sure, but in the spiritual level I don't think the family member is unified. For instance, I will sit with my parents in the living room with the television on, however, not only me, but also my parents use our digital devices to chat or play games. We may talk about some thing, but concentrate on own world. The model is called by us as 'spending time with family' in present day, just siting no interaction. No matter how this may be a good beginning to start our interacting relationship, and the living room TV bring us together physically, in a way.

Besides, from the research, we can see that people is much more rely on digital devices, such as smartphones and tablets. It is said that the number of digital devices we use is rapidly increasing, while the quantity of television we own is steadily decreasing. Some mother use the tablet to entertain their babies, when they get something to do. The small tv in teenagers' room is replaced by a iPad or other digital devices. In the present world, we can do every thing on the smartphone or the tablet, and we called today as 'digital era/generation'. In this trend, the television may be replaced in the future as the radio replaced by tv.

Rewiring the brain

This looks interesting. Listen to the broadcast, and look at the animation. What are your reactions?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05077kg
It's available on-line from Tuesday afternoon!

Google and the World Brain

Google and the World Brain

  Further to our discussion in the class about the documentary of the BBC “ Google and the World Brian”, we decided to put this subject in the blog to extend our discussion and go further through the questions that we have been given by the teacher 

: The following is a conclusion for the points that we agreed about 

Google vision in this project seems to be positive, that it is apparently to empower people to take decision about their life by give them unlimited access to the  knowledge. However, we were all in agreement that google work to (knew everything) by maps, book, people’s personal information…etc, make goole activities and projects are suspicious and terrifying and could be used negatively.

About the advantage of this technology, we are in agreement that the main aim for google is to invest money from 

digital books.

  ,The main criticism over this project is related to copyrights issues and it is arising a question about "ownership "of knowledge  

we agree that is not all the knowledge of the world as it is impossible to google to" know everything”.We are in the age of information’s explosion. The knowledge is arising quickly and hundreds if not thousand of books are published every years in different languages.

-In terms of the accessibility of 'The World Brain' we are in agreement that not all the people in the world will benefit from it because it would be limited for those who have access to the internet. Additionally, google does not allowed all pages of the books for free. 

-The key technology of ‘ world brain’ is scanning beside the internet and computing

-The core idea of this technology ( digital books ) is not new it have been used in the library for long time. Same project also taken place in China.

Google Translate

Last Wednesday Google added a very interesting feature to its  'Google Translate' app, allowing users to instantly translate texts just by pointing their smartphone camera at words in a foreign language.

Another new feature has the ability to translate speech in real time into other languages, and vice versa, almost like the Babel Fish from ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ (although not as quickly). Is the future already here?Potentially, such application could have tremendous effect on the way we communicate. The whole concept of learning a foreign language might disappear. Will there still be a necessity for memorizing Chinese hieroglyphs or French grammar, when a machine could make you understandable to anyone in any part of the world? Provided the technology works, of course.

Let’s give it a try.

The app copes with translating the book title into Russian pretty well.

And it can even understand the hand-writing.But what if one tried to translate something more elaborate than a restaurant menu?

As you can see, the interpretation of McLuhan's "Understanding Media" from Russian to English is completely gibberish.

The same goes for the audio feature. Arabic to Russian and Chinese to Russian translations were working properly, until we tried saying something more difficult then “hello” and “how are you”.

Probably, this technology will not make the whole industry of learning languages vanish any time soon. However, it could be quite useful for travellers. And, who knows what might happen in the future, when the app is significantly improved?

For more information:

The Guardian: Google Translate update seeks to break language barrier

Google: Have a conversation with Google Translate

Google's new Translate app

Machines translating language.....

What do you think of this? Will it catch on? What impact could this have on language and communication in general?

SHARING ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

As for you, the smart phone might just be your friend. But a true friend will occasionally give you a smile. In TED 2013 conference, Keller Rinaudo show Romo, a mini-robot controlled by a smart phone, it can take a walk with you that can help you transport a cup of coffee on the table, it can be programmed to respond to you face.

The robot Romo use your phone as his brain and by leveraging the power of the iphone's processor. They can create a robot that is wifi enabled and computer vision-capable for 150 bucks which is about 1% of what these kinds of robots have spent in the past.

It can also connect him from any other ios device such as ipad to control it. Romo will actually stream video to this device, people can see everything that Romo sees.