Photoethnography.com

You know when you're procrastinating when you find out the only good anagram for your name is "Ran a Karma Nuke."

How many anthropologists suffer from dromomania?

A potential grad student wrote to me asking about which faculty at Yale worked on queer anthropological topics. Here are the faculty who are interested in, or supportive of, topics regarding gender and sexuality:

• Jafari Allen (Cuba; Carribean; USA; Black consciousness)
• Sean Brotherton (Cuba; HIV; biomedicine)
• Kate Dudley (USA; poverty; South)
• Karen Nakamura (Japan; disability; identity)

In addition, Prof. Marcia Inhorn does work on gender, health, and reproductive technologies.

I just received my new copy of MacSpeech Dictate, version 1.5. I have to say that I'm impressed. Although I was not happy about the $50 upgrade fee, the accuracy of the speech recognition is much improved. You can guess of course, that I am typing this using the speech recognition software. So far there have been no errors in recognition.

Yes, this is how it should have been from the very beginning. Now, you can spell out names using the international radio alphabet (foxtrot alpha!). However, I found that this doesn't work perfectly, for example I have to type f-o-x-t-r-o-t a-l-p-h-a because I could not get MacSpeech to recognize when I wanted letters and when I wanted words.

Also, training new words,isn't as easy as Dragon Naturally Speaking. You can't just say "correct that." You have to train new words individually in a separate panel. Also because there is no "correct that" command, it can be frustrating when the speech recognition does actually make a mistake.

The overall verdict so far after my short time testing it is that the basic speech recognition is improved greatly. The ability to add the words is fantastic, although he should have been in the original release. However the inability to correct words on the fly is a huge impediment and limits the ultimate usability of this program.

Overall, I'm glad to see some improvement being made in it, and I hope that they continue to work on further. Perhaps one more release and it will be at the level where Dragon Naturally Speaking was five years ago.

One of my colleagues asked for a recommendation for a digital video camera for the field. I recommended against getting a Mini-DV or HV camcorder and instead going all digital with a flash (SDHC) based camcorder:

These days, instead of using tape, I recommend going all digital. That way, you can simply dump the video files to your PC and don't have to bother digitizing them. You will need a large hard drive, but a 500 gigabyte pocket hard drive is cheap and fits in your laptop bag easily.

I recommend these models:

• Canon Vixia HF-10 or HF-100 (this is the one I use)
• Sanyo Xacti (small, handheld, the microphone isn't as good on this, but size is excellent)

Be sure to get a large SD card -- at least 4 gigabytes. Eight or 16 gigabytes is preferable.

Karen

Do you think this was good advice? Please post any suggestions or comments (or questions)!

The New York Times has a new photojournalism blog titled Lens:

The New York Times introduces Lens, a photojournalism blog that intends to present some of the most interesting visual and multimedia reporting: in photographs, videos, audio slide shows and any other medium that fits -- our format.

I imagine others have remarked about the web's effect on photography, but this seems to be another example of a shift in emphases as a result of the web and really lives up to the promise of hypermedia.

The article titled "On Assignment: A Photo Op, More Like a Photo Hop," which features a video of a photographer's experience of the Oval Office, is an especially good example of the worlds that the Internet in general and this blog in particular can allow us to enter.

My friend George sent me this amazing link to a youtube video. It's a Pantene commercial from Thailand featuring a deaf violinist.

One of the best ads that I've ever seen. And their signing isn't that bad either!

This is just a collection of photography related things that caught my eye over the past few weeks.

Jewelry made from "discarded camera components." (Via @Bllix.)

A huge lens, especially with no tripod.

Jens Tønnesen asks, "Too much photoshop?" (Via @Shashwati.)

One of the more interesting panels at the Association for Asian Studies meeting Chicago was the Japan Image Use Protocol Guide workshop. This was organized by the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources.

Basically, the Image Use Protocol Guide is designed to help academic authors and publishers navigate the somewhat circuitous path to getting image use rights from Japanese copyright holders. The most useful portion for me is the Permission Request Templates that you can use to send to image rights holders (museums, publishers, etc.) asking for permission to reprint photographs in your papers and monographs.

The protocol guide is still in the beta stage and they are asking for comments:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ncc/imageuse/index.html

Well, the little iPhone Kindle app has convinced me that a Kindle2 might not be a total waste of money. I'm actually enjoying read both academic and non-academic books on the iPhone. Although the Kindle2 doesn't have a backlight, it looks like it'd be a good way to read before bed or on the airplane.

I wish the Kindle2 had WiFi, I guess that -- along with the backlight -- is my big concern for the unit. Especially as Sprint might be going bankrupt if it continues to bleed customers like it is now. I wonder what will happen to the Kindle's EVDO if that happens....

I'd love to hear from anyone who has one.

Hmmm... seems JCR posted the sushi video to this blog, Linda saw it, posted it to her blog, and I saw her blog before reading my own one, and posted the sushi video back here. Now removed just in case it caused a matter:antimatter reaction and destroyed the universe.

Thanks Linda and Jason!

This wonderful video is currently making the rounds. The camera was placed on the conveyor belt at a kaiten sushi restaurant in Japan, and you can see everyone's reactions as it moves around the room they discover that they are on camera. I just love the way it does such a great job at capturing everyday life.

It has such a cinematic quality. I watched it first without sound and I think that added something to it. Perhaps some ambient music in the background would add a nice touch.

However, I don't think I would have the guts to do something like this.

I don't know if I ever linked to Prof. Steven Fedorowicz's Visual Anthropology of Japan Blog, but just in case I haven't:

http://visualanthropologyofjapan.blogspot.com/

Steven has a very nice section on the Ethics of Visual Anthropology in Japan -- especially intended for his students.

As Borat would say, "Verrrryy niiiice!"

I buy a lot of DVDs from Japan, but unfortunately they are often region 2 restricted. In order to play them back on an American DVD player, I need to "rip" them and then burn them back as unrestricted (region 0) DVD-R.

The program I use on the Mac is MacTheRipper. Unfortunately, the program development on it seems to have stalled, and it isn't keeping pace with the latest encryption and anti-hacking technologies being used by some companies.

In these cases, I switch to my Windows XP operating system (under VMWare Fusion) and use a program callled DVDFab. It's commercial (i.e., costs money) but there isn't a DVD out there that it hasn't cracked. It works great under Fusion -- and it even writes the VIDEO_TS files out to a shared folder on my Mac OSX partition, so I can then write them out immediately using Toast, or use Handbrake to further compress them.

(You can compress to H.264 inside of DVD Fab but I think that Handbrake's algorithms are better and you have more control over the process).

Karen

I'm setting up a media server in the anthropology department using Mac OSX 10.5 Server. With the demise of the C-Labs service, I wanted a secure way to make streaming video available for in-class use. The Mac OS X Leopard Server was an obvious choice.

Right now, I'm just using flat files and the Mac OSX Server built-in Apache server. In order to restrict the streams to just Yale students, I wanted to limit the contents of certain directories to just Yale IP addresses.

This should be easily done using .htaccess files. However, the default configuration doesn't have .htaccess services turned on (since it is server / file system intensive to do so). However, I couldn't for the life of me to get the Apache server to recognize my modifications in the /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file. ARGHH!!! It was almost as if it was ignoring it.