I'm never sure what to make of Horizon - it's often over-dramatic, gives unnecessary weight to disrespected theories and sometimes seems to play on fear as it's main dramatic weapon (how many episodes end something like: "scientists believe this disaster happens every 100,000 years - and the last recorded occurrence was... 105,000 years ago"?).
However, amongst these programmes, there are still some high-quality science documentaries in there, and with the internet at your disposal, lots of older Horizon programmes can be watched as well. One such programme caught my attention not only for being of high quality (content, not video as you will see!) but by really showing how much things have changed.
I've always been a big fan of Richard Feynman, so a 50-minute interview with him seems like a great idea for a documentary. Yet, these days Science documentaries tend to be much more flashy and virtually always about space, medicine or climate change. The second video is much more recent, but I found the information fascinating also, but it's worth noting how different the style of these programmes are - and it'[s not all down to the technology at their disposal at the time - I'll keep my fingers crossed for a few simpler Horizon programmes in the near future, but alas, I don't see it happening.
Videos and information shown below - if they don't work, click the quote source to get to the Google Video page and it should work directly from there:
This post is the result of one of those bizarre internet journeys, made easier by Wikipedia. I was listening to Guy Garvey's Finest Hour on BBC 6Music and he played Golden Brown by The Stranglers. It's a classic song, but it made me look it up to find out more about the unusual song structure.
I then read that one of the lines is a classic 'Mondegreen' or misheard lyric, so I started reading about misheard language in general and ended up with a few good examples and a video to post:
So, starting with the Mondegreen - this is a simple case of mishearing the lyrics of a song with those in your head. It's pretty easy to do, but there are a few famous examples. The term was coined by Sylvia Wright in 1954, where she quoted her own mishearing of a line in the 17th century ballad, "The Bonnie Earl O'Murray".
Where she heard "They hae slain the Earl Amurray, And Lady Mondegreen", the real line was "They hae slain the Earl Amurray, And laid him on the green." The example I've heard quoted in the past is from the Jimi Hendrix song, Purple Haze, where the line "Scuse me while I kiss the sky" is misheard as "Scuse me while I kiss this guy".
AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix get the Mondegreen T-shirt treatment.
But what if the original lyrics are in one language and are misinterpreted as being in another? That's what Soramimi is - when foreign lyrics are misheard in your own language. Again, this is quite common - when hearing a song not in your native tongue, you naturally try and hear meaning you are familiar with, so often just replace the words with ones of your own language.
Soramimi is most often applied to English songs when heard in non-English countries and the word comes from Japan - as do a lot of funny examples. But to mix things up, here's an example that started in Spanish: From Filippa Giordano's 'Casta Diva', "A noi volgi, a noi volgi" (English: Turn to us, turn to us) is heard in Japanese as "Ano iboji, ano iboji" which means "Um, I have haemorrhoids; um, I have haemorrhoids" :)
So finally, let's move on to Hatten Är Din. This is the name given to a form of viral video, where the lyrics of a song are 'translated' soramimically. The name comes from the Swedish for "the hat is yours" and is linked to a misheard lyric in a song by Lebanese artist, Azar Habib. A viral video to this end was released in 2000 and became popular around the world.
Recently, there has been a sharp rise in a similar type of video, often appended with "- literal version", where a (normally English) song video is animated with lyrics that describe the video and fit the tune and structure of the original song. So, in order to lighten up this post, I'll leave you with a couple of these videos, as well as the original Hatten Är Din viral:
I'm a bit of a fan of the BBC Horizon programme. For the uninitiated, its a long running BBC Science series, highlighting current scientific research and making it accessible to the public. It systematically gets criticised from some quarters for being 'un-scientific' and it's true that over time it has perhaps lost its way a bit with this regard, but I think it's important to put it into context - These days it is much, much easier to look up more information on scientific topics and the programme still offers a great introduction to a lot of scientific topics.
Anyway, without going into that argument too much, I thought I'd take a look at some of the logos used over time and suggest one of my own. As you can imagine, the logos often use a curved horizon as a theme (not long until they use an event horizon!), although the most recent logo is pretty simple ("modern").
The last one there is from a strategy game called horizon but I put it in as I thought it wouldn't look out of place at the start of the programme! The penultimate one is my design - it was only a 10 minute job but it's ok - I don't think I'll be sending it off to the BBC though! The pattern in the background is actually a graphic representation of a mathematical equation and the original was titled 'Math Horizon'. If you want more detail on the pattern, here's the creator explaining it in more detail:
Well, there you go - a look at a few of the logo designs over time. If you want more info on BBC Horizon, then check out the links at the bottom of the page. There are loads of episodes available online, so have a look and check some out - I've posted one video below, which you'll need to register with veoh.com to watch in full - but should give you a good idea.
I saw a story on the BBC website yesterday about Google.org creating a map of influenza activity in America based on recent Google search terms alone. The concept is relatively simple - keep track of the prevalance of certain search terms (for example "buy flu rememdies") and track the locations they are coming from to produce a map of current flu patterns across America.
This system wasn't designed to replace any current data (obviously, cases of Flu can be tracked by official health data) but instead could provide an early warning system for health professionals about where the virus is spreading and where its activity is strongest. Using this system, flu activity can be predicted 2 weeks in advance of officially released data.
The idea has been tested against the official data when it is released and the search terms being tracked tweeked to give the best results. As Google say on their "about" page:
"We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems.
Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?"
As you can see above, the data from Google and the official data match pretty well and the system can offer a useful pre-warning. I'd be interested to see how this idea can be taken further - the possibilities seem almost limitless!
The BBC recently concluded a 6-part series of articles by Michael Blastland, author of The Tiger That Isn't, and an advocate of logical data analysis, not media-hyped misinformation. Obviously, we should all be an advocate of this, but it can be easy to under-analyse what the media tells us, so these articles are well worth a read.
Below is a graphic with links to all the articles, just click the one you want and it'll open in a new window - just like that:
Here is a link to a review of his book and another BBC article, pre-dating the summer series:
I thought I'd round up a few things I've seen online recently, all with a nice photo. Just click on the photo to go to the relevant story, it's as simple as that!
The BBC have put together a nice looking site for Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture. It's a nice design and fits well with the multimedia nature of the site. In fact, it also follows closely with the modern end of my evolution of web colours post.
The site is currently showcasing La Machine, an unusual robotic spider that seems to host a DJ and a fair amount of foam! Still, it resulted in some intersting photos and some big crowds by the looks of things!
I spotted this service a year or so ago on BBC Backstage but it has recently been revamped and seems to work a bit better now too. All it does is use the BBC Radio Now Playing data feed and displays song information pulled from a variety of other sources.
I'm not sure how useful all these resources are but I find the service is great for finding out what song is playing on the radio as the BBC seem to hide this information, I've tried googling for it before, but to no avail.
The design of this service isn't great (looks a bit dated in my opinion) but it has a good function - and uses Ajax to update the page when a new song starts playing so it can be a good visual accompaniment to the radio.
It seems the BBC engineers thought they'd liven up their error messages with the BBC Sound Index by referencing Catherine Tate...the geekiness levels you'd expect I guess!
There has been a fair amount of buzz about the new BBC series, 'Britain from Above', in which satellite imagery and geo-tagged data are combined to help tell the story of Britain.
Well, that's what they'd like you to think - of course, none of the promotional imagery is anything other than computer-generated, albeit from geniune data sources. People like to believe that satellite images are standard photographs, when the truth is a lot of standard imagery is false-colour. Although the images provided to promote the series are intruiging, they are really just graphical representations of data on top of an altered satellite image.
I've nothing against this type of representation per se, but I do think that data is more readily accepted when it looks pretty. These images and maps offer brightly coloured lines and dots and the appearance of a fast-moving, exciting world. Often the images look great and you think 'wow, look how interesting that is' without really thinking about whether it shows anything at all.
Take a look at the 3 images below and have a think what they REALLY show you - and whether it's an unlikely outcome or just a nice represenatation of a fairly obvious principle [click on each image to enlarge]:
These images are certainly interesting - especially because I created the 2nd image on photoshop in 5 minutes. All it actually shows is lots of green and white lines on a tinted satellite image. I'm not sugegsting that any of the other images are faked or misleading, but just a word of warning - think about what the data actually shows and how relevant it is as it's not hard to make a pretty picture that illustrates nothing!
Well last week we weren't exactly bathing in sunshine. Instead, Britain had rain for about a week non-stop and some exciting thunderstorms too. This may not be hugely uncommon, but I liked the photos I saw from readers of the BBC website, so thought I'd stick the best ones on here.
Wordle has seen a lot of press recently, with organisations increasingly using its services to generate word clouds of press releases, documentation, blogs and reports. It's not what it was directly intended for (more for tag clouds on blogs), but it can be quite a good way of summarising the main themes of a project quickly and easily.
I've blogged on wordle before, showing how it could variously summarise this blog. Since that time, I have seen a number of blog posts on its uses, including one from the BBC:
So, just for fun, I thought I'd try using it on full transcripts of the Queen's Speech from the last 3 years. I figured - much like political speeches - these would be full of buzz words and if I limited the tag cloud to around 30 words, it would be easy to see what the big issues were that year. So, here are the results - click to enlarge:
As you can see, the main themes are strikingly similar each year, bordering on the lazy! But it's still a really interesting way to summarise a document and assess roughly what it is talking about. Now, next year I'm hoping the Queen has a bit more imagination! :)
I was quite pleased with the results (well, for 20 mins work) but the main reason I tried it out was the ability of photoshop to move images in a 3D space...(try pressing CTRL in a free transform).
It's an interesting tool - and one I'll use more and more - that can really help with designing various image products. This function has been in photoshop for a while but I've only just got to grips with it, yet it seems pretty effective..
I'll keep you updated as to the results of the competition - fingers crossed my ideas are appreciated, but there's a lot of talented peeps out there so I'm not expecting anything! :)
UPDATE [10/06/08]: Success! My design was the first feature in the competition results - great stuff!
The BBC seems to be rather busy at the moment, launching various beta releases of new concepts, often with little talk of their development previous to launch.
First up - and most revolutionary - is the BBC Sound Index, which trawls through a number of online music services and stores various data to help see "what's hot" right now, giving a list of top 1000 songs and artists. Although not much of this project code / data has been released to the public, it is still an interesting development and one which is well worth watching - lots of potential here.
It's all part of getting towards 'Web 3.0 / The Semantic Web', which is seen as the next big thing for the internet as a service. For more information on this, check out: The Semantic Web.
Next up is a new Climate Change service called BBC Bloom. This is a nice interactive application showing practical ways to help individuals combat climate change. It has an element of user control and you can log in to save your 'climate task list'. It's another great looking flash application from the BBC and really does make this subject more engaging.
I'd be interested int ehir budget for such projects, but these days having 'climate change' in your project name always helps bring in more funding :p. However, the BBC has obviously upped its budget for new web services, possibly on the back of the success of iPlayer - watch this space for more interesting applications soon!
Just a small round up of nice things I've seen recently. First up, a BBC radio programme that won the Sony Award for Multi-platform Radio at the 2008 bash. Now, I didn't catch any of this programme but i can see that the 'multi platform' nature of the show is stitched together using an interactive google map on the main page - the show was called Bangladesh River Journey.
This map is nothing particularly special, although I like the way separate pages can be scrolled within each map marker, allowing a lot o0f content to be added without too much clutter. However, there is nothing particularly groundbreaking here. I think what it highlights is that relatively simple maps can really help bring a diverse set of media into a coherent web of content.
Another nice site I found was a high-res flash site for Sparks (an energy drink company). I particularly liked the high quality and large image (much bigger than a computer screen) that had to be explored to find the content. Obviously, this would only work well for a website with little meaningful content (a BBC site like this would be disastrous!), but it's great for a high-impact design site and fits in with the "fun" image of an energy drink.
It also adds a bit of 'real-life' into the web as it's basically just a large photo of a wall with things pinned to it using flash. Normally, when a document is much bigger than the screen, scrolling around it causes disorientation, but here that doesn't really matter - it's fun trying!
I recently stumbled across a new BBC project: World On The Move which uses a Google Map to track animal migrations across the globe, showing predicted and actual routes as well as user comments - all on a nicely integrated map that can be changed along a timeline:
The nice thing about this map is how seamlessly it is integrated with the content and the webpage itself. The BBC aren't often ones to make new ground with their services, but they often take the 'old ground' and use it in a professional and interesting way.
This allowed BBC Berkshire and users of the website to post photos, video and audio reports to locations on the map, which were then displayed using a variety of symbols:
These data were supplemented by use of the Environment Agency official flood warnings as well as council designated 'safe houses' - the result was an up-to-date flood information map for the local community.
This map shares many ideas with our UK Webcam Map in the use of live data and an addition of environemntal data.
Google Mapping is improving fast and becoming easier to create bespoke maps - This change allows maps using live or recent data to be created quickly and to serve a usual public service.
This will delight and inspire anyone who would like to share something of the joys of scientific discovery. Feynman is a master storyteller, and his tales - about childhood, Los Alamos, or how he won a Nobel Prize - are a vivid and entertaining insight into the mind of a great scientist at work and play.. 
