New Florence. New Renaissance.

Guest Column: Technology and Opera

This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.

This time it is Guenther Tolkmit, who heads Worldwide Development for Lawson Software writing about his love of opera.

 

“Is this an oxymoron? At work, I drive technology change at a breathtaking pace. At the same time, I am becoming more and more conservative in life. At least in my hobby – my love of opera, mainly compositions by Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss.

Traditional, as in:

• As the world shrinks, I have seen performances all over the world but my favorite opera House is still the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.(in photo on right below) Maybe because the interior is mainly wood. Maybe because it has no galleries or boxes. Maybe because the orchestra is invisible to the audience. Or may be because it dates back to 1872.
• In a Twitter world where 140 characters are too many and a 3 hour movie is considered an epic, I am a big fan of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen which runs over 15 hours. And yes, like many I am sorry to see the Met in New York retire the famous Otto Schenk production after a 22 year run. 
• In a world where everyone gets ”fifteen minutes of fame” on YouTube and American Idol, I feel nostalgic about the soprano from New Zealand, Dame Kiri Janette Te Kanawa. Particularly her rendition of Richard Strauss’s Capriccio at the San Francisco opera from the 70s.

Opera, of course, seeks fans way beyond conservative ones like me, and this is where it has benefited from innovation and technology.

As with many people raised in Europe I saw my first opera early on in school. But it was not before I met my current wife about 25 years ago that I re-discovered opera. The musical, Phantom of the Opera was the spark. Our first love was Italian opera (Verdi, Donizetti and Bellini). It was tough not to enjoy the Bel Canto of the three tenors – Pavarotti, Domingo, Carerras – live on stage. But it was our first visit to the world-famous La Scala (in Milano) which re-introduced us to German opera. Parsifal conducted by Sir Simon Rattle in London completed the conversion to Wagner. 

It is impressive to see how technology in opera has evolved since my childhood in at least 4 major areas:

Opera House Design

Because they are designed for relatively large audiences, large casts and large stages, opera houses tend to be standout structures. And it is good to see newer ones like in Dallas and  Olso (photo on left below) built in this century also take a prominent place in their cities. Of course, snobs like me don’t like opera houses shaped like fruits (like the Durian in Singapore) but it is tough to argue with the investment they are making in acoustics, stage lighting, seat placement, parking facilities etc. The Met Titles innovation of translations on screens at every seat from 1995 seems so old today.

Opera Production

Opera is big business. Future seasons are planned three to four years in advance. Work on a new production begins many months before it is due to open. The formal rehearsal period for a new production of average size is generally five to six weeks. And yes, the singers who have a similar star status than Hollywood celebrities.  So it is not uncommon to cost $ 500,000 per show - for sets and costumes, artist and stagehand fees and musician costs. Indeed it is quite common that productions are shared by multiple theaters (e.g. Milano and München). Most depend on a wide range of revenues from ticket sales to donations to memberships (and in Europe subsidies). All this requires sophisticated project management, financial accounting, website technologies. Specialist software like that from Tessitura is aimed at opera and other creative management.

Opera Stage Technology

Invisible to the audience, revolutionary changes to the stage technology have happened everywhere (even in Bayreuth). Behind the scenes it looks more like the NASA control center in Houston. Also creating the illusions on stage is a matter of technology now rather than stage hands moving the scenery. Then there is broadcast technology. Last year, for the first time ever, a Bayreuth production was simulcast to an open stadium (inconceivable without high-class technology) as well as transmitted over the Internet.

Opera Fan Support

It has become so much easier to hear, see, share opera. I still happen to believe the best recordings were made over 50 years ago - not because of the recording technology but talent like Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen and Sir Georg Solti. But audio technology has since evolved from Edison Wax cylinders to MP3 players to satellite radio. I mostly listen on iPod given my travel routine. Friday night from Chicago to Frankfurt I listened to Die Walküre von Friedrick Furtwängler from 1956. We can get Opera DVDs and even watch it live at a local movie theater in High-Definition. Through Facebook, Twitter and other social tools we can now discover fans with similar interests around the world. And yes, each of us is now a critic! Most Opera Houses now have on-line ticketing – if I were to find myself in Sydney in August I could get advance tickets for Beethoven’s Fidelio. Last minute tickets have become easier to find with sites like StubHub. Of course, opera can also suffer when technology fails. For hours, many of us could not access the Met’s booking system to see Lorin Maazel play there after a prolonged absence.

Richard Wagner was considered a maverick in his time. Somehow I have a feeling he would be on the forefront of some of the technologies I mention above. The traditionalist in me is glad opera has stayed relatively unchanged over the centuries. In other ways, I am glad technology is making opera available to so many and will allow future generations to continue to enjoy what I love.

Let me conclude with the video below I hope you enjoy of Peter Hofmann and Jeannine Altmeyer in the famous duet Winterstürme from Die Walküre. And the provocative thought that to me opera (music) and software (technology) are actually one and the same. Both require complex abstraction and modeling – they materialize in our heads, but delight our senses”

NASA Technologies and Indy Cars

This NASA video segment describes how Indy car engineers use NASA technologies  to maximize safety and explains how the aerodynamics of the race car has improved due to new technologies. In addition, this segment also describes how NASA is utilizing Indy car crash data to minimize the risks associated with space vehicle re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and landing.

The Official Program for the 2009 Indianapolis 500, the largest and most comprehensive ever produced for "The Greatest Spectacle in Racing," celebrates 100 years of competition at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and is available at www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com The double-pane cover of the program features the painting "Indy Excitement" by famed artist Thomas Kinkade.

Guest Column: Technology, Grandchildren and Grandparents

This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.

This time it is all-around nice guy and even nicer family guy Frank Scavo pictured with his wife Dorothy and their three-year old granddaughter, Camdyn. He is President of Computer Economics, a 29-year old IT research firm based in Irvine, CA and Managing Partner of Strativa.  a management consulting firm. He blogs on enterprise software at the Enterprise System Spectator

"When Vinnie first told me about the hobby series, I proposed a piece on golf, but that subject had already been covered by Jim Rafferty.. How about wine? Already taken by John Dean. I protested that I had no hobbies left, unless you count grandchildren. Vinnie responded, “And the problem with that topic is?”

Initially I was incredulous, but the more I thought of how my wife and I interacted with our own grandparents and the technology advances in the four generations since, the more sense it made as a topic.

By way of background, my wife and I have three children, the oldest of whom lives with her husband and two children in Santa Cruz, CA, about six hours north of our home in Southern California. When they first moved there two years ago we were concerned that we would suffer the loss of regular contact with our grandchildren. But technology has helped bridge the gap nicely.

§ Staying in touch When I was growing up, an unexpected phone call from my grandparents would prompt my Mom to ask, “What’s wrong?” Long distance rates were so expensive that a three minute call was a guilt-trip and saved for special days like birthdays.  Today, we speak with our daughter and our grandchildren almost every day. Skype has dropped the cost to near zero and added video capabilities. Our extended families have a series of blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts that keep us in touch: with our other daughter in Spain and cousins on the East Coast, one of whom will soon be on an assignment with the U.S. State Department in Saudi Arabia. A far cry from the occasional family postcard of the past.

§ Digital cameras and online photo sharing. No event these days is too insignificant to capture in photos: trips to the park, play dates, a new pair of shoes, grandpa opening a grandchild’s present. We upload pictures often—Kodak Gallery is our preferred service—and share them with one another as well as with aunts, uncles, and cousins around the world. Compare that to yellowed and infrequent black and white photos we shared growing up courtesy of the US Postal Service .

§ Gifts and Toys. Growing up I remember getting mostly clothes and even a shoe-shine kit as gifts from my grandparents. The closest we got to technology was a chemistry set. Don’t get me wrong – that was delightful back then. Camdyn, in contrast, is already a proud owner of a toy “laptop” computer. It allows her to emulate her mother who works from home. Talking about technology and bonding families, my daughter in Santa Cruz, and the one in Spain both work for a closed captioning firm, which puts them online a lot during the day, allowing us all to to spend plenty of “virtual” time together even though separated by 6,000 miles.

As technology works to bring us closer to the next generation, it also helps us learn about preceding generations. My uncle, several years before his death, took it upon himself to write an autobiography, for the benefit of his grandchildren. He began to research our family tree and was able to connect, online, with an amateur genealogist in Las Vegas, Sam Tomaino.

Sam has collected and cataloged legal and church records extensively from several towns in southern Italy, including Decollatura, (with its well preserved church in photo) the town from where my great-grandparents emigrated to the U.S. As a result, Sam was able to reconstruct our family tree, on my mother’s side, back to the late 1600s.

It’s hard to imagine such an outcome without the Internet, genealogy sites like Ancestry.com, and software like Family Tree Maker which allow curators like Sam to assemble a larger database of historical records for these towns than are actually available in one place in Italy.

What does the future hold? DNA testing already allows individuals to confirm relationships, such as between adopted children and their biological relatives. Now the National Geographic Genographic Project  allows users to submit their DNA and trace their ancestry “along a single line of direct descent (paternal or maternal) and show the migration paths they followed thousands of years ago.” The project is a good example of the “network effect.” The greater the number of individuals that participate, the more detailed and refined the results become, as new understanding is gained on the migration of the human race around the globe. Incredible how affordable (about $ 125) and easy they have made this process.

I want to leave you with a photo with Camdyn on the annual family Pumpkin day. Growing up, my Dad used to fry pumpkin with potatoes in the fall. So, each year on October 31, in memory of my Dad, I celebrate by frying a pumpkin. I call the day, Upstate NY Italian-American Heritage Day.

Some traditions need little technology – just a heaping spoonful of family."

Microsoft’s Future Home

From BBC

Churchill Club: Top Tech Trends

Top VCs sharing their crystal ball in this annual ritual – courtesy of TechPulse 360

1. The Millennials Are Here. Everything is changing rapidly – Joe Schoendorf
2. The unstructured data deluge creates the next great information leaders – Ann Winblad
3. “Maintech” not “Cleantech” – Vinod Khosla
4. The triumph of the distributed Web – Steve Jurvetson
5. Consumption of digital goods on mobile devices is THE growth story of the coming decade -Ram Shriram
6. DC will prove to be a poor VC –  Tony Perkins
7. The rumors of the demise of the reporter have been exaggerated – Jason Pontin
8. Advanced batteries will be the most popular alternative energy investment in 2009-10 – Crowd idea
9. Wireless broadband that will one of the only IT sectors to see increased funding this year – Crowd idea
10. Power and efficiency management services will see a flowering of investment and innovation – Crowd idea
11. Healthcare administration will see the best growth in B2B software in 2009-10 – Crowd idea
12. Electronic displays will prove the hottest investment in hardware this year and the next- Crowd idea

Rafe Needleman’s Tweets from the event. Photo also from Rafe.

How do you use a power drill in microgravity?

“The challenges of building tools for working in space are, as you would imagine, nearly infinite in their complexity. How do you use a power drill in microgravity without torquing your entire body like a merry-go-round? How do you remove and manipulate components akin to the graphics card in your computer while wearing space gloves? How do you unfasten 110 screws that were never intended for in-orbit servicing without taking ten hours to do it? How do you keep the screws from floating away into deep space once you've removed them?

NASA had to answer all of these problems with the 116 custom tools created for the (Hubble) mission (of the Space Shuttle)”

Popular Science has a gallery of some of the tools – such as the high-speed, low-torque drill for removing Hubble's many screws during spacewalks

Star Trek Tech We Use Today (Almost)

PC World has a gallery comparing gadgets from the series to real life comparables today including

Star Trek: Medical Tricorder vs. Today: MRI Scanner;

Holodeck vs. Virtual Reality Headset

Communication Earpiece vs. Bluetooth Earpiece

Poster credit - Zimbio

Organic LEDs

"The up-and-coming electronics technology known as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) has spent the week in the, yes, spotlight. Earlier this week researchers announced that they had joined OLEDs to a rubbery conductor to make a computer display screen that could be bent, folded, and crumpled. Now, another team has tweaked OLEDs to make ultra-efficient panels that produce a white light similar to that produced by traditional incandescent light bulbs."

Discover

Photo credit

Guest Column: Technology and Writing

This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.

This time it is Charlotte Otter, who knows a thing or two about books and writing. As her widely read blog catalogs, she has read over 150 books in the last couple of years.  Unquestionably, words are her “hobby”.

“From the age of five, I wanted to be a writer, and now it is both my job (I am a freelance journalist) and my hobby (I am writing a novel and I blog). Before I started school, I remember trying to write my name into my Beatrix Potter books - a big “C” for Charlotte and then arbitrary letters, including an “X”. Now that I can spell my name, I hope to be one day signing it correctly in my own novels, possibly with an elegant fountain pen, and not only in books by other writers.

So how has technology changed my hobby? I spent my entire school and university career handwriting everything. I remember the cramps in my right hand as I rushed to get an essay in at the last minute. Luckily, my good cursive was usually worth five extra percentage points.

Technology entered my writing life in 1992, when, during a postgraduate journalism class, we were sent on a computer course and then encouraged to word process our submissions. I was lucky enough to have a boyfriend who had a computer so instead of booking time on the university’s machines, I had the luxury of working at home. I once famously phoned him during a high-level customer meeting to ask him how to print, and he still married me. “Shift F7” has now become the code-word for when I am having a technology moment. They happen; you can ask him :)

 My laptop is nothing more than a tool, the way writers in other ages used stone or clay tablets, vellum, parchment or paper. My keyboard is the means to put words down, the way writers have used styluses, quills, ink brushes, pencils and pens. I happen to use an Apple MacBook 1.1, but for my purposes, it is a glorified typewriter - a means to write and store that writing.

When I am writing creatively, as opposed to for business or in my blog, I often still handwrite. The flow from mind to pen still comes naturally for me, and especially if I need to write something in particular character’s voice, then I often break from the laptop, free write something on paper and later enter it into the computer. For me, typing is left-brain activity, while writing on paper is right-brain. I find the intuitive connections there.

The explosion in writing came with the Internet and connectivity. First it was useful as a source of stuff - shopping on Amazon for books - and for research, but now it is a place to connect. I connect with other writers via my blog and on Facebook. The Internet is not only changing how we work, but it’s changing language. When it comes to gaming, I am such a “noob” that a “brick” might “gib” me. “Tweeting” is no longer just for the birds.

There are amazing resources for writers on the Web just in the blogosphere alone. I have recently finished the first draft of my novel and have found a wonderful blogger called The Plot Whisperer. She is a professional plot consultant, but offers advice for writers on her blog for free. I am working through her plot planning course in advance of starting the second draft. I also read the blogs of literary agents and publishers.

When the time comes to market my novel, I will turn to the Web again. The first goal of someone with a manuscript is to find a literary agent, and sites like Agent Query provide databases of agents, what fiction they like to sell and how to approach them. If I’m in need of immediate gratification, I can put my manuscript, unfinished or not, up on Harper Collins’ site Authonomy which is like Pop Idol for writers. The HC editors guarantee to read the top five manuscripts every month.

Traditional publishing is being challenged by alternatives, so if my novel doesn’t find the audience I hope it will down the usual routes, I will have other options open to me - I could self-publish (using a service like www.lulu.com) or serialize it on my blog. Writers are starting to talk about collaborative, Web 2.0 models where they could peer edit, submit manuscripts to respected readers and then publish online for free. Readers could then download and read the manuscripts in any format they choose, from paper to Kindle.

I’ve avoided Twitter so far, because I struggle to express myself in only 140 characters. But believe me, if I get a publishing contract I’ll use every marketing tool out there to help sell it.

@WholeWideWorld? Read my book!”

Technothrill: 2009 BMW 7 series

Some of the technology (seriously only some) - courtesy of Motor Trend

• Lane Departure Warning, which vibrates the steering wheel if you change lanes without using the turn signals;
• High Beam Assist, which switches the headlights automatically between high and low beams
• Active Blind Spot Detection, which senses vehicles almost 200 ft behind. If a vehicle enters the blind spot, a warning triangle appears in the exterior rearview mirror. If the driver activates the turn signal, the triangle graphic flashes, and the steering wheel vibrates.
• Using an infrared camera, the optional Night Vision system scans a range up to 1600 ft ahead of the vehicle over a 24-degree-wide range..can figure out what pedestrians by the side of the road are doing: If they're moving parallel to the road, the system senses and displays the presence on the iDrive screen (see photo) or the head-up display but doesn't warn the driver. If the person is on a path to cross the road, a warning is displayed
• The revised iDrive system is more intuitive than before, placing a smaller multi-axis controller amid an array of menu buttons that can be differentiated by touch. It's easier all around to use, and it looks better, too.
• The 7 Series comes equipped with a 40GB hard drive, 13 gigs of which are allocated to music storage. The system is iPod and iPhone compatible, and the optional -- there's that word again -- Premium Sound System sounds stellar.