Here are the links that appear on the last slide.

• The Genome Center
• PolITiGenomics (this) blog
• LIMS Paper
• YAPC UR presentation

The Odyssey

So you may be asking yourself, how did he generate a movie of his talk? Even if you are not asking yourself that, I am going to tell you so that if you need to do it (or if I need to do it again), you can avoid a lot of hassle. This was all done on a MacBook using a slide deck created in MS PowerPoint 2008. First I tested screen capture using VLC. It took a few tries with the video settings to make it not look terrible (use H.264 at 1024 kb/s bitrate, 25 or more fps, MPEG 4 encapsulation), but the audio capture did not work. To compensate for the lack of audio, I did audio capture using GarageBand (podcast project type) at the same time I did the video capture. I then loaded the audio and the video into iMovie HD, synchronized the audio to the video, clipped the beginning and the end, and exported. This resulted in a fair quality product. Being stupid, I thought I could do better. I next tested recording narration in MS PowerPoint, but there didn’t seem to be a good way to export both a video of the slides with the recorded timings and the audio into a single format (not to mention it stupidly saves the audio in seemingly uncompressed files without an extension, one file per slide). So I imported the slides into Keynote 08, cleaned up the messes created by the import, recorded the slide show, and exported to QuickTime at high quality. This looked and played great in QuickTime so I went to upload it to YouTube. Sorry, YouTube has a ridiculous and arbitrary limit of 10 minutes for a video. Moving on to blip.tv (which, nicely, also supports Creative Commons licensing), I uploaded the video. After waiting for it to convert, I played it and noticed that although the audio was fine, the slides did not advance. Thinking something was wrong with the blip.tv Flash converter, I moved on to Vimeo. Slides didn’t advance there either. So next I checked the video by watching it using VLC and mplayer. No slide advancement. Trying to fix it, I went into the custom video settings when exporting in KeyNote, trying all sorts of combinations to generate a video that played well in VLC. Using various settings, I was able to get the slides to advance for a while, but eventually they would stop. Audio was always fine. I tried upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5. Still no luck (although in 10.5, VLC can capture from the iSight camera, so maybe audio capture will work in VLC now). I then recalled that the MPEG-2 on Mac was a little quirky (QuickTime won’t played decoded Tivo Series 2 video without first converting them to MPEG-4 using ffmpeg). As a last ditch effort, I imported the KeyNote exported movie into iMovie HD as an MPEG-4 project. I check to make sure iMovie HD played it correctly, then exported at full quality as an MPEG-4. This ballooned the size of the video from around 20 MB to over 110 MB, lessened the quality, and introduced a strange pulsing phenomena in the slides (probably due to compression degradation being corrected by key frames every second or so), but it seemed to play correctly in VLC and was higher quality than the VLC capture video. This video, uploaded to blip.tv, is what you see above.

Update: Here is how Lawrence Lessig screencasts.

You can find audio remixes of the interview on ccMixter and indabamusic and video remixes on YouTube. Here is a clever video remix.

It seems all this remixing has angered Mr. Colbert enough to create his own video for one of the audio remixes that included clips from his audio book as a warning to all not to do any more remixing, especially with clips from his audio book.

Update: Added links to remixes.
Update2: Added link to Colbert warning.

The concurrent ascendancy of Web 2.0 technologies and President-elect Obama provide an opportunity to update the term while returning it to its true meaning. Through the Change.gov web site, the transition team is posting its press conferences, weekly “radio” addresses, and other transition information on YouTube. In other words, the bully pulpit has become the bully YouTube. While many of the topics presented on Change.gov are front and center in the minds of most Americans, one of interest to me has not been: Creative Commons. While YouTube does not support Creative Commons licensing at present and until recently the content on Change.gov was not under a CC license, it appears the Obama-Biden transition team has done the right thing and put the content of Change.gov under a CC Attribution license. Bully!

Would you like open access to continue? Would you like PubMed to remain a comprehensive resource for NIH research? Write your representative and ask them to oppose HR 6845. You can also support open-access journals like PLoS.

Here is an example letter you can modify to your liking and send to your representative.

Representative NAME,

As a constituent who is strongly in support of the advancement of science, I am writing to urge you to vote against the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (HR 6845). This bill takes rights away from researchers at the forefront of our country’s efforts to remain the top research nation in the world and puts them in the hands of publishing companies whose business models are stuck on the 1960′s. Open access to research is a centuries old foundation of scientific advancement. Open access to government-funded research was a long overdue stance that provides the American taxpayer with the highest return on his or her investment. HR 6845 would undermine science and devalue the government’s investment in science. I strongly urge you to vote against HR 6845. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
YOUR NAME