Southern California Strings Seminar

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Southern California Strings Seminar

Clifford at 8:08 pm, September 6th, 2005

discussions at SCSS On Friday and Saturday (September 23rd and 24th), the next Southern California Strings Seminar will be happening! It’s a regional meeting for people doing research in string theory, and I’d especially like to see more young people come out and take part. We make a special effort to ask the speakers to spend a little time at the beginning of their talk setting the scene (speaking about motivations, what has gone before, etc) so that the series can be of great value to people who are trying to learn what’s going on in a particular topic at research level (this can be students, postdocs, or faculty, in fact). If you’re doing theoretical physics research anywhere in the Southern California region, and want to take part, please come. See the website for details, and let the hosts -this time it is UCLA- know that you’re coming.

Here’s the introduction that I have on the main page:

Join us as we (members of several of the local groups with interest in string theory and related topics) sit together to discuss new ideas and developments (both general and technical) in the field. The presentations will be accompanied by plenty of discussion and in the first part of each talk the speaker will take special care to set the scene and context of the work in a pedagogical manner so as to encourage participation by younger members of the field.

Also, here’s what I mention about the inaugural one, which was in May, hosted by the USC group:

The inaugural event was 20th-21st May 2005, and was hosted at the University of Southern California. It was great fun, and we all learned a lot! We had about 40 participants, from USC, UCLA, UCI, Harvey Mudd College, UCSD, and Caltech, with speakers from some of these places and also from Chicago, Michigan and Stanford.

For those who can’t make it to the events, you can find useful video of all the talks from that last one on the website too, and I hope that we’ll be able to generate video for the future ones too.

-cvj

P.S. Technical issue for which some of you might have the answer: If you have a look at the online material for the previous SCSS, you’ll see that it has a fully downloadable (and large) Quicktime movie for each talk, and some talks have RealMedia format being streamed. But the streaming file came out to be very inefficient…it rebuffers every 10 seconds and so is almost unwatchable, and I do not know how to fix this. This is because our system does not stream Quicktime, and so I had to convert everything to Real using a plugin for imovie on the Mac. I set the frame rate really low on everything since you only want to see the changes on the blackboard, while keeping the resolution high so that you can read the blackboard. But I could not find the right set of parameters in the plugin to get it to stop rebuffering so often when streaming. If you’ve any ideas, do let me know, since I’d like to generate some better Real format files so that people don’t have to download the .mov format files to their computers. I wonder if the solution is to get Final Cut Pro and then use the plugin in combination with that program? Perhaps there aren’t enough parameters to vary with just imovie and the plugin, so Final Cut will give more control…..? Ideas from people who’ve played with this sort of thing are welcome.

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10 Comments on “Southern California Strings Seminar” rss feed

Quantoken on Sep 7th, 2005 at 5:58 pm

Clifford said:

“I set the frame rate really low on everything since you only want to see the changes on the blackboard, while keeping the resolution high so that you can read the blackboard. But I could not find the right set of parameters in the plugin to get it to stop rebuffering so often when streaming.”

Clifford, that’s not your fault. The internet technology simply has not advanced to the point of providing general user the kind of bandwidth high enough to allow real time streaming of video that is of quality high enough to read the letters on the blackboard. The constant rebuffering simply tells you that the amount of data is more than can be streamed in real time, so it needs to pause and catch up once in a few seconds.

Most residential broadband ISP are either DSL or Cable Modem. Most DSL provides a download bandwidth of 256 kbits/second, which is roughly 25.6 kbytes/second. Assuming your frame rate is only 10/second, you have just 2.56Kbytes per video frame. You go find a high resolution jpeg image file that is just 2.56Kbyte and shows letters on a blackboard. You can’t. Smallest thumbnail images would be 50KB or more.

Quantoken
Clifford on Sep 7th, 2005 at 6:40 pm

Thanks, Quantoken, but actually it is possible, and quite commonly done in our field. The issue here is the efficient conversion from one format to another, not the data possibilities itself. See archived video of chalkboard talks at KITP, Perimeter, Duke, etc, to name a few. Also, I know I can do it in Quicktime. It is the conversion from imovie to Real that is the issue.

But thanks for the comment.

-cvj
Jacques Distler on Sep 7th, 2005 at 8:14 pm

The Darwin Streaming Server is the open-source version of the QuickTime Streaming Server.

They have precompiled binaries for MacOSX, Linux and Winblows 2000. The source should compile on most Unix platforms.

I use it on Golem and am quite happy. Why not use QTSS?
Clifford on Sep 7th, 2005 at 8:41 pm

Jacques, my IT people here say they’ll only handle Real streaming, not anything else. That’s the problem, and why I wanted to convert my existing stuff. Are you saying I can get around this with QTSS? I thought that for anything other than Real, I’d have to have ports open that they won’t open…. Please clarify.

Thanks,

-cvj
Jacques Distler on Sep 7th, 2005 at 9:39 pm

I’m sorry. I can’t speak for your IT people.

All I’m saying is that QTSS is

a) free (unlike Real, which costs a small fortune)
b) can stream over Ports 554, 7070 or 80

I’m sure your IT people are not blocking Port 80, though you will need to run QTSS on a different machine than your webserver, if you want to stream over Port 80.

It’s easy to set up, works outrageously well (even on a relatively underpowered machine, like the previous incarnation of golem) and, frankly, offers much better CODECs than Real.

The only good thing about Real is that they offer a free Linux client. The only way to get a QuickTime client under Linux (as far as I know) is to use CrossOver (which costs $40) with the Windows QuickTime client.
Clifford on Sep 7th, 2005 at 9:50 pm

Right… that’s the problem. I have to have it on the IT people’s server….. Grrrr

This is useful though. Thanks.

-cvj
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