Martyn Jones

Sakamoto Software

Small ActionScript project to visualize a countdown timer.

Digital Rose

A little Java Processing program which recursively takes random midpoints of a box, then draws a quadrilateral from those resulting midpoints.

Listen & Read Learning Tools for Japanese

This post refers to the Listen & Read method of language learning, whereby you watch a video in the target language and read subtitles, also in the target language.

I myself am studying Japanese, and find it quite difficult to find Japanese video with Japanese subtitles. The good news is that it’s relatively easy to make such a combination for yourself. DVDs and even AVI files have accompanying subtitle and time-stamp files. The subtitle file contains the text to be displayed and the time-stamp file contains the timing of when the text should be displayed. There are many different formats of these, some of them combine both sets of info into a single file, e.g. SubRip.

If you have a Japanese film that only contains English subtitles, it’s possible to replace or add a Japanese subtitles file. In the case of SubRip files, you can just open it up in a text editor and replace the English with the Japanese equivalent. It’s a little more complicated for formats that use separate subtitle and time-stamp files, e.g. VobSub.

You can check the contents of the subtitle files with a program like Subtitle Edit. When you import a VobSub file into SubTitle Edit, look for a Japanese channel. The Japanese version of the VobSub will be stored as image files and not textual data. You can turn the images into text, but you will need a Japanese Optical Character Recognition library. Alternaively, if you have the time, you can step through each image manually, and enter the Japanese for each character (you will need a Japanese IME). I should stress however that creating textual data for the subtitles is not necessary.

If you do not have a Japanese channel, you will need to search for a Japanese VobSub for the video you want to be subtitled. There are few collections on the Internethere and there.

Not all video players will be able to read subtitle files, or be able to switch between different language channels. Fortunately, Media Player Classic is free and does everything you need.

One last point about the VobSub format. The time-stamp file has a .idx extension. Along with the meta-data which syncs the text to the video, there is other information which can set the default language channel, subtitle text size and colour, and subtitle placement. Recently I wanted to add Japanese subtitles that already had English subtitles baked-in to the video. The first problem was that the subtitlies were appear way too early. This was remedied with the following line in the .idx file:

delay: +00:00:14:00

Similarly, I made the default langauge channel Japanese, and moved the subtitles to the top of the screen , so that the English was still legible, using these lines:

org: 0, -350
langidx: 1

Finally, it’s worth pointing out this utility: Subs2SRS. If you have a video, and the subtitles in your first and target language, this program will automatically created a set of flash cards for you. Except these cards will not only contain the English and Japanese text – it will also splice the video up and add it to the relevant flash cards!

Have fun playing

Data Visualisations

Just found a collection of Data Visualisations collated by Mashable: The Social Media Guide. Whilst most of them are interesting and novel, I’m not sure how useful they are. From an Information Design point of view, it is not immediately clear what you are looking at, and I’m not sure if the spatial positioning, colour scheme and symbols help to derive meaning or to uncover correlations. Equally, from an Interaction Design point of view, often it is not immediately clear what you can do or interact with.

The Digg visualisations are quite interesting. A real-time data stream updates constantly moving, evolving graphics – helping to give a sense that the website and the community around the site are active and alive.

Surely user-interfaces which automatically adapt to a user’s search preferences, search history and search correlations with people and content in their network will become more sophisticated and commonplace.

Are schools killing creativity?

In an article on the Guardian online earlier this year, Sir Ken Robinson (former professor of arts education at the University of Warwick, author and general creativity expert) suggested that the rigid prescriptive school structures in place around the world are robbing our children of desirable and necessary creative thinking skills.

Part of his criticism of the traditional school system is that it has too much structure and that subjects are too separated and narrowly defined. During a TED talk in 2006, he suggested that “…creativity comes about from the interaction of the different disciplinary ways of seeing things.” Certainly the Rose review into primary education agrees. It suggested a more broad syllabus:

• understanding English
• communication and languages
• mathematical understanding
• science and technological understanding
• human, social and environmental understanding
• understanding physical education and well-being
• understanding the arts and design

Another part of his criticism is that there is far too great a focus on tests and that schools are only really preparing students to take tests and entrance exams for university. Ken argues that such importance on tests teaches students to avoid making mistakes, and that subsequently they will fail to be able to create anything truly original. Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence) would also add that traditional tests only seek to measure IQ, but that there are many other intelligences which contribute towards creativity and that many of these are actually better indicators of how well a child will fare in life.

When I taught in Japan I was always amazed at how instructivist the teaching was and yet how creative the Japanese can be. They are renowned for the quality of their flower arranging, manga, interior design, fashion and architecture. Their natural flair for attractive aesthetics may be due to the fact that graphic design has be ingrained in their culture since the Edo period of the 15th century. The Japanese are well know for their ability to assimilate parts of other cultures into their own and to reinvent and redesign. However, Ken Robinson talked of creativity as the ability to come up with new and novel ideas. Under this definition, does this make the Japanese less creative than I give them credit for? If not, does the suppression of creativity during early schooling lead to an explosion of creativity later in life?

Guardian online article: Fertile minds need feeding

Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on TED

Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence