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Closed captioning in online video

The Wall Street Journal, of all places, has a detailed article about online video and the lack of closed captioning.

Though television networks and movie studios are rapidly expanding into Internet distribution, few online videos offer the closed captioning that companies are required by law to offer to TV viewers. (link, will expire in about seven days)

Unlike TV broadcasts, closed captions are not mandatory for online video, and the major broadcasters are currently choosing not to provide them for the shows they are putting online.

As a result, online video represents a step backward for hearing-impaired viewers–it’s essentially unusable.

I expect that this loophole will be closed rather swiftly.

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Project Mars — not chocolate?

The announcements just keep coming from Adobe today:

Mars is the code name for technology being developed by Adobe that provides an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based representation of Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. (Mars page at Adobe Labs)

In the long term, I think this means the Death of Distiller. Other than that, I think my brain has gone into information overload.

Any thoughts on where this is going?

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Rethinking the periodic table of elements

[heavy blogging. I must be trying to avoid some unpleasant task.]

Most of you probably don’t know that I spent the first two years of my college career as a chemistry major. When push came to shove, I decided that I would rather serve as editor of the science magazine than take analytical chemistry (which was notorious for an all-consuming laboratory component). And really, who could find working in Gross Chemistry Laboratory appealing? (To add insult to injury, the approach to the chemistry building was a set of steps that were completely unusable by humans, as each stair required about one-and-a-half strides. The joke on campus was that the civil engineering department had designed the stairs. “But Duke doesn’t have a civil engineering program.” “Not any more.”)

In any event, here is a fascinating new look at the periodic table, as a spiral. (h/t New York Times via Feld Thoughts)

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