SynBERC:MIT/Calendar/2007-3-20

Anyone in the synthetic biology community is welcome to attend.

Tuesday March 20, 2007 at 12pm

32-G449, MIT

Topic of discussion
Natalie Kuldell will lead a discussion on education in synthetic biology including the following topics...


 * What curriculum exists (and an open discussion of their efficacy)
 * What communities would benefit/find usefulness in the materials
 * What content should be taught (a big topic)
 * How to best convey material (comic 2.0 vs web tutorials vs SB majors vs textbook etc.)
 * What's holding us back (maybe...this might be part of all the rest of the topics and doesn't need a separate header).

Remote participation

 * Reshma 16:44, 13 March 2007 (EDT): On 3/13/2007 we managed to have video but no audio. We're working on getting mikes placed around the room so that you can hear the discussion.  Also, the video feed seems to sometimes be shut off.  We're not sure why but we'll try to make sure it is on prior to the discussion.
 * Wmholtz I was able to connect to all three streams on 3/20/2007. I was a bit surprised that I was having CPU limitation issues (P4 2.8GHz). Turns out viewing the Quicktime stream via VLC required about half as many CPU cycles as viewing the stream in the Quicktime player. Additionally, the quality of the video on the rtsp stream was better than the http streams, and the rtsp stream placed a signficantly smaller load on my system. If it is feasible on the MIT end, I'd recommend going with all rtsp streams. The audio quality was actually quite good and I could understand everything except when lots people or papers were moving around. Thanks you to the people who having been getting these feeds up and running!

Video
An archive of the video stream is available on blip.tv.

Video of today's SynBERC lunch should be available in real time (minus ~20 seconds) via the internet tubes in two different formats: the VLC videostream described previously, and as a quicktime stream. This quicktime stream is a test of the setup that will be used to broadcast Steve Benner's talk tomorrow, so if it works for you today, it should work tomorrow as well.

Streams
rtsp://caprica.csail.mit.edu/SynBERC.sdp - the Quicktime stream, camera position uncertain http://xibalba.csail.mit.edu:8080 - Camera looking from back of room towards presenter http://xibalba.csail.mit.edu:8081 - slides from laptop input 1 (if anything is connected)

Connection Instructions
Quicktime stream: In quicktime go to menu >> Open URL and paste the address into to menu dialog.

VLC streams: in VLC go to menu >> Open Network and paste the address into the menu dialog, taking care to clear it of any defaults first.

Note that VLC can actually open all three streams; quicktime player is not essential.

Also note that the OS X version of VLC does not provide options for opening more than one stream at a time; a quick and dirty workaround is to duplicate or triplicate the VLC application and open a different stream in each copy.

Chat
To submit questions and comments live during the lunch, visit the chat room and type in that window. (You need an OpenWetWare account and you need to enable chat in your preferences (top right hand side of browser window.)  We'll have a laptop open to the chat room during the lunch (eventually we might simulcast this on a screen).