Tag: FaithTech

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Speed Up Editing Sermon Audio & Generate Transcripts In a Flash

https://churchm.ag/editing-sermon-audio-generate-transcripts-pompom/Sermon audio sharing isn’t reserved for famous pastors like Tim Keller, John Piper, and Tony Evans.

However, editing sermon audio can be time-consuming, especially if you don’t have a dedicated staff person or a volunteer with relevant knowledge.

Thankfully, a new program is available for Mac and IOS that may help you quickly edit your sermons, get a transcript practically instantaneously, and produce shareable video clips. Pompom is its name.

Simply put, what is Pompom?
Pompom is a podcast editing tool for Mac and iOS that streamlines the recording, editing, and publishing processes. Pompom accomplishes this by combining AI and audio editing smarts to enable you make short modifications to your recordings before sharing them with the world.

Pompom, in contrast to the vast majority of today’s apps, is not browser-based but rather operates locally on the device, so you never have to worry about losing work due to a shaky internet connection or waste time waiting for a basic page vie

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Godinterest: A Return to the Web of Old, While Pushing the Internet Forward

Godinterest: A Return to the Web of Old, While Pushing the Internet Forward

The million-dollar question of the hour is: How does the future of Godinterest look beyond 2019? So, we hopped on the time machine, and we just came back from the future.

Now, it’s your turn to take the ride, so buckle up amigo, we’re hot in 3, 2, 1”¦

It’s 8am on a Thursday, early morning by cybre.space’s standards. Few have logged on to Godinterest’s microblogging social network, and it shows a follower feed filled with less than 50 users updates at a snail’s pace. It’s much slower than one would expect on a social network. But then again, cybre.space isn’t Godinterest. It runs off a CMS called WordPress, and is part of a much larger network of Godinterest MicroBlogs.

Have you ever blogged? How about microblogged? You might say no to the latter, but if you’ve ever posted something on social media, surprise! You’re a microblogger.


“Microblogging is an online broadcast medium that exists as a specific form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregated file size. Microblogs “allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links”, which may be the major reason for their popularity. These small messages are sometimes called microposts.”

There’s no reason to think that Jesus wouldn’t have used Facebook, Google, Twitter if it existed back when he was on earth.

The fundamental problem of religious communication is how best to represent and mediate the sacred. (O’Leary 787) What would Jesus tweet?

Historically, the quest for sacred connections has relied on the mediation of faith communication via technological implements, from the use of the drum to mediate the Divine, to the use of the mechanical clock by monks as reminders to observe the canonical hours of prayer (Mumford). Today, religious communication practices increasingly implicate Web 2.0, or interactive, user-generated content like blogs and microblogs “like” status updates of no more than 500 characters sent via Web-based applications like Godinterest, text messaging, instant messaging, e-mail, or on the Web.


According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s latest report in October 2009, 19% of online adults said that they used a microblogging service to send messages from a computer or mobile device to family and friends who have signed up to receive them (Fox, Zickuhr & Smith).


Pew Internet

The ascendency of microblogging leads to interesting questions of how new media use alters spatio-temporal dynamics in peoples’ everyday consciousness, including ways in which tweeting facilitates ambient religious interactions. The notion of ambient strikes a particularly resonant chord for religious communication: many faith traditions advocate the practice of sacred mindfulness, and a consistent piety in light of holy devotion to an omnipresent and omniscient Divine being.

Godinterest is a free social networking and micro-blogging service based on the WordPress software, using the Activity Streams and seeks to provide the potential for open, inter-service and distributed communications between its microblog and has grown steadily in the last couple of months, and with it the community. The platform enjoys an engaged pressence on the internet.

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66% of IT Projects Fail

Is Britain a nation of slient Christians?

Only one in three software projects will turn out to be successful. According to Standish Group’s 2015 Chaos report, 66% of technology projects (based on the analysis of 50,000 projects worldwide) end in partial or total failure. More surprisingly, these statistics have been the same for the last five years, the report shows. Furthermore, 17% of large IT projects go so badly that they can threaten the very existence of  a company.

On Average, Large It Projects Run 45% over Budget and 7% over Time, While Delivering 56% Less Value than Predicted

Despite such failures, huge sums continue to be invested in IT projects and written off. For example the cost of project failure across the European Union was ┚¬142 billion in 2004.

It Projects Always Come with an Element of Risk, but There Are Huge Gains to Be Had If We Can Just Avoid Some of the Factors That Contribute Frequently to Project Failure

What makes a IT project successful, though?

According to the Standish Group, a successful project is on time, on budget and has satisfactory results (value, user and sponsor satisfaction, and meets target requirements). Other measures of success are widely known and accepted as true such as getting requirements right, providing effective leadership, and having full support and engagement from sponsors and users. Without these, it’s unlikely that any project would succeed.

But there’s more to success than what is widely known and, apparently, rarely followed. To reduce the risk of failure for your tech project, here are  six key actions to take on the road to success.

1. Executive Vision and Involvement

Without a Executive Senior Sponsor Its Easy for Projects to Fail with the Organizational Resistance That Accompanies Large Change

Executive involvement is a primary variable in predicting the success of an IT project.   Having a leadership team aligned across an organization articulating the purpose, value, and rationale for a project goes a long way towards getting stakeholders and end-users pulling the proverbial rope in the same direction.

2. Have a clear view of scope and timetable

Oftentimes, a tech project flops because its developers fail to plan and rush forward with  an idea. However, some project  managers plan so meticulously that they end up falling behind and lose momentum. The best approach is somewhere in between.

Interviewing team members, documenting requirements, prioritizing what is “mission critical” versus “nice to have,” getting agreement across stakeholders can feel like a never-ending cycle.   As a result, requirement gathering has fallen out of fashion with many organizations  in the past few years.

However, the ideal starting point for a successful technology project is to have a set of fundamental requirements with sufficient detail to develop against.

Requirement Gathering Is Labour-intensive and Challenging but Remains the Roadmap and Measuring Stick for Software Projects

This approach allows you to maintain sight of the business benefits as well as engaging stakeholders and responding to their feedback.  In combination with a  clear business case, a  well-defined set of requirements also simplifies design and testing, two areas where projects tend to go  sideways.

Ensure that requirements for the project are clearly defined and agreed upon among stakeholders and that you have a way to track, measure, and manage changes in requirements as appropriate during the project.

3. Define how you will deliver

When it comes to delivering a major project, one size does not always fit all. All products are customizable to some degree, so what might have worked  in one company may not work in another company.

That being said, why reinvent the wheel if it’s already proven successful?  Sometimes it  can be more beneficial to  use an existing  off the shelf solution. Whichever direction you take,  choose the delivery mode that works best for your company.

4. Risk Identification and Management

Every project has risk and  there are many  factors out of your control. People leave the organization, for better or worse, leadership changes,   budgets get cut, however, many risks  to projects can be mitigated or even eliminated with some forethought and on-going management.    For example, do you have the resources you need to deliver the project (resource risk).   Are project goals clearly understood and requirements clearly defined (scope risk).   Do you have a realistic project plan and timeline (time risk).

Mitigating Risk Is a Combination of Science and Art, and Always a Balancing Process

5. Test your product again and again

A technology project is something that should overall support your business. It should not be something that dictates and forces you to  change your operations. If this is happening, you should shift gears and focus on tweaking the technology, rather than lowering expectations and adopting less ideal requirements.

Adequate testing is a must for any tech project. While some features may be fine with automated testing, the best approach is to have a dedicated testing team. Testing activities should mirror those with the development team throughout the project’s lifetime. With thorough testing, a project should deliver with less design flaws or missing requirements.

6. Prioritize simplicity and performance

Developers often leave the external look and feel of a product to the wayside thinking these things are not necessities for the consumer to enjoy. However, user experience is absolutely critical to the success of the project.

Developers must consider things like storage, network requirements, processing speeds and overall performance in order to satisfy the customer. If users are going to have to wait for an extended period to allow information to load, there must be a good reason for the wait, otherwise they won’t return for future products.

Simplification and Improved Efficiency Is What Adds Value

Ultimately, using the product should be a smooth and intuitive experience. Additionally, tools and alternative routes must be placed logically without being intrusive. The process can be complicated, but the finished product should emit simplicity. After all, that’s what makes companies like Apple so successful. Simplification and improved efficiency is what adds value.

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Small Projects Often Mean Greater Innovation

Small projects often embody more innovation than larger more costly or high profile ones.

Innovation is a wide concept that includes improvements in processes, products and services. It involves incorporating new ideas which generate changes that help solve the needs of a company and so increase its competitiveness. That’s hardly big news. But what may be surprising to some is that innovation has itself, well, innovated and it isn’t what it used to be.

New materials and energy, design approaches, as well as advances in digital technology and big data, are creating a wave of innovation within the construction industry. These new ideas are increasingly often tested and proven on smaller and agiler projects. Investing time and money is well spent on  these  ideas and technical improvements can then be used on large-scale developments.

Here are  three exciting small projects:

Vanke Pavilion - Milan Expo 2015 / Daniel Libeskind
Vanke Pavilion – Milan Expo 2015 / Daniel Libeskind

Vanke Pavilion - Milan Expo 2015 / Daniel Libeskind
Vanke Pavilion – Milan Expo 2015 / Daniel Libeskind

VANKE PAVILION Milan, Italy
VANKE PAVILION
Milan, Italy

1. Vanke Pavilion – Milan Expo 2015

The  corporate pavilion for Vanke China explores key issues related to the theme of the Expo Milano 2015, “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”.

Situated on the southeast edge of the Lake Arena, the 800-square meter pavilion appears to rise from the east, forming a dynamic, vertical landscape.

The original tiling pattern would have resulted in thousands of ceramic tiles of different sizes and shapes. The resulting complexity and lack of repetition could have led to high costs and a longer erection time.

Working with Architects Studio Libeskind, Format Engineers  (Engineering Designers with backgrounds in structural engineering, coding, mathematics, and architecture) changed the pattern from thousands of different tiles to less than a dozen and  simplified the  backing structure generating  huge cost savings. Format Engineers also proposed ‘slicing’ of the building and then fabrication of  the primary structure of steel ribs using  low tech flat steel plate elements.  These were then used in a series of long span portalised frames reminiscent of the ribs and spars in traditional boat building  resulting in a  column-free area for the display of Chinese Cultural Heritage.

The frame was built to a budget and without difficulty ahead of the neighboring Expo buildings.

Building Size
12 meters high
740 mq gross floor area (exhibition, service & VIP levels)
130 mq roof terrace

Architect:  Studio Libeskind

Engineer:  Format Engineers

Oxford Brookes Rain Pavilion
Oxford Brookes Rain Pavilion

Oxford Brookes Rain Pavilion
Oxford Brookes Rain Pavilion

Oxford Brookes Rain Pavilion
Oxford Brookes Rain Pavilion

2.  Oxford Brookes Rain Pavilion

The Rain Pavilion is an urban forest sculpture forming the front entrance to Oxford Brookes University’s Architecture Faculty.

“Rain Pavilion artwork is a sensory experience for the community.”

The complex form required extensive wind modeling and comprehensive structural analysis within a generative 3d model. This was allied with Format Engineers in-house code for the self-organization of voids and their subsequent redistribution.

.At each stage of the design process different modeling and analysis techniques were used to exploit the form and to optimise the structure. The considerable challenges posed by the slenderness of the structure and its dynamic behavior under wind were resolved by combining Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)  (a branch of  fluid mechanics  that uses numerical analysis and algorithms to solve and analyze problems that involve  fluid  flows) with a generative design environment. Conceptual design introduced the ideas of tubular stems and folded steel canopies, both of which were  perforated by circular holes arranged to allow the interplay of light and water through the structure. The voids were generated using a self-organizing process.

Grasshopper  (a graphical algorithm computer 3-D modeling tool)  was used  to produce a mesh that could include the voids in both the stems and the petals.

The Rain Pavilion is designed to celebrate the sound of rain, and the noise of water interacting with different sections of the installation is part of the experience of passing through it. The structure has a design life of five years and can  be transported to other locations.

Architect:  Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

Engineer:  Format Engineers

KREOD Pavilion
KREOD Pavilion

KREOD Pavilion
KREOD Pavilion

KREOD Pavilion
KREOD Pavilion

3.  KREOD Pavilion

The KREOD pavilions were first erected on the London Greenwich Olympic site in 2012.  Easily rearranged, three pod-like pavilions were formed with a wooden structural framework comprised of an open hexagonal composition.

Standing three meters tall, each double-curved wooden shell enclosed a footprint of 20 square meters,  totaling 60 square meters. A  waterproof tensile membrane sealed the interior from the elements fully portable with demountable joints,  the individual components can be  stacked for efficient transportation.

Chun Qing Li the architect required a temporary exhibition or function space that could be erected and demounted mostly by hand and by untrained staff. The quality of finish needed to  echo that of handmade furniture and had to be low cost and quick to erect. The continuously changing double curved form of the enclosure meant that in theory, every nodal connection was  different. A conventional bolted solution would have cost hundreds of pounds per fixing. Format Engineers  suggestion of a ‘reciprocal’ jointed timber grid shell required standard  bolts which equated to a fraction of the normal cost. It also allowed the structure to be built from simple and light flat timber elements.

The structure used Kebony timber throughout, a sustainable alternative to tropical hardwood. As this material had not previously been used in a structural context Format Engineers undertook load testing of the material and the connections at the University of Cambridge. The timber was fabricated using CNC routing (a computer controlled cutting machine)  allowing a highly accurate fit between members and basic  erection on site.

Architect:  Chun Qing Li  

Engineer:  Format Engineers

 

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The Golden Gate City’s out-of-control Housing Market: San Francisco Shack Just Sold for $1.2 million

The listed property at 16 De Long Street in San Francisco that sold for $1.2 million. Courtesy of Vanguard Properties

Long Way from Home: The Housing Crisis Lingers On “Distinguished home in need of work” as  listed with Vanguard Properties “Housing Special.” However, is this property a rich man’s dream or worst nightmare?

With rotting wooden shingles, peeling paint and boarded-up windows, this 1906 single-story home need’s a lot of work. But the price is what had people talking. The asking price was  $350,000, for 2 bedrooms, one bath, and a mere 765 square feet, about the size of a hotel suite.

The Golden Gate City’s out-of-control Housing Market

Located at 16 De Long Street in the more affordable Outer Mission district, the house price reflects  the out-of-control  real estate market in San Francisco. Since 2012, the city has seen a 103% increase in housing prices.  The average apartment in the city rents for $3,500 a month, and the median housing price reached an all-time high of $1.2 million and it’s expected to climb another 5.2% in the year ahead, according to Zillow. Manhattan rents in August, by comparison, topped $3,460, according to StreetEasy, a New York real-estate research firm that’s part of the Zillow Group Z, -2.95% .

The San Francisco Real-estate Market Is Probably the Hottest Market in the U.S Right Now

Not surprisingly, given the state of the actual building, the home’s value isn’t in the structure but in the land that it sits on.

Thinking of Moving to San Francisco to Make It Big in the Tech Industry

With the influx of tech workers driving up the housing market, along with a strain on the supply of houses to meet demand, it is understandable to brokers in San Francisco  why prices seem so unrealistic.

$1.2 Million Is What It Costs to Buy a Shack in San Francisco, Literally

The home is an earthquake shack. These tiny homes were built after the 1906 earthquake to house people who lost their residences. Many still remain around the city and have been restored, updated and refurbished.

According to a report from  Curbed San Francisco, the house had rats, black widows, mold, and hundreds of bottles of urine  inside it when it went up for sale and was subsequently  sold for $1.52  million.

The tiny home backs on to the eight-lane 280 freeway and a Bay Area Rapid Transit, or rail line that begins running at 5 a.m. and doesn’t stop until nearly 2.a.m.

On the flip side biking it to the local  station only takes eight minutes and getting on to the freeway isn’t difficult either, if you want to get out of town or into the city by car. Three golf clubs are also nearby.  And, for those late-night snacks, a convenience store stands just a few steps away at the corner of De Long and San Jose Avenue.

So maybe it wasn’t  such a bad deal, after all? or is it a sign  of how crazy the San Francisco real estate market has become?

Michael Lewis, writing for The New Republic, describes the negative effect of wealth on the moral behavior of wealthy people. He cites studies in which wealthy people, again and again, demonstrate a sense of entitlement and disregard for justice.

“As the recession lifted, poor and middle class Americans dug deeper into their wallets to give to charity, even though they were earning less. At the same time, according to a newChronicle analysis of tax data, wealthy Americans earned more, but the portion of the income they gave to charity declined.”

So rich people, statistically speaking, demonstrate disregard for their fellow citizens and the laws of the land. None of this should come as a surprise for Christians. Jesus warned of the dangers of wealth (Matthew 13:22) and of course Paul warns in 1Timothy, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” And yet solving the problem of extreme wealth in America is not so easy as spouting Bible verses. And for wealthy Christians, the solution to the problems of extreme wealth comes from entrusting that wealth to the Lord to the benefit of all.

 

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