New Perimeter video archive format

[marcus]

the Perimeter streamer site has over a year's worth of seminar talks and public lectures on video

and you used to get to them by going to the streaming media site and scrolling down menus and selecting from menus, but there was no comprehensive library structure that you could use to jump right to something

they totally reorganized this

now every seminar talk video file has a number. I am trying to figure out how to use it. It is in a certain sense imitating the Cornell "arxiv" of preprints. but it is doing it with media files instead of just PDF

 

[marcus]

if you go here
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/in...=113&Itemid=167&p=presentations&with_msl=true

and type "Smolin L" into the name box and press search
you see that Smolin's recent seminar talk (frinstance) has
PIRSA number 0610158

that number tells the year, month, and sequence within month, just like arxiv.org

so 06 10 158 means the seminar talk was 2006, October, and #158 within October listings.

If you click on "WINDOWS MEDIA" you can watch it. the title of the talk is
Could quantum mechanics be an approximation to another, cosmological, theory?

now we can give references to each other which are PIRSA numbers just like we already do with arXiv numbers like the arXiv paper that this video talk is based on is quant-ph/0609109, so to get it you just say
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0609109

What does PIRSA mean? Perimeter Institute something Archive.
Maybe Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive.

 

[marcus]

So let's try using the system. I always liked that November 2005 talk by Sundance Bilson-Thompson. So let's put "Bilson-Thompson S"
into the search tool.

Here is the main PIRSA page
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Scientific/Seminars/PIRSA/

and it is mainly for people who want recent stuff or well-known stuff like Smolin Introduction to Quantum Gravity lecture series.

but item #1 there has a link called "advanced search" and it says click on this option if you want OLD stuff, which takes you here:
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=113&Itemid=167

This is what they call the ADVANCED SEARCH page. Great, now we just type in Sundance name.

YAY! I just typed in nothing but "Bilson-Thompson" and I got PIRSA#0511762 and it says:

Topological preon models: a braid new world ( Windows Media , Macromedia Flash , MP3 Audio , PDF )
Speaker(s): Sundance Bilson-Thompson

plus a brief abstract of what it is about. And if you click on Windows Media you get the video, with stills of the slides, and audio etc.

However at present I do not know any way to get to that talk without going thru the "advanced search" form. Which maybe is just as well----it gives them a choke point. If you could link directly to those files from outside,
they might get too much business.

 

[marcus]

Here is the main PIRSA page
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Scientific/Seminars/PIRSA/

...

I just tried the "catch up" function. It's quite handy. It gets you all the videos of seminars which have been added to the archive during the past week (or you can select a longer period like two weeks or a month.)