Lectures now available for Mac/Linux

When I first announced that the Lectures of the Week were available for
viewing, and that the summer lecture series would specialize on the new
field of astrobiology, there were a fair number of comments, both
private and public, from this group expressing disappointment that they
were available only for Windows users.

We've rectified that situation now through the use of a second format,
SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). All of the
Lectures of the Week are now presented in this format and can be viewed
through the use of web-embedded QuickTime or Real Players on either
Windows, OS X, Unix or Linux.

For more information about the use of the web embedded players, please
see:

http://aics-research.com/lotw/notes.html

Thirteen lectures in this series have been presented so far, with two
to go. The lecture for this week will feature Seth Shostak of the SETI
Institute, Mountain View, CA. Seth argues that if we are going to
discover extraterrestrial intelligence, we're going to do it during our
lifetime simply due to the march of technological advancement.

The last lecture in the series will be given by Mario Livio of the
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD. His lecture will be
entitled "Cosmology and Life."

You may view any of the lectures in this series by going to the
archives:

http://aics-research.com/lotw/archives.html

Wirt Atmar


[[Mod. note -- I was unable to view any of the lectures. On an OpenBSD
system using Firefox 1.5.0.5 the "view as a webpage" links all required
browser plugins (a security risk I'm not willing to take); on a GNU/Linux
system using Firefox 1.5.0.1 both the quicktime and realplayer links
returned error pages, eg
Not Found
The requested URL /lotw/lotw20060821-qt.html was not found on this server.
If you want to make video available to a wide audience, it's useful to
(a) provide a link where the video file itself can be downloaded for
later viewing, and (b) consider providing the video as MPEG.]]
-- jt]]