Overview of the Guide to the SDMI Portable Device Specification Part1, Version 1.0

The secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is a working group that develop specifications to secure the distribution of music in digital form worldwide. They associated with worldwide recording, consumer electronics and information technology industries to provide effective way to enable consumers access music, artist and recordings conveniently while protecting intellectual property.

The growing popularity and use of the MP3 format to distribute music digitally, threatened copyright holders and artists, since the MP3 compression technology incorporate no security or authentication features with the files, thus, downloading of digital music has become  easily widespread. The Portable Device Specification guide released by SDMI was opted to be the industry’s answer to the widely popular MP3 digital music file format.

The Guide to the SDMI Portable Device Specification Part1, Version 1.0 provides an overview of the contents and benefits of SDMI agreed upon by SDMI member companies. The guide contains set of voluntary principles intended to provide a positive consumer experience while facilitating secure environment for distribution of digital music and its related contents that protects the rights of the artists.

Specification for portable devices is the first achievement of SDMI. The guide discussed the two phases of SDMI’s implementation of its digital rights architecture. The phase 1 includes the implementation of secure digital watermarking scheme and tracking system.  Through this, music is tagged with secure watermark (that is hard to remove from the source audio) without damaging it. SDMI’s Portable music players then incorporate these technologies to support both secured and unsecured formats. The phase 2 will ensure that the SDMI complaint players would not play not authorized SDMI tagged music for that device.  This means that even if the files were tagged, the device would not play it if it is not authorized to be played on it. The screening technology of SDMI will do this job. It will detect a signal that indicates a software upgrade for the portable device is necessary to play Phase 2 encoded music.  The purpose of this screening technology is to provide a mechanism to detect illegitimately distributed music. Upgrading to phase 2 technology is voluntary, but only those upgraded applications can import, play, or transfer releases coded with the Phase 2 specifications.  Moreover, contents that are distributed using phase 2 technology will not be played or imported if they are illegitimately or illegally distributed.

There are debates related to this technology, but the SDMI is continuing to work to achieve broader range of digital music applications (beyond portable devices).

You can download the guide here 
More Information here.

Helvetica: the universal font

 

            Most of the people don’t pay much attention or just not that aware on small things that actually bring or give impact to the society or to the environment we live in. To tell you the truth, I do consider myself one of them. To support that decree, just recently on our multimedia class, our facilitator advised us to watch a documentary film titled “Helvetica”, a typeface. What I thought that time was that the film would be another Steve Jobs kind of drama that would only showcase the evolution of a font and the success of its developer. And that thought didn’t give me any interest to watch it. And also considering the fact that the film was called a documentary, which registered on my vocabulary as synonymous with the term “boring”, was not that exciting to hear. However, I’m ashamed to realize that I made a wrong judgment on the film particularly on its subject.

            Helvetica, as what I mentioned earlier is a kind of font that made the world more appealing than it was before. Well, for those people like me who are not that keen observant, the Helvetica font face is just around announcing, leading, guiding, showing, directing us since the year of its birth. You will find Helvetica posing with the models on billboards, moving together with the cars, helping Nestle, Oral-B and any other products / companies to reach their peak. In short, Helvetica is the reason why effective commercialization existed.

            Isn’t it amazing to know this thing gained a reputation so great than the reputation a prominent person is keeping? And isn’t it interesting to realize that it is just a font? So how this font did achieved the status she is enjoying now? As what I learned on the documentary, Helvetica font is just a very simple font and a serious one. A font that never showed any emotions or expressions…a font that never designed to stand among the others and be famous…a font created for sole reason, to be straightforward. This is the reason why most of the companies all over the world prefer to use Helvetica font family on their logos and printout product advertisements. According to them, this font never outshines the product or the company it represents.

            I also read an article on the web wherein I found out that the known font “Arial” is an impostor of Helvetica. That means Helvetica created first before Arial. Since Helvetica is not downloadable for free, Arial set up its way to stardom. This is the reason why for youngsters on this generation (I’m raising my left hand!) are more familiar with Arial than Helvetica. For those who can’t afford to buy a license for Helvetica, they use Arial as an alternative. Well, the differences of Arial from Helvetica aren’t noticeable. Just like what I did on this article! I used both Arial and Helvetica... did you notice?

            Helvetica, to sum up all, is a universal font. Universal not because most of the people use it, universal because you can see and encounter it everyday and everywhere. Helvetica proved that simplicity is truly beauty. Well, after viewing the film, now I can say that typography isn’t boring at all.

PHILNITS

 

ABOUT PhilNITS:

The Philippine National I.T. Standards (PhilNITS) Foundation, Inc. formerly known as the Japanese I.T. Standards Exams of the Philippines (JITSE-Phil) Foundation, Inc., is a non-stock, non-profit, non-government organization that is implementing an I.T Certification Program from I.T. standards adopted from Japan, with the support of the Department of Trade & industry (DTI) of the Philippines and the Ministry of Economy, Trade & Industry (METI) of Japan. JITSE-Phil Foundation was registered with the Securities & Exchange Commission on April 10,2002 and set up its first office at the Penthouse of the Prince Bldg, in Rada Street, Legazpi Village Makati city.

PhilNITS Vision:

To make the Philippines an Industry Leader in IT and IT-enabled services

Mission

To attain excellence in Information Technology through the development of Certified I.T. Professionals adhering to recognized world standards

To develop our country’s human resource to sustain the I.T. industry

To accelerate economic development through the massive deployment here and abroad of our highly trained knowledge workers

Objectives

To establish an internationally recognized and accepted standard with which to measure the competency level of IT Engineers/Professionals in the country and have it adopted and implemented nationwide by Industry, Government and Academe in their selection process

To develop a workforce of Certified IT Professionals that are qualified and eligible for work not only in Japanese companies here and abroad but also in multinational companies anywhere in the world.
To help in establishing a strong middle class of qualified Filipino IT Professionals in the Academe, the Industry and Government, with good and moral work ethics, who will bring the country out of the quagmire of poverty.

To establish world leadership in I. T.

Expert judgement tools

What is expert judgement?

   On the PMBOK Guide 4th Edition, this term was mentioned several times, showing a proof that Expert Judgment has a vast importance on overall processes in project management. Example is in the process of Project Integration, expert judgment is often used to access the inputs needed to develop the project charter. Such judgment and expertise is applied into any technical and management details during this process. Therefore, expert judgment helps identify all the work including project management deliverables and those other deliverables required.
     Since in this post we are to identify the best tool use in expert judgment, let me first give you the definition of the term “expert judgment”. There’s a lot of definition on the internet, it’s up to you what you will consider first, but the thought is all the same with mine. Expert judgment is an expression on one’s or group’s opinions for finding solutions and their response are either based on their experience or knowledge or both. Anyone who has worked on a large company appreciates its importance on making good decisions. Project managers must not hesitate to ask or consult experts on different topics such as what methodology to follow or programming language to use and so on.

Expert Judgment is use for

four situations which require recourse to expert judgment by [Lannoy & Procaccia, 2001]:
- completing, validating, interpreting and integrating existing data; assessing the impact of a change,
- predicting the occurrence of future events and the consequences of a decision,
- determining the present state of knowledge in one field,
- providing the elements needed for decision-making in the presence of several options.
The uncertainty of data in Expert Judgment
Expert judgment depends on experts (knowledge, experience, motivation,…), the state of knowledge on the topic and the dialogue between experts and analyst. So, according to Cooke, the most important tool in using expert judgment is the representation of uncertainty [Cooke, 1991].

Actors in expert judgement methods

The are two kinds of actors in an expert judgement method:
- the experts, Ballay defines the expert as being the "person who has the knowledge" [Ballay, 1997],
- and the analyst who carry on the expert judgement exercise.
Advantages and disadvantages of using Expert Judgment
Expert judgment uses the experience and knowledge of experts to estimate the cost of a software project. An advantage of this method is the experience from past projects that the expert brings to the proposed project. The expert also can factor in project impacts caused by new technologies, applications, and languages. Examples of popular expert judgment techniques include the Delphi and Wideband Delphi methods. Expert judgment techniques are suitable for assessing the differences between past and future programs; and are especially useful for new or unique programs for which no historical precedent exists. However, the expert's biases and sometimes insufficient knowledge may create difficulties. It can be hard to document the factors used by the expert who contributes to the estimate. Although Delphi techniques can help alleviate bias problems, experts are usually hard-pressed to accurately estimate the cost of a new software program. Therefore, while expert judgment models are useful in determining inputs to other types of models, they are not frequently used alone in software cost estimating.

Expert Judgment Tools

The first two methods using expert judgement were developed by the RAND Corporation in the United-States after Word War II [Cooke, 1991] they are Scenario Analysis and the Delphi method.

Scenario Analysis

Herman Kahn is regarded as the father of scenario analysis [Cooke, 1991]. In The Year 2000 [Kahn & Wiener, 1967], Kahn defines scenarios as hypothetical sequences of events constructed for the purpose of focusing attention on causal processes and decision-points. They answer two kinds of questions:
- Precisely how might some hypothetical situation come about, step by step ?
- What alternatives exists, for each actor, and each step, for preventing diverting, or facilitating the process. 
          The method as applied in projecting the year 2000 works basically as follows. The analyst first identifies what he takes to be the set of basic long-terms trends. These trends are then extrapolated into the future, taking account of any theoretical or empirical knowledge that might impinge on such extrapolations. The result is termed the surprise-free scenario. The surprise-free scenario serves as a foil for defending alternative futures or canonical variations. Roughly speaking, these are generated by varying key parameters in the surprise-free scenario.
          Scenario analysis can also be used to illuminate "wild cards." For example, analysis of the possibility of the earth being struck by a large celestial object (a meteor) suggests that whilst the probability is low, the damage inflicted is so high that the event is much more important (threatening) than the low probability (in any one year) alone would suggest. However, this possibility is usually disregarded by organizations using scenario analysis to develop a strategic plan since it has such overarching repercussions.
Scenario planning is a useful way of challenging the assumptions you naturally tend to make about the situation in which your plans will come to fruition. By building a few alternative scenarios, you can foresee more unknowns that may come to pass, and therefore you will be able to plan measures to counteract or mitigate their impact.
The Delphi method
             The Delphi method was developed at the RAND corporation in the early 1950s as a spin-off of an Air Force-sponsored research project, “Project Delphi”. The original project was designed to anticipate an optimal targeting of U.S. industries by a hypothetical Soviet strategic planner. In the middle 1960s and early 1970s the Delphi method found a wide variety of applications, and by 1974 the number of Delphi studies has exceeded 10,000 [Linstone & Turoff, 1975].
            The Delphi method has undergone substantial evolution and diversification. The method was developed by mathematicians and engineers, and enjoyed considerable popularity among research managers, policy analysts, and corporate planners in the late 1960s early 1970s. By the middle of 1970s psychometricians, people trained in conducting controlled experiments with humans, began taking serious look at the Delphi methods and results. According to Cooke [Cooke, 1991], the most significant study in this regard is Sackman’s Delphi Critique (1975). As a result the whole question of evaluating expert opinion and developing methodological guidelines for its use has moved into the foreground. The Delphi exercises seem to have disappeared, and play almost no role in contemporary discussions of expert opinion.
The basic idea of the Delphi method is as follows:
• create a list of statements/questions
• have the experts give their ratings/answers/etc.
• make a report - send it out to everyone
• have the experts revise their answers
• make the second report
These make Delphi method as the best tool in securing Expert Judgment.

References:
State of the art on expert judgement.pdf
http://fast.faa.gov/pricing/c1919-5.htm#19.5.4
http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/docgener/evaluation/evalsed/sourcebooks/method_techniques/collecting_information/delphi_survey/index_en.htm