Digital Technology

Fifteen years ago, nearly 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses began sharing their stories with a group that would come to be known as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The testimonies, averaging about two hours each, were documented on videotape, a format whose quality deteriorates over time.

In the past 100 years, technology has drastically changed most things in our lives. But one crucially important part of our political system has remained mired in the last century: the way we choose our president. America's current nominating system dates to 1910, when the first presidential primary was held in Oregon. At the time, this was a radical step, aimed at taking the nominating process away from political bosses. Now, a century later, we're overdue for another radical step.

Recalling a medieval scribe laboring to preserve humankind's rarest writings, Edith Young gently places each fraying page of a 400-year-old Chinese manuscript on a special cradle before she lowers a glass plate to flatten it for a digital snapshot. Young, a technician in Harvard University's digital imaging laboratory, will repeat the step close to 100 times to create a digital record of "Story of Red Plum Blossom," a Chinese drama written in the early 1600s that for the most part had been rarely seen except by a handful of museum curators and researchers.

The Internet and digital technology have made it far easier than ever before for musicians to create and distribute their tunes. Now, Music Mastermind is making it easier for non-musicians to do the same. On Monday the company made a "first look" version of  Zya , a music-recording tool that's built like a game, available to the public as a free download. Zya -- which the company  demonstrated  in prototype form at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2010 -- lets users blend their own sounds seamlessly with pre-recorded loops and clips from well-known works.

Technicolor, the Camarillo-based movie film company, is continuing to expand into digital technology by buying a significant interest in a digital projection company, Real Image Digital. Technicolor announced last week that it paid $23 million to acquire 49% of Real Image Digital, a Los Angeles company that specializes in digital projection technology.

Two Cal Lutheran University professors will give a lecture Monday on digital technology. The presentation by Michael Arndt and John Kundert-Gibbs, titled "Digital Technology: Taking the Arts to New Worlds," will demonstrate the effects of multimedia on the visual and performing arts. Also featured will be the connection between the arts and computer graphics, two-dimensional and 3-D animation, digital video, CD-ROM and Web-based technologies.

More than 30,000 are expected to turn out for the annual California Cable Television Assn. conference and exhibition scheduled Tuesday through Friday at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This year's focus will be on advances in high-speed Internet access and digital cable technology. In addition, more than 350 exhibitors are expected to look at issues ranging from marketing and advertising to programming and branding. For more information, visit http://www.cct-assn.org.

Robert H. Johnston, an archeologist and teacher who combined his interest in ancient texts with digital imaging technology to help uncover new information about the Dead Sea Scrolls and other rare documents, died Oct. 19 at his home in Rochester, N.Y. He was 77. Johnston died after a series of health problems, including several infections and a stroke, his wife, Louise, told The Times on Thursday.

The latest in digital video technology and demonstrations of its business and Internet applications will be presented at the Digital Video Conference & Exposition beginning today in Long Beach. On display at more than 60 exhibitor booths will be examples of current technology in broadcast video, Web video, 2-D and 3-D graphics and animation. Part of the conference will include a so-called Web video boot camp designed to teach participants how to create videos for the Internet.

Southern California technology companies have won a spate of U.S. Army orders in recent months for systems and devices that do everything from mapping battlefields to deflecting enemy fire. The contracts--each worth tens of millions of dollars--have gone to both little-known defense industry suppliers as well as TRW Inc. and other giants that once dominated the Southern California aerospace economy.

Something sounded familiar last week when I heard U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski make a huge pitch for infusing digital technology into America's classrooms. Every schoolchild should have a laptop, they said. Because in the near future, textbooks will be a thing of the past. Where had I heard that before? So I did a bit of research, and found it. The quote I recalled was, "Books will soon be obsolete in the schools.... Our school system will be completely changed in 10 years.

  The Supreme Court confronted for the first time the government's growing use of digital technology to monitor Americans and ruled strongly in favor of privacy. The court said the Constitution generally barred the police from tracking an individual with a GPS device attached to a car unless they were issued a warrant from a judge in advance. But the ruling could limit a host of devices including surveillance cameras and cellphone tracking, legal experts said. "I would guess every U.S. attorney's office in the country will be having a meeting to sort out what this means for their ongoing investigations," said Lior Strahilevitz, a University of Chicago expert on privacy and technology.

Every revolution has elements of tragedy as well as triumphs — even the bloodless revolutions in the way people earn a living. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called it "creative destruction," the entrepreneurial-driven process that "incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. " Such a process was set in motion by digital technology, which released information from...

Capturing the special moments in photos is a holiday tradition. But will those pictures be around to treasure in decades to come? In today's digital world, photos pile up chaotically on hard drives, often with no backup. Here are some options for saving copies of your pictures for future generations. • External hard drive: These sell for $70 to $200 and typically connect to your computer's USB drive. They're a reliable way of backing up large numbers of photos and other data.

Like the passing of distinguished individuals, the passing of great corporations should prompt us to ponder the transience of earthly glory. So let's pay our respects to Eastman Kodak, which at this writing appears to be a shutter-click from extinction. Once ranked among the bluest of blue chips, Kodak shares sell today at close to $1. Kodak's chairman has been denying that the company is contemplating a bankruptcy filing with such vehemence that many believe Chapter 11 must lurk just around the corner.

Pushy waiters and know-it-all sommeliers, step aside. Your days may be numbered. Tablet computers are starting to take over. In the last few months, restaurants scattered around the country have installed iPads and other technologies on which customers can place orders and perform additional tasks usually handled by staff. At Stacked in Torrance, which opened in May, iPads mounted on 60 tables enable patrons to flip through a touch screen to view pizza, burger and salad offerings.

Something sounded familiar last week when I heard U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski make a huge pitch for infusing digital technology into America's classrooms. Every schoolchild should have a laptop, they said. Because in the near future, textbooks will be a thing of the past. Where had I heard that before? So I did a bit of research, and found it. The quote I recalled was, "Books will soon be obsolete in the schools.... Our school system will be completely changed in 10 years.

Rockwell International Corp., which is probably best known for its aerospace and automotive products, said Monday that it is getting into the cellular telephone business. The company said it plans to start manufacturing the integrated circuit components and other innards of a new generation of cellular telephones that use digital technology.

Steve Jobs announced this week that he won't be resuming his duties as Apple's chief executive, ending a remarkable run that transformed Apple from an also-ran computer maker into one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the United States. He'll remain chairman of Apple's board, so it's too early to declare the Jobs era over. Yet it's a good time to reflect on Jobs' seemingly magic touch. It's not Apple's ability to invent technologies as much as Jobs' uncanny sense of how to design and package them into products and services that consumers didn't realize they needed.

With digital technology rapidly transforming home entertainment, Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes is preparing aggressive moves to speed up the delivery of movies directly to the home, as well as to challenge fast-growing rental services Netflix and Redbox. In a conference call with analysts Wednesday to discuss the media company's financial results, Bewkes talked at length about "digital transition in film," which he said was "arguably the area of our business going through the most change right now. " The CEO reiterated previous statements that, beginning in the second quarter, Time Warner's Warner Bros.