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February Last revision Mar 18, 2023

Next Meeting: We will meet on KSU campus at Dole Hall in Manhattan, hosted by Robert Nelson. The meeting will be on Tuesday March 21 at 7:00 PM. John Langer will demo a brief overview of ATSC 3.0 transition, the roll out currently going on, and what will be needed to view on a ATSC 1.0 television. He hopes to demo the Silicon Dust "HomeRun" Flex 4K tuner and how it can be used with existing equipment. Several of us will be eating at Pizza Ranch before the meeting if you care to join us about 6:00 PM.

Last Meeting: Tuesday February 21 we met at 7:00 PM in a Zoom session. Dick Abraham, Robert Nelson, John Langer, Jacob Cummins, Duane Loyd, along with Charles Westphal of Crestron were in attendance and established a quorum for the meeting. Chairman Dick Abraham called the meeting to order at 7:01 PM and asked for reports from committees. Robert Nelson, Treasurer reported there had been no change in the balance other than a few cents interest added since last month. He also reported there had been no activity with requests for frequency coordination in Kansas. Program Chair John Langer said for March, he could demo an ATSC-3 adapter if Robert Nelson could host at KSU. Robert says he could host on the third Tuesday in March (21), but was busy on the second Tuesday. There will be no meeting in April in deference to NAB, but on the third week of May, we will be in Wichita with Josh Skaar who will have a media show called the Next Best Thing, featuring various vendors of audio and other control gidgits to show along with gear from his company. With no other old business we moved on to new business. Robert mentioned Jacob Cummings was wanting to get some certification. Robert moved the chapter purchase the SBE CBT training disc, and pay for one SBE Exam fee for Jacob. John Langer seconded the move and the motion passed on unanimous vote of members present. Jacob is now employed with Cumulus in Kansas City. There being no other business at hand, the business meeting stood adjourned at 7:13 on motion of John Langer and vote of the members. Charles Westphal is National manager of government and educational facility accounts for Crestron. Crestron has developed software for frame computers to network large numbers of conference rooms together with low latency.

They have engaged with Dell using their Octoplex set up for reliability, and have specialized in accommodating many third party operating systems together to accomplish the networking needed to bring all this together. Crestron supplies three licenses ($500 lifetime for extras) with each frame unit purchased. Each frame will handle up to twenty rooms, and you can connect additional frames together to add up to 500 rooms to your network. The Dell with Crestron VC-4- PC3 frame software loaded is priced at about $3K, Crestron training is included with webinars and streaming subjects available to anyone with an account with them at no charge. Of course, they want you to succeed with their gear. Their training is found under CTI Portal (Crestron Tech Institute) on their website. When you click on an operating system you use in the initial setup, Crestron already has the drivers loaded to add to the configuration you are putting together. Most this is accomplished with drag and drop on screen operations. They attempt to keep it simple. You have no software stored at your site. It is all downloaded from them for each session, which allows them to control updates. They are compatible with several calendars (Google, etc.) in their meeting scheduling setup. It is the aim of Crestron to be compatible with as many different operating systems as possible, and they work hard at doing just that. In some cases, they have to accomplish that goal with dongles that are easily plugged into the system, but most of the time the ability to connect is already incorporated into their software. They also have lesser cost gear for people who do not need all of the features available on the big frame unit, but still using the concept of Audio/Video over IP. A bit about Crestron. They began in the
70's working with automation products for home and business. Today, they have expanded to include more than 90 fully staffed offices that provide 24/7/365 sales, technical, and training support across the globe. In addition to its world headquarters in Rockleigh, New Jersey. They moved from automation and control to communication applications between and within larger groups, including universities, governmental and businesses, adapting and including new media forms as they went. We appreciate Crestron and especially Charles Westphal taking time this evening to tell us of his company's products. It's good to see a company trying to be inclusive of products you may have in service, rather than being so tightly proprietary. As fast as things change today those who follow the latter ideology are soon left in the dust of progress. Thank you Charles.

Crestron incorporates media devices within a room, then adds in other rooms, to allow maximum communication between all parties involved.

Have you heard of the ChatGPT-3 A.I. software that will write an essay of your choice? It sure brings up some ethical problems in
several areas. Of course, the first to come up is that of did you write the essay or did an A.I. program - this in the case you are a student and were assigned an essay in your class. But there is another more troubling situation. A person asked ChatGPT to write a 200 word essay using a presumption 1.) a case of Trump winning the last election over Biden; then, 2.) a case of Hilary Clinton winning an election over Trump in the election before the last one. The results were performed in the first case, but it did not want to write on the situation presented in case two. When pressed, it did write the second one, but the results were skewed considerably between the two situations, and smelled very much of the WOKE ideology being put forth today. This problem is of enough concern that even 60 minutes interviewed someone from Micro- Soft on this matter. They told that one of the problems is that the inputs to Chat-GPT come from books, Wikipedia, and even social media. Although there are some filters, there are no guarantees that misinformation will not get through and be accepted as truth. What a tool for some entity wanting to spread propaganda. Another problem is that the program can take off on its own. This is termed as "hallucinating", and even the programmers do not understand how this process happens. Even the Microsoft person being interviewed thought oversight regulation might be a good thing for this problem. Who sets the rules for A.I. ? How are we to know if a slant or bias is built into A.I. software? Should A.I. developers be responsible to certify their software is politically neutral, or that it promotes one ideology over another? It is indeed perplexing, and no, I don't have an answer to the problem. But you say, "I don't need to write essays. Why should I be concerned about A.I. ?" Oh, my friend, you encounter A.I. everyday.

Did you ever stew on the telephone trying to work through an unending menu of choices before you get to a "real person"? That's A.I. I watch with amazement as our sweeper robot stumbles through or around an object left in its road, or try checking in for a doctor's appointment. How about speech recognition for captioning? That's A.I. And more is coming - unmanned vehicles are likely the most complex we might encounter, but there are driverless freight trucks being tested on the roads in Arizona today! Whom do you sue if one of those trucks runs you over? All this is Artificial Intelligence development is being done in the name of reducing labor, and while there may not be ethical issues with many of the situations posed above perhaps that should be a consideration going forward or at the very least, should you find yourself involved with A.I., maybe it should be tested so all persons using it are aware of any biases or irregularities in its operation under conditions it might be used within your company. That is a look at the downside of A.I., Now let's look at the positive side. There is an interesting book out now that may shed light on where A.I. is going. It is called: "Next, A Brief History of the Future", by Avi Jorisch, and predicts that A.I. will be a very large part of the future. Avi says that much of the future is already here, it just isn't properly distributed. By the end of 2030, the world will look much different than it does now. Many cancers will be solved; there will be an end to Alzheimer's. Computers will be able to process faster than the human brain! He says in regard to A.I. That thinking machines such as GPT Chat, are coming whether we like it or not. These will solve many of the challenges of today although they will bring other challenges as well.

A.I. can help us solve the challenges such as food and water distribution around the world. One of the main fears of many, is that A.I. can have intent, or develop a mind of its own. But Avi says while this may be a challenge in the future, he doesn't see that as a problem right now, Water problems will be solved - not only that of rising sea levels, but inadequate supply. Avi also spoke on the subject of Crisper (gene splicing). He describes Crisper as genetic engineering on steroids. Being bald himself he says Crisper may allow him to once again have hair on his head. Crisper will have advanced by 2035 to the point of being able to print new organs and limbs to replace diseased or damaged ones. Avi was asked, "are we opening Pandora's box?" He replied, "We are opening Pandora's box." The main question is whether we will allow technology to be used for betterment of the world or for bad purposes. Technology in itself is value neutral; it is how we decide to use it that makes the difference. We have four thousand years of recorded history, but it is predicted by some scientists that between now and the end of this century there will be what we now know as 20,000 years of change! The world as we know it will be fundamentally different by the end of this decade, and totally unrecognizable by the end of the century! It is possible the world will have a middle class the likes of which the world has never seen. We could even have an end to much of government corruption, because government could be totally in the cloud - which makes it accessible and transparent to all. This book may have as much effect as Alan Toffler's "Future Shock" did when it came out in dealing with the accelerating rate of change. That might be a good book to re-read. In the mean time, hang on to your hat! 30.

Functional Diagram showing integration of various media to the network

Attending February 21:
Top, L-R: Charles Westphal, Robert Nelson, Dick Abraham; Bottom: Jacob Cummings, Duane Loyd, John Langer.
Our thanks to those who took time to participate.

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