Past Preservers teams up with Crimson Bamboo to develop historical tours for iPhone app

NEW YORK CITY and CAIRO—March 24, 2011-Past Preservers and Crimson Bamboo LLC announced today that they would be teaming up to develop tours for Rama, Crimson Bamboo’s flagship augmented reality app for iPhone.

Named by BBC Travel in 2010 as one of the ten best new travel apps, Rama is a mobile phone platform that takes users on historical walking tours which not only tell the story behind the stops on the tour, but also show archival images of how those locations once appeared. Past Preservers, a historical and archaeological consultancy that has previously provided support for programming for such major television networks as the History Channel and Al-Jazeera International, will tap into its considerable media connections and expertise to produce innovative new tours on locations around the world, which will be sold directly to users on Rama.

“We are very excited to work with Past Preservers on offering new tours for Rama,” Michael Carroll, co-founder of Crimson Bamboo, stated. “We founded our company with the mission of delivering top-quality content to users while also providing authors with new tools for telling—and showing—history’s greatest stories. Past Preservers has one of the largest networks of historical and new media experts in the world and we are sure that the tours we produce with them will continue to expand Rama’s reputation for providing users with the opportunity to understand and experience history like never before.”

Both companies also stressed that, in addition to providing a new form of immersive content for users, the collaboration would also focus on serving the authors of the tours.

“Past Preservers has always been dedicated, first and foremost, to helping academics and professionals to earn money doing the things that they are most passionate about,” said Past Preservers’ president, Nigel Hetherington. “Rama not only offers the perfect opportunity to reach new audiences using one of the most cutting-edge platforms available, but also offers our clients a new opportunity to write first-class historical content that they can sell directly to customers. This is a truly innovative publishing model that we are convinced will really serve our clients’ interests.”

Historical walking tours jointly produced by the two companies will be available for purchase within the Rama app, and are generally priced between $0.99 and $2.99. Rama can be downloaded on iTunes here.

Crimson Bamboo is a New York City-based Limited Liability Company founded in March 2010, with the mission of creating new convergences between people, data, and the world.

Past Preservers, founded by Nigel J. Hetherington in 2005, taps into its extensive network of archaeologists, historians, Egyptologists, engineers, geologists, and other specialists to provide historical and archaeological consultancy and professional support to the media industry. With offices in Cairo and London and representatives throughout the Middle East, North America, and Europe, Past Preservers has a strong hold in the international media scene, having completed assignments for the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, Al-Jazeera International, TLC, and Living Channel.

Edited From Past Preservers

"The President's Speech": An odd reaction to the President's Speech

You gotta love how language and culture collide especially when reading Oliver Sack's article, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat (And Other Clinical Tales). Yes, the title had be rolling for a bit since I'd never really read the story per se. I had certainly never heard about aphasia before this witty piece.

The basis of this amusing yet educational article was how and why aphasia patients started to laugh as one of the most prolific speakers in presidential history, Ronald Reagan, spoke to the American public on television.

Aphasia.org defines aphasia as an acquired communication disorder that impairs a person's ability to process language, but does not affect intelligence. Aphasia impairs the ability to speak and understand others, and most people with aphasia experience difficulty reading and writing.

The President's Speech: the reaction

There he was, The Old Charmer, the Actor, with his practiced rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal . A typical American would have reveled in the president’s keen words and delighted in the fact this president was able to inspire a nation.

On the other hand and in another realm, so to speak, the aphasia ward, filled with “crazies”, exploded with laughter. Why he or she may ask?

Albeit these eccentric individuals couldn’t see the meaning of words, they could understand prose and body language and they couldn't believe the fantastic lies they were being told live on by the President.

Aphasia patients can understand natural speech, as most men and women speak this way every day. Natural speech, the meaning, is somewhat detectable and understandable to patients. Mannerisms and simple utterances flow naturally, and to an aphasia patient, they are more normal. Contrived hand gestures and body movements seem robotic, as seen in the president’s speech.

Furthermore, the tone of the speech most definitely set the patients off, so much so, their laughter flooded the room. Henry Head mentions “he speaks of “feeling tones” in his treatise aphasia, and stresses how it is preserved, and often enhanced, in aphasiacs.”

What does this mean?
 
You cannot lie to aphasiacs. Body language and expression are much more powerful because words have no meaning. Therefore a slight smirk or wink will immediately set aphasiacs off, as a light bulb in your head goes off when you have an idea. It’s immediate sometimes and it acts on reactions, which are normally the right ones the first time you have them.

Therefore the aphasiacs are laughing at the falsified gestures and cadences and the abnormal tone of the speech.


Have you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks? Look at page 80 (Chapter 9). Once you have, tell me what you're interpretation was?

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