Author: tgposzadmin

Those who have ears – ABC Radio National

Excellent program on auditory processing for educators.

So much about science and nature (including the nature of us) is misunderstood. This was a refreshing program outlining work being done in this area.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2007/1913317.htm

Brisbane educator Jennifer Riggs discusses children who have serious problems with auditory processing. Studies have shown that a third of us are strongly visual-spatial learners and many children cannot learn through being talked at, but will learn better by seeing and doing. The fundamentals of learning are the five senses, but how many of them do we use in teaching?

Download audio

New Horizons program on Discovery

jupiter_zoomLast weekend I saw a program on the New Horizons Spacecraft on the Discovery Channel, and while this was a great program and very informative, I was disappointed about one fact that continued to be misrepresented. I cannot find a link to the show itself on the Discovery Channel website, because I’d like to view the whole program again.

I found the artwork of the spacecraft itself by Mike Derer.

I wrote about the subject matter I was disappointed in back in September, 2006 (here and here) when the whole Pluto is a planet or not stuff was going on. Journalism has a duty to inform the public, but when poor diagrams are utilized, the facts are misinterpreted.

New Horizons lifted off on 1/19/2006 and after a little more than a year, just had a Jupiter flyby in order to gain a speed boost, but trading the increase in speed for a little loss of Jupiter’s rotational momentum. It’s speed after launch was 16.21 km/s (36,260 mph) making it the fastest spacecraft so far, but as it approached Jupiter at 23 km/s (51,449 mph) relative to the sun. After the Jupiter flyby, on 2/28/2007, the gravity assist increased the spacecraft’s speed by nearly 4 km/s (8,947 mph).

Even with the increase in speed, New Horizons will not get to the Pluto flyby until 7/14/2015, a little more than 8 years from now. The program mentioned this, but only stating these facts in passing, sort of letting the viewer figure it out. In fact, the pictures they showed were very similar to the inaccurate ones you used to see in text books, or similar to the planet models your kids make in school.

  • one year to get to Jupiter
  • 8 more years to get to Pluto
  • without the gravity assist from Jupiter, it would have been 10-12 years to get to Pluto

Gee, it must be pretty big distances involved out there…

Well, as a matter of fact, yes they are very big distances… So here was an opportunity to inform the public, be a little more descriptive with the facts, but they didn’t quite put the facts out there in the right manner.

Vonage hanging on?

On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in KSR vs. Teleflex, finding that the “combination of two commonly known elements into something obvious” is not patentable. While on it’s surface this is a good thing, eliminating lots of expense in litigating bogus patents or patents that do not really enhance, as might be expected the next piece of news was:

From FierceVOIP: Vonage has seized on the ruling, asking an appellate court to throw out the verdict against it and order a new trial. Verizon, of course, is opposed. Vonage is already appealing its loss at trial; the appellate court has set a June 25 hearing on that appeal. Vonage wants the appeal to be put on hold pending the results of the new trial. If it loses that second trial, Vonage wants the existing appeals process to resume. Even though Vonage was convicted of infringing three patents, the courts are letting the company operate pretty much as normal while the appeals are being heard.

I need a playbook.

Let’s see,

  • I’ve lost,
  • I’m appealing, but
  • I want my appeal on hold and I want a new trial,
  • but if I lose at that trial, I want my appeal to start again

Public Service Msg for the Deaf

At this link is a PR regarding AOL and Sprint supporting Deaf people by extending the Sprint IP Relay to AIM users. I’ve noticed this in the past, since I was working some deaf related issues having to do with supporting TTY in voice mail, but this appears to be another public notice about the availability of this service.

I salute the efforts of both companies to get the word out about this service. I hope each and every deaf person with a computer uses it. Since there are IM clients for mobile phones as well, this just further extends the capabilities…

… Oh, I use Yahoo, I am deaf, I don’t want to use AIM ???? For those people, don’t forget that there are number of IM programs that support multiple IM services. Check out GAIM (small footprint version at here) and Trillian (here). It’s easy to sign up for the extra account on AIM and you won’t miss out on much at Yahoo or MSN, either.

Sprint has more than 15 years of experience in providing relay services to persons who are deaf, hard of hearing or deaf-blind, or who have a speech disability to communicate with hearing persons on the phone. Sprint offers relay services through an intelligent platform in 32 states, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, New Zealand and to the federal government.

SPAM

I know you all get your share of spam, but I had an observation for one piece I got today.

Subject: approach on parachute
Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2007 22:38:43 -0800

Our loan officers is seriously happy to obtain your house refinancing requisition affirmation that we accepted nearly 4 days ago

Were pushing through your finance query
Please if you would this minute you need to finish up your last details at our form

“approach on parachute”????
“Our loan officers is seriously”

Seriously, even if they had received a req from me “nearly 4 days ago” (is that, like, 3.9 days ago? or 3.8 days ago?) because of the bad English, I certainly wouldn’t respond to this. I guess they get what they pay for, the bottom of the Internet barrel responding to this junk. It’s too bad that there are so many illiterate people that all have computers and driver’s licences now…

BTW, this idiot didn’t even bother to include a form or link to click, completely wasted spam, no way to harvest anyone.

I mean, they are not even trying anymore, it’s like, jeez, copy the dictionary, man, at least that would be more interesting…

Spyware

A decent radio broadcast, available via podcast or direct download, is available in this link. Look slightly to the right of the text in the middle column, you’ll see to links, one for Real Audio, the other for Windows media player. Most people reading this will probably have the Microsoft media player due to it being preinstalled on their PCs. You can download and listen in one click, and keep on working on your computer while it’s playing.

Kojo’s show, as do a number of NPR radio stations now, is available as a podcast as well. Just look for the orange POD button, and paste the link there into your podcatcher software.

Kojo does a decent job of hosting a weekly technical show, this week Spyware was the discussion topic, and it includes decent advise and I really “feel” for the call-ins, who are having trouble because of Spyware.

From Kojo’s website:

Spyware and viruses cost Americans nearly $8 billion in the last two years, and experts say online attacks are getting more insidious and harder to fix. We’ll look at the evolving nature of spyware and assess federal efforts to prosecute online wrongdoers.

Intel: Advancing Multi-Core Technology into the Tera-scale Era

From Intel:

ASCI Red was the first computer to benchmark at a teraflops (1996). That system used nearly 10,000 Pentium® Pro processors running at 200MHz and consumed 500kW of power plus an additional 500kW just to cool the room that housed it. Although not a general purpose computing device, this Teraflops Research Chip delivers 1.0 teraflops of performance and 1.6 terabits aggregate core to core communication bandwidth, while dissipating only 62W.

Wow! – from 1 teraflop requiring a 1,000,000 watts to 1 teraflop requiring 62 watts. Pretty soon, there will be a computer for a $1,000 with AI software that will probably be smarter than most everyone…

It was only 5-6 months ago that quad core were being announced.

Ex-Official at Monster.com Admits to Backdating Options

I try to write about Technology here in this blog, but I noticed this today and had to speak out. I guess everyone needs to speak out.This behaviour is unacceptable. I’m glad Mr. Myron F. Olesnyckyj is facing some stiff penalties and perhaps some jail time. It’s about time these people were shown the door AND punished.

It’s hard enough to do good things in a company, even harder in the bigger ones. When the executives are cooking the books, it makes the engineer and the rest of people on the front lines want to just give up.

Good companies, they need to set the example. Instead, we have so many examples of bad behavior. I mean, “What were you thinking? That you could get away with it and it wouldn’t hurt anyone?”