jason

There should be songs for all math and science education.

The Citizen: Chinese cop helps quake effort by breastfeeding

CHENGDU, China - A Chinese policewoman is contributing to the country’s massive earthquake relief effort in a very personal way — by breastfeeding eight babies.
A newspaper in Chengdu, the capital of quake-hit Sichuan province, devoted a special page to the 29-year-old woman, calling her a “hero.”
The woman from the quake-ravaged town of Jiangyou has just had a child herself, the Western Urban Daily said.
She is nursing the children of three women who were left homeless by the quake and are too traumatised to give milk, as well as five orphans, the report said.
The babies who lost their parents have been put in an orphanage which does not have powdered milk, it said.
An estimated 50,000 people were killed in the May 12 earthquake, China’s worst natural disaster in a generation.

While looking around for old photographs, I found this Panda Movie that yuka and I shot in 2001… not real pandas. But cute.

U.S. dollar bills discriminate against the blind, court rules

The United States might have to redesign its money after a Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the traditional green dollar bills discriminate against the blind and visually impaired.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the 2006 lower-court ruling that using the same colour and shape on all bills makes it too difficult for people with poor vision to distinguish between values.

The latest ruling means U.S. Treasury Department may have to make bills different sizes, and include raised markings and oversized numbers on each bill. The department has not yet said if it will fight the court decision, or change its money.

The U.S. government has acknowledged that its current designs hinder the visually impaired, but argued that those with disabilities have already adapted by relying on store clerks for help, using credit cards and-or folding the corners of their bills to differentiate between them.

Canada among countries with vision-friendly bills

The three Appeals Court judges, ruling 2-1 against the government, panned this argument.

The court said using the government’s logic, people could argue there’s no need to build wheelchair ramps because people without use of their legs can crawl or ask for help from strangers.

In 2001, Canada started adding a tactile feature to its bills, placing raised dots and symbols to distinguish between denominations. The decisions were made in consultation with blind and visually impaired Canadians.

The bills also contain large, bold numbers. Bills of different values are printed in different colours.

Police snap children during stop and search

Scotland Yard has admitted its officers have been photographing children who are stopped and searched even after they have been found to be innocent.
Police in Lambeth, south London, claim the tactic helps fight street crime and insist the pictures are kept on a database only for intelligence-gathering purposes. But the civil rights group Liberty has condemned the measure, and a leading community group working with the police has described the tactic as “sinister”.
On Wednesday, police announced the temporary suspension of the tactic after meeting with the community police consultative group for Lambeth.
Last week, Sandra Moodie told how her son Jordan had been stopped and searched by plainclothes officers on his way home from school. They found he was carrying only school books, but took his picture.
Critics claim it marks the return of a new form of the “sus” law. James Welch, the legal director of Liberty, said: “The police don’t have carte blanche to do anything that they think will help prevent crime; they have obligations under the Human Rights Act and the Data Protection Act.”
In a statement, the police said: “The [Met] has, since 1998, employed the tactic of overtly photographing or filming persons in the street as a way of preventing offences, gathering evidence and intelligence and identifying offenders.”

I really thought there was a law against this sort of ‘abuse’ of children’s rights. Well, there is, but for some reason people don’t bother calling the government and seem to think that the lack of autonomy for children is a good thing. Strangely enough, there’s little research done on this… though there are suggestions that the lack of autonomous experiences for children is the cause of disaffection and a sense of disenfranchisement in children. Something I want to explore more.

Found this on slashdot:

Most Business-Launched Virtual Worlds Fail, Gartner Says — Virtual Worlds — InformationWeek

The vast majority of virtual world projects launched by businesses fail within 18 months, but the impact of the collaboration technology on organizations could eventually be as big as the Internet, a market research firm said this week.
Fully 90% of business forays into virtual worlds fail because organizations focus on the technology rather than on understanding the needs of the employees using it, Gartner said.

“Businesses have learned some hard lessons,” Gartner analyst Steve Prentice said in a statement released Thursday. “They need to realize that virtual worlds mark the transition from Web pages to Web places and a successful virtual presence starts with people, not physics. Realistic graphics and physical behavior count for little unless the presence is valued by and engaging to a large audience.”
Other reasons for the high failure rate include starting projects for the “cool” factor or because competitors are doing it, Gartner said. Many projects are abandoned because of a lack of clear objectives and a limited understanding of the demographics, attitudes, and expectations of virtual-world communities.

A benefit of virtual worlds is the rich collaboration experience, which includes a real-time visual dimension through the use of avatars and the ability to include emotional information in the online conversations between individuals, Gartner said. These attributes separate virtual worlds from other forms of Web-based interactions.

Virtual worlds as a collaboration tool are also attractive because of the relatively low price. Companies can implement a virtual world platform for about $50,000, and trials can start as low as $5,000, Gartner said. The low cost makes virtual worlds viable as an additional form of communication to reduce the use of expensive videoconferencing facilities and the need to bring employees from multiple locations and time zones to a single site.

“Companies need to start thinking what their virtual world strategy is, incorporate it into their Internet strategy, and merge their two-dimensional Web pages to support a 3-D Web place,” Prentice said. “Virtual world presence is not to replace the 2-D world but to supplement it.”

In selecting a virtual-world route, organizations have three choices: They can enter an existing one, such as Second Life or There.com; create their own public world; or build an internal, private world. By 2012, Gartner estimates that 70% of organizations will have established their own private virtual worlds. By then, the success rate will be far greater because of lower expectations, clearer objectives, and better constraints.

And I say… DUH! Reminds me that people need to go back and at least read Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure? By Jan Fernback & Brad Thompson from 1995, on Howard’s site.

Slashdot | Black Holes Don’t Trap Information Forever

“New calculations suggest that black holes are not a one-way street. Anything that falls into them may eventually come out. The findings lend important support to quantum gravity, but fly in the face of Einsteinian relativity. They also support Stephen Hawking’s reluctant admission that information couldn’t be destroyed by black holes. Penn State researcher Ahbay Ashtekar was quoted saying, ‘Once we realized that the notion of space-time as a continuum is only an approximation of reality, it became clear to us that singularities are merely artifacts of our insistence that space-time should be described as a continuum.’ Let the physics infighting begin.”

All I can say is, “WOW”.

The Harrow: Original Works of Fantasy and Horror is back up!

It took a couple of days to realize that dreamhost.com had changed something, and either didn’t know or wouldn’t admit it. The OJS folks (thanks alec) really helped to fix things up.

Stolen Mac helps nab burglary suspects | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

A remote desktop access feature found in some Macintoshes is being credited with leading police to two suspects in the burglary of an apartment in New York.

While police in White Plains, N.Y., were coming up empty with their investigation, Duplaga learned that her computer was being used on the Internet and turned on the Back to My Mac feature installed on her Mac from another Mac, according to the report.

The feature allowed Duplaga to see immediately how the computer was being used at the time, as well as operate it remotely. Recalling that she had a camera installed on the computer, the fast-thinking Duplaga snapped images of one of the burglary suspects before he realized what was happening, according to the Times. Duplaga showed the image to friends who recognized the suspect as someone who attended a party at the apartment.

Now, if that’s not going to help boost the idea of security.