Category: Media

OpenSTEM in the Media

The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol | MinnPost

Twenty-five years ago, a small band of programmers from the University of Minnesota ruled the internet. And then they didn’t.

The committee meeting where the team first presented the Gopher protocol was a disaster, “literally the worst meeting I’ve ever seen,” says Alberti. “I still remember a woman in pumps jumping up and down and shouting, ‘You can’t do that!’ ”

Among the team’s offenses: Gopher didn’t use a mainframe computer and its server-client setup empowered anyone with a PC, not a central authority. While it did everything the U (University of Minnesota) required and then some, to the committee it felt like a middle finger. “You’re not supposed to have written this!” Alberti says of the group’s reaction. “This is some lark, never do this again!” The Gopher team was forbidden from further work on the protocol.

Read the full article (a good story of Gopher and WWW history!) at https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol

Australia moves fast: North-West actually

Australia on globeThis story is about the tectonic plate on which we reside.  Tectonic plates move, and so continents shift over time.  They generally go pretty slow though.

What about Australia?  It appears that every year, we move 11 centimetres West and 7 centimetres North.  For a tectonic plate, that’s very fast.

The last time scientists marked our location on the globe was in 1994, with the Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994 (GDA1994) – generally called GDA94 in geo-spatial tools (such as QGIS).  So that datum came into force 22 years ago.  Since then, we’ve moved an astonishing 1.5 metres!  You may not think much of this, but right now it actually means that if you use a GPS in Australia to get coordinates, and plot it onto a map that doesn’t correct for this, you’re currently going to be off by 1.5 metres.  Depending on what you’re measuring/marking, you’ll appreciate this can be very significant and cause problems.

Bear in mind that, within Australia, GDA94 is not wrong as such, as its coordinates are relative to points within Australia. However, the positioning of Australia in relation to the rest of the globe is now outdated.  Positioning technologies have also improved.  So there’s a new datum planned for Australia, GDA2020.  By the time it comes into force, we’ll have shifted by 1.8 metres relative to GDA94.

We can have some fun with all this:

  • If you stand and stretch both your arms out, the tips of your fingers are about 1.5 metres apart – of course this depends a bit on the length of your arms, but it’ll give you a rough idea.  Now imagine a pipe or cable in the ground at a particular GPS position,  move 1.5 metres.  You could clean miss that pipe or cable… oops!  Unless your GPS is configured to use a datum that gets updated, such as WGS84.  However, if you had the pipe or cable plotted on a map that’s in GDA94, it becomes messy again.
  • If you use a tool such as Google Earth, where is Australia actually?  That is, will a point be plotted accurately, or be 1.5 metres out, or somewhere in between?
    Well, that would depend on when the most recent broad scale photos were taken, and what corrections the Google Earth team possibly applies during processing of its data (for example, Google Earth uses a different datum – WGS 84 for its calculations).
    Interesting question, isn’t it…
  • Now for a little science/maths challenge.  The Northern most tip of Australia, Cape York, is just 150km South of Papua New Guinea (PNG).  Presuming our plate maintains its present course and speed, roughly how many years until the visible bits (above sea level) of Australia and PNG collide?  Post your answer with working/reasoning in a comment to this post!  Think about this carefully and do your research.  Good luck!

Conversations on Collected Health Data

wearable-health-deviceThere are more and more wearable devices that collect a variety of health data, and other health records are kept electronically. More often than not, the people whose data it is don’t actually have access. There are very important issues to consider, and you could use this for a conversation with your students, and in assignments.

On the individual level, questions such as

  • Who should own your health data?
  • Should you be able to get an overview of who has what kind of your data?  (without fuzzy vague language)
  • Should you be able to access your own data? (directly out of a device, or online service where a device sends its data)
  • Should you be able to request a company to completely remove data from their records?

For society, questions like

  • Should a company be allowed to hoard data, or should they be required to make it accessible (open data) for other researchers?

A comment piece in this week’s Nature entitled “Lift the blockade on health data” could be used as a starting point a conversation and for additional information:

http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/535345a

Technology titans, such as Google and Apple, are moving into health. For all the potential benefits, the incorporation of people’s health data into algorithmic ‘black boxes’ could harm science and exacerbate inequalities, warn John Wilbanks and Eric Topol in a Comment piece in this week’s Nature. “When it comes to control over our own data, health data must be where we draw the line,” they stress.

Cryptic digital profiling is already shaping society; for example, online adverts are tailored to people’s age, location, spending and browsing habits. Wilbanks and Topol envision a future in which “companies are able to trade people’s disease profiles, unbeknown to them” and where “health decisions are abstruse and difficult to challenge, and advances in understanding are used to aggressively market health-related services to people — regardless of whether those services actually benefit their health.”

The authors call for a campaigning movement similar to the environmental one to break open how people’s data are being used, and to illuminate how such information could be used in the future. In their view, “the creation of credible competitors that are open source is the most promising way to regulate” corporations that have come to “resemble small nations in their own right”.

 

Swiss Professor starts Cybathlon

The Cybathlon will challenge assistive device developers to create technologies that thrive in day-to-day activities.

The prosthetic arm from the M.A.S.S. Impact team. (Credit: ETH Zurich)
The prosthetic arm from the M.A.S.S. Impact team. (Credit: ETH Zurich)

While working as a professor in the sensory-motor systems lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), Robert Riener noticed a need for assistive devices that would better meet the challenge of helping people with daily life. He knew there were solutions, but that it would require motivating developers to rise to the challenge.

So, Riener created Cybathlon, the first cyborg Olympics where teams from all over the world will participate in races on Oct. 8 in Zurich that will test how well their devices perform routine tasks. Teams will compete in six different categories that will push their assistive devices to the limit on courses developed carefully over three years by physicians, developers and the people who use the technology. Eighty teams have signed up so far.

Riener wants the event to emphasize how important it is for man and machine to work together—so participants will be called pilots rather than athletes, reflecting the role of the assistive technology.

“The goal is to push the development in the direction of technology that is capable of performing day-to-day tasks. And that way, there will an improvement in the future life of the person using the device,” says Riener.

Read more at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/06/22/a-sneak-peek-at-the-first-cyborg-olympics/

and CYBATHLON: Championship for Athletes with Disabilities

PDF previews

Our PDFs (from base resources to teacher handbooks and student workbooks) now each have one or two preview pages visible on their product page.  All have page 1, and those with four pages or more also have page 4 available for preview from your browser.  The example below is just a thumbnail, the actual pages are decently scaled and readable.

EnglandAgeDiscovery-1
Page 1 preview from the resource: England in the ‘Age of Discovery’

There is one exception, and that’s the PDFs containing the model answers for the student workbooks. We only make those available to clients. Those PDFs are part of the teacher sets, which each have plenty of PDF previews anyhow.

This is in addition to our free curriculum samples where you can download a number of complete resources, teacher handbooks and student workbooks, so you can see how we work and judge the quality for yourself!

As always, if you have any feedback or questions, please let us know!