This is via Jabber from Jeremy – a very cool work in progress of a Human Computer Interface (HCI) called Multi-Touch Interaction Research. They’ve got a really nice movie up in MPEG1 or Quicktime which you can drool over..
Monthly Archives: February 2006
Yet Another Mistaken Detention of an Australian as an “Illegal Immigrant”
So, about a year after Cornelia Rau was found locked up, the subsequent ongoing enquiry, then the disclosure of the wrongful deportation of Vivian Alvarez Solon (another Australian who was reported as a missing person when DIMIA spirited them away) the Federal Minister for Immigration announces another mistaken detention of an Australian with mental health problems.
Once is a mistake (a severe & tragic one at that), twice is carelessness, but three?
How many more cases like this are there ?
Bird Flu Found in Africa for First Time
According to the BBC H5N1 has arrived in Nigeria, the first time bird flu has been identified in Africa.
This has been seen as something of a worry by scientists due to the size of the continent and the prevalence of AIDS which means many people with weakened immune systems who could both succumb and provide carriers for future mutation of the virus. As this New Scientist editorial said:
It is pretty clear now that wild water birds are carrying the virus. We do not know how many are infected, but they could spread the infection to the rest of Asia next and to Africa, where the prevalence of backyard chickens, poverty and HIV will be an explosive mix. The more humans are infected, the more likely it is that H5N1 will learn to spread between us.
On a complete tangent, Rich Boakes “autometa” tag generator for Technorati came up with the following, rather appropriate, list: h5n1 arrived nigeria time bird identified africa worry
Stardust@Home
Here’s an interesting project I picked up from the Planetary Society’s Planetary Radio podcast – the Stardust team needs volunteers to scan images from microsope photographs of the Aerogel that has been recovered to spot the tracks made by interstellar dust grains.
I know, you’re thinking “why don’t they do it automatically?” – the reason is that the grains will only travel a very short distance into the aerogel, and make marks quite similar to natural cracks that will have appeared during the mission. It is, in fact possible – BUT:
In order for it to work, however, they would have to “train” the computer with real images of aerogel containing grains of interstellar dust. But here’s the rub: no such particles had ever been collected!
So it’s a classic chicken/egg situation – they could find them automatically but they need to find the grains to teach the program before it will work reliably.
So, now it’s time for the public! They will produce a lot (order of a million) images for people to go through one by one (after some online training) to try and spot these particles by eye. The article on the challenge at the Stardust@Home site likens it to:
…searching for 45 ants in an entire football field, one 5cm by 5cm (2 inch by 2 inch) square at a time!
At least in this case the ants won’t be moving.. 🙂
So, if you want to find out more read the Planetary Society page on the project, the Berkeley press release about the project and the Stardust@Home project page itself & think about registering to help them out. Who knows, you could be the first one to find a piece of cosmic space dust!
Mobile Cookery
How to boil an egg in 3 minutes with 2 mobile phones.
I guess it’s obvious when you think about their power output, but it’s still a little disturbing…
Via Leon
Relatives Storm Offices of Haj Ferry Accident Company
The BBC is reporting (as breaking news) that relatives of those on the ferry that was bringing back Haj pilgrims and migrant workers have stormed the offices of the ferry company and trashed it after more details about the tragedy and subsequent apparently disorganised rescue emerged.
RSS Feed Problems
Andrew seems to be having problems with his RSS feed – a word of advice mate, try FeedValidator.org as that seems to show quite a few problems with your feed..
Mind you, at least p.l.o.a is still picking up your feed, although they parse my validated RSS feed the stories aren’t appearing on the site for some reason – time to ping that admins I think!
Rats Smell In Stereo ?
Here’s an interesting article from the BBC saying that scientists believe that rats smell in stereo – a pretty neat feat!
I’ve been trying to work out what it would feel like by closing my eyes and listening carefully and sniffing but all I’ve managed to do is give myself a headache.. 🙂
Iran to be reported to the UN Security Council
Reports about Iran being reported to the UN Security Council are being reported at the ABC and BBC with the vote going 27 for, 5 abstentions and 3 (Venezuela, Cuba and Syria) voting against.
Predictable reaction from Iran, they say they’re going to do what they threatened to do if referred which is to scale back cooperation and immediately restart reprocessing.
Further continued adventures with WordPress
Fun fun fun! Now integrated more plugins for various bits of neatness such as the WordPress Gallery2 Plugin that lets me both integrate my gallery2 installation into WordPress and to easily put piccies from Gallery2 into blog postings – like this..
Neat eh ? :-)  It’s also doing the random image in the sidebar on the right..
I’ve also been playing around with another of Rich’s plugins – this time for the automatic generation of Technorati tags so this is a bit of a test to see if it’ll do what it says on the can..