Here’s an interesting story from ABC news about a New Zealand Uni who have tagged a crocodile with a satellite transponder and are tracking him online.

The website now works with non-Internet Explorer browsers, kudos to the maintainer (who isn’t an IT person) for fixing it so rapidly after I dropped them a quick email alerting them to the issues.

Well we’re back from our trip up to lovely Queensland, where the weather really was beautiful one day, perfect the next! Donna was doing a day of talks on the Sunday for the Gladstone Area Autism/Asperger Support Group as part of a two day conference, with the Saturday being done by our friend Wendy Lawson. We all stayed at the wonderful Earth & Sea B&B and special thanks to Anlyn and Marshall for looking after us so well there!

We then had a few days to ourselves and we’d booked a cabin at Capricorn Caves which was wonderful, no mobile coverage, brush turkeys everywhere & a small mob of ‘roos. We took the opportunity to pootle around the Capricorn Coast area including Yeppoon, where we were treated to the initially puzzling fact of seeing snails in rockpools with legs, ’till we twigged that there were thousands of tiny hermit crabs there, and spotted a mass of roosting flying foxes in the mangroves around the river just outside the town.

We also managed to loose our rental car keys on the beach, but thankfully some kind soul found them and handed in at the police station, so as we were desperately trying to find a number for the company we got a call from them asking us if we’d lost our keys.. 🙂

Leaving the caves for the trip back to Gladstone we had to stop to avoid hitting a bird sauntering across the road that looked like a cross between a pheasant and a raptor, but turned out to be a Pheasant Coucal, a very large member of the cuckoo family (not a pheasant!) that is the only member to raise its own young. A wonderful view!

Anyway, we’re now back in Melbourne, in the rain, and actually enjoying it. You soon realise that if the weather’s good all the time then there’s no contrast to make it stand out.

An interesting piece of research from Perth, they did a study of people who had required hospital treatment due to a car accident and found that using hand-held mobile phone gave you almost a 5x chance of having an accident in the next 10 minutes, whilst using a hands-free system meant almost a 4x chance of an accident.

This study is bolstered by a study done in Japan which appears to have found at least one reason why trying to use a mobile phone whilst driving is so dangerous. It’s all down to the audio quality as the signal drops out as you move from cell to cell or from obstructions.

To quote from the New Scientist article on the report:

Hamada’s team measured the sound quality of mobile phone calls in parked cars and in cars travelling at 65 kilometres per hour. A comparison of the two types of voice signal revealed silent periods of about 300 milliseconds interrupting the signal roughly six times a minute. They also discovered a time lag of about 300 milliseconds for a phone in a moving car, while for 5 per cent of the time, the frequency range becomes distorted.

Then researchers then played 11 volunteers an audio recording of a story that included similar interruptions. As the volunteers struggled to hear the distorted parts of the recording, their right parietal cortex, the part of the brain that perceives sound, became more active (Transport Research Part F, DOI: 10.1016/j.trf.2005.04.016).

And for all of our sakes, please don’t even consider SMS’ing whilst driving, that’s even more dangerous!