Always nice to see a familiar website turn up in book form. This time it’s Atlas Obscura’s turn. Altas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders comes out from Workman Publishing in September but can be pre-ordered now.
See my Map Books of 2016 page for other books of interest coming out later this year (several of which I have added within the last week or so).
Continuous training and learning should be one of our main activities during our professional careers. And in these difficult times for the Oil & Gas industry, with massive lay-offs and the perspective of long-term unemployment, their importance is even bigger, specially for those who have lost their jobs. It is an opportunity to identify weaknesses, to find new ways of growing and to keep our skills trained and ready to jump into any task.
Free Online quality training resources for Geosciences have not been always easy to find. Many of them are associated with journals and associations that require memberships and payments.
But there is a change going on: the Internet is democratizing online learning, and companies and professional associations are starting to offer free resources for marketing purposes. And those are very good news for us Explorationists.
These are some of the resources I’ve found lately that could be useful to any geoscientist interested in continuous development. There is much more out there, of course, and I hope that this post will be an opportunity for us all to share our sources in hope that, in the future, I can make more entries like this in the benefit of everybody.
“Knowledge that is free and open for all”. This pdf library, offered by Total, contains up to 50 reference books covering subjects as diverse as engineering, earth sciences, career & personal development, marketing, management, information technology, and much more.
These are some of the most interesting:
Schlumberger experts are running webinars more or less once every month in geoscience, reservoir engineering and petroleum engineering. You can register to see them in streaming or you can access any time you want afterwards.
Schlumberger is characterized by technical excellence and software development for the upstream industry, something which comes clear in these one-hour high quality webinars highly illustrative and educative, including workflows and best-practices.
My favorite so far, is the one entitled “Do Your Faults Seal? Understanding the Risks and Uncertainties in Exploration and Development“, by Russell Davies.
Schlumberger has prepared also a huge amount of videos related with the use of Petrel, its software platform for the exploration and production industry, which are available in Youtube. The Petrel 2014 playlist, for instance, contains more than one hundred videos covering all kind of processes in detail.
This one goes for us Geophysicist. EAGE is the European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, a global professional association involved in geophysics, petroleum exploration, geology, reservoir engineering, mining and mineral exploration, civil engineering, tunneling and environmental matters.
They produce very good publications and they have a fantastic training and learning database, but they both require membership payments.
On the other hand, they are producing a series of videos which are posted on a youtube channel, focused mainly on Geophysics, with very interesting state-of-the-art approaches and techniques.
This playlist in youtube contains quite interesting webinars for geologists and explorationists related with Petroleum Systems and Source Rocks characterization and understanding.
We can also find a playlist with more than ten hours of a Petroleum Geology course by the University of Delf which is highly interesting and contains several basics that we tend to forget through our careers.
Since late 1990s, people started sharing their work with the E&P community by publishing their software/research work online. The idea was to exchange the knowledge and the technology between them.
OpendTect is one of the results from that approach: a free seismic interpretation software with all the capabilities to identify a petroleum prospect from the seismic data.
These are some of the free features that can be found in the open source version:
Downloaded over 140,000 times, OpendTect is today used by tens of thousands of open source, academic and commercial users.
Academic users get free access to the commercial plugins, which improves the level of education and R&D.
Not only the software is free but it offers too a set of Seismic Surveys which are fantastic for training purposes, including 3D and 2D seismic, Prestack 3D data, well data, Acoustic Impedance…
‘MOOCs’ (Massive Online Open Courses) have been a revolution in Higher Education. Apparently born in Stanford University, where two Artificial Intelligence academics responded to massive demand for their courses by uploading them open access to the web, it went viral, and more than 150,000 students signed up for the course.
And, from the same place where these courses originated, we can now have access to this “Reservoir Geomechanics” course which connects rock mechanics, structural geology and petroleum engineering .
The course considers key practical issues such as prediction of pore pressure, estimation of hydrocarbon column heights and fault seal potential, determination of optimally stable well trajectories, etc.
Other platforms with a huge variety of courses are Udacity, edX and Coursera.
Future Learn is a consortium of Leading UK universities, led by The Open University, set up to deliver MOOCs with a distinctive style.
The list of partners is impressive and the amount of courses, astonishing. Among them, I find particularly interesting the one about “Shale Gas and Fracking: the Politics and the Science“.
This four-week course covers the politics, economics, and science of shale gas particularly in the UK. Why are the US and UK experiences so different? What do the public think of allowing unconventional gas to be developed? What are the local effects in terms of water contamination, seismic activity, and air pollution? What are the global effects? Does shale gas offer a ‘bridge’ to a low-carbon future, or would we be walking the plank?
This course has been followed by 21,049 people from 148 countries in its 2016 edition. Those are huge numbers…
It can be very interesting for young professionals in this industry, as it will introduce them to the whole chain of the Oil & Gas business. It takes four weeks with an average dedication of 2-3 hours per week.
The only problem with this training is that it is a signup course, so you have to be aware of future sessions.
This is just coming out from the oven: Social image interpretation. Who could imagine this? “Interpret images and compare your interpretations to everyone else”. Wow!
The idea is simple: You can upload an image and ask the users to propose a particular interpretation to be done (an unconformity, a fault pattern, DHI´s, etc.) or you can do your own interpretation on other images proposed by members (i.e. the picture below to the left).
After you’ve done your interpretation, you submit it and it is “added” to the rest of proposed interpretations. The most repeated interpretations add up and appear as a bright line (i.e.the picture above to the right). You can then browse through each individual interpretation and vote up or down for the good ones or the bad ones. Depending on the votes you receive, you “build” a reputation for your own interpretations.
This tool is less than a week old, but it is something really interesting which is worth keeping an eye on.
Linkedin is becoming a great tool for professionals. Most of the people use it just as a way to be in touch with job opportunities, but it has way much more potential. A lot of information is being shared by people in your network and published in its blog, Pulse.
Linkedin Groups are also a great way to interact with people in your industry. That´s how I came to know this Seismic Attributes folder which is available for everybody in Google Drive.
It contains up to 442 papers, presentations, images and books related with this interesting topic. The best way to get an idea about what it there is to go take a look.
So what’s your experience? Do you know of any more valuable free resources for Explorationists? Do you want to share them?
From baby boomers' fire metaphors to millennials' love of sharing, bridging the generation gap could help you get higher pay.
You want a raise. Do you deserve one? Of course you do. But your opinion doesn't count; The challenge is to convince your boss.
About 2 percent of the 2013’s top 250 top-grossing films were shot by female directors of photography. The fact that many readers probably don’t know whether that’s high or low speaks to a real problem in the film industry. To that point, Vulture recently published a compilation interview with three of the most respected women cinematographers currently working, and it’s packed with more insights than an average frame of The Neon Demon is with glittery luminescence.
French DP Maryse Alberti (Creed, Velvet Goldmine) on dealing with male producers and crew members:
I remember the producer asking me, “Can you handle the big lights?” And I thought, Do I want to be sarcastic, or do I want the job? So I said, “I don’t handle the big lights, I just tell big men where to put the big lights and they do it.” ... Male crews know ...
For many stories, death is an inciting incident that forces plot to move forward (looking at you, Game of Thrones). We’re so accustomed to stories where people die, it would seem that animals dying in fiction is barely noticeable, right? At Lit Hub, Laura Lampton Scott disagrees: according to her, we should be more careful about when we write about dying animals in fiction.
Sophie Curtis, marketing director at RE*WORK has a post and interview with 4 high profile women engineers including Adafruit’s Limor Fried, celebrating National Women in Engineering Day
As an all-female team, RE•WORK are strong advocates on supporting women in technology and science, so we’re celebrating today by talking to female pioneers in the field about ensuring equality, future breakthroughs, encouraging others to become engineers and more.
The day was set up by the Women’s Engineering Society and is dedicated to raising the profile and celebrating the achievements of women in engineering. By encouraging girls into engineering careers we will not only increase diversity and inclusion, but also enabling us to fill the substantial future job opportunities that have been predicted in this sector.
Get involved with the day and share inspiring women in engineering that you know or admire by using #NWED2016
Limor Fried is Founder and Engineer at AdaFruit, a company she created to establish the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. This month the White House honored her in their Champions of Change for her commitment to building both innovation and community, and creating resources for learning.Sarah Ostadabbas is Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, and recently formed the Small Data/Decision Support (SDDS) Laboratory to enhance human information-processing capabilities through the design of adaptive interfaces via physical, physiological and cognitive state estimation.
Michal Segalov leads groups of engineers at Google Play, focusing on apps and games discovery. She won the Anita Borg Institute Social Impact award for her work on the co-initiated Mind The Gap program, aimed at encouraging girls to learn computer science and math, which has expanded globally with more than 10,000 participants to date.
Helen Wollaston is Chief Executive of WISE, a campaign created to increase the participation, contribution and success of girls and women in STEM, from classroom to boardroom. Prior to WISE, Helen gained extensive experience in promoting female talent, including directing campaigns for the Equal Opportunities Commission and her own consultancy Equal to the Occasion.
What inspired or motivated you to begin your work in engineering?
Limor: Working in engineering is about solving problems together. One of the first times I remember thinking I’d be an engineer was when I was about 7 or 8 I saw a bunch of balloons stuck to the ceiling at a local mall after an event, no one could reach them so I went home and constructed a mechanical arm with my Dad. After going back, getting on his shoulders and using the balloon catcher device we made we retrieved all the balloons and gave them to others who also wanted balloons.
Michal: Growing up, I never actually thought about engineering or computer science as a career path for me; I really liked art and painting so I thought more of a career in architecture. I also really liked math, puzzles and riddles. However, I never realized that computer science was solving math problems and puzzles every day. I thought it was super geeky and missed out on how creative it was! I remember my parents trying (and failing) to convince me to pick up some programing skills. At 18, things shifted. I found myself being forced into a programing course. This is when I realized this is what I wanted to do. Ever since, I’ve been learning and working in CS, enjoying every minute! How can we encourage more women and girls to work in engineering?
Limor: We like to say “we are what we celebrate” – how can we get others in the spotlight who are doing great work? How can print magazines, tv, online sites, social media networks and more celebrate the diversity in engineering that is there but often overlooked or ignored? What we all need to do is lift each other up on each other’s shoulders more.
Michal: Be out there. Be visible. Act as a role model and spread the word. In your organization, and in your community. It’s important for young women and girls to see role models they can identify with. Show the world the diversity in CS and engineering. Diversity is important not only because it’s fair– studies show that diverse teams build better products and diverse companies have better financial performance. We need to be proactive about the underrepresentation of women and minorities in CS and engineering, it is not going to solve itself.
Helen: WISE looked at the evidence on this question for Network Rail a couple of years ago. We identified a conflict between how most teenage girls see themselves – the type of person they are – and their perception of the type of person who is a scientist or engineer. This identity conflict leads them to the conclusion that science and engineering is not for them and explains why despite many years of initiatives to encourage girls to work in engineering, it is still seen as an unusual choice of career for a woman in the UK. Our People Like Me campaign uses a fresh approach. In a 45 minute session for girls, they start by picking adjectives which best describe themselves – words like “friendly”, “organised” or “creative”. Their choices determine which “type” they are, they get a list of jobs which suit people of this type and are introduced to role models just like them doing an exciting and interesting job using science, maths or technology. Feedback from girls, teachers, parents and role models has been very positive. “A fabulous, innovative way to get girls thinking outside the box in terms of future careers” – Angie Baker, physics teacher. Since launching the original pack in September 2015, we have done spin off packs for Digital, Electronics, Physics as well as for individual companies such as Babcock International and Network Rail. These packs are free to download from the WISE site because we want them to be used far and wide. We offer expert training to take people through the theory behind the campaign and explain how to make the most of these resources to add value to science, technology and engineering outreach and engagement programmes.The campaign opens girls’ eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. We are always on the look-out for different role models. If you want to help, why not nominate yourself or a colleague for a WISE Award? The aim of the Awards is to identify new role models and champions to work with us to inspire others to follow in their footsteps. As well of course as being a great way to boost your own career profile and extend your network. Please help us to spread the word before the 8 July closing date for nominations.
Read the full interview here.
Here's something to fear about self-driving cars! Once they're up and running and insurance companies and legislators realize they're much better at it than humans, you won't even be allowed to drive. Also, the infrastructure is decaying badly and there's no political will to face up to the costs of fixing it, so the roads themselves may end up getting effectively sold off.
Public-private partnerships for roads might begin the erosion of the public right of way. But it’s also possible that autonomous vehicles will all but require limited access to public roads to operate effectively.
Today’s self-driving cars have to be designed and programmed to interact with messy circumstances. Pedestrians, dogs, bicycles, human-driven vehicles, and other obstacles all pose challenges to robocars, and if autonomous vehicles are even modestly successful, avoiding collisions with fallible human drivers will prove a temporary problem. ... The more self-driving cars there are on the roads, the less complex and more predictable the overall behavior of traffic becomes.
Hey, ha ha, remember how the last few episodes of Game of Thrones have seemed to be a bit… low-key? Uh, well, now we know the reason why: It was spending all its time (and manpower, and probably a sizable portion of season six’s budget) on creating what is possibly the most incredible battle that has ever been seen on TV.
In 1969, Laurence J. Peters, a professor at the University of Southern California, published the bestselling book, The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, where he advanced this theory: “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence … in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.” Meanwhile, the real work gets “accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.”
Above, Adam Westbrook offers a short introduction to “The Peter Principle” and its corollary, the concept of “creative incompetence.” If you take “The Peter Principle” seriously, you’ll know that not all promotions are good ones. As you move upward, you might find that you’re dealing with more headaches …. and less work that you truly enjoy. To preempt the bad promotion, Peters suggested (somewhat light-heartedly) engaging in some “creative incompetence”–that is, creating “the impression that you have already reached your level of incompetence. Creative incompetence will achieve the best results if you choose an area of incompetence which does not directly hinder you in carrying out the main duties of your present position.” In short, find the job you really like, do it well, but give your boss the occasional oddball reason not to mess with a good thing.
Got examples of your own creative incompetence to recommend? Feel free to add them in the comments below.
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How to Achieve Professional Happiness Through “Creative Incompetence”: A Corollary to the Famous “Peter Principle” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.
Klaus Teuber is a name that’s probably not immediately recognizable to you but might ring a bell in the back of your mind because as the inventor of Settlers of Catan, his name graces every box. Surprisingly, board game design was originally Klaus’ hobby, but after selling 25 mil copies of Catan, he no longer has to work in a dental laboratory—or really ever again.
Effie Brown has been in the film industry for over twenty years and has 53 films under her belt in some capacity, including Real Women Have Curves, But I’m a Cheerleader, and Dear White People. But it wasn’t until a spectacularly cringe-worthy moment on the recent season of HBO’s Project Greenlight that Brown rose to prominence in the mainstream and became something of a spokesperson for diversity in film.
In a recent interview with Women in Hollywood, Brown once again talked about diversity, but she brought up some really interesting points that don’t get nearly enough attention. Like, for example, the difference between diversity and inclusiveness. The interviewer brought up the notion that “diversity is only numbers, like programming a film festival with 50% women and 50% men directors, but inclusiveness, which would be more like wanting to hear stories from other voices and placing value on them is what is eluding us,” then asked if Brown wanted to speak to striving for both of those things. Brown responded:
I am all for inclusiveness. There’s been a lot of talk about this and Ava [DuVernay] is so eloquent speaking on it. I feel that when it’s diversity, diversity, diversity, it starts to feel exclusive to some people. Where including someone, well, everybody wants to be included. That’s the stuff that we learn in Kindergarten. “You gotta share.” I feel that the word “inclusive” brings about a bit more openness for people who would otherwise feel that we are taking something from them.
I’ve had conversations with people who go, “I am white, I am straight, I am a man, and I am out here struggling as much as anyone else and now people are looking at me all side-eye because I am white, straight, and male, like I should have some sort of in and I don’t.” And they tell me to my face! And also that I am getting a leg up because it’s cool to be a woman and I’m black.
What’s so interesting is that I can actually see their point. I don’t agree with it, but I can see it. And this is where “diversity” feels like “I’m taking something from you” and “inclusive” is more like, “Hey, I’m coming in too, I’m not taking anything away from you, I’m just coming to get mine.” At the end of the day everybody has something.That’s what inclusiveness means to me.
So, diversity is about numbers. That’s the easy part. Inclusiveness is about an ethos, and that’s harder to create and/or change. Still, clarifying the difference between the two is extremely helpful in determining what can be done, and how. When you break the issue down like that, ie: it’s easy to create diversity in projects by solely going by the numbers, while inclusiveness must be tackled by getting people to be honest about how important that kind of inclusion is to them, it’s easier to see where the real problems are. In clarifying that the issue of inclusiveness isn’t about subtraction, but addition (no one is taking away “your jobs,” they just want their own), we can then have honest conversations about whether or not that kind of addition matters to someone and why (or why not).
You should definitely give the rest of the interview a read, as it is super-insightful, and you can also read about how much Effie Brown genuinely loves genre films and will see superhero tentpole movies with absolutely zero indie filmmaker shame, because she is one of us.
(image via screencap)
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This is pretty interesting: during the latest national congress of the China Association for Science and Technology, chairman Han Qide announced that the country would be setting up a program to promote science fiction and fantasy, including the creation of a new major award.
There was an inevitable sense of things falling into place on “The Broken Man.” Sure, the seventh episode of the season is usually when Game of Thrones starts putting its endgame in motion, but there was an extra sense of finality to it, making it a gut-punch of an episode. Hmm. Maybe gut-stab is a better word.
When I began studying how animals swim, I didn’t feel much like a physicist. I’d just finished my bachelor’s in physics during which time I’d been taught that physicists work on one of a handful of buzzwords: quantum mechanics, cosmology, gauge theory, and so on. To see if graduate school was right for me, I shadowed a friendly research group at the University of California, San Diego—but they didn’t study any of these buzzwords. They used high-powered mathematics to understand things like the locomotion of snails, worms, and microorganisms.
I was grateful for the opportunity, and I thought the problems they studied were beautiful and interesting—just not fundamental physics. As I became more involved in the group, this distinction grew into an identity crisis. Theoretical physicists are kind of like artists, or athletes: If you feel yourself drifting further from Klee or Peyton Manning, it can seem like a catastrophe. I thought I could feel Einstein and Feynman looking down at me and frowning as I took a turn down the wrong path.
[NB:rec]
It would take some impressive feats by microorganisms to convince me that they were as sexy as smashing atoms together—and they did not fail to deliver. Some…
Read More…
Something that baffles laypeople about copyright is what is, and is not, copyrightable; US law and international treaties protect the creative part of copyright, but not the labor part of copyright: merely working hard ("the sweat of the brow") on something isn't enough to give rise to a new copyright, but even a trivial amount of creative work is. So copying out the phone book gives you no copyright, even if it takes you all year, doesn't make it copyrightable. But writing a single haiku does. (more…)
Most everyone who knows the work of George Orwell knows his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (published here), in which he rails against careless, confusing, and unclear prose. “Our civilization is decadent,” he argues, “and our language… must inevitably share in the general collapse.” The examples Orwell quotes are all guilty in various ways of “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision.”
Ultimately, Orwell claims, bad writing results from corrupt thinking, and often attempts to make palatable corrupt acts: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” His examples of colonialism, forced deportations, and bombing campaigns find ready analogues in our own time. Pay attention to how the next article, interview, or book you read uses language “favorable to political conformity” to soften terrible things.
Orwell’s analysis identifies several culprits that obscure meaning and lead to whole paragraphs of bombastic, empty prose:
Dying metaphors: essentially clichés, which “have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”
Operators or verbal false limbs: these are the wordy, awkward constructions in place of a single, simple word. Some examples he gives include “exhibit a tendency to,” “serve the purpose of,” “play a leading part in,” “have the effect of.” (One particular peeve of mine when I taught English composition was the phrase “due to the fact that” for the far simpler “because.”)
Pretentious diction: Orwell identifies a number of words he says “are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.” He also includes in this category “jargon peculiar to Marxist writing” (“petty bourgeois,” “lackey,” “flunkey,” “hyena”).
Meaningless words: Abstractions, such as “romantic,” “plastic,” “values,” “human,” “sentimental,” etc. used “in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.” Orwell also damns such political buzzwords as “democracy,” “socialism,” “freedom,” “patriotic,” “justice,” and “fascism,” since they each have “several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.”
Most readers of Orwell’s essay inevitably point out that Orwell himself has committed some of the faults he finds in others, but will also, with some introspection, find those same faults in their own writing. Anyone who writes in an institutional context—be it academia, journalism, or the corporate world—acquires all sorts of bad habits that must be broken with deliberate intent. “The process” of learning bad writing habits “is reversible” Orwell promises, “if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.” How should we proceed? These are the rules Orwell suggests:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
What constitutes “outright barbarous” wording he does not say, exactly. As the internet cliché has it: Your Mileage May Vary. You may find creative ways to break these rules without thereby being obscure or justifying mass murder.
But Orwell does preface his guidelines with some very sound advice: “Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning.” Not only does this practice get us closer to using clear, specific, concrete language, but it results in writing that grounds our readers in the sensory world we all share to some degree, rather than the airy word of abstract thought and belief that we don’t.
These “elementary” rules do not cover “the literary use of language,” writes Orwell, “but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.” In the seventy years since his essay, the quality of English prose has likely not improved, but our ready access to writing guides of all kinds has. Those who care about clarity of thought and responsible use of rhetoric would do well to consult them often, and to read, or re-read, Orwell’s essay.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing Clear and Tight Prose is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.
My only real want along the way was to illuminate something about the human condition in a voice and from a point of view that could belong only to me. And if a bid for posterity beats in the heart of every writer, mine is alive with the possibility that long after I’m gone, someone will discover an old paperback of my work and say, “What’s this?” But whether or not that happens is independent of the volume of work a writer publishes, so what’s done is done.
Over at Lit Hub, Jamie Clarke shares why he left the writing world to become a bookstore owner.
Interesting article via Greenbiz
Every day, postal workers deliver millions of packages through the mail, trucks full of produce are transported around the globe and billions of dollars worth of packaged products are created, bought and sold.
Packaging is a ubiquitous, necessary aspect of modern consumer cultures. It keeps our products safe, clean and intact. Yet over time, much of this packaging leads to waste and pollution. Isn’t there a better way to package the products and services we use every day?
If we look to nature, there are signs that the answer is yes. This collection aims to explore some of the varied ways in which nature designs and develops life-friendly packaging.
How does nature build breathable containers? What clues from nature might point us toward designing protective packaging that serves an additional use after the item is unwrapped? Much like humans, the rest of nature is continuously on the move and transporting goods. How can nature’s ideas help us design solutions to our most difficult packaging challenges?
Fran Wilde took home the Andre Norton award for her novel Updraft last night, which makes us think that we’ll see her on an award ballot again before too long for her latest novella, The Jewel and Her Lapidary.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler testifying before the House Communications and Technology Subcommittee. (credit: House Energy and Commerce Committee)
Legislation that would ban rate regulation of Internet service providers could prevent the Federal Communications Commission from enforcing net neutrality rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization, according to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.
Although the FCC decided not to regulate the monthly prices charged by broadband providers, the commission's net neutrality rules rely partially on rate-oversight authority over common carriers. The relevant sections of the Communications Act say that the prices charged by common carriers have to be just and reasonable; those sections also ban "unreasonable discrimination" in charges and practices.
This rate-oversight power, along with other authority, was used by the FCC to justify the three so-called "bright-line" rules that prevent blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. That's why the Republican-sponsored "No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act" could threaten the FCC's core net neutrality rules, Wheeler told lawmakers in a letter dated March 14 and posted on the FCC's website last week.
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2.6 million people die in the United States each year.
Stroke is the fifth leading killer in the United States.
795,000 people have a stroke each year.
I had a friend who had a massive bleeding stroke and froze in mid-stride and mid-sentence, like a statue. He later died after life support was turned off.
The ways for folks like you and me to detect a stroke (aside from the person keeling over) were these until a decade or so ago:
S: Smile — If one side of the face droops or doesn’t move, call 911.
T: Talk — Speak a simple sentence. If it comes out garbled, call 911.
R: Raise — Raise both arms. If the person can’t, call 911.
About a decade ago it was discovered that there is a fourth sign that a stroke is taking place: the behavior of the tongue. Ask the person to stick out his or her tongue: if it doesn’t come out straight, but points off to the side in an odd way, call 911. Oddly this hasn’t received the publicity it should.
If you can get a person having a stroke to a hospital and into treatment within a few hours, there are drugs which, if administered rapidly enough, can mitigate the effects. Who knows … you might save a life.
Image: Shutterstock/wavebreakmedia
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Andrew Wiseman’s “When Maps Lie” was posted on CityLab last year, but its importance is evergreen: it’s about map literacy, and how to avoid being fooled by confusing, misleading or simply bad maps. This is very much what Mark Monmonier did in How to Lie with Maps (see my review; Amazon, iBooks); Wiseman updates it for the social media age.
Maps are big these days. Blogs and news sites (including this one) frequently post maps and those maps often go viral—40 maps that explain the world, the favorite TV shows of each U.S. state, and so on. They’re all over Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and news organizations are understandably capitalizing on the power that maps clearly have in digital space: they can visualize a lot of data quickly and effectively. But they can also visualize a lot of data inaccurately and misleadingly.
It’s a must-read. [via]
I’ve seen makers create wearable replicas of LEGO minifigs, but I don’t often see entire outfits made from LEGO bricks. Brian D’Agostine, also known as Dag’s Bricks, designed and made a classic little black dress and matching handbag for his wife to wear at Bricks Cascade. He used Technic movable bricks and the dress came as a result of experimenting with how to make wearable LEGO pieces. Brian explains on his website:
When I first played around with staggering rows of 2L rubber technic axle connectors on axles I had no idea how large that table scrap would grow. That little thought grew until it became a pair of flip-flops. Then they got fancy. Then they needed something more so I played around with the same concept in a different way. I used a bunch of 2L technic liftarms and connected them with 3L pins. Once I figured out the pattern I could run long strings. These strings then were fastened together and suddenly I was a weaver, creating large swaths of cloth. With a little finagling I was able to convert these large chunks into form fitting pieces. Thus, a dress was born.
And the stats: The dress is made from around 12,000 individual Technic pieces and weighs about seven pounds. It’s separated into a skirt and bodice so weight was distributed more evenly.
via CNET
Though India's independent telcoms regulator has banned services like Facebook's "Free Basics" -- which bribed phone companies to exempt Facebook's chosen services from the carriers' punishing data-caps -- the debate rages on, as Free Basics has taken hold through many poor countries around the world. (more…)
Could the rumors be true? After a month of rampant speculation that physicists have finally discovered gravitational waves , today we learn the truth. Lead scientists from the the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) have assembled at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and they’re about to make a big announcement.
