My own personal interest in the passionate discourse that surrounds nuclear power and radiation and the effects it has (or doesn’t) on cell biology fuels me to continue to read, evaluate with a level-headed critical perspective, and learn from the various information that abounds on the topic.
Unfortunately, there is a significant amount of information available that seems to be compiled with a very focused and premeditated goal. Thus my post title…maybe it should be simpler = science vs hysteria?
Case in point, Fukushima’s Children are Dying. This piece is far from honest in that it not only uses alarmist language and unsubstantiated or vague claims about certain abnormality, it twists the information resourced for the piece. Sadly, this is exactly the type of information that those who have been brainwashed into believing that radiation at any level is death inducing have been prepared to soak up without question.
On the other hand, it is nice to see that if one makes a concerted effort to find responsible inquiry, it does exist. Is there a link? If there is it is not immediately obvious and requires careful methodical research and analysis.
Even from a very simplistic linguistic perspective, the difference between these two approaches is apparent from the titles of the pieces.
Fukushima’s Children are Dying – Obvious from the get go that the jury is in and there is no need for further (honest) inquiry.
Why do I care? Because subjective and biased damification (I know that’s not a word…think slander if you prefer) of nuclear power and radiation have the very real negative force of eliminating a safe and environmentally friendly energy source as a viable option from the world when it is desperately needed.
So I have this new idea for adding blog entries here on my blog. I want to try and use Siri and see what kind of blog posts I can make using only voice recognition. I’m very interested in using Siri as a language learning and pronunciation training platform so this will be a good way for me to test its abilities. From what I’ve been able to tell so far Siri works very well with sentences but when you try to say single words it is much more difficult. I’m sure that’s because voice recognition is much more difficult when there is less reference material in the form of phonemes that have statistical relevance to one another. The more clues or cues that are provided to the statistical guessing system the easier it is to decipher the sentence. (all dictated with Siri)
Musashi Communication Village is an area where students can practice the foreign language they are studying and, by doing so, improve their communicative competence in that language.
 Having never formally studied the mythology, presented with a word association test for the term “Pandora’s”, I would have said “box”. Interestingly, that response would only be correct from the perspective that the word that I had always heard follow the possessive name of the greek deity who was said to have released “all the evils of humanity” from her jar…yes, jar, was “box”. Apparently it wasn’t a box that she was originally attributed to letting evil spill from, it was a jar.
Likewise, I was, for many years, led to believe that nuclear energy was evil from any perspective. The simplified and often dishonest narrative was one that would be the core motivation for my initial response following the March 11th earthquake in Japan and subsequent nuclear reactor debacle in Fukushima. What has transpired for me since then has been an awakening and frustrating realization about the hope (which is what was said to be all that remained in Pandora’s jar) that nuclear power really holds for society if we could simply get beyond our ignorant fears and open our minds to the facts.
Pandora’s Promise is a new narrative (new in format and scope of the individuals it includes) that attempts to shift the tide of public opinion and understanding while there is still hope that doing so will be in time.
The book was finally finished and published by Packt Publishing in early January of 2011. It turned out to more of a task than I thought it would be to write a book about using Moodle as a tool for educational administration. Sadly, it was somewhat outdated with the release of Moodle 2.0 just as it went to press. Nevertheless, the ideas and procedures I explain are bound to no specific version of Moodle. It is simply that the steps required to get there changed significantly with the new version of Moodle.
For those interested in the idea of using Moodle to manage curriculum in an educational program as well as to control and organize the various types of information that flow through it, you might find some thought provoking ideas in the book that is outdated from a system perspective but will always be relevant from an educational program management perspective. 🙂
WordPress is one of the better known blogging platforms out there and is used by people all over the world so I assumed (I know, assuming is often a bad thing to do 😉 ) that it was multilingual ready by default. After typing some Japanese into a post and clicking on Publish, a different picture became apparent. A long string of question marks ??????????? was what followed. I started searching Google for a solution to the problem and the following is the result. One fix led to another problem but in the end I’m up and running with WordPress installed in English but fully customized (just a few tweaks that should be included in the standard package in my opinion) to display Japanese or any language for that matter.
1. When installing WordPress via Fantastico, the database that gets created is not set to use UTF-8 collation. Mine was set to Swedish, I think? At any rate, you need to change the collation to UTF-8. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to do that.
2. Next, you need to also convert all the tables in your database to UTF-8. You can do this directly via SQL commands or, if your site is hosted, which it most likely is if you used Fantastico, you can use PhpMyAdmin (accessible from within CPanel with most hosting services). Here are some links to help with that process (from WordPress and the previously linked tutorial)
3. I thought that would do it but for some reason I was still getting the question marks even after changing the database collation and converting all the tables to UTF-8. Then I stumbled onto a post that indicated I should remove the database collation commands from the config.php file in the WordPress directory root. I didn’t remove them but commented them out (use two forward slashes like this // ) and FINALLY I was able to type Japanese into my WordPress blog and have it interpreted correctly. Whew!
4. But the adventure didn’t stop there. I started working on a post and noticed that every time I used a comma, there was no space being inserted after the comma. Figured out that it was related to a bug in the theme I’m using (Atahualpa). Here are the instructions to get that issue fixed. You’ll need to be able to access files in your directory root (the same as in #3 above for accessing the config.php file).
Now, after performing those tasks, you can use Japanese (or any other language, I think) on your English version of WordPress. Happy blogging! ãŠç–²ã‚Œã•ã¾ã§ã—ãŸï¼
After over a year of spending virtually no time on this blog, I have finally been motivated to do some writing. More than anything, writing on my blog will force me to organize my thoughts and gather data but maybe I’ll be lucky enough to get some of you to comment on the content that appears.
I got a used MacBook Air about 6 months ago from a computer shop here in Japan (PC Depot) that sells premium used computers and components. The price was right and I was wanting a truly portable machine (with full sized keyboard) so I went for it. The package also included the external CD/DVD-R drive which, although you do have the option to connect to the drive of another computer wirelessly, is crucial if you’re going to be installing software on the computer 🙂 . It is a Rev. A (1st model of the MacBook Air) which meant that the hard drive interface uses only PATA drives via a ZIF connection. That meant, originally, that options for hard drive upgrade were limited.
Initially I couldn’t find much information about solid state drives of the size that I wanted (at least 128Gig) or the information that I did find told me that SSD’s for the Rev. A were either too expensive or weren’t recognized by the system etc. etc. Recently however, I started to see quite a few SSD’s for sale on eBay and the price was in a more “considerable” range so I took the plunge and purchased a Kingspec 128 Gig solid state drive and the following is my experience with installing, setting up, and using the drive. It’s been fun and exciting so far! Solid state memory has to be the direction for the future of memory storage. Less power consumption, faster data access, and much less prone to failure as there are no moving parts.
Anyway, after receiving the drive (very well packed) directly from Kingspec in China, I admired how small it is and then proceeded to disassemble my MacBook Air. There are a slew of video guides on Air tear down and hard drive installation on YouTube. Here are the two I used.
The removal of the old drive and installation of the new SSD took less than an hour and that includes answering the phone once in the middle of the process 🙂 . I cloned my hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner prior to removing it so getting my system, exactly as it was on the old drive, was a snap. I definitely have to make a donation to Bombich Software!!
Started up the computer and aside from the 30 seconds or so it took the computer to identify the system on the drive, the drive is amazingly fast!! It is noticeably faster than the old 80Gig Toshiba drive. Startup from a complete shutdown took about 1 mintue and 27 seconds with the old drive and now takes about 43 seconds!! Quickness while using the computer is equally drastically faster!! (Note – The delay to find the system goes down to something like 12 seconds or so once you select the drive as your startup drive from the System Prefernces.)
One thing of note is that if you plan to install OS’s other than MacOS on your machine (I plan to install Vista…shame on me) and you’re going to use BootCamp. Make sure to use the GUID partition map when you partition the drive. When I partitioned the drive initially the default partition map was set to MBR and I didn’t notice it so I had to go back and re-clone, re-partition, and re-install in order to get things in order to install Vista using BootCamp. I’m guessing the default MBR was a result of the original formatting scheme on the drive.
That’s it! If you decide to go SSD on your Rev. A. I hope this helps.
Ok, I’ve been meaning to write a quick review for this product for over a month but have been so busy at work that I couldn’t get it done. I’ve been a long time very satisfied user of Speedplay’s X-Series pedals. I use the ones with the titanium spindle and they are wonderful. Extremely easy entry without ever having to look down and zero pre or accidental release. I transitioned to these from Time pedals over eight years ago and have never looked back. The tensioning spring on the Time pedals eventually would wear out and get weak (happened on two sets of pedals) and then release on the upstroke in the middle of a sprint….yikes!!!
Anyway, enough praise for Speedplay’s pedals. Due to the respect I have for Speedplay, and its cool looks, I decided to buy a pricey new waterbottle cage to replace the American Classic cage that I have as the powdercoat on the Am. Classic is falling off and looks awful. So, why not splurge, I thought, and bought the Speedplay Nanogram cage from Excel Sports. I got the cage, put it on my bike and took off for work. I hadn’t gone two miles down the mountain before the bottle shot out of the cage. I had to turn around and pick it up and then constantly look down to check to make sure it wasn’t about to shoot out again. I gave it a good solid week of riding hoping that I’d be able to figure out a set up that was workable….down tube, seat tube…nothing worked. I ride a 58cm Airborne Torch (6/4 Titanium). It’s a relatively stiff bike but I’ve never had this kind of problem with bottles before. I was using the bottle that came with the cage but that didn’t seem to matter.
In the end I sent it back to Excel and they very cooperatively refunded my money. The Excel rep. did say that he was unable to replicate the problem….can’t imagine that it stayed in on his bike but….??
So, the point of the story is, avoid the Nanogram water bottle cage and buy from Excel. 🙂 Ironically, I noticed that Speedplay does not list the Nanogram bottle cage anywhere on their website.
My own personal interest in the passionate discourse that surrounds nuclear power and radiation and the effects it has (or doesn’t) on cell biology fuels me to continue to read, evaluate with a level-headed critical perspective, and learn from the various information that abounds on the topic.
Ok, I’ve been meaning to write a quick review for this product for over a month but have been so busy at work that I couldn’t get it done. I’ve been a long time very satisfied user of