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Tweet from David Risney

2016 Oct 13, 6:19
TIME is really painting themselves into a corner. Still several weeks before election plus aftermath available for additional melting. https://twitter.com/TIME/status/786531960902524928 
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4 people are living in an isolated habitat for 30 days. Why? Science!

2016 Feb 1, 3:27

nasa:

This 30 day mission will help our researchers learn how isolation and close quarters affect individual and group behavior. This study at our Johnson Space Center prepares us for long duration space missions, like a trip to an asteroid or even to Mars.

image

The Human Research Exploration Analog (HERA) that the crew members will be living in is one compact, science-making house. But unlike in a normal house, these inhabitants won’t go outside for 30 days. Their communication with the rest of planet Earth will also be very limited, and they won’t have any access to internet. So no checking social media kids!

The only people they will talk with regularly are mission control and each other.

image

The crew member selection process is based on a number of criteria, including the same criteria for astronaut selection.

What will they be doing?

Because this mission simulates a 715-day journey to a Near-Earth asteroid, the four crew members will complete activities similar to what would happen during an outbound transit, on location at the asteroid, and the return transit phases of a mission (just in a bit of an accelerated timeframe). This simulation means that even when communicating with mission control, there will be a delay on all communications ranging from 1 to 10 minutes each way. The crew will also perform virtual spacewalk missions once they reach their destination, where they will inspect the asteroid and collect samples from it. 

A few other details:

  • The crew follows a timeline that is similar to one used for the ISS crew.
  • They work 16 hours a day, Monday through Friday. This includes time for daily planning, conferences, meals and exercises.  
  • They will be growing and taking care of plants and brine shrimp, which they will analyze and document.

But beware! While we do all we can to avoid crises during missions, crews need to be able to respond in the event of an emergency. The HERA crew will conduct a couple of emergency scenario simulations, including one that will require them to maneuver through a debris field during the Earth-bound phase of the mission. 

image

Throughout the mission, researchers will gather information about cohabitation, teamwork, team cohesion, mood, performance and overall well-being. The crew members will be tracked by numerous devices that each capture different types of data.

image

Past HERA crew members wore a sensor that recorded heart rate, distance, motion and sound intensity. When crew members were working together, the sensor would also record their proximity as well, helping investigators learn about team cohesion.

Researchers also learned about how crew members react to stress by recording and analyzing verbal interactions and by analyzing “markers” in blood and saliva samples.

image

In total, this mission will include 19 individual investigations across key human research elements. From psychological to physiological experiments, the crew members will help prepare us for future missions.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

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4 people are living in an isolated habitat for 30 days. Why? Science!

2016 Feb 1, 3:27

nasa:

This 30 day mission will help our researchers learn how isolation and close quarters affect individual and group behavior. This study at our Johnson Space Center prepares us for long duration space missions, like a trip to an asteroid or even to Mars.

image

The Human Research Exploration Analog (HERA) that the crew members will be living in is one compact, science-making house. But unlike in a normal house, these inhabitants won’t go outside for 30 days. Their communication with the rest of planet Earth will also be very limited, and they won’t have any access to internet. So no checking social media kids!

The only people they will talk with regularly are mission control and each other.

image

The crew member selection process is based on a number of criteria, including the same criteria for astronaut selection.

What will they be doing?

Because this mission simulates a 715-day journey to a Near-Earth asteroid, the four crew members will complete activities similar to what would happen during an outbound transit, on location at the asteroid, and the return transit phases of a mission (just in a bit of an accelerated timeframe). This simulation means that even when communicating with mission control, there will be a delay on all communications ranging from 1 to 10 minutes each way. The crew will also perform virtual spacewalk missions once they reach their destination, where they will inspect the asteroid and collect samples from it. 

A few other details:

  • The crew follows a timeline that is similar to one used for the ISS crew.
  • They work 16 hours a day, Monday through Friday. This includes time for daily planning, conferences, meals and exercises.  
  • They will be growing and taking care of plants and brine shrimp, which they will analyze and document.

But beware! While we do all we can to avoid crises during missions, crews need to be able to respond in the event of an emergency. The HERA crew will conduct a couple of emergency scenario simulations, including one that will require them to maneuver through a debris field during the Earth-bound phase of the mission. 

image

Throughout the mission, researchers will gather information about cohabitation, teamwork, team cohesion, mood, performance and overall well-being. The crew members will be tracked by numerous devices that each capture different types of data.

image

Past HERA crew members wore a sensor that recorded heart rate, distance, motion and sound intensity. When crew members were working together, the sensor would also record their proximity as well, helping investigators learn about team cohesion.

Researchers also learned about how crew members react to stress by recording and analyzing verbal interactions and by analyzing “markers” in blood and saliva samples.

image

In total, this mission will include 19 individual investigations across key human research elements. From psychological to physiological experiments, the crew members will help prepare us for future missions.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

PermalinkComments

mostlysignssomeportents: More than 90% of Americans believe...

2014 Jun 7, 9:55


mostlysignssomeportents:

More than 90% of Americans believe that the US government is unduly influenced by money, and the Mayday.US super PAC is raising $5M to fund the election campaigns of politicians who’ll pledge to dismantle super PACs and enact other campaign finance reforms. They raised more than $1M in 30 days last month, and this month, the goal is $5M. It’s the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, who’s going to run prototype the project by running five electoral campaigns in 2014, and use the lessons of those projects to win enough anti-corruption seats in 2016 to effect real change.

Again, I’m not able to contribute to Mayday.US, because I’m a Canadian and Briton. But I ask my American friends to put in $10, and promise that I’ll put CAD1000 into any comparable Canadian effort and/or £1000 into a comparable UK effort. We all win when countries embrace evidence-based policy guided by doing what’s best for its citizens, rather than lining the pockets of corrupting multinationals.

Mayday.US

Please reblog!

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Shout Text Windows 8 App Development Notes

2013 Jun 27, 1:00

My first app for Windows 8 was Shout Text. You type into Shout Text, and your text is scaled up as large as possible while still fitting on the screen, as you type. It is the closest thing to a Hello World app as you'll find on the Windows Store that doesn't contain that phrase (by default) and I approached it as the simplest app I could make to learn about Windows modern app development and Windows Store app submission.

I rely on WinJS's default layout to use CSS transforms to scale up the user's text as they type. And they are typing into a simple content editable div.

The app was too simple for me to even consider using ads or charging for it which I learned more about in future apps.

The first interesting issue I ran into was that copying from and then pasting into the content editable div resulted in duplicates of the containing div with copied CSS appearing recursively inside of the content editable div. To fix this I had to catch the paste operation and remove the HTML data from the clipboard to ensure only the plain text data is pasted:

        function onPaste() {
var text;

if (window.clipboardData) {
text = window.clipboardData.getData("Text").toString();
window.clipboardData.clearData("Html");
window.clipboardData.setData("Text", util.normalizeContentEditableText(text));
}
}
shoutText.addEventListener("beforepaste", function () { return false; }, false);
shoutText.addEventListener("paste", onPaste, false);

I additionally found an issue in IE in which applying a CSS transform to a content editable div that has focus doesn't move the screen position of the user input caret - the text is scaled up or down but the caret remains the same size and in the same place on the screen. To fix this I made the following hack to reapply the current cursor position and text selection which resets the screen position of the user input caret.

        function resetCaret() {
setTimeout(function () {
var cursorPos = document.selection.createRange().duplicate();
cursorPos.select();
}, 200);
}

shoutText.attachEvent("onresize", function () { resetCaret(); }, true);
PermalinkCommentsdevelopment html javascript shout-text technical windows windows-store

thebluthcompany: Hey, guys, remember this? Please don’t forget...

2012 Nov 7, 6:06




thebluthcompany:

Hey, guys, remember this?

Please don’t forget to go out and vote! Find you polling place here.


Voting complete. Now we get more Arrested Development.

PermalinkCommentshumor vote election obama arrested-development

Natural Selection

2012 Sep 6, 6:45

Classic 2d space shooter except you are fighting the ghosts of previous players. Your play through is replayed as an enemy against future players. Also, written in HTML/JS

PermalinkCommentsgame video-game neat html justin-rogers

RFC 3797 - Publicly Verifiable Nominations Committee (NomCom) Random Selection

2010 Dec 13, 11:12Used to generate publicly verifiable random numbers. For instance to pick 'xn--' for the IDN prefix from a set of prefixes, they decided on a hash, a set of stocks and a time in the future to generate the hash from the stock values. The resulting value is random and anyone can check the work to verify that it was chosen randomly.


Although, now looking back from the future I can't verify that they didn't generate this data after the stock quotes came out. And they're using MD5...PermalinkCommentsrfc algorithm random election ietf technical

Completion of IANA Selection of IDNA Prefix

2010 Dec 8, 6:44Description of how they picked 'xn--' as the ACE prefix for IDN. Shockingly elaborate =)PermalinkCommentsidn technical ace encoding unicode rfc ietf

Amazon Kindle: Most Highlighted Passages of All Time

2010 May 3, 7:27Amazon has the most highlighted passages of Kindle users. Of course Dan Brown is all over that. But in 94th place of most highlighted is a passage from the 'Kindle Shortcuts' book on how to highlight passages: "Go to top Notes and Clippings (Kindle 2) To create a highlight: use the 5-way controller to highlight the content you want to clip and then press the 5-way to save your selection... Highlighted by 319 Kindle users"PermalinkCommentshumor highlight amazon kindle technical meta

Boing Boing - Essentials

2010 Mar 11, 7:36Boing Boing recommends I buy things. Probably a good selection of odd or geeky gifts.PermalinkCommentsboingboing amazon gift purchase wishlist

Fun With the Minneapolis Mayoral Race - Boing Boing

2009 Nov 3, 5:02The sample ballot for Minneapolis elections is awesome (see second to last entry)PermalinkCommentshumor politics image

Dive Into HTML 5 by Mark Pilgrim with illustrations from the Public Domain

2009 Aug 21, 3:26"Dive Into HTML 5 seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of features from the HTML 5 specification and other fine Standards. I shall publish Drafts periodically, as time permits." Lovely design.PermalinkCommentsvia:waxy reference programming howto design html5 typography mark-pilgrim html web development technical

Creating Accelerators for Other People's Web Services

2009 Aug 18, 4:19

Before we shipped IE8 there were no Accelerators, so we had some fun making our own for our favorite web services. I've got a small set of tips for creating Accelerators for other people's web services. I was planning on writing this up as an IE blog post, but Jon wrote a post covering a similar area so rather than write a full and coherent blog post I'll just list a few points:

PermalinkCommentstechnical accelerator ie8 ie

W3C File Upload API

2009 Jul 27, 5:34"This specification provides an API used to prompt the user with a file selection dialogue and obtain the data contained in files on the user's file system."PermalinkCommentsweb w3c api upload script dom technical

Outline View Internet Explorer Extension

2009 Mar 23, 8:13

I've made another extension for IE8, Outline View, which gives you a side bar in IE that displays an outline of the current page and lets you make intrapage bookmarks.

The outline is generated based on the heading tags in the document (e.g. h1, h2, etc), kind of like what W3C's Semantic data extractor tool displays for an outline. So if the page doesn't use heading tags the way the HTML spec intended or just sticks img tags in them, then the outline doesn't look so hot. On a page that does use headings as intended though it looks really good. For instance a section from the HTML 4 spec shows up quite nicely and I find its actually useful to be able to jump around to the different sections. Actually, I've been surprised going to various blogs how well the outline view is actually working -- I thought a lot more webdevs would be abusing their heading tags.

I've also added intrapage bookmarks. When you make a text selection and clear it, that selected text is added as a temporary intrapage bookmark which shows up in the correct place in the outline. You can navigate to the bookmark or right click to make it permanent. Right now I'm storing the permanent intrapage bookmarks in IE8's new per-domain DOM storage because I wanted to avoid writing code to synchronize a cross process store of bookmarks, it allowed me to play with the DOM storage a bit, and the bookmarks will get cleared appropriately when the user clears their history via the control panel.

PermalinkCommentstechnical intrapage bookmark boring html ie8 ie extension

PolitiFact | The Obameter: Tracking Barack Obama's Campaign Promises

2009 Jan 24, 2:42"PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken."PermalinkCommentspolitics news government obama election president tracking

I Voted

2008 Nov 9, 11:18

I Voted 2008 - Farewell to Polls by RedRaspusThis past Tuesday I voted in my first presidential election. Of course I was eligible twice before so don't tell my social studies teacher. I read about folks who stood in line for twelve hours waiting to vote but I personally had no issues. I found the voting location around 10am and it seemed appropriately busy: There were people voting but no lines. I came in and looked confused until an elderly lady gave me a paper to bubble in. The voting booth was more like a fold out voting table at a very awkward height and in the end my back ached. It feels better to vote in person and have a back ache after. Its more like I've accomplished something.

PermalinkCommentspersonal voting

2008 Election Maps

2008 Nov 6, 6:24Comparison of various website's US presidential election maps: "Most media outlets covering the 2008 US Presidential Election used the familar red/blue map to track the progress of the race as results from the polls rolled in Tueday evening. Here are several of those maps, in some ways as similar to each other as they are varied."PermalinkCommentsmap visualization geography president election vote voting politics

Candy Vote

2008 Nov 4, 1:33Kid dresses up as voting booth for Halloween collecting candy as votes in either a McCain or Obama bag and tallies the results on CandyVote.com: "Welcome to CandyVote.com - The results are in!"PermalinkCommentshumor video politics election obama mccain voting halloween costume
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