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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Guardian - Secrets, lies and Snowden’s email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit
"For the first time, the founder of an encrypted email startup that was supposed to insure privacy for all reveals how the FBI and the US legal system made sure we don’t have the right to much
privacy in the first place"
2010 Dec 6, 12:17Ye olde DoS: "The Berners Street Hoax was perpetrated by Theodore Hook in the City of Westminster, London, in 1809. Hook had made a bet with his friend, Samuel Beazley, that he could transform any
house in London into the most talked-about address in a week, which he achieved by sending out thousands of letters in the name of Mrs Tottenham, who lived at 54 Berners Street, requesting
deliveries, visitors, and assistance."humorhistoryprank
I built timestamp.exe, a Windows command line tool to convert between computer and human readable date/time formats
mostly for working on the first run wizard for IE8. We commonly write out our dates in binary form to the registry and in order to test and debug my work it became useful to be able to determine to
what date the binary value of a FILETIME or SYSTEMTIME corresponded or to produce my own binary value of a FILETIME and insert it into the registry.
For instance, to convert to a binary value:
[PS C:\] timestamp -inString 2009/08/28:10:18 -outHexValue -convert filetime
2009/08/28:10:18 as FILETIME: 00 7c c8 d1 c8 27 ca 01
Converting in the other direction, if you don't know what format the bytes are in, just feed them in and timestamp will try all conversions and list only the valid ones:
[PS C:\] timestamp -inHexValue "40 52 1c 3b"
40 52 1c 3b as FILETIME: 1601-01-01:00:01:39.171
40 52 1c 3b as Unix Time: 2001-06-05:03:30:08.000
40 52 1c 3b as DOS Time: 2009-08-28:10:18:00.000
(it also supports OLE Dates, and SYSTEMTIME which aren't listed there because the hex value isn't valid for those types). Or use the guess
option to get timestamp's best guess:
[PS C:\] timestamp -inHexValue "40 52 1c 3b" -convert guess
40 52 1c 3b as DOS Time: 2009-08-28:10:18:00.000
When I first wrote this I had a bug in my function that parses the date-time value string in which I could parse 2009-07-02:10:18 just fine, but I wouldn't be able to parse 2009-09-02:10:18
correctly. This was my code:
2009 Jun 19, 3:27You must wonder if Bruce Schneier is having trouble selling his laptop just because he's Bruce Schneier and he announced his sale on his blog. I thought his description was funny though: "But I still
want to sell the computer, and I am pissed off at what is essentially a denial-of-service attack." A scam or attack to you or me is at worst a DoS to Bruce Schneier.bruce-schneierebayfraudsecuritydos
2009 Jan 12, 12:48Results of a FOIA request for the DHS travel records: "I had been curious about what's in my travel dossier, so I made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for a copy. I'm posting here a few
sample pages of what officials sent me."foiasecurityairplaneairportprivacygovernmentinformation
2008 Sep 3, 6:15"National University of Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab is fast becoming my favorite in cutting edge (and a little wacky - okay, a lot) research. Take, for instance, this project titled Poultry
Internet, where a chicken is outfitted with a special dress that lets its owner pet it over the Internet." Johnny Cat writes: "Kudos to Gonzo for inventing this." I can't get to the actual site with
the info on the project but it is available on the Wayback Machine.chickenhumorinternetvirtual-realitymixed-reality
Information about URI Fragments, the portion
of URIs that follow the '#' at the end and that are used to navigate within a document, is scattered throughout various documents which I usually have to hunt down. Instead I'll link to them all
here.
Definitions. Fragments are defined in the URI RFC which states that they're used to identify a secondary resource that is related
to the primary resource identified by the URI as a subset of the primary, a view of the primary, or some other resource described by the primary. The interpretation of a fragment is based on the
mime type of the primary resource. Tim Berners-Lee notes that determining fragment meaning from mime type is a problem because a
single URI may contain a single fragment, however over HTTP a single URI can result in the same logical resource represented in different mime types. So there's one fragment but multiple mime types
and so multiple interpretations of the one fragment. The URI RFC says that if an author has a single resource available in multiple mime types then the author must ensure that the various
representations of a single resource must all resolve fragments to the same logical secondary resource. Depending on which mime types you're dealing with this is either not easy or not possible.
HTTP. In HTTP when URIs are used, the fragment is not included. The General Syntax section of the HTTP standard says it uses
the definitions of 'URI-reference' (which includes the fragment), 'absoluteURI', and 'relativeURI' (which don't include the fragment) from the URI RFC. However, the 'URI-reference' term doesn't
actually appear in the BNF for the protocol. Accordingly the headers like 'Request-URI', 'Content-Location', 'Location', and 'Referer' which include URIs are defined with 'absoluteURI' or 'relativeURI' and don't include the fragment. This is in keeping with the
original fragment definition which says that the fragment is used as a view of the original resource and consequently only needed for resolution on the client. Additionally, the URI RFC explicitly
notes that not including the fragment is a privacy feature such that page authors won't be able to stop clients from viewing whatever
fragments the client chooses. This seems like an odd claim given that if the author wanted to selectively restrict access to portions of documents there are other options for them like breaking out
the parts of a single resource to which the author wishes to restrict access into separate resources.
HTML. In HTML, the HTML mime type RFC defines HTML's fragment use which consists of fragments referring to elements with a
corresponding 'id' attribute or one of a particular set of elements with a corresponding 'name' attribute. The HTML spec discusses fragment use additionally noting that the names and ids must be unique in the document and that
they must consist of only US-ASCII characters. The ID and NAME attributes are further restricted in section 6 to only
consist of alphanumerics, the hyphen, period, colon, and underscore. This is a subset of the characters allowed in the URI fragment so no encoding is discussed since technically its not needed.
However, practically speaking, browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer allow for names and ids containing characters outside of the defined set including characters that must be percent-encoded
to appear in a URI fragment. The interpretation of percent-encoded characters in fragments for HTML documents is not consistent across browsers (or in some cases within the same browser) especially
for the percent-encoded percent.
Text. Text/plain recently got a fragment definition that allows fragments to refer to particular lines or characters within a text document.
The scheme no longer includes regular expressions, which disappointed me at first, but in retrospect is probably
good idea for increasing the adoption of this fragment scheme and for avoiding the potential for ubiquitous DoS via regex. One of the authors
also notes this on his blog. I look forward to the day when this scheme is widely implemented.
XML. XML has the XPointer framework to define its fragment structure as noted by the XML mime type definition. XPointer consists of a general scheme that contains subschemes that identify a subset of an XML document. Its too bad
such a thing wasn't adopted for URI fragments in general to solve the problem of a single resource with multiple mime type representations. I wrote more about XPointer when I worked on hacking XPointer into IE.
AJAX. AJAX websites have used fragments as an escape hatch for two issues that I've seen. The first is getting a unique URL for versions of a
page that are produced on the client by script. The fragment may be changed by script without forcing the page to reload. This goes outside the rules of the standards by using HTML fragments in
a fashion not called out by the HTML spec. but it does seem to be inline with the spirit of the fragment in that it is a subview of the original resource and interpretted client side. The other
hack-ier use of the fragment in AJAX is for cross domain communication. The basic idea is that different
frames or windows may not communicate in normal fashions if they have different domains but they can view each other's URLs and accordingly can change their own fragments in order to send a message
out to those who know where to look. IMO this is not inline with the spirit of the fragment but is rather a cool hack.
2008 Mar 28, 10:35Scott A Crosby and Dan S Wallach "present a new class of low-bandwidth denial of service attacks that exploit algorithmic deficiencies in many common applications' data structures." DoS via worst
case behavior in hash tables and exponential time RegExp'sscott-crosbydan-wallachdosprogrammingregexresearchsecurityhash
2007 Oct 29, 1:48FTA: "Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor who writes the Bad Science column in the Guardian, examining the claims of scaremongering journalists, quack remedy peddlers, pseudoscientific cosmetics
adverts, and evil multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Thmonthlyblogsciencepoliticsreligionmedianewshealthyresearchhumor
2007 May 5, 10:05Carissa and Elijah are married! Sarah and I flew to Oakland the Friday of two weeks
previous (April 27th) into the Oakland Airport. We were on the same flight as Jon which was fun but we weren't seated with him. Instead I was seated between Sarah and a middle aged lady who enjoyed
talking to herself. It seemed a bonus if others such as myself listened but not a prerequisite for her speaking.
Sarah and I rented a car and we drove Jon first to Hayward where he was staying then we drove to our hotel in Dublin. The car we got turned out to be a PT Cruiser which was a
surprise of course but actually wasn't that bad. The power windows are controlled by the center console rather than by a switch near the windows themselves which led to several embarrassing seconds
when we later tried to pay the toll for the Bay Bridge.
The next day we went to Carissa's wedding which was lovely. In a small church with white roses Carissa's mom married Carissa and Elijah.
Afterward we went to the reception at the Senior Center. "Senior Center" may conjure up images of rolley charis that smell like old people but it wasn't like that at all. It appears to be a community
center funded by the Senior Condos next door so it was very nice.
Carissa is the first of the college roommates to get married! I guess I'm just having trouble imagining any of us getting married...weddingfriendpersonalcalifornianontechnical