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.
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.
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);
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
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...rfcalgorithmrandomelectionietftechnical
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"humorhighlightamazonkindletechnicalmeta
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:
The first thing to try is looking for developer help for the web service, specifically if there's a REST-ful URL based API. For example, Bing Maps has great URL API documentation that would be enough to
create an Accelerator.
The Accelerator XML is very similar to HTML forms. If you can find an HTML form for the web service for which you want to create an Accelerator, you can view the HTML source and create an
Accelerator based on that.
I created the FormToAccelerator extension based on the previous idea. You can
use the extension to create an Accelerator from an HTML form, or just use it to create the start of one and edit it manually after.
If the page doesn't use an HTML form, you can start up an HTTP debugger like Fiddler, use the web service from the normal web
page, and then in Fiddler see if you can find a REST-ful looking URL you can use.
When looking to create a preview for your Accelerator, see if the web page for the web service has a mobile version or a version that's intended to embed in other web pages via an iframe. On
this same line, iPhone apps make great Accelerators usually with lovely previews.
If there's no mobile or embeddable version and the only thing wrong with the normal web page for the web service is that the useful information doesn't fit in the preview window then see if you
can find an HTML tag with a name or id near the useful information, and stick a '#' fragment pointing to that tag onto the preview URL template.
Without a reasonable REST-ful API you can use a combination of Google's "site:" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" to find the most relevant page on a particular site.
The value of a name and value pair need not consist of only a single Accelerator variable. You can get creative and put other text in there. For instance, I implemented a Google currency conversion by setting the query to "{selection} in US Dollars".
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."webw3capiuploadscriptdomtechnical
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.
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."politicsnewsgovernmentobamaelectionpresidenttracking
This 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.
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."mapvisualizationgeographypresidentelectionvotevotingpolitics
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!"humorvideopoliticselectionobamamccainvotinghalloweencostume
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.
This 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.
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