As part of my studies at the University of Regina, I have enrolled in a special capstone project where I will be working with Undergraduate and Graduate students from around the world on an open-source project called "Freeseer" [pronouced Free-See-R] which is used to record conferences using very simple equipment.
For the next semester, this blog will be used for that course.
Up until now, my all time favorite piece was written back in 1997 for my History of Science class when I wrote about the history of the barber-surgeons and how they fixed a delicate problem for the King Of France. This piece is now my favorite and is dedicated to the wonderful people at the South Saskatchewan Independent Living Centre.
Back in May of 2012 my daughter, Elizabeth, ended up injuring both ankles badly enough that she could not walk a step; she would require the use of a wheelchair. Since we didn’t know how long she would need it, we decided to purchase a second hand manual wheelchair for about eighty dollars. She is now recovered, and the wheelchair had been sitting unused in the storage room in our house for a few months. Her experiences in the chair gave her a personal appreciation for the accomplishments of the disabled along with the struggles, both physical and social, they face on a daily basis. In November of 2012, I decided as a personal challenge to spend two days as a paraplegic and get a sense of the realities of life in a wheelchair.
While I could talk in depth about how difficult it is as a big fat guy to propel myself using the handrims, and how my arms were quickly exhausted from the effort, I will not, because that is an issue that is quickly solved with exercise and practice. By the end of the day, I was getting better. Given time, the apparent effort needed for self-propulsion in a wheelchair would be no different than the normal effort needed for walking. I’m out of shape, the wheelchair simply pointed that fact out to me in a roundabout way. Despite my inexperience in a wheelchair, I was still able to notice a few challenges that people in wheelchairs face on a daily basis.
The first thing I really noticed about moving around in a wheelchair is that Saskatchewan is not as flat as it appears. Since I am not allowed to use my daughter’s handicapped parking permit, and I wouldn’t use it myself even if I could, I parked in my normal spot in Lot 17 at the University of Regina, a gravel parking lot that normally leaves me with an easy ten minute mosey over to class, over what appears to be flat terrain. Even when sleepy after a long night working on my Computer Science projects, I can still walk in a straight line to class and avoid walking on the grass or running into light poles.
There is no such thing as flat when you are in a wheelchair. Downhill is easy, right? Point the chair in the direction you want to go and coast to the bottom, keeping your hands close to the handrims so you can apply the brakes when needed. Um, no. While speeding downhill in a wheelchair, you will discover the sideways slant that pulls the chair to one side, forcing the front off the sidewalk and tipping the chair over, throwing you into the grass. Properly aiming the chair is much like putting in golf. On the golf green, if you aim the ball directly at the hole, you will miss. Instead, you have to read the break of the green and aim the ball uphill from the hole so that gravity does the rest, dropping the ball in the center of the hole. In a chair, if you only aim at where you walk to go, you will either end up in the ditch or you will have to keep readjusting your aim, wasting a lot of energy in the process. If I drove like I move about in a wheelchair, I would end up with a DUI.
When walking, do you slow down when walking through an open door? If you are like me, one moment you are in the Archer Library Building, the next moment you are in the AdHum building without realizing you walked through a doorway. A closed door isn’t even much of an obstacle to a fully bipedal human, open the door with one hand, hold it open for the person behind you and keep on walking. I can even do that, drink from my water bottle, and respond to a text message without slowing down at all.
This does not happen in the wheelchair. Even an open door is an obstacle, as the width of most door frames is just a bit bigger than the width of the wheelchair. The process of going through an open door isn’t too bad, but you have to make sure the chair is lined up directly through the center of the doorframe, and that your hands won’t get pinched between the frame and the handrims as you slowly push your way through the door. Another way is to just grab the door with one hand, the frame with your other, and pull your way through.
Closed doors can have a huge effect on the accessibility of the building, especially in some corners of the University. If you are lucky, there will be an automatic door opening button, and it will be on the same side of the hall as the door it opens. Others, like the one connecting the Archer Library to the Residences, have the door button on the right, but the door on the left is the one that opens. This means you have to travel right to push the button, reverse in traffic, line up the chair properly, and pass through the door as it shuts behind you trying to catch your rear wheel. If the button is instead beside the door, it’s a simple matter to line up the chair to the door, push the button, and go through. Why can’t they all be like that?
Worst of all is a closed door that does not have a button to open it. If it is your classroom door, your best bet is to simply thank your classmate for opening and holding the door for you. However, if you are alone in the CS lab, trying to find and fix the annoying bug in your code after everyone has left, you will have to open the door yourself. This is a process that involves setting your brake, turning the doorknob, push (or pull) the door, and use the chair to keep it open while you pull yourself through the door frame. Good luck sipping a drink and texting while doing this.
Carrying a drink and your lunch is not easy in the chair. For someone able to walk ordering a drink and a meal is simple. Order, pay, grab your drink, find a table, sit down, wait for your number to be called, walk to the bar, grab your food, return to your table, and eat. Easy. However, in the wheelchair, how do you carry a glass filled with your beverage of choice with one hand, and propel the chair with the other? It’s not easy. A real paraplegic likely wouldn’t be able to hold the drink between their legs. Even if I cheated and used my thighs to hold the glass, it would likely spill as I made my way to the table. My only real option was to hold the drink with one hand and propel myself with the other hand, and switch hands every push of the chair. This is not very efficient, but it does work. It is easier to simply place the food platter in your lap to move to your table, but anything bigger, like a bag of groceries, and you will begin to have a much more difficult time.
After eating and drinking, the next step is to visit the washroom. Normally this function is completely automatic. You walk in, do your business, wash up, and walk out. Able bodied people do not rate washrooms on their degree of difficulty to get in and use. Unfortunately for those in wheelchairs, not all washrooms are accessible. It takes more than just a wider stall; just like a door, you must also be able to line up the chair to the entrance. Inside the stall, you have to spin the chair 180 degrees, and reverse to the toilet in order to transfer over. I still have not figured out how true paraplegics lower their pants in order to use the toilet. To be honest, once I got the chair over to the toilet, I cheated. After finishing up, there was another problem: I could not reach the soap dispenser, and it was quite the stretch to reach the sink to let the motion sensors activate the water taps. Again I had to cheat, either because the sink area was inaccessible or I was just too inexperienced to figure out how to do it.
The most surprising aspect of working with a wheelchair is that surfaces matter. Hard, smooth surfaces are best. A soft carpeted surface makes it seem like you are wheeling uphill due to the excessive friction between the carpet and the wheels. You have to continue to push the handrims to move; if you stop, so will the chair. Decorative surfaces, like in the Education and Kinesiology Centre, that may look hard still rub against the wheels, slowing them down, making every meter a hard push. The plain linoleum in the Classroom building is the best surface I found for using the wheelchair; I was actually able to glide a bit through the hallways and rest my aching hands a bit. The worst surface is a frosty sidewalk. The light dusting of snow and frost takes away all traction from the wheels preventing almost all movement. You can spin the wheel as much as you want, but the chair only moves a few centimeters at a time. It was so bad, that I actually had to abandon my simulation and walk the chair back to my van. Very few people would notice a difference in the effort needed to walk across these surfaces, but in a chair you notice every change; not all of them are good.
I finished my two days as a paraplegic exhausted, sore, but incredibly thankful for the experience. Two days after finishing the experiment, my hands are rubbed raw with small blisters on the fingers, and the muscles in my wrists, forearms, and pectoral region are still stiff and sore from the unexpected workout. My experiences with the wheelchair have alerted me to the more subtle issues that make it more difficult for people in wheelchairs to move about and take care of daily living. Prior to my daughter or myself being in the chair, I believed that the only consideration for wheelchair accessibility would be extra maneuvering space and alternatives to stairs. Wider bathroom stalls, wider aisles in classrooms, and ramps or elevators to deal with elevation changes. Spending two days in the chair has opened my eyes to the subtle challenges that face the users of wheelchairs and other mobility aids. When others complain of the cost of making modifications to make building more accessible, my response is simple:
“What if it was you who couldn’t use the washroom in this building?”
The second of my ENGL 251 essays, this one draws its inspiration from my aborted career as a classroom teacher. Written as an example of "Exemplification" the assignment was to provide examples to prove your thesis.
One of the biggest problems with the Canadian education system today is the self-esteem movement. Starting in the 1980s, teachers were told that in order for students to achieve, they had to have good self-esteem. The consensus was that failing or disciplining a student damages their self esteem, leading to lower levels of achievement in school. The problem with this concept is faulty causality; students with good self esteem do not achieve. It is the other way around. Students who do well develop their own sense of self esteem, and more importantly, develop a sense of personal responsibility in their lives that allows them to achieve on their own. Canadian schools have failed in their duty to teach this basic concept and are doing long term damage to our students, in order to avoid short term pain.
I developed my own sense of responsibility in Grade 5, shortly after moving to a new school. I told my new teacher, Mrs. Clements, that I didn’t have to study for the science test the next day. She said nothing. She knew there was nothing she could say to make me take my science text home to study; instead she handed me all the rope I would need to hang myself. I had always taken pride in my marks so scoring a 35% on that test was an important bruise to my ego. Over time I took homework and test preparation much more seriously than I did before. Later, I would graduate, with distinction, from the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Education.
Schools no longer want to “damage” students by failing them. My wife required parental permission to fail any student. That permission was never given. Unfortunately for these struggling students, each school year builds upon the concepts taught the previous year. In some cases, like Mathematics, this makes it even more difficult to keep up. By the time these students get to high school, where social promotion is no longer an option, many of them find themselves so far behind, they cannot catch up.
The results of this misguided policy were found in the Mathematics 30 classes I taught in the Northwest Territories and northern Alberta. A typical Math 30 question would be “Solve for x in 7 log10 (5x) = 28”. The problem solution is relatively simple; only one step requires any skills that are new to a student taking Math 30. The step by step solution is below:
7 log10 (5x) = 28 // Divide both sides by 7 (basic algebra) log10 (5x) = 4 // New in Math 30: Rearrange to remove the log 104 = 5x // Grade 5 calculation: 104 = 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 10000 10000 = 5x // Again basic algebra, divide both sides by 5 to isolate x x = 2000 // Final answer
Very few of my students were able to do this relatively simple question correctly. Not because I was unable to teach logarithms, but because they could not handle Grade 7 algebra, or in a few cases even Grade 3 division was too challenging. Why are Canadian students unable to master basic concepts in earlier grades? It is because they do not study for exams or do their homework as there have never been any consequence for failing. From the time they are in Grade 1 until the end of Grade 9, students today know they won’t be left behind. Teachers need to ability to ensure that students do not move on to the next grade unless they have proven mastery of the material they were given this year.
Unfortunately, classroom teachers no longer have the power to teach life skills such as personal responsibility in meeting deadlines. Lynden Dorval, a high school physics teacher in Edmonton, was initially suspended for giving students who had not completed an assignment a grade of 0 in violation of school and district policies. Without the threat of a zero on an assignment or an exam, Mr Dorval reasoned that students have no incentive to complete the work as assigned. They are not held accountable for their actions. Despite support from parents, colleagues, and even his own students, Mr Dorval was eventually fired by the Edmonton Public School Board.
Canadian students do not benefit long term when schools cater to their short term self-esteem at the expense of helping students develop the skills they need to take responsibility for their own learning and behaviour. Students who are struggling with the material do require extra help from their teachers and parents, and should receive it. Extra help should not include “doing their homework for them” or passing them off to another grade to become “someone else’s problem.” Such methods do not allow students to develop any sense of accomplishment.
Their self confidence can be developed in programs, such as at Cochrane High School, where students like “Steve” often begin their apprenticeship training in one of the trades. After struggling for years in the regular classroom environment, Steve blossomed in carpentry as he learned how to frame and build houses. Experiencing success for the first time in carpentry, he applied his new found confidence in his academic classes, finishing High School with honours and a clear path to success in the trades.
Twelve years after I failed that Science test, I ran into Mrs Clements at a teachers’ rally at the Alberta Legislature. I thanked her for letting me fail when she was still in a position to help me pick myself up. No amount of grade inflation would have assisted me over my lifetime than that single moment when I had to face the consequences of my poor choice not to study. At the time, I called her the meanest teacher I ever had. But now, twenty-five years later, because she showed me the value of failure, she is the best and most influential teacher I have ever had.
This article is my Descriptive/Narrative essay assignment for my ENGL 251 class at the University of Regina. It is mostly true, with some necessary "embellishment" needed to make it a good story. When people ask me why I don't drink any alcohol, this is the reason:
“He’s vomiting again!”
“Eighteen year old male -”
“Bed 16! Stat! Crash Cart ready.”
“Uuuuuuhhrhhrrrraaaah”
“Cyanotic, breaths shallow, slow and irregular -”
“How much did he drink?"
“Body temp 32, with seizures -
“Can I have a squirrel?”
“Lethargic and confused.”
"Only one glass. He didn't even finish it."
“BAC point three four!”
"Seriously! Look! I’m trying to save his life. How much did he drink?"
"I told you. Not even -"
"God dammit! Don't lie to me you idiot! How much did he drink?"
“I’ll name him Harvey. Harvey’s a good name.”
"One glass."
"You can't tell me he only had one glass, more like twelve. How many?"
"Code blue!”
It’s a miracle I survived. Emergency Room doctors and nurses get to see this more often than they want to. New adults stumble into the ER, their clothes and bodies covered from head to shoe top in the aftermath of the explosion at the vomitus factory. If they are lucky, they are still awake, not yet having fallen into a coma after their body temperature has plunged into hypothermia, while their skin has turned a deathly blue as respiration slows to a stop, and the hypoglycemic seizures twist their body into pretzels . It’s just a matter of time before the brain finally succumbs to the toxic chemicals they have freely forced into the bloodstream.
The strangest part about my near death experience is that it should never have happened. It simply wasn’t possible that three quarters of a glass of severely over ripe grape juice did all the damage that it did. After all, I had just turned the magic age of 18; according to the ritual, I should have been downing shot after shot of whatever the bikini-clad waitresses were pushing, as if my chances of scoring with them increased after every glass. Then, after striking out at the bar, my next step should have been to stumble back home, pass out on the couch, and wake up with a pounding headache and spend the morning with my face no further than three millimeters from the water in the toilet. This is called “having a good time.”
“Finally!” exclaimed Fatima as the study group completed eight weeks of research, observation, and writing about mathematics education in elementary schools.
Vanessa grabbed the pages from the printer and exclaimed, “Beer time!”
“I’ll drive.”
“No, Lloyd. You drove last time. Enjoy yourself this time,”
I replied, “It’s not a problem, really. I can’t drink anyway. I’ll drive."
A small smile came to Fatima’s face. “My uncle’s a Friend of Bill W. Twenty years next month.”
“That’s quite an accomplishment. Congratulations to him.”
“How long have you been a Friend?”
“I’m not, but I appreciate his work.”
I did eventually learn what had happened to me on my eighteenth birthday. When alcohol enters the liver, the enzyme Alcohol Dehydrogenase goes medieval on alcohol’s reactive hydroxyl group, replacing a deadly poison with a slightly less poisonous aldehyde. That’s the theory, but my body doesn’t work that way, never has. It cannot grab the slippery alcohol molecule long enough to remove a single hydrogen atom. You would have more success asking a paraplegic to stand up and beat Usain Bolt in the 100 meters.
In most humans, the liver is able to process about 90 - 95% of the alcohol you ingest before it reaches the brain and starts killing off useful brain cells. The rest of the alcohol is slowly excreted through your breath and urine. Since my liver cannot process any of the alcohol before it reaches my brain, the effect of drinking a single glass of wine is the same as four entire bottles for most other people. I zoom past tipsy without even looking, hit and run over drunk, and crash directly into “I’ve forgotten how to breathe properly”. Because I cannot drink any alcohol, I am often mistaken by others as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
One August long weekend, we were driving to my in-laws to spend the weekend. I was having those coughing fits that make you curl up into a the fetal position. The force of the spasmodic coughs squeezed my stomach in a space the size of a shot glass, which has the natural side effect of making one heave, retch, and cough some more. Arriving at the Shoppers before it closed, I sprinted into the store, blindly grabbed some cough syrup, paid, and hurried back to the van. While my wife Deborah continued to drive, I downed a shot of the cough syrup and proceeded to fall asleep almost immediately.
During that entire weekend I was either asleep, snarling at my kids over the tiniest of infractions, avoiding everyone altogether, or cursing the burning pokers embedded in my eyeballs. Deborah was pissed. It was not a great weekend, and the hacking continued, no matter how many slugs of cough syrup I downed. Going home was going to be one of those trips featuring the “Silent Treatment” that husbands know so well. While sitting down to supper, I picked up the cough syrup to take another belt, and saw the ingredient list for the first time.
"Oh Shit!”
The phrase that rang out in my in-laws kitchen was definitely out of place for me, my family, and my in-laws. The entire kitchen went silent. Everyone turned their heads and stared at me. I handed the cough syrup over to my wife and quickly grabbed a glass of water. Her voice was quiet and shaking as she read out the label, "Non-Medicinal Ingredients: Alcohol". I was not quite such a donkey after all. For the first time in my life I was actually drunk, enjoying all its wonderful gifts including the nausea, headaches, and the malaise that come with the hangover as you dry out. People actually look forward to this?
After spending my life as a mandatory teetotaler and permanent designated driver, I cannot say I have missed on the social experience of drinking alcohol. When meeting people on cruise ships or in other scenarios where alcohol is heavily pushed, it does give me the interesting talking point, “Did you know there is enough poison in that wine to kill me?” In some ways, the drinkers are jealous of my life. Nights out are cheap when you don’t have to buy an overpriced bottle of wine.
Louise set her glass down, “Nice choice of wine to go with the Barramundi, dear.”
“You’re welcome,” replied Dan. “Lloyd, no wine? Here, have a glass,” he offered. He held the half-empty bottle in his hand: ready to pour.
“No thank you,” I politely responded, giving him the brief version of the story of my condition.
“Wow, never heard of that before. Too bad. I’m guessing you just don’t understand what we have been saying about how important it is to get the wine pairing correct. I personally just can’t imagine having supper without a good glass of wine to go with it.”
“No, I suppose I don’t,” I laughed, “but I have found that fresh lemonade or a Coke goes well with just about anything.”
“To a great cruise!”
As the others at the table lifted their wine glasses, Deborah and I joined in with our virgin Cuba Libres.
“Salud!”
Flashback to the 1990s, when this new-to-IT pilot fish is trying to perform a calculation in Visual Basic as part of a database query -- and he's not having much luck getting it to work.
But he has an idea. "I had served on a committee with an older colleague who had betrayed a knowledge of such things and a willingness to help out a neophyte, so I wrote to him with a code sample and explanation of what I was trying to accomplish," fish says.
"After about 30 minutes, a reply came back -- I suspect he hadn't read my email for 25 minutes after I sent it -- and he provided an altered code snippet which, of course, worked perfectly.
"I wrote back to thank him and I asked, 'How do you know all this programming stuff?'
"His reply: 'It's very simple. You make mistakes. You learn from your mistakes. You repeat for 30 years.'
"As I was only 28 years or so behind him, I was much heartened by this statement."
These password rules prevents others from gaining access to they system, and can also protect your own personal accounts. If an attacker guesses your password from information you have posted on Facebook, they can gain access to ALL of your accounts, including on-line banking, email, and anything you have access to on the company network.
The more complex a password, the harder it is for someone to guess using brute force methods. Steve Gibson has created a calculator on how long it would take to crack a password at https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm. Try out a few passwords and see the difference adding numbers and punctuation has on the length of time it would take to break - especially when you add characters. Try to get the Massive Cracking Array Scenario over 30 minutes.
Once an attacker has a password, they will sometimes wait for a period of time just in case you get suspicious and start checking everything. Changing the password regularly combats this problem - a compromised password will not work very long.Once I explain the WHY behind my password policies on the networks I manage, there is much less "flak" from employees about having to change their passwords on a regular basis. In fact, I often get asked if the same rules should apply to their other accounts. The rules become more personal.
The patent, titled "Automatic message interpretation and routing system," is unsurprisingly general. It was filed in 1998 and awarded to a company called Brightware, Inc. in 2002, and it basically describes an autoresponder. "The method for automatically interpreting an electronic message may also include the step of retrieving one or more predetermined responses corresponding to the interpretation of the electronic message from a repository for automatic delivery to the source," reads the patent.
Polaris accuses Google of "actively inducing infringement" on the patent and contributing to the infringement of others by implementing its own automatic e-mail responder within the company. Amazon, Borders, AOL, and all of the other named defendants are accused of doing the same. "As a result of these Defendants' infringement of the '947 Patent, Polaris has suffered monetary damages in an amount not yet determined, and will continue to suffer damages in the future unless Defendants' infringing activities are enjoined by this Court," reads the complaint seen by Ars Technica.Patent Trolls increase the cost, and slow down the pace of development in the IT world due to the expense of having to deal with inadvertent patent infringements. In most cases, the business model of the Patent Troll is simply to sue for damages whenever someone infringes on their patent, they do not otherwise produce any product or service. With copyright protection, when software is found to be accidentally too similar, the developer can fix their code easily using different algorithms to solve the same problem. When the problem is patented however, no amount of re-writing the code will make it non-infringing.
The problem is that searching for old inventions is really difficult. Patents in the United States are keyword coded and searchable, but they use dense, technical language that makes them difficult to browse through. What’s more, “prior art”—a description of an invention published prior to a particular patent’s filing date—can exist anywhere, not just in a patent database. If I sue you for infringing my patent on an ancient Chinese healing technique, you’d have to look all over China for a description of the technique that was published in days of yore. But how would you know where to begin?Unfortunately, this makes it still difficult to combat Patent Trolls. So here is my suggestion for reforming Patent Law. I release it into the Public Domain, no patents here:
“Too many OB/GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.” - George W. Bush.Sicko has three major themes running through it:
