Re: [AI] A tricky problem in MS Word that needs immediate solution
hi, go to tools menu select options, then go to edit tab. there make the following changes: typing replaces selection checkbox checked drag and drop text editing checkbox checked use the ins key for paste checkbox not checked overtype mode checkbox not checked now it should be OK. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
[AI] Battle for bandwidth as P2P goes mainstream
Battle for bandwidth as P2P goes mainstream; Just how the conflict plays out will determine whether P2P can realise its potential to deliver high quality video and software direct to our PCs Anil Ananthaswamy WHEN Microsoft released the eagerly awaited Xbox 360 game Halo 3 last month, fans waited through the night outside stores to get their hands on the first copies. How much more convenient it would have been if the game had simply arrived on their computers as soon as it was released. If we had a delivery service, we could deliver the content electronically and maybe offer a discount, says Jin Li of Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. Unfortunately that wasn't possible. Microsoft's connections to the internet would have been overwhelmed had they needed to send out more than a million copies of the game. That could soon change if the company decides to deliver games using a peer-to-peer (P2P) delivery system, which alleviates such bandwidth burdens. While the workings of P2P systems differ between applications, it could go something like this: instead of every customer downloading the game directly from Microsoft's servers, the software would first be distributed to a small number of computers. These seed computers would transmit the game to purchasers, who would in turn pass the game to other purchasers, or peers, all in a legal and accountable manner. Microsoft itself would need far less bandwidth to deliver the software in this manner than if everyone connected directly to its servers. Microsoft is not alone. P2P networks were first popularised as the technology behind music file-sharing network Napster. They now look to be the future of high-quality content delivery. Warner Brothers in the US is using the BitTorrent P2P system to deliver video, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is banking on P2P software to deliver live TV, and universities are building P2P systems to boost robustness at the core of the internet . But while P2P applications remove the data bottleneck for the organisation that originates the content, the surge in data exchange between ordinary users' computers is consuming huge swathes of internet bandwidth . The business models of the internet service providers (ISPs) that supply that bandwidth have yet to account for this growth in use. Feeling the pinch, some are fighting back, and the way this plays out will determine whether P2P can realise its potential in delivering high-quality video and software directly to our PCs. For most of us, most of the time, the internet operates according to a client-server model. Each time you want to download a web page, for example, an individual copy of that page is sent from the web server to your computer. This has worked well for reading news, accessing email, listening to radio and even viewing low-quality video, since these applications require relatively small amounts of data. But as the internet gears up to deliver high-quality video and television, the client-server model is beginning to creak. Take the problem faced by the CBC. To upload content to users it has to buy bandwidth, which can cost about $150,000 per year for a 45 megabits/second pipe. Under a client-server model, this could stream high-quality video to up to 60 computers simultaneously, so servicing the CBC's 6 million customers would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention technically challenging. Like the researchers at Microsoft, to get around these problems, Mohamed Hefeeda and colleagues at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, is building a P2P network for the CBC. Great news for the broadcaster, but what about the ISPs that transport the content between peers? Home computer users with broadband connections typically buy their bandwidth from an ISP at a monthly flat rate. That connection tends to lie unused most of the time: The internet service providers are counting on that, says Dan Wallach, a P2P expert at Rice University in Houston, Texas. In contrast, P2P networks are designed to squeeze every last drop of the network bandwidth available to them. Once you actually start using P2P networks, you break the business model of the ISPs, says Wallach. P2P data now accounts for 60 per cent of daytime internet traffic and 90 per cent at night, according to Klaus Mochalski of German internet-traffic management firm Ipoque, so it is a serious problem for ISPs. Mobile bandwidth providers are especially concerned, he says, because their networks are smaller.Call to arms So what options do ISPs have? Metering bandwidth and charging users who exceed a certain limit is an option, but is unpopular with customers, who prefer to pay a flat rate. To conserve its bandwidth, an ISP can also choose to cut a customer off if they are generating levels of P2P-like traffic that exceed conditions of fair use for a home broadband connection. Or they can restrict the bandwidth available to that user - an
[AI] Hackers' dirty tricks threaten to distort elections
internet - previously touted for its potential to democratise the political process - allows politicians to anonymise and broaden the scope of their dirty tricks and paves the way for new scams Jessica Marshall FOR more than an hour on US election day in 2002, the lines of a get-out-the-voters phone campaign sponsored by the New Hampshire Democratic Party were clogged by more than 800 prank calls. In the 2006 election, 14,000 Latino voters in Orange county, California, received letters saying that it was illegal for immigrants to vote and doing so could result in their deportation. Shameful though these examples are, at least those responsible - Republican party officials, consultants and campaign staff - were traced and charged or shamed by the press. In future, however, tracing dirty tricks and bringing perpetrators to account might not be so easy. The internet, touted for its potential to democratise the political process (New Scientist , 9 March, p 28), may in fact do the opposite. It allows people to anonymise and broaden the scope of such dirty tricks, and paves the way for new scams, say security experts who attended an e-crime summit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, last week. One trick that can be borrowed from hackers is spam email. Usually used to hawk counterfeit goods, anonymous bulk emails could be sent to voters giving the wrong location for a polling station, for example, or incorrect details about who has the right to vote. More people could be reached than with letters, and although people don't generally fall for spam emails, in close races it might not take many discouraged or misdirected voters to change the outcome. Meanwhile, telephone attacks like the New Hampshire prank calls could be harder to trace if made using an internet phone line instead of a landline, says Rachna Dhamija of the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society. They could even be made using a botnet - a collection of home computers that are remote-controlled by a hacker. This would make tracing even harder because the calls wouldn't come from a central location. What's more, the number of calls that can be made is practically limitless. Internet calls might also be used to sow misinformation, changing the playing field for voter-suppression tactics, says Christopher Soghoian at Indiana University in Bloomington. Anonymous voter suppression is going to become a reality. The internet also makes new kinds of scams possible. John McCain, Republican presidential candidate hopeful, discovered this when campaigners set up a MySpace page for him. A bug in the programming allowed another user to add the following text: Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage... particularly marriage between passionate females. Although people who saw this likely realised it was a prank, it illustrates the ease with which mischievous words can be added. More traditional media such as newspapers are nearly impossible to deface. Manipulation can also happen in more subtle ways. Last year, supporters of California state's Proposition 87, an initiative that would fund alternative energy through additional taxation, snapped up negative-sounding domains including noon87.com and noonprop87.org and then automatically routed visitors to a site touting the proposition's benefits. Similarly, people have registered hillaryclingon.com and muttromney.com . Although merely unflattering to US presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, such typo domains could be used to spread malicious software or take fraudulent donations, says Oliver Friedrichs of Symantec in Mountain View, California. Older tricks such as phishing - fraudulently obtaining personal information via the internet - are also changing politics. In 2004, a fake website for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry stole campaign contributions and users' debit card numbers. Campaigns are vulnerable to such scams because domain names tend not to be standardised - compare barackobama.com with joinRudy2008.com - making it difficult to pick the official one. Phishing could ultimately stop people donating online, a move that would disproportionately affect Democrats and young people, who are more likely than other groups to donate online. The low probability of getting caught online combined with the fact that anti-spam laws and no-call lists exempt political messages makes the threat real. The fact is that all of the technology for all of these things to happen is already in place, Soghoian says. I'm not sure this will happen in 2008, but it will happen. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
[AI] may be off topic but interesting
The end of death? Advances in diagnostics and medicine are yet again changing our definition of death - and may eventually break down the concept altogether, says James Hughes James Hughes NEXT May, several hundred neurologists and philosophers will gather in the resort of Varadero, Cuba, for the fifth International Symposium on the Definition of Death. At first sight, defining death might not seem like something that requires much scientific or philosophical attention. Look more closely, though, and the line between life and death is rapidly becoming increasingly fuzzy. The problem started some 40 years ago with the invention of ventilators - machines that keep lungs breathing and hearts pumping even after the brain has suffered extensive damage. This raised for the first time the question of whether people could or should be treated as dead simply because their brain is dead. One set of philosophers argues that the destruction of the frontal lobes, with the memories and personality they encode, is enough to declare someone dead. This definition includes those in a permanent vegetative state - permanently unaware, but with enough brain function left to breathe unaided. Others resist the idea of brain death altogether and insist that the heart must stop beating before a body can be treated as dead. The compromise whole-brain-death position, which has been written into law in most of the industrialised world, is that a person can only be declared dead if almost all brain function has been irreversibly destroyed. Whichever definition is adopted, there are many practical and political implications. For instance, physicians are generally obliged to treat the living and to stop treating the dead. Vital organs can only be removed from someone declared dead, and brain-death laws have permitted hearts, livers and other organs to be maintained in the body by ventilators until they are removed for transplantation. Some bioethicists, such as Robert Veatch of Georgetown University in Washington DC and Linda Emanuel of Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, have proposed that individuals should choose their own definition of death - at some point between permanent vegetative state and the heart stopping. But having different definitions of death from bed to bed presents enormous practical and cultural difficulties. To see people treat the dead as if they were living, or the living as if they were dead, is profoundly disturbing. As diagnostic technologies have advanced, declaring total and irreversible brain death has become ever more problematic. First, brain damage is far more complicated than the whole-brain-death model supposes. Damage to small parts of the brain can result in permanent unconsciousness, even if the rest remains intact. In the 1990s advances in electroencephalography allowed residual brain activity to be detected in many patients who would previously have been considered brain dead, and we now understand that even parts of the brain that are electrically quiet can still be healthy. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, a team at the University of Cambridge has been able to detect near-normal brain activity in several people who had been in a vegetative state for more than six months (Science , vol 313, p 1402). A second problem is that the growing ability to compensate for the loss of the brain's regulation of the body means that doctors can maintain some brain-dead bodies indefinitely. One argument for the whole-brain definition of death was that the bodies of those diagnosed as brain dead would soon die, regardless of medical treatment. Now some brain-dead bodies on ventilators have survived for years. A third problem is that we have discovered more about the brain's self-repair mechanisms and are rapidly developing new ways to repair damaged brains. We now understand that the brain continues to produce neural stem cells throughout life, and drugs and gene therapies have been developed that can stimulate this self-repair capacity. It may soon be possible to engineer new neural tissue from patients' cells and transplant it into damaged areas. Progress in nanotechnology and the miniaturisation of computing will also eventually allow brain damage to be repaired with implanted machines. Implanted wiring and computer chips already speak directly to and from brains, allowing the deaf to hear, the blind to see, and . Implanted pacemakers can deliver electric current into the brain to suppress seizures and depression, and researchers are working on the development of mechanical implants that model and replicate the functions of different parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus. Progress in the creation of biocompatible nanomaterials such as nanowires to conduct signals to and from neurons will increase the safety and fidelity of brain-computer implants. Eventually, if futurists such as Ray Kurzweil are right, it may be possible to release
Re: [AI] Here's Your Diwali Gift!
I never heard a case wherein a company has become bankrupt due to piracy. Though I am not the user of above mentioned application, developers of such applications need not to discourage themselves,They can still make profit. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
Re: [AI] Reflections on Becoming Blind
Hi, If you are a born totally blind like me, restoration of sight will bring its own complexities. You have to learn a language called seeing which sighted people mastered since the very first day of their birth. I am sure, this is not as simple as both blind and most of the times sighted people believe to be. - Original Message - From: Geetha Shamanna [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: accessindia@accessindia.org.in Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 8:48 PM Subject: Re: [AI] Reflections on Becoming Blind While I do not disagree with anything said in the article, if gene therapy is made available and if it guarantees restoration of sight, I would be the first one to take it. Identity and all that sounds good in the ideal world. Although I have adjusted reasonably well to blindness, nothing can replace the total and absolute independence that sight grants a person. There is simply no substitute for it. Geetha - Original Message - From: Subramani L [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: accessindia@accessindia.org.in Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 10:47 AM Subject: Re: [AI] Reflections on Becoming Blind Fantastic story. After reading this, I wanted to forget about our agreed etiquette regarding on and off topics and wanted to express my feelings on this one. I think the whole thing sounds extremely honest and seem to reflect my own experiences of becoming blind from the same condition. When I reacted indifferently to my mom's suggestion that I must seriously consider gene therapy to restore my sight, she was shocked and couldn't understand how such an important thing as getting back my sight failed to evince a serious response from me. I told her blindness has become my identity in the last 15 years and I am not all that comfortable shedding that identity. I told her it offered a fresh and a totally different perspective to life and so on, much on the same lines as Becky has described in her article, but the problem with the so-called able-bodied people is that they somehow fail to see the other side of things. Also, I don't know how many of you agree with me if I say this: when we are blind, the world wants us to follow their weird and convoluted understanding of morality. They, for instance, can't digest a blind person smoking. Forget about the health implications of smoking or drinking, but most people think it is utterly wrong as a habit for a blind person to smoke, even if he enjoys this activity with his sighted friends who are more than willing to light their cigarette for them or pour their drinks. As a smoker myself until three years ago, I used to learn from my sighted friends that I attracted disgusted looks from sighted strangers (who themselves would have gathered near that Tea shop to light a cigarette), whenever I smoked. As a teenager losing sight, smoking then was a way of gaining acceptance in the mainstream world that never used to treat me on par. Only after realising the serious health implications as a thirty-something, did I ever quit smoking and drinking. I am not recommending this to anyone as ways of gaining acceptance into the mainstream world, but am merely trying to point out the weirdness in thinking among the able-bodied individuals in our society. Subramani -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of LSanjay Sent: Saturday, November 10, 2007 12:03 PM To: accessindia@accessindia.org.in Subject: [AI] Reflections on Becoming Blind Reflections on Becoming Blind by Rebecca Atkinson From the Editor: On July 17, 2007, the Guardian, one of the most prestigious newspapers in the United Kingdom, published an essay by a woman who is losing her sight from retinitis pigmentosa. In some ways her assumptions and experience of blindness depart startlingly from the American, or at least NFB, presumption that a trained blind person can travel as rapidly and cross streets as efficiently as sighted pedestrians. Yet by and large her experience and attitudes are healthy and articularly expressed. This is what she says: Rebecca Atkinson is going blind. An experimental therapy could offer her the chance to see again, but would she take it? Earlier this year doctors at Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, began the world's first gene therapy trials to treat twelve patients who have Leber's congenital amaurosis, a condition that causes progressive sight loss. Following successful animal trials (said to have restored the vision of blind dogs so they could navigate a maze without difficulty), it is hoped that the technique, which involves injecting working copies of faulty genes directly into the retina, will prove equally effective when carried out on humans. The results will not be made public for a year, but, if the technique works
[AI] Reflections on Becoming Blind
Reflections on Becoming Blind by Rebecca Atkinson From the Editor: On July 17, 2007, the Guardian, one of the most prestigious newspapers in the United Kingdom, published an essay by a woman who is losing her sight from retinitis pigmentosa. In some ways her assumptions and experience of blindness depart startlingly from the American, or at least NFB, presumption that a trained blind person can travel as rapidly and cross streets as efficiently as sighted pedestrians. Yet by and large her experience and attitudes are healthy and articularly expressed. This is what she says: Rebecca Atkinson is going blind. An experimental therapy could offer her the chance to see again, but would she take it? Earlier this year doctors at Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, began the world's first gene therapy trials to treat twelve patients who have Leber's congenital amaurosis, a condition that causes progressive sight loss. Following successful animal trials (said to have restored the vision of blind dogs so they could navigate a maze without difficulty), it is hoped that the technique, which involves injecting working copies of faulty genes directly into the retina, will prove equally effective when carried out on humans. The results will not be made public for a year, but, if the technique works, scientists hope it could eventually be used to treat a wide range of inherited sight disorders affecting up to 30,000 visually impaired people in the UK and potentially millions more worldwide. The first viable treatment for blindness is twinkling on the horizon, and, as one reader said on a national newspaper message board discussing the trials, The possibility of being able to give improved sight to people with visual impairments is a great development for the human race. But what of the people we seek to repair? Those who have been born blind and those, like me, who are losing or have lost their vision. Is this what we have been waiting for? Is it a great development for the human race, or a step forward in the eugenic quest for an über race, free of imperfection and rid of the unease about disability that nestles quietly in society's pocket? For the past thirteen years I have been losing my sight, due to a genetic and incurable condition called retinitis pigmentosa (RP). RP causes the photoreceptive cells on the retina to die off, causing, in my case, tunnel vision. I liken it to looking at the world down the middle of two toilet rolls. My central vision remains intact, but where once was peripheral vision, now float only my thoughts. In time these loo rolls will shrink to knotholes and then pinholes and then possibly nothing. In the early years after my diagnosis, blindness remained a repulsive and terrifying concept. Every year I would visit the doctor, and he would say the same thing--that I must live and plan my life with the certainty that blindness was inevitable. And so, slowly over time, that is what I learned to do. But now the advent of gene therapy has pushed open a chink in the door. Disabled people have long asked themselves the hypothetical would you be cured if you could? question. Now for the first time there is a chance, albeit very small, that maybe one day I might actually get my sight back. Hurrah, you cry. I must be thrilled. Actually I am a bit confused. It is easy to assume that all visually impaired people will be hammering down the doors should gene therapy prove successful. But to say this is to assume that a blind life is lesser and that all blind people really want to be sighted. They don't. The first blind man I ever met, who also happened to be my boss at the time, is one of them. I recently asked him if he would have gene therapy if he could. No, came his reply. Because, he tells me, regaining sight is more than just seeing again. There are issues of identity and culture at stake too. As the blind-from-birth son of blind parents, I am, in part of my soul, defined by my blindness, he explains. It directly equates to ethnic or racial origin. If you give a black person the choice to be white, there may well be significant advantages in such a deal: more access to better jobs; freedom from the shackles of ignorant prejudice; in short, a step closer to equality. But I'd bet most would turn the offer down flat. But what if, unlike my old boss, you haven't always been blind? What if, like me, you grew up with full vision and have seen all the cliché- ridden things that those born totally blind are pitied for never having seen--the sunset, your own reflection, the look in your lover's eyes. What if your soul is sighted, and then you go blind? You will cry and wonder why. You will hope and pray. You will wish it would all go away. But the longer your
Re: [AI] using Oxford English dictionary
if you are using kurzweil use its dictionary too because it is accessible as well as the best one to my knowledge. - Original Message - From: Rajasekhar Vijjeswarapu [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: accessindia@accessindia.org.in Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 8:11 AM Subject: Re: [AI] using Oxford English dictionary dear friends, I am unable to read the Oxrord English dictionary with Jaws and this is what most of our students grapple with. Can anyone suggest us how to overcome this problem? What is the dictionary on CD which is most accessible with Jaws? waiting for your kind advice. regards, Rajasekhar - Original Message - From: Sudhir R (NeSTIT) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: accessindia@accessindia.org.in Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 9:38 AM Subject: [AI] Books required by a PG History student. Folks, Vineeth, who ranked first in B A (History) in Calicut University this year and is currently doing PG, needs a few books in e text. Kindly help him out with either books or web references if you can. His mail is forwarded below. Thanks and rgds RS M: 98 472 76 126 -Original Message- From: vineeth ramachandran [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 7:02 PM To: Sudhir R (NeSTIT) Subject: Re: Hello. For my 1st semester MA history i need electronics books on following topics Anciant world Aryan debate[india] Indian feudalism debate Pottancialities of medevial india De-industrialisation Changes in indian national movements and Social theories can anybody in our group send some books on these subjects by vineeth _ 5, 50, 500, 5000 - Store N number of mails in your inbox. Click http://in.rd.yahoo.com/tagline_mail_4/*http://help.yahoo.com/l/in/yahoo/mai l/yahoomail/tools/tools-08.html/ here. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
[AI] Joybubbles, 58, Peter Pan of Phone Hackers, Dies
(By Douglas Martin. Reprinted from The New York Times © Aug. 20, 2007) Joybubbles (the legal name of the former Joe Engressia since 1991), a blind genius with perfect pitch who accidentally found he could make free phone calls by whistling tones and went on to play a pivotal role in the 1970's subculture of phone phreaks, died Aug. 8 in Minneapolis. He was 58, though he had chosen in 1988 to remain 5 forever, and had the toys and teddy bears to prove it. The cause of death has not been determined, said Steven Gibb, a friend and the executor of the Joybubbles estate. Joybubbles, who was blind at birth, was a famous part of what began as a scattered, socially awkward group of precocious teens and post-teens fascinated with exploring the phone system. It could then be seen as the worldapos;s biggest, most complex, most interesting computer, and foiling the phone system passed for high-tech high jinks in the 1970's. It was the only game in town if you wanted to play with a computer, said Phil Lapsley, who is writing a book on the phone phreaks. Later, other blind whistlers appeared, but in 1957, Joybubbles may have been the first person to whistle his way into the heart of Ma Bell. Phreaks were precursors of todayapos;s computer hackers, and, like some of them, Joybubbles ran afoul of the law. Not a few phreaks were computer pioneers, including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, founders of Apple. Joybubbles felt that being abused at a school for the blind and being pushed by his mother to live up to his 172 I.Q. had robbed him of childhood. So he amassed piles of toys, Jack and Jill magazines and imaginary friends, and he took a name he said made people smile. But he never lost his ardor for phones, and old phone phreaks and younger would-have-beens kept calling. Joybubbles loved the phone company, reported problems he had illegally discovered, and even said he had planned his own arrest on fraud charges to get a phone job. And so he did, twice. Well before the mid-1970s, when digitalization ended the tone-based system, Joybubbles had stopped stealing calls. But he was already a legend: he had phoned around the world, talking into one phone and listening to himself on another. In an article in Esquire in 1971, the writer Ron Rosenbaum called Joybubbles the catalyst uniting disparate phreaks. Particularly after news accounts of his suspension from college in 1968 and conviction in 1971 for phone violations, he became a nerve center of the movement. Josef Carl Engressia Jr. was born May 25, 1949, and moved often because his father was a school-picture photographer. At 4 or 5, he learned to dial by using the hookswitch like a telegraph key. Four years later, he discovered that he could disconnect a call by whistling. He found this out when he imitated a sound in the background on a long-distance call and the line cut off. It turned out that his whistle precisely replicated a crucial phone company signal, a 2,600-cycles-per-second tone. Joybubblesapos;s parents had no phone for five years because of their sonapos;s obsession. Later, his mother encouraged it by reading him technical books. His high school yearbook photo showed him in a phone booth. By the time he was a student at the University of South Florida, Joybubbles was dialing toll-free or nonworking numbers to reach a distant switching point. Unbeknownst to telephone operators, he could use sounds to dial another number, free. He could then jump anywhere in the phone system. He was disconnected from college after being caught making calls for friends at $1 a call. In 1971, he moved to Memphis, where he was convicted of phone fraud. In Millington, TN, he was hired to clean phones, a job he hated. In 1975, he moved to Denver to ferret out problems in Mountain Bellapos;s network. He tired of that and moved to Minneapolis June 12, 1982, partly because that dateapos;s numerical representation of 6-12 is the same as the cityapos;s area code. He advertised for people yearning to discuss things telephonic and wove a web of phone lines to accommodate them. He lived on Social Security disability payments and part-time jobs, like letting university agriculture researchers use his superb sense of smell to investigate how to control the odor of hog excrement. Joybubbles is survived by his mother, Esther Engressia, and his sister, Toni Engressia, both of Homestead, FL. His second life as a youngster included becoming a minister in his own Church of Eternal Childhood and collecting tapes of every Mr. Rogers episode. When asked why Mr. Rogers mattered, he said: When youapos;re playing and youapos;re just you, powerful things happen. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at
[AI] Urban Indians are paying with their health the price of being in computer-intensive jobs
This is an article from outlook: Raghu Karnad Nothing about Vijaykumar's daily schedule suggested any kind of health risk. For a young man, still pushing 33, he seemed to have an impeccably balanced lifestyle. He woke in the morning to drive to the Bangalore offices of IT major Cisco, where he worked as a programmer. He spent eight or nine hours at his computer, steadily tapping out code. His was a serious workday, but not an oppressive one, compared to the 14-hour shifts call centre workers clocked in over on Bannerghata Road. When he had time, he swam a few laps in the pool, and headed home to spend time with his family. In 2003, however, something changed. CRI strikes not just those who work 15-hour days, who have been working for years, are old or arthritis-prone... It was a numbness in the hand, he recalls. Then a cold sensation from my shoulder to my palm, and sometimes my hand became paralysed. We're all getting older, he thought, gritting his teeth, and this must be the beginning of the inevitable wear-and-tear. And so he swam more to stay limber, tried yoga, ointments and pranayam to ease the pain. He relaxed his pace of work, moved the mouse from his right hand to his left. But that only shifted the pain to different places. The orthopaedist he consulted told him not much else could be done. The condition progressed. A year ago, Vijaykumar stopped driving his car. Then he discovered he could not lift his kids-one and three years old-and carry them in his arms. Five months ago, people started telling me I looked thin and worn out, says Vijaykumar. And I realised I was living with a lot of pain, and barely sleeping at night. So, I had to take indefinite leave, and hoped the problem would die down. It wasn't till he was home one afternoon, browsing the web, that he came across a website that described his symptoms perfectly, and he realised it was his computer doing the damage all along. ...It afflicts even those who are young, fit, starting their first computer-dependent job. Average age: 27. In the computer-intensive sectors of the Indian economy, bad ergonomics and work habits are more the rule than the exception. Businesses operate out of rented spaces, pre-equipped with shoddily designed desks and flimsy chairs. Hands, elbows and torsos lock in crooked formations between monitors, keyboards and mouses. The glaring screens look like they were installed to kill flies. Our bodies can endure a certain amount of repetitive stress and bad posture before muscle, bone and nerves begin to come apart at the seams. Computer-related injuries (CRI) can be classified three ways: visual damage, orthopaedic trouble resulting from bad posture, and most prominently, repetitive stress injuries. Symptoms can appear anywhere in the body-from the eyes and the fingers, to the lumbar disk and the feet, so they are usually dismissed as the benign aches-and-pains of overwork and ageing. But in reality they have the potential to do acute damage to bodies and careers. And they are the fastest-growing occupational health hazard in India. Naturally, it is in Bangalore, the hub of the country's it-bpo sector, that the scale of the problem first came to notice. According to the first comprehensive study, conducted by Dr Deepak Sharan of RECOUP Rehabilitation Centre in Bangalore, of the 27,000 knowledge workers it examined in the city, as many as 75 per cent reported musculo-skeletal symptoms. A smaller study in the National Capital Region, published in the Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, examining 200 IT professionals, found musculo-skeletal symptoms in 78 per cent, and visual problems in 76 per cent. The geographic spread of this statistic increases as computer-intensive jobs move to other metros and Tier-II cities, where it may well be called the Bangalore Epidemic. What makes this epidemic alarming isn't just its prevalence, but how acute the injuries can be. While most repetitive stress injuries can be fixed, the risk of relapse is permanent, and exacerbated cases can develop into Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD), which means lifelong damage and pain. RSD can be crippling, explains Dr Sharan. Apart from the loss of your job, many simple activities you take for granted-buttering your bread, holding a teacup or turning a doorknob-can become impossible. Myths about CRI tend to disguise the onset of the problem: naive ideas that it strikes only those who work 15-hour days, who have been working for years, who never exercise, who are older or prone to arthritis from the outset. In fact, says Dr Sharan, it is frequently a problem for high-ranking managers and CEOs, and people in entirely different industries and professions, be it journalists, bankers, lawyers, academics or students. Over 50 per cent of Dr Sharan's patients were injured within a year of starting their first computer-dependent job. You
Re: [AI] A question regarding programming
ask your teacher to teach psudo-code that ids equivalent to flow chart in the context of programming that too if you are a beginner. - Original Message - From: amar jain [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: accessindia@accessindia.org.in Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 12:49 PM Subject: [AI] A question regarding programming Dear Access Indians, I want to learn programming and for that I met to a teacher he was telling me that before we start programming I will teach you a flow chart but I checked that Jaws is not supporting it. And now I want to ask that is there any way by which we can learn flow chart? Or is there any other sollution? Please assist me as soon as possible. Regards, -- AMAR JAIN. MOBILE:91 99298 79006. EMAILS:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
Re: [AI] How to type the simbols like Delta, Squire root of A and other such characters?
You may find some symbols in fields and symbols options of insert menu. For square or any power sign just superscript the index i.e. if you want to write a squared, then write as a2 and select and superscript the 2. The shortcut for superscript is ControlShift = sign. - Original Message - From: Syed Imran [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: accessindia@accessindia.org.in Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 6:40 AM Subject: [AI] How to type the simbols like Delta,Squire root of A and other such characters? Hi As I have to submit my assignments online in DOC format, I want to know how I can type the simbols like Delta, To the power of, Squire root of A or B. These simbols are not available in Jfws Select a simbol to print diolog. any idea on how to do it? With best regards Syed Imran To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
[AI] Virtual worlds are becoming more like the real world;
Virtual worlds are moving on from the fantasy of Second Life to enhance our experiences in the real world Annalee Newitz YOU are in a foreign city. Instead of lugging a guidebook around, you put on a pair of chic glasses. As you walk down the street, the lenses become semi-transparent monitors that feed your eyes with information about the buildings and streets around you, maybe giving you directions to a shoe shop, or the nearest place that sells ice cream. This, say many researchers, is the future of virtual reality. Unlike the fantasy space of virtual worlds like Second Life, the world of the networked glasses is there to enhance the real one. It can be used to map objects, instructions or data onto what you see through the glasses in a way that is, hopefully, relevant and useful. You can do all of this with technology that's available now, says Amy Jo Kim, who teaches game design at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Such glasses are already being used to by superimposing a sketch of a wider field of view onto what the person can see. Kim believes this kind of technology will soon evolve to become a reality augmentation or digital filter over real life. We'll drape digital magic over the real world, says futurist Stewart Brand, who is based in Sausalito, California. Although people will continue to inhabit fantasy worlds - precisely because that's what they like about them - for those who don't really get Second Life, digital glasses might be the first use of a virtual world that makes sense to them. Despite the hype surrounding Second Life, relatively few people actually use it. That's partly because of the fantastical weirdness of its world, which bears little relation to real geography and can be downright confusing. San Francisco-based Daniel Terdiman, whose book The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life will be published in November, says nine out of 10 people who sign up for the virtual world never return because it is simply too hard to figure out. If the glasses sound overly futuristic, you could just check out the online versions of the real world. The best example of this is Google StreetView . It was created from millions of panoramic photographs taken by specially equipped vans that drove down every street in nine US cities, including San Francisco. The program allows you to walk through a photorealistic, 3D copy of the real city, rather than just viewing it from above, as you do with Google Earth. Microsoft has a similar application called Virtual Earth 3D . Stephen Chau, who helped create StreetView, says at the moment people are using the application to do things like supplement driving directions, see what neighbourhoods look like and pick out landmarks before visiting them. In future these digital cities might be populated by avatars, preserving many of the advantages of Second Life - such as (New Scientist , 25 August, p 26) - but this time in a world that looks just like the real one. There might be several advantages to this kind of virtual world. Mikel Maron, a programmer in Brighton, UK, is working on a project called geoRSS, which aims to make map data more portable. It works in a similar way to standard RSS feeds, through which a website can send news headlines directly to subscribers' PCs, saving them from having to visit numerous sites to keep up with current affairs. GeoRSS broadcasts geographical information instead. You could use it, for example, to overlay weather data onto a virtual representation of a region and plan your route home to avoid fog patches. Maron also imagines a future where the real world is full of sensors that monitor everything from pollution levels to how crowded a place is. Each sensor could have a geoRSS feed, he says. It could send out a stream of data about what's happening at a particular place. Subscribers might plug that information into Google StreetView, or even their networked glasses, and get an instant image of how many people there are near their favourite park bench, or how polluted various cycle routes home are. I hope this will get people more into and engaged with reality, Maron says. Even for those virtual world denizens who prefer the fantasy of places like Second Life, improvements are in store. Some companies refuse to set up shop in Second Life because they perceive it as unsafe. They don't mean that their (New Scientist , 1 September, p 28), rather that Second Life's underlying technology isn't secure enough to support sensitive financial transactions or to host private business meetings. That concern is one of the reasons why the newly hatched company Multiverse of Mountain View, California, has created software that allows people to build their own virtual worlds. Not only does this give people more freedom to create their own flavours of virtual world, it also means that each world can have its own level of protection: users are free to tweak the worlds by building in
[AI] leaping Cellphones
Cellphone tells paramedics which floor you're on; Your location inside a skyscraper could be pinpointed to within two floors by comparing weak signals from dozens of cellphone masts Paul Marks A MAN working in a skyscraper has a heart attack and phones for help, but he fails to tell the emergency operator which floor he's on. Paramedics then have to waste precious minutes searching the 40-storey building, and the man dies. Researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada and chipmaker Intel have developed a system that they say could help prevent such deaths. Called Skyloc , it can estimate the location of callers inside high-rise buildings to within two floors. If used in New York's 102-storey Empire State Building, it could cut the floor space that would have to be searched from 204,000 to 2000 square metres. In a city, cellphones pick up signals from many tens of masts but to make a call they only use the masts sending the strongest signals. Signals can be used to triangulate a phone's position using the three nearest masts, but it is only accurate to 50 metres and can't distinguish between floors. Skyloc exploits the fact that every point in a city is bathed in a unique combination of radio signals from hundreds of masts, each at different strengths and frequencies. Skyloc uses this miasma to generate a position fingerprint that is unique both to the phone's horizontal coordinates and vertical position. On each floor of three high-rise buildings, a team led by Alex Vershavsky of the University of Toronto recorded the signals received from 29 masts. Specially developed software successfully allowed a phone to transmit these position fingerprints during calls. These were then matched against a database of all fingerprints from the building to pinpoint the caller's floor. Vershavsky says lives could be saved if all tall buildings were radio-mapped and phones were programmed to transmit their position fingerprints. Amanda Goode, a UK-based expert in cellphone forensics, sees other uses for the technology. The ideas behind this could be useful in kidnap or serious crime investigations, she says. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
[AI] off topic but informative
As we are celebrating 50th anniversary of space technology, which has revolutionised our lives, I am pasting an article from New Scientist. Way to go; How hard can it really be to launch yourself into space, asks Stephen Battersby Stephen Battersby HERE's how to make it into outer space. Step 1: fill a big tube with fuel. Step 2: make a hole in one end. Step 3: light the fuse... and whoosh, there you are. Could there be any more to it? There is nothing in the way. You don't have to reach any magical escape velocity. And you don't have to go very far. Space tour operators are aiming for the Karman line, 100 kilometres up, which is roughly the altitude at which aeroplanes don't work any more, because they would have to travel so fast to get useful lift from the tenuous atmosphere that they would effectively orbit the Earth. Conversely, the Karman line is too low for satellites: that same atmosphere would quickly drag them down. Double the altitude to 200 kilometres, and the atmosphere becomes thin enough that a spacecraft could orbit a few times before being dragged back to Earth. You'll need to be travelling horizontally at orbital velocity - 7.8 kilometres per second - when you get up there, though, so that Earth's gravity bends your path into a perfect circle. Then you can spend some time in orbit, doing somersaults, playing with globules of drink and pointing to your house from time to time. How much fuel you need depends crucially on the speed at which the exhaust exits your rocket, and that depends on how explosive your fuel mixture is. Gunpowder - the most popular rocket fuel of all time, if you count fireworks - will give you an exhaust velocity of up to 1 kilometre per second. Besides their payloads, rockets must also lift their own fuel, so trying to go much faster than the exhaust velocity you soon hit the law of diminishing returns. To accelerate a 1-tonne vehicle to 7.8 kilometres per second, you'd need to burn an awfully big pile of powder: 2500 tonnes of it, to be precise. Allowing for the weight of the tanks to hold it all, the great space firework becomes all but impossible.Frugal fuel Using NASA's favourite chemical fuel mix - liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen - exhaust velocity can reach about 4 kilometres per second. In theory, a 1-tonne capsule only needs about 6 tonnes of such fuel to reach low-orbit speeds. In practice, it amounts to rather more fuel than that, but the upshot is that you only need several times the payload in fuel, not thousands of times. There are other snags for the do-it-yourself rocketeer, though. Being so explosive, the liquid oxygen-hydrogen combination is hard to handle safely, so the pumps and engines must be sophisticated pieces of engineering. Then you have stability and guidance to sort out. And let's not forget the small matter of getting back down in one, preferably unroasted, piece. Re-entry is the most difficult part of all, with the risks of burning up or bouncing off the atmosphere. So can we all go? There are probably still enough fossil fuels left on Earth to send all 6.5 billion of us into orbit by burning aviation-grade fuels or by generating electricity to electrolyse water into hydrogen and oxygen. If that happened, though, it might not be worth coming back down again. The environmentally aware space tourist could instead use electricity from renewable sources. Solar cells on your roof might gather 10 kilowatt-hours per day, enough to electrolyse a couple of kilograms of water, so you'd only have to wait 15 years to collect enough for a trip to space. Just enough time to get into shape for the journey. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
