Brett

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Don’t read if you don’t want a potential spoiler.::

Here’s what I was about to say: Source Code was exTREMEly FUN, SUSPENSEFUL, attention-holding. Pretty smart plot. Good characters who got pretty well developed for this kind of movie.
Up until these last twelve minutes (that’s how far I have to go). This is a cheap OUT. The character named Goodwin is really going to make such an idiotic choice? What idiotic plot writing. Why would the creators give up their creativity now? Cooling down, I guess I have to say that predictability tends to make me wince. Maybe that’s not the same for everyone, but is it not a central element to creativity?

Well then…my mind was blown again. (“Again?”) And though I still think Goodwin was being stupid, it did work out so creatively. The story was not predictable like I was fearing it would be with those twelve minutes left to go. It reached up from behind, like Captain Stevens did to the Frost guy on his last run through the train scenario, and presented new possibilities to me (“new worlds,” in fact). It wrapped the ending round with ribbons of unendingly possible beginnings for the protagonist, just as it took the story thread through a needle’s eye to leave us with a powerful hope for those left in the building that most of the movie took place in.

Everything is unique. Everything is connected.

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“Hidden Whale Culture Could Be Critical to Species Survival” | Wired Science | Wired.com http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/whaleculture/ |

Though it sounds at first like a marine biologist’s take on political correctness, respecting the cultural diversity of whales may be essential to saving them.

 Scientists are accustomed to thinking of whale populations in terms of genetic diversity. But even when they share the same genes, groups of whales can live in very different ways, raising the possibility that species might be saved even while individual cultures vanish. The tragedy of cultural extinction aside, cultural diversity may sustain the long-term health of Earth’s cetaceans.

“We have no idea what’s going on. As we mess up the world, it goes off in all kinds of weird directions,” said biologist Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. ”The more diversity that’s out there, both genetic and cultural, the more whales can deal with it.”

That whales could even have culture is a relatively new scientific proposition. It was not unil the late 1960s that recordings of humpback whale songs provided a glimpse of the unexpectedly complicated and beautiful world of cetacean communication. The songs don’t appear — for now — to reach the level of language, but they’re clearly a form of learned communicative behavior common across the cetacean realm. And as researchers spend more time with whales, they’re realizing just how much their learned behaviors differ.

One of the best-known example of marine culture comes from killer whales (which, technically, are dolphins, but they’re mentioned in the same breath as whales by biologists). Pods of killer whales have highly varied dialects and ways of life, even while sharing the same habitat — the aquatic equivalent of a neighborhood populated by two different ethnic groups.

Over the last decade, two pods found off North America’s west coast and known to researchers as the Northern and Southern residents became the focus of an international conservation battle. Scientists showed that the pods had different dialects and feeding habits. The Southern Residents, their numbers at a fraction of historical levels, often ranged south through Puget Sound and into waters off the California coast. They’re more threatened than their Northern counterparts by shipping collisions and depleted salmon populations.

In 2004, Canada’s environmental officials declared the Southern Residents both distinct and endangered, but U.S. officials insisted on treating the two pods as a single, genetically similar and unendangered group. The next year, following outrage among scientists and environmentalists, the United States acknowledged the Southern Residents as unique and endangered.

Their decision was promising, but cultural considerations are otherwise absent from U.S. government conservation plans and the agenda of the International Whaling Commission. To some extent, the absence reflects the state of cetacean science. Most species have not been extensively studied at the cultural level. But with pollution, noise, global warming, overfishing and intermittent hunting threatening the recovery of creatures nearly hunted to extinction by the early 20th century, it might be time to expand the focus.

“If I take all the sperm whales in the North Atlantic, can I consider them as one population? If I can, I can apply all kinds of theoretical results to it. But if there are factors that might break the population apart, that’s going to impact the way I can use the models to manage the populations,” said Luke  Rendell, a postdoc biologist at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. “Once you realize that these sorts of things are going on, that has to be taken into account.”

Rendell is a specialist in sperm-whale vocalization and learning patterns of sperm whales. Over the last decade, he and Whitehead and other researchers have painstakingly analyzed acoustic recordings of the whales, linking them to observations and biological samples, ultimately cobbling together an unexpectedly complex picture.

Sperm whales live in small social units linked by maternal lineage, and form larger groups only with other units from the same clan. In the Pacific, these groups are large and tightly linked. In the Atlantic, they’re small and loosely distributed. Vocalizations vary widely between groups, as do their habits, from hunting patterns to babysitting. Yet their genes are extremely similar.

In the Pacific, warming waters produced by El Niño fluctuations appear to affect clans differently, said Whitehead. “In normal temperatures, one of the clans does better,” he said. “And when El Niño strikes, the clan that was doing worse does better than the other clan. The clan that was doing well is in trouble. That has implications for global warming, because it’s going to make conditions more like El Niño. You can see how maintaining the diversity of clans in sperm whales makes it more likely that they’ll survive.”

Whether other cetacean species possess equally rich cultures is largely unknown, but mostly because so little research has been conducted. “It’s notoriously difficult to collect hard evidence about what’s going on,” said Rendell. “It’s not like a bird or a bat or a chimpanzee that you can bring into the lab and investigate how they behave.”

But given the abilities seen in the cetaceans that have been studied, and the socialization patterns obvious in other species even when they haven’t been rigorously studied, researchers say cultural diversity is likely common.

“My guess is that there are all kinds of complicated social conventions. We know some from the killer whales, but I bet they’re in lots of other whale species as well,” said Whitehead.

New research is “giving us a window into really complicated societies,” said Rendell. “You get a much better appreciation of the complexity. Ten or 20 years ago, it was just, ‘There’s a bunch of whales over here.’”

The Next Three Days was very stressful. I just finished watching it.

I now have looked up the director and screenwriter, Paul Haggis, and he has done a bunch of great movies. Crash, Million Dollar Baby, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, e.g.

This one did not disappoint, either.

Thanks to a little investigating on the Disqus website, and their helpful guide, I’ve discovered that I can have comments on this blog. Simple, I know–but I hadn’t realized it until now. Well, I am excited to have dialogue whenever you have something to say back to whatever in the world I’ve said ;)

-Happy reading and writing

4 Ways iPads Are Helping People With Disabilities
http://mashable.com/2011/07/25/ipads-disabilities/

Noah Rahman has moderate Cerebral Palsy affecting his communication, cognition and upper and lower body movement. When he turned two, his language, cognitive abilitity and fine motor skills were diagnosed by a developmental specialist as being at least 12 months behind. Then Noah got an iPad.

Four months later, his language and cognition were on par with his age level. His fine motor skills had made significant leaps.

Today, the three-year-old (pictured at right with his father)

spends an hour or two on his iPad each day. He switches his apps between reading and writing in English, Arabic and Spanish. In the fall, he’ll enter a classroom of five-year-olds. “The iPad unlocked his motivation and his desire because it’s fun,” says his dad Sami Rahman, co-founder of SNApps4Kids, a community of parents, therapists and educators sharing their experiences using the iPad, iPod touch, iPhone and Android to help children with special needs.

SNApps4Kids taps into a burgeoning trend for people with disabilities. Touch devices — most notably the iPad — are revolutionizing the lives of children, adults and seniors with special needs. Rahman estimates some 40,000 apps have been developed for this demographic.

“Touch has made it exceptionally accessible — everyone has an iPad, everyone has an iPod,” says Michelle Diament, cofounder of Disability Scoop, a source for news relating to developmental disabilities. “If you’re someone with a disability, having something that other people are using makes you feel like part of the in-crowd.” For people lacking motor skills, touch screens are more intuitive devices. There is no mouse, keyboard or pen intercepting their communication with the screen. Larger platforms, like iPads, are preferred over smaller iOS and Android devices for ease-of-use and, of course, the cool factor.

Here are four ways that touch devices are changing the lives of people with disabilities:

1. As a Communicator Before the iPad and other similar devices, using touch-to-speak technology was incredibly expensive, costing around $8,000. Now, it only costs $499 for an iPad and $189.99 for a thorough touch-to-speak app like Proloquo2Go.

That relative affordability has made the technology more available for children and adults that can’t use their voice.

With the simple touch of an iPad, a hungry non-verbal person can communicate exactly what he or she would like to eat. Those apps can then be customized with photos or features to suit an individual’s life and needs.

Another option is Assistive Chat, which predicts several sentence completion options. For the most severely disabled people, Yes|No is a simple app that allows individuals to voice their preference in yes-or-no responses.

“It gives dignity back to people who are more disabled,” says Vicki Windham, a special education teacher in the Clarkstown Central School District who trains people of all ages to make the most of their iPads. Windham reviews apps for people with a variety of special needs.

For hard-of-hearing iPad users, soundAmp R amplifies sound in a variety of situations. Users can also record lectures or presentations they want to listen to again later.

2. As a Therapeutic Device SNApps4Kids co-founder Cristen Reat’s son Vincent was born with Down syndrome, which can also lead to low-muscle mass. While he can walk, Reat describes his son as a Buddha that prefers to sit still most of the time. Throughout his life, Vincent’s therapists and parents have tried to help him be more active. It was not until his physical therapist placed an iPad on a treadmill that Vincent was motivated to walk. He now stays on for nine and a half minutes, interacting with his iPad while he’s in motion.

In addition to increasing his gross motor ability to walk, Vincent’s iPad has helped his fine motor skills. For Vincent, computers and older technology required visual shifting — between a mouse or keyboard and the screen. On an iPad, Vincent can watch as one of his fingers writes directly on the screen to make selections.

Similarly, Noah Rahman has shown motor improvement. After playing the Elmo Loves ABCs app on his iPad, he can write the entire alphabet, requiring sophisticated finger isolation. As a three-year-old, this puts him well above his grade level.

“First it was ‘do it for me,’ then it was ‘do it with me,’ now he does it by himself,” says Noah’s father.

3. As an Educational Tool Years ago, one of Jeremy Brown’s autistic elementary school students picked up his iPhone off his desk and began navigating the iOS with ease. “It’s like a fish to water,” says Brown, a teacher for autistic elementary school students, of his students’ interactions with touch technology.

Brown is immersed in online discussions of technology and special education, moderating the Facebook group iTeach Special Education, collaborating on the podcast EdCeptional and coauthoring the blog Teaching All Students. While use of the iPad in classrooms is not yet approved in his school district, he believes the iPad is a great supplemental method of instruction, estimating 80% to 90% of his students with autism see great results when using iOS devices.

Brown hopes his school district and others across the country will approve iPads in the classroom.

While no one advocates replacing traditional instruction, a number of apps do address academic subjects from math to language to reading and writing. In October 2010, Apple even featured an “Apps for Special Education” section in the App Store.

Brown encourages parents to separate their children’s recreational uses of the iPad from those in the classroom. Some students may watch YouTube videos on the school bus but while they’re at school they know Mr.

Brown’s iPads are only for education.

4. As a Behavior Monitor Behavior Tracker Pro is a popular app for parents, therapists and teachers to quantify the behavioral progress of children with special needs. In addition to taking notes, good and bad behaviors can be video recorded and later reviewed. The app automatically turns that input into visual graphs and charts.

High school teacher Vicki Windman notes that the iPad can also be a great way to strengthen and reinforce memory for seniors with Alzheimer’s or memory loss. Still, she warns that touch technology is not a miracle drug: “You’re not curing Alzheimer’s. Parents challenge me all the time — they want a cure. It’s no cure.” That doesn’t mean it can’t help. Apps like Medication Reminder tell users when it’s time to take medication. Memory Practice, a memory strengthening app, was created for the developer’s mother shortly after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Windman’s father uses an app called Nudge, which gives him a persistent reminder every fifteen minutes to accomplish lapsed tasks on his to-do list.

Long-Roads Ahead Despite these successes, SNApps4Kids cofounder Cristen Reat recommends a measured approach. “Just because you buy a device doesn’t mean it’s going to change anything,” she says.

Rahman agrees. He says that viewing the iPad as the solution is the backwards approach. “We are big advocates that the user needs to understand the objectives first before you pick the technology,” Rahman says. “We’re not just putting [our son] in front of an iPad and walking away. That’s the real key.” Image courtesy of Sami Rahman.

You don’t need more brainpower, just techniques to utilize what you already have.

RT @the99percent: Training Genius: The Learning Secrets of Polyglots and Savants - http://t.co/keWjGUv