Category: Technology

I am currently writing a post about pico and femto satellites for Sciencebase, these devices are tiny compared to the enormous one tonne behemoths many of us would picture if asked to visualise an artificial satellite (more on that later). Anyway, the earth’s escape velocity at sea level from a standing start was a figure I needed to hand while writing the piece.

I found a value in metres per second, converted to kmh and did a quick search with Google Toolbar just to get some references and to confirm my calculation. The kmh value, as you may have guessed, comes out at about 40320. However, Google’s auto-suggest offered me a search for the phrase “40320 plain bob major”, which was odd, to say the least, but would have been the obvious figure to a bell-ringing friend of mine. He would have immediately spotted it as an astoundingly long peal of bells. In fact, this very long peal was rung in 1963 in Loughborough, England, using eight tower bells in all possible permutations 8 multiplied by 8 factoria (8×8!) would come to 322,560 blows. Apparently, it took more than 18 hours to ring the changes all the way through.

Of course, the peal of 40320 arises because of the 8 factorial connection, 8×7×6×5×4×3×2×1 (8!) and has nothing to do with earth’s escape velocity, but it hooked me on a bit of guided searching looking for other significant mentions of the number 40320.

40320 is the number of minutes in 4 weeks and so February with its usual 28 days, should be designated “International Factorial Appreciation Month” according to one author (except in leap years, such as 2008, of course).

Kentucky 40320 is a spot on Ford Hampton Road in Kentucky, USA.

Item 40320 in the SigmaAldrich catalog of chemicals is 2,2-dimethylglutaric acid and bug number 40320 in Ubuntu Linux – “devhelp starts with an “empty” page area, which is not redrawn”, whatever than means, apologies to Ubuntu fans, I’ve not been there, nor done that yet.

The PubMed ID (PMID) 40320 points to a paper in the August 1979 issue of the journal Tijdschr Diergeneeskd entitled “Relationship between the presence of meconium in newborn lambs and postnatal pH and blood gas tension levels” and Tinyurl page 40320 displays a scan of a cheque for $950 with the filename bloodmoney.jpg.

Assuming Rudolph is at the front, there are 40320 ways to arrange the other eight reindeer (this simply relies on the 8! value mentioned earlier and could apply to clusters of any eight objects). It ignores “Olive the other reindeer”, you know the one who used to “laugh and call him names”. At the time of writing there were 207 cars listed for sale according to Google that had 40320 miles on the clock and just 5 with that same number in kilometres, while according to Cancerwise, 40320 women will be diagnosed with uterine cancer this year.

40320 is the item number for a “please shower” sign at BackyardGardener.com and BIOS 40320 is the Aquatic Conservation course covering global freshwaters, science and policy at University of Notre Dame.

Most of these various facts are totally unrelated, except those invoked by 8! Amazing what you learn writing about femto satellites. If you have any other fascinating examples of the number 40320 please give them a mention in the comments box below.

As Russ Swan of Laboratory Talk pointed out in reference to my previous post on the redundancy of the phrase “male semen”, there are numerous other examples around. For instance, the phrase HIV virus is equally redundant as it literally says, “human immunodeficiency virus virus”, likewise ATM machine (automated teller machine machine), PIN number (personal identification number number) and the Sierra Nevada mountain range (Snowy mountain range mountain range). There are lots more everyday examples of interlanguage tautologies of the latter kind on Wikipedia

But there are plenty of examples in science and technology. For instance, this patent title – RAID array configuration synchronization at power on is just one of many examples that cite the acronym RAID followed by the word array, as if RAID standing for “redundant array of independent disks”. Ironic indeed that the phrase itself contains the word redundant.

HIV virus shows up countless times throughout the media, and no less in scientific journal article titles, such as this one – Prevalence of HIV virus among patients, I even saw the phrase “female girls” in one reference on the subject of Rett syndrome. And, there are plenty of examples along the lines of LED display, LCD display, and DC current.

Not quite a pure rhetorical tautology, the graphics acronym TIFF is often accompanied by the word “file” as in a TIFF file, which literally means “tagged image file format file”. Same goes for the phrase pertaining to Adobe’s almost ubiquitous and much-maligned “PDF format”, which expands to “portable document format format”. Then there are phrases like DOS operating system (disk operating system operating system), Windows NT technology, (Windows New Technology technology), BASIC code (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code code), and ISDN network (Integrated Services Digital Network network).

There’s a nice extensive, long itemised listing of redundant tautologies to be found located here, but is there any purposeful point to drawing your attention to these phrases? Not really, but they’re great fun to find so if you discover any others please let me know via the comments box.

In an effort to keep Sciencebase bubbling along during the holiday season, I figured a quickie post listing some of my favourite science blogs from this year might be interesting. Blogs come and go, of course, and my newsreader account is in constant flux with new blogs that catch my attention briefly getting pole position and then dropping off.

However, I remembered that there is a quicker way for you to grab a recent snapshot of my feed favourites and that is with my newsfeed OPML file (right-click and save the link with an “.opml” extension. You can then import it into any compatible news aggregator, offline (Snarfer) or online (Google Reader) with minimal fuss. Or use an OPML editor to edit it, it’s entirely up to you. My science OPML file is up to date, relatively speaking, although I may have added or removed a few feeds from my own aggregator in the last few days. Anyway, it’s as good as it gets at this time of year.

Meanwhile, a growing list of blogs with a genetics, DNA, and health theme can be found on the DNA Network. At the time of writing, my good friends Ricardo Vidal and Hsien-Hsien Lei are busy creating a new website for the Network that will feed on all the RSS files from the member blogs (I should admit, Sciencebase is a member of the Network). It’s difficult to single out any of the other blogs in the DNANetwork for specific attention, Ricardo and Hsien’s are superb, and so are many of the others. So. once you’ve trawled through my science OPML, do check out the DNA Network too.

Seeing as the holiday season is fast approaching, I thought I’d offer an extra post covering some of the browsing and blogging tips and tricks I run on the Significant Figures site at Sciencetext.com. On that site I used to mainly discuss inappropriate unit conversions, sloppy statistical use, and dodgy typos in the media and still do occasionally.

For instance, there was a lot of press on the comet bigger than the sun issue recently, which interconverted miles and kilometres with astoundingly high improvements in significant figures. Then there was the discussion of how much does Santa Claus weigh…

But, like I say, mostly it’s tips on how to get the most from your web browser, improve security, and boost your blog’s performance. It acts as my personal lab book for all kinds of hacks, so I always have an online reminder of tweaks in case I lose track of how I fixed a particular problem. To follow are some of the most commonly accessed pages on the site, hopefully one or two of them will strike a chords and be of use to Sciencebase readers:

• Make Firefox load faster – a few simple tweaks to speed up Firefox
• Reset your Windows Live password – a phishing attack warning
• Instant file sharing – Sidestep the limitations of convetional email systems to share 500 Mb files and more
• How to open banned sites – Totalitarianism is illegal, find ways round the filters
• Get Windows Vista on XP – Skin up your XP installation
• Import Firefox bookmarks into Google bookmarks – Does what it says on the tin (other metals are available)
• Use Google Mail as an online drive – Ditto
• How to extract images from Powerpoint files – Errr…ditto
• What to do When Your PC Won’t Boot – How to do a hard reset at the motherboard level
• How to watch DVDs on your iPhone – Find out how to go portable with movies

So, there you go, if you plan to use any of these, please backup any important data files first to avoid the need for data recovery and don’t blame me if it all goes horribly wrong, you use them at your own risk. I would be interested to hear how you get on if you do apply any of my hacks.

If you’ve just bought an iPhone, you’re probably expecting many happy years of battery power. Well, not so fast. Laptop batteries are very similar to rechargeable batteries in other devices, they wear out. I’ve had my current laptop for about 18 months and in the last few weeks I’ve noticed that I’m not getting quite the battery life from it that I was when I first bought it. I used to be able to run for about 3 hours doing wordprocessing, email, and web browsing even on a wireless connection. Lately, however, the lithium battery seems to run down within an hour or so, which is a real pain when I’m offsite.

I checked out Battery University to see if there is anything I can do to get my battery life back to normal. Apparently, there isn’t, and as a chemist, I should have known that (it’s all about crystallization of the components and such). It turns out that I basically broke all the rules concerning lithium battery use. Here’s a quick run down of what you should and shouldn’t do to help maintain the health of any lithium battery whether in a laptop, iPhone (other hybrid devices are available):

1. Avoid frequent full discharges; regular partial discharges and an occasional full discharge are better. Lithium batteries have no charge “memory”, unlike NiCd batteries, so frequent recharging does no harm.
2. Carry out a deliberate full discharge once every 30 charges, you can do this by simply running the battery down in the equipment (if you have power management enabled switch it off temporarily and make sure you are not running any critical software). An advantage of this approach is that it helps calibrate the battery fuel gauge and avoids premature hybernation.
3. Keep the lithium-ion battery cool. Heat is a killer for batteries. Don’t leave your device in a hot car or window ledge, don’t use a laptop on your lap (how’s that for irony), above about 45 Celsius, a lithium will wear out very quickly.
4. If you’re running on fixed power, think about removing the battery from a laptop to reduce the impact of internal heat. Of course, you lose the mobility advantage of the battery and also the safety should your mains power go down.
5. Don’t buy spare lithium-ion batteries to use later on. Even when not in use a lithium battery will age.
6. If you do have a spare lithium-ion battery, use one most of the time and keep the other wrapped in a hermetically sealed plastic box or bag in the refrigerator, but do not freeze your battery.
7. If you have to store your battery or device, make sure it’s charged to about 40% before leaving it for extended periods.
8. If you’ve just bought a new device, follow this advice and pop back in a year or so to let me know how you got on. After 12 months any lithium battery no matter how well looked after may lose up to 20% of its charging capacity but if you’ve lost more than that, then you probably broke the Battery University rules.

This post was originally destined for my blogging and browsing tips site Significant Figures, for more of the same and different again, check out the Sig Figs site at sciencetext.com

The notion of the Invisible Web created quite a buzz, long before Google even had just one “oo” let alone half a dozen. The phrase alluded to the putatively millions of additional web pages, essentially hidden from view behind database scripts – fascinating product catalogues, riveting company backend data, and, scientific databases.

Scientific databases, you say, invisible?

Of course! You probably think of the databases with which you are personally familiar as being directly accessible and that there is nothing hidden about their contents at all. Much of the search functionality of countless scientific databases will work perfectly well regardless of your IP address, irrespective of whether you have logged in, and from almost anywhere in the world. Some are closed off to non-subscribers or those outside a particular campus or organisation, of course, but many are not. So, by what stretch of the imagination might they be described as hidden, or worse, invisible?

Well, do you know precisely what is contained in the close to 1000 terabytes of information in the National Climatic Data Centre? What about your favourite literature database? What about PubMed or ChemSpider? Or, any of dozens and dozens of other databases hidden by virtue of their very nature from conventional search engines. Obviously, specific users will have a relatively detailed perspective of the contents of a particular database, but what about cross-disciplines or, perish the thought, lay outsiders who may need to access information quickly without spending hours, days, weeks, attempting to find the right database and then attempting to figure out what is in it?

Yih-Ling Hedley and Anne James of the Faculty of Engineering and Computing at Coventry University, and Muhammad Younas of the Department of Computing at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, England, point out that invisible web databases dynamically generate results in response to users’ queries. And, therein lies the rub. Search engines, which traditionally crawl, spider and index, the web, see only the front-end search page when they visit a site acting as a user interface for a database, in general. This means that the actual keywords associated with the data within those databases is not accessed, because it is dynamically generated by real users, and is not rendered by the search engine robots

Nevertheless, Hedley and colleagues say, “The categorisation of such databases into a category scheme has been widely employed in information searches,” but with only limited success. Now, the team has developed and tested a Concept-based Categorisation over Refined Sampled Documents (CCReSD) approach that effectively handles information extraction, summarisation and categorisation of such databases. Unlike a conventional search engine, CCReSD behaves in some ways like a real live user and detects and extracts query-related information from sampled documents of databases.

The result is that the system can generate a table of keyword terms and their frequencies to summarise database contents. The team explains that their system also generates descriptions of concepts from their coverage and specificity given in a category scheme.

Okay, sounds useful, CCReSD is basically a database savvy search engine spider that can create an index from otherwise hidden web resources by spoofing the behaviour of a genuine human user of that database. Aside from the potential breaching of database terms & conditions that forbid automated accesses, this could be a potentially very useful tool for technical subjects that have many, many hidden databases.

The team tested their system on the Help Site database (computer manuals on a system with multiple templates), CHID (a healthcare database with a single template) and the general database-driven site Wired News (single template). They found that it could extract relevant information from sampled documents and generate terms and frequencies with improved accuracy on previous approaches.

The team discusses CCReSD in detail in the Int J High Performance Computing Networking, 2007, 5, 24-33