We’re heading over to AT&T Park for the A’s/Giants game in a couple of hours, and we fly back tonight. It’s been a great trip, but we’re ready to get back to the land of peaches and pollen.
Heading Home
Walking the Bridge
We decided that Friday afternoon would be a good day to walk across the Golden Gate. I believe this will rank right up there with the coolest of things I’ve ever done. If you haven’t been to San Francisco, I highly recommend that you try to make it to this wonderful city.
Final Day at COSN
The conference ended earlier today, and the overwhelming sentiment is that the conference was a huge success. We did have a moment of extreme rudeness today when one of my colleagues was doing a presentation and a representative from a company chimed in and essentially began doing a product pitch. Her badge clearly identified her as a vendor, so I’m not sure what she was thinking by doing that. We did capture her rudeness on tape, and it will be shared with the conference organizers.
This would be a good place to send pushy vendors.
City By the Bay
COSN continues to be an amazing conference. I promise to write more detailed reviews when I get back, but I will simply say that the sessions have been amazing so far. (so has the food!)
Another great day at COSN
Today’s highlight was getting to hear Marc Prensky talk about technology in education. I also sat in on a very nice session about how principals in Minnesota are using data driven data decision making to improve their schools.
Oh, and the weather has been great!
Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Sought in Texas
My fingers are crossed that we will find them there!
Corinne Campbell stuffs her gear in waterproof sacks and stuffs them and herself into a tiny circular cutout that marks the seat in her green kayak. With a clear signal from the GPS unit clipped near her orange vest, she shoves off between large downed tree trunks. Then she propels her tiny needle-nose craft into a wide rain-swollen creek that wiggles through what’s been called the biological crossroads of North America. And so begins another daylong search for a giant bird that may not exist.
Campbell and a pair of companions in similar kayaks have been on a tedious winter-long canvass of Texas’ famed Big Thicket, an often impenetrable jungle of swamps choked with thorny vines and prodigious pine and cedar trees, in pursuit of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
The bird, at 20 inches with a nearly three-foot wingspan, is the third-largest woodpecker in the world and the biggest woodpecker north of Mexico.
The first sighting in generations was made by Gene Sparling in Arkansas on Feb. 11, 2004, and has spawned interest across the South. Biologists converged on the Arkansas bayou area of the sighting and subsequently captured a 4-second video of what they said was an ivory-billed. Just this month, however, a Scottish scientist, in a British biology journal article, said identification of the bird from the video couldn’t be certain.
The last East Texas sighting of an ivory-billed was more than a century ago in 1904.
Link to article
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite iPods Help Doctors Recognize Heart Problems
I never would have imagined this benefit from an iPod. I hope more and more helpful uses are discovered as well.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteDoctors can greatly improve their stethoscope skills and therefore their ability to diagnose heart problems by listening repeatedly to heartbeats on their iPods.
Previous research has shown that the average rate of correct heart sound identification by physicians is 40 percent.
In a new study, 149 general internists listened 400 times to five common heart murmurs during a 90-minute session with iPods. After the session, the average score improved to 80 percent.
Proficiency with a stethoscope—and the ability to recognize abnormal heart sounds—is a critical skill for identifying dangerous heart conditions and minimizing dependence on expensive medical tests, said lead researcher Dr. Michael Barrett, clinical associate professor of medicine and cardiologist at Temple University School of Medicine and Hospital. “It’s important to know when to order a costly echocardiogram or stress test,” Barrett said.
Barrett believes the skill of learning heart problems is best learned through intensive drilling and repetition, not by traditional methods, usually a classroom lecture or demonstration in medical school and then on the job.
Now maybe I’ll go scuba diving
This looks really cool.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteAn Israeli Inventor has developed a breathing apparatus that will allow breathing underwater without the assistance of compressed air tanks. This new invention will use the relatively small amounts of air that already exist in water to supply oxygen to both scuba divers and submarines. The invention has already captured the interest of most major diving manufacturers as well as the Israeli Navy.
The idea of breathing underwater without cumbersome compressed air tanks has been the dream of science fiction writers for many years. In George Lucas movie “The Phantom Menace”, Obi-Wan whips out a little Jedi underwater breathing apparatus and dives in. As things tend to happen in our world, yesterdays science fiction has turned into today’s science fact due to one Israeli inventor with a dream. There are a number of limitations to the existing compressed air tank underwater breathing method. The first is the amount of time a diver can stay underwater, which is the result of the compressed air tank capacity.
Crikey!
I wish the Crocodile Hunter were alive to see this. (I miss that guy!) 
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteThe fossil remains of a crocodile-like reptile called Thalattosuchia have been discovered in rocks in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon—about 5,000 miles (8,050 kilometers) from where it most likely died, researchers announced on Monday. So far about 50 percent of the animal, including the upper leg bone and rib fragments seen here (bottom), have been unearthed.
“This creature lived in Jurassic times, so it’s 150 to 180 million years old,” retired University of Oregon geologist William Orr said in a press release. Orr provided expert advice to the excavation team.
The reptile, the oldest ever found in Oregon, is a rare discovery in North America. But similar fossils have been found throughout Southeast Asia, so experts believe that the remains were carried to the U.S. by plate tectonics. As the section of Earth’s crust containing the fossils moved eastward, the Pacific plate collided with the North American plate, pushing the bones into the mountains.
The 6- to 8-foot-long (1.8- to 2.4-meter-long) creature, shown in an artist’s conception (top), is part of a group that scientists think represents an evolutionary transition for this line of crocodilians. Features from related fossils suggest that the animals were evolving from being semiaquatic to entirely ocean dwelling.
City By the Bay
Only a few more days until I get there…
Thanks so much to Thomas Hawk for all his great photos!
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite