It’s always nice to have these on the wall. It’s always nicer to help others hang them on their walls.
Other Half – Chinese Stem Cell Initiative
There are over 12 million donors registered in the Bone Marrow Donors Worldwide database. The Canadian stem cell agency, OneMatch, is a member of that network. Less than 500,000 or 4.2% of these registrants are of Chinese origin.
Currently there are about 10 patients of Chinese origin waiting for unrelated stem cell bone marrow donors in Canada. Caucasian patients needing stem cell transplants have about 80% success rate in finding unrelated matched donors. However, Chinese patients have less than a 10% chance of finding unrelated matched donors, which means that more than 90% of the patients are not able to have the life-saving stem cell transplants they need. This is because Chinese are grossly under-represented in the worldwide stem cell registry.
Gah, forgot to actually post this, it was on draft mode! I hope some people went out to this event though since I posted it on Facebook!
America’s Army – Edutainment at its best!
In November 2007, avid America’s Army player Paxton Galvanek came across such a scenario when he found himself as the first person on the scene of a horrific, multi-victim car accident. According to Yahoo Games, 28-year-old Galvanek rescued two victims from an overturned SUV on the shoulder of a North Carolina highway. He was able to safely remove both individuals involved in the crash, and he properly assessed and treated their wounds, which included bruises, scrapes, head trauma, and the loss of two fingers. Quote: “So obviously, this guy must be a doctor or at least a medical student, correct? Well, in a manner of speaking… He learned it playing as a medic in the game, America’s Army.”[31]. According to Galvanek, “I have received no prior medical training and can honestly say that because of the training and presentations within America’s Army, I was able to help and possibly save the injured men.“[30]
This takes edutainment to a whole new level. I love playing first person shooter games. I gave up much gaming and only really do things that have a reasonable answer to my question:
“How does what I am doing now help me in the future?”
Even if I am relaxing, the answer could be that it will help me perform better in the near future.
This game however, has now moved to the top of my “must play” list based on that little segment above about how Paxton Galvanek managed to save lives based purely on the game!
True, I could actually go out and learn CPR, but my current flaky work schedule means I can’t sign up for courses or volunteer for St. John’s Ambulance like I wanted to.
So this will be a great backup solution!
TechEBlog » Solar Batteries
Simple yet functional, these SunCat Solar Batteries “are basically a set of old NiMH rechargeable batteries wrapped in a flexible Photo Voltaic cell created by the Institute for Energy Technology.” The photo voltaic cells were glued on and wired using a conductive silver pen along with flat wires.
This looks like a great piece of renewable technology, especially for places like third world countries because they seem to be closer to the equator with a lot of sun!
Even here in Canada, I’d be happy to use these battries in my equipment. I can’t wait for the day we discover ultra efficient photovoltaic panels!
YouTube – A woman missed her flight at the boarding gate HKIA
YouTube – A woman missed her flight at the boarding gate HKIA.
This is hilarious! How could there be people like this in the world? Wow, talk about spoiled, bratty … and … I really wish I could understand what she was saying! :P
Walk in the Park
Sometimes my job is a walk in a park. Literally. Like this morning when I got to witness cute birds being fed by people in the local park. I love every minute I get to go out there and capture life’s most precious moments.
Morbid: Chinas Death Buses Deliver Executions, Organ Harvesting On the Go
The buses, of which over 40 are currently in use, are replacing firing squads as Chinas preferred method of execution. The buses provide a setup for lethal injections, and the acts are carried out on streaming video so local authorities can observe and ensure that everything is done legally.
Critics say that the buses help the government secretly harvest organs to sell to the west, as theres already a doctor on hand to administer the injection and they never show the bodies between execution and cremation.
via Morbid: Chinas Death Buses Deliver Executions, Organ Harvesting On the Go.
I guess this is kinda being practical? If someone’s going to be executed for a debt to society, then in death, that debt can be repaid through their organs.
Quote of the day
This quote comes from the group Men To Boys, a local acapella group that sang at an event I was covering.
When food starts replacing sex, men can’t even get into their own pants!
Hahaha, I thought that was awesome!
“This site may harm your computer” on every search result??
If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.
[...]
We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately and here’s the human error, the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.
via Official Google Blog: “This site may harm your computer” on every search result??.
It is a pretty unfotunate incident, but I guess that’s the drawback with processing huge amounts of data. One wrong keystroke can cause a whole system to fail.
Presumably, all test cases cannot be accounted for, and, like this one, will have to be dealt with when it occurs.
I suppose no one would have thought to flag as potential invalid data if the value for a URL contained just one character.
Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.
I think it’s great that the Google team managed to find this error within 40 mintues. I wonder what the algorithm or process they went through to find this error. It is literally looking for a needle in a haystack. The “/” really does look like a needle. :P