Report on BT Young Scientist & TechnologyExhibition 2014 #BTYSTE

I spent so long queueing to have my book signed by Chris Hadfield that I had very little time to view the projects. However, I did mainly concentrate on the Technology section and there were a few projects which caught my eye:

• 
  Gearduino - this project was effectively an automatic transmission system for bikes. It used sensors on the pedals and an Arduino based controller to determine when the gears should be shifted either up or down  (hence the project name).
  The student who did this project told me that he has filed a patent application and once this is granted he will approach bike manufacturers to see if they are interested in bringing it to the market. As a regular cyclist I can easily how this could be a best seller.
• 
  Another cycling related project was Bike Radar - I didn't get a chance to speak to the students responsible for this project, but it seems that they developed a warning system for cyclists to alert them to the fact that cars are potentially on course to collide with them. It sounds like a great idea and is similar to the collision avoidance system which are currently available on high end cars.
• A very useful project was Gum shield communication device for players and managers. This project won the overall runner-up prize for developing a wireless communication device which could be embedded into a gum shield and would allow players to receive messages from the manager during the game. It seems to operate by generating vibrations in the gum shield which are then perceived by the player as sound waves. I can see this being used in several different sports.
• The entologic project developed a system which would tanalyse a program and turn it into a normal English explaination of what the program did. This should be useful for non-programmers who wished to understand what the program was doing.
• A similar project was Easy shell which developed a system for transforming a set of instructions written in normal English into a bash shell script which could be executed. I didn't get a chance to try it out, but the idea is definitely interesting.
• 
  Last but not least I was interested to see New Method for Card Counting in Blackjack - this project developed an improvement on the classical method of counting cards to improve the odds in a game of BlackJack. This project clearly has commercial potential. One of the students told me that his father has promised to invest in sending him to Las Vegas on a practical trial of the algorithm once he reaches the legal minimum age for gambling.

Prezi for Coder Dojo

Here is the Prezi that I will use to introduce the Apps4Gaps competition to the IBM CoderDojo session tomorrow.

Is there an App for that Gap

Young people today are very familiar with Apps. However, most of them simply use Apps created by other people and don't realise how easy it is for them to create their own. The Apps4Gaps competition is an attempt to rectify this by offering young Irish people to develop apps which leverage open Data.

The site provides links to the Irish 2011 census data feeds, but the rules seem to allow entrants to use any open data set to built their application. It seems that a number of organisations including the teachers organisations and CoderDojo movement are involved in prompting the contest.

The closing date for registering your project is 31st of January, but you have until 11th of April to complete your entry. The web site is not clear about what the age limit is for young people. I wonder would I be stretching the rules if I entered an application (although I am 51 I feel young at heart).

The Art of Hapiness

One of the presents that I got for Christmas was a book called "The Art of Happiness". This book was written by Howard Cutler (an American Psychiatrist) based upon his discussions with the Dalai Lama about his general philosophy on life.

I found this a very interesting read because I have long been interested in the teachings of the Dalai Lama. Initially I was surprised to read that he though that the fundamental purpose of everyone's life should be to pursue happiness, However, his holiness makes a distinction between the pursuit of a temporary joyful feeling which can be a selfish pursuit and the pursuit of happiness which he claims can only be achieved by practising compassion and caring for other creatures.

An interesting aspect of the book was the fact that the psychiatrist was comparing the Dalai Lama's guidelines for pursuing happiness with the quest that his patients back home were seeking a return to mental health. In many ways the Dali Lama's version of happiness corresponds reasonably closely to good mental health.

Overall I recommend this book highly. I see that the cover claims that it is an international best seller so clearly many people have already read it.

My Love/Hate relationship with my new Mac

Slightly over 10 years ago I bought an Advent home computer in PCworld. It really served us well and never gave any real problems especially once I upgraded it from Windows XP to Ubuntu. However, I recently decided that I should upgrade to something more modern and I decided that I needed to splash out an buy reasonably good hardware if I expected this new PC to last as long as its predecessor.

I was advised by friends to consider buying Apple. I don't have very happy experiences with Mac-OS, but my Mac loving friends tell me that I just needed to be more patient and once I learn the oddities of Mac-OS I would eventually fall in love with it.

I briefly considered buying an iMac 27", but I balked at paying almost €2k for a PC. Eventually I settled on buying a Mac mini and a separate ASUS 27" screen which reduced the price down to slightly over €900. Having the screen and PC in one unit is handy, but didn't justify doubling the price. Overall I am quite happy with my purchase, but my opinion of Mac-OS has not really been a love affair.

I really only have two problems with the new system

1. I have an old HP OfficeJet 4500 which  should be capable of printring, scanning and faxing. However, due to a long standing fault in the paper feed mechanism it only works as a scanner. Linux just calls this a generic scanner and it works fine. Mac-OS recognizes it asa HP Officejet 4500, but even when I download a special driver from the HP web site it refuses to work (a helpful error message "internal error"). 
2. The computer refuses to suspend when I select sleep from the system menu, but at least it does suspend OK based on an inactivity time.

However, there are also some features of Mac-OS that continue to annoy me e.g.:

• There are a well documented set of control key combinations which are almost universally implemented in every computer system (e.g. crtl-C to cut, ctrl-V to paste etc.) It seems that Apple hate following any standard that they didn't invent themselves, but these key combinations are too well known to be ignored so they compromised by implementing them, but not with the control key. Instead they implement these with another key whose name that I don't know (it is in between the control and alt keys). This is OK once you practice using a Mac for long enough, but I still make the mistake of expecting the control key to work the same that it does in every other operating system.
• Likewise the middle scroll wheel on the mouse works the wrong way on the Mac. I know that Apple probably claim that there is some reason why the way they implemented the mouse scroll button is better than everyone else, but anyone (like me) who uses more than one type of computer will hate when they don't go with the consensus,

On the plus side I find that there are normally more help documents online for Mac than there are for Linux.

I am a pretty persistent guy so I will stick it out a while longer before I take the nuclear option and install Ubuntu on my new system.

Can you really learn all about Spotify in 10 minutes?

When I was in the library a few days ago I spotted a book with the catch title "Teach yourself Spotify in 10 minutes". I had been using Spotify for the last few months and thought I knew how to use the service already - but then I though "why not invest 10 minutes of my time to really learn how it works?"

The title of the book is slightly misleading. Although it is really little more than a booklet it still took me about half an hour to read. (A5 sized and about 160 pages in length with much of he space given over to pictures). Nevertheless I was delighted with the valuable stuff I learned.

I initially signed up for Spotify as a replacement for the Pandora service after they changed their policy and decided that Irish residents would not be allowed to use their service any more. I assumed that Spotify would be a direct replacement for Pandora - and I wasn't disappointing because it fulfilled this role fully. However, after reading the book I realized that Spotify has loads of features which Pandora doesn't (e.g. music sharing, 3rd party applications etc.) and so I was only using a tiny fraction of the service that I paid for.

I strongly recommend this book to any Spotify user. Even if you can't borrow it for free from your library it still costs slightly more than one month's subscription and after reading this book you will get much more value out of the service you are paying for.

Why I won't be sorry to see the seanad disappear

At the moment Ireland has two parliaments, but tomorrow we will hold a referendum to decide if one of them should be abolished. I am in favour of the abolition and this post describes why.

1. The Dáil is roughly the equivalent of the English House of Commons and its members are directly elected in a pretty conventional election process with single transferable voting. This parliament has all of the normal powers you would expect to make laws and appoint governments etc.
2. The other parliament Seanad (or Senate) has virtually no power and is roughly equivalent to the English House of Lords. It is elected by a complex and slightly bizarre method:
• The bulk (43) are elected by an electorate which consists of members of local government groups e.g. county councils and city corporations. These positions are normally filled by politicians who unsuccessfully went for election to the Dáil (the deadline for nominations is set to be after the result of the Dáil election is known - hence the public perception that they are essentially rejected or second best politicians.
• 6 members are elected by graduates of either Trinity College Dublin or the National University of Ireland (3 each). At the time when the Seanad was formed these were the only universities in existence. Over the year, graduates of some of the newer universities have occasionally complained about the unfairness of it - but in general nobody gets too worked up about it because nobody cares enough about the Seanad to get very worked up about it.
• 11 are directly appointed by the incoming Taoiseach. This means that the party with a majority in the Dáil is almost guaranteed to also have the majority in the Seanad. By tradition the Taoiseach's nominees have included some well respected public figures who were not associated with the government party, but this is only after they have appointed enough party members to ensure that they have a safe majority.

Much criticism has been made of the fact that the Senate electorate are effectively the elite and privileged members of society. Of course, when the state was initially founded this was the intention. The idea was to form a second chamber which would have a larger influence from the protestant elite (who were more likely to have a university degree)  which formed during British rule and to moderate the more extreme influences of the uneducated masses. However, I think that this motivation hardly makes sense in modern Ireland (I don't have statistics  but I imagine that Catholics and Protestants have broadly the same chance of having a university degree today).

The Seanad has effectively no real powers to influence legislation  In theory they can delay the passage of legislation, but this has rarely ever been used. Therefore it is effectively a debating club. While I agree that some senators have contributed to public debate, these senators are a minority and in any case we could rectify the loss by asking the newspapers to provide better coverage of the debating societies that exist in all universities.

Nobody really supports the current Seanad, but the debate has included many people who argue that we need a second chamber to provide more debate and they would argue that we should keep it, but reform the election process. This might make sense - but nobody has proposed a realistic proposal for exactly how the reform should be done.

The campaign in favour of abolition has been mainly focussed on the potential financial saving, estimated to be €20m. However, I don't think this is really a large amount of money and it would be good value for money if it really improved out law making process (but as I said earlier it doesn't so I think I will be voting for its abolition).

Microsoft is doing to much too late

Companies who fail to adapt to new market realities are often accused of doing "too little, too late". However, in the case of Microsoft I think they may be a case of doing  "too much, too late".

Until recently Microsoft had a virtual monopoly in the market for operating systems and productivity software that ran on Desktop PCs. People who were technology aware tended to favour either a MacOS desktop (which its fans claimed as being so much better that it justified the extra cost) or Linux (which is available for free but is rarely offered pre-installed on new PCs). However, there was (and indeed still is) a market for people who don't want new features and would prefer if the interface stayed the same as the one that they fist learned to use over a decade ago. In order to defend their monopoly position Microsoft made minimal changes to their software and put a top priority on backward compatibility which ensured that they appealed to people who did not want to learn any new interface.

In the last 5 years or so it became clear to Microsoft executives and anyone else observing the computer industry, that the desktop is becoming less important. In order to appeal to this new market Microsoft developed Windows mobile and then Windows v8. This was a brave move because, although these interfaces have received good reviews from people who have put the effort into learning them - the interfaces are very different from earlier versions of Windows and hence they force Windows users to learn something new.

I personally know only one person who has a Microsoft windows based phone - although he tells me that he grew to love it once he invested in learning the unconventional interface. The only thing I hear about Windows 8 based desktops is enquiries from people who are technical laggards asking if there is any way to downgrade from the version of windows 8 which came with their new PC.

I applaud Microsoft for their bravery to experiment. However, they have already lost their fans among the technical elite because of their slowness to innovate. With Windows 8 coming out I feel that they might also be set to lose their fans among the sizeable portion of the public who don't want to learn new technology.

Monitoring my Heart

I recently acquired a blood pressure monitor from Lidl. I find that the readings vary considerably depending upon when I measure it. This encouraged me to dust off my Polar Bluetooth heart rate monitor which allows me to monitor how my pulse varies as I take part in various activities.

I find that when I go running my pulse goes up to 145-150 BMP and stays there for ~4 minutes before falling back to 120 BPM for the remainder of the run.  When I use the cross trainer, my pulse climbs to roughly 170-180 BPM and stays there.


Interestingly when I meditate, my pulse stays level around 85-90 BPM. I think this is an indication that I am not very good at meditation, because this is higher than my normal resting heart rate of 75-80 BPM. If I were a Zen guru, I should be able to bring my pulse down very low while meditating.

The SPAM comments are back again :-(

I had a problem with SPAM comments some time ago. After trying a few defence mechanisms I finally settled on forcing people to log in. Recently I saw a revival of the SPAM comments. Of course this time I know the identity of the people leaving the stupid comments. I would threaten to leave junk comments upon their blogs - but this would not deter them (they might welcome the extra traffic).

 At the moment I am deleting the SPAM comments shortly after they are left, but if the problem doesn't go away I might be forced to introduce comment moderation.

 As they say It is an ill wind that blows no good. While I was deleting the SPAM comments I noticed that my home weather station has been off line since 14th of August. Hopefully I will be bringing it back on line again soon.