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The quality of one's penmanship is not defined solely by how each individual letter is formed. The flow between pairs of letters, called bigrams or digraphs, is also important, and a lot of the personalization in handwritten script is how adjacent letters are tied together. (I know that I write 'th' very differently than I write 't' and 'h' by themselves.) Bigram frequency varies widely between languages based on the Latin alphabet. Here is a nice PDF that shows this effect in ten European languages. So I would think that it's likely that the penmanship of someone writing in a second language would differ from their penmanship in their primary language.

I don't know if it is a development that influenced this move by AAP, but the EC is considering new guidlines on open access to research that is funded by EU-grants:

"The European Commission is preparing new guidelines for the 3 billion a year European scientific publishing industry that could put pressure on major firms such as Elsevier or Oxford University Press to give free access to articles based on EU-funded work. ... The EU should consider establishing a "policy mandating published articles arising from European Community-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives" the report states." (EUObserver, 25/01)

Seems reasonable imho... On a personal and self-interested note, I would also like software that is funded by EU & government (through academia) to be open sourced where possible, starting with the named entity recognition software behind News Explorer (which is developed by the EU's Joint Research Center) ;-)

I don't know if it is a development that influenced this move by AAP, but the EC is considering new guidlines on open access to research that is funded by EU-grants:

"The European Commission is preparing new guidelines for the 3 billion a year European scientific publishing industry that could put pressure on major firms such as Elsevier or Oxford University Press to give free access to articles based on EU-funded work. ... The EU should consider establishing a "policy mandating published articles arising from European Community-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives" the report states." (EUObserver, 25/01)

Seems reasonable imho... On a personal and self-interested note, I would also like software that is funded by EU & government (through academia) to be open sourced where possible, starting with the named entity recognition software behind News Explorer (which is developed by the EU's Joint Research Center) ;-)

Actually magnetic induction decreases with the cube of the distance, not square.
See Metal Detectors for Humanitarian Demining: from Basic Principles to Modern Tools and Advanced Developments, and search for "cube" in the text, or some of these search hits

Arjuana34

On a related note: if you are in the EU (and maybe even if you are not), you may want to sign the petition for public geo data. Apperently, there is a proposal considered by the EU that would make geo data collected by public agencies no longer free to use.

Three visitors experimented ABI. In less than 1 hour of training they achieved rather good performances. In particular, a lady was able to write something without errors on an on-screen keyboard and play the computer game Pac-Man. This confirms the adaptive capabilities of ABI.

The actual reseacrh described in the Yahoo article using implanted electrodes seems a bit strange - though the claim to have identified a few individual neurons is interesting.

Most of the other groups are working with stick-on electrodes. At the moment all they can do is move a mosue around a screen and click, but progress seems to be good - Correct recognition is around 70% after 5 one-hour sessions, which sounds impressive to me. The big obstacle to getting this into service for real people with disabilities is that the hardware is currently a bit chunky, especially the EEG machine. But we all know what happens to hardware, very, very quickly.

Oh - and, yes, the guy i talked to says the thing that secretlty drives him is eventually using it to play Quake. (Wonderful thing, altrusim)

Now wouldn't that be cool.(Unfortuantely you have to shave your head, I think!)

That study produced even a freely available software (not really open source, but the project coordinator is open minded enough to discuss that subject, I think) the software may be compiled on *nix, with the needed tweaks.

The commercial version - used in some Italian and German school - other than enabling the hearing impaired children to learn effectively makes the lecture a truly multimedial and entertaining experience for the entire classroom :)

You are right by saying that pressure will play a much larger part in this artificial injection experiment since the gas will meet the water at a pressure presumably much greater than 1 atmosphere.

The water pressure at 780 meters is roughly 78 atmospheres, and at 930 meters it's roughly 93 atmospheres. So, duh! (pun intended)

1.) how much pressure will they have to exert on the gas to get it down to this level? (remember, you must displace ALL of the water for the entire length of the tube going down)

2.) will this pressure be greater than that needed to liquify or solidify CO2?

maybe transporting large quantities of dry ice to the bottom of the ocean is the answer! surely it won't melt or sublime at such low temp and high pressure ;)