As a trained teaching guy: If I were to design a course with the objectives to "survey the histories of these genres and recognize how world events have been reflected onto other worlds," I would focus on the science fiction that uses contemporary topics and extrapolates current technologies.
Azimov? Clarke? Awesome, yes. Iconic, surely. But rockets, FTL, time travel, aliens... all over-worked tropes. Kids have seen it and done it, beat the boss, posted the walkthrough on youtube. It's not sci-fi. It's the future of the archaic past.
Focus more on the future of the present.
Here's a story I'd love to include for a younger audience: Boyfriend, by Madeline Ashby. Kids subscribe to virtual boy- and girl-friend AI apps on their portable computers, and the AIs begin to rethink the meaning of their service to humanity. Listen to it on Escape Pod. Now *that* is a rich topic for today's generation of cell-phone slinging, hyper-connected, emotionally stuntable youth.
I absolutely adore Lovecraft. However, I'd save him for a specialty class, probably a college level class. His fecund verbosity overpowers my even my most perspicacious tendency, rendering opaque the once-transparent word hoards of narrators across the visages of time, sending my love of storytelling into the blissful quiet of a new dark age.
Well, I worked for Polar, so I'll give them a nod. They have an outstanding training program, the equipment is solid, and the beeps and boops you get from their gear is actually very informative and encouraging.
The F10 was their flagship HRM when I was there a few years ago. I've still got mine and I swear by it.
I proposed a product idea to the company that basically turned the HRM into a little play companion, a la tomagotchi. You fed it, watered it, played with it just like the normal one, but if you didn't exercise with it, it would get fat and die no matter what else you did with it.
If it tied to WoW, I wonder if kids would be inclined to play for PHAT DROPS.
Ditto. I exercise with interest now that I have a set of trackable data from my HRM. Without one before, I was just running in circles. Now I'm running in circles with a goal... or something.
Anyway, they're fun. Worth the price if you really intend to improve your fitness.
I worked for Polar as a technical writer. Their HRMs are very neat. If they're using a basic model it's exactly what you describe.
The zippier models like the F10 actually will do fitness evaluations on your heart, though. They call it "OwnAge" and "OwnZone" and "Own-" whatever. Marketing, but a cool idea behind it.
Those ones do detect variations in rhythm and timings between beats. They take that information, plug it into an equation that accounts for BMI, age, recorded exercise history, and other factors, then spit out a number that helps you track the fitness of your heart. The idea is to give you a graph of the good your exercise is doing for you.
That's all interpreted by real time data coming in, though. They don't record a waveform for later examination or anything. Certainly not medically diagnostic. All you ever get to see are the averages as datapoints.
I'm betting it's not even that and it's just a heart rate monitor to improve the quality of aerobic exercise. I concur.
I worked as a technical writer for a place that made HRMs. We sold to pro athletes, gyms, personal trainers, Navy seals, fitness enthusiasts of every stripe... we even had a version of the product made especially for training race horses. It was pretty cool.
I was surprised at what a difference using one of those things made in my *own* ability to exercise. I'm an overweight writing nerd, but man: there's nothing like beeping, booping technology to get my interest. Using an HRM is like keeping score on a video game. Or playing the tomagotchi game with your body as the avatar. Or something.
Something fun and trackable, anyway.
The HRM went a long way toward getting me off my butt and dropping pounds because it provided metrics and feedback that I could understand and affect. That's more than my "hustle! hustle! hustle!" school coach ever managed to do.
All this being said: I doubt that the information on your kid is going to be recorded for more than 9 weeks, honestly. There are, like, serious LAWS about that information getting off campus, too. Anybody who is into selling kids' info to Nefarious Businesses Incorporated is going to have access to a lot more dirt than just a weird blip on your child's HRM.
That HRM, by the way, is certainly *not* medically diagnostic in quality. I'd be surprised if it did more than note the heart rate at 1 second intervals and track the changes over time. It *might* try to estimate a general sense of fitness on the heart, but it will, at best, give you a meaningless number on a scale from "is this thing on?" to "cybernetically enhanced athlete trained atop the Himalayas from birth."
No need to worry. The poster's school's coach is probably just trying to do a great job at keeping the kids in his care interested in physical fitness. I applaud him/her for it.
Or someone will get congratulated and promoted. It depends on the response to diagnose and fix the issue, whatever it is. Major outages aren't always the fault of some apocryphal guy asleep at the switch.
I've used Google mail for years. This is the first outage I've heard of, and it hasn't even affected me. I can tell you the in-house exchange server at my company has caused for more trouble than this for our employees in the past 8 months.
I work IT at a home nursing business, and I get work tickets submitted all the time. The nurses and office coordinators use software that -- don't ask me why -- requires them to use all capital letters when entering patient visit notes and ordering medications. They leave the CAPS LOCK key on all the time as part of their professional work, and are so used to it that it doesn't stand out when they use it in other contexts.
HIPAA makes no distinction between a compliance consultant and an IT consultant. If you're getting paid to work on a project related to health care and patient information, HIPAA requires you to be aware of the implications of information transmission.
That's the *whole point of the law that is HIPAA.*
Giving legal advice is one thing. Bringing attention to areas of your expertise that carry implications for HIPAA is another. IT professionals know about how technology affects the flow of information. We have a responsibility to our employers to put that knowledge to use on their behalf.
That's one way to frame the argument, and it's a good one.
I'd stress to them that HIPAA PHI standards require the company -- AKA your bosses -- to be able to vouch for the security of the entire pipeline of information flow. It's not an issue of "they're not interested" or "the chances are low." It's an issue of minimizing the holes in the pipeline.
Google does not offer anything like PHI-compatible security. They are a big hole in the secuirty, whatever the chances or interest are. One could argue that the world's largest indexer of information, who makes the results of those indexes freely available to the public, is the antithesis of security.
If your bosses are serious about health care, they're not going to be idiots about it. (They may chose to be idiots about other things. Probably not this.)
Exactly right. The company that made LoJack lobbied for the feature to be installed, but they want you to pay for it to be activated. If you don't give them money, it's dormant.
Now, if somebody hacked or appropriated their activation scheme, or compelled the company to activate it without your knowledge, that would be a cause for concern.
My company recently investigated the LoJack system after one of our laptops got stolen. It's impressive technology. The sales rep talked up how "fortunate" they were to get the cooperation of many BIOS implementations from the folks who make BIOSes. I don't think that's fortune at all -- it's a corporate deal. Whatever.
It's common but not all-pervasive. (yet?) I looked for my laptop on the list and didn't find it, though, so it's not exactly all-pervasive. It's intended for corporations and individuals who want it.
While the inclusion of this feature into many BIOSes is kinda creepy, I'm not terribly unsettled by it. It does, however, make me want to pursue the open BIOS initiatives.
More to the point, I'd like to see this app extended to other criminals who cause major damage to society and yet move unseen among us. Unethical individuals in the banking, real estate, and politics business. Just so I know who I'm potentially making deals with. Their debts to society far outstrip the psychological twitch of one person's regretable encounters.
The sex offender stigma is totally overused, though.
XCOM is rebooted all over the place. Google for UFO Aftermath or UFO AI or UFO2000 or UFO... well, just about any noun phrase will probably land you somewhere.
That Bard's Tale was mostly a jab in the ribs to fantasy gaming tropes. Light-hearted, cynical, brash, and sophomoric in its humor. It did include on of the original BT games, Thief of Fate, I think, as a side-game. Just to show that the game had roots of some kind or other.
I liked the simple gameplay mechanics -- as a bard, you couldn't fight very well yourself, so you had to summon allies to help you. Different allies brought different strengths to the field, so it was a dynamic sort of rock-paper-scissors event but with many more options. Fun enough, I thought. And the story was fair enough.
If you like single player fantasy RPG, you might look into Jade Empire.
Bioware created the world themselves, so they took it in some fun directions. A bit arcady in the combat, but fun and intriguing, especially since they get away from the overwrought D&D-inspired worlds and into something fresh to these westerner's eyes.
There are about a hojillion XCOM reboots out there: some open sourced, some commercial. A common phrase is "spiritual successor." Honestly, you can't swing a dead cat on a google search without finding one.
UFO Aftermath was the start of a great series with both the strategic and tactical options, all set in a post-apocalyptic world. UFO Extraterrestrials is another. Then there's UFO2000, UFO:AI... different games focus on different aspects of the game type.
XCOM is next in my line of reviews, so I've been gathering a ton of this information together lately.:)
Star Control II was remade into Ur Quan Masters... not a reboot with new graphics, but there is updated music and options to make it playable on any current system. I'd love a new sequel though. Go to Toys for Bob's sourceforge page and sign their petition for commercial development if you're moved to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
As a trained teaching guy: If I were to design a course with the objectives to "survey the histories of these genres and recognize how world events have been reflected onto other worlds," I would focus on the science fiction that uses contemporary topics and extrapolates current technologies.
Azimov? Clarke? Awesome, yes. Iconic, surely. But rockets, FTL, time travel, aliens ... all over-worked tropes. Kids have seen it and done it, beat the boss, posted the walkthrough on youtube. It's not sci-fi. It's the future of the archaic past.
Focus more on the future of the present.
Here's a story I'd love to include for a younger audience: Boyfriend, by Madeline Ashby. Kids subscribe to virtual boy- and girl-friend AI apps on their portable computers, and the AIs begin to rethink the meaning of their service to humanity. Listen to it on Escape Pod. Now *that* is a rich topic for today's generation of cell-phone slinging, hyper-connected, emotionally stuntable youth.
I absolutely adore Lovecraft. However, I'd save him for a specialty class, probably a college level class. His fecund verbosity overpowers my even my most perspicacious tendency, rendering opaque the once-transparent word hoards of narrators across the visages of time, sending my love of storytelling into the blissful quiet of a new dark age.
Seriously. Yuck.
Let the never-ending beta begin!
Well, I worked for Polar, so I'll give them a nod. They have an outstanding training program, the equipment is solid, and the beeps and boops you get from their gear is actually very informative and encouraging.
The F10 was their flagship HRM when I was there a few years ago. I've still got mine and I swear by it.
Many clocks in school have converted to digital now.
No second hand, so no pulse measurement. Unless you try to keep the kids still and attentive for an entire minute. Ever try that?
I proposed a product idea to the company that basically turned the HRM into a little play companion, a la tomagotchi. You fed it, watered it, played with it just like the normal one, but if you didn't exercise with it, it would get fat and die no matter what else you did with it.
If it tied to WoW, I wonder if kids would be inclined to play for PHAT DROPS.
The straps go around the chest.
The chest of a middle schooler.
A sweaty, pubescent middle schooler.
Running around in the hot sun.
Who is only beginning to understand about the need for personal hygiene.
Yeah. I don't want to keep a collection of those in the same building I work in either. Ew. I think that's an OSHA violation or something.
Ditto. I exercise with interest now that I have a set of trackable data from my HRM. Without one before, I was just running in circles. Now I'm running in circles with a goal... or something.
Anyway, they're fun. Worth the price if you really intend to improve your fitness.
I worked for Polar as a technical writer. Their HRMs are very neat. If they're using a basic model it's exactly what you describe.
The zippier models like the F10 actually will do fitness evaluations on your heart, though. They call it "OwnAge" and "OwnZone" and "Own-" whatever. Marketing, but a cool idea behind it.
Those ones do detect variations in rhythm and timings between beats. They take that information, plug it into an equation that accounts for BMI, age, recorded exercise history, and other factors, then spit out a number that helps you track the fitness of your heart. The idea is to give you a graph of the good your exercise is doing for you.
That's all interpreted by real time data coming in, though. They don't record a waveform for later examination or anything. Certainly not medically diagnostic. All you ever get to see are the averages as datapoints.
That's what you get for caring, Bruce. If you'd just practiced more neglect, everything would have turned out fine.
I'm betting it's not even that and it's just a heart rate monitor to improve the quality of aerobic exercise. I concur.
I worked as a technical writer for a place that made HRMs. We sold to pro athletes, gyms, personal trainers, Navy seals, fitness enthusiasts of every stripe... we even had a version of the product made especially for training race horses. It was pretty cool.
I was surprised at what a difference using one of those things made in my *own* ability to exercise. I'm an overweight writing nerd, but man: there's nothing like beeping, booping technology to get my interest. Using an HRM is like keeping score on a video game. Or playing the tomagotchi game with your body as the avatar. Or something.
Something fun and trackable, anyway.
The HRM went a long way toward getting me off my butt and dropping pounds because it provided metrics and feedback that I could understand and affect. That's more than my "hustle! hustle! hustle!" school coach ever managed to do.
All this being said: I doubt that the information on your kid is going to be recorded for more than 9 weeks, honestly. There are, like, serious LAWS about that information getting off campus, too. Anybody who is into selling kids' info to Nefarious Businesses Incorporated is going to have access to a lot more dirt than just a weird blip on your child's HRM.
That HRM, by the way, is certainly *not* medically diagnostic in quality. I'd be surprised if it did more than note the heart rate at 1 second intervals and track the changes over time. It *might* try to estimate a general sense of fitness on the heart, but it will, at best, give you a meaningless number on a scale from "is this thing on?" to "cybernetically enhanced athlete trained atop the Himalayas from birth."
No need to worry. The poster's school's coach is probably just trying to do a great job at keeping the kids in his care interested in physical fitness. I applaud him/her for it.
Nope. It honestly IS the first outage I've heard of.
Admittedly, I have my head in the sand a lot. But I don't lie about it afterward. :)
Or someone will get congratulated and promoted. It depends on the response to diagnose and fix the issue, whatever it is. Major outages aren't always the fault of some apocryphal guy asleep at the switch.
No need to get cocky, kid.
I've used Google mail for years. This is the first outage I've heard of, and it hasn't even affected me. I can tell you the in-house exchange server at my company has caused for more trouble than this for our employees in the past 8 months.
I work IT at a home nursing business, and I get work tickets submitted all the time. The nurses and office coordinators use software that -- don't ask me why -- requires them to use all capital letters when entering patient visit notes and ordering medications. They leave the CAPS LOCK key on all the time as part of their professional work, and are so used to it that it doesn't stand out when they use it in other contexts.
You learn to live with it.
HIPAA makes no distinction between a compliance consultant and an IT consultant. If you're getting paid to work on a project related to health care and patient information, HIPAA requires you to be aware of the implications of information transmission.
That's the *whole point of the law that is HIPAA.*
Giving legal advice is one thing. Bringing attention to areas of your expertise that carry implications for HIPAA is another. IT professionals know about how technology affects the flow of information. We have a responsibility to our employers to put that knowledge to use on their behalf.
That's one way to frame the argument, and it's a good one.
I'd stress to them that HIPAA PHI standards require the company -- AKA your bosses -- to be able to vouch for the security of the entire pipeline of information flow. It's not an issue of "they're not interested" or "the chances are low." It's an issue of minimizing the holes in the pipeline.
Google does not offer anything like PHI-compatible security. They are a big hole in the secuirty, whatever the chances or interest are. One could argue that the world's largest indexer of information, who makes the results of those indexes freely available to the public, is the antithesis of security.
If your bosses are serious about health care, they're not going to be idiots about it. (They may chose to be idiots about other things. Probably not this.)
Exactly right. The company that made LoJack lobbied for the feature to be installed, but they want you to pay for it to be activated. If you don't give them money, it's dormant.
Now, if somebody hacked or appropriated their activation scheme, or compelled the company to activate it without your knowledge, that would be a cause for concern.
A list of participating manufacturers is right there on the company's web site: http://www.absolute.com/partners/bios-compatibility
My company recently investigated the LoJack system after one of our laptops got stolen. It's impressive technology. The sales rep talked up how "fortunate" they were to get the cooperation of many BIOS implementations from the folks who make BIOSes. I don't think that's fortune at all -- it's a corporate deal. Whatever.
It's common but not all-pervasive. (yet?) I looked for my laptop on the list and didn't find it, though, so it's not exactly all-pervasive. It's intended for corporations and individuals who want it.
While the inclusion of this feature into many BIOSes is kinda creepy, I'm not terribly unsettled by it. It does, however, make me want to pursue the open BIOS initiatives.
More to the point, I'd like to see this app extended to other criminals who cause major damage to society and yet move unseen among us. Unethical individuals in the banking, real estate, and politics business. Just so I know who I'm potentially making deals with. Their debts to society far outstrip the psychological twitch of one person's regretable encounters.
The sex offender stigma is totally overused, though.
So, one rotten character is spoiling the bunch, then?
XCOM is rebooted all over the place. Google for UFO Aftermath or UFO AI or UFO2000 or UFO... well, just about any noun phrase will probably land you somewhere.
That Bard's Tale was mostly a jab in the ribs to fantasy gaming tropes. Light-hearted, cynical, brash, and sophomoric in its humor. It did include on of the original BT games, Thief of Fate, I think, as a side-game. Just to show that the game had roots of some kind or other.
I liked the simple gameplay mechanics -- as a bard, you couldn't fight very well yourself, so you had to summon allies to help you. Different allies brought different strengths to the field, so it was a dynamic sort of rock-paper-scissors event but with many more options. Fun enough, I thought. And the story was fair enough.
If you like single player fantasy RPG, you might look into Jade Empire.
Bioware created the world themselves, so they took it in some fun directions. A bit arcady in the combat, but fun and intriguing, especially since they get away from the overwrought D&D-inspired worlds and into something fresh to these westerner's eyes.
There are about a hojillion XCOM reboots out there: some open sourced, some commercial. A common phrase is "spiritual successor." Honestly, you can't swing a dead cat on a google search without finding one.
UFO Aftermath was the start of a great series with both the strategic and tactical options, all set in a post-apocalyptic world. UFO Extraterrestrials is another. Then there's UFO2000, UFO:AI ... different games focus on different aspects of the game type.
XCOM is next in my line of reviews, so I've been gathering a ton of this information together lately. :)
Star Control II was remade into Ur Quan Masters... not a reboot with new graphics, but there is updated music and options to make it playable on any current system. I'd love a new sequel though. Go to Toys for Bob's sourceforge page and sign their petition for commercial development if you're moved to do so.