Blackberry REACT October 2010 Newsletter

Quick Clicks

Crowdsourcing disaster relief

After the Haitian earthquake, volunteers instituted a text-message number for to report their needs. Locals sent texts in Haitian Creole, which the responders couldn’t read. Instead of hiring contractors, they posted the texts online and let Haitians in other countries do the translation, often in real time. Crowdsourced maps were created on Openstreetmap.com to guide responders to neighborhoods in need.

By allowing the local population to participate in their own rescue, actual needs were met, something not done by conventional aid providers.

Need cables?

We all need cables at times, and deepsurplus.com provides remarkably cheap prices.

200 Supermans at Burning Man

Supermans? Supermen? There’s only one, right? So 200 would be Supermans. Anyway, 200 showed up to get their photo taken, busting a previous record to smithereens for the number of Supermans showing up in one place.

Our representatives are not our best technology monitors

The next time our Senators or Representatives make a pitch about new technologies, consider whether those people are the most knowledgeable to make such decisions. In addition to the gaffe by the late Senator from Alaska in explaining how the intertubes work, there is the resolution by the Senate in 1930 banning dial telephones from their part of the Capitol because the Senators disdained having to perform the duties of an operator, finding dial phones awkward and difficult to use.

How to survive a dog attack (if you’re lucky)

Tips on how to avoid an attack by an aggressive dog and what to do if you are bitten.

Continuous Chest Compression CPR

Video on the Continuous Chest Compression. The University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center has a new theory of CPR – no rescue breathing. Louise and I have been taught this at first aid classes. The theory is that stopping for breaths lets the heart drain, and it takes maybe 20 pumps to get the blood going again. If you’re only doing 30 pumps between rescue breathing, you’re not getting enough blood to the brain and heart, and it’s too long without circulation.

Electromagnetic Waves and Antennas

Sophocles Orfanidis is a professor at Rutgers, and he wrote his own textbook. It’s available online at this link for free. He covers three main topics: *The propagation, reflection, and transmission of plane waves, and the analysis and design of multilayer films. *Waveguides, transmission lines, impedance matching, and S-parameters. *Linear and aperture antennas, scalar and vector diffraction theory, antenna array design, and coupled antennas.

A few of these topics may be of interest to us as hams.

Put the elderly in prison and the prisoners in nursing homes?

A tongue in cheek look at switching locations.

US Light House Establishment traveling libraries

Photos of a portable library sent out to lighthouse keepers and their families. Often lighthouses were in locations where there were no libraries so the US Light House Establishment put together very nice wooden boxes which were numbered and contained an inventoried supply of reading materials. The boxes and the books remained the property of the USLHE and were rotated among the lighthouses according to some schedule.

Events

Dec 4 – BBR Annual Dinner