Paul Taylor Opened The Lines Of Telecommunication For The Hearing-Impaired

February 23, 2021 by Kristina Panos 23 Comments

These days, nearly everyone communicates through some kind of keyboard, whether they are texting, emailing, or posting on various internet discussion forums. Talking over the phone is almost outmoded at this point. But only a few decades ago, the telephone was king of real-time communication. It was and still is a great invention, but unfortunately the technology left the hearing and speaking-impaired communities on an island of silence.

Paul and an early TDD. Image via Rochester Institute of Technology

Engineer and professor Paul Taylor was born deaf in 1939, long before cochlear implants or the existence of laws that called for testing and early identification of hearing impairment in infants. At the age of three, his mother sent him by train to St. Louis to live at a boarding school called the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID).

Here, he was outfitted with a primitive hearing aid and learned to read lips, speak, and use American sign language. At the time, this was the standard plan for deaf and hearing-impaired children — to attend such a school for a decade or so and graduate with the social and academic tools they needed to succeed in public high schools and universities.

After college, Paul became an engineer and in his free time, a champion for the deaf community. He was a pioneer of Telecommunications Devices for the Deaf, better known as TDD or TTY equipment in the US. Later in life, he helped write legislation that became part of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

Paul was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2017 and died in January of 2021 at the age of 81. He always believed that the more access a deaf person had to technology, the better their life would be, and spent much of his life trying to use technology to improve the deaf experience.

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Flapping Wings And The Science Of How Bees Can Fly

February 22, 2021 by Lewin Day 70 Comments

Jerry Seinfeld launched his career with Bee Movie, an insect-themed animated feature that took the world by storm in 2007. It posed the quandary – that supposedly, according to all known laws of aviation, bees should not be able to fly. Despite this, the bee flies anyway, because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.

The quote isn’t easily attributed to anyone in particular, but is a cautionary tale about making the wrong assumptions in an engineering context. Yes, if you model a bee using the same maths as an airliner, of course you’ll find that it shouldn’t be able to fly. Its tiny wings can’t possibly generate enough lift to get its body off the ground. But that’s because the assumption is an erroneous one – because bees don’t fly in the same way planes do. Bees flap their wings. But that’s just the beginning. The truth is altogether more complex and interesting! Continue reading “Flapping Wings And The Science Of How Bees Can Fly” →

NASA Selects SpaceX To Launch Lunar Gateway

February 18, 2021 by Tom Nardi 37 Comments

While not a Cabinet position, the NASA Administrator is nominated by the president of the United States and tasked with enacting their overall space policy. As such, a new occupant in the White House has historically resulted in a different long-term directive for the agency. Some presidents have wanted bold programs of exploration, while others have directed NASA to follow a more reserved and economical path, with the largest shifts traditionally happening when the administration changes hands between the parties.

So it’s no surprise that the fate of Artemis, a bold program initiated by the previous administration that aims to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon, has been considered uncertain since the November election. But the recent announcement that SpaceX has been awarded a $331.8 million contract to launch the first two modules of the lunar Gateway station, an orbital outpost that will serve as a rallying point for astronauts coming and going to the Moon’s surface, should help quell some concerns. While the components still aren’t slated to fly until 2024 at the earliest, it’s a step in the right direction and strong indicator that the new administration plans on seeing Artemis through.

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Would You Like Fries With Your Insect Burger, Ma’am?

February 10, 2021 by Jenny List 167 Comments

A trip to a supermarket is a rare luxury in a pandemic lockdown, but were I to cruise the aisles with my basket today I’d probably come away with a healthy pile of fruit and veg, a bit of meat and fish, and maybe some cheese. My shopping basket in 2031 though might have a few extras, and perhaps surprisingly some of them might be derived from insects. That’s a future made a little closer, by EU scientists declaring that farmed insect products are safe for humans and animals to eat.

Global map showing meat consumption in 2013 — Is meat consumption at this level sustainable? Our World In Data, CC BY 3.0.

We humans, like some of our fellow great ape cousins, are omnivores. We can eat anything, even if we might not always want to eat some things twice. As such, the diets of individual populations would in the past have varied hugely depending on the conditions that existed wherever they lived, giving us the ability to spread to almost anywhere on the planet — and we have.

Over the past few hundred years this need to subsist only on foods locally available has been marginalized by advances in agriculture. For those of us in developed countries, any foodstuff that takes our fancy can be ours for a trivial effort. This has meant an explosion of meat consumption as what was once a luxury food has become affordable to the masses, and in turn a corresponding agricultural expansion to meet demand that has placed intolerable stresses on ecosystems and is contributing significantly to global warming. It’s very clear that a mass conversion to veganism is unlikely to take place, so could farmed insects be the answer to our cravings for meat protein? It’s likely to be a tough sell to consumers, but it’s a subject that bears more examination. Continue reading “Would You Like Fries With Your Insect Burger, Ma’am?” →

Sewage Maceration Is As Gross As It Sounds

February 4, 2021 by Lewin Day 100 Comments

Day to day, few of us really contemplate what’s happening on a deep, mechanical level when we use the toilet. The business is done, the toilet is flushed, and we go about our day. However, the magnificent technology of indoor sanitation should not be sniffed at, given the manner in which it facilitates a cleaner, more comfortable existence for us all.

The vast majority of flush toilets rely on the benefit of gravity to remove waste from the house. This necessitates that the toilet be installed above the sewage lines that exit the house. For most installations at ground floor and above, this isn’t a problem. However, on occasions you may encounter basements or houses with rooms at lower levels where a regular toilet simply won’t work. Obviously, a pump is in order, but human sewage being a mixture of liquids and solids makes this impractical. Instead, it must be turned into a slurry that can be pumped; a process known as sewage maceration. Buckle up!

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Machine Learning In The Kitchen Makes For Tasty Mashup Desserts

February 3, 2021 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

What did you do during lockdown? A whole lot of people turned to baking in between trips to the store to search for toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Many of them baked bread for some reason, but like us, [Sara Robinson] turned to sweeter stuff to get through it.

The first Cakie ever made. Image via Google Cloud

Her pandemic ponderings wandered into the realm of baking existentialist questions, like what separates baked goods from each other, categorically speaking? What is the science behind the crunchiness of cookies, the sponginess of cake, and the fluffiness of bread?

As a developer advocate for Google Cloud, [Sara] turned to machine learning to figure out why the cookie crumbles. She collected 33 recipes each of cookies, cake, and bread and built a TensorFlow model to analyze them, which resulted in a cookie/cake/bread lineage for each recipe in a set of percentages. Not only was the model able to accurately classify recipes by type, [Sara] was able to use the model to come up with a 50/50 cookie-cake hybrid recipe. The AI delivered a list of ingredients to which she added vanilla extract and chocolate chips for flavor. From there, she had to wing it and come up with her own baking directions for the Cakie.

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It Costs WHAT?! A Sounding Into Hearing Aids

February 1, 2021 by Bob Baddeley 153 Comments

We are accustomed to medical devices being expensive, but sometimes the costs seem to far exceed reasonable expectations. At its most simplistic, a hearing aid should just be a battery, microphone, amplifier, and speaker, all wrapped in an enclosure, right? These kinds of parts can be had for a few dimes, so why do modern hearing aids cost thousands of dollars, and why can’t they seem to go down in price?

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