eBooks and eReaders

The NEW greatest product of the last few years has been eReaders and tablets.  We had digital pictures, movies, and music for years, but we have only had proper eBooks (not pdf's) for a couple years.  No one thought to put a book in a computer. We built huge libraries and databases to catalog those books, and  NO ONE said "Hey, we should stop buying these big things and just get a digital copy." I do not like to read text books (most people don't), and an eReader will put all those books in one place. Plus, I can get them instantly.  Here is another reason eBooks are better than normal books, if you read books that have citations (which must text books do), all the citation links work on the eReader, so you can read what the author read.  Kindle software also allows you to change font size and background color, so you can adjust settings to your level of comfort.  The other type of eBook I am familiar with is a .pdf ., which is not really an eBook, but they are the de facto standard for many publications.  On an eReader, the pdfs are a little harder to work with, as there is no way to change the look and feel of the pdf.  Currently, I have 4 Amazon Kindle books and 3 .pdf style books (I'm just starting down this road). They all work very well and I intend to purchase more.  The original reason I wanted a an eReader is that, as a Master's student, one ends up buying lots of books, many of which you may choose not to sell back because they contain information that is important to keep. Or you can't sell back because the book store does not want that book.  eBooks are cheaper than the real thing (10-50% cheaper),  and, to top it all off, they are better for the environment since there are no production and distribution costs.

Tymponometers...tymp what?

Okay, one more gadget related to hearing screenings: the tympanometer. Like the otoscope, this device does not test what a client can hear or not hear, but helps evaluate the health of the middle ear. A tympanometer increases and decreases the pressure in the ear canal and charts the response of the eardrum (tympanic membrane) to the changes in pressure. Ideally, the eardrum should flex, indicating that is responds correctly when it comes into contact with sound waves. This produces a chart, known as a Type A tympanogram, that looks like this:

When the eardrum does not work properly, you will get charts that look like the following:

The first atypical graph is called a Type B tympanogram. This type indicates little or no flexibility of the eardrum, which could be attributed to fluid/infection located behind the eardrum, or even a hole in the eardrum. The second atypical graph is a Type C tympanogram. This type has a peak, indicating flexibility of the eardrum, but the peak is shifted to the left (in the negative numbers), indicating an abnormal amount of negative pressure in the ear canal. This can be attributed to congestion of the sinuses, often due to colds or allergies. (All the picture graphs were taken from Wikipedia)

Tympanometers come in a few different varieties. I, personally, have used two different kinds. The first kind I used is a little more complicated and, although portable, is more of a hassle to move around, as it must be plugged into an outlet. A picture, taken from www.drkaneent.com, is shown below.This shows a person holding the probe, which is the part you stick into the ear canal. You can also see that it prints out a paper copy of the graph (described and shown above).

The second variety that I have used before is much smaller and is shaped more like a gun (It looks a lot like an otoscope) which sits on a charger when not in use. It is much easier to stick in the ear, and gives you a picture of the graph on a small screen. If you wanted to print it out, the charger has a printer built into it. A picture, from www.eardoc.info, is shown below.

This concludes my segment on gadgets used in hearing screenings--next I will be discussing some very interesting technologies used as alternatives to oral communication. 

Just got a tablet: First Thoughts

Kindle running on a ViewSonic G-Tablet

I just purchased an Android tablet! I have not played with it too much yet, maybe a couple hours.  I purchased a ViewSonic G-tablet,which came with a dual core processor and Android 2.2 (aka 'Froyo').  The interface that came with the device was lacking. ViewSonic must have thought "Hey let's take a proven mobile platform and cripple it with our own software interface." I reloaded another version of Android onto the tablet, which was very easy. It came with great instructions and took less than 20 minutes start to finish, including downloading the software.  I put VEGan-TAB on the tablet, but there are several other versions floating around the internet.  My primary reason for buying this thing is that I am trying to purchase EBooks every chance I get. I intend to write a proper post about EBooks and E readers soon. The tablet runs the same Android version as my phone, so it was easy to learn the device controls. The development group that made VEGan-TAB is hard at work making an Android 2.3 (aka 'Gingerbread') version for the tablet.  Having never picked up an Android tablet, (I did handle an iPad once) it felt a little heavy.  But, it has twice the power of an iPad for 100 bucks less.  Unlike the iPad, it came with both a Standard USB port and a micro SD card port.  Give me a week and I'll have a full review of the device. 

The Beloved Gameboy Color

When I was in junior high, the cool thing to have was a Gameboy Color. I got one for Christmas, but of course, I had to share it with my little sister (who doesn't like to share).  A while later, my parents were forced to buy another Gameboy Color for my sister, so that war would not break out in the back seat of the car.  She then proceeded to take all the best games. This pair of Gameboys traveled the world as it journeyed from New Albany, IN, USA to Germany, Austria, Canada, Florida, Bahamas, and countless other car trips.  I played this thing so much that my grades suffered in school (that's a lot of video games because you don't get a lot of homework in junior high). Tell me, audience, did you ever carry a battery charger on vacation when you were young, just so you could play Gameboy?  As with my Gameboy original, I never got a lot of games, so got really good at the ones I had. I played a lot of Pokemon on my color even though they were not color games (Red and Blue). I had all the Pokemon characters in all three versions, by sharing them back and forth between two Gameboys. These Gameboys could display all sorts of colors, but a dirty little secret was it could only display 56 colors at any one time. So, you may think that a game is really pretty, but each  individual screen was not very colorful.  One thing I remember thinking was that my Gameboy had a "butt." The plastic container had a slight rise where the batteries were held.  If anyone has stories about their Gameboy, please comment about it. 

Distributed Computing

Last post, I talked about my graphics card purchase. This post, I want to talk about other helpful uses a gadget like this may be able to do. Let's say I play 2 hours of video games a week, but I have a $350 piece of equipment. That sounds like a waste of money, doesn't it? Well, I have a solution to keep my purchase from going to waste. It's called distributed computing. People buy computers with powerful processors and graphics cards and then only use that resource a few hours a day or week. Distributed computing allows for your expensive hardware to do some good for mankind. How it works is a research institution develops an application that can use my fancy graphics card to do very large math problems. The application downloads a math problem to my computer. The graphics card crunches the numbers and then sends back the results to the university. When enough people run the application, you can "build" a distributed super computer.
The point of all this number crunching is to use consumer hardware to better mankind through computer intense research. My Radeon 6970 never sits idle, so my investment is always providing a service to someone. Currently, my graphics card is crunching numbers that "rewind" the formation of our galaxy (the Milky Way). There are many other projects going on right now as well, and you can choose what kind of research your computer partakes in. Another widely participated distributed computing project is Folding@home. The project is run by Stanford University. They use your computer power to "fold" proteins into new forms in an attempt to discover how genetic diseases can be treated. Here are two project applications that are currently using the distributed computing model for research: Boinc and Folding@home. If anyone is looking into purchasing a graphics card, but is having a hard time coming to terms with the cost of manufacture and purchase, when the item is used so little should look into these projects. And, of course, I believe that the Radeon 6970 is a nice piece of hardware for both gaming and number crunching.