Electronic darkroom helps Web images

Lot's of folk are posting image to the Web. The feeling is that they brighten their blog posts by breaking up the grey expanses of type. Hmmm. This one reason the editors with whom I once worked insisted on placing pictures on their pages.The more things change the more they stay the same.

Taken from the Web for illustration purposes:

Now, let's see what a few seconds of image enhancement does.

If this looks as good on your screen as it does on mine, I think you'll agree that a few seconds spent setting endpoints and tweaking contrast is time well spent.

Thinly staffed newsrooms fail to catch errors

Since I started blogging, I've had some disputes with reporters over their "facts". Unlike some in the past, which got downright nasty, the most recent dispute has remained civil but it follows the usual pattern.

All too often, newspapers use other newspapers for the source of their facts. This is not a good research method. It is important to go to the original source and even then one must stay vigilant for errors. This is where a good editor is important. Sadly, good editors are a dying breed at most newspapers.

Let's look at few of these media myths or "truthiness" facts as Stephen Colbert would say.

• Cats are the only animals besides humans that can be born congenitally deaf. - wrong
• The carp barrier in the canal near Chicago uses $20,000 worth of electricity per day. - nope
• In hot weather, avoid caffeinated drinks as they make you more thirsty. - not true

The $20,000 per day cost for the carp barrier would have raised questions with any good editor. That's a whomping big chunk of electricity. Can that really be true? In today's newsroom, the figure just slips through the system — or lack of system — with no questions asked.

If you'd like to know the full story about the fish barrier claim, read on. If you are a journalism student, you might find it informative. If not, move on, there is nothing more to see here.
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Last night I read "an electric fish barrier, built for $9 million at Chicago, consumes $20,000 worth of electricity every day." I've been following the story about the electrified barrier in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal that was built to prevent Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes, and I've come across this figure before. And it may be wrong.

I believe a good editor would have done some quick math and said, "Whoa!" The reporter would have been asked for the source of this figure. When I questioned the reporter, I got an e-mail telling me:

"The figures of $20,000 a day and $7.3 for electricity for the year came from a big spread in the Sunday Detroit Free Press of July 17."


Forgive the large, bold font but it is the one used by the reporter. Hmmm. Shouting? Maybe this has turned a wee bit nasty.

When I checked the Detroit Free Press, I discovered the paper had actually reported: "Below the water, an electrical field lurks, thrumming 24 hours a day at a daily cost of $20,000." I was surprised; This does not claim the charge for electricity is $20,000 a day.

I have written a number of online stories about the carp problem. It was easy to discover the following:  The Army Corps of Engineers requested $7.25 million for barrier operations in the President’s FY2011 Budget. (Let's see, $7.25 million divided by 365 is $19,863.)

It appears the Detroit paper was talking about the total cost of operating the electric fish barrier. I contacted the Army Corps of Engineers. Lynne Whelan LRC confirmed the oft quoted figure of $20,000 includes all costs associated with operating and maintaining the barrier system. It does not represent the cost of electricity alone.

Today, thanks to the immediate sharing of stories between newspapers in large chains, an error made in London, Ontario may appear in papers and media outlets right across the country. For instance, 24 Hours Vancouver carried the story.

How wild was the $20,000 per day claim? Well, in June of this year (2011) the cost of a kwh of electricity in the Chicago area cost about 15.3 cents. If you are wondering how much electricity a kwh represents, the average home in Ontario uses between 800 and 1000 kwh in total each month.

Remember: This is a barrier that does not kill the fish but simply repels them by making them feel uncomfortable when they attempt to swim through the electrified water. So, how much does it cost to make a fish feel uncomfortable. We still don't know, but it's not $20,000 a day.

The cost of electricity in the Chicago area charted for the past 5 years.

Scribbles: Motor babbling

I love abstract art done by children like my granddaughter.

Fiona loves colourful markers. Pencils are out.

Come September my granddaughter Fiona will be all of two. And Ga-ga, that's what she calls me, has had the pleasure of watching her develop. It's been wonderful.

Naturally, I think she's quite the talented little girl. But, thanks to the Internet, I know the truth — she's just a normal child developing on schedule.

Right on cue, at 18 months, the kid discovered pencils, pens and paper. (I am so thankful she discovered paper. Lots of kids don't. They discover walls.)

Fiona would sit on the floor, a pen gripped tightly in her fist and get great joy from swirling the pen over the paper. This is typical of many toddlers as they do not have good finger, hand and wrist control.

Now, the little tyke has moved past grey pencil lines and boring blue ink — she is now deep into colour. She loves her package of colourful felt-tipped pens. She sometimes makes a simple work with only one colour and a few, concise lines but it is far more common for her to attack the paper with every colourful pen-weapon at her disposal.

She chooses her colours carefully.

Toddlers learn to speak by first learning to babble. But there are more ways to babble than just verbally. There is also motor babbling that teaches children muscle control and enhances coordination.

Baby talk has meaning. Mothers understand their child's babbling. Scribbles also carry meaning. Children as young as 18 months have been known to use dots, for example, to represent falling rain. (We know this, I assume, because the message has been babbled to mom.)

I don't understand Fiona's verbal babblings but I do have a feel for her art, her motor babbling. I'm sure she is concerned with colour, line and placement. She loves to experiment with the process, mixing a variety of dots and bold dashes with sweeping, full-page ovals.

As she gains more control, she will gravitate toward more and more realism in her art. She may oscillate between realism and scribbling but the move is always towards the real.

By the time she is six years old outlines will be replacing single lines to depict legs and arms. Stick figures will be out.  It can take another two or three years before body proportions become important to a young artist like Fiona.

Then, if she is a real artist, maybe she will rediscover the abstract. Her aunt did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It has been more than a year since I wrote the above piece on motor babbling. Fiona's love of art has remained strong. She loves to get out her paints, her brushes and create five or six works of art before moving on to another activity.

Done shortly before she turned three, Fiona titled this work "Rainbow."

Fiona, 3, finds inspiration in the world surrounding her: "Red Flower"

Woonerf Court

Woonerf: It's the latest cool word in urban planning circles. North American suburbanites have been enjoying their own form of woonerfs for years: Courts, crescents, places and culs-de-sac.

This London cul-de-sac is a perfect living yard: Woonerf.

I first encountered the word woonerf in the Toronto Star more than a year ago. In my reading since then the word has cropped up now and again, most recently in an article by Kelly Pedro in The London Free Press.

According to the London paper, woonerf is Dutch for naked street. No, we are not talking nudism. A woonerf is a residential street stripped of the clear division between traffic and pedestrian rights of way.

Traffic and kids at play share this suburban court.

One idea being floated to improve the London downtown is to convert Dundas or another downtown street into a woonerf. Two little corrections should be made here: First, a woonerf is a residential animal. If you want to release a woonerf in a commercial area, you need a winkelerf. Second, a woonerf is more commonly translated as a living street and not a naked one.

The word may be Dutch but according to Colin Hand the concept originated in Britain with a British road engineer and architect, Colin Buchanan.

In this tale of how the woonerf came to be, a story also retold in the pages of Architecture Week, it was a Dutchman, Niek De Boer, who took the Englishman's idea and ran with it or should I say planned with it.

Woonerfs are streets designed, or redesigned, to force drivers to slow down as they shared the road space with cyclists, pedestrians and children. De Boer named these streets woonerfs, or living yards. His woonerfs were residential in character and the first one was built in the City of Delft in the '60s.

In Toronto, woonerfs (pedestrian oriented streets) are planned for the West Don Lands development.

If you search the web, you'll find examples of Dutch woonerfs with gardens and pedestrian seating nestled in among the shrubs and flowers. These remind me of  the court directly above mine and linked to my court by a well-used walkway.

When I first wrote this I was being a little facetious. Now, I'm not so sure. It's possible that some of the finest examples of woonerfs may be found in North American suburbs.

The Dutch government set design standards and passed traffic laws regulating woonerfs in 1976. Some suburban courts come quite close to following many of the Dutch government guidelines:

• Playing on the roadway is permitted
• Pedestrians may use the full width of the roadway
• Drivers must make allowance for the presence of pedestrians and children at play
• Speed bumps may be encountered
• The roadway may curve and shorten a driver's line of sight
• The roadway may be narrower than that of other area roads
• There may be flower filled islands and large pots
• Seating areas may encroach into the area of the street once designated only for vehicular traffic.

If the design principals of a woonerf are applied to a commercial area, the area becomes a winkelerf, which is not covered by the woonerf regulations.

Some suburban courts, crescents, places and culs-de-sac answer many design guidelines for woonerfs. See the following pictures taken near my Byron, Ontario home.

Narrow roadway is not car friendly.

Short line of sight plus park, complete with benches, all act to calm traffic.

A walkway links culs-de-sac making the distance shorter to walk than drive.

Finding lost graves at 'Uncle Tom's' family cemetery

UWO grad students Flannery Surette and Jim Keron surveying Henson cemetery.

Contrary to popular mythology, Uncle Tom may have been a bold fighter for freedom. Josiah Henson, possibly the man behind the Uncle Tom character, was an escaped American slave who fled the United States with his wife and children to enjoy freedom in Upper Canada, the future province of Ontario.

Josiah Henson's last home still stands in Dresden, Ontario

Henson was a renowned abolitionist, preacher and "conductor" on the Underground Railroad.  He personally "conducted" more than 115 runaway slaves to freedom, according to Devon Robinson of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site, In all, the secret network helped almost 30,000 make it safely to Canada.

Henson delivered on his promise: "I'll use my freedom well." His home in Dresden, Ontario, is now a historic site commemorating his work.

Today archaeologists from The University of Western Ontario are searching for unmarked graves hidden in the Henson Family Cemetery. A few years ago Henson's home was moved a few hundred metres (yards) to its present location beside the cemetery.

Archaeologists find lost graves with ground penetrating radar.

Originally, the search was to be completed before the 177th anniversary of Emancipation Day, which celebrates the abolition of slavery in the British colonies.

Unfortunately, rain prevented the UWO archaeologists from mapping the areas in question before the symbolic August 1st date. The team is using sophisticated Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) which beams radar waves into the ground. It cannot be used in the rain.

Hidden features and buried objects reflect the waves enabling archaeologists accurately to map anything they discover. This approach minimizes surface disturbance — very important when mapping an historic cemetery. GPR allows a thorough but respectful search by the archaeologists.

Dena Doroszenko, archaeologist for the Ontario Heritage Trust, which owns and operates the historic site, said, "This work will be extremely helpful. Because the Henson family cemetery is still in use today . . . "

A forgotten grave was unearthed at the Henson Family Cemetery during a burial —  an unnerving event. "We are trying to prevent this happening again," said Edward Eastaugh, a UWO archeology supervisor and leader of Western’s survey team.

It is possible some of the unmarked graves will later be identified with the help of family members who have a knowledge of Henson Family genealogy, Doroszenko said.

Josiah Henson shown with Harriet Beecher Stowe, top right.

Many have forgotten how influential the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was at the time of its publication. It was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book of that century, only bested by the Bible. It was a catalyst for positive, radical change when it came to society's rejection of slavery in the States and around the world.

Shortly after the release of her book, Stowe acknowledged that Josiah Henson's autobiography, published a few years earlier in 1849, had been an inspiration for her novel. Henson, himself, republished his work as The Memoirs of Uncle Tom.

Sadly, as The New York Times recently pointed out:

"Today, of course, the book has a decidedly different reputation, thanks to the popular image of its titular character, Uncle Tom — whose name has become a byword for a spineless sellout, a black man who betrays his race."

Clearly the original meaning of Uncle Tom has been lost or Henson would not have taken the name for the later release of his memoirs. The archaeologists from Western are finding long forgotten graves while showing great respect as they conduct their search.

Josiah Henson's grave is not forgotten. It is clearly marked. But the respect for "Uncle Tom" seems to have been lost. Finding the man behind the myth is easy, no GPR necessary, but finding Uncle Tom's noble character, now obscured by time, seems much harder.

Dormant or dead?

Dying? Dead? Or just dormant?

Recently I started thinking that Stephen Colbert was onto something with his newly minted word: "truthiness". Someone suggested to me that the widely reported story of lawn grasses going dormant during a drought may be more truthiness rather than truth. They were right.

When newspapers and other media outlets tell you "grass goes dormant during dry periods" and proceed to encourage you to refrain from watering, you see yourself as green, if not your lawn. Unfortunately, follow this advice too rigidly and you will not be green and your lawn will be dead — permanently dormant.

Surprisingly, the lack of truth in the advice is not in the claim of dormancy, grass does go dormant during a drought. It is the belief that dormant grass needs no water where the error creeps in. Dormant grass is living grass and so it should come as no surprise that it still requires a little water.

So, what is the greenest response to lawn care during a drought? Based on information gleaned from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and from Ohio State University:

• Water turf once every two weeks with about half an inch or 1.27 cm of water. This will supply enough moisture to keep crowns, rhizomes and roots of your lawn grass hydrated and alive. This amount of water will not regreen a dormant lawn, however, it will help to insure good recovery with the return of rainfall. (If your soil is very sandy and does not hold water well, your lawn may require watering more often —  say, once a week.)
• Use water gauges to measure the depth of water applied. A lawn water gauge can be as simple as several empty straight-sided cans, such as tuna and salmon containers, placed in the sprinkler's watering pattern.
• If possible, cycle irrigation to allow water penetration and avoid water runoff. Dry soils may not absorb even 1.27 cm of water in one application.
• Water turf in the early morning to reduce water loss from evaporation.
• Never allow sprinklers to water pavement, driveways or sidewalks. This wastes water.
• Never trim lawns shorter than two and a half inches or 6.35 cm. Taller grass develops a deeper, more extensive root system. Keep mower blades sharp to avoid tearing rather than cleanly cutting the grass. A healthy lawn is better positioned to survive a drought.

If the drought is serious and a total ban on lawn watering is in force, face reality; Your lawn may be toast.

What does it have to do with me?

Mel Goodale is director of the centre focused on the "three pounds of wet matter" between our ears.

When research centres hold press conferences to make important announcements there is a tendency for the average person to have the response, if they have a response at all, of: "So what? What does all this have to do with me?"

The Centre for Brain and Mind at The University of Western Ontario held such a press conference today. It was announced that The Centre will begin training post-doctoral fellows from University of Cambridge, King's College London and University College London (three of the top institutions in the United Kingdom). Similarly, Western will be sending three post-doctoral fellows to each of the three U.K. institutions for four-month training periods.

Stephen Williams, King's College, U.K.

This was big news — it had to be — as research scientists from the United Kingdom made the long flight across the pond to speak at the press conference.

Still, you can be forgiven for wondering, "What does any of this have to do with me?" Research like that done by The Centre can sound esoteric and its concerns remote, unless it involves you or a loved one.

Years ago, while still working for the local paper, I covered the installation of a special, 3 Tesla MRI unit at The Robarts Research Institute.

Kim Krueger, an MRI technologist, shows scans during tour.

I was told the huge scanner being carefully lowered by a giant crane slowly into the Robarts Centre was 10 to 15 times the strength of low field or open MRI scanners then in common use.

Interesting, impressive, but so what?

Then, a few months ago I found myself inside that high-field MRI as part of an ongoing research study.

The clarity of those images revealed what been hidden from specialists right across the continent, from London to Winnipeg to San Francisco; The 3T MRI showed that the right side of my heart is being converted from muscle to fat and scar tissue causing the right side to weaken and expand. A valve is leaking.

DNA testing confirmed that this was an ongoing problem with a genetic cause. I have ARVC.

Videographer Craig Glover films 7T MRI from a safe distance.

When I heard The Centre for Brain and Mind at the University of Western Ontario in the Natural Sciences building works closely with both University Hospital and the Robarts Research Institute, I knew this was a press conference I did not want to miss.

I learned the Robarts people have an even more powerful scanner than the one used to diagnose my heart problem; They have a 7 Tesla MRI — one of only three 7Ts in the world developed specifically for neurological use. According to Siemens, MRIs don't come any more powerful for human applications. Wow!

The research scientists with The Centre will be using this incredible and very rare machine. There are less than four dozen of these in use in the entire world. There are clear reasons why The Centre is widely recognized as a global leader in many branches of neuroscience research.

So what diseases may be forced to reveal their secrets by Western's pioneering scientists? Think Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, schizophrenia, epilepsy, stroke, a myriad of psychiatric disorders . . . Sadly, I am sure something in that list hit all too close to home. What is being done here is not remote, ivory tower research but work advancing our knowledge about, and our ability to deal with, everyday medical tragedies.

And now you know the answer to the question: What does an announcement of the grand opening of The Centre for Brain and Mind have to do with me? In a word: "Lots!"
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To read more about The Centre's research which is being conducted by approximately 20 principal scientists and many others across many disciplines at both Western and the Robarts Research Institute, check out the following links:

• Click of his tongue unleashes sonar-like bat sense
• People blind and deaf from birth have remaining senses enhanced
• UWO team proves sound of yawning is contagious