PEBCAC

If anyone cares, I’m taking a break until around the new year. the first thing I will be blogging is my experience ordering a cyberpowerpc.com media center….So far it’s been a bit confusing configuring properly…but their sales folks are pretty good.

Nonetheless, work is occupying all of my free time, literally- all of it. I’m not in the main office often, being split between three other offices…but it seems my free time is spent researching what everyone else is doing and what might be the next ‘big thing’…

As a result…I’m burnt…toasty…so I’m taking a break…back around the new year…should have pics too…

happy holidays

 

Group pushes for handicap poll access

Sunday, November 12, 2006

By Lynda Guydon Taylor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Sixty-four percent of 141 polling places in Washington County surveyed last summer by the Tri-County Patriots for Independent Living were found to be inaccessible to the disabled.

Results of the survey were given to county Elections Director Larry Spahr last month, said Bob Romero, membership director of the organization, which also is known as TRIPIL.

But on Election Day, the disabled still found inaccessible polls or poll workers inexperienced in dealing with disabled voters.

Mr. Spahr said he visited each of the county’s 168 polling places and acknowledged the county’s obligation under the Help America Vote Act to make a good-faith effort to find polling places for the disabled and the elderly.

“It’s an ongoing effort,” he said.

A disabled voter, he added, could take the option of casting an absentee ballot.

But, “an absentee ballot continues to reinforce isolation, segregation and denies full integration into the community. That’s not acceptable,” Mr. Romero said.

Some TRIPIL members could get to the polling place, but the door was too heavy to open, Mr. Romero said. There is an impression, he said, that if handicap parking is available, it makes a building accessible. Not true.

Mr. Romero, who was born without arms and uses his feet to write, said that when he voted Tuesday at the South Strabane municipal building, he ended up sitting on the floor to use the machine.

He said the poll worker he dealt with was unable to adjust the machine to a height he could use, and the machine had to be removed from the stand and placed on the floor. Because the screen was vertical Mr. Romero said, he had to get down on the floor with the machine to read it.

“We want the right to vote in our community like anyone else and what’s required by law,” Mr. Romero said,

“We’re going to try to work in conjunction [with TRIPIL] and see what we can do.” Mr. Spahr said.

TRIPIL recounts polling woes

Barbara S. Miller
Staff writer

Advocates for the disabled addressed Washington County commissioners Thursday, pointing out pluses and minuses they experienced last week when going to the polls to vote.

Ed Pahula of Cokeburg, operating a motorized wheelchair, mentioned mediation as a possible route to removing obstacles to the polls encountered by Tri-County Patriots for Independent Living.

The group surveyed 141 of the county’s 185 polling places before the Nov. 7 election, finding that 64 percent of the polls were not accessible to the disabled. TRIPIL shared its results with Larry Spahr, county elections director, who said in many areas, alternate polling sites are not available. The county’s listing of poll accessibility is submitted to the state, but TRIPIL found more deficiencies than the county did.

Pahula, who votes at the Cokeburg fire hall, said he found no clear path to the door, no signs posted at accessible entrances, or accessible parking. The county, however, lists the Cokeburg Volunteer Fire Department as accessible to the disabled.

Pahula said he has discussed TRIPIL’s points with commission Co-Chairman Bracken Burns in light of the Help America Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002.

On the other hand, Florence Moffit of Washington, who also uses a wheelchair, talked of how helpful the members of her local election board were in accommodating her, calling the experience and her interactions “wonderful.”

A sore spot with the group is the use of an alternative ballot, the same as an absentee ballot, even though the law provides for its use if a resident’s polling place is inaccessible. TRIPIL urged its members to go to the polls to increase their visibility.

Andrew Cooper of North Franklin Township, deputy director of TRIPIL, said he sees legal action as a worst-case scenario to resolve differences on the issue.

“I would hope to avoid having to file suit. That is an option, but I don’t want to exercise that option,” Cooper said after the meeting.

Bob Romero, a member of TRIPIL who has no arms, met Wednesday with commission Co-Chairman Larry Maggi and Commissioner Diana L. Irey. “I could not read the monitor sitting on a chair and was forced to sit on the floor in order to vote,” Romero noted in a TRIPIL statement.

“They brought a lot of problems to our attention. We’re going to try to solve some,” Maggi said after the meeting. “Can we solve them all? No, but we can strive to solve as many as we can. They brought up valid issues, good issues.”

Irey said Romero pointed out how the weight of a door or doorknob can pose an obstacle.

Romero was quick to mention potential difficulties in getting into the public meeting room of the Courthouse Square office building.

“A person with a disability or hand problems can’t get in because of doorknobs,” Romero said. “There are doorknobs on every office in this building, not handles. Public buildings should be accessible.”

The most deadly form of brain cancer may be treatable with a vaccine that uses proteins from patients’ own tumours, an encouraging preliminary trial suggests.

from engadget:

While there’s no shortage of bathroom-based oddities floating around out there, the Urilift system definitely takes top honors. Since the presumably alcoholics anonymous-approved Wizmark urinals can’t keep everyone from getting a little tipsy, officials in Victoria, British Columbia are taking a note from European countries to keep urine off the streets. Rather than leaving inebriated party-going males nowhere to relieve themselves on the streets, the government is considering installing hydraulic toilets in the roadways, which are remotely triggered at night to appear from their subterranean dwelling place.

While there’s no doors or privacy factor involved, those who were previously choosing to take it to the sidewalks probably won’t mind all that much, and designers say the open design discouraged loitering and criminal activity anyway. Priced at $75,000 a pop, Victoria plans to become the first North American locale to try these newfangled restrooms out — and hey, at least we know where to head for a clean(er) Spring Break now, right?

Cat mates with dog… and gives birth to puppies?

Are cabbits next?

read more |digg story

Season Shot is made of tightly packed seasoning bound by a fully biodegradable food product. The seasoning is actually injected into the bird on impact seasoning the meat from the inside out. When the bird is cooked the seasoning pellets melt into the meat spreading the flavor to the entire bird. Forget worrying about shot breaking your teeth!

read more | digg story

“Gizmodo reader/potential vampire Shaun just popped this interesting graph in our email this morning, comparing the price of HP ink to other various fluids, some bodily in nature”.

read more | digg story

from digg:

Scientists predict that without major changes to human seafood consumption patterns, the world’s oceans will be fished dry by 2048. Takeru Kobayashi unavailable for comment.

from nature.com

Heidi Ledford

What’s your favourite seafood dish? Seared scallops? Salmon sashimi? Grilled shrimp?

Enjoy it while you can, because by 2048 it could all be gone. A recent survey of global fisheries data says that seafood stocks around the world will collapse within 50 years — if we don’t change the way we treat the world’s oceans¹.

“That’s the end of the line,” says Boris Worm, a marine conservation biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and lead author on the study. “Whatever your favourite seafood is, you will most likely not be able to eat it anymore.”

Worm and his colleagues reached this conclusion by analysing more than 50 years worth of data from the Sea Around Us Project — a database containing almost 500 million records of catch rates from fisheries around the world and based at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The international team of researchers used this data to model the ocean’s bounty over time.

Their calculations showed a precipitous drop in coastal biodiversity over the past 200 years, along with a concomitant decline in water quality and a surge in harmful algal blooms, coastal flooding and fish kills. Analysis of data from large marine ecosystems indicated that 29% of the seafood stocks available in 1950 had already collapsed as of 2003, and the remainder would follow by 2048.

Fortunately Worm’s analyses also showed that current conservation efforts have succeeded in reversing fishery decline in some regions. Worm hopes that conservation plans and fishing management will prevent us from ever reaching the point of total collapse. “I’m optimistically convinced that we will not hit 100% at 2048 because we will turn things around before that,” he says.

Saving seafood

To prevent the collapse of the seafood industry, Worm says, fishing should focus on stocks such as herring and mackerel, which are less sensitive to heavy fishing. Habitat restoration, pollution reduction and a slowdown in climate change will also be key factors in reversing current trends, he adds.

Efforts like these can restore biodiversity to marine ecosystems, which will make them more productive and so more resistant to disturbing factors such as storms and fishing.

In addition, a recent report from George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, suggests that preserving the larger, older fish within a population would make it more resistant to collapse².

Point of collapse

Steve Murawski, chief scientist at the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service, agrees that seafood supply needs to be actively protected. But, he says, Worm’s models rely on a definition of ‘collapse’ - the point at which a fishery’s yield dips below 10% of its historic maximum - that may not truly reflect fishery conditions.

“That’s not a good metric of what a healthy stock would be,” says Murawski. “In many cases that high catch occurred because you were dramatically overfishing the stock.” Evaluating stocks relative to an overfishing event sets the bar artificially high, Murawski argues, leading researchers to conclude that a fishery has collapsed even if it is being stably maintained.

Worm concedes Murawski’s point, but points out that catch data is the only global data available. Meanwhile, he adds, the trend in his data is clear even if a precise date for worldwide seafood collapse may vary.

“It’s like a lemon,” says Worm. “We have to press harder and harder to get juice out of it. At some point we just can’t force more out — we’re going to start running out of species.”read more | digg story