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Information on ordering a commercial kit or assembled and tested unit of this circuit is available from the TracTronics Price List.
This is the tenth in our series of articles describing a set of electronic building blocks we have designed to control our model railroad layouts: Rich Weyand's N&W Pocahontas Division, Bill Pistello's Union Pacific, and the Reid brothers' Cumberland Valley System. This month we will continue the discussion of signaling. We began last month with a pair of signal driver circuits which provide a standard connection to the many different types of signals we can use, and showed how these circuits can be used to implement Automatic Block Signaling. This month we will describe a new circuit which will allow us to implement Absolute-Permissive Block signaling.
We are presenting these circuits both as circuit diagrams and as circuit layout patterns, allowing readers to breadboard or etch their own circuits. This month's circuit is not yet available as a commercial product, but TracTronics will be bringing it out as a commercial product in the future. As we mentioned last month, the series of articles has caught up with our product introductions, which has both good and bad repercussions. The good part is that the prototype board layouts are a little easier to etch, usually being single-sided and with wider traces than our commercial product. The bad part is that the boards are bigger than they need to be, and they have not been tested as thoroughly as our commercial products.
APB is a common signaling method used on prototype single track lines. It consists of two absolute signals which control the entrance of trains from either direction onto each single track portion of the line. Between the absolute signals, intermediate permissive signals maintain spacing between trains heading in the same direction. These intermediate signals are called permissive, because the most restrictive signal, red, means "stop and proceed at restricted speed." In contrast a red absolute signal means "stop."
In operation, the system works in this way. When no trains are present, all signals are green, in both directions. When a train leaves a double track portion and proceeds onto the switch in front of the green absolute signal, all opposing signals turn red all the way back to the next double track portion. Each signal circuit knocks the next one down, and so the opposing signals are said to tumble down, like dominoes. The absolute signal and the intermediate block signals in the train's direction now operate like ABS signals, so that the signal immediately behind the end of the train will always display red, and the signal behind that will always display yellow, keeping following trains in the same direction spaced properly.
The opposing signals will remain red until all trains are out of the single track portion. All signals will then go back to green, permitting a train from either direction to proceed onto the switch and through the absolute signal into the single track portion and start the process over.
This is a very simple description of how an APB signaling system works. It is not the goal of this article to instruct in how APB systems work, but in how to build one. John Armstrong's book "All About Signals" from Kalmbach is a good source for more information on APB systems. Be assured, however, that we know how they work, and the system we describe here is really very close to the prototype in operation.
Last time we described two circuits which allow us to implement ABS signaling. If we now add a direction precedence circuit to our bag of tricks, to determine and remember which way the signals should tumble down, we can implement APB signaling with very little additional work. The circuit we designed for determining direction precedence, which we call WhichWayTM, is shown in Figure 1. This circuit is not just forward logic. There is some logic feedback in this circuit which makes it difficult to follow, but I'll try to describe it.
The inputs to this circuit, EOS, IB1, IB2, IB3, IB4, and WOS are from the track detectors of the single track portion and the OS sections. The small section of track containing the switch, which is from the fouling point of either branch of the switch to the absolute signal, is called an OS section, where OS means "over switch." The OS section at each end of a single track portion has its own detector. The circuit input EOS is from the east OS section detector, the input WOS is from the west OS section detector. The inputs IB1 through IB4 are from the intermediate block detectors on the single track main line. The outputs EAST and WEST connect to the D direction inputs of the AutoBlock signal driver circuits for the eastbound and westbound signals.
The key to the circuit is two feedback loops, each made of two 7438 open-collector AND gates, which are used to remember which direction takes precedence, and to hold that precedence until all of the detector inputs to the circuit are released. These feedback loops act like one bit memories to remember the direction required.
If none of the inputs are pulled down by the detectors, the output of the center 7406 inverter will be low, and the outputs of the second 7438 of each feedback loop will be high. This means the outputs of the circuit, EAST and WEST, will be high, allowing green signals to be displayed in both directions.
If one of the OS section detector inputs is pulled low, when a train moves onto one of the switches at either end of the single track portion, the output of the first 7438 gate for that direction will go up, as will the output of the center 7406 gate. This will cause the output of the second 7438 gate for that direction to go low, which will cause the circuit output to go low, forcing red signals to be displayed for opposing trains. As the train moves through the intermediate blocks, the feedback from the output of the second 7438 for that direction to the input of the first 7438 gate for that direction holds the direction precedence, and maintains the output, keeping the opposing signals red.
When the entire single track portion is clear, and all of the inputs are released, the output of the center 7406 gate goes low, breaking the feedback loop and allowing the output to rise, clearing all signals to green. The other two 7406 gates in the center of the diagram are wire-ANDed between the two feedback loops such that, once one feedback loop has been triggered, the other will be disabled from being set up. Only once all of the inputs have been released will both feedback loops be available to be triggered once more.
You will have to think about this for a while if you really want to understand how it works. The circuit is not an easy one. Then again, it will work whether you understand it or not, so you can just copy the circuit, call it magic, and not worry about it.
The circuit etch patterns and component placement diagram for the WhichWay circuit are given in Figure 2 for those who want to etch boards, rather than perfboard the circuit. The component placement diagram includes the hole locations to aid in drilling your board. The component listing is given in Table 1.
Note that the etch pattern is always printed as seen from the component side of the board, per electronic industry standards. The solder side image must be reversed on the board you build, so that the text and the image are correct. The convoluted logic of the circuit made a single sided board very difficult if not impossible, so this is a two-sided layout, which is a little tougher to etch. Iron the pattern onto one side of a double sided blank first. Then center punch and pilot drill the four mounting holes. Now iron the other pattern on the other side, using the mounting pilot holes as registration guides. Etch the board and drill out all the holes. When you mount components, you must solder the component lead on both sides of the board whenever there is a trace from the pad on both sides of the board. Use long-tail sockets so you can mount the sockets slightly above the board to solder the top side connections.
Please be very careful to install C5 to match the polarity indication in the component placement diagram; electrolytic capacitors will explode when power is applied if they are wired backwards.
This circuit must be run on a filtered and regulated 5 volt DC supply. You can go to a radio hamfest or flea market and buy an old PC or computer supply cheap. These supplies usually provide 10 to 20 or more amps of 5 volts, as this is the most needed voltage in a computer. You can also use the power supply we have discussed for the other circuits we've done, which is repeated here as Figure 3.
While this circuit requires a 5 volt regulated supply, it can be used with DetectTrain and AutoBlock circuits which are running on different supply voltages. The circuits have all been designed to work together even when run on different supply voltages, as long as all the power supply grounds are connected together. This allows you to use 12 or 24 volt bulbs with the AutoBlock circuit while maintaining the 5 volt regulated supply on the WhichWay circuit.
Figure 4 shows the wiring for APB signaling for a stretch of single track with three intermediate track blocks, and Figure 5 shows it for two intermediate track blocks. The direction precedence circuit is actually set up to handle as many as four intermediate track blocks, but this is an unlikely model situation. Bear in mind that on the prototype, the blocks are usually about two train lengths long, or about two miles per block. In HO scale four intermediate blocks would be about 500 feet long! Even for short train lengths, four intermediate blocks of two train lengths each is an unusual operating bottleneck on a model layout. Figure 4 and Figure 5 should handle most model situations.
Figure 4 and Figure 5 have been set up to overlap with each other to form a signal wiring diagram for your layout. Make multiple copies of Figure 4 and Figure 5, and cut them off along the dotted lines at either side of the figures. If you now butt the figures together, using Figure 4 where you have three intermediate blocks, and Figure 5 where you have two intermediate blocks, you can build up the diagram for the system you need.
You should note that Figure 4 and Figure 5 are very similar to the diagram we used last month for ABS signaling on a single track with traffic in both directions. The left to right, or eastbound, signals and signal driver circuits are on the bottom, and the right to left, or westbound, signals and signal driver circuits are on the top. Only one set of detectors is required. The positive supply voltages provided to the detectors, the signal driver circuits, and the direction precedence circuit need not be the same, or even from the same power supply, but the grounds of the supplies must be connected together. Of course one supply can also be used. Again, the RLED limiting resistors are probably not necessary, but are shown in case they are required for your application.
As before, the OCCUP signals from the track block detectors are connected to the two westbound signal driver circuits located east of the track block, and to the two eastbound signal driver circuits located west of the track block, but in this diagram all of the OCCUP signals from the detectors in the single track portion are also connected to the direction precedence circuit.
Also as before, the DIRECTION inputs of all the eastbound signal driver circuits are all bussed together, as are the DIRECTION inputs of all the westbound signal driver circuits. But now the direction precedence circuit replaces the direction toggle switch of last month's diagram, and we have added OS section detectors to the switches at either end of the single track portion. The DIRECTION inputs of the signal driver circuits are now connected to the outputs of the direction precedence circuit. If the direction precedence has been set for westbound, the EAST signal goes low, forcing all eastbound signals to red, and if the direction precedence has been set for eastbound, the WEST signal goes low, forcing all westbound signals to red. One direction precedence circuit is required for each section of single track in which APB signaling is to be implemented.
The OS section detectors are wired differently than the others, because they are not really separate blocks. The OS sections are part of the main line track through the double track portion. We use 1N4001 diodes (Radio Shack 276-1653) to connect the OS section detectors at either end of a double track section to the main line track detector of the double track section. This allows the OS sections to participate in the ABS signaling of the permissive signals along the main line. The OS sections also connect to the direction precedence circuit to begin the tumble down when a train leaves the double track portion and moves onto the switch.
The two SPST switches on the OS section OCCUP signals at the bottom of the diagram are the switch circuits. If the switch at the end of a double track portion is in reverse, the OS section is occupied. On the prototype this is accomplished by a set of contacts attached to the switch points, which shunts the OS section track circuit. On the model we can accomplish this by using a set of contacts on the switch machine to ground the OS section OCCUP signal when the switch is in reverse. If the switch is being controlled by a SwitchLock circuit, and the AutoBlock circuits are running on a 5 volt supply, we can instead use the Y output of the SwitchLock to ground the OS section OCCUP signal, as shown in Figure 6.
Note that there is no detection of the auxiliary main line through the double track portion, as the OS section provides all the train control required. If the switch is in reverse, the signals will protect the auxiliary main, and if the switch is in normal, the main line detector will operate the signals in the ABS mode as required. Note also that putting the switch into reverse will occupy the OS section, and tumble down the opposing signals in the single track section. Finally, if a train crew leaves the switch in reverse, or the train extends beyond the fouling point of the switch into the OS section, the signals will not clear, and the direction precedence will remain locked into the circuit. This operation is as on the prototype.
The last permissive signal of a single track section needs some special handling. The absolute signal for the next section of single track can be red under two conditions, either because of a train in the same direction in the first block of the next single track section, or a train in the opposing direction anywhere in the next single track section. These two conditions are carried by the S stop and D direction inputs to the signal driver circuit of the absolute signal. Both of these inputs need to generate a yellow signal on the last permissive signal of the previous single track section. The A1 and A2 approach inputs of the AutoBlock circuit are used for this purpose as shown in Figure 4 and Figure 5.
The prototype wires the second last permissive signal on a single track portion in each direction slightly differently also. While the last permissive signal of a single track portion is wired to display a yellow signal if the next absolute signal is red, there is a problem if two trains are approaching a double track section from opposite sides. There is a chance that one or the other or both will get to a red signal without having seen a yellow signal first. The possibility of a collision under these circumstances is very real. To get around this problem, the second last permissive signal of a single track portion is also wired to display a yellow signal if the next single track section has opposing traffic.
We can also do this using the second approach input, A2, on the AutoBlock board. Connect the A2 input of the second last permissive signal to the direction precedence signal of the next single track section. This wiring is also shown in Figure 4 and Figure 5.
For other signal types, such as signals using bulbs, searchlight signals, and position light signals, use the modifications from last month's article on the signal driver circuits to modify Figure 4 and Figure 5.
For searchlight signals the AutoSearch signal driver circuit from last month is used. The current version of the AutoSearch circuit does not have two approach inputs, however. Figure 7 shows the modification to the APB wiring diagrams required to connect two approach inputs to the AutoSearch circuit for the last two permissive signals. The two diodes shown are 1N4001 rectifier diodes, Radio Shack 276-1653.
We talked about electrically locked switches off the main line back in the November 1993 Mainline Modeler. The basic idea is that a switch off the main line into a siding or spur must interface with the signal system to ensure that through trains don't end up with green signals into a lumber yard or a chemical plant. The controls for these switches are locked, and unlocking the controls shunts the track circuit for that main line block.
In the APB system of Figure 4 and Figure 5, the electric lock switch circuit from the November 1993 Mainline Modeler article is connected to the detector output of the main line block in which the siding or spur switch is located. This will result in proper and prototype operation of the signals for all switching activities along the main line.
The APB system described here is an elegant and simple implementation of a common prototype signaling system. The modules are small and inexpensive, the wiring is simple, and the operation is very, very close to that of the prototype. This is the simplest and most complete model APB system implementation we have seen.
The direction precedence circuit is the last of the electronics modules that we need for signaling. There is one more very common prototype signaling system which we have not discussed, however. Next time we'll use the modular circuits we've already presented to take on the toughest one of them all: Centralized Traffic Control with intermediate Automatic Block Signals and fleet mode for express tracks. We're most of the way there now; just a little more work and we've got it all. Don't miss it.


text:
Mata expects Turf testJuan Mata believes Saturday's match will be like a "cup final" for Burnley.
Boss expects transfer movesLouis van Gaal admits there could be incoming and outgoing moves ahead of Monday.
Boss: Angel's a team playerLouis van Gaal is convinced record signing Angel Di Maria will succeed at United.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Steve Kovach, Business Insider
Those numbers include all Kindle devices, from the Kindle Fire Tablet to the $79 Kindle reader.
As usual, Amazon didn't provide specific numbers, so it's impossible to tell how many of the Kindle devices sold were Fires versus the other e-ink readers.
Amazon also said gifting of Kindle books was up 175% over last year, but again didn't provide specific numbers.
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.


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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82881832014-08-19T07:51:44.520-04:00Vowel MovementMusings on the Semantic Web, the origins of agriculture, evolutionary meme theories, the venture capital process and the occasional political rant; not necessarily in that order.prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-19684692566172387272014-08-18T23:21:00.001-04:002014-08-18T23:21:33.378-04:00The Customer Service Disaster that is US AirwaysIt has been fascinating to watch the rise of customer-centric business models over the last decade. From Rackspace's "Fanatical Support" promise to the acquisition of Zappos by Amazon solely for their customer service capabilities, consumers have benefited from this new-old way of saying, "the customer is always right". Unsurprisingly customers like that. Perhaps more surprisingly in some board rooms, businesses who try it find that they experience less churn and higher profit margins.

Nobody seems to have mentioned this trend to US Airways.

The problem at US Airways is really quite simple: Their people are not empowered to fix problems easily - so everything becomes hard.

After a routine booking problem, US Airways:

Informed me that they could not put me on another flight the same day, even though they had seats available.

Suggested that they could sell me a new ticket for $1,200 in place of mine.

Canceled my return flight against my express communication to the contrary.

Caused me over $900 in additional costs, some of which went to them and the remainder to other companies.

Blamed each stage on US Airways computers who would "not let" the humans handle a routine variance.

Here is my story. I was invited to attend a reunion of some former shipmates from the US Navy. The reunion was in Maine from a Friday-Sunday in August, but I needed to be in San Francisco that Sunday. I very much wanted to go. We were a close group back in the day and I wanted them to know that I cared enough to attend. Trying to get from Washington, DC to Maine, back to DC and then to the West Coast was going to be tight. I am a disabled veteran and find that too much travel, even daily commuting, can reduce my ability to walk well or even at all. I lose workdays due to these problems far too often. However, I hadn't been bitten by airline problems in a few years so I was confident that I could squeeze it in and willing to take the risk.

The best flight seemed to be on US Airways. US Airways Flight 3332 leaves DC's Reagan National Airport at 10:20 AM and arrives in Portland, Maine just before noon. I carefully sorted the flights by arrival time so I could calculate how much time I could actually spend with my friends. The last thing I wanted was to arrive late or need to leave too early. My flight to California was scheduled to leave in the early morning of the Sunday, so I booked a flight back to DC that left Portland Saturday at 4:00 PM. Both flights were direct and therefore quick. I reported to my wife that the trip was possible and booked the tickets via Expedia.

Traffic around DC can be unpredictable and even more so currently with the construction of an expanded HOV lane on I-95. I left home early and arrived more than two hours before my scheduled flight. US Airways happily checked me in and I breezed through security. My mood was upbeat as I contemplated the reunion. I wished I had been to the gym more regularly.

My boarding pass said that my flight was to leave from Gate 41. The flight wasn't on the departures board yet and a flight to New York was advertised on the sign above the gate. I put both down to the fact that I was so early. I killed time by topping off the charge on my cell phone and chatting with other passengers.

I noticed about an hour before my flight that the New York departure hadn't occurred yet. In fact, it was due to depart just ten minutes before my flight. There was no way that another aircraft was going to get to that gate, refuel and reprovision, board passengers and depart in ten minutes. Something was not right.

The gate agent told me not to worry. The New York flight would leave and mine would be along next. OK. I had my shoes shined, looked through the shops, checked my email and wandered over to the departures board. There was still no listing for my flight. Uh oh. I carefully reviewed my boarding pass. I was checked in on a flight that was scheduled to leave twelve hours later, at 10:10 PM. US Airways Flight 3460. Now how did that happen? I thought back to my careful sorting by arrival times. It would have been difficult to have selected a flight from the very bottom of that list whose arrival time was the following day.

The gate agent directed me to a separate desk between gates where three ticket agents for US Airways sat. None of the three were helping anyone.

"Um, I seem have made a terrible mistake", I started. "I was supposed to be on Flight 3332 in 45 minutes, but was booked for a flight this evening. Can you help me?" The ticket agent took my boarding pass and turned to her computer. She typed. A lot. Airline systems seem to require a very large amount of input. She informed me that she couldn't help me because I was not within six hours of my flight's departure. I was shocked.

"I really need to get to Maine today", I said. "Surely there is something that you can do?". "Well", she replied, "you could buy a new ticket." She informed me that Flight 3332 had "plenty" of seats and that for a mere $1,200 she would be more than happy to put me on it.

"Wait. Are you telling me that even though I am booked on your airline for a flight to the same destination today and have checked in for that flight that you cannot give me one of those empty seats on the earlier flight?". I had no checked bags. I was carrying an over-the-shoulder bag with just enough for a one-night stay. My suitcase for my longer trip to San Francisco was packed and waiting at home.

I wondered at this point why US Airways would have let me check into my flight and receive a paper boarding pass fourteen hours before my flight was scheduled. I knew you could do that online but it struck me as odd that it would be allowed in person. The TSA agent who checked my boarding pass and ID similarly said nothing. Did they not care or think nothing of someone apparently intending to spend all day hanging around a terminal? The security implications seemed to be less than ideal. On the other hand, a casual mention by either the US Airways agent or the TSA agent would have served to tip me off to the problem.

"That's right, sir. The computer won't let me do it." She went on to explain that even if I had been within the six hour window she would need to charge a $200 change fee. I could live with the fee but baulked at the proffered ticket price. I asked for my boarding pass but she grabbed it away from me. More typing ensued while she explained that she needed to remove me from the morning flight and put me back on the evening flight. Minutes passed. Minutes more. Eventually she stopped typing and handed me my boarding pass.

I went to the gate for Flight 3332. Maybe I was just dealing with the wrong person. The gate agent was pleasant and sympathized. She expressed dismay that she couldn't help me. "The computer", she said, "won't allow me to give you one of the seats we have." We spoke briefly about post-911 changes to the power of gate agents to move passengers through the system. She suggested that I could go to the ticket agents outside of security but doubted that the answer would be different.

I called my wife and asked her to look for other flights to Maine. The ticket agents outside of security were polite but firm. There were no flights that US Airways or its partners could put me on that would allow me to arrive on Friday. No seats were to be found on the United flight out of Dulles Airport, 45 minutes drive to the West. Things were not looking up.

Discussions with my wife went better. She identified a flight from Baltimore-Washington International Airport an hour to the North and booked me on it for roughly $250. I informed the US Airways ticket agent that I could get on another flight and would take my scheduled return flight back on Saturday. She said nothing to indicate that would be a problem. I had to hustle, but left National Airport for BWI having exhausted all other avenues for arriving in Maine on the day I intended.

Where did the error in booking occur? My Expedia receipt confirmed that I purchased a ticket for the evening flight. Perhaps it was my error and perhaps an unintentional bait-and-switch between Expedia, Sabre and US Airways; a bug somewhere. I know software systems well enough not to presume that the error was mine although it certainly could have been. The important thing to me was getting to Maine on time and without further damaging my health.

I did get to Maine in time for dinner. The only way for me to make the trip at that late hour was to drive to BWI then fly to Boston, rent a car in Boston and drive the three hours to my destination in Maine. I could barely walk by the time I arrived. The rental car company charged me an extra $200 to drop the car at the Portland Jetport instead of returning it to Boston. I had no choice: my return flight on US Airways left from Portland. Besides, I'm not sure I could have driven back to Boston if I wanted to.

My old shipmates and I spoke until the wee hours, reminiscing and catching up on lives after the service. It was just after six in the morning when I received a text from my wife that my return flight had been canceled by US Airways. I called Expedia as the message suggested. In less than 10 minutes the Expedia representative determined that he could not help me because my ticket had been somehow "taken over" by US Airways. I would need to deal with them. You should not be surprised at what happened next.

US Airways refused to allow the Expedia rep to transfer my call to them. They instead insisted that I call them directly. I am left wondering why this basic courtesy offended them. Perhaps it is simply a matter of corporate policy designed to insult Expedia and other middlemen who are reducing their profit margin. Whatever the reason, I spent the next two hours on the phone with two US Airways representatives. The first call dropped or was cut off. I called back. They informed me that there was no way to get me back to DC that day. I couldn't miss my flight to California for work! Finally, by 8:30 AM, I was magically offered a flight from Portland to DC's National Airport if I could depart at 12:30. I hustled down to breakfast with my friends, spent the time I could and raced to the airport.

A woman waiting to board in Portland complained to me that she had come in on a flight with a two-year-old and been assigned exit row seats by US Airways. The error was entirely the airline's fault and, when caught by the gate agent, she wasn't allowed to board. This is just the kind of routine problem that used to be handled quite competently by flight attendants on an aircraft. No more on US Airways flights. The woman said she was kept from boarding until everyone but three people had boarded the flight. Those three were asked whether any of them would volunteer to switch seats with the woman and her child. Fortunately, she was seated and the flight took off with her on it. What would have happened otherwise? She was told she was to be left behind. As crazy as that sounds, it was entirely consistent with my experience. Again, US Airways rigid policies snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They made something easy into something hard.

I arrived at National Airport and began the long Metro and bus rides to BWI to retrieve my car. I tweeted my frustration to @USAirways and was pleased to get an instant response. The conversation, however, went nowhere. The droid pushing the sound bites back to me had no more power to right wrongs than the gate agents, ticket agents, call center workers or flight attendants. US Airways had systematically stripped them of any power to go off-script. After six queries and responses my questions passed a magic threshold of undetermined quality. I was awarded a hyperlink to the formal customer complaint system. I arrived home, less than an hour's drive from National Airport, five and a half hours after landing. I'm now in San Francisco and relying on my wife to carry my bags, a situation I find demeaning and embarrassing. It takes me minutes to climb out of a car. I avoid stairs and standing for any period of time. I simply hurt more and I hate it. All because a poorly paid ticket agent couldn't put me on a flight with "plenty" of seats available because her computer wouldn't let her. Her company is demeaning to her as well. I pity her need to work for them.

This lengthy blog post is my answer to US Airways. I have submitted a link to it via the US Airways customer relations site. I will wait with bated breath for their answer which, no doubt, will be polite, firm and utterly unyielding. To do otherwise would not, perhaps, be permitted by their computers nor in compliance with their policy. Updates here when I know more.

prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-50242902640790649972013-10-08T12:02:00.000-04:002013-10-08T18:25:51.354-04:00
Repairing Makerbot Replicator 2 Nozzle Insulation

The Problem: Filament Ball Tears Insulation Tape
I have finally used my Makerbot Replicator 2 (not a 2x) enough to run into a problem that is not strictly end-user serviceable. A large filament ball stuck to the ceramic insulation tape surrounding the Replicator's nozzle and ripped the tape when the ball was removed.

Makerbot does have a video on removing a filament ball (or "blob" as they call it - must be a technical term). Look for the video entitled "Removing a PLA Blob" on their troubleshooting page. They suggest heating the extruder nozzle and gently lifting off the ball while being "careful not to rip the ceramic insulation tape". Yes, indeed. I agree that it is always best not to remove a filament ball when the nozzle is cold, but the described process wasn't sufficient for me. I have since discovered that I can use the "Load filament" option under the Utilities menu to heat the extruder and use newly applied filament to melt and gently force downward the ball. That seems to make it easier to remove cleanly.

I decided to replace the ceramic insulation tape and the kapton tape that holds it in place. This required a rather complete tear-down of the extruder assembly, but it wasn't really that bad. Anyone reasonably careful should be able to do it themselves.

The filament ball complete with insulation tape stuck to it:

Parts

I sourced some ceramic insulation tape and some kapton tape to cover it from UltiMachine, a RepRep printer supply company in Tennessee. Unfortunately, Makerbot doesn't supply such parts.

1 x Dupont Kapton High Temp. Adhesive Tape 1/4" ($6.00), SKU UMKPTON025

1 x Ceramic Insulation Tape ($1.50), SKU UMCERTAPE

The kapton tape from UltiMachine was quite thin side-to-side, much thinner than the tape used by Makerbot. I used it anyway and just wrapped it around to ensure a complete coverage. It seems to be fine.

Repair Instructions

The first thing to do is to carefully remove the fan assembly and extruder motor from your Makerbot Replicator 2. These instructions will help you if you are unfamiliar with the process. They were developed for the upgrade of the extruder assembly. Follow them just until you remove the fan assembly and the motor, but do not take off the extruder itself.

Next you will need to remove the side fan assembly. Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the two screws holding the assembly to its chassis (shown at 10 o'clock and four o'clock in the picture below).

Disconnect the electrical wire connectors so the fan assembly hangs down out of your way. Note that you will still have two wires (in a single insulated cable) connected at this time. Those are the thermocouple wires that are used to heat the nozzle bock. They will be removed shortly.

Remove the two hex screws from the base of the chassis that connect the chassis to the aluminum block beneath it.

Removal of the chassis exposes the aluminum heat sink. The nozzle assembly is attached via a bolt and hangs beneath the heat sink.

Removal of the aluminum heat sink requires you to look underneath the assembly to find two more hex screws, one on each side of the heat sink.

Once you have the heat sink entirely removed from the extruder mount, it should look something like this:

Now it is time to remove the thermocouple wires. Unscrew the thermocouple connector from the nozzle block. Note that the wires will twist if you leave the block in place! Instead, you should rotate the nozzle block to remove the thermocouple connector as soon as you loosen the connection enough to do so. That will keep the wires from breaking.

You should now have the nozzle block and heat sink completely removed from the printer. You can move it to a more convenient working surface, such as a workbench.

Use a crescent wrench or socket wrench to remove the nut at the top of the heat sink, as shown. You will see that the bolt has a hole through its center; that is where the filament passes on its way to the nozzle.

Remove the heat sink and set it aside. You should also remove the nut between the nozzle block and the heat sink.

Clean off the old kapton tape and ceramic insulation tape. Some of mine was baked on and was difficult to remove. Carefully remove the tape so you don't damage the brass nozzle, the aluminum block or the wires. I used a utility knife to remove most of the material and found that heating the material with a portable butane touch made it easier to remove.

Please note that a steel utility knife blade is substantially harder than the aluminum of the block or even the brass of the nozzle. You can shave off bits of them if you aren't careful. You only want to remove the old tape.

I placed the block into a vise to facilitate cleaning it and also (carefully) used a wire brush for the final touches.

Cut some ceramic insulation tape to the width of the nozzle block.

Cut holes in the ceramic insulation tape for the bolt and the nozzle. The round hole on the right is for the nozzle because I wanted to ensure that the join in the tape would not be at or near the nozzle. Wrap the tape around the nozzle block by putting the nozzle through one hole and the bolt through the other. Obviously, it works better to start by putting the tape over the long bolt and then wrapping around to the nozzle. Cut the end of the tape to fit the size of the block.

Wrap the nozzle block with kapton tape to hold the ceramic insulation tape in place.

Reassembly

You will need to follow the tear-down instructions in reverse. You might follow the pictures. I did :)

There are a couple of things to watch out for:

1. Make certain to align your nozzle block on the heat sink so it is straight (not crooked as shown below) and make sure that the screw holes are facing toward the nozzle (so you can screw them in from the bottom when you remount the unit).

2. Next, and this is really very important, ensure that the bolt on the top of the nozzle block-heat sink unit (shown on the right in this picture) does not protrude above the top of the nut. If it does, the extruder will not fit over top of it.

This also seems to ensure that the nut in between the nozzle block and the heat sink does not compress the insulation.

3. Another minor gotcha occurs when remounting the side fan to the fan housing. The picture below shows where the two sets of black-and-white wires fit in a slot on the left side of the housing (toward the back of the Replicator 2). The picture shows me pushing the wires into the slot with my index finger. This will keep the wires from being kinked when the fan is screwed into place.

Getting it Working Again

Don't forget to level your build plate after the reassembly! This is critical because you may have changed the nozzle height, however slightly. Look under the Makerbot's Utilities menu for the "Level the build plate" option and follow the on screen directions.

Next, load some filament and try a small test print. The "Mr. Jaws" model from the Makerbot's SD card printed flawlessly for me the first time. Yay!

You might ask how long it took me to generate another filament ball. Less than an hour ;-) Fortunately, that one didn't tear my newly fixed insulation.

prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-55402609720558317992011-06-14T21:54:00.002-04:002011-06-14T21:55:14.493-04:003-minute Executive Briefing on Linked DataA new 3-minute executive briefing on Linked Data is available now at: http://3roundstones.com/3-minute-executive-briefing-on-linked-data/prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-54478649391515014152011-06-03T18:51:00.003-04:002011-06-15T09:49:14.838-04:00Schema.org and the Semantic WebThe interweb is all atwitter today about schema.org and what it may mean for the Semantic Web. Here is my take.

There has been a long-standing argument between microformats and the Semantic Web. Many developers, and to some degree, search engines have preferred microformats because they are easy to use and to understand. Microformats are widely deployed because of this. However, there is simply no way to combine microformats on a single page. This is the Achilles heel of microformats; sooner or later someone wishes to use more than one (or a few if they play together particularly nicely) at a time and can't do it.

RDF is harder to understand (although an experiment in Germany showed that fifth graders could easily be taught RDF. It is adults who have already learned other ways to think who have trouble.) RDF is a completely general solution to the problems that microformats solve. RDF's raison d'être is to allow for the combination of data from multiple people (e.g. developers and search engines, or multiple relational databases or as an interchange format between proprietary system). RDF can represent any type of data, and combines easily with other RDF.

The argument between microformats and RDF can thus be thought of as an argument between short-term pragmatism and long-term planning. Those who want to solve a specific problem now use microformats. Those who want to solve more general problems in the future use RDF.

The presumption in the Semantic Web community is that the best (perhaps the only) way to combine microformats is either RDF or something very much like it. Further, people have been expressing needs to combine the use of multiple microformats on Web pages for about five years.

Microsoft is aware of the Semantic Web and, in fact, was an early supporter of the RDF standards at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They even paid for some marketing; proof may be found here.

Unfortunately for those interested in open standards, Microsoft decided that Netscape's (remember Netscape??) use of RDF in their portal was threatening, so they decided to reinvent RDF internally as a proprietary technology. Microsoft's internal version of RDF has appeared in their file system, Sharepoint and other products. That's the way this story simply must play out: Use RDF or reinvent it.

Yahoo was the first search engine to support RDFa (RDF in Web pages), followed by Google. Both supported particular vocabularies of RDFa, which is the same as saying 'microformats encoded in RDF' and therefore along the lines of my earlier comments.

The new schema.org announcement is a partnership between "Google, Bing and Yahoo" or "Google, Microsoft and Yahoo" depending where you look. Since Microsoft bought Bing and Yahoo has licensed Bing for its search services, schema.org is really between Google and Microsoft.

So, I read schema.org as an attempt (actually, a further attempt) by Microsoft to reduce the impact of RDF and Semantic Web techniques on the search business specifically and their larger business in general. Time will tell whether that will work. History suggests that it will partially work by changing the places RDF is seen as threatening to big business. Another similar area to watch will be RDF and Linked Data's threat to the Data Warehousing market (a $10 billion market in 2010). That fight will be primarily between standards and Oracle.

Michael Hausenblas at DERI released Schema.org in RDF while I was writing this. Well done to Michael and his colleagues. As Michael said, "We're sorry for the delay". Awesome.

Update 2011-06-15: Google announced at a BOF at SemTech 2011 last week that they will continue to support Rich Snippets (their RDFa implementation). That's helpful and what we should be promoting.
prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-78648795946977567102011-02-08T13:41:00.003-05:002011-02-08T13:44:47.314-05:00Semantic Web Elevator PitchEric Franzon at SemanticWeb.com asked the community to provide "elevator pitches" for the Semantic Web. Here's my attempt:

prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-73624188161043380582011-01-06T12:51:00.002-05:002011-01-06T12:59:04.836-05:00Ian was Right and I was WrongFollowing Ian Davis' post A Guide to Publishing Linked Data Without Redirects, I followed with A(nother) Guide to Publishing Linked Data Without Redirects. In that post, I argued that resource descriptions should be separated from resource representations at the HTTP level. I see now that I was wrong.

Ian challenged me to come up with a compelling reason why HTTP should encode the difference between a resource representation and a resource description and, after some effort, I simply could not. Ian summarized his thoughts in a new post: Back to Basics with Linked Data and HTTP.

The problem in my mind has always related to the use of HTTP URIs to identify things in the real world. We can get around that easily enough by returning RDF whenever someone resolves those URIs. You get a description of a real-world thing that is as richly described as the publisher wanted it to be. Cool.prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-65409230139598308462010-11-09T10:59:00.004-05:002010-11-10T17:18:01.455-05:00A(nother) Guide to Publishing Linked Data Without RedirectsIt seems to me that we in the Linked Data community have a need to:

Assign URIs to resources, be they physical, conceptual or virtual (information resources) in nature.

Apply the same mechanisms for metadata description to any resource, regardless of type.

Be able to traverse in obvious ways from a resource to its metadata description and from a metadata description to its resource.

Unfortunately, we can't do all that yet, at least not easily and in all circumstances. We are close, but not close enough.

Linked Data deployment is hampered by the requirement for so-called "slash" URLs to be resolved via a 303 (See Other) redirection. Unfortunately, many people wishing to publish Linked Data don't understand the subtleties of 303 redirection, nor do many of them have adequate control over their Web server configurations to implement 303 redirections. Ian Davis has been looking for a solution to this problem. Unfortunately, I don't think he has found it yet.

Ian published A Guide to Publishing Linked Data Without Redirects specifically to find a way around the confusing (and sometimes difficult) usage of 303 redirects for Linked Data. Ian's original question was: "What breaks on the web if we use status code 200 instead of 303 for our Linked Data?"

Unfortunately, the use of the Content-Location header with Linked Data begs the same questions as 303s:

It requires a change of thinking regarding the meaning of 200 (OK), specifically to the http-range-14 finding.

It suffers from the same problem as 303s in relation to deployment with current hosting companies/IT departments. If you don't have control over your Apache, you can't publish your Linked Data.

There is an "implicit redirect", in that one may wish or need to check the URL in the Content-Location header.

The first one admittedly bothers me most. If one resolves a URL and receives a 200 (OK) response, we are currently guaranteed that both (a) our request succeeded in the way we expected and (b) that the thing we received is an information resource. We expect that the thing we received is an information resource that is a representation of the resource we requested (and identified by its URL address).

In short, I think Ian's proposal mostly but not completely solves the problems that Ian was meaning to address. Unfortunately, there is practically little difference from the status quo. Tom Heath has some of the same concerns.

If we are going to fix fundamental problems with serving Linked Data, I'd prefer to explicitly address the fundamental questions related to URI naming of physical, conceptual and information resources (the overloading of the HTTP name space), so I proposed an alternative solution on the email@example.com mailing list last week. This post expands on those thoughts with some more detail.

The use of 303 redirections by the Semantic Web and Linked Data community is a bit of a hack on top of the existing 303 functionality laid down in the early Web. The http-range-14 debate tried to end the arguments, but only slowed them down. We can't really hack at the 303 any more than we have. I explored that in 2007 and came up pretty empty.

My Proposal

I propose deprecating the 303 for use in Linked Data (only) in favor of a new HTTP status code. The new status code would state "The URI you just dereferenced identifies a resource that may be informational, physical or conceptual. The information you are being returned in this response contains a metadata description of the resource you dereferenced." This new status code would be used to disambiguate between generic information resources and the special class of information resources that describe (via metadata) an addressed URI.

The "metadata description" would generally be in some form of RDF serialization, but could also be in HTML (for human consumption) or in some future metadata representation format. Existing HTTP content negotiation approaches and Content-Type headers would be sufficient to inform both requester and Web server what they received.

I propose that the new status code be called 210 (Description Found).

Existing HTTP status codes may be found in RFC 2616 Section 10.

Example Requests and Responses

Let's start with the basics. If we resolve a URI to an information resource, we get a 200 (OK) response upon success:

# Get an information resource:
$ curl -I http://example.com/toucan.info
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:37:44 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 1739

An information resource that supports some (any!) form of embedded RDF can easily point to its metadata description at another URL (e.g. via a link element or a POWDER description). The metadata description can easily point back to the described resource.

Physical and conceptual resources are where we have historically ran into trouble on the Web of Data. A "slash" URI assigned to name a physical or conceptual resource has required a 303 redirection to another document and the semantics are unclear at best. Instead, this proposal suggests that physical and conceptual resources explicitly return a 210 (Description Found) status code, thus removing any ambiguity from the response.

The resolution of a URI to a physical resource might return:

# Get an information resource:
$ curl -I http://example.com/toucan.physical
HTTP/1.1 210 Description Found
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:38:52 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Content-Type: text/turtle
Content-Length: 1739

The body of the response would naturally be (in this case) an RDF document describing the physical resource. The fact that the resource is physical would be encoded in an RDF statement in the description.

Conceptual resources could be handled in an identical manner. The only difference would be in the requested URI and differing content returned:

# Get an information resource:
$ curl -I http://example.com/toucan.concept
HTTP/1.1 210 Description Found
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:40:12 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Content-Type: text/turtle
Content-Length: 1214

Again, the fact that the resource is conceptual would be encoded in an RDF statement in the description.

Savvy readers might note that the existing status code 300 (Multiple Choices) could be used when multiple metadata descriptions of a resource are available:

The requested resource corresponds to any one of a set of
representations, each with its own specific location, and
agent- driven negotiation information (section 12) is being
provided so that the user (or user agent) can select a
preferred representation and redirect its request to that
location.

Note that Ian's statement that when using a 303 "only one description can be linked from [a resource's URI]" is not correct; standards-compliant Web servers could use a 300 status code should they so wish (and can figure out a way to configure their Web server to do that).

Ramifications

How does my proposal stack up to Ian's? Ian proposed nine problems with the 303, the most important of which (in my opinion) were:

it requires an extra round-trip to the server for every request (at least, that's important to those implementing browsers, spiders and Linked Data clients and to those with limited bandwidth)

the user enters one URI into their browser and ends up at a different one, causing confusion when they want to reuse the URI (PURLs also suffer from this due to odd UI decisions by browser makers)

having to explain the reasoning behind using 303 redirects to mainstream web developers simply reinforces the perception that the semantic web is baroque and irrelevant to their needs.

Additionally, three of his concerns related to the difficulties of Web server configuration:

its non-trivial to configure a web server to issue the correct redirect and only to do so for the things that are not information resources.

the server operator has to decide which resources are information resources and which are not without any precise guidance on how to distinguish the two

it cannot be implemented using a static web server setup, i.e. one that serves static RDF documents

The 210 status code proposal would effectively deal with Ian's major issues. Metadata describing a resource could be returned in a single GET if the resource were physical or conceptual (that is, not an information resource). It would be reachable for information resources, although requiring two hops if the URL to the metadata is not known. The URI displayed by a browser would not change. Importantly, the 210 is conceptually much easier to explain.

Support For Existing Web Servers

Web servers, even existing ones at hosting centers, can be easily configured to serve 210 content immediately. At least, via a simple hack. The one we use for 3roundstones.com (Arvixe) allows limited site configuration using cpanel. Cpanel allows Apache handlers to be associated with file extensions in URLs. One of the Apache handlers installed by default with Apache is mod_asis.

mod_asis is used to send a file "as is". A file sent that way can contain HTTP headers separated by a blank line. Using that trick, we might associate a URI (say, http://example.com/toucan.physical) with a metadata description of a physical object. The resource file served when that URL is resolved looks like this (inclusive of the 210 status code!):

Status: 210 Description Found
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2010 15:07:14 GMT
Content-Type: text/turtle

<http://example.com/toucan.physical>
 a <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Toucan> ;
...

The combination of mod_asis and a file (with a mapped extension) containing custom HTTP headers (including a Status pseudo header) will result in the remainder of the file being served with the designated headers. In this case, that means that we can return 210 status codes from any URL we wish using a stock Web hosting service.

Some might consider the use of file extensions restrictive (or just a PITA), but the Principle of URI Opacity protects us from people like that :)

Other Considerations

It may interest some to note that common Web clients (including human-oriented browsers and command line clients such as curl and wget) do not seem to mind a non-standard 200-series status code. They return the document and the new status code without complaint.

There are some disadvantages to the 210 proposal. Most importantly, this proposal is a change to the very fabric of HTTP and thus the Web. The W3C and IETF would need to standardize the 210 status code, probably in a new IETF RFC. That will take time and effort. Web server operators would have to configure their Web servers to return the correct status code (as described above), at least until Web servers ship with 210 support by default.

Please comment. If we want to build the Semantic Web and the Linked Data community on a designed fabric instead of a series of hacks, the time to start is now. Even now is late, but it is not (yet) impossible.prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-60655197182349909812010-10-20T09:40:00.002-04:002010-10-20T09:42:50.631-04:00Linking Enterprise Data Book on the WebThe book Linking Enterprise Data is now on the Web in its entirety at http://3roundstones.com/linking-enterprise-data/.

You can buy print or ebook versions at Springer or Amazon:

 <iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=vowelmovement-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1441976647&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0">prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-60413078750205173052010-10-07T10:14:00.002-04:002010-10-07T10:16:51.523-04:00Call for Chapters: Linking Government DataI'm working on a new contributed book to be entitled Linking_Government_Data. Please see the Call for Chapters if you have any interest in contributing.

A primary goal of this book is to highlight both costs and benefits to broader society of the publication of raw data to the Web by government agencies. How might the use of government Linked Data by the Fourth Estate of the public press change societies? How can agencies fulfill their missions with less cost? How must intra-agency culture change to allow public presentation of Linked Data?prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-64643157325619183532010-10-07T10:13:00.003-04:002010-10-07T10:14:43.473-04:00Starting at TalisI am very pleased to have accepted a job offer at Talis. I'll be helping to stand up a new U.S. subsidiary for them and will continue to focus my efforts on the evolving Linked Data market, both in relation to government transparency and its use in commercial markets.prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-76524923012691409222010-08-02T17:28:00.003-04:002010-08-02T17:32:08.426-04:00New Book in Pre-ProductionLinking Enterprise Data is an edited volume contributed by worldwide leaders in Semantic Web research, standards development and early adopters of Semantic Web standards and techniques. Linking enterprise data is the application of World Wide Web architecture principles to real-world information management issues faced by commercial, not-for-profit and government enterprises.

I edited this book for Springer and the publisher has created a Web site for it as it enters production.

Springer seems to think the book won't be out until 2011, but I'm hoping on November because I'll be speaking at a conference then and would like to see it out.

I have been given the rights to put the entire book's content on the Web and plan to do so as Linked Data sometime shortly.prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-33722896152894944892010-08-02T17:15:00.002-04:002010-08-02T17:21:51.581-04:00Leaving ZepheiraI have decided to leave Zepheira and seek employment elsewhere. Uche, Eric, Bernadette and I have worked closely together over the last couple of months to arrange a clean transition for me. With my current projects at or near an end, this seemed like a good time. My last official day as an employee of Zepheira was 31 July.

I wish Zepheira well and believe I am leaving at a time when the company is strong and their future looks bright.

The future for me is a bit less certain at the moment, but I'm speaking with a number of good people. More when a decision has been made, probably in late August around my birthday. In the meantime, I've updated my resume and Linked In profile as I make the rounds.

Feel free to contact me or leave a comment if you know of exciting opportunities.prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-7049875647895880512010-07-01T08:22:00.002-04:002010-07-01T22:12:04.774-04:00Introducing the Callimachus ProjectCallimachus is a Semantic Web framework for easily building hyperlinked Web applications. Callimachus allows Web authors to quickly and easily create Semantically-enabled Web applications with a minimal knowledge of Semantic Web principles. James Leigh and I have been working on it for a while. A presentation is also available.

Callimachus version 0.1.1 is now available. This release includes
updated documentation and the first sample applications.
Please see the directions in the file SAMPLE-APPS.txt to understand
the sample applications. More are coming soon!

You can acquire this release either by downloading the ZIP archive
from the downloads area or by checking out the v0.1.1 tag:

svn checkout http://callimachus.googlecode.com/svn/tags/0.1.1/

Either way, follow the directions in README.txt to get started.

Have fun and please report your experiences with Callimachus to the discussion list!prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-58179645445604126972009-10-22T21:06:00.001-04:002009-10-22T21:06:46.169-04:00Chinese Units of Measure

Chinese Units of Measure
Originally uploaded by prototypo
I found this antique Chinese ruler in Seoul, ROK, last week. It uses the old Chinese units of length measure, the fēn, cùn and chǐ units.

The tiny fēn is about 3 mm. The cùn is traditionally the width of a person's thumb at the knuckle. The chǐ (or Chinese 'foot') is derived from the length of a human forearm, like a cubit. Or so says Wikipedia.

Those were hard-working people, to have thumbs as wide as a cùn.

The ruler is wooden, with brass inlays marking the units.
prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-36548224992696726712009-09-04T20:59:00.006-04:002009-09-04T22:13:41.496-04:00Why I will Never Own a KindleFears of Internet security experts everywhere were realized today when Amazon revealed, apparently by accident, that it keeps copies of annotations made on the Kindle ebook reader.

This article at Reuters reported on damage control attempts at Amazon after it (in a delicious piece of irony) deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 from its Kindles in July. The provider of the ebook version of 1984 apparently did not own the appropriate publication rights. Readers were naturally upset at the sudden disappearance of content from their readers, although of course they forget to read the fine print, didn't they? You can't buy an ebook, you can only rent. Amazon was technically within their rights to delete the content.

That's hardly the full story, though. Amazon was sued by a high school student for having also removed his "copious notes" regarding the deleted novel. The Reuters story linked above showed Amazon's hand when they reported:

Amazon's email on Thursday said that the company would replace
the deleted books along with any annotations made by customers.

That's right, Kindle fans. Amazon has admitted publicly that they, like Orwell's Big Brother, keep copies of any annotations that Kindle users make on the devices. For at least months. Holy cow!

The full text of Amazon's email to affected customers is available at the WSJ.

Perhaps more amazing is that Kindle readers don't particularly seem to care (cf. comments to the WSJ blog post). Kindle notes are synced to an Amazon server and thus available to readers over the Web. That may seem like a feature to some, but not to me. I'll back up my own notes, thanks.prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-13774407460421435212009-08-21T21:57:00.003-04:002009-08-21T22:10:33.885-04:00Just Published: 97 Things Every Project Manager Should KnowO'Reilly Media has published 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know. My colleagues Kathy MacDougall and James Leigh also wrote for this book.

This is a new style of "collective wisdom" books from O'Reilly. An earlier one was aimed at software architects.

I was pleased to see that O'Reilly used one of my quotes at the top of their home page for the book ("Clever Code Is Hard to Maintain...and Maintenance Is Everything").

The tips I wrote for this book were:

Clever Code Is Hard To Maintain

The 60/60 Rule

The Fallacy Of Perfect Execution

The Fallacy Of Perfect Knowledge

The Fallacy Of The Big Round Ball

The Web Points The Way, For Now

Check it out if you do project management. There's some good stuff in there.prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-43281794323585109552009-08-17T18:56:00.002-04:002009-08-17T19:06:16.635-04:00The Death of the Copenhagen Interpretation?Wow. A climate researcher in the UK has had the guts to propose a new geometry for space-time that provides a new way of answering pesky questions in quantum mechanics. This article in Physorg (see also the article's full text) provides a good overview.

I don't know if I still have the math to slog through it, but it looks to be worth the effort.

Called the Invariant Set Postulate, the proposed law offers a geometry of space-time that resolves long-standing difficulties in quantum mechanics, including complementarity, quantum coherence, superposition and wave-particle duality. Quantum description of gravity may even be possible. Wow. That is an amazingly out-of-the-box contribution.

For the faint of heart, here is a key quote: "The Invariant Set Postulate appears to reconcile Einstein's view that quantum mechanics is incomplete, with the Copenhagen interpretation that the observer plays a vital role in defining the very concept of reality."prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-54164990167191866892009-06-15T14:16:00.001-04:002009-06-15T14:17:36.844-04:00OK, OK, I'm back on TwitterI'll be at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference this week and will be twittering on @prototypo.prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-57256707551978708952009-06-12T22:26:00.003-04:002009-06-12T22:28:53.230-04:00Freemix is Live!Freemix is live in invitational Beta. Come check it out!

We at Zepheira will officially introduce it to the SemTech crowd next week and to the press on Tuesday.

You can see my profile on http://freemix.it/profiles/dwood/.

Whew!prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-49526252739124794562009-06-01T20:59:00.003-04:002009-06-01T21:02:06.584-04:00Musicians and CodersBernadette recently gave me a CD (yeah, really, not an iTunes gift card! She's very quaint.) by Jeremy Pelt, a fantastic jazz trumpeter. In the inside cover of November, he says, "Our greatest responsibility as musicians is to live and grow... then, you might play something hip!"

Indeed.prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-38873636690282069022009-05-29T00:07:00.002-04:002009-05-29T00:10:43.732-04:00Announcing FreemixZepheira has announced the forthcoming launch of Freemix, a social networking site for data and the people who use it. Freemix will be officially launched at the Semantic Technologies Conference in San Jose, California on June 16, 2009.

Zepheira partners Eric Miller, Uche Ogbuji and myself will brief representatives of the press at 12:00 US Pacific Time in the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. Zepheira will demonstrate Freemix in a booth on the SemTech exhibit floor.

SemTech conference attendees may also attend a briefing on Freemix on Wednesday, 17 June 2009 from 5:00-6:00 PM US PST.

If you are a spreadsheet user and want to share your data more widely, Freemix is for you. Wouldn't it be nice if your data had friends, too?prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-38249338396686753122009-05-21T15:51:00.003-04:002009-05-21T16:05:55.057-04:00Speaking at SemTechI will be speaking at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose again this year from June 14-18, 2009.

Dan McCreary and I will be giving a three-hour tutorial on entity extraction on the Monday. I'll be presenting a talk on Active PURLs: Stored Procedures for the Semantic Web on the Tuesday. Additionally, it seems likely that I will replace Uche on a panel dubiously entitled Web3-4-Web2, also on the Tuesday.

Speakers have been authorized to share coupons for up to $200 off registration fees. If you would like to get the coupon code, please contact me or leave a comment here by May 29, 2009.

Zepheira is a gold sponsor again this year and we will have a very cool announcement. We are going to officially launch Freemix at the conference. The site is still under authentication, but will be released to the public just before the conference. It should be exciting. If you care are putting real, live, useful, everyday data on the Semantic Web, come see it.

prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-71910508467750766882009-05-16T10:02:00.002-04:002009-05-16T10:50:53.069-04:00Playing with Wolfram AlphaWolfram Alpha has been launched and is available for the public to try. I sat down to play with it.

FIrstly (using the rare American adverb here - don't be confused), you can't expect Wolfram Alpha to act like Google. It is a new kind of search engine, as one should expect from Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram is famously the inventor of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science.

Wolfram Alpha seems to consist of a linguistic interpretation engine coupled to Mathematica and a growing number of databases. Google, on the other hand, is a free-text indexer of Web content. That suggests that while one might be able to type just about any word or phrase into Google that is somewhere on the Web, one must limit Wolfram Alpha queries to concepts that are in its databases or may be treated as mathematical relationships. Indeed, this seems to be the case.

Wolfram's overview video is well worth watching. It, and the example search results available from the home page, give a flavor for the powerful searches one can do with the site.

Following a lead from the video, I tried typing the female name "Bernadette" into the search box. Wolfram Alpha, as advertised, did indeed respond with a presumption that I wanted information about the name and results that included a time distribution plot of popularity. Searching for "Bernadette David" gave me a distribution plot of both names which showed the highest combined popularity did in fact occur around our birth years. Well done, Wolfram Alpha.

Changing the previous search to "Bernadette Peters" resulted in some minor information about the actress and a link to her Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia links are provided where possible, as a transparent but useful attempt to provide flesh to limited source content.

However, more general searches, such as the word "Zepheira", produced no results. Wolfram Alpha responds to null result sets with a message saying "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.". That alone makes it clear that Wolfram Alpha and Google are at best complimentary.

Too many users on the site result in a cute message saying "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that..." - which is only mildly freaky if your name happens to be Dave. The reference naturally comes from the mutiny of the HAL 9000 computer in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey".

Math, science, engineering and finance queries work well, as expected. A Web interface to Mathematica is useful in itself. I suspect that the site will be most effectively used by college students and some working professionals. My mom and dad are unlikely to find it compelling (although my dad is a weather geek and weather data is well represented, so I might be wrong). Still, the lack of detailed weather results such as live RADAR images would more likely lead him to weather.com.

One can do funky and useless math with aplomb. Wolfram Alpha rapidly provided me with the correct interpretation, unit dimensions and unit conversions for the search "100 furlongs per microfortnight", a speed well above that of sound but under that of light.

Minor misspellings were handled effectively (e.g. "area of icosehedron" was correctly interpreted as "area of icosahedron"). Similarly, "volume of icosahedron" resulted in a correct interpretation. I expected the search "distance to a star" to fail miserably, but the answer was surprisingly useful. Try it yourself to see what I mean.

The problem with this kind of interface is that interpretations of intent are notoriously hard, if not impossible, in the general case. How can Wolfram Alpha expect to know that when I typed "birth year of gandhi" that I meant Mahatma Gandhi? What if I meant Indira Gandhi? Guessing is fine as far as it goes, but most search engines chose to give up that approach a decade ago in favor of appendation of search results.

The interface style is also naturally limited by its underlying data. Searching for "the size of the World Wide Web" resulted in a suggested to try "the size of the world wide" - which it could answer as the diameter of Earth.

I wonder how many people recall that Yahoo used to allow mathematical equations in their search engine? They seem to have removed the functionality. One can only presume that they got in the way of becoming a more general Internet search engine. I suspect there is a lesson there for Wolfram Research. Will Wolfram Alpha stay aimed at specialists or will they grow into a more general tool? Time will tell. Their promise to integrate more databases does not promise to address the inherent limitations of guessing linguistic intent.

In summary, Wolfram Alpha is an expert-friendly search system for specialists and is best used as an orthogonal complement to Google and other general search engines. Its approach is pure Wolfram - unashamedly different and unapologetically ignoring of lessons learned by others.prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-43273407763978706902009-04-26T10:12:00.007-04:002009-04-26T10:52:43.358-04:00Finally, Some Clues on the Domestication of RiceThe subtitle to this blog promises posts about "the origins of agriculture", although the field is so slow moving that I have not posted on the topic in three years and have not reported meaningful research here since speculating on religion as a driver.

Fortunately, others are doing active research on agricultural origins even if I am not. Dr. Dorian Fuller of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London has cracked a very special nut, indeed. He and his team have located substantial evidence of the location and timing of rice domestication in the Lower Yangtze region of Zhejiang, China.

Dr. Fuller and his colleagues discovered a location where the local diet shifted dramatically from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural one over a mere three hundred years. That alone is fascinating and an important discovery. Equally interesting was the dating of the shift, from 6900 to 6600 years ago. That places rice domestication in a timeframe fully two thousand years later than thought and lends serious support to diffusion theories (versus parallel development).

The process used by Fuller collected mixtures of midden material from the site, and painstakingly separated wild rice remains from domesticated rice remains. Specifically, they looked at spikelets, the place where rice seeds attach to stalks. Like other domesticated plants, rice underwent a genetic shift to retain the seeds for harvest by humans by a process of artificial selection. The shape of the spikelets is sufficiently different as to be distinguishable.

There is a nice scanning electron microscope image of a wild rice spikelet base at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

The last I heard, Londo's investigation1 was still suggesting multiple independent origins of rice in Southeast Asia and lower China. Hopefully Fuller's paper2 will put that to rest. Londo at least admitted that his team wasn't certain.

Wikipedia's entry on rice says, "Rice has been cultivated in Asia likely over 10,000 years." It is clearly time to correct that entry and, more broadly, correct the education of literally billions of people who are taught it. I really need to get back to work on my Origins of Agriculture summary and update it with these findings.

References:
[1] Londo, J.P., Chiang, Y-C, Hung, K-H, Chiang, T-U and Schaal, B.A. (2006). "Phylogeography of Asian wild rice, Oryza rufipogon, reveals multiple independent domestications of cultivated rice, Oryza sativa". PNAS, http://www.pnas.org/content/103/25/9578.long

[2] Fuller, D.Q., Qin, L., Zheng, Y., Zhao, Z., Chen, X., Hosoya, L.A. and Sun, G-P (2009, March 20). The Domestication Process and Domestication Rate in Rice: Spikelet Bases from the Lower Yangtze, Science 20 March 2009, 323/5921, pp. 1607-1610, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5921/1607prototypohttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-12912900012063001262009-04-25T18:35:00.002-04:002009-04-25T18:38:12.487-04:00Back to BasicsTorture is wrong, regardless of efficacy, regardless of culture, regardless of how it is justified, regardless of how the enemy is dehumanized, regardless of whether someone - anyone - thinks it is useful. Period.

Even my eight-year-old can figure this one out, all by herself and with no hints.prototypohttp://firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
Book your room at Super 8 Bath Hammondsport Area
Standard Room, 1 King BedMax Occupancy: 2 guests (up to 1 child, 1 infant)
Standard Room, 1 King BedMax Occupancy: 2 guests (up to 1 child, 1 infant)
Double Room, 2 Double Beds, SmokingMax Occupancy: 5 guests (up to 4 children, 4 infants)
Standard Room, 1 Queen BedMax Occupancy: 2 guests (up to 1 child, 1 infant)
Standard Room, 1 Queen Bed, AccessibleMax Occupancy: 2 guests (up to 1 child, 2 infants)
Double Room, 2 Double BedsMax Occupancy: 5 guests (up to 4 children, 4 infants)
Bath motel with a complimentary breakfast
Situated in Bath, this motel is in the same region as Glenn H. Curtiss Museum and Bully Hill Vineyards.
Property Features
Super 8 Bath Hammondsport Area offers a complimentary continental breakfast. Other amenities include complimentary wireless Internet access, free self parking, and a 24-hour front desk.
Room Amenities
Televisions come with premium cable channels. Guestrooms also feature complimentary wireless Internet access, complimentary high-speed (wired) Internet access, and refrigerators.Information missing or incorrect? Tell us!
Super 8 Bath Hammondsport Area
At your hotel
Guests can enjoy a complimentary breakfast each morning. High-speed wireless Internet access is complimentary. Onsite self parking is complimentary.
- Number of buildings/towers - 1
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- Total number of rooms - 32
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Available in all rooms: Free Wi-Fi , Free wired high-speed Internet
Available in some public areas: Free Wi-Fi
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A complimentary continental breakfast is served each morning between 6 AM and 9 AM.
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Accepted at this hotel: American Express, Diners Club, Discover, MasterCard, Visa
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Extra-person charges may apply and vary depending on hotel policy.
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- Pet fee: USD 10 per pet, per night


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Home > News > World
Saturday March 1, 2014 MYT 11:40:01 PM
Saturday March 1, 2014 MYT 11:40:57 PM
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's upper house of parliament on Saturday approved a proposal by President Vladimir Putin to deploy Russian armed forces in Ukraine's Crimea region.
The Federation Council voted overwhelmingly to back a proposal to use "the armed forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine until the normalisation of the socio-political situation in that country."
It said the decision took effect immediately.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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18490 Fielding Street
Detroit, Michigan, 48219
Most errands require a car.
A few nearby public transportation options.
18490 Fielding Street has a Walk Score of 42 out of 100. This location is a Car-Dependent neighborhood so most errands require a car.
This location is in Detroit. Nearby parks include Milan Playground, Reid Park and Votrobeck Playground.
Nearby schools include Metropolitan Academy / Detroit, Holcomb Elementary School and Emerson Elementary School.
The closest grocery stores are Apollo Market, Quick Pac and Consumers Party Shop.
The closest coffee shop is Motor City Java and Tea House. There are seven restaurants within a 15 minute walk including Bob's Pizza Palace Inc, Jack's Coney Island and SUBWAY® Restaurants.
18490 Fielding Street is near Milan Playground, Reid Park and Votrobeck Playground.
Explore how far you can travel by car, bus, bike and foot from 18490 Fielding Street.
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View all Detroit apartments on a map.
Popular apartment searches include hardwood floor, fireplace and single family. View all Detroit apartments and rentals.
This location is in the city of Detroit, MI. Detroit has an average Walk Score of 52 and has 713,777 residents.


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Photo reblogged from Scientific Illustration with 302 notes
'Eggs of North American Birds' (1902). American Lithographic Co.
Image and text courtesy NYPL Digital Gallery.
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Tonight's Gender of the Night is: Dark Gaia
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someone still loves you boris yeltsin, "young presidents"
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Photo reblogged from Zoe Keller with 465 notes
Finished up this drawing yesterday - here's another detail of it in progress.
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The Wonderful Art and Illustration of Christina Mrozik
Christina Mrozik has spent the majority of her life observing the natural world and the types of relationships that form within it. Having grown up on the Grand River in Michigan, she was inspired by it's habitats at an early age. Blending the external world with her own understanding of the human condition has led to her distinct style, in which flora and fauna stand in, representing the simultaneous and often opposing matters of the human heart. She often draws with ink and marker on paper, adding bursts of color with watercolor and high pigmented acrylics. Christina is inspired by many of the early naturalists such as Audobon, but also by visual storytellers such as Rackham. She views the art making process as one of portraiture, in which analyzing the drawing helps make sense of peoples' histories and abilities. Currently based in Grand Rapids Michigan, she has shown both regionally and nationally. Currently she is working on designs for Twinne in London, branding projects for Nice Collective and recently returned from Cabin Time: A Roaming Artist Residency in the Porcupine Mountains. She is making work every day in her studio in preparation for upcoming shows, and is excited to see what's next.
Photoset reblogged from Nineteenth Century Eyes with 1,799 notes
Beautiful astronomical illustrations by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, all based on observations made by the French artist-astronomer in the 1870s and 1880s. Fun fact: Trouvelot, also an entomologist, is somewhat infamous for the unfortunate introduction of the gypsy moth into North America. Those pesky things are known to feast on the leaves of over 300 species of trees, shrubs and plants. (New York Public Library)
Source: digitalgallery.nypl.org
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A Handbook to the Carnivora - Part 1: Cats, Civets, and Mongooses (1896)
The present volume deals with the members of the Carnivora, with which most people are familiar, viz., the Cats, and I am again indebted to Mr. Lydekker for a most useful summary of our present knowledge of these animals, and also for his very interesting conclusion to the work, wherein he deals with the extinct members of the Order.
Photoset reblogged from Alice Carrier with 373 notes
inspired by field guide illustrations, a western meadowlark (oregon's state bird!) on the belly of a tough-as-nails 18 year old who sat for 2.5 hours barely flinching.
Photo reblogged from Scientific Illustration with 180 notes
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Measured Red Fox skull illustration
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If Cymbals Eat Guitars has a unifying philosophy, it's that rock music is a negotiable solid.
Really enjoying this band and especially everything off this new album.
Photo reblogged from The Earth Story with 40 notes
This may look like the result of photoshop, but unfortunately it is not. This orange discolouration is the result of Acid Mine Drainage (AMD). It is caused when water flows over or through sulphur-bearing materials forming solutions of net acidity. It is mainly associated with abandoned coal mines and currently active mining. AMD is formed when pyrite, an Iron Sulphide is exposed and reacts with air and water to form sulphuric acid and dissolved Iron. It is the Iron precipitate that is accredited to the discolouration. The acid nature of the run off also aids to further dissolve heavy metals such as lead copper and mercury; this in turn can lead to contamination of both surface and groundwater.
Aside from the potential impact on potable water, AMD can have severe impacts on fish, animals and plants. Many impacted streams have a pH of 4 or lower; that is similar to battery acid. For an example of how AMD has effected aquaculture in 8 miles of a river in New Mexico follow the link: http://nm.water.usgs.gov/projects/questa/ .
So, we know that AMD can affect humans and animals, but there is some more bad news. It is not a once off event. Acid mine drainage can be described as perpetual pollution in that in can continue indefinitely -long after mining has ended. As an example; officials have determined that acid drainage at the Golden Sunlight mine in Montana will continue for thousands of years.
Acid mine drainage can be treated, but at a huge cost; currently acid runoff from the Summitville Mine in Colorado, which killed all biological life in a 17-mile stretch of the Alamosa River, is being treated at a cost of $30,000 a day. That's $10,950,000 a year.
As ever, prevention is better than cure; and certainly cheaper.
For further examples of acid mine drainage, go here:http://toxics.usgs.gov/regional/mining/index.html
This image shows Lick Run, a tributary of the West Branch Susquehanna River in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania.
Photoset reblogged from Alice Carrier with 1,257 notes
Tattoos on my friend Peter
Soooo good.
Photoset reblogged from Scientific Illustration with 219 notes
Paulus Roetter sketchbook on pines and cactus, on Flickr.
By Roetter, Paulus, Engelmann, George, Mueller, Mrs. S.
Contributing Library:Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library
Source: wapiti3
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Manly - New South Wales - Australia (von nigelhowe)
Source: Flickr / legin101
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text:
Category Archives: Mage Related
Lady in Red
Alas ditched her ugly pink and green Outlands getup and went red: I think this is a change we can all live with. As fun as it was being a nerve-jangling eyesore (for about five minutes), I find a return … Continue reading
Minipost: A possibly unpopular opinion
Several weeks ago, I saw a bit of a kerfuffle on The Twitters regarding the PvP stage of the legendary quest. I don't actually recall who was involved in the discussion, so take my recap with a grain of salt. … Continue reading
One Word
I don't know how many of you have heard of One Word. I've known about it for a few years now, but I haven't ever bothered to try to fine one word that could sum up my whole intentions for … Continue reading
and believe me I am still alive
I'm not doing much in the way of science, but I am still alive. I've been in a weird place with WoW lately, in that I am playing and enjoying the hell out of the time I have spent playing, … Continue reading
Yesterday morning found me at work, logging into all my characters on Azuremyst and stripping them of anything that might conceivably be of use to Alas in preparation for her venture away from her support system of 9 alts to … Continue reading
Looking for Guild
I'm officially putting myself on the market. There's been some developments over the past week that have made the decision to leave the Effers the only real choice for me. It's a decision tinged with sadness, but I admit to … Continue reading
Wishing for mage portals again
I often wish for the sort of ease of travel that is so abundant in WoW. Today, those wishes are going to multiply many times over. I hate airports. I hate airplanes. But I do love those former guildmates of … Continue reading
I've been giving it a lot of thought lately. Like about 5 minute's worth. And under the extreme and rigorous scientific conditions of some tests I've run (mostly in Portal 2, which is when I was doing the thinking about … Continue reading
Dispelling the myth: DPS ain't easy
I'm sick of hearing tanks and healers talk like they've got the hardest jobs in the game and generally behaving as though DPS are a bunch of slack-jawed yokels who don't do anything except mindlessly press the same handful of … Continue reading
The resentment of giving
One of the few things I dislike about being a mage is the occasional times I get a random whisper from someone that typically reads about like this: can u port to Dal plz I usually won't make any sort … Continue reading


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The World : Asia : Russia : Novosibirsk region : Novosibirsk
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Fotografie panoramica de Anton Grankin Fotografiat 14:02, 08/07/2011 - Views
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The World > Asia > Russia > Novosibirsk region > Novosibirsk
Novosibirsk, Petukhova Str. 82/2
Novosibirsk region is a part of Siberian federal district of Russian Federation. It's located in south-west Siberia and adjacent to the Republic of Kazakhstan and Russia's Altai region. Its administrative and economic center is the city of Novosibirsk.


text:
Juvenile Toilet - Facility Management Product Release
Mansfield Plumbing Products LLC
website | Company information
Elementary Toilet measures 24 inches to the top of the tank with a rim height of 11‐1/4 inches, which meets ASME's juvenile height standards, as well as TAS Standards for 5-8 year olds, according to the company. The toilet uses 1.28 gpf and includes safety features such as a slow-closing seat, and a cover lock.
Content Category: Plumbing & Restrooms
- Waterless Urinal FAQ: All You Wanted To Know And More About Waterless Urinals
- Identifying Essential Drain-Cleaning Equipment
- Technician Training Essential to Use Drain-Cleaning Tools
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- Accessibility and Restroom Renovations
- Accessibility and Restrooms
- ADA: Ensuring Restroom Accessibility
posted: 3/19/2014
Search Juvenile Toilet on FacilityZone.com


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You can now filter search results with text. Example: "person: john" will search only person pages for "john".
Sort of like The Divine Comedy, but with more Hemingway.
Kamala Khan has her first Marvel Team-Up and luckily for the neophyte hero, it's with someone with PLENTY of experience in that area.
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Dr. Antoinette E. Rose, MD
Internal Medicine, Palo Alto Medical Foundation
- 701 E El Camino Real
Mountain View, CA 94040
- Within miles of
- 1 Office Location
- Email a Friend
- (650) 404-8400
Dr. Antoinette E. Rose has been practicing medicine for 25 years. Dr. Rose graduated from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1989. She practices medicine in Mountain View, CA and specializes in Internal Medicine. Dr. Rose is affiliated with San Francisco VA Medical Center, Mills Peninsula Health Center, El Camino Hospital and Good Samaritan Hospital.
Gender: Female
Years in Practice: 25 Years
Languages Spoken: English
Medical School: Stanford University School of Medicine
Graduation Date: 1989
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Specialties: Internal Medicine
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Born: September 14, 1976
Aram Shelton is a multi-instrumentalist on saxophones and clarinets, a composer & improviser, and creates electroacoustic music with computer-based electronics. While the music he makes is spread across a variety of aesthetic lines, it is related by the importance of improvisation to develop material and express the individuality of musicians. He currently lives in Oakland, California.
Shelton has performed with a wide variety of talented musicians, including Tim Daisy, Ken Vandermark, Jason Ajemian, Josh Berman, Audrey Chen, Fred Lonberg-holm, Dave Rempis, Damon Smith, Steve Bernstein, Weasel Walter, Jason Roebke, Liz Albee, Rob Mazurek, Matt Bauder, Jessica Pavone, Fred Frith, Josh Abrams, Harris Eisenstadt, Jeb Bishop, Tim Perkis, Kevin Drumm, Jon Raskin, Frank Rosaly, Guillermo Gregorio, and Chris Brown. He has performed throughout the United States, Canada and Europe including appearances at the Chicago Jazz Festival, the Suoni per il Popolo Festival in Montreal, and the Krakow Autumn Jazz Festival. His playing and music has been documented on more than ten albums through various imprints including 482 Music, Locust Music, MultiKulti, Edgetone, Delmark, and his own Singlespeed Music....
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Shelton's alto tone is full of the quizzical curls and bitter wisps, not to mention sharp repetition, that recall Roscoe Mitchell at his hairiest.- Clifford Allen
Shelton plays alto with a singing sound and a wonderful way of developing juicy phrases into full-blown solos. - John Litweiler
brings to mind a young Anthony Braxton, with an acerbic asceticism, obliquely rooted in jazz, at work. - All About Jazz
Octet482 Music
Everything For SomebodySinglespeed Music
There Was...Clean Feed Records
InclineSinglespeed Music
Two CitiesDelmark Records
The WaySinglespeed Music
Last DistractionsSinglespeed Music
This information is provided by discogs.com or the profile administrator.