Personal Blog
Code Club 18/12/2021
The next Club will be on Saturday 18th December 2021 @ Paignton Library. Please contact the library to book.
We will carry on with what we were doing last session, hopefully expand on what we were doing with the Micro:bit
Links
Tags
#CodeClub,#FreeCodeCamp,#Microbit,#Scratch
Next Code Club
Next code club Saturday 15/1/2022 : Please contact Paignton Library to book.
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Learning disability awareness
I have now completed 'Learning disability awareness' with e-learning at work. Another really good course.
This course will start by giving you an overview of some of the common types and causes of learning disabilities and how they affect people.
It will touch on how a person centred approach to care will get the best results and look at how management must perform, and at the needs of the individual.
It will also discuss overcoming the stigma attached to learning disabilities and much more.
The course covers the following modules:
Links
Tags
#CPD,#Learning,#Disability,#Awareness
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Paper on Covid 19 transmission
I was sent this during a discussion on Mastodon about masks and how effective masks are, when worn by people who may not put on properly, compared to a doctor who has a team of people to ensure this happens. Interesting discussion and nice be sent a link to an actual paper to provide some help with the discussion.
Feel free to join / continue the discussion, however you will need to join mastodon and follow me @zleap@qoto.org to do so.
Links
Tags
#Science,#Journal,#PNAS,#Article,#Research,#Covid19,#Transmission,#Mastodon.
Bibliography Information (just for reference)
@article {Bagherie2110117118,
author = {Bagheri, Gholamhossein and Thiede, Birte and Hejazi, Bardia and Schlenczek, Oliver and Bodenschatz, Eberhard},
title = {An upper bound on one-to-one exposure to infectious human respiratory particles},
volume = {118},
number = {49},
elocation-id = {e2110117118},
year = {2021},
doi = {10.1073/pnas.2110117118},
publisher = {National Academy of Sciences},
abstract = {Wearing face masks and maintaining social distance are familiar to many people around the world during the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Evidence suggests that these are effective ways to reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, it is not clear how exactly the risk of infection is affected by wearing a mask during close personal encounters or by social distancing without a mask. Our results show that face masks significantly reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to social distancing. We find a very low risk of infection when everyone wears a face mask, even if it doesn{\textquoteright}t fit perfectly on the face.There is ample evidence that masking and social distancing are effective in reducing severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission. However, due to the complexity of airborne disease transmission, it is difficult to quantify their effectiveness, especially in the case of one-to-one exposure. Here, we introduce the concept of an upper bound for one-to-one exposure to infectious human respiratory particles and apply it to SARS-CoV-2. To calculate exposure and infection risk, we use a comprehensive database on respiratory particle size distribution; exhalation flow physics; leakage from face masks of various types and fits measured on human subjects; consideration of ambient particle shrinkage due to evaporation; and rehydration, inhalability, and deposition in the susceptible airways. We find, for a typical SARS-CoV-2 viral load and infectious dose, that social distancing alone, even at 3.0 m between two speaking individuals, leads to an upper bound of 90\% for risk of infection after a few minutes. If only the susceptible wears a face mask with infectious speaking at a distance of 1.5 m, the upper bound drops very significantly; that is, with a surgical mask, the upper bound reaches 90\% after 30 min, and, with an FFP2 mask, it remains at about 20\% even after 1 h. When both wear a surgical mask, while the infectious is speaking, the very conservative upper bound remains below 30\% after 1 h, but, when both wear a well-fitting FFP2 mask, it is 0.4\%. We conclude that wearing appropriate masks in the community provides excellent protection for others and oneself, and makes social distancing less important.Previously published data were used for this work (https://aerosol.ds.mpg.de/). All other study data are included in the article and/or SI Appendix.},
issn = {0027-8424},
URL = {https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118},
eprint = {https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118.full.pdf},
journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences}
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UK Covid restrictions include work from home
As the new UK Covid restrictions advise working from home, it is perhaps time to reboot some thinking when it comes to video conferencing.,
Big blue button is an open source video conferencing platform, that has been developed with teaching in mind, but is an extremely capable platform.
There are lots of excellent features, but importantly it is secure, can be self hosted which makes it ideal for environments where privacy and data protection is very important (e.g schools) or hosted by a 3rd party within the UK or EU meaning it is then covered under the GDPR.
Unlike MS teams or zoom, there are very few cookies dumped on your computer, MS teams needs an MS account (or seems to). Zoom is limited to short calls unless you pay for the premium version, if you use the free version then adverts are going to be used.
BBB has NONE of this nonsense.
If you are a non profit, SME or school. You are able to use the instance at https://bbb.faircam.net for free. You will need to sign up using your organisation e-mail address. Students just need to be given a link to the teaching room and if set up a passcode.
If you need help setting up you can go to the BBB website above or chat on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel #phillw-social.
The above link opens up the Libera Chat web client page.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
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John Lennon 1940 – 1980
Born:John Winston Lennon, Oct 9, 1940, Liverpool, Lancashire, England Died:Dec 8, 1980, New York City, New York U.S. References: Wikipedia entry
I have created this page as a Tribute to John Lennon. Photo downloaded from Wikipedia for this purpose.
#Beatles,#tribute,#John,#Lennon,#music,#musician,#writer, #imagine,#givepeaceachance,#assassination,#liverpool,#band,#history,#johnwinstonlennon,#sixties,#seventies,#eighties
George Harrison – Tribute to John Lennon
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Blender 3 features
In a related post to the Sprite Frigiht video from November 1st,
This video looks at some of the great features in version 3 of Blender.
Looks pretty good, you can follow Blender on the Fediverse with blender@video.blender.org.
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Linux Foundation events
This is a list of upcoming Linux foundation events.
#Linux,#OpenSource,#Events,#Software,#Technology
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EFF Job Opening
The Electronic Frontier Foundation have a job opening. Details in the embedded post below.
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Science Daily : Articles on Plastics and Polymers
The two articles were posted to Mastodon.
Firstly a look at the problem of Micro-plastics
Secondly an article on Polymers
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Science,#ScienceDaily,#Articles,#MicroPlastic,#Polymers,#Chemistry, #Plastics,#Research,#Mastodon,#SocialMedia,#TheYearOfTheFediverse
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Growing Salt Crystals
Reposting this due to adding a link to a Science Forum post.
As Salt (Sodium Chloride) dissolves in water, you can grow salt crystals quite easily. There are lots of instructions on the internet, on how to do this with Salt, as well as other chemicals; such as, Alum (Aluminium Sulfate), Borax (Sodium Borate) for example.
For the purpose of my attempt, I used
*a conical flask from my old Chemistry set,
* a wooden lollipop stick,
* string
* paper clip (to hold the string in the solution)
This is illustrated in the first picture, while the 2nd is a photo of the resulting crystal formation.
Update 17/10/2021
I took more photos on the 4th October to illustrate further growth of the crystals
It is probably worth mentioning that table salt contains Sodium Chloride but also a Anti caking agent called Sodium Ferrycyanide which according to that wikipedia article is a yellow solid.
I am not sure if this somehow affects the growth or shape of the resultng crystals. At some point I should try the same experiment pure NaCl
Tags
#Chemistry,#Salt,#SodiumChloride,#NaCl,#Crystals
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