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A one Dollar Compound Microscope

I love this thing - for a very little amount of money, you can have something to make discoveries with that you wouldn’t be able to make without. It reminds me of computing or driving - it’s an enabling object that yields a powerful ability.

A one Dollar Compound Microscope

In this article, we describe the construction of a very simple low-cost compound microscope. As shown in Figure 1, the microscope we describe is one that just about anyone can build and will produce a magnification of about 75 times. Microscopes may be thought of as very intricate and mysterious instruments but in reality, they are not as complicated as one may think. Building this simple instrument is not only a fun project, it will help you understand how microscopes work. This microscope, which will cost you no more than about a dollar or so to build, is essentially identical to the expensive microscopes that professionals use. Through this project you will gain an appreciation for the need of using corrective optics to reduce the aberrations. Obviously, the performance of this simple microscope cannot be compared with those more expensive professional instruments, which will produce much clearer and brighter images. Nonetheless, it should compare well to the low-cost microscopes that are sold in the toy or hobby shops. It is our experience that so called “toy microscopes” are a real disaster because they commonly give little more than diffuse images or shadows, and can give a young person a bad impression about microscopes consequently causing them to loose interest in these instruments. However, an instrument of suitable quality has the potential of sparking a young person’s interest and opening up a world of discovery to them.

A microscope is essentially formed by two lenses: the objective and the eyepiece which is also referred to as the ocular. The objective forms a magnified image of the specimen and the eyepiece in turn magnifies this image. In another article entitled “From Lenses to Optical Instruments”, we explore how lenses and microscopes work, so, if you feel the need to review or learn more about the basics, please consult this article. Other components such as the main tube, the focusing system, the stage, the condenser and the illuminating system complete the microscope. The instrument we present here is called as a compound microscope because it is formed by two main optical components: the objective and the eyepiece. A simple microscope, on the other hand, comprises a single lens, which is essentially a more or less powerful magnifier. The glass-sphere microscope, which we described in another article of our gallery is such a simple microscope

RedDot 6.5: New Features Extend Usability and Simplify Content Delivery

I quite literally almost choked when I saw this. Saving to CMS from Word? Editing from Firefox interface!! Yay!

New Features Extend Usability and Simplify Content Delivery

RedDot, Now Even More User-Centric

With RedDot’s improved SmartEdit, content contributors and other business users can create and edit content using Microsoft Word and save changes directly to CMS, eliminating the need for any CMS training.

A new Mozilla Firefox user interface allows RedDot CMS users to work on any platform supported by the open-source browser, including Macintosh, Linux and Unix based systems.

OpenDocument Fellowship - Resources - FAQ

Given all of the hullaballo over MA’s decision to use OpenDocument rather than MS Word’s Document format, I thought it might be nice to give a link to a FAQ about OpenDocument. Enjoy!

OpenDocument Fellowship - Resources - FAQ

What is OpenDocument?

OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument or ODF) is:

* An open, XML-based file format.
* An open standard from the OASIS standards group.

OpenDocument covers the features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. Some background information on the format can be read in “History of OpenDocument, From birth to world movement”, by Daniel Carrera. A non-technical overview of the format is found in “Everybody’s Guide to OpenDocument” by Marco Fioretti.

The short name of the format is OpenDocument.

Productive Strategies: List of Academic Lecture Podcasts

I would love to intigate smething like this at Rider. It would be a relatively simple task for the Instructors, no student voices would likely ever be heard, ceasing privacy/inclusion issues, and the workflow would ensure a auick turnaround and availability - additional benefits would be that the students would have a way to review the lectures. Oh, and there is still value added by coming to class, going to University, etc. because a lot of the value of in class education is the visual aspects, the human interaction, and the ability to dig deeper into the topic with an expert in front of you, none of which can be gotten with these mp3s. Together with the BBC’s annotatable audio tool this could be a fantastic teaching and learning tool.

Productive Strategies: List of Academic Lecture Podcasts

Several universities are making lectures available as Podcasts. Not every class is work well on an iPod, but the content is much more directed toward people who want to learn and not just be entertained. Of course the flip side of this is that some of the professors are boring in person, to say nothing of listening to their recordings on an iPod. You may need to look around to find someone who is interesting to listen to, but once you find the right feed, you have a tremendous amount of content regularly published for entire semester.

Alexa - Web Discovery Machine: Watching the ‘Net Trends

I was a bit surprised to find that I had been doing many of these. It really does give you a heads up on what’s going on to pay close attention to del.icio.us/popular, for instance. You end up being the one who says “Hey did you hear that ?” all the time, and people respond with some wonder, thinking “How did he hear about that - I’ve been on CNN all morning and they never said a thing. That’s web 1.0 thinking right there, buddy.

I must say though, I’m not as big of an alexa fan as this guy.

John|work++

Alexa - Web Discovery Machine: Watching the ‘Net Trends

Watching the ‘Net Trends
My job requires that I keep tabs on all the latest trends on the ‘Net, but there is no single good way to do that. Some things still escape my attention. So, I thought it would be interesting to have a discussion about trend-watching on the ‘Net and the methods for keeping up.

The Daily Princetonian - Blackboard merger may benefit users

Here’s one analysis of the acquisition of WebCT by Blackboard. I personally think that it’s very likely the merger will create a disaster. I also think that the revered simplicity of Blackboard will go away. Oh, yeah, and since there’s no competition to speak of, demand of services, support and features will rise and supply of those will fall, resulting in [incredibly] a larger price tag.

The Daily Princetonian - Blackboard merger may benefit users

“What people will see in the next year or two is more and improved features, but I think we would see them without this merger,” he added. Later on, Hood said, Blackboard will probably try to fuse its reputedly easy-to-learn system with WebCT’s more complex, feature-rich system.

“For people who want to do more collaborative work in their teaching and research, I think [WebCT] facilitates that more easily,” he said. “It’s not a simple thing to learn how to do. I would say, for example, the learning curve for Blackboard is an hour as opposed to the full day to learn WebCT. I know that the WebCT folks say that WebCT is so much richer [in features].”

Introduction to platonic geometry and fractals

This is a mighty cool website focusing on the beauty of visual mathematics. Having never been very good at maths myself, but very interested in the visual arts and design, this is one way I can very deeply appreciate math.

Introduction to platonic geometry and fractals

The Koch Snowflake: example (below) is similar, except rather than subtracting the middle of the line in each step or iteration - we add a triangular bulge to each line, and then to each resulting line … and so forth until the border goes from a triangle to a star, to a wrinkled snowflake.

This also illustrates a fundamental property of fractals .. infinite boundaries.

APP.COM v4.0 - Principal curbs kids’ Internet activity | Asbury Park Press Online

Somehow I don’t think they thought this out very well. I know privacy is dying in this country, but it’s certainly not dead yet. blogging == free speech, especially where personal independent accounts exist. I think Rider might take some issue with what their students blog on their own, too, but I’m sure they would never try to do anything to stop them.

APP.COM v4.0 - Principal curbs kids’ Internet activity | Asbury Park Press Online

When students post their faces, personal diaries and gossip on Web sites like Myspace.com and Xanga.com, it is not simply harmless teen fun, according to one Sussex County Catholic school principal.

It’s an open invitation to predators and an activity that Pope John XIII Regional High School in Sparta will no longer tolerate, the Rev. Kieran McHugh told a packed assembly of 900 high school students two weeks ago.

Effective immediately, and over student complaints, the teens were told to dismantle their Myspace.com accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs. Defy the order and face suspension, students were told.

Audio and Video File Extensions

In case anyone was wondering: A great overview of AV file format extensions. You know you wanted to know what a m2v was just as much as me.

MIT/~tbuehler on File Extensions

aac - A newer MPEG sound format.

ac3 – A Dolby-Digital encoded audio file. Used primarily in DVDs. Needs proprietary codec to play.

aif, aiff – Audio Interchange File. The Mac equivalent of wav, but it is cross platform as well.

asf – Advanced Streaming Format. The original file extension for Windows Media files, this extension refers to both audio and video files. The confusion this caused lead to Microsoft abandoning this extension in favor of wma and wmv.

avi – Audio-Video Interleaved. One of the most common video files.

divx – Some DivX encoders and applications give the option of using the divx file extension for DivX encoded files. The files are exactly the same as those with the avi extension, with the only difference being that they have substantially worse compatibility (many applications that can play and import DivX encoded avis do not work with files that have the divx extension). Needless to say, the extension is pointless and you shouldn’t use it.

dv – Raw DV stream. Not commonly used, since most raw DV streams use an avi or mov extension.

m1v – An elementary MPEG-1 video stream. Cannot contain audio.

m2p – MPEG-2 program stream.

m2v – An elementary MPEG-2 video stream. Cannot contain audio. Requires MPEG-2 codec (commonly acquired with DVD player software) to playback. Most professional DVD authoring packages require m2v files.

mov, moov – Quicktime movie.

mpa – An elementary MPEG-2 audio stream.

mpg, mpeg – A multiplexed (audio and video combined) MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 file (although most commonly MPEG-1).

mp1 – MPEG audio, layer 1.

mp2 – MPEG audio, layer 2.

mp3 – The ubiquitous audio format that we all know and love. It is actually called “MPEG audio, layer 3″ and, as the name implies, intended to encode the audio portion of MPEG-1 movies.

mp4 – MPEG-4 movie (although MPEG-4 movies can also be avi or mov). Some people claim that mp4 is a new version of mp3. These people are idiots.

mpv – See m2v.

ogg – Ogg Vorbis audio file.

ogm – Ogg Vorbis video file.

omf – A video format developed by and used primarily by Avid editing systems, but has been adopted by other professional video applications and has become a high-end standard. Usually these files are not playable from the desktop but rather only inside the applications that use them. Stands for “Open Media Format.”

qt – Quicktime movie.

rm – Real video file.

ram – Real audio file.

swf – Macromedia Flash animation file.

vob – Video object file. Used in DVDs. Contains MPEG-2 video and several possible audio formats, as well as menus and interactivity.

wav – Microsoft wave audio file. PCM (pulse code modulation) audio, usually uncompressed.

wma – Windows Media audio file.

wmv – Windows Media video file.