Eliminate Your Phone Bill

I have written about Innovation Thinking with Clayton Christensen on the Curious Cat Management Blog previously. Here is an example of such innovation. All you need is a broadband internet connection and you can Kiss your phone bill good-bye:

The Ooma service uses so-called Voice over Internet Protocol (or VOIP) technology to deliver calls to your existing phone using a broadband connection. Consumers need only to buy a $249 Ooma Hub (it was a hefty $399 when the service launched last year); all domestic calls are free. (Ooma charges a few pennies a minute for international calls to landlines and 20 to 30 cents a minute for overseas calls to mobile phones. Calls from Ooma box to Ooma box are free.)
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Replacing your phone service is, of course, just the start for Ooma. In some ways, calling is the Trojan horse to get the box in your house and then figure out other services to sell, like enhanced network security or kid-safe Web surfing.

I ordered mine from Amazon for $203 and have been using it for a little over a month; it has been great. Relatively easy to setup (they had a pretty good customer survey and I recommended they use colored cables – they color cables in the drawings in the users guide but give you 3 white cable to use – they are different types of cables so it isn’t tough to figure out but that would make it a bit easier).

I have been using Vonage for awhile and it is ok, but I don’t see any reason to pay each month when Ooma doesn’t charge a monthly fee (even on the lowest option on Vonage the bill is over $22/month).

I think gadgets are cool, but I will admit most of the time I don’t really want to be bothered to actually use them. But this is easy to you and saves me $20/month, that I like.

Related: Freeware Wi-Fi app turns iPod into a Phone – Home Engineering: Physical Gmail Notifier – Six Keys to Building New Markets by Unleashing Disruptive Innovation – The Innovators Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor –

Mathematicians Top List of Best Occupations

These lists are basically silly but here is one sites opinion on the best occupations. I don’t really accept the methodology used as providing anything very meaningful about the “best jobs” but at least the spell it out. Best jobs

Mathematician
Actuary
Statistician
Biologist
Software Engineer
Computer Systems Analyst

Their criteria really value being able to sit at a desk and not having to do physical work. High salary and limited stress are also significant factors.

Making Magnificent Mirrors with Math

At Drexel, he designs amazing mirrors

Could math provide the path to better reflection? Perline asked.

Indeed it could. Eight years and numerous calculations later, Hicks is now testing a prototype mirror – for a car, not a bike – and he is in talks with a foreign manufacturer. As with the bike mirror, the rounded surface provides a wide field of view – so wide that it eliminates the dreaded, driver-side “blind spot” – yet the subtle mathematics of his design result in little or no distortion.

He didn’t stop there. The 42-year-old mathematician went on to design half a dozen other reflective surfaces for various applications – a few of them in collaboration with Perline – and they are like nothing you’d ever see on the bathroom wall.

Panoramic mirrors. Mirrors for use with high-tech surveillance cameras. Mirrors with odd, undulating surfaces that are fashioned with a computer-guided milling machine. And one wacky mirror that doesn’t yield a mirror image at all. If you raise one hand while looking into the curved surface, your reflection appears to be raising the opposite hand.

It’s not clear what use that one will have, beyond entertainment – Perline calls it “the vampire mirror” – but with his driver-side prototype, Hicks may be onto something.

Billions for Science in Stimulus Bill

Science wins big in US economic plan

Democratic leadership in the US House of Representatives unveiled on Thursday an $825 billion economic stimulus bill that includes tens of billions of dollars in new funding for basic research, science infrastructure and clean-energy initiatives.
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House appropriators would pump $3 billion into the National Science Foundation (NSF), $2 billion into the National Institutes of Health (NIH), $1.9 billion into the Department of Energy and $1.5 billion into university research facilities. Much of that money would be directed toward science infrastructure like renovating buildings or laboratories, but the NSF and NIH would receive $2 billion and $1.5 billion respectively that could be used to pay for thousands of basic research grants that have already been approved but for which there was previously not enough money.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. And short term spikes in funding are problematic for numerous reasons. But I have long argued for the value of investing in science and engineering excellence for long term economic benefit. I am worried the government will fail to provide adequate strategic thought to investments.

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the USA: Watch the entire I Have a Dream Speech.

New Family of Antibacterial Agents Discovered

Bacteria continue to gain resistance to commonly used antibiotics. In this week’s JBC, one potential new antibotic has been found in the tiny freshwater animal Hydra.

The protein identified by Joachim GrÃ¶tzinger, Thomas Bosch and colleagues at the University of Kiel (Germany), hydramacin-1, is unusual (and also clinically valuable) as it shares virtually no similarity with any other known antibacterial proteins except for two antimicrobials found in another ancient animal, the leech.

Hydramacin proved to be extremely effective though; in a series of laboratory experiments, this protein could kill a wide range of both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, including clinically-isolated drug-resistant strains like Klebsiella oxytoca (a common cause of nosocomial infections). Hydramacin works by sticking to the bacterial surface, promoting the clumping of nearby bacteria, then disrupting the bacterial membrane.

GrÃ¶tzinger and his team also determined the 3-D shape of hydramacin-1, which revealed that it most closely resembled a superfamily of proteins found in scorpion venom; within this large group, they propose that hydramacin and the two leech proteins are members of a newly designated family called the macins.

Source: American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Evolution, Methane, Jobs, Food and More

Photo from May 2005 by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars.

Science Friday is a great National Public Radio show. The week was a great show covering Antimicrobial Copper, Top Jobs for Math and Science, Human-Driven Evolution, Methane On Mars, Fish with Mercury and more. This show, in particular did a great job of showing the scientific inquiry process in action.

“Fishing regulations often prescribe the taking of larger fish, and the same often applies to hunting regulations,” said Chris Darimont, one of the authors of the study. “Hunters are instructed not to take smaller animals or those with smaller horns. This is counter to patterns of natural predation, and now we’re seeing the consequences of this management.” Darimont and colleagues found that human predation accelerated the rate of observable trait changes in a species by 300 percent above the pace observed within purely natural systems, and 50 percent above that of systems subject to other human influences, such as pollution

Very interesting stuff, listen for more details. A part of what happens is those individuals that chose to focus on reproducing early (instead of investing in growing larger, to reproduce later) are those that are favored (they gain advantage) by the conditions of human activity. I am amazed how quickly the scientists says the changes in populations are taking place.

And Methane On Mars is another potentially amazing discovery. While it is far from providing proof of live on Mars it is possibly evidence of life on Mars. Which would then be looked back on as one of the most important scientific discoveries ever. And in any even the podcast is a great overview of scientists in action.

This week astronomers reported finding an unexpected gas — methane — in the Martian atmosphere. On Earth, a major source of methane is biological activity. However, planetary scientists aren’t ready to say that life on Mars is to blame for the presence of the gas there, as geochemical processes could also account for the finding. The find is intriguing especially because the researchers say they have detected seasonal variations of methane emissions over specific locations on the planet.

Martian Methane Reveals the Red Planet is not a Dead Planet
The Mars Methane Mystery: Aliens At Last?

Friday Cat Fun #11: Ninja Cat Stair Climbing

Another video of a curious cat experimenting to learn about the road less traveled.

Successful Emergency Plane Landing in the Hudson River

Photo of a plane that crash landed in the Hudson River, New York, by jkrums.

emergency landing in river by New York City

A US Airways Airbus A320, Flight 1549, has made an emergency landing in the Hudson River after a failed attempt to take off near Manhattan. There were 148 passengers and five crew on the flight to Charlotte from LaGuardia Airport. The plane took off at 3:26 PM EST (UTC-5) and went down minutes later. All aboard survived the landing.

The United States Coast Guard has reported that they have sent units to the scene of the incident, and that a nearby ferry was giving life jackets to survivors. According to witnesses, the plane landed in the river, making a large splash in the water, at a somewhat gradual angle.

“This looked like a controlled descent,” said Bob Read, who witnessed the incident from his office.

A source told The Wall Street Journal that the plane initially was maneuvering to make an emergency landing at nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, but lost too much altitude and had to ditch in the river.

Unconfirmed reports are citing the pilot as saying that the plane encountered a flock of geese and that some of them went into each of the jet’s engines, leading to a loss of powered flight. Passengers told the press that they heard a loud bang shortly after takeoff.

A Federal Aviation Administration official said that the plane was only airborne for three minutes. For these rare waterlandings, pilots are trained to bring the plane down as they would on land, but with the landing gear still stowed.

How often do birds cause plane crashes?

Soil Mineral Degrades the Nearly Indestructible Prion

Warped pathogens that lack both DNA and RNA, prions are believed to cause such fatal brain ailments as chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and moose, mad cow disease in cattle, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. In addition to being perhaps the weirdest infectious agent know to science, the prion is also the most durable. It resists almost every method of destruction from fire and ionizing radiation to chemical disinfectants and autoclaving, which reduce prion infectivity but fail to completely eliminate it.

Other studies have shown that prions can survive in the soil for at least three years, and that soil is a plausible route of transmission for some animals, says Joel Pedersen, a UW-Madison environmental chemist. “We know that environmental contamination occurs in deer and sheep at least,” he notes.

Prion reservoirs in the soil, Pedersen explains, are likely critical links in the chain of infection because the agent does not appear to depend on vectors — intermediate organisms like mosquitoes or ticks — to spread from animal to animal.

That the birnessite family of minerals possessed the capacity to degrade prions was a surprise, Pedersen says. Manganese oxides like birnessite are commonly used in such things as batteries and are among the most potent oxidants occurring naturally in soils, capable of chemically transforming a substance by adding oxygen atoms and stripping away electrons. The mineral is most abundant in soils that are seasonally waterlogged or poorly drained.

full press release

Tiny $10 Microscope

Researchers at Caltech, who developed the revolutionary imaging system, say that the devices could be mass-produced at a cost of $10 each and incorporated into large arrays, enabling high-throughput imaging in biology labs. The device could also broaden access to imaging technology: incorporated into PDA-size devices, for example, the microscopes could enable rural doctors to carry sophisticated imaging systems in their pockets.

The Caltech device uses a system of tiny fluid channels called microfluidics to direct cells and even microscopic animals over a light-sensing chip. The chip, an off-the-shelf sensor identical to those found in digital cameras, is covered with a thin layer of metal that blocks out most of the pixels. A few hundred tiny apertures punched in the metal along the fluid channel let light in. As the sample flows through the microscope, each aperture captures an image. One version of the microscope uses gravity to control the flow of the sample across the apertures. Another version, which allows for much better control, uses an electrical potential to drive the flow of cells.