According to this report, a school in Lund, Sweden, has informed a boy that if he hands out his birthday party invites on their property, he must invite all pupils, rather than those he is actually friends with. I would have not raised an eyebrow had they simply been telling him not to bully others, or make fun of someone due to their weight/skin or hair colour, but to tell a child that his birthday party attendees will be controlled by the authorities really does seem totally OTT. Whether general opinion backs the teacher who confiscated all the invitations, or this was a politically correct little authoritarian, I was unable to discover, but the story caught my eye, so I thought I’d pass the link along…
Aug 25 2007
Out Of Body Experiences Explained?
Researchers believe they have been able to induce an Out of Body Experience in volunteers who took part in their experiments. Both in Sweden, and Britain, virtual reality googles, a camera, and a simple pen were used to create an OBE in people with no mental health issues, or drugs (such as Ketamine) involved.
The investigation required the volunteers to wear the VR goggles, they then had an image of themselves displayed. When a researcher stroked the person’s real life back with a pen, they could feel the sensation as normal. However, when the same was done virtually, that is to say only an image of a pen stroking their back was used, with no physical contact, the volunteers still felt the sensation. The experiment went one step further, by deliberately placing the virtual image of the volunteer in a different section of the room, compared to where they were situated in real life. When asked to move away, and then back to their original position, volunteers often took the place that would have been used if the ‘false’ virtual body had existed in reality.
In case that didn’t make enough sense, go check the BBC article 🙂
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Jul 17 2007
OECD Broadband Report
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has released a report on broadband prices & speeds in developed countries. The report states that users are receiving hugely varied standards and price structures, with a very slow take up in the use of fibre optics to replace the copper twisted-pair cabling still used in most country’s telephony systems.
Obviously those countries that had taken up fibre optics had the fastest speeds available, with Japan, Korea, Finland and Sweden offering 100Mbit connections in many areas.
Of the developed countries surveyed, Turkey was the most expensive, with pricing equivalent to $81 per Mbit per second! Compare this to just 22 cents in Japan, and you can start to see the disparity.
I have not yet figured out exactly how to calculate the prices quoted, but for comparison, our ISP here in Kazakhstan charges around $150 per month for a 256Kbit connection, or around $100 if you decide to download than 700Mb (per MONTH!)
When you check this against the Swedish price of $10.79 (the cheapest in the survey), or even the most expensive (Mexico) at just $52.36, which is 4 times quicker anyway, at 1Mbps.
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