communication – Australian Science

Why Some Cables are Faster than Others

Dunya — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 12:10:14 +0000

In an increasingly information-oriented world maximising the speed of data transfer and download are crucial to competitiveness in the workplace. Needless to say, not all cables are the same, even though they may feature the same input – e.g. USB or HDMI. The material they are made of will have a major impact on reliability, durability and speed.

Common Cable Types

Different types of telecommunications cables include copper, aluminum, and fibre optic cables. Aluminum and copper are the cheapest type of cable with copper being more durable and flexible than the former. Aluminum is significantly cheaper than copper cable, though copper is faster and has become the standard for telecommunications companies, particularly prior to the gradual switch over to fibre optic cables, and the age of high speed broadband.

Whilst copper and aluminum cable are made by bundling pairs of copper or aluminum strands together before jacketing them, the fibre optic cable is made of glass or plastic fibres through which light is transmitted allowing for even greater speeds of data transmission.

Factors Affecting Speed of Copper Cable

Ethernet cable consists of several twisted pairs of copper wiring, which cancel out the interference. This interference would otherwise produce background noise during telephone or internet communications.

Ethernet cable is divided into categories, which currently run from Cat.4 through to Cat7.a, with categories 8.1 and 8.2 under development. Level1, Level2 and Cat.3 and Cat.4 twisted pair cables run from 0.4 to 20 Mhz, which is relatively slow, and are suitable for telephone calls and slow dial-up connections only. Of these only Cat.3 is commonly used.

The cables most likely to be in use for data communications run from Cat.5 to Cat.6a, with Cat.5e (an enhanced version of the Cat.5 cable) and above used on all new cable installations. Cat.5 is suitable for large scale data transfer over short distances, though Cat.5e is better for high speed Gigabit Ethernet. Whilst both categories have a bandwidth of 100 Mhz, Cat.5e has features designed to deal with ‘crosstalk’, which is the undesirable phenomenon whereby two wires which are paired together interfere with each other’s signals.

Cat.6 performs at up to 250 Mhz and has further features to deal with crosstalk, whilst Cat.6a (or augmented category 6) performs at 500 Mhz. Other factors which affect twisted pair cable categorisations include the length at which a wire can be run between terminals and its durability.

Advantages of Fibre Optic over Copper Cable

While copper is capable of high speed data transfer and is likely to be used for many years to come, making it an ideal choice for your home or office network, fibre optic cable is set to become the standard over time.

Fibre Optic Cabling by Joel Penner

Fibre optic cable carries visible light or infrared signals which are bounced across the inside of the cable through a process of ’internal reflection’, at an even frequency, reducing interference and delivering data in an even manner. A fibre optic cable consists of thousands of hair-width glass fibres bundled together.

Although fibre optic cable is in most cases more expensive than copper cable, it is less expensive to maintain and can be installed over greater distances. It also has a higher bandwidth making it a popular choice choice for telecommunications companies. It is more secure, being difficult to ‘tap into’, not least as any resulting interference from a third party would involve an obvious loss of light, causing the system to fail. Additionally, fibre optic is less subject to environmental factors such as changes in temperature and can make contact with water without risk, reducing the need for excessive insulation.

Scientists in New Zealand have recently produced a new fibre optic cable capable of delivering the entire world’s internet traffic down one cable due to their having inserted several cores in each hair-like glass fibre. Whilst such speed has little application in daily or business computing, they do point to the superiority of fibre optic cable in the long run.

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Interview with Joanne Manaster – a multipassionate scientist

Danica Radovanovic — Sat, 29 Nov 2014 16:58:20 +0000

Joanne Manaster is a cell and molecular biology lecturer at the University of Illinois. She currently works as an online course developer and lecturer of science courses for the School of Integrative Biology. Prior to this current position, Joanne has taught histology, cell biology, and tissue engineering laboratories to biology and bioengineering students for nearly 20 years. Beside her academic career, she is a science writer and communicator, science video host, and STEM advocate. Joanne has run a girls’ bioengineering camp, and helped with the iGEM synthetic biology team and other outreach activities. She also makes video reviews of popular science books as well as whimsical science experiments with cats, cookies, gummy bears and make-up.

Joanne writes about science at her website, Joanne Loves Science and also at Scientific American blogs. She has been named by Mashable as having one of the 25 Twitter Accounts That Will Make You Smarter. You can find her on Twitter as ScienceGoddess.

Welcome to Australian Science! Would you, please, tell our readers a little bit more about yourself? What is your scientific background, and your professional scope?

Thank you for asking me to join you!

I am a faculty lecturer at the University of Illinois. I initially started my college studies with plans to head to medical school but through my course of studies I found I really clicked with cell and molecular biology and was very adept at lab work. Through various opportunities, I also discovered I had a knack for explaining scientific concepts so eventually changed my path to teach at the university level. I studied muscle development at the microscopic level in grad school and eventually transitioned to teaching cell biology and histology.

How did you initially get interested in science? When did you start to express your curiosity for science?

I always loved nature and had a fascination with human health. I spent a lot of time in nature and did a lot of reading on science topics. I didn’t know any scientists. I knew they existed from reading textbooks, but the whole field seemed shrouded in mystery. However, I understood what doctors did and thought that becoming a physician would be a valid way to pursue my passion for science. As I mentioned above, it wasn’t until college that I realized how scientists did their work, and could then consider that as a career path.

It is interesting to mention that you are a former international model, back in the days of your adolescence. Did you find something scientific in the world of modeling and fashion?

As far as modeling goes, I was discovered while I was in high school. Initially, I wasn’t enthusiastic about it but realized it would be a great way to earn money for medical school. While I was modeling, I wasn’t thinking about it in any scientific manner as I was learning to interact with a very new and somewhat foreign world. It wasn’t until I completed my science training in college did I really start to see how science explained just about everything. In my course of teaching students, I also began to see the value in piquing their interest by talking about things they could relate to in terms of science, and that extends to my online outreach!

Would you tell us more about your role within executing online courses for current and future science teachers?

After many years of giving lectures and running laboratory classes which overlapped with my online outreach, I realized that I could apply my ability to communicate online to my instructing position so I transitioned to teaching cutting edge biology through my online program for middle school and high school teachers who want to obtain their Master of Science Teaching. I have designed and executed three courses for this program so far: The Human Genome and Bioinformatics, Evolution and Medicine and Emerging Infectious Diseases. I enjoy mixing primary scientific literature with popular science communication to both train the teachers and to give them resources for their classrooms. Teachers make the best students!

You have a very unique approach for science book reviews using video as a format for presentation, encouraging everyone to read. Other videos are an interesting and whimsical introduction to the world of science disguised in everyday items. How did you get inspired to make such videos?

Book reviews are a natural for me. I love to read and I love science! The gummi bear videos began from a question asked by one of my college students. He asked if a gummy bear could be liquefied through the process of sonication (using high frequency sound waves). I then considered how I could subject the gummy bears to other lab techniques!

One of my favorite videos is Cats In Sinks, which was inspired by a fun website that showed numerous cats in sinks and it made me think I could talk about theoretical vs. experimental science by trying to figure out how many cats could fit in my large lab sink.

I also really enjoyed using cookies as my models of blood cells to create a series about those cells called “Blood Cell Bakery

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Climate Change, Resilience, Communication

Kelly Burnes — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:10:57 +0000

Hurricane Gloria devastation on Fire Island, New York, 28 Sept 1985. (AP Photo/Rick Maiman)

Climate Change

Last week I listened to a webinar on climate change discussing findings of the draft report from the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee. Not much has changed from the year 2000 report, or the 2009 report. Well, a few changes: the science has improved, climate change is now being stated directly as a result of human activity and the report is more accessible and understandable to the public at large. The public that actually takes the time to read it, that is. How communities engage with science and government is a hot topic and will continue to be. The idea of citizen scientists was mentioned during the webinar and it has been in the news quite a bit. I’ve written about it here, but after today’s presentation, it triggered some new thinking and I pondered it a bit more in terms of climate change and planning resilient communities.

Engineering Community Resilience

With the recent round of floods and bush fires, particularly in Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania, and with Hurricane Sandy in the northeastern United States, I’ve been thinking more about how we engineer our communities and our transportation networks to withstand the dramatic stresses placed on them by natural disaster events such as these. In the face of extreme and more frequent weather events, we must begin to look at how we protect investments, not how do we avoid it, but how do we work with it once faced with the situation; how can our societal networks “adapt” to natural events. After hitting the power-on button after a disaster, how long does it take before we are up and running at full speed? It’s definitely not automatic and there is a lag time, but the mission should be to reduce that lag time as much as possible. We can do that through better planning of our communities, both urban and rural, from top to bottom.

Outdated Planning Manual

Jane Jacobs in her book, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, wrote the way we plan cities is outdated. Those thoughts were from the late 1950s; I wonder what she would think at the progress, or lack of, made now. While Ms. Jacobs was not an urban planner, she was an astute observer of city life. We have been planning to the same model for years, basing our land use and transportation plans on activity centers and primary uses as if these things were completely and utterly independent. When in reality, today more so than ever, emphasis should be placed on the connections between and among uses, from primary to tertiary uses and beyond. Emphasis should also be placed on addressing aging infrastructure. Outdated, roads, buildings, bridges, sidewalks, subways, telephone lines, sewers; all of these facets of modern society that once made life convenient can actually make life more inconvenient if technology does not keep up with the pace of increasing population and demand. It is a tough task to balance the needs of a community, of a nation, but attention to rediscovering and reengineering our primary uses to connect with present and future day society has to be part of this century’s new planning paradigm.

Community Communication

How does this national climate assessment report actually impact individuals? What does the public need to know? What does government and science need to tell people? I think ultimately that people have a desire to know what goes on in their communities; but they’re busy, they elect people and trust them to hire staff that will get the job done. And there is this mentality that they just want things to work and society grows cranky when things don’t work. Think about water pipes. An invisible zigzagging network buried underground. Much thought isn’t given them until they burst and the faucets run dry. Adding to the problem is that the public doesn’t understand how antiquated our infrastructure is, be it water pipes, bridges, or telephone lines. And public refusal to pay for a system’s upgrading because water has always been cheap just adds to the complex ability to make change happen. But I believe it can.

It all boils down to communication, at the basic, most simplistic level. That’s why it is critical governments do a better job at explaining and giving information to citizens when disasters strike AND details about the recovery and clean up process OR explaining why adaptation and mitigation measures need to be taken because not everyone understands why systems that date back to the 19^th century can’t handle pressures from the 21^st century. I can’t speak for other countries, but the “red tape” political pomp and circumstance on parade in the U.S. needs to shift toward a “green tape” common sense implementation attitude. Waiting over three months for recovery funds to come through after Hurricane Sandy hit inhibits community rebuilding and cuts to the psychological core of those affected.

Cyclone Oswald, Eastern Australia, 29 Jan 2013. (itv.com, Photo: Reuters)

Citizen Scientists Participation

Popularity of science among the masses is growing and should be engaged. So how can citizen scientists help? With all this talk of using ordinary citizens to collect data for large-scale research projects and as budgets tighten and staffs decrease, I think there will be a greater role for the community at large to help provide answers to research questions. To start with, our scientific organizations will need to use the cerebral thought process of corporations. The scenario is not that citizen scientists will be out there running amok with data; a trained scientist would no doubt be in charge. Like a project manager would in a big corporation, they would have people reporting to them, following the protocols, procedures and plans they have discussed to achieve a certain goal. I think this is the way science will have to move in order to stay somewhat viable as we attempt to solve the looming problems we face in the future.

Science, the community, government and private industry all need to be present and active partners communicating as we move forward designing our cities and countrysides in a certainly uncertain world. Policy choices should have been made 10 plus years ago as an attempt to deal with climate change, but hindsight is always 20/20. While this piece speaks mainly to the developed world, we shouldn’t ignore the rapid urbanization that is sweeping across the developing world, with many key urban issues not being fully explored. The municipal level has an opportunity to be a catalyst of change. As cities think about how to assess their risks and incorporate resiliency measures into their town planning, the population may actually be able to ebb and flow with climate disruptions.

Cite this article:
Burnes K (2013-02-26 00:10:57). Climate Change, Resilience, Communication. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 29, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/environmental-science/climate-change-resilience-communication/

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Linux – The Open Source Ecosystem

Kelly Burnes — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:33:12 +0000

Australian Science travelled to Canberra for the linux.conf.au (Linux Conference Australia) last week and had the opportunity for exclusive one-on-one interviews with a number of the keynote speakers. You may have been a little hesitant reading the first word of the title of this article, ‘Linux’, but perhaps the ‘Open Source Ecosystem’ in the latter part put your mind at ease. We are a computing world, a society heavily dependent upon computers. Computers, in their many shapes and sizes, are touching even greater areas of our lives and reaching a far greater number of people than ever before. Open source is revolutionizing the way we communicate. So while we all may not understand coding and app development, we can understand the end products that allow us digital consumers to produce and share our experiences and stories. The person who has had a tremendous impact in the Linux world is Bdale Garbee. And this is his open source ecosystem.

Bdale Garbee is a computer genius. Although he retired in 2012 after a long career with HP, serving as Open Source and Linux Chief Technologist, he shows no signs of slowing down. Quite the contrary, his workload may be picking up with the number of projects he is involved with, such as serving on the boards of The Freedombox Foundation and The Linux Foundation.

“Linux – euphemism for entire open source ecosystem and idea of collaborated development and maintenance of software and related data

Cite this article:
Burnes K (2013-02-07 14:33:12). Linux – The Open Source Ecosystem. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 29, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/interviews/linux-the-open-source-ecosystem/
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Best of Science blogging – September 2012

Danica Radovanovic — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 03:15:23 +0000

Lot of events happening this September and I’m looking forward to share with you some wonderful articles and interesting posts, interviews for you to read. We have weekly science blogging picks with the guest editor each week, now it’s almost a tradition called #ScienceSunday, you can search for it on Google Plus as well. We are coming out soon with the new design for the Australian Science and some new interesting initiatives.

Contact us if you’d like to join our team of science and tech bloggers and authors – please read the Editor’s note, also if you’re interested in Weekly Science Picks scroll down the article to find about it more. The Australian Science recap of the September 2012:

Lighting the Imagination in Science by Kelly Burnes

Let’s think about the role of imagination in science. The process of imagination is on display everywhere in an early childhood classroom. But by the time they reach middle school, students seem to burn out and tire of science. Where is the imagination? What is driving the curiosity?

Got Science? Australian Science on Display at Mitchelton State School is part two of the previous article by Kelly, an interview with Mitchelton State School staff :

McIntyre indicated that in addition to exposing children to science, it’s also essential “to develop the attributes of curiosity that are necessary to the investigations around science.

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Networking the Solar System

Markus — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 09:33:22 +0000

When the human race inevitably expands off planet Earth, we’ll naturally want to take our internet with us – over the past 15 years or so, the internet really has become an integral part of our lives! In fact, even as you’re reading this, 300 gigawatts of electricity worldwide will have been used to transfer 640 terabytes of information across the internet to 1.5 billion desktop computers and a further billion mobile devices. In the time you’ve taken to read this paragraph, over 200 million e-mails have been sent, 6 million Facebook pages have been loaded, 1.3 million YouTube videos have been watched, and 100,000 people have posted an update to their twitter accounts.

Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson enjoying a view from the ISS Cupola window.

Inspite of its sprawling extent on our planet though, the internet’s first step off-world was able to fit inside just 1120 bytes. On January 22, back in 2010, astronaut TJ Creamer made a small but important piece of internet history by being the first human being ever to post to a twitter feed from orbit. Astronauts had been updating twitter feeds while in orbit for some time, but they had previously always relayed their messages via NASA back here on Earth. Since 2010, however, the International Space Station (ISS) has been upgraded to have its own internet connection. Intended for personal use by astronauts and still routed through ground based systems at NASA for security, this is how e-mails, blog posts and twitter updates are sent back home. All the same, even though it might seem a long way away, the ISS is relatively nearby in low Earth orbit.

Things start to become more complicated when you consider travelling further afield, because whether we like it or not, we can’t cheat special relativity. The speed of light is the fastest any interplanetary communication (or anything, for that matter) can travel. The Moon is still close enough that interaction is possible in almost real time. Sending a message to someone on the Moon would involve a delay of a little under three seconds. Good enough to hold a conversation, but with gamers here on Earth complaining about latencies higher than 600 milliseconds, you’re obviously not going to be able to play Halo or Warcraft against a friend over that kind of distance. Travel as far as Mars and the problem becomes even more pronounced, with delays of anywhere between 3 and 22 minutes, depending on exactly where Mars is in relation to Earth. Minutes turn to hours as you continue to travel outwards (transmissions from Voyager 2 currently take over 13 hours to reach us). All things considered, using an interplanetary internet sounds like a rather good idea for communication over distances like these. While phonecalls to Mars would be essentially impossible, delays between responses to e-mails and tweets are fairly routine. You could quite easily have a twitter conversation with someone over on a neighbouring planet.

Preparing for the future, NASA and Google teamed up a few years ago to develop a new internet protocol designed to be used in space. Called Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN), it’s designed to work a bit differently to the internet we’re all familiar with. While our familiar TCP/IP systems rely on a constant connection to transfer data, this is obviously unfeasible in deep space. While a DTN network would still operate using a series of nodes passing information from machine to machine, the way ground-based networks do, each node needs to hold onto the data being transmitted until it has a confirmation that the message has been safely passed on.

SpaceX believe it should be possible to send people to Mars within 20 years.

With a steadily accumulating collection of spacecraft in various parts of the solar system. Google’s Vint Cerf has expressed plans to use these old pieces of hardware, many of which have long since completed their original missions, as nodes in what will become an interplanetary internet. Indeed, spacecraft have already transmitted data amongst themselves en route back to Earth. ESA’s Mars Express probe, for instance, has served as a relay between Earth and vehicles landing on Mars, and is set to do so again when NASA’s Curiosity rover arrives at the red planet later this year. In an interview with networkworld.com last year, Cerf is quoted as saying “…if they are still functionally operable — they have power, computer, communications — they can become nodes in an interplanetary backbone. So what can happen over time, is that we can literally grow an interplanetary network that can support both man and robotic exploration.” He continued to explain how, while all space missions to date have involved point-to-point communications, future space missions will likely require “a richer communications network.” This also has an added plus that an interplanetary network infrastructure will allow scientists to receive more data from deep space missions than is currently possible.

With many astronauts already maintaining active twitter feeds from orbit, it has to be said that similar social networks may well play an important role in communications in the future. By the time that role is needed, a network infrastructure will likely be in place for it to operate on. A company like Google, processing petabytes of data and serving hundreds of millions of queries for an index containing billions of websites every day, is certainly qualified to help set up a computer network on interplanetary scales. Maybe in the future when people talk about Google Mars, they might mean it literally!

Image credits: NASA/Tracy Caldwell Dyson (top), SpaceX (bottom)

Cite this article:
Hammonds M (2012-06-13 09:33:22). Networking the Solar System. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 29, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/space/networking-the-solar-system/

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Is Communication a Lost Art?

Kelly Burnes — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 07:50:17 +0000

So how far away are we from planet Earth morphing into Holodeck 5 and we all have Geordi La Forge glasses? There are several pairs of augmented reality glasses already on the market, many from brands you’ve probably never heard of, but then I’m sure you have heard of Google and their latest project in the foray.

No longer information at your fingertips, oh no, information at your eyelashes. And much more than information, as some researchers and visionaries have conjured up all sorts of ways to use these glasses. From finding directions to a new coffeehouse, online dating, downloading music, answering a phone call, no need for a handheld device.

Some have taken it a step further. Dr. Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, seems to believe these glasses will forever change the way we interact with the world. He speaks about when you walk into a crowded room, say for a networking event where you are looking to land a new job. Your glasses will steer you who to speak with in that industry. A big red arrow will point them out to you. But in your glasses, their entire biography is laid out before your eyes. Where they went to school, how many brothers and sisters they have, the name of their dog – you have all this information. Likewise, someone wearing these glasses would have all this information about you. What questions will you ask? What would be left to discover about the people you meet at this event? What is their left to converse about? Oh right, work. You can talk about work.

The art of conversation involves the asking of questions. Wouldn’t these reality glasses just negate the need to speak with anyone? Is technology reducing our social ability to communicate with the spoken language? Is it in fact devolving our language? Or are we evolving and becoming more efficient that we no longer require the use of our vocal chords? Getting a bit far out there.

Social media has connected us, we keep “in touch

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Turning Information into Action

Kelly Burnes — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 08:05:08 +0000

We hear…but do we comprehend? What connection does our brain make to statements transmitted through our auditory canal such as global warming is increasing at 0.13°C per year? Or there are 495 dead zones covering 95,000 square miles of our world’s oceans as a result of increased runoff from agriculture? We see…but are those images stored in our brain, to recall in decision making when confronted with a particular behavior choice? For instance when the image of a little girl sifting through a rubbish pile looking for a bite to eat burns onto our retinas, do we remember that later when we casually toss out half our dinner plate in a Styrofoam takeout container? How many of us in the developed world actually comprehend that our actions contribute directly to global warming?

Until every human makes this connection and takes steps to modify behavior, only then will we see the beginnings of a response to addressing this issue of global warming. Easier said than done, right? Many organizations have started to tackle this problem; how do we solve it?

Social media has “connected

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