Minneapolis high school students take e-field trip to the operating room

About a year ago I observed that 64% of the schools in this region have connectivity at 100 Mbit/s or greater to the K12HSN -- and in turn the Internet and Internet2. I shared a few thoughts on how this might be used to do some nifty things.

Today I came across a news item from the Internet2 web site, covering a high school in Minneapolis that, using an Internet2 connection, participated in a live knee surgery.

As the surgery progressed before them, the 30 juniors and seniors in John Redelsheimer's class reacted to crystal-clear images of sliced flesh and bone with predictable groans and urrrghs. They asked questions of the surgical staff, such as how long the implant might last, and how a full and partial knee replacement differ.

Students in the Robbinsdale Armstrong High School anatomy and physiology class observed Wednesday as a surgeon in Columbus, Ohio, performed total knee-replacement surgery on an 85-year-old woman. And they didn't even board a bus.

Students in the Robbinsdale district are among a select group for whom technological expertise and resources have aligned to allow them to take an e-field trip -- in this case, to Dr. Joel Politi's operating room. Other classes have been to the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minn., a classroom in Egypt and a village in Mozambique.

The session was sponsored by COSI, a science center in Columbus, Ohio. It was made possible by Web-driven video-conferencing technology via Internet2, a superfast network linking universities, industry and government. The basic technology -- the cameras and microphones -- isn't new, but schools haven't been able to use it fully until recently because most lack that fast, powerful connection.

Link to full article is here.



This is what I am talking about!

Improvements at Digium? ....and New AA50 Firmware

Yesterday I noted that Digium pushed out a new firmware release for their small business targeted hardware appliance (the AA50) and it looks like a good sized update. It is dated the 4th in the release notes but the 14th elsewhere so I think one or the other is a typo.

They appear to be syncing it up with their other code bases (Asterisk Business Edition, AsteriskNOW). From what I've seen in the public commits and hints on mailing lists from staff, they've been hitting pretty hard on both of those in the QA department of late.

Digium is clearly working on changing how they manage their code bases and the mixture of their commercial and open source releases, to address different customer/user segments and some of the problems that have come up. There was even a note about a split release change they are going to with AsteriskNOW for the GPL purists. Glad to see some serious re-thinking about releases, meeting the desires of different customers, quality control enhancements, and the public evidence of the aforementioned outside of press releases.

I imagine things will continue to trickle down and we'll see more improvements coming together. I'm sure some will turn out to be good ideas while others head back to the drawing board but that's how most progress works, eh? :)

The additional leverage should improve things across the board no matter where you fall in the Asterisk eco-system. Even if you don't use an Asterisk based telephony solution, their moves impact the others in the marketplace (and visa-versa).

Back to the new AA50 firmware release: It would appear to address IVR and ring group related bugs I encountering early on in the GUI, that I ended up bypassing the GUI to workaround. I haven't tried it yet on the AA50 I have access to. I'll probably give it another couple o' weeks in the wild first since it's a .0.1 rev. That client has some other problems and improvements they want me to attack first anyhow. Below are change log excerpts:

Version 1.1.0.1 - February 4, 2008
* Enable Internationalization settings in the GUI
* Provide the ability to select between kewlstart and loopstart
* g722 codec is available
* WAN Side Provisioning of Polycom phones is enabled
* AA50 has been synchronized to ABE C.1 branch source code
* Ring groups number of seconds field has been added
* Ring group bug using ivr option has been fixed.
* Polycom bug concering use of standard timezone has been fixed
* Blackfin math for meetme conferencing has been implemented
* Adjustable flash hook duration is now available in teh GUI
* Calling rule editing and deleting bug has been fixed.
* Bug concerning setting incoming rule to choose voicemail is fixed.
* DTMF twist settings for Brazil have been added to tone generation
* Call forwarding loops have been prevented so that they do not crash the AA50
* Voicemail attachments are set to WAV format.
* Network setting tabs no longer disappear.
* Added an optional full-wave mode DAA ring detect in the sx00i driver

Underwater Telecommunications Industry Geeks

For those who are interested in the inner workings -- both technical and business -- of the submarine fiber optic cable industry, take a look at SubOptic. Particularly recommended are the presentations from their last conference which are available to freely peruse all you like here.

Finally Was Time To Hire An Assistant

Well, I finally broke down. I hired Sandy and the fact that I can call her anytime with my speed dial is amazing, though it's still taking some adjustment to get used to not having to do it all by myself. She makes sure I don't forget to do things, reminds me about appointments, looks up information for me, calls ahead to let folks know I'm on my way or running late, and jots down thoughts and ideas that occur to me while I'm out and about away from my computer. Oh, and because she gets along well with others, there are endless possibilities to improve how I work. If this trial continues to be so promising, and thus I decide to keep her around, I just hope I can continue to afford her along with the tools she needs to do her job.

-jr

Asterisk Mashes Up Politics

I ran across this application today, called CommitteeCaller.com, which makes it easier for (U.S.) folks to contact their representatives. It's a nifty example of the type of applications that become possible when some imagination gets combined with lowered barriers to entry. This is what mashups are all about. Taking information that is out there on the Internet and combining it in ways that make it more useful, accessible, relevant, visible, etc.

This particular one uses Asterisk for the telephony, a database built from information on the Internet, and a custom AGI to interact with the user input, look up things in the database, make the calls, and get post-call rating feedback. AGIs are the equivalent of HTTP world CGIs (yes, the Asterisk world is progressing quite fast but the Web did get a big head start on it so it's still a little behind; CGIs, or AGIs, are pretty 1997 but you have to start somewhere).

Just wait until all the old school web developers that are used to coding in PHP, Ruby (Adhearsion), C, Perl (Asterisk::AGI), etc. discover they can write Asterisk telephony applications just as easily and in the same languages. (The Adhearsion page, even if you're not a Ruby programmer, has a good overview and example applications if you're curious).

CommitteeCaller.com is a site that allows one person to target an entire congressional committee over the phone. The web application utilizes the open source Asterisk PBX system to connect you to every senator or house member on a particular committee. No more digging around the 'net entering zip-codes to retrieve phone numbers of representatives. CommitteeCaller.com automates the tedium of finding and dialing your favorite politicians.

Select a committee, enter in your phone number and click "Put me in touch with democracy!" and you'll be called by our system and sequentially patched through to the front office of each member on that committee. You can even rate how each call went; information that will enable us to rank representatives on how accountable and responsive they are to their constituents.
[...]
Once connected Committee Caller will tell you which representive you are calling, who their legislative director or chief of staff is, and what district they represent. At any point you can use the * to hang up the call and move on to the next one. Remember not to hang up after each call as you will have the opportunity to rate how your call went.

-jr

Cordless VOIP Phones, Well, Stink

Michael Graves, over at the VOIP Users Conference, has a nice summary of the common frustrations he's had with cordless VOIP (SIP) phones. Michael plays with a lot of hardware, is a real user, and isn't selling anything related. His opinions are worth a read.

-jr