No audio in Flash 9 in Windows XP
I’ve come across several PC’s that will play Flash videos, but with no audio. There appear to be a couple of possible fixes to try, thanks to Selder and others in the Weyland.be blog. Go
Continue readingDisplay invisible files in the finder – Leopard
If you are trying to edit .htaccess files or other invisible files through the GUI, or using Fetch’s automatic linkage with BBedit, you will need to show hidden files. Open the terminal and type: defaults
Continue readingStem cell tourism
While stem cell research funding remains bogged down and encumbered in the United States, other countries, most notably China, have forged ahead. Patients are travelling to foreign stem cell clinics, to try treatments not available in this country, whether they follow standard testing and clinical protocols or not.
Lab research with stem cells has been extremely exciting and suggestive of great potential, but the current artificially embargoed situation in the US and several other countries provides ground for less than scrupulous treatment centers.
Beike Biotech, in Shenzen and other cities in China, is one bio-technology company which offers stem cell treatments for diseases that are usually considered untreatable. Their site offers many testimonials from people who have been treated for conditions like Spinal Cord Injury, Autism, ALS, and brain injury, but little in the way of systematic followups. Reading their patient blogs, although very interesting, it is difficult to tell for any given patient exactly what was done beyond “injections of stem cells” and exactly what their outcome was after they left the clinic. Most of the blogs end one or two entries after leaving. Beike’s treatment philosophy is summed up in this paragraph from their website:
Continue readingClarke’s law # 3 in action – Shazam, an amazing iPhone app!
I just got my mind blown by “Shazam”, a new FREE application for the iPhone. Shazam uses the iPhones microphone to listen to songs or music happening anywhere in earshot. It will then tell you what song you are listening to.
Just click “Tag it” and point the mic end of the phone in the general direction of the sound. It twirls for a while, then reports back, usually extremely accurately what song you were listening to.
Shazam sending song info to the web for processing.
Shoot screenshots on the iPhone
You can find this anywhere, but I am putting this entry up for my own reference: To shoot a screenshot of any screen on the iPhone, hold down the Home and Sleep buttons simultaneously until
Continue readingSCORM 2.0 workshop
The SCORM Workshop held by LETSI (Learning Education Training Systems Interoperability) is over, and some clear direction emerged from the blizzard of whitepapers, informal submissions and comments over the last few months. I was very impressed by how fast they moved things forward in a few days.
The design process will be driven by use cases generated by the people who actually use SCORM applications in their work: Instructional designers, administrators, teachers, and other strategic adopters all over the world. This is significantly different from the way SCORM was originally designed, by a small community of LMS vendors and the U.S. Department of Defense, one of the BIG USERS of training and tracking.
Continue readingUpdate on Autism research
Although repeated studies show little or no correlation between vaccination with the MMR vaccine and the onset of autism, there is a lot of popular support for the idea that there is some causal link. Originally the use of mercury in the form of thiomersal in vaccines was suggested as the culprit, but this seems less likely since mercury was removed from vaccines in North America and Europe by 2001 and the incidence of Autism continued to rise
Still many people remain unconvinced there is NO link between vaccination and autism, despite all the negative results, so other ideas have been floated. These include:
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A SCORM-ready template: Part 2E. Add the video player to your learning module
If you are in a hurry, here are two ready-to-use pieces of player code to choose from. All you need to do is choose one, edit a few lines and drop the code into your page. You will need a playlist for both of them, although it can be very simple for the single file player. Save the playlist to the media folder (there is probably a sample one there already in newer modules).
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