I’m watching NHK where I just learned that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s #3 storage pool contained MOX (plutonium mix) fuel and that its floor may have cracked from the earthquake or explosion.  Snow is now falling on northern Japan, 28,000 people have evacuated, over 8000 people are in shelters without food and sufficient heat and 13,000 are dead or missing.

I don’t want to sound like an apologist for the nuclear industry but a Terra-watt of coal energy does result in more deaths than a Terra-watt of nuclear energy.  I would like to see nuclear power live up to its promise of safe and clean energy but this accident is a sad reminder that many have failed to take the long view and plan for the event that happens ever 500 or 10,000 years.

Is there any good news?

Yes there is some good news but, like the glimmer of hope in the bottom of Pandora’s box, it is very difficult to find.  I can’t do anything about earthquakes, tsunamis or other disasters but I’m going to try to post as much good news as I can find so that we can crush hopelessness and help the people of Japan overcome these terrible disasters.

Anyone who has survived this tsunami and earthquake has already survived something worse than the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accidents.  But in the information vacuum resulting from the tsunami, bad news travels fast and far.  The news media is eager to hype this bad news and the nuclear industry is in “cover your *** (CYA)” mode, so they’re afraid to reveal anything beyond the absolute minimum they are required to by law.  Recent updates at the TEPCO website and the IAEA have not been helpful.  The ecological, biological and psychological effects of nuclear accidents seem much worse because we know so little and have so little control.  TEPCO has failed to release timely and accurate information so that people can understand the risks and decide for themselves how to act upon this risk.  It seems their fear of panic is likely to create the conditions where panic might occur even in a country which has been remarkably stoic in adversity.

So what is the good news?

• The highest published reading, 400 millisieverts, was between two reactors.  The level at the power plant’s gate was lower and in populated areas much lower.  The levels reported elsewhere appear to be within the 0.1 to 1.0 microsieverts/hour range. NOTE: I mistakingly reported nanoGreys as microsieverts.  A nanogray is 0.001 microsieverts a microsievert is 0.001 millisieverts.  So the highest number reported here is  0.000953, about 1/400,000th the level between the two reactors.  It makes you appreciate the heroism of the power plant workers.
  
• Japanese food such as sushi, miso soup and komubu assures that many already have enough iodine to reduce the absorption of radioactive iodine.
• The Japanese culture of cleanliness including the practice of wearing anti-pollution face masks should reduce exposure.
• The power plant is very near the sea and falling rain and snow should help remove radioactive dust from the air.  Much of this dust will land on tsunami debris which must be disposed of anyway.
• The disaster is unfolding before the growing season for most crops.
• There are no reports of large amounts of cesium 137 or strontium 90, most of the reports only say “radiation”, much of this is likely radioactive water (tritium?) and Chlorine-37 (injected seawater activated by neutrons).  These don’t bioaccumulate for long in humans, its biological half life is around 10 days.
• The prevailing winds tend to blow over the Pacific where rain and wind will dilute the radioactive isotopes.
• If anyone outside of Japan is reading this, don’t worry about iodine unless you like miso soup, radiation may be measurable in your country but it is extremely unlikely to have measurable health effects.

This is only my first post on this topic.  I hope it has been helpful.  Please let me know if you hear of more good news or if I’ve made any mistakes here.

I’ve also set sight on some long term projects.

• Use mobile phone accelerometers, GPS and camera data to create a community ‘best accessible path’ with (optional) community tags.
• Horizontal and vertical obstacle recognizer using conventional phase/contrast detection AF and cylindrical lenses
• Fourier optic shape recognizer
• Plenoptic camera in face/environment recognition system.
• Music as an I/O method
• Using observability tools (e.g. dtrace) to glean a11y information from badly behaved “closed” applications.

None of this makes much sense yet but I’ve written it down here so I don’t forget about it.  A year ago I considered buying an arduino, beagleboard or hawkboard.  Now it looks like I should be buying a smartphone since my old symbian smartphone died in Spain.  Since I intend to do some opensource and a11y hacking, I’ll stay away from Apple.  I’d like an android with a qwerty keyboard for about 200 Euro which seems to be an impossible goal here in Ireland.  Wish me luck.

Family hacking

So now I’m inspired to try to help accessibility by:

• Formalizing the standards for different types of accessibility so that they can be written as rules which are pulled into data-driven automated regression tests.
• Improve Accerciser, add capability to use automation tests in a plug-in. Add link from interface view to documentation, improve general documentation.
• Build ATSPI2 and orca on Solaris so I can do some dtrace exploration of the cache misses Mike mentioned and try to dig out the root cause of other performance issues.  I have this running at the moment and the dbus-daemon does spend far more time in syscalls than anything else.  This isn’t a smoking gun because it seems to be doing usual daemon type things.
• Use dtrace to glean accessibility information from inaccessible apps (Adobe are your ears ringing?)
• Have a look at other applications of OpenGazer technology and orca. (I already tried to build it on Ubuntu but it seems unhappy with my choice of cheap webcams)  There are many possibilities which make use of community weighting, mobile phones, GPS and image recognition.  When trying to figure out a simple fast method using optical FFTs to separately detect horizontal and vertical obstacle, I realized that I was reinventing aspects of how our vision works.  Hmm.

I just returned from the First international Aegis accessibility conference and Gnome hackfest in Seville, Spain. I began with a presentation of my automated accessibility testing prototype. I intended for this to be a round-table discussion rather than a one way presentation but things got off to a slow start and Peter gave a detailed presentation of the Aegis testing framework background so I tried to wrap up quickly. I did get some excellent feedback and more importantly, I began to get to know some of the talented people who work on Gnome Accessibility.

Joanmarie and API suggested that I organize the test classes around roles rather than application. Applications are accessible with the application role. We need to get together to discuss the rules. If possible, I’d like to see the rules expressed in a parseable format which can become part of the documentation. We also discussed several levels of report, similar to a compiler’s warning/error/pedantic reporting flags.

Shaun pointed me to blip, a really nice reporting tool which he wrote and which would be a nice central place for test results as well as linking the maintainer to the code and allowing us to notify the correct person.

Mike was working on some dbus performance issues with ATSPI2. We were wondering about those ubiquitous bounce events. Why are they being sent over the bus and could we improve things if we only sent stuff over the bus when there were registered listeners for that event.

I met with Gerry later to go over the technologies and design. He liked what I’d been doing and would like to try to help if possible. I could use help! The Accessibility team could use help. The people are brilliant but there are too few of them. It’s quite a blow when big companies pull out talented people such as Willie Walker for no coherent reason. If it weren’t for Mike, Joanmarie, Eitan, API, Mario… opensource desktop accessibility might have been set back years.

I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to work with this team. I only realized earlier today that my interest in accessible technology goes back to the late 1980s when I build a hardware text-to-speech device and used the tuner from an old radio in place of the crystal so that the speech rate could be varied.  I found that designing a katakana to phoneme translator in Commodore 64 basic was much easier than designing an English to phoneme translator.

Thanks to all of the people I met in Seville. I’m looking forward to working with you and seeing you again soon.

http://opensourcemechanic.com/stories/submit/

Here is the facebook application I’ve tied to it:
http://apps.facebook.com/textrum/

The little guy helped break it, but we can fix it and learn how it works.

Boys will be boys, and the little guy loves playing music keyboards with his feet. So one of the black keys was wobbling like a loose tooth.

Who needs C# anyway?

I decided to take it apart and try to epoxy glue the key. Wow there were quite a few screws inside! I read that the SK1 had 4 screws holding the key assembly into the case, this one had 14! Ideally I would replace the cracked key or swap it for a seldom used one at the top of the range, but while white keys are discreet, black keys are grouped, about 10 together on a single piece of plastic. The plastic has exactly the right springiness to make the keys bounce well. The SK-200 is full of discrete electronics, many ICs capacitors, diodes, transistors… all work together to make a robust and wonderful keyboard. Here is a photo of the M4135-MAIM board:

Main logic and sound circuit board SK-200

Here are some of the parts on the M4135-MAIM board

I took apart a cheap modern keyboard recently and only found one of those ugly black blobs. You can see why keyboards such as this and Casio’s SK-1 are sought after by circuit benders. There are thousands of points where circuit modifications could be made. I found a point where it would be easy to pitch bend and the trick of piggybacking an extra memory bank and soldering the data-select to a toggle switch wouldn’t be too difficult, but I think I’ll leave well enough alone. With this minor repair the keyboard is just as fun as it was in the 1990s and neither Casio nor Yamaha appear to have taken advantage of 20-years of advancements in memory and sampling electronics and given us a higher quality portable sampling keyboard. So this was well worth fixing.

One word of caution, if you do use epoxy, only use enough to fill the crack. You don’t want the stiffness of epoxy to mess up the key bounce. And be very careful you don’t glue the key to the case.