It might be time to start that 'Second Career'!
Thought this was interesting... :)
The City of Edmonton is moving forward on its crackdown on aggressive panhandlers.
These are a group of about 20 or 30 people who police estimate were responsible for 90 per cent of the complaints they received last year.
"I know of one individual that lives in a high-rise downtown," Edmonton police Insp. Brian Nowlan said Monday. "He makes about $400 a day panhandling, so this is a way of making an income." 
Could Silicon Valley become the next Detroit?
While Pittsburgh has somewhat recovered from the death of the steel mills in the 1970's, Detroit is a different story. Where will the next dead/dying industry be? Has anyone considered Silicon Valley?
Emphasis on science and technology in the US is very inadequate in comparison to countries like India or China. Top executives at Hewlett-Packard, are ringing an alarm bell not just for HP, but for the entire U.S. tech industry. They say that unless we boost government spending on science, technology, engineering and math -- STEM, in industry jargon -- we will be unable to keep up with countries such as China and India.
Williams, a Ph.D. chemist at HP, has spent the past decade pleading with Congress to devote more funding to research and education in the sciences. So far it hasn't happened.
Last year, on a trip to India, he kept running into Indian scientists who earned Ph.D.s in the United States and worked here, but had recently returned to India -- not for sentimental reasons, but because they wanted their kids to grow up in a place with the best opportunities, and, shockingly enough, in their minds the United States was no longer that place.
Soon after, Williams traveled to China, where the government is creating the world's largest nanotechnology research facility and dishing out grants of as much as $100 million to veteran scientists. One woman he met, a 28-year-old fresh out of graduate school, had been given $5 million to pursue nanotech research. "In the United States," he says, "a young assistant professor would struggle to raise $50,000, let alone $5 million."
In Williams's lab at HP, only 18 of the 75 scientists were born in the United States, and 10 of those American-born researchers are over 50 years old; only six are under the age of 35. For now, HP can rely on foreign-born scientists, but "what happens when those people stop wanting to come here?" Williams asks. "That's the scary part."
Williams got through college and grad school in the 1970s thanks to government grants. He reckons he was a good investment. Through taxes, he's paid back the government many times over.
"Technology has been paying the bills in this country," he says. "It's delivering all of the innovation and the profits in the United States. The IT industry has created the wealth that we're enjoying now. But because the industry is doing well, it gets neglected.
I'm going to try and help in my own small way. The IEEE has a set of 'Lesson Plans' for their "Teacher In-Service" Program.
I've looked at several of these and they are quite good. Not sure of the reception, but I may plan on approaching the teacher at my kids school and see if they are open to doing something like this during National Engineering Week (Feb 15th thru 21st)
It will be interesting to see the kind of reception I'll get!? Stay Tuned
Geronimo trail on S. Mountain
(from a different perspective)
Az MTBR 'Double Bypass' Ride
I went Saturday for a ride up in the McDowell / Sonoran Preserve in Scottsdale, AZ. Many of the group were doing the 'Quadruple Bypass' ride. Thus named because you climb up and over 4 passes as you circumnavigate the preserve. I ended up just doing a 'Double Bypass' which was enough for me mileage wise. I need to get out and do these trails more often. They are such a bear to climb up that you get a tremendous workout, even if you have to push/carry your bike uphill for part of the way!
The Garmin 'Connect' website looks like it's gone through some upgrades as of late. Check out this link to the data from the ride that day. You can play it back in your web browser, and it steps through the waypoints and annotates the data. Pretty neat!
The engineer in me loves this kind of stuff, although the truth of the data is sometimes a bit of a blow to the ego!
