Recent Blogs Posts

What qualifies a person to say whether we have a strong mind or even a weak mind? I'll bet most English speaking people can read the following. Anyway, it’s not much of a brain teaser.
Good example of a Brain Study... if you can read this you have a strong mind:

7H15 M3554G3 53RV35 7O PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5! 1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5! 1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG 17 WA5 H4RD BU7 N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3 Y0UR M1ND 1S R34D1NG 17 4U70M471C4LLY W17H 0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17, B3 PROUD! 0NLY C3R741N P30PL3 C4N R3AD 7H15. PL3453 F0RW4RD 1F U C4N R34D 7H15.

According to Dr.Douglas Kellner at U.C.L.A., the new 21st Century millennium was ushered in by a dramatic technological revolution.

We now live in an increasingly diverse, globalized, and complex, media-saturated society. This technological revolution will have a greater impact on society than the transition from an oral to a print culture.

[url]http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/21stcent/principles.html[/url]

This is a great link:

[url]http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/21stcent/principles.html[/url]

To learn more about me, you may be interested in reading my Blog which is based on a short article that appeared in Thursday, March 18, 2004, edition of the Leisure World New, announcing the Leisure Worlder of the Month.

Briefly, Cheryl Walker, Leisure World News reporter, in her interview, covers a few places, people, ideas and organizations that have been influential in my life as a Senior Volunteer and retired Public School Teacher.

For more information about some thoughts and challenges concerning my feelings related to Education, Volunteerism, Online Learning and New Learning Literacies, please contact me by email at: [email]woodjr@teambase.com[/email] and/or Portal Base - Powered by vBulletin; and we are proud to announce the launch of the Portal Base current events and blog sites.

The Leisure World News headline stated “Hooked on volunteerism” and went on to say that Woodley Butler just couldn’t say “no”.

Some twenty-eight years after his first teaching assignment in a south Los Angeles County Middle School and some thirteen years, after his last teaching assignment in a Tustin Unified School District Middle School in Orange County, retired educator Woodley Butler continued living his Golden Years the same way he did when in the workforce. He’s still giving generously of his time and talents as a volunteer, not just to one but to numerous organizations and educational issues.

And he recently added one more task to his full schedule when, with Third Mutual Director, Dennis Welch, he was co-volunteer coordinator for the Taste of Volunteerism Event schedule in Clubhouse 5.

“Uncle Woodley”, as he is familiarly known, has been described as “the ultimate quite man behind the scenes”, and has been a key coordinator behind a number of successful community and educational events, like the Exercise Challenges, two Transportation Awareness Days, and last year’s outstanding Senior Fraud Fest activity.

“Volunteerism has become a way of life for me,” Uncle Woodley commented, “and is an infinite source of personal satisfaction that began when as a West Texan I volunteered for the U.S. Air Force during World War II.”

Before being honorably discharged, the young B-17, 303rd Bomb Group tail gunner, flying over Europe, had earned a Distinguished Flying Cross, an Air Medal with four Oak Leaf Clusters, and a Purple Heart.

Butler attended U.C.L.A. under the G.I. Bill where he earned his bachelor’s degree in English. He hoped to be a writer, but also took classes in education.

Although he worked in marketing and merchandising at Time and Life magazines after graduation, he began to lean more towards teaching when his son was diagnosed with a severe hearing impairment at an early age.

While teaching in Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange and Inland Empire counties, he also volunteered with various agencies and organizations that dealt with education and the problems and challenges of the hearing impaired community.

Not surprising, the focus of his volunteerism broadened with available free time. He know he’s hooked on volunteering, and while working with his daughter and her Doctoral dissertation Online Learning Experiences of Naïve American High School Students at The University of Montana, Missoula, became “engulfed” with Digital Learning, the new E-learning places that increased emphasis on social learning, and use of social software such as: blogs, wikis, websites, video clips, podcasts, media, course technology, and virtual worlds.

When beginning to create E-Learning content, the pedagogical approaches need to be evaluated. Simple pedagogical approaches make it easy to create content, but lack flexibility, richness and downstream functionality. On the other hand, complex pedagogical approaches can be difficult to set up and slow to develop, though they have the potential to provide more engaging learning activities for students.

Somewhere between these extremes is an ideal pedagogy that allows a particular educator to effectively create educational materials while simultaneously providing the most engaging educational experiences for students.

Learning takes place through conversations about content and grounded interaction about problems and actions. Advocates of social learning claim that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to others.

According to Dr.Douglas Kellner at U.C.L.A., the new 21st Century millennium was ushered in by a dramatic technological revolution. We now live in an increasingly diverse, globalized, and complex, media-saturated society.

This technological revolution will have a greater impact on society than the transition from an oral to a print culture.

#

Originally Posted by PBFeed

A little snow and rain are falling in a few states today, but the 2011–12 winter has been extremely warm and dry across the continental U.S. Meteorologists think they have figured out why.
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Greetings.

As stated in my 1st PortalBase BLOG post on the HODPOD Hydrogen Generator project... after about 1 year of R&D, my Uncle Hank and I had finally created a very stable hydrogen generator that we called HODPOD 511.

So.. we were a little surprised to find that this technical marvel that was mounted in the trunk of my 2006 Pontiac G6 car and generated an amazing 1.5 Liters of pure HHO gas (splitting water H2O into HHO) ... did NOT improve the MPG as expected.

This turned out to be because every car after the year 1996 has a mandatory ODB-II compatible on-board car computer (ECU). This ECU along with several sensors monitor the amount of O2 and seek to achieve an Air/Flow (A/F) ratio of 14 to 1.

So, the HODPOD was making some great HHO gas that was fed in by plastic tube into the Pontiac engine air filter.. and this was causing a better and cleaner burn of gasoline fuel. This gave more HP but also generated almost no pollution as measure by the O2 sensors.

So... the ECU commanded the engine fuel ejectors to add more fuel.. and that produced the needed 14:1 A/F ratio that brought the O2 and pollution readings back into standard ECU guidelines.

So.. what did we do to get around this ECU and O2 sensor problem?

We HACKED the on-board ECU computer system!

This was done with an amazing 3rd party device called the Volo Performance FS2-HHO ODB-II chip. This is a small electronic device about the size of a small cell phone. The FS2-HHO simply SNAPS IN directly into the standard ODB-II plug located in EVERY car and truck since 1996. The ODB-II receptor is located under the driver's side dashboard and easy to spot, if you look. This is the same connector used by techs to check your engine for various reasons.

So... the purpose of the FS2-HHO device is to intercept the O2 and other sensor data.... translate the AS-IS sensor readings into the "HHO" SHOULD-BE readings.... and send the modified signals along the way to the car's ECU on-board computer.

And, it worked Great!

The HODPOD 511 is pumping out the 1.5L/Min of HHO gas... which is getting ingested into the normal air intake of the engine to mix with the regular fuel and make a more powerful and cleaner burn.

The exhaust from the HHO+gasoline burn generates less O2 than normal (less pollution) ... but the sensor readings flow through our friend the FS2... and are modified to adjust for the improvements provided by HHO ... and the result ?

10% improved MPG and almost no pollution!

And... this improvement was only from a rough hacking of the Pontiac ECU and sensors from the outside.

What if GM and other auto manufacturers would modify their ECU from the INSIDE to work with the amazing and free HHO gas produced by this marvelous water-filled electrolysis device? 15%? 25%? 50% improved MPG and no pollution ?

So, why has this cool HHO technology not caught on by storm all around the world? Why, indeed......

Look for the answer in my next BLOG post...

All the best!

Smil'n Jack

Essentially you can use calorie counting to drop your weight to your desired level and also use it to maintain your target weight to avoid yo-yo dieting pattern.

To achieve this, you have to get into the habit of tracking the amount of calories or energy in every food or drink that you consume.

The general guiding principle behind calorie counting for weight loss management is that in order for you to lose weight you need to burn more calories than you consume daily.

You either do this by eating less calories than your pre-determined daily requirement or you introduce some form of exercise to help burn more calories than your daily consumption or a combination of both.

So effectively calories out should exceed calories in.

When starting out with calorie counting, it is important that you first of all establish your daily caloric need or requirement.

Now this varies from person to person because your actual daily calorie requirements depends on a host of factors such as your age, sex, height, current weight, and indeed your level of activity.

When you have sorted out your basal metabolic rate you are then required to keep a daily log of all the calories in the food and drinks you consume daily as well as an 'exercise and activity log'. This is to ensure that you tilt yourself into a negative calorie balance because that is how you lose weight.

Keeping these Food logs alongside Exercise and Activity logs can be a nightmare without the help of a reliable calorie counting software or fitness software. However, all calorie counters or fitness software are not created equal.

I had experienced difficulty with calorie counting dieting and calorie counting software for years, so I embarked on a research to discover why you lose some weight initially but the loss just seems to tail off after a while.

Here are the flaws I came up with.

1. Your Rigid Calorie Diet is doomed to fail.

Something that happens when you are on a rigid calorie diet is that your weight loss results become affected by the law of diminishing returns over time.

Your calorie counting software may advise you to consume say 2200 calories a day and you follow that religiously only to discover that you are not shifting enough pounds as you would like to as time goes on.

How, you ask?. You see, in the first 2 weeks of our weight loss program, we may burn say 500 calories a day but as we move into week 3 and beyond, our body's metabolic rate slows down and may start burning about 450 calories or less.

Therefore, your rigid or fixed calorie counting diet weight loss results begin to diminish as a result.

2. Calorie Counting software are programmed to count one pound of weight loss as being equivalent to 3500 calories.

This is wrong. Yes, one pound of fat loss is equivalent to 3500 calories but you lose more than fat when you lose weight i.e you lose water and you also lose lean body.

Although you lose more fat at the initial stages of your weight loss program, you will eventually start to lose lean body mass as time goes on.

If you burn 3500 calories of fat, you lose one pound of weight. However, the story is different with lean body mass. In fact, the calorie loss requirement to lose one pound of lean body mass is totally different. This does not even include variables like your body mass index (BMI) which is important.

Now most calorie counters and weight loss software do not take this into consideration when they churn out results. They simply make one universal assumption of 3500 caloric loss is equivalent to one pound loss. Wrong.

3. Exercise and normal daily activity calorie use overlap which calorie counters miscalculate.

In your normal daily routine activities like browsing the internet as you are doing right now, you do burn calories. You may burn say 50 calories just being idle. Now if you mount your exercise bike, your calorie counter may advise 240 calories has been used up by you.

Well, at the completion of that biking exercise, you have actually burnt 190 calories i.e 240 deduct or take away 50.

Why.....because the 50 calories is what you would have spent anyway even without mounting the exercise bike and this must be taken into account when you do the calorie math.

However, your calorie counter or fitness software does not know this and will report 240 calories.... and you wonder why you have difficulty achieving your weight loss goals.

The point being made here is that your calorie counter tends to overestimate calories spent thereby giving you a false sense of achievement.

I have been working on my own variation of the famous HHO (water+electricity = Hydrogen Gas on Demand) product that I call the HODPOD.

I started this quest about 3 years ago after driving home in metal-to-metal stop and go traffic on the 75 freeway North of Atlanta, GA. The idea just came to me.... HYDROGEN !

After the typical Google search yielding millions of web sites, blogs and movies... I got "bit" by the HHO bug and started to design and develop my own HODPOD HHO Hydrogen on demand (HOD) generator device (POD).

I contacted my uncle "Hank" who is a seasoned engineer and he also became interested.

We both jumped "head first" into this exciting "green" HHO technology with visions of 200,000,000 automobiles getting 50% better MPG, using less fuel and reducing polution on our mother planet Earth.

Over the next year, we created (and documented) several different models of the HODPOD (some that look like a cheap horror movie bomb) until we finally came up with HODPOD #511. This was the 11th variation of a 5 cell HHO generator (thus, 5-11). It has five separate HHO cells and generates about 1.5 Liters per minute of Hydrogen HHO gas using a standard 14VDC auto alternator at about 20 AMPS.

HODPOD-611.jpg

We then mounted the HODPOD 511 into the trunk of my 2006 Pontiac G6 with a long plastic hose that "piped" the HHO gas into my regular V6 engine intake.

Next was 6 months of very scientific MPG testing... documenting every mile driven using consistant and repeatable driving methods and recording every amount of gasoline consumed.

The result ?

NO CHANGE IN MPG !

Why?.... oh why, indeed.

Because every gasoline powered car and truck built after 1996 follows the ODB-II onboard ECU computer rules mandated by the US Federal Government and all car companies that sell cars in the USA. This is called the Air/Fuel (A/F) Ratio. This ratio is monitored by several sensors... one of which is called the O2 (Oxygen) sensor (see this example: http://www.sjmautotechnik.com/troubl.../10vo2sen.html ).

So... the onboard car computer system (ECU) was FIGHTING my HODPOD HHO. The HODPOD was adding to the normal air flow some HHO at a rate of 1.5 L per minute. This extra Hydrogen+Hydrogen+Oxygen gas actually causes the ignition during the power stroke to be more powerful (more HP) ... but... the burn causes 99% of all of the polution to go away. (yes... HHO makes a cleaner burn and reduced the level of polution from a car or truck).

So, the O2 sensors do NOT see enough O2 ... and they send this low O2 reading back to the ECU computer. The ECU computer has a series of look up tables (Maps) and it determines the problem must be NOT ENOUGH FUEL.

So, the ECU orders the fuel enjectors to add more fuel ... which makes the needed 14:1 A/F ratio to fall inline with the manufacture's requirements... and burns more fuel.. and that negates the advanteges provided by the HODPOD HHO gas.

Read my next BLOG post to learn what we did NEXT to TRICK the ECU and allow the HODPOD HHO to bring us a 10% MPG increase and almost NO polution !

Cheers,

Smil'n Jack