Monthly Archives: January 2011

Bionic Ear research targets the brain stem

The Bionic Ear Show presenter Tobin May

The lipreading course I attend each week helps its students understand more about hearing in general, as well as teaching vital skills in dealing with its loss. This week, we had a presentation called The Bionic Ear show which gave an excellent insight into the workings of the ear and also the research currently underway to help correct the things that can go wrong. Aside from the engaging physical demonstrations of how the human ear receives and processes sound, the electron microscope footage in an accompanying video showed how incredibly complex the inner ear structure is and also examples of what a healthy, fully functioning hearing system looks like versus one that has been damaged. Continue reading →

An omen – perhaps?

This year marks a once in a lifetime event that only happens once every one hundred years.

I’m talking about significant dates from a numerical  perspective. It’s not quite on the scale of 11.11.1111 – but close. This year brings some fun date combinations such as 9.10.11 and also 11.11.11

A recent article I read in The Economist highlighted the fact that the number 11 is significant with numerologists as although it isn’t officially regarded as a palindrome itself, it generates them like no other number. I particularly liked this massive palindromic example… Continue reading →

Finding a new mountain to climb

“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.”

My Niece very bravely played hostess to the family over New Year at her place in Crystal Palace – a hilltop suburb of London that gives excellent views of the city skyline.

The NTL/Arqiva transmitter near Croydon - one of a number of amazing structures and facilities I was privileged to visit and, on a few occasions climb, when I worked for the company in the 1990s

I know the area quite well from my time in the broadcast industry in the early 1990s as it is home to two significant structures that have played key roles in broadcasting history – not just in the UK, but worldwide too. On the site of the original Crystal Palace stands the Crystal Palace transmitting station and a few miles down the road stands the Croydon transmitting station. I visited these stations quite a bit during my early days with NTL as they were often a focal point for the demonstration and launch of new digital broadcasting and telecommunication services . It was always fascinating to get an inside view of these amazing structures and the operations centres that sat beneath them and also to talk with the engineers who maintained the analogue services and were key to developing and implementing the new digital ones.

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, my experiences working for Lucent’s mobile/3G operations at the beginning of the century echoed those in the broadcast industry as it was during those pioneering days when there were many possibilities with what the technology could achieve but some very big mountains to climb to get there .

So, sitting in my Niece’s front room after the New Year’s celebrations were done and dusted, thoughts turned to what all those activities had led to 20 years on in broadcasting and 10 years on in the mobile web. Continue reading →