Australia Lesson Activities - IT

THEME: Limestone Gorge, Gregory National Park
SUBJECT AREAS: Information Technology
TOPIC: E.P.I.R.B. Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon

When April, John and I left in the truck on Friday to travel to Moolooloo Cattle Station to do some filming for our Discovery Zone series, we knew we’d be leaving the group in quite an inaccessible part of the world: at least 60 kms from the nearest assistance at Timber Creek. Without access to the truck’s satellite phone, they’d have to have walked a long way to call for help is something had gone wrong – like someone hurting themselves really badly.

We did however leave one piece of life-saving equipment that we also use at sea on the pedal boat: an E.P.I.R.B. This stands for Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. Basically, if you get into a life or death situation, either on land or at sea, you press a special button to activate the unit to start sending pulses to a satellite many miles above the earth’s surface. These pulses then get relayed to an LES (Land Earth Station) and forwarded via fibre optic land lines to an emergency control centre, in this case probably in Sydney. The people manning the centre are alerted to someone in trouble, and can identify exactly who by a special code embedded within the signal. So, in our case for example, if one of the team had broken their leg while swimming in the water hole there at Limestone Gorge and needed to be airlifted out, the emergency services would come looking for a 2-person crew of a pedal powered boat named ‘Moksha’, as this was how our EPIRB was originally registered. This might be the cause of some head-scratching with the emergency response personnel, but the main thing from our point of view of course would be to get help out to us.

Suggested learning activities: research the increased use of satellites since they were first introduced. Find out when the first satellite was put up into space. What purpose did this first satellite serve? What functions have satellites since performed and how have they impacted our lives?

Those of you who have been following this website will know that we’ve been unable to send updates since the events in New York the 11th. The reason for this was one of the servers through which we can send updates and receive email was housed in one of the two towers of the World Trade Centre that was hit.

Today is the first day the service has been back to normal. Technicians at Stratos Communications - our ISP (Internet Service Provider) in Newfoundland – have rerouted traffic through other servers positioned at other locations around North America. It’s a little more complicated than this though. It would be easiest to draw a diagram to explain how we get out updates on the website – unfortunately not possible here so I’ll have to use words instead. There are 7 stages:

1. We write all of the daily updates in MS Word on 3 x laptops we have with us. (This is quite challenging at the moment because of being overwhelmed by moths and flying ants that are attracted to the screens!). We also download all of the digital photos for the day from the 2 x video cameras and choose the best and most appropriate ones to run with the text. We then use Adobe Photoshop to manipulate photos where necessary and Macromedia Fireworks to compress them all to a size we can realistically send by the low baud rate Mini-m satellite phone.
2. Text and photos are loaded into the satellite program (which actually uses Netscape 6.0). Using dialup networking we then try and connect with the server in order to send the updates and photos - like you would with normal (terrestrial) email.
3. The satellite phone sends a signal to a satellite 26 kms above the Pacific Ocean in geo-stationary orbit, requesting to be connected. There are 4 such satellites that cover the earth’s surface. From our position here in Australia we can also log on via the satellite above the Indian Ocean.
4. The Pacific Ocean region satellite (or Indian Ocean one) then sends the request to a Land Earth Station (LES) in Sydney or Melbourne.
5. From the LES the request is translated into light signals and sent via fibre optic cable under the Pacific Ocean to the server in N. America. This whole process from 1-5 has taken less than 2 seconds!
6. The return signal to establish password authentication back to our satellite phone travels the same route and take about the same time. Several signals are passed back and forth before we eventually get connected. This all takes around 20 seconds to complete.
7. We are then able to send our updates to a yahoo email address. Our Webmaster in San Francisco then reads them as regular email, formats them and posts them to the site using MS FrontPage.

The reason we’ve been having so many problems getting connected was first because of the servers in the World Trade Centre being destroyed, and secondly because all of the congestion from other uses like ourselves trying to log on once alternative servers were put in place.

Suggested learning activities: using the information above, draw a diagram of how we send our updates from the outback. Then draw one for how you connect to the Internet and compare one from the other.

We finally left town today, whilst we where doing so we caught a caption of the news. This news severely emotionally affected at least five of the group and we decided that it would be best to wait until we could find out more information.

To wait for information in this day and age does not take long. Our technology permits us to send messages with E-mail, talk to people with telephones and satellite telephones, and our televisions use satellites transferring images within the minute.
The question that I kept asking myself today was “is this for the good or the bad?” in my opinion ‘no news is good news’. If we had left yesterday we mightn’t have heard the news till Darwin, though back around 100 years ago people wouldn’t find out about news that occurred a month ago in another country; as the message had no means of getting to the receiver.

This could be reversed - what if something happened on a remote station or community; they had no means of sending an instant message to the press, doctors or family.

This occurred to us today. Some of us felt that we were privileged to receive news, and others felt as though ‘we are in the Australian outback, if we wanted to do something about something we are going to have to put if off until we get back to civilisation.”

A device that measures temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, and altitude is used daily within the group. The device is called a Windwatch. To get an accurate reading for wind-speed the tool must be held into the wind, in a reasonably clear open space.

We use the Windwatch so that we can record daily data of the criteria being measured above, and post it on the Internet. We also use them so that we can compare results to previous results for our own personal interest.

Feed your children wheat. Joshua.

Technology can sometimes be a double-edged sword. This morning it took
me five hours to repair a software problem on one of the laptops,
delaying our departure until noon. "So why let computers determine the
bike schedule?" I hear you say. "Surely it should be the other way
round - the physical side of the journey taking precedent over the
technology".

Well, in a way you're right. But there are two reasons why technologies
- especially computers - are now such an integral part of the
expedition:

1. First, we feel it's important to be able to share our travels and
adventures with classrooms around the world. Without computers no one
would know what we were doing and no great educational value would come
of it.
2. Second, if people are expecting news, they assume no news is bad
news. So when a computer fails, like it did this morning, friends and
especially family would start to get concerned. Peace of mind is in the
daily updates!

But sometimes I spend more time writing about a sunset on the computer
(to send to the website) than looking at the sunset itself. And this is
when I know that the balance needs to be revised. I didn't join the
expedition to spend most of my day and evening staring at a computer
screen. I joined it to see the world.

Suggested learning activities: identify a piece of technology that you
use on a daily basis. Make a list of the pros and cons of owning and
using this technology.

Would you believe that the most important part of getting in shape is how well you rest after a workout? That is correct. In order for your muscles to gain from the workout you have given them, they must have the proper rest. Did you also know that the more fit you are the better you are at resting? Well, could you tell me what muscle you should be most concerned with when you do work out? I will give you a hint. It is also the muscle you should be most concerned about resting. That is correct. Your heart is the most important muscle in the body and it is also the muscle that needs to rest. One of the best tools in the fitness industry for watching the heart’s progress in fitness is a simple watch, two fingers and a notebook. There are more sophisticated devices that you could use like a heart rate monitor that I use on our expedition.

Let me explain first what a heart rate monitor does and then I will show you how you can check your heart’s ability to rest using your watch and two fingers.

There are two pieces to a heart rate monitor. One is a elastic strap with two sensors that wrap around your torso. The other is a watch that picks up the two sensor readings and displays them on the watch face continuously. What the sensors are sending to the watch is each beat of the heart. The computer in the watch computes the amount of beats per minute and displays that for the athlete. “But why?” you ask?

This heart rate monitor allows the athlete to know if he has reached his aerobic level of training. It also lets the athlete know whether they have not reached it yet or has gone over their target heart rate. Aerobic training is the specific training of the heart through body movement such as Mountain Biking. Anaerobic is what you get when you have gone over your aerobic level and have started to starve your heart from oxygen. I have gone well over my aerobic heart rate on this trip and rest has been the key to compensate for it. The heart rate monitor will give you the distance between your aerobic level, for me it is 145 beats per minute, and my final resting heart rate, which for me has been 80 beats per minute. How quickly I get from 150 beats per minute to 80 beats per minute gives me a good indication of my hearts fitness. How do these numbers let me know if I am resting my heart enough after a workout? In part, as I check the measurements it will show that my heart goes to rest quicker than it had before. That is when I get my heart to 150 and then stop my exercise the time it takes my heart to come back to rest at 80 beats per minute should decrease as my training goes on. The final measurement is my “waking heart rate”. If I leave the device on and I look at it right as I get up in the morning it should read even less than my resting heart rate. For me my “waking heart rate” has been 62 to 65. This is the best indication that I am keeping my heart fit and rested. A well-rested muscle will last longer and perform better.

Okay, you try it. Take a watch in your left hand and with your two fingers, index and forefinger, onto your neck just below your jaw and ear. Can you feel the pulses? That is your heart beating. Now count how many beats there are in ten seconds and times that number by 6. That is your heartbeats per minute. Write it down and than-do the same when you get up the next morning and write it down. Go ride your bike for 30 minutes then immediately take your heart rate. Once that has been done count the number of seconds it take your heart to get from your highest number back down to the beats per minute you wrote down yesterday. What in the end that you are looking for is if your waking heart rate goes up, stays the same or goes down. Going up wouldn’t be the result you are looking for. Now if you want to do a quicker experiment on why your heart needs as much rest as exercise than try this.

Put your hand out all the way as if to shake some ones hand. Turn your palm to the sky. Now, like the beat of your heart, open and close your hand swiftly (open, close open, close…) for two minutes. I bet you can’t for a whole 5 minutes before your hand gives up. Now while you are doing this remember that your heart must never stop doing what your hand is doing. The heart can’t take a lunch break or a weekend holiday. The heart must keep beating all the time. Okay, you can stop opening and closing your hand now. But try to open and close your hand as relaxed and as slow as you can now. Notice a difference? That is the kind of break or holiday we can give our heart with good fitness. Be it a heart rate monitor or just taking your pulse, you can tell whether you’re giving your heart the rest it needs.

Mick Roney

August 13, 2001
Central Queensland

With 8 people biking and 1 x person driving the support vehicle we can all pretty much get out of sight of each other in less than a minute. Living so close together day after day there are many days when we want to. We can also get easily separated because we all like to travel at different speeds.

For those of you who have kept up with the updates, you know that we’re lost half the time. We’re working off of old maps. New roads have been constructed, others have disappeared. There are few or no road signs for up to 100 kilometers sometimes. We often come to forks in the road that we weren’t even expecting. Sometimes we send the support truck off in a different direction altogether to pick up fuel or water. We make plans to help keep us together to some degree, but we get a big help for this using the technology of two-way radios.

At the moment we have about 4 FM transmitters that we can use up to a kilometer away. We give one to the person assigned to lead the group for the day and one to the person assigned to the back of the group. The other two are given to other team members at random. When the front person can’t see the back person, he calls back to make sure that everything is OK. Somebody in the back might have a flat tire or maybe they’re just slow. With radios, we at least know what’s going on and never get too far apart. If somebody was to get hurt in the back we could call to the front and have them stop immediately and provide assistance if necessary.

We also have 2 high-powered UHF radios. These are also given to the front and back cyclists. There is one mounted in the support truck as well. These have a range of about 14 kilometers. This allows the bikers to talk to the truck. We can send the truck ahead and maintain contact when we are really confused about where we are, or when we’re trying to pick a campsite within 14 kilometers that doesn’t have a lot of cow poop.

Even though we rely heavily on the radios, we always have a plan in case their batteries run out or we lose them or were too far away from each other for them to be useful. We can’t trust them entirely to keep us together. Things are tough out here. We can’t afford to lose each other. Our survival could be at stake.

Suggested learning activity: Think about technology that you rely on a lot at home. What would happen if the power went out and you couldn’t use it anymore? Could you do without it? For how long?

Todd

Information Technology
August 9, 2001
Just west of Georgetown, Australia

We take a lot of digital pictures everyday, but only a couple make it back to the web site. The video cameras we are using to capture the action are also equipped with memory cards to store any still photographs we want to take. This is great since we don’t have to drag a fourth or fifth camera around with us as we ride our bikes (we have the cameras strapped around our necks as we ride and they jab us in the ribs as they swing about under us. More cameras, more jabs).

When we come back to our computers at night it’s an easy matter to take the memory cards out of the video camera and transfer them to the waiting computer slot. The slot allows the digital picture information to be read by the computer, just as if you had put in a CD.

Here’s where our work finally begins. The detail on the photos is quite remarkable and the photos saved are quite large in size. They often start at greater than 150K. This is far too much memory required for us to send photos efficiently so we have to play with them somewhat and bring them down to 35K or less.

To do this we take the photo over to a program called Photoshop and highlight only the necessary part of the photo for our needs. Then we might increase the contrast or the color saturation to improve the quality of the image. After that we take the photo over to another program called Fireworks 2 because it’s still way too big. There we can reduce the size of the picture and compress the photo automatically down to the size we need to send to you.

Hope you’re enjoying them.

Todd

The picture of the windmill illustrates a very useful application of technology for the cattle farming family at Pinnacle Springs. The windmill is located over a well that was drilled down to water some 21 meters below (around 60 feet). As the wind moves the windmill blades, the energy generated helps to operate a pump down in the well. This pump forces water up and through a pipe to the large circular water container. This water is used to fill the trough in the foreground that the cattle drink out of. The water in the trough is filled to the top automatically using a mechanism similar to the one that tells your toilet to stop filling with water. There’s a bulb that floats in the water. If the water level falls, as when the cattle are drinking, the bulb level drops with it and opens the valve to the water tank and allowing water to flow into the trough. When the trough is full again, the bulb rises with it and closes off the valve to the tank.

Today, with modern technology, wind power can be harnessed to generate electricity to be used for any power application. Jason had a wind power generator on his boat ride across the Pacific and he used the power to pump his water, use his razor and turn on his computer.

Suggested learning activity: design and draw a wind generator for your home. List as many different things as you can think of that might be powered from it.

Todd

Near the end of our 60 km ride today we visited Wrotham Park, a cattle station here in this remote section of Queensland. Read some of the other updates today and find out how big this station is. It is HUGE.

What I’ll talk about here is the schooling of the children on the station. We met Sam, the 13 year-old son of the station manager. Sam and his brothers and sisters have been educated through a ‘Distance Learning’ program based in Cairns, as are many outback children. The lessons are done with a member of the family here on the station with frequent UHF radio contact, as well as phone conversations with his teacher over in Cairns on the other side of the Great Dividing Range.

To support the Distance Learning program there’s also the ‘Volunteers for Isolated Students Education’ (VISE), whereby retired teachers work in rotation for six-week stints at stations. I met John Swanson, who has worked for 8 years as a teacher for three months a year at two different stations per year. He’s worked with Sam’s older brothers and sisters in past years, and in our conversation today he said he’s focusing on Sam’s mathematics this year.

Here’s an interesting use of technology. For Sam’s music studies he’s chosen the trombone. He makes a phone connection once a week with his trombone teacher and the teacher listens to Sam’s playing, makes corrections and suggestions, plays some sample music, and Sam continues his daily practice until the following week. Does it work? Once a term all the Distance Learning students meet in Cairns for a week. All the kids with their instruments gather and form a band. They practice for a little while, and then perform. And they win competitions, too! They’re reputed to be very good.

Most of Sam’s communications are via the UHF radio, which is the cheapest method of communication. Every morning Sam phones into his teacher at 9:00 a.m. Or, they can radio into a location in the morning, to a message center, and then make the necessary phone calls, which have become a bit cheaper recently from station-to-station, but are still costly into Cairns.
The daily conversations are about a half-hour in length, and Sam can phone back during the day with other questions he might have. He spends a few hours a day on his lessons.

You might be asking, ‘what about the Internet? Video conferencing? Chat sessions? Web-based research? Well, out here it’s all about speed. Most phone lines are still very slow for internet connections and it takes too long for information to come down-line. Telstra, the Australian phone company, is working to provide better access.

Every two weeks Sam sends in a completed unit by mail, which is corrected by his teacher.

So it’s a real combination of technologies at use in Sam’s schooling: phone, radio, a bit of computer and internet, paper and pencil, parent tutoring, and six weeks of support from a visiting teacher.

How does this compare to your schooling? Do you think you’d like it?

Jim

Ever wonder how we calculate our distance traveled everyday? We have computers on our bikes!

These computers work together with tiny electronic devices that are attached near the wheel. A wire goes down from the computer on the handlebars and along the fork that hooks the frame to the front wheel. This wire hooks into a magnetic sensor that gets a signal from a special piece of metal that is hooked to the spokes. As the wheel goes faster, of course, the little piece of metal goes faster along with it and the computer can use the data from the signal to calculate things like our maximum speed, the total hours we’ve been riding, our average speed per hour and our distance traveled.

This device really is a big help in keeping track of where we are everyday.

Todd

I am sitting at the side of Lake Emma in Northern Australia, 10 km from the nearest power outlet and 50km from the nearest phone line. There are bats flying overhead, it’s pitch dark but I’m sitting editing today’s photographs for the expedition website on my laptop. How does all this work and how do I get the pictures back to you – sitting at your computer anywhere in the world?

Well the first part of the process is taking the photographs. As we’re cycling along we take digital still photographs on the video camera - the quality isn’t as good as a normal film camera but the results are instant. When we get to wherever we’re camping for the night, I can immediately load all the images on to my laptop and pick the ones for the updates.

Now the first problem I have is where to get power to run my computer and charge my batteries – so we carry a small generator, which is now purring away in the bush behind me. It runs on gasoline and can run all our computers, chargers and lights for the evening on about 5 liters of petrol/gas. We rig up extension leads to the computers and whilst I’m working on the photographs Jason and the other cyclists are writing their updates for the day.

The second thing we’re missing here in the Outback is a phone line to connect to the Internet. So we’re using a satellite telephone rigged up on our support truck to send our updates back. Normal phone lines use wires connected to your phone or computer that run out of your house or school and down the road to the telephone exchange where they can be connected to everyone else’s phones and internet servers. A satellite phone doesn’t have any wires and instead relies on sending a signal up into space to be bounced off a satellite orbiting 40,000km above earth. The signal then gets bounced back down to a earth station which is connected to all the normal phone lines and can patch us into anyone’s number or server.

But, because the signal has to travel so far and the satellite can only handle so much information the quality isn’t as good as a normal line. Normal modems connect at 56 K per second but the satellite phone can only handle 2.4 kbs so, for example, if you had to wait 10 seconds for an image to load on your computer it would take us almost 4 minutes to send. So we use special software to compress our photographs as much as we can to keep the satellite time to a minimum. It takes a little more work but once we email the photographs and updates to our webmasters it’s out on the web for everyone to see. We’ll turn off the computers, generator and satellite phone, go to our tents, sleep and start all over again tomorrow - kilometers from anywhere but still connected.

Kenny Brown