All the game modes are available such as 3 Strikes and One Mad Maths Minute.

Great way to learn and improve mental maths performance for free! Given your brain a maths workout!

See the entry for Maths Bug on the Android Market.

Just a quick note to say that the Maths Bug app for android has been updated to include:

• 3 strikes and your out game mode, 3 lives unlimited play – see how high your score can go!
• 1 mad maths minute – one minute to answer as many right as possible
• built in explanations of mental maths tricks

This is free to use. Please give it a go and let us know what you think.

One the key mental tools I think is being able to be good at performing mental maths. Lets face it, despite the increasing usage of technology and associated aids in our lives – nothing beats being able to just perform mathematical operations in your head. It gives you a massive advantage over those who cannot as you can analyse information and approach problems more quickly and more precisely.

Therefore to help my children strengthen their mathematical ability I wrote an app, called ‘Maths Bug’. This app provides a series of graded tests on different mathematical areas to allow the child to learn and progress. Maths Bug is designed to be engaging and interactive. To help you support the child extensive reporting is built into the application so you can exactly see where they may be having trouble. Also built in as a resource library linking out to sites providing mental maths tricks and techniques.

Maths Bug is available on the Android market here for free.

If you are viewing this on an Android phone click here to go straight to it on the Android Market.

Otherwise visit the online calculator. There is a link on that page to the app for you.

The Android app has all the features of the online calculator plus.

• Ability on the fly to change between R-Value, U-Value and metric or imperial (so can also act as a converter).
• You can add your own materials to the selection list.
• Additional heat transfer calculator, so given a certain sized wall with internal and external temperatures you can work out the energy transfered over time.
• Cut and paste the results between apps.
• Email the results to other people easily.

New features will be added to the app over time. So this would be very useful to a builder, architect or home owner interested in modeling energy losses to improve energy efficiency. With this calculator it can help you make cost/reward decisions over improving your energy efficiency.

May seem a strange question – but in other countries where they enjoy 100Mb and greater connections speeds its like the end user ‘utility’ has gone up 10 to 100 fold. Plus it looks like there could be a cost of around $7000 per property to connect into the NBN – thats a heck of a connection fee for a 100Mb connection – thats only about 10 times faster than a good ADSL2 connection.

Note: South Korea will by 2012 have 1Gb connections available to its population – so by the time the NBN is completed we will be well behind the bandwidth curve.

I’d much rather we focus on the money on getting the core infrastructure right and as future proofed as we can make it, then let market forces take care of the final mile connection to the consumers.

Just a quick heads up that Sustainable House Day is on this Sunday in Australia. Lots of good people around Australia will be opening their homes to show people how to be more sustainable in their day to day living.

See here for more details

Simply put, underfloor heating is a when a heating element in embedded within the floor structure itself. Given the element will heat what surrounds it, this will then result in the floor acting as one big ‘radiator’. Given cold air in a room sinks to the floor, this means the coldest air in the room is heated, which then rises to heat the rest of the air – generally raising the temperature and hence comfort level within the room so heated.

The big win for most people with underfloor heating is that the means of heating the room is essentially ‘invisible’ – no vents in the walls or floor, no free standing gas or electric heater. The other win is that given the floor itself is being heated its warm to walk on – something if importance in a tiled bathroom.

For more detail, see the Underfloor heating, is it Green? article on ecowho.com .

We now have a Green Directory on ecowho.com for people to list their Green or Eco businesses for free!

We have also set up our own hosted blog on which you can comment. Covers a variety of eco and green issues.

Enjoy!

Himalayan Glacier Melt only out by a few hundred years..

Overstating the impact on the Amazon rainforests

Dodgy citations from none peer reviewed literature and SIGs

Top climatologist openly breaks with climategate conspirators

Andrew Weaver, probably Canada’s leading climate scientist, is calling for replacement of IPCC leadership and institutional reform.

I think to say things are coming to a head is perhaps an understatement..

See this article for a detailed analysis of what is going on. Its just shocking the lack of scientific rigor being shown in this space; in any other field people would have been fired, fined or imprisoned! If some in the medical profession operated like some climate scientists have done, they would make Sweeney Todd look like a saint!

Basically, the human influence on our climate via CO2 has been totally overplayed – natural climatic systems totally swamp out the effect – like the effect the Sun has on our climate. The models used have either being too narrowly focused on a subset of natural processes, or too dependent on vanishingly small subsets of measured data to make the conclusions reported statistically worthless (read the links on the article to see what I mean). Although this lack of significance has not stopped a multi-billion dollar business around managing Climate change popping into existence in the last few years.

Also, quite a lot of the climate change we are experiencing is most directly due to what we have done in local areas, i.e. the micro effects:

• extracting too much water out of lakes and rivers
• reducing forests
• building in flood plains, etc

Basically if you behave in a way which brings you to loggerheads with a local environmental or climatic system – odds are the natural system will win out, react and you have local climatic change. So worry about doing things right with your local environment first; then if you do that right the larger climate will take care of itself perfectly fine; with no need for anyone to be taxed over CO2.

In conclusion – People need to stop blindly adhering to the Climate Change stories ‘photocopied ad nauseam’ in the main stream media and start doing some reading of their own, ask questions and be heard!