BIT - Bookkeeper Information Technology

  Although the term “fast water” is often used jokingly by swimmers to deflect personal performance issues, it has its roots in science. 

Fast water is calm water free of waves and sub-surface turbulence.  Pools with surface gutters (wave catchers) and good quality buoy lines are faster than open surface pools with hard and high vertical walls.  Deeper pools allow the vortices to dissipate before being reflected back to the surface.  Swimming close to a wall will increase reflected turbulence.  While racing, leading the pack has a distinct advantage because the water will have less wave motion from competitors.  The fastest and most worthy racers are typically assigned the middle lanes to more evenly distribute wave activity to opponents.

Two leading scientists in the field of fluid dynamics are Dr. Raul Arellano (Faculty of Physical Activity and Sport Science, Granada University) and Dr. Jun Zhang (Physics Department, New York University).  Dr. Arellano has spent decades studying water propulsion and how the resulting vortex activity affects speed and motion.  His filmed experiments using tiny air bubble delivery mechanisms on the feet and hands are a unique method for visualizing flow.  Studying swimmers passing through and along his “bubble wall” revealed a variety of vortex activity at each phase of the stroke.  Among many revelations, his 1999 paper on “Vortices and Propulsion” states that “the size and movement characteristics of the vortex seem related to propulsion obtained by the hand and foot movements.”

Dr. Zhang and his team are studying filament activity in fast moving soap film mediums to gain insight into the relationship between “flapping phases” versus “stretched-out phases” and how this vortex activity might apply to swimming and gliding.  In Dr. Zhang’s words, their “ultimate goal is to better understand how fish swim and why they are so efficient.”  Some of his tests suggest that a swimming fish produces an “inverted von Karman” vortex street which could have implications on swim stroke style and movement.  Both of these scientists recognize the overwhelming importance of vortex management while swimming.

  Lulu.com is a great website. I am not sure where the name came from, but I speculate that it has something to do with the past tense of the French word for “read” – Lu.

The service they provide is self-publishing. The really cool thing is that the old “print-on-demand” has evolved into “publish-on-demand” and almost any kind of product (books, documents, music, art, etc.) can be promoted and sold on-line in an independent and free environment.

Where most publishers seek to have 100 authors selling one million books each, Lulu’s strategy is to have one million authors selling 100 books each. They’ve targeted their market well because much less than one percent of all independently published books sell more than 100 copies each.

“To be clear, Lulu is not a publisher. It’s a digital marketplace guided by a vision of empowerment and accessibility, and built on a business model that has proven wildly successful. The rapid growth of Lulu, which is being driven by over 15,000 new registrations a week and more than 100, 000 unique visitors everyday, is built on its proven ability to grab hold of the long tail of user-generated content and provide an empowering outlet for creators of all types.” – Lulu.com, Corporate Profile

Lulu.com is one of the self-publishing industry leaders and provides a solid return on investment for time and effort. Check it out at http://www.lulu.com/.

  BIT Intranet is a shareware file management system that provides a controlled homepage framework to display documents, photos and reports via a pull-down menu located in a top-of-page “BITBar”. Designed for small businesses, BIT Intranet© is a simple means of sharing documents, photos, audio, video, reports and information company-wide using only a web-browser and a Local Area Network.

• Demo to try
• Download.com to download/buy

 

The BIT Intranet© BITBar features a customized location bar, menu bar and page title for your intranet site as well as an automatically created pull-down menu of up to 200 documents.  Pre-formatted reports from any number of different applications can be written to the intranet in seconds. Updating intranet content is as simple as copying the new file into the intranet directory.

Unique in the market, BIT Intranet© provides a low-tech, zero-maintenance solution that easily disseminates information company-wide without third party assistance or specialized web-authoring software. The program is simple, efficient and economical:
1)       No web server software or ‘back office’ controls
2)       No specialized web-authoring software
3)       No knowledge of HTML coding or protocols required