Legion of Angels News Archive

PARIS - Paris may be the most visited city in the world, yet it’s also one of the most expensive.

“This city is worth the price,” says veteran tourist Alex Wadkin, 71, a retiree from Dublin, Ireland, sipping a $6 cup of coffee on the Champs-Elysees. “If you avoid expensive neighborhoods — like this one — you’ll do alright. But the key is to plan ahead.”

For travelers on a budget, the choices can be tough: stay in a far-flung suburb and eat a baguette for every meal, or leave happy but broke. Yet for those in the know, there are plenty of cheap — and even free — ways to enjoy the city.

THE SIGHTS: The Eiffel Tower may be impossible to miss for any self-respecting tourist, but it costs $19 to reach the top and long lines leave you exhausted by the time you reach the celebrated view.

Instead, do as the Parisians do: come in the evening, pack a picnic, and sit on the sprawling lawns surrounding it to watch the sunset and admire the tower alight at night, sparkling every hour for 10 minutes.

For a great view of Paris, just hike up to the top of Montmartre and sit on the Sacre-Coeur Basilica’s steps overlooking the city.

THE MUSEUMS: Unless you plan on spending most of your time in museums — which, granted, is possible among the dozens of great museums in Paris — the museum passes (two, four or six days) may not save you much. Better compare prices first at http://www.parismuseumpass.com.

Try to time your visit to include the first Sunday of the month, when the Louvre and all the major museums are free. And students, always have your ID card on you.

Don’t discount a couple of smaller free museums. Le Musee Carnavalet has lots to offer: located in the gorgeous Marais neighborhood, it retraces Paris’ rich history, from the Revolution to today. Meanwhile the Petit Palais, an architectural beauty in the heart of Paris, shows off collections from Paris in the 1900s all the way back to antiquity.

For photography fans, the gates surrounding the Luxembourg gardens host free open-air exhibits featuring stunning large-scale photography from around the world. And don’t forget to go into the park, where Parisians hang out by the fountain, get a tan, and listen to free music on summer weekends.

THE SOUNDS: Paris boasts not one, but two, world-class opera houses. Good seating remains prohibitively expensive, but if you reserve early and don’t mind craning your neck a bit, there are seats for $11 and $16. For the under-28 crowd, last-minute tickets — sometimes for coveted seats — can also reach low prices. These are sold 15 minutes before the start of the show. The Opera Bastille reserves 62 standing-room tickets at $8, on sale as soon as doors open, generally 90 minutes before starting time.

And for a musical Notre Dame, drop in on Sunday afternoon starting at 4:30 p.m., when free organ concerts bring out the cathedral’s sacred atmosphere.

THE WANDERING: The cheapest and most satisfying way to see the city is on your own. A year ago, Paris debuted an extensive system of rental bikes that you can help yourself to for just $1.50, credit card only, a day at numerous spots all over town. Velib’, as they are called, are a great way to wander around the city independently. However Paris traffic can get pretty hairy, and the bikes don’t come with helmets, so stay alert.

If cycling isn’t your thing, hop on a bus and see where it goes. Weekly passes, which also work on the metro, are well worth investing in. Some scenic bus lines include numbers 24 (goes by the Seine, the Louvre, Notre Dame, several bridges, the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Elysees) and 30 (the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Elysees, the Moulin Rouge, Sacre Coeur).

And there is always the Seine River. Try the Batobus — it’s $19, but unlike other flyboats its tickets are good for a whole day, and you can hop on and off with ease at eight top sightseeing spots.

THE FOOD: Food and drink are tricky to budget for in cuisine capital Paris, but if you stray away from touristy streets, there are cheap eats to be had.

For typically French food, no need to go to expensive restaurants, either. Try Le Bouillon Chartier (7 rue du Faubourg Montmartre, metro Grands Boulevards), not just for its stunning art deco interior but for its simple, affordable fare. Or pick up a traditional French picnic at La Cantine de Quentin (52 rue Bichat, metro Goncourt), and walk over to the lovely Saint Martin Canal.

Try street food in the atmospheric Latin Quarter, or fixed-price lunch menus, cheaper than their dinnertime counterparts.

For gourmet ice cream with a view, try Berthillon, at the tip of the Ile Saint Louis, a little island in the middle of the Seine.

Or peruse Paris’ traditional outdoor markets. One of the best and least expensive is the Belleville market, between Avenue de Menilmontant and Avenue de la Villette, on Tuesdays and Fridays.

THE ROOM: If you’re staying for a week or even just a few days, short-term rentals found on Craigslist can be a lot cheaper than hotels. For an intermediary and a bit more peace of mind, the one-woman company Alcove & Agaves will set you up in lovely Parisian homes -http://www.bed-and-breakfast-in-paris.com.

If you can afford to, avoid budget hotels or rentals in the suburbs of Paris, as you’ll waste too much time on transportation. Lastly, if you find a place so cheap it doesn’t come with an Internet connection, take heart: there are free Wi-Fi spots all over Paris, including in many public parks - check out http://www.wifi.paris.fr.

Source — Yahoo!

For blind students, surfing the Web or taking detailed notes in physics and calculus classes can require cumbersome and expensive learning aids. Two new technologies, however, promise to greatly expand access to text and graphics for the blind community without breaking the bank.

The Pulse Smartpen, which debuts in retail stores this month, records and synchronizes nearly everything a student hears and writes. And WebAnywhere, a free Internet-based service released last month, works as a screen reader by converting Web site text to electronic speech.

Beyond meeting an immediate need in the classroom or office, some researchers believe the products could help dramatically expand career options for the blind by opening new doors to information.

“Many of the solutions that are provided to this community are pretty expensive because the community is small,” said Andy Van Schaack, a lecturer in Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development in Nashville, Tenn. But by focusing on a consumer product marketed to the general public, he and colleague Joshua Miele, an associate scientist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, have found an economical way to close the accessibility gap.

The audio-tactile graphic system resulting from their research centers on the Pulse Smartpen by Oakland start-up Livescribe, for which Van Schaack serves as a senior science advisor.

The pen works just like a regular one if it’s not turned on, he said “But when you turn it on, it’s now actually a computer.”

The smartpen recognizes handwriting through a small infrared camera at its tip that snaps 72 pictures per second, focusing on millions of tiny dots printed on every page of a special notebook accompanying the pen.

“It actually takes a picture of the page and what’s printed onto each page, which is a very fine, almost invisible dot pattern that’s almost like a barcode pattern,” Van Schaack said. The notebook’s unique microdot patterns can help the pen pinpoint the location of a word on the top of page 11, say, instead of the bottom of page 12.

When a note-taker taps the image of a record button on a control strip along the bottom of every notebook page, twin microphones on the pen synchronize the notes to whatever is being said at the time. Tapping on the notes later — a calculus equation, for example — recalls the relevant digital audio recording, such as the teacher’s explanation for each symbol in the equation.

The smartpen has enough memory to capture up to 100 hours of audio or 30,000 pages of notes. Both audio and visual elements can be uploaded to a computer via a USB cradle that also recharges the pen, and the pen can play back recorded audio either through its tiny speaker or through a headset attached to an audio jack.

Putting a finger on problem graphics
Miele said he immediately recognized the pen’s potential for helping blind people, and in particular, blind students taking science, technology, engineering or math classes.

“Spatial information like charts and maps are heavily used in technical fields,” he said. “Blind people are historically underrepresented in those fields because it’s hard to represent all of the graphical information for blind students.”

As a blind scientist himself, he said, “it’s important to push those numbers in the right direction.”

Braille, roughly equivalent to 24-point type, has traditionally permitted only a few words on complex figures and tables due to size constraints. Furthermore, Miele said only about 10 percent of blind people are literate in Braille. With its ability to produce audio labels, the pen system could be used not only by people who don’t yet know Braille, but could also help them to learn it. “If you don’t know what a character is, you could tap it with the pen and it could tell you,” he said.

The blind can now publish professional-quality, pen-enabled materials such as maps, periodic tables, economic tables, bar charts and organizational charts on a Braille embosser — or printer — all embedded with audio tags based on the printed microdot patterns instead of the much larger dots required for Braille, Miele said.

“You can annotate stuff to your heart’s content,” he said. “You can layer stuff. Tap it once, and it tells you what it is. Tap it twice, and it may give you supplemental information. You can keep on layering information that would be absolutely impossible if you were to do it in Braille.”

Aided by a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the researchers are also using the smartpen in conjunction with what’s known as a Sewell Raised Line Drawing Kit. “Think of it as a clipboard that has a rubberized surface — your thumbnail would leave an impression,” Van Schaack said.

A clear plastic transparency over the clipboard allows users to draw an image that will leave a physical impression. “The [teaching assistant] can say something like, ‘The teacher just drew a triangle,’ while drawing it on the clipboard, and you can feel it,” he said. “So it’s a tactile figure.”

The smartpen, used in conjunction with the Sewell kit, records not only the drawing’s location but also what was said when it was drawn. Later, a student can tap on the raised triangle and hear the associated classroom commentary as a site-specific auditory label.

The researchers will eventually bring in students on an individual basis and gauge how well they can use the combination of tools as learning aids. Later on, Van Schaack hopes to train students and teaching assistants and let them use the system in real classroom settings, “so we can figure out how what we’ve learned in the lab translates to the real world.”

A smartpen with one gigabyte of memory sells for $149, while a pen with two gigabytes goes for $199. A four-pack of 100-page notebooks sells for $19.95, though Van Schaack said users eventually will be able to print out their own notebook paper.

Free-range surfing
WebAnywhere, an Internet-based service released last month, boasts an even better price tag: free. The program’s innovation isn’t so much about what it does — no more than existing Web readers that convert written text to digital speech — as it is about its availability on almost any computer.

Screen readers normally require users to download software that connects to the Web server and converts text into speech from an electronically generated voice, compressing it into an MP3 file and playing it back to the person.

WebAnywhere instead processes the text on an external server before sending the audio file back to whichever Web browser is in use, thus allowing blind people to access unfamiliar computers in libraries, schools and other public places.

“All the individual parts had been designed, but hadn’t been linked up together before to come up with this,” said Jeffrey Bigham, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington and WebAnywhere’s creator.

Once a user connects to the service, WebAnywhere can act as a search engine or as a conduit for a specific URL. By default, the system processes all of the text on a Web page. Alternatively, the software can anticipate what the user may want to read, retrieve it ahead of time, and cache it on the computer browser to minimize the time needed for the text-to-speech conversion.

This algorithm-driven shortcut, known as pre-fetching, can waste computer time if it retrieves the wrong text block. But by taking account of user preferences during the session, the program can get better at anticipating upcoming text blocks to minimize the latency, or the delay between a user’s request and the actual playback.

“You hit a button and expect it to play text to you. Any delay is really noticeable and really annoying,” Bigham said.

Reducing the lag time, in fact, is key to making the system fully functional, and Richard Ladner, Bigham’s thesis advisor, said other computer scientists were initially skeptical that a Web-based system could get around the problem. By incorporating pre-fetching, caching and other known concepts into the system’s design, however, he said Bigham was able to neatly sidestep the issue. “No one had put them together in this unique way,” Ladner said.

WebAnywhere’s current server can support 100 to 200 people simultaneously (based on current Web server limitations), though Bigham said he’s commandeered other computers in the department to help support the system. So far, early reviews have been generally positive, and speed hasn’t been an issue.

“People are really positive about this, they really see a need for this,” Bigham said.

In initial tests, blind Web surfers have successfully used the program for reading e-mail, retrieving bus schedule information and performing Internet searches. Ladner said he dreams of the program eventually being added to Google’s roster of free products as its first accessibility tool, an arrangement that would greatly expand WebAnywhere’s reach.

Already, inquiries have poured in from China, Portugal, India and other countries. With the release of the program’s HTML and Javascript source code, the researchers are hopeful that programmers can add some of the many extras requested by users as well as translate the software into multiple languages — further helping to break down many of the long-standing barriers for the blind community.

Source — MSNBC