The Digital Frog Blog

I heard an interesting newscast the other day – it seems that researchers believe that urban noise might be affecting frog populations because female frogs cannot hear the mating calls over the cacophony of human activities.

In our frog dissection, anatomy and ecology program The Digital Frog 2.5, we address environmental concerns and the effects they have had on frog populations. Since we first published in 1995, new research has identified other possible causes, including urban noise and tiny parasites which have been found to cause damage to devloping limb buds.

It looks like it’s time to update the ecology section in The Digital Frog, part of which you can read here:

Introduction

Many scientists consider frogs important bio-indicators. Frogs have permeable skin and live both on land and in water. As a result, environmental problems quickly affect frogs. Recently, frog populations have declined or disappeared around the world, and deformities and mutations are becoming common. People have found adult frogs with misshapen bodies, extra legs, missing or abnormal organs, and even eyes growing inside mouths!

A Thousand Friends of Frogs

A Thousand Friends of Frogs Project was founded in 1995 to collect data on deformed frogs, and pass the information to research scientists. This project links students, educators, families, and scientists from around the world, and helps to educate people about frogs and their importance to us.

Possible causes

Frog deformities, mutations and declining populations are not likely to result from any single cause; it is much more probable that many factors affect our amphibian friends. Scientists have identified holes in the ozone layer, chemicals, pollution, habitat loss and frog harvesting as possible causes.

Ozone layer

Laboratory tests with ultraviolet light have produced frogs with leg deformities. Scientists speculate that holes in the ozone layer may allow enough ultraviolet light through to affect frogs in the wild.

Chemicals and pollution

Amphibian skin absorbs chemicals from both land and water. Tests show that some chemicals, pesticides, and industrial pollutants cause mutations, abnormal growth, or fatal deformities in frogs.

Industrial and agricultural by-products can harm local frogs. Acid rain and runoff rain can carry these chemicals to places far removed from human habitation.

Habitat loss and frog harvesting

Habitat loss is probably the biggest single factor in declining frog populations. Wetlands are frequently drained, filled in, or otherwise destroyed, depriving frogs of places to live. Commercial harvesting is another pressure. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of frogs are captured each year and used in laboratories, schools, and restaurants; this causes serious declines in certain species.

Did you know?

We used four frogs in the original Digital Frog and none had deformities. This version required five frogs, and we discovered internal deformities in three of them.

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We pride ourselves on making software that just works so that you can focus on the important things: teaching and learning. But sometimes things happen that are out of our hands, but make things work not as smoothly as they should. If you use our software or demos on Windows and have upgraded to the latest version of QuickTime, you’ve probably discovered this first-hand.

If you’re using QuickTime version 7.6 or later, you may encounter a problem when you try to launch our software with QuickTime not being recognized. You may be prompted that you need to install QuickTime to use the program even if you have it installed and will be unable to run the program at all. Unfortunately this effects both full and free DemoWare versions on all versions of Windows that run our programs.

Thankfully we have two pieces of good news:

1. We’re working on a fix.
2. Until then, we have a workaround solution that will allow you to run the programs. You can get full details on a support page on the QuickTime issue.

We regret if this creates any problems for our users. The cause of the issue was out of our hands. But we’re doing all we can to make things just work as they should again.

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Well I have the luxury of bringing my dogs to work with me at Digital Frog International. I think this is a blessing, but some days I am not so sure.

We had a canine team of three when Widgett, my Border Collie X pup, started coming to work with me. He joined Whiskey, a 12 year old German Shepherd and Dudley a one year old Golden Retriever. Whiskey was the office boss and took this job seriously (as any boss does) reminding the young guys to stay in line and out of her spot. Whiskey is the dog made “famous” in Digital Frog software, she is featured in the eyeshine section of The Digital Field to The Rainforest and, randomly on various Quit screens in the other programs. Sadly this spring Whisley’s age caught up with her and she is no longer patrolling our office and preventing the planes from landing on the property.

We run an educational software company and when customers call the office they can often hear the dogs “chatting” to us or to each other in the background. Dudley is very vocal and “talks” to his friends to get them to play. When not allowed to do as he pleases Dudley will think nothing of standing his ground and giving us his best back-talking woofs, and as with a toddler in trouble it is hard to not to laugh at his back barking.

With two pups in the office things aren’t always safe. A favorite thing to steal is the bubble wrap from the shipping department and just like kids they like to pop all the bubbles.

I spend a chunk of my day stepping over, around and on dogs! The young dogs love to lie under my desk and chair so I have run over stray ears,tails and feet on more than one occasion.

With Whiskey gone, a new dog was adopted from the local Humane Society for the Digital Frog security team. A handsome two year old Shepherd cross named Kado who now calls us his family. I can now bring my older dog Beemer (a clash with Whiskey) to work as well.

The canine team of four is a good one, one dog for notifying us to the imaginary cars driving up and the other three for reinforcements in case no one is really there!!

We have some messy moments, like when Dudley decided to go visiting the neighbors, uninvited. He had to have a swim in their pond and he likes to swim under water.I was so happy to find him up the road until I realized I would have my own Digital Field trip to the Wetlands in my car once he jumped in. Being a dog lover gave me no choice but to invite him into my car, sopping wet, covered in duck weed, algae and smelling like a swamp beast.

Some days are not as productive as others in our office; it depends what the dogs have on the agenda for the day. We laugh at the dogs everyday and some days wonder what we were ever thinking having four dogs, getting in the way causing mayhem and havoc. If you call our office and it sounds like a kennel, remember it is our dogs in the office.

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Since we opened our online store last year, we’ve been committed to providing the best and most secure online shopping experience for Digital Frog’s range of educational software. We provide a range of payment options to accommodate all our customers, from credit cards to Paypal to purchase orders for those of you in educational institutions.

While payments have always been processed through secure servers, we have had some customers concerned that the entire store was not hosted on a secure site. And we’ve taken those concerns to heart.

We’re happy to announce that as of today, the entire store has been upgraded to ensure that every step in the ordering process is secure and all information transmitted to us is encrypted. It’s an extra layer of security to ensure that you can feel safe placing your order through our online shop.

Photo by AMagill released under Creative Commons.

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From all of us at Digital Frog International, we want to wish you a happy new year and best wishes heading into 2009!

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My role as President of Digital Frog International and a very large garden to be cared for do not leave me much time for vacationing. However, last week, we took a few days off and headed up to Algonquin Park with some friends who are visiting from England.

For once, the weather gods were on our side and we managed to catch the fall colors at their peak, But perhaps the most special experience for me was finally getting to visit Cloud Lake. Of course I have visited it digitally hundreds of times as it is the location for The Digital Field Trip to The Wetlands, but this was the first time I had actually been there.

Our developers chose the location for several reasons, not the least being the stunning scenery, which is even more beautiful in the fall. With clear blue skies and incredible colors, it was an unforgettable experience. Perhaps the most surreal experience is listening to the loons. My ever patient brother-in-law spent hours on Little Joe Lake patiently filming a surprisingly bold loon, capturing its eerie cry on tape.

As the name implies, Cloud Lake is at a fairly high elevation on the Centennial Ridges Trail, so it was a somewhat challenging climb for my poor old body, but worth every aching bone! Our goal was to secrete a metal box with several copies of The Digital Field Trip to The Wetlands for intrepid geocachers to locate using GPS technology. If you do not know about geocaching, check out www.geocache.com – it is a great way to discover out-of-the way gems that most people never find and a fabulous way to teach children about geography and nature. And plan to visit Cloud Lake soon. We intend to keep the cache stocked with CDs.

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Today is International Teachers Day – this got me thinking about my checkered career as an educator and how much teaching has changed over the last half century.

I trained as an elementary teacher in England in the sixties and was in the first cohort of three-year trainees. I majored in English Literature and avoided the sciences whenever I could, but as a junior school teacher had to teach everything including music (and I’m tone deaf!). My most vivid memory of my three years isolated in an old English castle learning the craft of teaching was an elderly professor thumping on the table and saying “If you say you are going to kill a child, you MUST kill that child”. That woke me up! Of course, what she was saying was that you should never threaten a child with a punishment you have no intention of carrying out – some of today’s parents would do well to remember that shocking advice!

I remember one practicum when I had to teach photosynthesis to a class of unruly eleven-year olds. The truth is I did not really understand it myself – but stayed up all night trying to create a large poster that would help the students (and me) understand the process. Which leads me to muse on the incredible visual aids available to today’s teachers. With overhead projectors, interactive whiteboards, the internet and computer resources such as Digital Frog’s natural science software, no teacher needs to stay up all night struggling to create third-rate visual aids.

Truthfully, I never did get to grips with photosynthesis until I was editing the text for Photosynthesis in The Digitial Field Trip the The Wetlands. The excellent animations make it much easier to understand the basic process, while offering details for the older students – they can even click to view the molecular structure of the chemicals – and I did have one bright student in that class long ago who would have lapped up that information.

Of course, that is another advantage of technology-enabled learning tools; they cater to multiple intelligences and learning styles and allow slower learners to work at their own pace, while quick learners can continue to delve deeper and are less likely to disrupt the class.

One change that I personally think is not an improvement is that teaching, at least in North America, has become very prescriptive. Whenever the politicians get any flack about the educational achievements of students, they try and fix the problem by passing legislation such as No Child Left Behind. These mandates are almost always underfunded and impose more bureaucracy and strain on already overloaded teachers, while not improving the overall education.

I was lucky enough to teach in an era when teachers were considered to be professionals who could decide what and how to teach as long as the students left elementary school having mastered the “3 Rs” – reading, (w)riting and (a)rithmetic with exposure to the sciences and the arts. If there was an eclipse of the sun, we would drop everything else and teach everything around this exciting event – we’d find stories and poems that featured thsi mystical event as well as teaching the science (again, with inexpert drawings and posters! The administration understood that not all students could achieve the same academic levels and we were expected to accommodate the multiple strengths and weaknesses.

Although I have not been teaching in the classroom for many years (I moved into corporate training, technical writing and then software development), it seems to me that today’s teachers are so¬† pressured by¬† the prescriptive curriculum that teaching today is even more challenging than when I was teaching, in spite of the incredible teaching tools available to them.

What do YOU think?

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Well the cooler nights and crisper mornings has me thinking about fall and the back to school routine. As marketing coordinator at Digital Frog International, working on the back to school specials got me remembering that favorite time of year (especially for parents!) We each treasure memories from our own school days and the beginning of a new school year. I remember being so hot on the first day of school because I would insist on wearing my new fall school outfit even though it was 80 degrees out!

My daughters were always excited about the new school year, wondering who would be in their class, did they get the teacher they hoped for and of course how would they look in the new school outfit! We all look forward to the shopping trip for new binders, pens, pencils and of course stylish new clothes. In the interest of recycling and reusing we tried not to buy everything new each year though I gave up trying to make my children reuse the markers and colored pencils from one year to the next even though they were barely used, the old ones became the home work set and the new ones went off to school. My girls loved organizing the new binders with paper and dividers and they swore every new year to stay neat and organized in their books(usually that lasted the first 2 weeks)

My daughters have very diverse interests and have chosen very different paths in school. We had a surprise from one of our daughters when she went into science at college. Science was not of any interest to her in high school and after spending her summer working for Digital Frog International testing the new versions of our science programs SciencMatrix: Cell Structure and Function and The Digital Frrog 2.5 she had her interest piqued in anatomy and biology and is now working towards a career in the science field.

Our family will be celebrating the beginning of school for many more years as only one of our four girls has graduated from post secondary education.

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Update‚ÄîAug. 14, 9:55 am‚ÄîEverything on the store is back up and running. Over the next few days, we will be doing some other under the hood changes, so there is a slight chance the store may be offline again. If that is the case, it should not be for more than a short span of time and anything in your shopping cart will be retained and saved for when we’re back online

We’re in the process of upgrading The Digital Frog Online store and hoped it would be a quick and hardly even noticeable process. But as these things sometimes go, we’ve run into some unexpected issues. The store is currently offline, but we’re working hard to fix them as quickly as possible and get everything back up and running smoothly.

In the meantime, if you do wish to place an order for any Digital Frog product (or even a DemoWare CD), you can call our order line at 1-800-621-3764. (Customers outside North America can call +1-519-766-1097.)

We’ll let you know as soon as we’re back up and running.

———-

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You may have read the best-selling book, Marley & Me, (sub-titled “the world’s worst dog) by John Grogan. Well I am beginning to think that our nine-month golden retriever, Dudley, might just be vying for that title. He is adorable, he is beautiful, and he is driving us crazy.

Digital Frog International has always “employed” two canine security guards. Sadly, our nine year old shepherd/lab cross, aptly named Goober, developed lymphoma last Summer and died. I was traveling to science conferences until the end of November, so delayed the search for another security guard until December. We normally “hire” rescue dogs, but very few suitable young dogs were available. One rescue organization had a suitable dog, but turned us down because we do not allow our dogs to sleep on our bed!

So, I went online and found a litter of golden retrievers. One snowy Tuesday in early December, I chose Dudley, and left him with a cuddly toy so that he would have something that smelt of his litter mates when we brought him home. On the Friday we picked up this adorable bundle of fluff.

Whisky, our number one security guard, the alpha German Shepherd, tolerated the intruder. On Saturday, we took Dudley to the vet who pronounced him fit and healthy. By Sunday evening, he was in intensive care suffering from the dreaded parvo virus with a fifty//fifty chance of survival! It seems the first injection had not taken and he had picked up the virus when walking with his foster parents.

One week, and thousands of dollars later, we again brought him home and he has not looked back since, but‚Ķ Our early training efforts appeared to be paying off until Toby, his “cousin” came to visit. Toby taught him to steal food from the compost and to go visiting our neighbors across the road. None of our corrective efforts deterred this behavior, until, in desperation, we installed an invisible fence. Now, he stays on the property and we do not have to worry that he will chase cars.

Dudley, however, is full of mischief and loves to steal shoes, socks, hats, plants, plastic bags, DVDs, childrens’ toys, and even, last night, two dressmaker pins I had just removed from the garment I was working on. Now, the problem is, we have no chance of catching him so the only way we can retrieve the stolen item is to distract him – and the one sure way we to distract him is with food, which, of course, is simply reinforcing the larcenous behavior. One day, when the grandchildren were visiting recently, he stole a pair of socks, looked up at my daughter, trotted over to the treat bin, dropped the socks and tried to remove the lid of the bin.

His thievery is not restricted to inanimate objects – he spends hours on the pond waiting for unsuspecting frogs to emerge.

Sometimes he he succeeds and trots off with his new friend, which he then drops on the grass, anxious to continue the game of tag. Amazingly, most of these frogs do survive – after all retrievers have been bred to retrieve ducks without damaging them. He even retrieved a very large goldfish and deposited it on the grass. Fortunately we found it almost immediately, put it back in the pond and it, too, survived.

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