Hello,
I previously worked in tech support but have a long history of interest in science and cutting edge like life extension. I was a member of imminst and I tried and failed to maintain a wiki about human rejuvenation called Rejuvepedia. If you check the site you see a broken media wiki installation.
Recently I had a life changing experience where I moved out of my parents house and into a rental property. This property had quite a bad mould problem as I found out. Interestingly due to my interest in biological science I learned quite a lot from this experience for example that fungi communicates with a chemical lexicon by releasing MVOCs Microbial Volatile Organic Compounds. You should probably think of their language as something like a cross between the language of heptapods in the arrival and hypnotic commands. In simple terms their language might be something like "feel romantic now", "feel loved now", "feel horny now", "asexually reproduce now" and oddly this chemical lexicon is conserved across evolution and on some very subconscious level humans respond to it as well. So much for free will!
Anyway after losing my job and failing several job interviews due to looking sickly and stinking like mould I finally moved out of the house. I reported the issues to the real estate agent and made it very clear the house was uninhabitable. They didn’t seem to care and decided to try to lease it out to someone else that had no idea either. This made me realise that they probably knew about the issues prior to leasing the house to me. If you want to see the letters I wrote them they are on my wiki at http://www.bioeme.com
In the end I reported the house to the environmental safety office of the local council. I have the extremely damning report that I will likely scan and link to on the wiki.
I did finally get another job but it was doing IT support for a new children’s hospital that had moved from the old children’s hospital. We were working in an old building just next to the new children’s hospital and while cleaning on the build room I found a coffee mug with mould in it.
I was slightly sick but I cleaned it up. I reported the incident and tried to lodge it as an OH&S issue. I bumped into my managers boss on the way to see my boss and informed her. She got very annoyed and gas lighted me and said that mould is harmless. She then called up the agency I was with and got me fired.
I had to apologise to the agency but about a week later I did email them the scanned OH&S agreement that I was actually obligated to report all OH&S issues and it especially mentioned mould. It also said I was to report if things like the aircon wasn’t working. It wasn’t.
After this I started reporting mould findings in commercial buildings and found that literally no one would take responsibility. The buck would just get passed around from one governing body to another. For example when I tried to speak to someone at the health services union they only cover industrial issues not OH&S and they had mould in their building too!
So to that end I started to Urban Biosecurity Volunteer Taskforce. The website is http://www.bioeme.com/osticket
I have been taking tickets from people with mould in their rental properties and have been recruiting and working with other volunteers.
I have bought the Flir One IR, a UV black light. a humidity monitor and a moisture monitor.
I have started building a raspberry pi with air quality sensors but the reason I am here is because I am interested in the development of the e-nose for example Michael Madsens work.
You see the e-nose has the potential to quickly and cheaply identify mould by sniffing for MVOCs and could nearly instantly identify the presence and concentrations of mould and even identify species all without needing to send samples to a lab.
I want to build a kind of peer to peer mesh of air quality and e-nose sensors that communicate via Li-Fi at least that’s the long term goal.
I feel that to get the kind of required olfactory sensitivity or even something really powerful like the olfactory system of the tobacco moth we are going to need a neural net.
That’s what I thought of today when I saw the aritcle about Generative Capsule Networks.
Honestly I’m struggling to understand it and I will keep re-reading until I do then I will have to do the same for the current work on the e-nose.
Until then I’ll keep building raspberry pi devices with off-the-shelf sensors from ali-express or local electronics shops.
Thank you for reading my long post and I hope to be able to contribute something to this community and I hope to learn a lot from it too!
