Cutting Edge

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo may be tough competitors when it comes to Internet software and services, but they are putting their differences aside to build a developer community to tackle bigger picture problems like saving lives in emergencies.

The companies have joined with NASA, the World Bank, and PR agency SecondMuse to organize the first-ever Random Hacks of Kindness event, which was held at a warehouse space-cum community center called Hacker Dojo this weekend. For two days, coders worked on ways to use technology to help solve real-world problems, such as how people can get information and find each other during disasters.

Developers gave presentations on their projects at the Random Hacks of Kindness event on Saturday at a space dubbed Hacker Dojo.

(Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET)

The event came about after representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo attended a Crisis Camp conference for emergency and disaster relief groups in Washington, D.C. in May. The technologists decided that they would join forces to create a community of developers to build tools to help emergency workers.

"We're trying to seed the community," said Jeffery Martin, business product manager for Google Crisis Response. "We're saying, partner with the private sector and we can push technology forward and innovate."

Developers worked on a dozen or so tools that could help disaster and emergency workers in times of crisis. Several tools took advantage of social media sites, like Twitter, and SMS for information sharing. One project envisioned using laptops, routers, mobile devices, USB keys and Wi-Fi to create a mesh network for times when normal networks are down.

Several projects explored the use of maps, including one group that built a widget that allows a user to click on a point in a map to have the coordinates automatically inserted into a message that can then be posted to multiple social networks at once via the HelloTXT service.

The first-place prize went to a group of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley researchers who also work at NASA. They worked on a mobile notification app that can be used when regular cellular networks are so bogged down people can't make phone calls. Using the "I'm OK" app, people can easily notify friends and family members that they are safe via SMS by clicking one button. The "I'm OK" message is then instantly distributed to everyone a user has designated on a pre-set contact list.

The I'm OK mobile app lets people notify loved ones via SMS that they are safe.

(Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET)

Separately, NASA coders collaborated with Google on a GeoCam tool that was used by people fighting California fires earlier this year to place photos of burn areas that were taken by GPS-enabled cell phones on maps so workers can see what damage is like in specific locations.

In addition to training AMES Research Center employees to be first responders in disasters, NASA wants to offer developers use of the satellite and other earth science data collected by its space crafts, which comes to about four terabytes per day, said Robert Schingler, a project manager in the office of center director at NASA Ames research center at nearby Moffett Field. NASA also has tools to analyze the data, which provide information about things like sea surface temperatures, ice sheet activity, and aerosols in the upper atmosphere, he said.

"We've got 40 years of data," Schingler said. But, NASA needs a good application programming interface (API) so developers can make better use of it, he said. Meanwhile, the tools developed at Random Hacks of Kindness events could be used by workers at the World Bank and other agencies.

"It's a perfect opportunity to mobilize the technology community to work on issues such as sustainable development and disaster relief," said Emma Phillips, a consultant in disaster risk management and sustainable development at the World Bank. "This is a first step in building community, and bringing together the public and private sectors for a common goal."

The next Random Hacks of Kindness event will be early next year in Washington, D.C.

Photos: Random Hacks of Kindness

Software may soon enable cell phone users to record their coughs and diagnose a cold, flu, etc.

(Credit: Mac Users Guide/Flickr)

We've already written this week about using cell phone imaging to analyze a blood sample and diagnose disease. Because viruses such as influenza are smaller than light waves, diagnosing something like H1N1 is not yet possible.

Thankfully, the sounds of our coughs might be all we need to diagnose whether we have a cough, flu, or respiratory disease. It all boils down to the quality of a cough, such as whether it is dry or wet (aka "productive" or "unproductive"), where the presence or absence of mucus on the lungs helps to determine the cause of the cough.

Trained health workers are already able to distinguish cough types by sound. Thanks to software currently being developed by Star Analytical Services, people may soon be able to install an app to have this audio know-how at their fingertips.

"We are relying on doctors and nurses with good old technology from the 19th century," Suzanne Smith of Star tells Discovery News. "Why haven't we been measuring coughs?"

The software would work much like a fingerprint check, comparing one recording to a database of pre-recorded coughs that contain the sounds of all known respiratory diseases from people of both genders, and various ages and weights. The current database is only several-dozen large; the Star scientists anticipate needing about 1,000 recordings for the software to be truly effective.

If it's true that each respiratory illness carries distinct audio cues, comparing one's cough to a database could be a great way to get an idea of whether you've got a cold, flu, or some other illness. But I'm skeptical that a sound check can give a definitive diagnosis.

For one, certain coughs could contain a variety of underlying issues from preexisting conditions (a heavy smoker, an asthmatic, someone who has a cough and then gets the flu). And second, as far as I know, I've never had a doctor or nurse definitively diagnose an illness through the sound of my cough alone.

Still, there are certainly circumstances under which I'd prefer coughing into my cell phone to get an educated guess over trekking to the doctor's and paying to be told I simply need to rest.

(Credit: Oto Melara)

The Italian army has ordered 81 Hitrole Light remote-controlled weapon stations for its Iveco Lince vehicles in response to increased attacks in Afghanistan employing improvised explosive devices, according to a statement last month from Italian Ministero della Difesa, or ministry of defense.

Italy has struggled to live up to its NATO commitments in the face of widespread domestic opposition to the war in Afghanistan, and it has gone to great lengths to keep casualties to an absolute minimum. One way to do that is to stay buttoned-up.

The Hitrole is an electrically powered machine gun turret, operated by a single gunner ensconced safely below. The gunner aims and fires, using a flat-panel display and a joystick; elevation and traverse functions are electric. The standard sensor package contains a color daytime TV camera, infrared night sight, and an eye-safe laser range finder (PDF).

The gun system, which is fully stabilized, features an automatic target tracker, increasing the probability of first-round hits on both stationary and fleeting targets, even while the platform is moving, according to Italian manufacturer Oto Melara, which signed a contract worth 20 million euros with the Italian defense ministry.

A subsidiary of Finmeccanica, Oto Melara was once called Vickers Terni, of rugged World War 1 Vickers machine gun fame.

The unit can be fitted with a variety of weapons up to a .50 caliber machine gun or an automatic grenade launcher. Reloading is also preformed from below, with belt ammunition being fed through a flexible duct.

There have been at least 1,500 coalition deaths in Afghanistan since the war began, according to a recent tally--22 of whom were Italian.

Desktop virtualization is saving St. Vincent's both electric and staff energy.

(Credit: Pano Logic)

It's no secret that the installed base of technology at large medical facilities needs refreshing, especially as hospitals work toward digitizing medical records.

At St. Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in New York, a nonprofit with 42 facilities across five boroughs, the constant accessing and updating of patient records through the hospital's shared-bandwidth MPLS network resulted in unacceptable lag time pretty much all day, every day.

So Kane Edupuganti, director of IT Operations & Communications, convinced the higher-ups to retire the hospitals' hundreds of five-plus-year-old desktops and buy more than 600 zero client cubes from Pano Logic.

"About six months ago we did the proof of concept and rolled out our first batch in three weeks," Edupuganti says. "That's how easy it was. Right now we are at 300 and change, and we'll be at 640 by the end of the year."

By opting for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), St. Vincent's went from being bogged down on the MPLS network to running applications and the desktop in the data center, with screen scrapes done to an endpoint device.

The Pano Device uses less than 3 percent the energy of even EnergyStar desktop PCs.

(Credit: Pano Logic)

Edupuganti has placed his faith in Pano Logic because the stateless, tiny Pano Device (3 inches by 3 inches by 2 inches) "simply serves to connect peripheral devices--a keyboard, mouse, VGA display, and audio output--along with other USB peripherals, to a virtualized Microsoft Windows desktop operating system running on a server in the data center."

No OS, no CPU, no memory, no fan, no moving parts at all. As Edupuganti puts it, the devices are essentially just screensharing, using VMware ESX in the background to spin up the hospitals' virtual desktops. If a nurse was in the middle of updating a record and is interrupted (not uncommon in a hospital setting), the nurse could finish updating via an entirely different cube in a distant unit.

Beyond the obvious savings in staff time, from the perspective of not only medical personnel but the center's eight engineers who serve 7,000 people, Edupuganti is already seeing enormous energy savings, with each cube using less than 3 percent of even EnergyStar PCs: "Regular fat PCs suck up 140 to 160 watts; Pano Logic uses 5. Multiply that times 500 units. It's huge."

And it needs to be. In its existence BP (Before Pano), St. Vincent's was purportedly one of New York State's top five power hogs. The significant reduction in energy costs is not only good for the environment, but a key factor in justifying the cost of the Pano devices.

Of course, the cubes are only as good as the network, whose occasional blips result in blank screens on the user's end that a simple restart does not fix, and can be a nuisance when the entire IT department is sleeping soundly at home. But that's a small price to pay, compared to the fat client problems that came before.

Warwick Warp BioLog equipment is already in use on construction sites, where workers have notoriously abraded prints.

(Credit: University of Warwick)

It's long been held that no two fingerprints are exactly alike, rendering the old-fashioned print more reliable than current DNA sampling, which has resulted in false positive identifications.

But what if a fingerprint is warped? When I volunteered to be a mentor recently, I had to get my prints taken, and the process was tedious and full of re-dos because, as I rotated each finger, I tended to slightly smudge the results. (I might have made a good criminal, but I was an annoyed--and inky--mentor.)

Now, the biggest problem with fingerprints--that a good one is hard to find--may have finally been solved, according to new research out of the University of Warwick in the UK.

Most fingerprint techniques identify a handful of features on a print and match the entire set of characteristics against each fingerprint in a database of templates--a laborious, often time-consuming endeavor. Researchers at the University of Warwick took a different approach.

Considering the entire pattern of a print, they would transform its topology into a standard coordinate, thus allowing the "unwarping" of any print distorted by such common real-world issues as smudging and uneven pressure. The clearer digital representation of the print is then mapped onto an "image space" of all other prints in a given database, so instead of comparing one print to every other print in that database, the overlaying of the print against the entire database finds a match, if there is one, in seconds, regardless of whether that database holds a million or a thousand prints.

The unwarping is so effective, it turns out, that it even compares the position of individual sweat pores (there are hundreds) on a print. Previously, the slightest distortion of a print rendered these densely-packed pores unreadable.

The technology has already won over the construction industry, with spinout company Warwick Warp installing its BioLog for security and staff management at six building sites. (Apparently construction workers often have abraded fingerprints due to the nature of their work.)

And the results have already impressed more than the construction industry. In the past week, the technology has been examined by two of the world's most respected technical fingerprint benchmarking tests; the UK's National Physical Laboratory ranked Warwick Warp's fingerprint technology best overall for accuracy, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S. ranked it third.

The signature may soon be obsolete. Want to use your credit card, see personal medical files, buy beer when you look underage? Take off your glove, please.

The Department of Energy on Monday named the first winners of a program aimed at generating breakthroughs in clean-energy technologies.

The program, called Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), began taking applications earlier this year for research ideas that reduce imports of foreign fuel, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and improve energy efficiency. Funding for the agency is part of the Obama administration's goal to improve the economic competitiveness of the U.S. by investing in energy technology.

The DOE is awarding $151 million in 37 grants to both academics and green-tech companies, most of which are start-ups. The ideas are meant to be high-risk and high-reward, with a number not expected to meet their goals.

Authority to create the agency, roughly modeled on the DARPA defense program that spawned the space race, happened in 2007 but it wasn't funded until earlier this year. ARPA-E now has authority to fund as much as $400 million in research. A second tranche of grant awardees is scheduled to be announced later this fall.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

The naming of ARPA-E grants is being closed watched in the green-tech start-up community and among researchers. There were 3,600 concept papers submitted, followed by 300 full applications and ultimately 37 awardees.

One awardee is an effort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make an all-liquid battery, which would make storage of storage of solar and wind power more cost effective.

Another is funding for a bioreactor developed by the University of Minnesota that proposes using two microorganisms to make a vehicle fuel. One bacteria would convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into a sugar, and another would convert the sugar into a fuel.

Two other efforts include developing enzymes that would more effectively capture carbon dioxide from power plants and a low-cost material for making LED lighting. The full list of awardees is at the ARPA-E site (click for PDF).

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is scheduled to speak at Google Monday morning in Google to make an announcement, after which Google CEO Eric Schmidt will speak with Chu. Through its philanthropic arm Google.org, Google has invested in a number of renewable energy companies. It has also developed Web-based energy monitoring software for consumers.

So you're a programmer deciding where to invest your energy. What's a better idea: the latest Apple device, where hot new games can mean big bucks and millions of users, or a calculator introduced 10 years ago?

ticalc.org news editor Michael Vincent

(Credit: Michael Vincent)

Most go for iPhones and iPods. But another community thrives in its own way. These are the folks who spend hours trying to elevate their Texas Instruments calculators to a level far surpassing their modest roots.

Among their achievements: adding new features, creating new operating systems, connecting the calculator to keyboards and other hardware, playing a video excerpt from "The Matrix," and even running Nintendo Game Boy video games. Not bad for calculators such as the $100 TI-83 Plus, introduced in 1999 with a Z80 processor running at 6MHz, 24KB of memory, 160KB of flash memory, and a 96x64 pixel display.

Why all this work for projects that realistically are not going to reshape the future of computing? Much of the motivation parallels mountaineer George Mallory's rationale for climbing Mount Everest: "Because it's there."

TI's graphing calculators are programmable, affordable, and widely used in schools--a lot more approachable than a Himalayan peak. That doesn't mean they're easy. The calculators must be programmed in assembly language--a slightly more human-readable version of the very basic machine code the calculators execute, but hardly something more easily read and debugged such as C or Java.

Twitter may not be making money but at least it's providing a forum for some innovative artistic collaboration.

Take, for instance, science fiction writer and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman. He's going to create an audio book based on tweets provided by Twitter users.

You might remember the game of "Exquisite Corpse" where a group of people create a poem or story together by writing down sentences in succession that no one else can see until everyone has contributed. Read as a whole, the mish-mash can be entertaining, at least to slightly inebriated English literature students bored on a Friday night.

Well, Gaiman is going to start the project off with a first line to be tweeted at midnight EDT Monday at http://twitter.com/BBCAA. Others can tweet their contributions to "#bbcawdio."

"When roughly 1,000 tweets are logged, we'll edit the contributions and compile a script, then head into the studio to record and produce the audiobook. The final audiobook will be downloadable free on our Web site and also available as a digital download at iTunes and other audiobook retailers," the BBC Audiobooks America Blog says.

Given that Gaiman has 1.2 million followers, I suspect it shouldn't take long to get 1,000 contributions.

It's not clear where this idea came from, but Gaiman has a history of using the Internet in interesting ways. He came up with the idea of raising money for causes by auctioning off the names of characters in upcoming books on eBay, and organized such an auction with other writers in 2005.

(Thanks to Galleycat.)

Neil Gaiman is using Twitter to solicit contributions for an audio book project.

(Credit: Twitter)

At first glance, James Dyson's latest invention looks like a powerful HD antenna or perhaps a small portal into another world. But in fact, the device, which carries the vaunting title of Dyson Air Multiplier, is something much more common: a fan.

What, a fan with no blades? Yes, that's exactly what you're looking at, and what makes the Air Multiplier so hard for people to classify at first. This fan uses some innovative airflow engineering to pull air up through an energy-efficient brushless motorbase and multiply it 15 times, expelling it through an airfoil-shaped ramp at a rate of 118 gallons a second, according to the press release.

Dyson, the company, says its fluid dynamics engineers spent four years "running hundreds of simulations to precisely measure and optimize the machine's aperture and airfoil-shaped ramp" and air fluctuations were mapped with something called a Laser Doppler Annometry.