NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

NYC Subway Stations Eerily Empty: DNews Nugget

NYC Subway Stations Eerily Empty: In anticipation of the flooding from Hurricane Sandy, New York shut down its public transportation last night at 7 p.m. The MTA has posted images of their preparations on their Flickr page, including photos of empty subway stations. If you've ever ridden the subway in the City, you know that there is never a time a day when stations like those servicing Times Square or Grand Central Station are devoid of people. But these images have a post-apocalyptic, "I Am Legend" vibe that will give you the heebie-jeebies. via Gawker

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Credit: MTA

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Bus Stop Ads Recharge Your Battery

How many times have you been waiting for a bus or a train when you hear that alarming beep? You take out your phone only to find the battery is drained and only a sliver of red remains. Foolishly, you dig for your charger and look around for an outlet that doesn't exist. Well, search no more. Next time you're in this pickle, you just might find what you're looking for.

BLOG: When Will My Bus Come In?

In an effort to plug (pun intended) the "energy-boosting" properties of their drink, Vitaminwater is outfitting bus shelter ads in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston with 5-volt battery USB ports so users can charge their phones, iPods and gaming devices while on the go. Sure, it's a brazen marketing campaign preying on the vulnerable, battery-depleted masses, but what isn't these days?

DNEWS VIDEO: FUTURE OF CARS, TRAINS AND PLANES

The ad campaign is brainchild of Miami-based advertising agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, famous for their Truth anti-tobacco campaign. The agency has been named agency of the year for the second year in a row by Communication Arts.

Although bus shelters are literally a new outlet (Samsung offers this service in airports) creative marketing is no stranger to them. In 2009,the Got Milk? campaign rigged bus stations in San Francisco to smell like cookies.

BLOG: Electric-Bus Startup Charges Ahead

Now if only an ad agency could come up with a way to recharge our spiritual batteries after enduring long, cross-town bus rides with loud talkers, sloppy eaters and crying babies. Wouldn't that be something?

[Via Yahoo]

 

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Lost Luggage? Have It Find You in 5 Seconds

Five Second Lost Item Locating System: $19.95 for the starter pack; Membership: Included the first year, $4.70 each year after

Is 25,000,000 a big number? That's how many airline passenger bags were lost in 2009. It seems like a lot; but at the time, it was actually an improvement over previous years. The U.S. Department of Transportation's Aviation Consumer Protection and Enforcement offers some tips on avoiding baggage problems. Just the same, you may want a back-up plan.

NEWS: What Happens If You Get Sucked Out of a Plane?

The way the five-second luggage tag works is that a person...somewhere...finds your suitcase, notices the bright yellow and black tag, goes to the Back2You website and enters the serial number on your bag's tag. About, oh say, five seconds later, you're notified of its location by some combination of email, phone, fax and text. These anonymous and sturdy stainless steel tags are lightyears better than the flimsy old paper and elastic ones. If those tags fell off, your bags might've wound up in Scottsboro, Alabama, where its contents (your former belongings) would be sold off. Or potentially worse, while you're still away, either your bag could be returned or someone could see your personal information and decide to visit your home themselves... The same system can help you find pets, electronics or other items. Your membership, which covers multiple items registered to your account, is free for the first year and about five bucks each additional year.

Credit: Simply Think Group

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Virtual Grocery Shopping In the Subway

Who says waiting for the subway has to be idle time? Rather then fiddling with your smart phone with that glazed look in your eye, why not use it to get some grocery shopping done?

South Korean supermarket chain Home Plus has developed a trial run of a virtual grocery store that allows commuters to restock their kitchens on their way to work.

WIDE ANGLE: SMART PHONES

Home Plus plastered subway stations with replicas of groceries that are labeled with a unique code for each product. As they pass by on their way to work, commuters can use a mobile-phone app to snap photos of desired products, then check out. Groceries are then delivered to their doorstep by the end of the work day.

DNEWS VIDEO: IS IT FUTURE YET?

Home Plus reported a 130 percent increase in online sales. With more than 10,000 customers, this virtual grocery store has been a huge hit.

Home Plus's virtual supermarket works like this: Each grocery item image is accompanied by a quick response b code (photo above) that encodes data, the product and its price. Items go into an online shopping cart when each code is scanned and then customers then use their phones to purchase items before catching the train to work. During the day, the orders are filled by Home Plus employees at one of their retail locations and delivered once the subway shoppers return home from work.

NEWS: Cell Phone App Offers Eye Prescription

"For sure, your cell phone will be the graphical user interface to the shopping services," Abel Sanchez, research lead at MIT's Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory, told TechnologyReview. "Think of the early days of the Web versus today. In the early 1990s, the Web was one way, like a paper book. Today, the Web is full of interaction; it's how we do our jobs. I think the supermarket will go through a similar transformation."

[Via Technology Review]

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Double-Decker Bullet Train Could Speed Through Australia

Australian design firm Hassell has unveiled a concept for a new double-decker high-speed train meant to travel between Melbourne and Sydney. Flying at speeds of 248 miles per hour, the train would make the trip, which is one of the busiest air traffic corridors in the world, in less than three hours.

Hassell's design shows a spacious, sophisticated train that has private booths for business meetings as well as dining facilities and a convenience store. Such a train could appeal to commuters, who are tired of dealing with long lines, delayed flights and cramped seating common in air travel.

PHOTO: China's High-Speed Train Breaks Another World Record

According to Hassell's website, the train would do the following:

• remove the reliance on air and private vehicle travel to in turn reduce carbon emissions
• provide shorter travel times to regional cities under pressure from population growth and urban sprawl
• reduce transport-related congestion, opening up housing choice and affordability, and increasing national productivity.

 

[via Sydney Morning Herald]

Credit: Hassell

Robot Train-Plane Could Levitate Future Commuters

Look, over there! Speeding across the countryside on a cushion of air! It's a commuter train! No wait, it's an airplane. It's a ... train-plane! 

Whatever you want to call it, it could be the future of commuting.

At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), in Shanghai, a team of Japanese researchers from Tohoku University unveiled a prototype of the Aero-train, a free-flying, robotic train-plane that levitates on a cushion of air.

DNEWS VIDEO: MAGLEV TRAINS

Essentially, the drafts of the future craft look much like an airplane, complete with four stubby wings (two on each side), a tail fin and two propellers that allow it to fly inches from the ground.

Because it handles like a plane, incorporating pitch, roll and yaw, besides the throttle, reluctant future passengers will be reassured that the research team, led by professor Yusuke Sugahara, has built a prototype that stabilizes all three axes.

For more stability, and to kept it from careening out of control, the Aero-train travels in a U-shaped concrete channel.

So far, the team's small, six-winged prototype successfully skimmed along a runway. Researchers hope to use data gleaned from the robotic prototype to build a manned experimental prototype that can travel 125 miles per hour.

China's Shanghai Maglev Train already zips around the country without relying on rails, instead using high-powered electromagnets to levitate the train as it zooms across the track at 268 miles per hour.

Although this rail-less technology cuts down on the friction that leads to lost energy, MagLev trains still create wind drag between the track and the bottom of the train, making them less efficient and more costly.

The Aero-train's concept actually embraces this wind drag, using the ground-effect principle's fast-moving air beneath the train to propel it down the track.

Credit: Ground Effect Transportation System

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Microwave Camera Could Aid TSA Traveler Scanning

DNEWS VIDEO: ADVANCED T-RAYS PEEK INSIDE OBJECTS

The media is in a tizzy over recent information found in Homeland Security documents suggesting the TSA might have planned to scan people outside of airports using covert mobile X-ray units (TSA denies testing of this technology, in a Forbes update). As a result, a host of hairy ethical and policy issues related to body screening and privacy are back in center stage.

Technologically speaking, however, scientists at the Missouri University of Science and Technology have at least some good news for the disheartened. They've developed a new portable camera that operates like the airport scanners, but which uses safe millimeter and microwaves rather than harmful X-rays. Beyond finding weapons, it could be used for easy, non-invasive detection of dangers from skin cancer to structural damage.

NEWS: Can Math Improve Airport Security?

The camera works by collecting up to 30 images per second of an object from different planes and distances away. These are transmitted to a laptop which puts them all together and creates a synthetically focused image of what was hidden inside. The whole system is small enough to be powered for several hours by a battery about the size of what you'd find in a standard laptop.

Currently, the patented camera operates only in a transmission mode, meaning the object being scanned must pass between the wave source and a collector. The team is working on a newer one-sided version that will work more like a video camera. In the future, they even hope to make a prototype that can display real time images from a scan in 3-D or as holograms.

Imagine standing next to your virtual braces in an airport. One ticket to the Twilight Zone, please.

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Air-Powered Cars Could Challenge EV's in Cities

When it comes to cars, everyone brakes. The kinectic energy from braking is captured by an electric or hybrid vehicle and used to power a generator that recharges its battery. But researchers at Lund University in Sweden think the kinectic energy of braking could be captured in the form of compressed air and used to power the engine. This type of engine could be cheaper to produce and more energy efficient than battery-electric hybrids.

The pneumatic engine of a so-called air hybrid vehicle collects compressed air in a small storage container during braking and then provides power during acceleration or idling. And because air hybrids depend on starting and stopping for their “recharge,” they are ideal in jerky-driving situations like the stop-n-go motions characteristic of city driving. Calculations show that the a compressed-air hybrid could could reduce the fuel consumption of city buses by 60 percent. That's promising, for an experiment full of hot air.

So far the Swedes have only experimented on a single-cylinder engine, but they are already seeking contracts and getting requests to study multi-cylinder engines. Though designs for pneumatic engines have been around for decades, the Lund team claims they are the first to actually experiment with an engine.

Photo: Lund University

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What Do You Want Obama To Say?

Tonight, President Obama will report on the condition of the Nation, and also outline his legislative agenda and priorities. Everyone and their uncle is wondering what the President will say in the State of the Union Address. It's not too much of a mystery. In a four-minute preview video published on the Organizing for America website, Obama said, "My principle focus ... is going to be making sure we are competitive, that we are growing and creating jobs -- not just now but well into the future."

Obama Aims Space Program at Mars

He asks the question that anyone watching the video would ask: How? "How are we going to make sure that we have to most innovative, dynamic economy in the world?"

The answer, he says, is "...we're going to have to out-innovate and out-build and out-compete and out-educate other countries."

I like the way that sounds, but what does it mean to you?

To me, out-innovate means we need to go back to our turn of the 20th-Century roots when Americans were cranking out world-changing inventions like electrification, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, computers and the Internet. Those inventions improved the lives of millions of people and brought about jobs. We need new ideas that will do the same and that takes investment.

5 New Tech Initiatives from Obama

I don't know what "out-build" means. Build what? Infrastructure? Cars? Buildings? Lots of things that were built here are now manufactured elsewhere for much less money. So what can we build here that would make us "out-compete?"

In terms of out-educating, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, seven countries consistently outperform the United States in science: Chinese Taipei, the Czech Republic, England, Hungary, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. We're also outperformed by other countries in reading and in math. Not only does having an education give a person the opportunity to earn more money (see this graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics), it also keeps him/her employed.

So what do you think? Yes, the country needs job and it needs to cut the deficit. But how does it do that and still stay competive in the world market? Post your feedback and tell us what you think.

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What Are Green Jobs?

If you’re looking for a definition of "green jobs," you might think the Green Jobs Act, which Congress passed in 2007, would be a good place to start.

Try again.

The Green Jobs Act allocated $500 million of federal stimulus funds to train workers for energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors. Yet nowhere does the legislation precisely define what constitutes a green job.

Despite all we hear about green jobs from politicians, economists, environmental advocates and others, there isn’t a broad agreement on what these highly touted jobs are in the first place.

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“The reason there isn’t yet a consensus on the definition of ‘green jobs’ is that the (green jobs) movement really didn’t start with economists and statisticians,” said Michelle Melton, a research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “It wasn’t a need of the government, either. It came from an advocacy movement, and now that it’s gained currency everyone has to step back and say ‘OK, what do we really mean?’”

Different Shades of Green

Melton’s research focuses on sifting through the mixed messages and measurements to develop concrete concepts of both since different stakeholders see different shades of green jobs.

While the Department of Energy interprets "green" as solar panel manufacturing and other occupations within the energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors, the Occupational Information Network embraces a broader green spectrum that includes mass transit construction, agriculture and education.

Melton predicts the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will ultimately set the standard. The agency has undertaken a multiyear initiative to accurately quantify and analyze the green workforce and industries in the United States. Those findings should establish the go-to green job criteria.

The BLS currently classifies green jobs based on whether the employer produces green goods or services, or the employees' duties help minimize  businesses’ environmental impact.

Even still, pinpointing green jobs can get tricky.

More From HowStuffWorks:

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• What are Green Colar Jobs?
• How to Do a Local Job Search
• How Employment Agencies Work
• 10 Questions to Ask at a Job Fair

 

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Does the employee handling toxic chemicals that go into the lithium-ion batteries powering hybrid cars qualify as green? Is a secretary at a recycling plant greener than a secretary at a coal plant?

“There’s a lot of room for interpretation at this point (regarding whether employers are ‘greenwashing’),” Melton said. “In this world, nothing is settled yet, with  the exception of LEED standards and Energy Star, and is therefore up for creative interpretation — is 20 percent less plastic in a bottle more green?  Or are any plastic bottles at all not green?"

Ultimately, Definition Isn't As Important As the Job

For the 9 percent of Americans out of work, what defines green jobs probably matters far less than how many are out there. 

Even with generous federal investment, such as the $500 million Green Jobs Act, the green economy hasn’t bloomed overnight.

“Very, very few jobs are 100 percent green by any definition,” said Jeff Strohl, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “Only 1 or 2 percent of the workforce is really green jobs, and it’s not even clear if those are 100 percent green.”

But with a standardized definition of green jobs that can directly influence workforce training programs and education, Strohl expects the employment outlook to brighten.

“As we green the economy, we’ll begin to see each industry identifying green skills and tasks, and I’d bet in 10 years there’s going to one (employee) whose responsibilities will be those green tasks,” Strohl said. “In the short-term (green training) is going to become one of the prerequisites of getting a job.”

Image: iStockPhoto

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