Archive | Technology | Armed with Science

Wednesday Tech Talk: Enriching STEM Education for K-12 Students

Filed under Education & Culture, Technology by John Ohab on October 19, 2010 at 2:43 pm {3 comments}

Dr. Michael E. Kassner, director, ONR Office of Research (Discovery & Invention). (Photo: ONR)

Join the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for an online discussion at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 20, about its goal to enrich science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education for K-12 students.

ONR is leading the Navy’s STEM2Stern initiative, a collection of efforts designed to encourage and inspire today’s students into STEM disciplines. By sparking scientific curiosity, supporting educational initiatives (e.g., science fairs, robotics competitions, etc.) and …mentoring K-12 students, ONR hopes to ensure a pipeline of unparalleled technology talent in the future.

In addition to hosting regular STEM2Stern dialogues, ONR joins the nonprofit Iridescent group Oct. 16 for the opening of a new ONR-funded science studio in Los Angeles, with another to open Nov. 4 in New York. The studio will provide hands-on learning through sophisticated research equipment, tools, mentoring, film and interactive art — all designed to heighten science appreciation and opportunities among urban, at-risk youth. This month, ONR also co-sponsors the first-ever USA Science & Engineering Festival Expo to elevate STEM awareness on the National Mall, Oct. 23-24.

Join ONR for the discussion on this fascinating topic. It’s as easy as this:

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Night Vision Goggle Training Mission [Dispatches from Antarctica]

Filed under Education & Culture, Technology, Videos by Armed with Science on October 17, 2010 at 12:50 pm {3 comments}

This is the fifth entry in the Armed with Science series, Dispatches from Antarctica. The series features Air Force Lt. Col. Ed Vaughan’s first-hand experiences on OPERATION: DEEP FREEZE, the Defense Department’s support of National Science Foundation research in Antarctica.

1 October 2010: McMurdo Station, Antarctica — Night vision goggle training mission.

The alarm blared in my ear. I woke up with that familiar disorientation that occurs from too many nights on the road, over too many years of traveling. It’s a kind of temporal distortion that briefly freezes time and space. For a few seconds, you wonder where you are, what time it is, what day of the week. Why is it so dark!?

I extended my arm into the cold void and fumbled toward the flickering red “10:30pm” at the source of the noise. The air felt like cold metal on my hands and neck. Ok, ok. Brain on…game on! I’m still in the coldest, driest place on Earth, and we have an inbound flight.

After a full day preparing living and working spaces, plus attending to the requisite reports, meetings, and phone calls, I returned to my quarters to grab a short nap. The last C-17 night mission of the season was en route from New Zealand. In just under two hours, they’d be here.

Lt Col R. G. “Beef” Wellington knows it all comes down to this flight. Night vision goggle (NVG) operations in the US Air Force are now routine, permitting round-the-clock operations in both hostile and non-hostile environments. However, flying NVG missions in Antarctica is a different ball game altogether. And training opportunities in this busy mission are hard to come by. Despite his humble answer to such inquiries, make no mistake… Lt Col Wellington is the recognized authority on such highly specialized operations.

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Register for the 2011 DoD Cyber Crime Conference!

Filed under Cyber Security, Education & Culture, Technology by John Ohab on October 8, 2010 at 3:00 pm {5 comments}

By Jim Christy (S.A. Ret.), Director of Futures Exploration at the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3).

I’m excited to announce that registration is now open for the 10th Annual Department of Defense Cyber Crime Conference and Exposition 25-28 January 2011 (pre-conference training 21-24 January 2011). This year, we have relocated from St. Louis, MO, to a hopefully warmer Atlanta, GA, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Downtown Atlanta. City Lights and Southern Nights, Atlanta is certainly a change from snowy St. Louis!

This year’s conference theme, “Cyber Hunters: Predators and Prey…,” explores the ever-increasing ways criminals prey on personal and institutional security and how individuals and organizations can combat and prevent these threats. Come learn from the experts about the most sophisticated tools and techniques available for exposing and preventing cyber crime and how investigators can better hunt down the predators. We’ll also export a 250-300 node network and provide over a dozen different hands-on digital forensics courses to help you make sure you’re the predator and not the prey.

I encourage you to register and attend the 10th Annual DoD Cyber Crime Conference. This is the only program that brings together legal, information technology, investigative and forensic personnel for an open and interactive forum to facilitate information sharing and team building on issues facing the Department of Defense, as well as State and Federal Governments within the cyber crime arena. Visit http://www.DoDCyberCrime.com to register today!

See you in Atlanta! In the meantime, check out this shout-out from Sean Murray, cast member on NCIS.

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Tracking Medical Equipment Using Radio Waves

Filed under Life Sciences, Technology by John Ohab on October 6, 2010 at 1:58 pm {3 comments}

Larry George is a retired Air Force clinical laboratory officer and currently serving as a contract project manager for the Center for Partnerships in Research and Technology (CPRT) in the Office of the Assistant Air Force Surgeon General for Medical Modernization. CPRT has projects and personnel assigned at Falls Church, Virginia, San Antonio, Texas and Biloxi, Mississippi.

As August 2010 drew to a close, and just a bit over two years after we started, we wrapped up a most interesting project with the 81st Medical Group Hospital here at Keesler Air Force Base in South Mississippi. One of the applications in our Automated Identification and Data Collection (AIDC) project evaluated how Radio frequency ID (RFID) tags could improve asset management for mobile medical devices in the facility.

AIDC is that collection of technologies including RFID and related technologies, such as infrared, ultrasound, ultra wide band and good ole bar codes. RFID comes in two flavors – active with an on-board battery on the tag and passive where the radio on the tag draws power from a nearby sensing antenna. You’re probably most familiar with passive tags that cause the alarm to go off as you go out the door when the clerk fails to deactivate the tag in a purchase at Wal*Mart.

We used a special form of active RFID for the medical equipment known as the ZigBee sensors. These sensors look much like Glade air fresheners and just plug into a 120v outlet. Once plugged in, they activate their radios, begin looking for other ZigBee sensors in the neighborhood and automatically establish a full-mesh network – fault tolerant much like the internet itself is. One sensor per 700 to 1000 square feet is required, and although we try to keep all operating, you can randomly lose up to 1/3 or so of the sensors without seriously impacting the location accuracy.

This wireless network connects to the hospital’s network with ZigBee bridges to send the signals to a server that the user may access. During installation, the location of each sensor is marked on a floor plan of the hospital resident in that server. A key advantage of Zigbee is that there are no wires to pull since the sensors talk to each other wirelessly. The company installing the system “lit-up” the entire hospital and nearby dental clinic in about 1½ weeks without pulling a single wire. This is a big advantage in terms of not disrupting patient care and avoidance of dust abatement problems if you have to rip out ceiling tiles pulling wires.

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Wednesday Tech Talk: Navy Clean Water Initiatives

Filed under Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Technology by John Ohab on October 5, 2010 at 1:47 pm {3 comments}

Paul Armistead manages the Functional Polymeric and Organic Materials basic research program at ONR's Naval Materials Division. (Photo: ONR)

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is going green! In ONR’s fourth Facebook “Tech Talk,” at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 6, Dr. James Paul Armistead will talk about advancing how the Navy provides potable water aboard ship – and in its humanitarian efforts – at significant power and cost savings.

Often at sea for long durations, Sailors are surrounded by sea water, some of which is channeled into the vessel’s fire main for use aboard ship – but none of which is drinkable without treatment. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, author Samuel Taylor Coleridge may have explained it best: “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”

In a multistep process, U.S. Navy vessels screen out debris ranging in size from mollusks to molecules. Well before desalination can take place at the molecular level, large objects are removed in prefiltration. Just like a swimming pool filters, however, prefiltration membranes eventually build up with debris that blocks the flow of water. Chlorine and other disinfectants can clean the fouled filters, but not without damaging the specialized reverse osmosis membranes used in later phases to rid the water of salt.

Next-generation reverse osmosis membranes must withstand the tolls of chlorine and other disinfectants in the fire main. ONR is investigating nontoxic solutions to reduce its cycling of filters and significantly cut back on desalination power and maintenance costs.

Armistead is a program officer in ONR’s Naval Materials Division. He manages the Functional Polymeric and Organic Materials basic research program – which currently has interests in novel dielectric materials for high-density energy storage, organic photovoltaics and nontoxic antifouling coatings for ship hulls – as well as an applied research and development program in Advanced Shipboard Seawater Desalination.

Prior to joining ONR in 2000, Armistead worked in Naval Research Laboratory Chemical Division, where he conducted research on composite interfaces, high-temperature composites and polymer crystallization kinetics. He receive bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, or VA Tech, and a doctorate degree in materials science from Johns-Hopkins University.

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Defense.gov Reloaded: User Testing Drives Website Redesign

Filed under Technology by John Ohab on October 5, 2010 at 9:50 am {one comment}

You told us, and we listened. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve taken a step back and looked at the information available to us to try and make Defense.gov a website based on the needs of our viewers. We’ve read your survey responses, analyzed our website statistics, researched search queries and set up user-testing sessions. The new look for Defense.gov is based on those findings.

Below, you’ll find some of the major changes and why they were developed. We hope for and encourage your feedback. Please let us know how we can do better, and it wouldn’t hurt for you to tell us what you think we’re doing right. Use our website feedback form and help us make this the website you come to first for your Department of Defense (DoD) information. Thank you for your interest, and we hope you enjoy the great new features.

Two versions of homepage

One of the major changes we’ve made is to build two distinct homepages. One is for the general public; one is for the Defense community.

To get to these homepages, you’ll notice there are now tabs at the top right corner of the website. By clicking on the two tabs, you can see the different versions of the homepage.

Best of all, the website remembers which one you chose, so the next time you visit you’ll see the last homepage you clicked on.

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The DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge

Filed under Cyber Security, Technology, Videos by Armed with Science on September 30, 2010 at 5:01 pm {4 comments}

Did you know that you can win 11 possible prizes for helping digital forensics examiners solve real-world challenges and develop new investigative tools, techniques, and methodologies? Today marks the last 35 days available to submit your solutions for the 2010 Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3) Digital Forensics Challenge.

The DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge encourages innovation from a broad range of individuals, teams, and institutions to provide technical solutions for computer forensic examiners in the lab as well as in the field. Approximately 25 different challenges ranging from basic forensics to advanced tool development are being provided to all participants.

The challenges are single based challenges and are designed to be unique and separate from one another. Each challenge level establishes the total number of points available per challenge assigned based on its difficulty toward a solution (known to unknown). This is based on the complexity of what a digital forensics examiner normally runs into and has to adjust for/extract/scrutinize in an analysis of those file types for examination problems.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Jim Christy, DC3′s director of Future Exploration and creator of the Digital Forensics Challenge, a few key questions that will help you get to work on solving this year’s challenges.

Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center

Jim, why was this public cyber challenge created?

Due to the ever changing technology, we had real-world issues with some aspects of some of our forensic exams at our Defense Computer Forensics Lab (DCFL) and we didn’t have the research and development resources to address them. So we created a contest. And we received solutions that we didn’t previously have which helped solve real cases.

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VIDEO: Brain-Computer Interface Demo

Filed under Technology, Videos by John Ohab on September 29, 2010 at 1:26 pm {4 comments}

In this demonstration, Tami Griffith of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory‘s Simulation & Training Technology Center, maneuvers through virtual space using a brain-computer interface and a head-mounted display. Tami is controlling the virtual world entirely through her own two headsets. What she is seeing in the head-mounted display is also projected on the screen to the left.

The brain-computer interface provides movement (forward, back, stop) while the head-mounted display injects directional information. As the user turns, direction is injected into the virtual environment. The brain-computer interface is wireless, while the head-mounted display is wired. The head-mounted display also provides 3D sound and a microphone. The total cost is $2,100.

The project is part of Tami’s exploration of ways to improve a user’s sense of presence using low-cost, off-the-shelf technology, with current emphasis on neural-navigation.
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