September 1st, 2011 - by admin | Posted in: EDUCATION
Imagine it’s your first day of college. You’ve naively registered for an 8 a.m. class, bright and early Monday morning. As you plop down in your seat, you fight back a yawn and feel the eyelids getting heavy. But then, the professor says “Free iPads for everyone!”
That would get your attention, now, wouldn’t it?
That’s exactly what happened to 24 lucky University of Texas at Tyler freshmen who registered for Dr. Ann Beebe’s English Composition class last fall.
iPad as a learning tool?
In April of 2010, Beebe, along with her colleague Dr. Robert Sterken in the Political Science Department, proposed a pilot program that would use the popular new devices to enhance their class’s learning experience.
August 29th, 2011 - by admin | Posted in: BUSINESS, ENERGY
At Houston’s Texas Medical Center, power is a commodity in high demand. The sprawling medical center houses more than 6,800 beds across 33.8 million gross square feet of patient care, education and office space. In terms of space, TMC is the 12th-largest business district in the United States.
“Last summer, Texas had two days where the state was close to its capacity on the electrical grid,” says Richard Wainerdi, TMC’s president. “In the Texas Medical Center, you can’t afford to not have electricity — or heating or cooling, for that matter.”
TMC officials recently welcomed plans by Thermal Energy Corporation (TECO) –– which heats and cools TMC member institutions –– to generate its own power and relieve the strained power grid.
On a typical day at Houston’s Methodist Hospital a familiar face, known to doctors, nurses and staff as “Stan,” is going under the knife. Today it might be brain surgery, or it might be a knee replacement. It might be a colon endoscopy; it might be a vascular procedure. It might be all of the above.
Stan might sail through with flying colors. He might bleed out. He might live or he might die. He might even get a do-over.
But one thing is for certain – Stan will be back on the table tomorrow.
You can do that when you’re made of rubber and steel and filled with pig entrails; when your sole purpose is to help train and hone surgical skills. Stan – short for iStan, the name given by the folks who built him – is one of three state-of-the-art mannequins with a starring role at the Methodist Institute for Technology, Innovation and Education (MITIE), where the goal is to make medical students into surgeons and surgeons into better surgeons.
June 21st, 2011 - by mcastellon | Posted in: BUSINESS
The future of location-based check-ins, and why Texas rocks for business.
New forms of online networking and engagement are occurring thanks to applications that tap into your smartphone’s connectivity.
One form of this engagement is geolocation check-in services –– apps that enable you to pinpoint where you are on a map using your device’s GPS (usually a business or event) and share that location with your friends on Facebook and Twitter, and even engaging with the business itself.
One of the top geolocation services is Austin-based Gowalla, which last year became the darling of the geek chic at the SXSW Interactive conference. Gowalla is the brainchild of Josh Williams and Scott Raymond.
Gowalla recently logged its one-millionth user, and has leveraged its expanding user to base to partner with several high profile companies, including Nike and Adobe.
Now, the race is on for businesses to use services like Gowalla to engage customers over the network (check-ins at many locations typically yield users incentives such as freebies and discounts while helping to drive awareness, foot traffic and customer service).
Josh Williams, who currently serves as Gowalla’s CEO, talks to Texas Innovator about how geolocation apps can serve both customers and businesses, and the advantages of doing business in Texas.
No, nanoshells aren’t something that Mork brought with him from his planet of Ork. But they may hold an otherworldly-like power to defeat our planet’s biggest nemesis: Cancer.
Jennifer West, professor and chair of the Department of Bioengineering at Rice University, and Susan Blaney, deputy director of Texas Children’s Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine vice chair for research in the Department of Pediatrics, have tested a groundbreaking technique that employs customized gold nanoshells to destroy cancerous glioma tumors.
Gold nanoshells were the mid-1990s brainchild of Naomi Halas, a Rice University researcher. Nanoshells have been compared to tiny malted milk balls – only in this case, they’re coated with microscopic layers of gold instead of chocolate, and they are about 20 times smaller than a red blood cell. Researchers can fine-tune nanoshells to respond to varying wavelengths of light, and West and Halas showed in 2004 that nanoshells could be used to destroy cancer tumors in mice.
West’s and Blaney’s new research, the results of which appeared in the Journal of Neuro-Oncology, marked the first time this potential cancer-fighting method has been tested against glioma, one of the most aggressive and toughest to treat forms of brain cancer.
The team tested mice that had abdominal tumors of human glioma cells. The researchers first injected customized nanoshells intravenously and then waited 24 hours for the nanoshells to accumulate in the tumors. Then, for upwards of three minutes, a near-infrared laser light was beamed at the tumors. While harmless to the healthy tissue in the mice, the laser’s light caused the nanoshells to generate enough heat to kill the tumors and the blood vessels supplying them. The team believes using light-activated nanoshells to zap glioma tumors may make it possible to effectively treat cancer patients without the draining and debilitating side effects that are common with chemotherapy or radiation treatments.
In short, nanoshell treatment has the potential to provide pinpoint destruction of cancerous glioma tumors with minimal intrusion. It’s like a heat-seeking missile that destroys the bomb factory but leaves the surrounding neighborhood and roads intact. Employing nanoshells to treat glioma is of particular interest to the team because glioma tumors are often inoperable, and fewer than 5 percent of glioma patients survive beyond five years.
More than half of the mice that received the nanoshell treatment demonstrated no signs of cancer three months after the treatment. More research must be done before the technique is tested on human patients, but the team is encouraged. Nanospectra Biosciences, Inc., a Houston-based company co-founded by West in 1999, will be at the forefront of finding ways to commercialize nanoparticle-based glioma cancer therapy and bring it to the medical marketplace as soon as possible if the technique is proved feasible through further research.
April 6th, 2011 - by admin | Posted in: COMPTROLLER
You spoke, we listened. Here’s what to expect in 2011.
In December we asked our Texas Innovator audience to tell us a little about their holiday spending plans, and about expectations they have for the publication moving forward.
We saw a wide variety of responses from those of you who filled out our survey. More than 35 percent of you opined Apple iPhones and iPads for the holiday season, and almost 14 percent of you put a Blu-Ray player at the top of your must-have list. Slightly more than 48 percent of Texas Innovator readers said they planned to spend about as much money for the holidays as they did the year prior. This gives us plenty of hope for the economy in 2011.
Now, let’s talk about us. We asked you to provide some details about what you expect from Texas Innovator staff in 2011. We’ve generated some great ideas from you –– ones that we are already working on making a reality, including more stories about women in technology and women-owned businesses. We also plan to include more about innovation in industrial and commercial construction across Texas, and more content about job training and technical education throughout this great state.
We’re listening to you. If you have any ideas for Texas Innovator, simply e-mail us, or better yet, reach out on Twitter. You can find us at @txcomptroller.
March 3rd, 2011 - by mcastellon | Posted in: BUSINESS
Consumers are talking to businesses in entirely new ways.
In the latest issue of Fiscal Notes, I write about how social media tools have helped Texas companies like Dell and Southwest Airlines tear down the wall that exists between corporate offices and customers. Both of these companies have been instrumental in defining true innovation in the field of real-time customer service, outreach and promotion.At the very front of this discussion is Doc Searls, author of 1999’s The ClueTrain Manifesto.
… Searls and a small band of fellow journalists and technology enthusiasts proposed that the Internet was much more than slick interfaces and dynamic content. Rather, they proposed that the Internet scratched a primitive itch possessed by humans: to connect and to be understood, to tell tales and participate in the village bazaar. Storytelling and word-of-mouth in these ancient markets were major forces in trade and economy. The Internet, they predicted, would torch the corporate firewall and force companies to interact on a closer level with markets –– with individuals –– on a one-to-one basis, just as a hunter or spice trader at a village market. Companies that chose not to participate in the new model would be doomed.
In his book The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman calls Searls “one of the most respected technology writers in America.”
Searls recently took the time to visit with Texas Innovator to explain how social media tools and customer service trends are affecting business.
Researchers at the University of North Texas are leading the charge to reduce the time your electronic devices spend on the charger.
With minimal use, portable systems, like mobile phones, will last 10 hours on one charge. But more than likely you’ll have to replenish the battery in a few hours. Power leakage and inefficient consumption have long been a problem Dr. Saraju Mohanty hopes to solve.
An innovative “chicken coop” design, backed by a $9.9 million federal grant, is allowing Yahoo! to drastically cut energy costs at its new state-of-the-art data center.
The technology is housed in 120-by-60-foot structures that look like chicken coops – hence the name Yahoo! Computing Coop (YCC) – and ventilated to use natural air circulation for cooling. Yahoo! estimates the design will consume 40 percent less energy than before, and 95 percent less energy than a typical data center.
The first-phase of the center, with 155,000 square feet in capacity, was opened in September 2010. A second phase, scheduled for completion in 2012, will add as yet undetermined capacity. The center is expected to eventually accommodate an estimated 250,000 server nodes.
The energy-efficient design earned a $9.9 million sustainable energy grant in 2010, the largest given out by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Green IT program. That was part of $117 million in federal stimulus and other DOE funds targeted toward making telecommunication and data centers more energy efficient.
Yahoo! chose western New York for two main reasons – climate and power availability.
Buffalo’s average temperatures dip to a low of 17.8 degrees in January and peak at a high of 79.6 in July, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This allows for widespread use of natural air cooling.
Also, the facility will use electricity generated by Niagara Falls. The New York Power Authority, the main utility in western New York, has guaranteed 15 MW that will save Yahoo! about $100 million of 15 years.
The data center has a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.08, far below the industry average of 1.92 as determined by the Environmental Protection Agency. PUE is calculated by dividing a data center’s total power use by the power used to run the computer infrastructure.
Data centers account for about 1.5 percent of U.S. electric consumption, according to the EPA.
The design will save enough energy to power more than 9,000 households for a year and enough water to provide a year’s worth of drinking water for 200,000 people, according to Yahoo!.
David Dibble, Yahoo executive vice president of service engineering and operations, says the building allows the company to allocate for cooling only one cent of every dollar spent on electricity.
“Significantly reducing electricity usage is not only good for the environment, but good for our bottom line, giving Yahoo! a competitive advantage,” he says.
The facility will include a data center, an operations center to monitor infrastructure uptime and a round-the-clock global support center for Yahoo! employees. It is expected to bring 125 jobs to the area.
IBM has also taken the green approach to data centers, building a $362 million facility in Research Triangle Park (RTP), N.C., that used 95 percent of an existing building shell and recycled 90 percent of interior building materials.
The 100,000 square-foot RTP center also uses ambient air, when possible, to chill water used to cool the servers.
The RTP facility also has more than 30,000 sensors that move workloads around to avoid server temperatures from rising too high.
- Mark Wangrin
To view resources and information about energy-efficient data centers, visit the Green Data Center Alliance.
Designers at Hungary’s Schwinn Csepel ZRT recently unveiled the Stringbike. Instead of a chain, sprocket and cassettes, Stringbike’s pedals drive thin, polyethylene cords that run along each side of the bike and back to a drum on the rear hub. The cords wind and unwind around the hub, which drives the rear wheel.
The result, to the relief of cyclists, is a lack of a greasy chain –– the nemesis of clean pants and shoes everywhere.
The positioning of the cords on both sides of the bike also creates symmetry within the pedaling, distributing load to both sides of the bike.
According to the company, maintenance of the bike requires no lubrication once it leaves the factory.
“We feel the new model’s development is a great improvement over the first one,” says Michael Lantos, a company representative. “We just took a slightly different approach to the same principle functions.”
One of the more notable variations from standard bikes is the absence of a chain, which gets to the heart of Stringbike’s overall principle — efficiency. Traditional, chain-driven bike gears and components are subject to wear-and-tear. This leads to friction as lubricated metal collects dirt, grime and other materials.
Stringbike’s early designs featured a kidney-shaped disc that, when turned by the pedals, drove the cords to the rear wheels.
“The disc was large, heavy and the force on the swinging arm was very high,” Lantos says.
The bike’s gearing mechanism is contained within the triangular piece and controlled by the rider’s right hand. It can be changed for stiffer or lighter pedal resistance, providing more power for racing.
According to the company, maintenance of the bike requires no lubrication once it leaves the factory.
Photos and instructional videos detailing the build, drive system, starting and stopping and more are online.
November 30th, 2010 - by admin | Posted in: COMPTROLLER
Texas Innovator readers are on the cutting edge of innovation. We’re conducting this anonymous and confidential poll to research your attitudes and preferences on the hottest tech gifts this holiday season.
We’ll post the results early next year – so you can see how other members of the Texas Innovator community voted.
November 19th, 2010 - by admin | Posted in: BUSINESS, SCIENCE
At Chicago’s Field Museum, a new generation of display dinosaurs watches as visitors approach.
“The fact that they watch you and react to your movements is just incredible,” says Hilary Sanders, the museum’s senior project manager.
What makes these dinosaurs so different from traditional static displays is that they not only move, but move in different ways and with different reactions based on the movement of onlookers.
The dinosaurs themselves, five displays in all –– a Tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops with an accompanying nest display and two velociraptors — hail from Japan. But at the heart of their interaction is technology developed by Texas-based Kumotek Robotics. Display dinosaurs, like those found at many museums, are a perfect fit for Kumotek’s interactive software, which can play a significant role in visitors’ experiences.
Consumers are talking to businesses in entirely new ways.
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to our RSS feed
