Month: February 2009

Bytemarks Cafe – Episode 27 – Feb. 18, 2009

After the headlines, Meleana Judd from Hawaii SEED will tell us about an upcoming event. Then, Ron Hashiro and Rich Fewell from the Emergency Amateur Radio Club will join us to talk about the current state of amateur radio technology, and the role groups like the EARC play in the event of a disaster.

First the News:

  • Researchers at the University of Hawaii, working with colleagues from Johns Hopkins and Northwestern University, have discovered new promise in an old drug remedy. The team has found that clofazimine, a synthetic compound made in the 1890s and used to combat leprosy, has promise in treating multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, and type 1 diabetes.
  • Farrington is now the first high school on Oahu to establish a Project EAST program, which is a national initiative to teach students to solve real-life problems using technology.
  • We’ve previously discussed NASA’s Lunar Rover and its test runs on the rugged terrain of Mauna Kea, where the volcanic soil is the best representation of the lunar surface. This week, Michelin announced that it will provide its “Tweel” for upcoming missions of NASA’s Lunar Rover. The “Tweel” is an non-pneumatic Tire/WhEEL combination which offers a no-maintenance, easily-retreadable tire for consumers, and the holy grail for the military – a tire that can’t be “shot out.”
  • The National Park Service is in the middle of a multimillion dollar renovation of the Arizona Memorial Visitor Center. But work is also underway to give visitors an unprecedented look at the sunken battleship itself. The Parks Service is working with the U.S. Navy and researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanic Institution to create a 3-D video tour of the U.S.S. Arizona. Top-of-the-line high-definition equipment allows them to collect both detailed videos and still images.

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Bytemarks Cafe – Episode 26 – Feb. 11, 2009

After the headlines, Sabrina Velazquez from the Academy of Arts will tell us about “Wikipedia Loves Art.” Then, Ted Liu from the Dept of Business, Economic Development and Tourism and Bill Parks from the US Department of Energy will join us to talk about Hawaii’s energy future, and the role the Clean Energy Initiative plays in shaping it.

In the News this week

  • The U.S. Department of Education has granted nearly $192,000 for a project to help native Hawaiian elders (or kupuna) to record their personal histories and have them endure in digital form.
  • After 10 years of development here in Hawaii, an Australian-based drug company says it’s confident that a dengue fever vaccine it’s developing will protect people against all four strains of the mosquito-borne disease.
  • For a large data processing company like Island Insurance Company, disaster recovery is an important business consideration. To address this need Island Insurance has selected Houston, TX INX’s Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service (VRS) as their DR solution.
  • As commercial aquaculture grows, the need for fish food grows as well, and catching wild fish to feed to farmed fish presents obvious problems — not the least of them being the impact on the environment.

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