Link: NASA Ikhana Assists SoCal Firefighters

ackthpt writes “Ikhana (a NASA drone) is primarily designed for suborbital earth sciences missions, but may be fitted out with a variety of sensors. Wednesday, Ikhana took off from Edwards Air Force Base for a 10 hour mission to observe forest fires in California, scanning the terrain from 23-25,000 feet using a variety of sensors for visible and IR light. Able to remain aloft for up to 30 continuous hours Ikhana serves up information in minutes, a process that takes hours when done by manned aircraft observation. ‘The data is processed on the aircraft, up-linked to a satellite and then downloaded to a ground station. From there it’s delivered to a computer server at NASA Ames. The imagery is then combined with Google Earth maps. Command center personnel can view the images on their computer screens and then delegate local firefighters accordingly.’”

Link: How To Motivate Employees

Interesting stuff at the Business Opportunities and Ideas blog, as usual…

Link: Hands on with Google’s OCRopus open-source scanning software

The first alpha version of Google Code’s open-source OCRopus optical character recognition scanning software is out. We put it to the test to see how it handles an assortment of text samples.

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Link: Babel’s Nobel

Observers seem to track the nations, not the languages, of the 104 Nobel-winning writers. Yet parsing the list of 25 languages that they wrote in turns up many interesting instances of disproportion.

Link: Introduction to Porting UNIX/Linux Applications to (15 Oct 2007)

The UNIX Porting Guide is a first stop for UNIX developers coming to Mac OS X. This document helps guide developers in bringing applications written for UNIX-based operating systems to Mac OS X. It provides the background needed to understand the operating system. It touches on some of the design decisions, and it provides a listing and discussion of some of the main areas that you should be concerned with in bringing UNIX applications to Mac OS X. It also points out some of the advanced fe

Link: The case of the missing CableCARD-ready set-top box

As of July 1, the FCC’s integration ban took effect, and cable companies needed to begin offering CableCARD-ready set-top boxes to their customers. Three months later, they’re impossible to find. Ars goes in search of the elusive set-top boxes.

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Link: Chicago Developing ‘Suspicious Behavior’ Monitoring System

narramissic writes “Over the past few years, Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC) has been blanketing the city with a network of thousands of video cameras in an effort to remotely keep track of emergencies in real time. Now, with the help of IBM, the network is getting some smarts. IBM software will analyze the video and ultimately ‘recognize suspicious behavior,’ says OEMC spokesman Kevin Smith. ‘The challenge is going to be teaching computers to recognize the suspicious behavior,’ said Smith. ‘Once this is done this will be a very impressive city in terms of public safety.’”

Link: New Zealand Police Act Wiki Lets You Write the Law

PhoenixOr writes “New Zealand is now on the top of my list for cool governments. They’ve opened a wiki allowing the populous to craft a new version of their Police Act, the legislative basis for policing in New Zealand.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link: Toshiba taps Cell BE for video chip

Toshiba took the PS3’s Cell BE, cut it in half, added some MPEG2 and H.264 hardware, and now plans to sell the result in the consumer electronics market.

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Link: Linux Crashes the Mobile Party

superglaze writes “ZDNet.co.uk has a fairly comprehensive feature on the progress being made by Linux for cellphones. Seems a pretty consumer deal for now, but there are some interesting hints of Linux eventually challenging Windows Mobile and Symbian in business use. The article also seems to suggest that the two big groups pushing mobile Linux could be amenable to a merger due to common interests.”