Ask E.T.: Project Management Graphics (or Gantt Charts) - came across this forum from a newsletter email from brucemaudesign. A fantastic forum discussion thread still active after 4 years!! Lots of posts from large civil projects to novels to movies to F1 teams regarding how to visualise the many interdependencies in managing multivariant projects - did they use a Gannt chart for the great wall of china.

From one of the posts a link to good PM resource from ex Columbia uni prof: http://www.projectreference.com/

One Day, That Economy Ticket May Buy You a Place to Stand - New York Times Charles forwarded me this link after our recent workshop on Airport Retail. Inevitably part of the discussion ended up around the future of airline interiors and the kind of services that may become available.

What i liked about this article was the standing *harnesses* if only they would make them horizontal for the same cost.....

Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.

Intelligent Sensing Programme
Intelligent Sensing Programme Meeting
Venue: Riverside Room, IEE (IET), Savoy Place, London, WC2R 0BL
To see meeting handouts and delegate list contact Duncan Wilson x52794

Research challenges in wireless sensor networks
Richard Egan - Thales Research and Technology (UK)

Focused on who might pay for WSN, the building monitoring example referring to the CMIPS project. Showed the temperature plots from ground level to ceiling height. The plot for a day showed the heating coming back on in middle of the night - why was this the case - the FM guy / engineer can explain it away but for the first time this *anomaly* was visible to others.

EU project: ESense - http://www.ist-e-sense.org/ a technology oriented project. High level aim is to improve energy efficiency. Focus is low power and bandwidth efficiency - aim is to achieve 20nJ/bit. The flip side to this is to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted so the project is also looking at distributed processing, collaborative processing etc.

Sensor networks for real homes
Tobie Kerridge - Goldsmiths College, London

2 pieces of work from an interaction design perspective. Weather watchers + Home Health Horoscope. Emphasis on context of everyday usage. Equator project EPSRC funding.
Weather watchers - Philips and Helen Hamlyn research centre, RCA - looked at different ways to *show* weather features - the end user involved in the project (a retired met guy) however did not like any of the prototypes - not accurate enough for him.

Home Health Horoscope - Bill Gaver, intel sponsors - promoting well being in the home. The sample house hold was *analysed* by looking at: use of cleaning materials (business of activity), a sofa in the bedroom (a place for intimate moments) etc. from these a measure of *being* could be established. Using Crossbow Micaz. Prototyped boxes to contain motes for use in environment. All this data (mote, pict based serial data etc) is all collated and transformed in a *fuzzy* way to create a daily horoscope which can be printed out for the household. Offered to meet at later date to chat about how they are collating and aggregating data. Also noted that they have had serious battery issues with Micaz running in high power mode - 2-3 days battery life.

Oceanographic sensing - Challenges and opportunities
Matt Mowlen - National Oceanography Centre, Southampton

what to measure - CO2, Oxygen, Methane, Nutrients, Trace nutrients. Measurement density is a key parameter. Traditionally done via research ships. Had a nice diagram showing processes and platforms - man years on one axis and scale of measurement on the other, showing what can be monitored given these spatio temporal parameters - current problem is that measures have a huge variability - cannot get measures that satisfy Nyquist.

Bio fouling is another issue - when submerged in the sea (sometimes down to 6000 ft) other orgs in the sea want to grow on your sensors or even worse eat them!!

Next steps - looking at lab on chip systems

Sensor Networks for Monitoring Water Supply Systems - Lessons from Boston Water.
Ivan Stoianov - Imperial College

Working with Intel using Intel Mote 2, 32bit XScale PXA 271 processor. http://embedded.seattle.intel-research.net/wiki/index.php?title=Intel_Mote_2
Some interesting slides on water distribution system and what is being monitored - issues such as Jan 2005 discharge of 250 million cubic meters of raw sewage into Boston harbour *beacause pump went down and they were not sure of levels in system and did not want it to surface in the city*. 80 combined sewer outfalls around Boston harbour area - how can we monitor when an event occurs that could put bathers at risk? and make this activity available to them. http://db.csail.mit.edu/dcnui/

Centre for large scale infrastructure monitoring - http://www.senseITall.eu/ research project just funded by EPSRC Partners include Intel, Thames and Yorkshire water, MIT, Cambridge Uni. - looking for industrial partners.

Wireless MEMS sensors - A new vision for sound measurements
Richard Barham - National Physical Laboratory

NPL, QinetiQ, Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering (Strathclyde Uni) - have demo devices that they would like industrial partners to try - get contacts for Acoustics and potential for use in office environments? sound mapping on roads and the recent study that Verity published in ATN?
Road traffic and wind farm monitoring are the first users of the prototypes - does Arup have a good test application?

Post meeting... WiSiG WSN special interest group meeting

20 people in attendance - 36 members on community,
2 page doc to put in front of DTI Strategy Board to propose a WSN strategy for UK industry.
DKArvind has prepared a first draft of this document.
Resources to support KTN will come from the Sensors KTN - this is the benefit from hosting it within that entity. They will benefit if the community grows and is successful since their KTN is supporting a community.
discussed the different activities that this community / special interest group would want. mixed bag of responses, mostly tech suppliers, tech producers, academics - only a couple of integrators.
6-12 month meetings
volunteered to participate on the advisory board for WiSiG.

one of the metrics of KTN's is the number of new collabs and meetings held.

Programmer’s Notepad 2 - i started using PN when developing in NesC for Crossbow motes and have just come across this updated version - a great simple code editor for windows.

Sun SPOT should be rolled out in May - looking forward to getting my hands on these. Here is an intro for information:

Based on a 32 bit ARM CPU and an 11 channel 2.4GHz radio, Sun SPOT radically simplifies the process of developing wireless sensor and transducer applications. The platform enables developers to build wireless transducer applications in Java using a sensor board for I/O, an 802.15.4 radio for wireless communication, and use familiar Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), such as NetBeans to write code.

The Sun SPOT system features the "Squawk VM," a small J2ME virtual machine (VM) written almost entirely in Java. It provides the ability to run wireless transducer applications "on the metal," (directly on the CPU without any underlying OS), saving overhead and improving performance. End users also gain the flexibility to experiment with different implementations of low-level services, such as networking protocols, which are typically buried inside an OS. A set of Java libraries under development will provide access to the sensors, the I/O pins on the sensor application board, and the integrated on-board radio. By running multiple applications on the one virtual machine, and by using a more compact representation of class files, the Squawk VM makes better use of the small memory space available on SPOT devices.

Howstuffworks "How Motes Work" - came across this great intro again...

Discovery Channel Video - on the use of motes for monitoring vineyard growing conditions - had seen the articles about this but good to see a video of the environment and the packaging they are using.

WSN Update - News and Information About Zigbee & Wireless Mesh Sensor Networks a handy blog to review what is going on in the world of WSN - has a US focus.

Paper in IEEE Computer and course info for
CSE 466: Software for Embedded Systems (Wi'06) a great demo of ad hoc networks and emergent behaviour. Each mote in the network sings a bird song. If another mote near by is also singing the same song it reinforces that tune. If they all sing the same then someone starts a new one. If no one nearby is singing the same then they try a new one. This way an emergent flocking starts - nice...

follow up with Bruce Hemingway to request a way to replicate demo.

GpsActionReplay have been looking for this kind of GPS tool for a while - should have thought to look for an application made by / for windsurf speed sailors... Just need to download a .gpx xml file (i use easygps) containing data for a route and then load it into the gps actionreply applet to analyse your speed over a journey (on the bike, motorbike, snowboard or windsurf session)

Chris Jofeh, Director, Ove Arup & Partners will be presenting on Drivers of Change to an audience at the R&D Society - all welcome - Tuesday 25 April 2006, 6.00pm http://www.rdsoc.org/06L4notice.html

Chris is passionate about the role of engineers in dealing with the challenges posed by the consequences of human activities. Until a generation ago many of these consequences were unforeseen or poorly understood. Now they are becoming all too clear. Four major drivers of change of the built environment are climate, energy, water and demographics.

Arup's R&D investments have traditionally been pushed by particular project needs or the enthusiasms of individuals. Chris will describe his expectation that in the future Arup's R&D will be pulled by analysis of the drivers of change that will affect our future.

Chris Jofeh is a structural engineer and a director of Ove Arup & Partners, based in Arup's Cardiff Bay office since 1991, following 3 years in Los Angeles , where he gained his US professional engineering qualification. His research interests are focused on climate change and the environmental physics of large volume enclosures in hot arid regions. Chris has also worked in Saudi Arabia , Qatar and Kuwait and has taught and lectured in the USA , Hong Kong and Australia . Chris has been responsible for leading multidisciplinary engineering design teams on a wide range of projects. He is currently designing the tallest building in Latin America.

MoteWorks Wireless Sensor Network Platform has been launched by Crossbow - this should mean out the box configuration of wireless sensor networks (given the apps that ship with it and those that can be used as plugins...) Watch this space... will report more when I have installed and played with it.

Another thing blogs and open source software have in common is that they're often made by people working at home. That may not seem surprising. But it should be. It's the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. Companies spend millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes, which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive.

This proves something a lot of us have suspected. The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.

That last point from Paul Grahams essay on what business can learn from open source is curious when you add it to a comment he makes further down:

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.

If we believe in our gut that this is true how can we start to quantify this? To change a system or organisation we need to modify what is measured as input and output...

A nice way of getting the message across...

Want to find images on Flickr? Just sketch the kind of image you want on retievr. Here is my effort to find trees in a field with blue skies and green grass.

Working for experimental company Cloud9, James Clar is building a working prototype for a model of the Habitat Hotel, near Barcelona. He says:

It is a hotel with a light mesh that wraps the whole building. The light mesh has sensors that will read the daylight sun amplitude and then at night each node will give off color according to how much that node collected sun. Therefore, the mesh reflects the energy levels of each day, it will change over seasons and due to weather.

Two great examples of persistence of vision. One is at the planned public library in Minneapolis where LED's on the outside of the lift reveal letter by letter words describing the titles of books being checked out. The second came via Make magazine - one for the kids - SpokePOV - LED bike wheel images - look at the how to on instructables...

From Arup Bike User Group - gmap-pedometer. You can plot routes, work out distances and even get plots of elevation along the route - great for cycling.

Came across mashups of earth lights on google maps and Moon maps showing moon landings - excellent. On the former i was amazed to see the comparison of light levels in Middlesbrough and the NE compared to London and SE.

One to consider if you don't want the bundled apps that come with crossbow networks.

Another cool example of people visualising energy usage but also developing the theme of ambient devices....

[from information aesthetics]

This technology has been around for 30 years (Mecanum wheel, Wikipedia) or so but this is the first time I have seen it in action. The movie is much more compelling than an image or sketch of the concept.

[from - Signal vs. Noise by 37signals]