ISLAMABAD — Pakistan's eight-wicket win over Sri Lanka in the Twenty20 World Cup at Lord's on Sunday will have gone a long way toward making up to its fans for the nation's inability to host international matches due to security concerns.
And considering that the ongoing army offensive against the Taliban in the northwest of the country and a series of suicide bombings will not allow international cricket to return to Pakistan for years to come, it was a much-needed boost to the country's millions of cricket fans.
The International Cricket Council acted early to move the 2011 World Cup matches that Pakistan was due to host and also awarded its hosting rights to the Champions Trophy to South Africa last year. However, the game's governing body will be under pressure not to isolate the nation of 160 million people - the second-largest cricket-playing population after India.
"They (ICC) won't be able to discard Pakistan after Sunday's terrific victory," said veteran columnist Zakir Hussain Syed.
Pakistan's lack of international exposure meant that the team went into the tournament with little international match preparation.
The world's top Twenty20 World Cup contenders such as defending champion India and Australia prepared for the competition by giving their players as much international exposure and practice as possible in the shortest form of the game, but Pakistan's players were forced to rely on just their domestic Twenty20 competition to prepare.
Pakistan's government barred its players from competing in the Indian Premier League just before the tournament was shifted to South Africa, giving all of their opponents whose players participated in the much-publicized and lucrative IPL a significant edge.
Pakistan became a cricketing pariah after gunmen sprayed the Sri Lankan cricket team's bus with bullets and fired a rocket and a grenade as it travelled to a match against Pakistan in Lahore on March 3. Seven players were wounded and six police killed before the bus sped off and eventually reached the safety of the stadium.
The result was that the ICC and other cricket-playing nations made Pakistan a no-go zone.
But all that was forgotten - at least temporarily - on Sunday as Pakistan beat Sri Lanka in the final.
Giant screens were put in place in the main markets of Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad and Multan where thousands of men, women and children gathered to watch the final live.
When the celebrations of Pakistan's triumph die down, the country's cricketers and the sport's administrators will need to once again face the reality of living in an international cricket-free zone.
"No doubt for a while - may be for a year or so - we have to concentrate on organizing our matches at a neutral venue, but gradually when security improves, we should see international teams returning to Pakistan," Syed said.
Just when that will be is anyone's guess.
source: http://www.google.com
Pakistan celebrates Sunday's Twenty20 World Cup cricket victory
Analyst Predictions for Information Needs in 2009
The end of this past year left more for speculation than probably any other year in most of our memories. We're experiencing the most challenging financial crisis we've seen since the Great Depression, plummeting retail sales that will likely change the landscape of the retail industry as much as the banking world has already been changed, continued exponential increases in health care, distrust in our banks and financial markets which has only been compounded by Madoff and what is being described as the largest Ponzi scheme ever, and increased turmoil in the Middle East with terrorism reaching Mumbai and renewed fighting over Gaza.
Of course, this has also led to increased uncertainty. The Dow seems to go up and down by hundreds of points on a daily basis with no clear rhyme or reason. Gas prices continue to fluctuate back and forth. And consumer spending...and investing...is seeming unpredictable. Maybe that's why so many analysts are predicting that companies will need to increase their investments in information in 2009.
IDC, in their report on Worldwide Information Access, Analysis, and Management Software 2009 Top 10 Predictions, talks about the importance of solutions that can "unify access to multiple types and sources of information" and "put better information access and analysis capabilities in the hands of more users." IDC recognizes that IT budgets will be impacted, but suggests that "the economic turmoil will also increase the need for insight into operations, finance, and sales processes." Some of the business drivers they cite include "compliance requirements, the need to compete effectively while keeping down costs, the enterprise information glut, and the recognition that unifying access and management of all types of information improves business processes, increases knowledge worker productivity, and decreases the risk of not understanding the real status of an enterprise because of an imperfect view of its internal information."
Of the top 10, the three I thought were most relevant were:
Need for tools to increase the performance and competitiveness of organizations
Corporate events (e.g. M&A, executive turnover, staff reductions) will trigger need for investment in capabilities to automate "knowledge" processes with reduced staff
Increased need to manage ALL types of information spurred by stricter regulatory compliance and needs for better, more intelligent business monitoring and decision making
Gartner Can't Say Enough About the Need for Enterprise Information Management and Business IntelligenceGartner has also been jumping on this bandwagon. In fact, in the beginning of December, Gartner release five separate reports, all about this topic. They started off by introducing a new EIM Maturity Model. In this report, Gartner claims that organizations cannot implement enterprise information management (EIM) as a single project, but must implement it as a coordinated program that evolves over time. They introduce an EIM maturity model to help organizations identify what stage of maturity they have reached and what actions to take to reach the next level. IBM had actually put together a maturity model almost a year ago, based on experience from several hundred customers that are trying to establish their own information agenda. There is even an information agenda checklist that companies can fill out and submit to get help assessing their own information agenda needs.
Gartner also issued a report on Enterprise Information Management Revisited: Foundations, Progress and Futures, in which they suggest focusing on information governance as a first project for those that are new to EIM, and stress the importance of "defining and socializing" the relationship of enterprise information management to the business and the business role and the benefits that they can expect, as there is still a great deal of misunderstanding as to what "enterprise information management" really means and how it can provide business value.
In Predicts 2009: Enterprise Information Management Will Prove Itself, Gartner makes predictions on the value of EIM and claims that enterprises that adopt EIM can outperform rivals in areas such as operational efficiency, product development and customer service. And in How to Really Do the Five EIM-Related Things Everyone Else Just Thinks They're Doing, Gartner highlights how enterprise information management can yield measurable business benefits, such as increased efficiency of critical cross-company processes and greater information transparency. In fact, IBM's Information Agenda initiative is all about providing guidance on how to realize these benefits and get results you can measure.
Finally, in Predicts 2009: Business Intelligence and Performance Management Will Deliver Greater Business Value, Gartner claims that the current economic crisis shows the importance of trust and transparency in the information that organizations use to run their business. They suggest that companies need to integrate the analytical insights derived from this information into the decision-making processes throughout the organization.So, it seems that the overwhelming message here is that 1) we're in for some challenging times ahead, and 2) companies need better access to better information to make better business decisions so they can improve their business performance and create a competitive advantage in the market.
Complex Event Processing Provides a New Level of Business Insight
With so many variables affecting the outcome of business events, the ability to gauge the likeliness of certain outcomes would be an extremely valuable asset for organizations. Complex event processing (CEP) is emerging as an effective way to provide those kinds of insights into events.
CEP is relatively new, and even the definition of the term seems to be evolving. In addition to its predictive elements, CEP enables organizations to analyze information on the fly, to make better sense of all the information that’s coming in from a variety of applications. CEP involves the use of software applications to predict events that are likely to result from specific sets of factors. The technology analyzes cause-and-effect relationships among various events as they are occurring, letting users proactively take action to respond to different scenarios in the most effective ways possible.
CEP can play a role in a several areas of IT and business processes, including risk management, customer relationship management (CRM), business process management (BPM), business activity monitoring (BAM) and stock trading.
“The main driver for CEP is the explosion in various forms of operational intelligence applications — often provided through online dashboards — that give near real-time visibility into the state of a company and its environment,” says Roy Schulte, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn.
Schulte says Gartner tracking shows that there are eight “pure-play” CEP engine vendors, seven vendors of CEP-enabled application platforms, and more than 70 other vendors that offer substantial CEP capabilities to complement other software functions.
CEP brings value to organizations in four key ways, Schulte says. One is improved quality of decisions. “Computers can extract the information value from dozens, hundreds or thousands of base events per second in real-world applications — as long as the events are simple,” he says. “By contrast, a person can assimilate only a few events per second, thus cannot consider nearly as many factors when making a decision.”
Another benefit is faster response. “CEP systems can respond faster than people,” Schulte says. “For example, CEP-based, financial-trading systems use rules to make fully automated buy-and-sell decisions in 20 milliseconds without human involvement. A person cannot type a character on a keyboard in that short a time.”
Yet another potential gain is preventing data overload. CEP systems reduce the volume of unwanted, unnecessary data presented to people, Schulte says. “A CEP system may run for hours or days, turning millions of base events into thousands of complex events before detecting a complex event that must be brought to the attention of a person,” he says.
Finally, CEP can lead to reduced costs. “CEP systems offload the drudgery of repetitive calculations and pattern detection comparisons from people to computers,” Schulte says. A CEP system can run continuously, evaluating incoming notifications throughout the day and performing at least the initial event screening and computation, he says. This reduces the amount of human labor needed to analyze data.
The technology offers “a set of building blocks to create an underlying business intelligence” about events, says Kevin McPartland, senior analyst at TABB Group, a Westborough, Mass., research and strategic advisory firm. “You could do this before, but building [the infrastructure] from scratch was complicated and very time consuming,” he says. “CEP providers are offering tool kits and libraries that allow you to build the logic based on multiple data streams very quickly.”
While the discipline is still evolving, experts say businesses in data-intensive industries such as financial services already are exploring the use of CEP in different areas. For example, for the past two years finance firms have begun using CEP for high-speed electronic trading, to help users make quick decisions based on fast-arriving market data, McPartland says.
More recently, he adds, financial services firms have applied CEP to risk management efforts, examining data from various sources across the enterprise to determine whether their organizations are meeting regulatory compliance and security requirements.
“One interesting [use of CEP] is to monitor the overall server infrastructure,” McPartland says. So, for example, a company could see precisely how much capacity it has on its servers at any point and calculate future performance and availability based on the applications currently running. CEP can also be used for low-latency monitoring, to predict whether network delays will occur that could have a huge impact on IT service delivery or the availability of information.
Like any other software-based technology, CEP is only as useful as the quality of the information that’s being analyzed, McPartland says. Also, organizations need to have an adequate IT infrastructure in place to fully benefit from CEP.
“A lot of vendors’ products get faster by throwing hardware at them,” McPartland says. “If the infrastructure is not up to snuff, then you’re not going to see the kind of speed or response times you hope to.
source:informationagenda.techweb.com
Turning the Tide to Energy: New Concept Could Harness the Power of Ocean Waves
Many different methods already exist for using moving water to create power. Hydroelectric plants, for example, are among the most established and least expensive sources of electricity. They benefit from the large hydrostatic pressure difference between the water surface behind the dam and the turbines that can be harnessed to produce power. But the power that can be produced in this manner is limited, because most of the suitable rivers already have hydroelectric dams.
Other technologies have been designed -- and are being developed -- to turn the energy of ocean currents, tides, and flowing rivers into another kind of power, called hydrokinetic energy. Many of these hydrokinetic energy systems use underwater turbines, similar to those in wind farms. Ocean currents or tides turn the turbines, which generate electricity that can be transferred by cable to shore.
Jack Jones, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Yi Chao, a JPL scientist, have designed a new kind of underwater hydrokinetic energy system. It uses water motion to generate a high-pressure liquid rather than electricity. That liquid is then transported to shore and used to produce electricity on land. Caltech, which operates JPL for NASA, holds the patent on this innovative energy technology.
The JPL/Caltech hydrokinetic energy system is a spin-off from a research project to find a new way to power robotic underwater vehicles. Most robotic underwater vehicles run on batteries and have to be recovered by ship to have their batteries recharged or replaced.
In this project, initiated by Pat Beauchamp of JPL's Center for In Situ Exploration and Sample Return, Jones was asked to develop a way to use temperature differences in the ocean to power submersibles. He had previously developed thermally controlled balloons for Venus, Mars and Titan. Jones was teamed up with Chao, who uses underwater gliders in his oceanographic research. "I saw we could extend the lives of these vehicles significantly by harvesting energy from the ocean environment," Chao says.
While they were working on this project, the researchers realized that they could employ the same concept -- using an environmental pump to generate a high-pressure liquid -- to produce electricity from the world's ocean.
Going with the flow
In the large-scale JPL/Caltech hydrokinetic energy transfer system Jones and Chao propose, ocean tides, currents and waves, as well as river flows, would provide the energy source to create the high-pressure liquid. As the water turns underwater turbine blades, the rotor's rotational speed would be increased through a gearbox, which drives a high-pressure fluid pump. The high-pressure fluid would be transported though flexible tubes to a larger pipe and then to an efficient, onshore hydroelectric power plant.
"If we use fresh water in a closed cycle and recycle the fluid, there would be no direct impact to the ocean or river's ecosystem," Chao adds.
"A major advantage of this design," says Jones, "is that it eliminates all submerged electrical components, which are subject to corrosion." In addition, other tidal turbine energy systems, such as the one now in operation in Manhattan's East River, transfer the power generated by the turbines to the surface through buried electrical cables. These are expensive, hard to maintain, and can be dangerous, Jones says. Similar issues exist with two other types of hydrokinetic systems in use in the United Kingdom and planned for South Korea.
"The JPL/Caltech hydrokinetic energy transfer system combines a simple, corrosion-resistant subsurface design with the least expensive electrical energy generation system onshore," says Jones."The JPL/Caltech hydrokinetic energy transfer system combines a simple, corrosion-resistant subsurface design with the least expensive electrical energy generation system onshore," says Jones.
"Our proposed system has another advantage," he says. "The pressurized hydraulic energy can be stored in an elevated onshore reservoir and can be used to generate electricity when it is needed to respond to energy-demand. Most environmentally friendly energy systems produce power intermittently."
"This type of hydraulic energy transfer system is potentially applicable to many types of hydrokinetic energy from rivers, ocean waves, tides and currents," Chao says. Scientists can use state-of-the-art computer models of winds, river flows, ocean currents and tides to determine any location's potential for energy production, he adds. They can also predict how much energy could be produced in the future to help in planning energy use and storage.
"As with all such technologies, the ultimate arbiter is the end result of systems-engineering studies, overall efficiency, and costs in terms of dollars per output watt capacity and cents per kilowatt-hour produced," says Paul Dimotakis, JPL's chief technologist. "Such studies and preliminary development efforts also need to be performed for the JPL/Caltech hydrokinetic energy systems, and if these are promising, then the next phase in development can be undertaken."
Jones and Chao will be presenting a paper on the JPL/Caltech hydrokinetic energy transfer system at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers conference on Ocean, Offshore and Arctic Engineering this summer in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Recipe for the Perfect James Webb Space Telescope Mirror
Mirrors are a critical part of any space telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope's mirrors are made of a special element that will enable it to withstand the rigors of space and see farther back in time/distance than any other telescope now in operation.Space telescope mirrors must endure the extremely frigid temperatures in space, be highly reflective, lightweight and tough. Those are exactly the qualities that make up the 18 mirrors being developed for the Webb Telescope.To collect as much light as possible to see galaxies from 13 billion light-years away, the Webb Telescope needs a large mirror but also needs to be lightweight enough to not weigh down the rocket carrying it into space. The answer was to make it out of beryllium. Mirror History and Make-upBy definition, a mirror is an object with a surface that is smooth enough to form an image, such as a "plane mirror," which has a flat surface. Curved mirrors produce magnified or reduced images or focus light or simply distort the reflected image. Most mirrors are designed for visible light. There are, however, mirrors that work at other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, "such as X-ray, infrared, microwave, or even radio wavelengths.
Mirrors on Earth have been made from many things. Europeans during the Renaissance coated glass with a tin-mercury amalgam. The silvered-glass mirror invented in 1835 involved the deposition of a thin layer of metallic silver onto glass through the chemical reduction of silver nitrate. Today, mirrors are often produced by the vacuum deposition of aluminum (or sometimes silver) directly onto the glass substrate.Space Mirrors: What is Beryllium?Mirrors for space telescopes require special materials. That's where beryllium comes in. Beryllium is a light metal (atomic symbol: Be) with many features that make it desirable to be used for the Webb Telescope's mirrors.Beryllium is steel-gray in color, very strong for its weight and good at holding its shape across a range of temperatures, which is just what it would encounter in space. Beryllium is also a good conductor of electricity and heat and is not magnetic. It also has one of the highest melting points of the light metals.What's also interesting is that beryllium is a relatively rare element in both the Earth and the universe, because stable forms of beryllium are not formed either in the atomic reactions inside stars or in the Big Bang. Instead, when carbon and oxygen atoms in the gas between the stars collide with each other or are struck by other particles, the nucleus of the atoms will occasionally break into up into the lighter elements lithium, beryllium and boron.Here on Earth, most of the beryllium exists in minerals such as beryl and bertrandite. It is also a component of the precious gems aquamarine, red beryl and emerald. Currently, most industrial production of beryllium is accomplished by a chemical reaction between beryllium fluoride and magnesium metal.Beryllium is used to develop parts for supersonic (faster-than-the-speed-of-sound) airplanes and the Space Shuttle, because it is both lightweight and strong. It is also used in gyroscopes, computer equipment, watch springs and instruments where light weight, rigidity and dimensional stability are needed.Beryllium is actually highly toxic to plants, animals and humans. It's not necessary or useful for life. In fact, it has no known role in living organisms. So, during the manufacturing and handling, special care has to be taken when working with it, because it is unhealthy to breathe in or swallow beryllium dust.How and Where the Beryllium Mirror is MadeThe beryllium being used to make the Webb Telescope's mirrors was mined in Utah and then purified. The particular type of beryllium used in the Webb mirrors is called "O-30" and is a fine powder of high purity. The powder is then placed into a stainless steel canister and pressed into a flat shape. The steel canister is then removed and the resulting chunk of beryllium is cut in half to make two mirror blanks about 1.3 meters (4 feet) across. Each mirror blank will be used to make one mirror segment; the full Webb mirror will be made from 18 hexagonal (six-sided) segments.Once the mirror blanks pass inspection, they are molded into their final shape, polished and temperature tested to ensure they can withstand the frigid temperatures of space.Beryllium is much more capable than glass to handle the frigid cold of space. The James Webb Space Telescope will face a temperature of -240 degrees Celsius (33 Kelvin). Beryllium contracts and deforms less than glass -- and remains more uniform -- in such temperatures. For the same reason, the optics of the Spitzer Space Telescope were entirely built of beryllium metal. It is thanks to beryllium that the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to see further back into the universe and back in time than any other space telescope operating today.The James Webb Space Telescope is expected to launch in 2013. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is managing the overall development effort for the Webb Telescope. The telescope, being built by Northrop Grumman, is a joint project of NASA and many U.S. partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
source: http://www.nasa.gov
With Every Beat, NASA Involved in How the Heart Behaves
And heart failure, like structure failure on an aircraft, is serious business.
The plastic is an advanced aerospace resin, Langley Research Center's Soluble Imide, or LaRC-SI -- a highly flexible material, resistant to chemicals, and withstands extreme hot and cold temperatures. The technology was developed for an aerospace high-speed research program. But among its other applications, the material was also discovered to be biologically inert -- suitable for medical use including implantable devices.
NASA licensed the patented LaRC-SI insulation technology in July 2004 to Medtronic Inc. -- a Minneapolis-based medical technology company -- who recognized the potential of the highly flexible resin for its Attain Ability left-heart lead cardiac CRT device.
Due in part to Langley Research Center's Soluble Imide, on April 6, 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a left-heart lead available for use with the new Medtronic CRT -- one of the thinnest available for heart failure patients. The use of this NASA-developed material in a medical implant is the latest in a long line of medical applications that have benefited from NASA technology.
Heart failure occurs when the heart muscle is unable to pump effectively to meet the body's need for blood and oxygen. It is a chronic and progressive condition that affects more than five million Americans and more than 22 million individuals worldwide. Cardiac resynchronization therapy, or CRT, is designed to coordinate the contraction of the heart's two lower chambers and improve the heart's efficiency to increase blood flow to the body.
The NASA insulation material makes possible the compact and flexible design of Medtronic's CRT lead, one of the thinnest left-heart leads available. Placing a lead in the heart is widely recognized by physicians as the most challenging aspect of implanting CRT devices. The narrow design allows physicians to choose between different sites on the heart to deliver optimal therapy. The lead is delivered by an inner catheter, a feature that helps physicians place the lead directly in difficult-to-reach areas of the heart. Clinical studies in the U.S. and Canada showed physicians were successful in placing the Attain Ability lead 96.4 percent of the time.
The Langley Research Center's Soluble Imide was featured in Spinoff 2008 -- NASA's annual premier publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. For more than 40 years, the NASA Innovative Partnerships Program has facilitated the transfer of NASA technology to the private sector, benefiting global competition and the economy. Since 1976, Spinoff has featured 40 to 50 of these commercial products annually.
In 1995, R&D Magazine selected the resin for an R&D 100 award as one of the top 100 technical innovations of the year.
FIRST Championship Ignites Students' Scientific Savvy: Discovering the Excitement of Science and Technology04.14.09
