Web Development Live

Rattlesnakes aren’t to be trifled with, but if you’re trying to collect the sound of every creature in the West that slithers, hops, flies or flops, distance isn’t a luxury you can afford.

“You get yourself in some strange situations,” said Jeff Rice, a soft-spoken University of Utah research librarian who’s trying to create the first comprehensive and free to the public archive of natural sounds in the West.

Minutes later he was squatting in the hills above Salt Lake City, training his lightweight parabolic microphone toward a Great Basin rattlesnake a few feet away.

The snake, caught by wildlife agents that day in a backyard, offered a few doubtful quiet moments. Finally, though, it let loose a long dry rattle, both eerie and fascinating, that unmistakably said “keep away.”

“I knew he’d come through,” Rice said, grinning like he’d been given a Christmas present.

The recording, reduced to a short clip, will be added to the Western Soundscape Archive, a Web-based sound clearinghouse headquartered at the university library.

Although it’s just a year old, the site already has more than 800 recordings. The goal is to catalog the nearly 1,200 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians that roam 11 Western states. It will also feature “ambient soundscapes” from wild places across the region.

The sounds will be available to teachers, scientists and anyone else interested in hearing the odd murmurings of a sage grouse, javelina, Columbia spotted frog or mountain-dwelling moose.

The landscape recordings could also provide an important audio snapshot that could be used for comparison later when trying to understand how animals respond to encroaching subdivisions, oil and gas development, a warming climate, or other changes.

Repeat photography can reveal changes in a limited area, but repeated recordings offer broader insights, said Kurt Fristrup, a scientist with the National Park Service’s natural sounds office in Fort Collins, Colo.

Many of the sound clips on the archive have been donated. Some, Rice had to get himself.

He has hunkered down in Utah’s remote San Rafael Swell to record the chatter of beavers; logged hours on the Nevada side of Lake Mead listening to relict leopard frogs; and visited a laboratory to tape the Northern grasshopper mouse, a pint-size rodent that perches on its hind legs to offer a shrill whistle of warning.

In the field, animals tend to be most active in early morning and evening. Rice comes prepared with hand-held digital recording equipment and a sense of adventure.

The work has its own quirky challenges he’s learned not to wear clothes that ripple noisily in the wind and an urgent, serious side too.

As natural places disappear, so do the animal sounds that decorate them.

The World Conservation Union estimates that one in three amphibian species is at risk for extinction. Rice, 41, wants to capture as many on tape as possible before they’re gone.

“It’s very much a race against time,” he said.

He figures the library has recordings of about 75 percent of the 53 frog and toad species in the states involved Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. It has about 70 percent of the birds and dozens of mammal and reptile recordings.

The recordings, even heard from the safety of a desktop, can stir something primal in the DNA, a sudden flight response, for instance, in the case of the rattlesnake.

“Responses to those kinds of sounds are almost reflexive,” Fristrup said.

He said Rice’s archive could help people learn what animals they’re hearing in the wild, even if they can’t see them.

“Most of us learn to ignore what our ears tell us and focus on the task at hand because we live in really noisy habitat,” Fristrup said. “But in some ways, hearing is the most alerting sense, directing us to things that matter.”

There are already several natural sound archives available on the Web, including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y., which says it has the largest sound and video archive of animal behavior.

American Health Holding, Inc. today announced that it has partnered with Strategic Health Development Corporation. The relationship will unite the companies’ products and networks to provide customers with an unparalleled level of integrated services.

“The partnership between American Health and Strategic Health will expand the depth and breadth of our product offerings,” states Michael J. Reidelbach, President and CEO of American Health Holding, Inc. “This will enable us to provide a superior level of value to our customers than either company could achieve on its own.”

Like American Health, Strategic Health provides Medical Management services primarily to third-party administrators and self-funded employers. Additionally, Strategic Health coordinates specialty services in the areas of Transplant, Kidney, and Cancer Case Management, providing customers with access to an extensive network of medical facilities that are recognized worldwide as Centers of Excellence.

The partnership provides American Health customers enhanced capabilities for gaining access to Strategic Health’s extensive network offerings; it also integrates Strategic Health’s networks and customers into American Health’s i-Suite software system.

I mentioned last Thursday that I’d had a visit and product demo from Richard Rabins of Alpha Software. I was initially hesitant to take this meeting at all, because I remembered Alpha Five from the 1980s: it was essentially an easy-to-use variation on dBase II. I couldn’t imagine any of my readers being interested in a product that depends on DBF files, no matter how easy it is for the developer.

What changed my mind is that Alpha Five Platinum, a.k.a. Alpha Five Version 9, supports working with SQL databases from the desktop, using active-link tables. For that matter, it can perform heterogeneous joins, with the relations between the heterogeneous tables enforced on the client. It uses optimistic record locking when working with active-link tables to avoid holding unnecessary server locks, and has a query optimizer that decides what filtering and sorting can be done on the server.

My enthusiasm for learning yet another computer language was extremely limited, but Xbasic and Xdialog both turned out to be easy and well-documented. I was skeptical about the performance of the Alpha Five application server for Web applications, but it was perfectly fine in my limited tests and Alpha has introduced a clustered server for people who need extra performance, scalability, and reliability. I was skeptical about how Alpha Five could possibly support Web 2.0 applications and still be easy for developers, but its new Ajax support easily integrates with Xbasic.

I haven’t done extensive development with Alpha Five Platinum at this point, but I have tested the beta enough to uncover a few small bugs in the newest demos, which the Alpha developers fixed overnight. On a weekend, yet.

I’d say at this point that the Alpha Five Platinum beta is good enough to be worth some evaluation time. Start with the older Alpha Five product overview to get a feel for the product; go on to the Alpha Five Platinum tour to find out about the new version; read about what’s new to get the details; watch the videos embedded in the “what’s new” material; read the blogs for Richard’s inside tips; and sign up to download a beta trial.

The reliance of restaurant chains and retail stores on outside companies to handle credit card processing and other information technology functions is partly to blame for a rash of consumer data breaches over the last few years, according to data sleuths at Verizon Communications Inc.

Even a chain with thousands of restaurants might have only 100 employees in information technology, so it uses outside vendors for many IT functions, said Bryan Sartin, director of the investigative response team at Verizon Business.

In a typical case Sartin was involved in, the team was approached by a large oil company in Canada, with thousands of gas stations. Customers found spurious charges on their credit cards after using them at the stations.

The team soon figured out that someone at a technology vendor was responsible, but couldn’t pin it down. So the investigators set a trap in the system, to see who accessed customer data.

“The trap went off on Saturday morning,” Sartin said. “Hackers always think nobody’s looking on Saturday mornings.”

Many breaches don’t happen through outsourcing.The gang that stole 41 million credit and debit card numbers from chains including TJX Cos. obtained access through unsecured wireless networks, not through subcontractors’ systems.

The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) is an internationally renowned non-profit research institute dedicated to the study and application of systems biology.  Founded in 2000 in Seattle, Washington, ISB’s goal is to unravel the mysteries of cellular networks and identify strategies that will usher in a new era of P4 Medicine.

ISB is currently seeking a Web Application Developer who will be responsible for developing, implementing, and maintaining web content management systems, web applications, websites, and their associated database and web hosting systems.  In addition, the position supports more general database administration, and scripting projects.

A Bachelors degree in a relevant discipline such as Web Development, Computer Science, Information Systems, or Informatics, and at least 2 years of relevant industry experience, or an equivalent combination is required.  Also requires a high level of organizational and time management, and the ability to either work on projects either independently, with an assistant, or as part of a team.

Must have good interpersonal and communications skills; able to work effectively with variety of people in a diverse workforce; adaptable to changing work requirements; able to effectively multi-task assignments of varied and changing urgency; high degree of professional integrity; strong client service orientation.