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The two educational experiments flying on Endeavour were designed and built at CU-Boulder’s BioServe Space Technologies, said BioServe Director Louis Stodieck, principal investigator on the project. One will be used to compare how “space” spiders differ from Earth spiders in web spinning and feeding. The second experiment will chart the life cycle of butterflies in the low gravity of space from larvae to pupa to butterfly to egg and compare it with that of earthbound butterflies, said Stodieck.

This will be the third shuttle flight of BioServe’s K-12 educational program known as CSI, which “brings actual space flight experiments into the K-12 classroom,” said Stodieck, a faculty member in CU-Boulder’s aerospace engineering sciences department, home of BioServe. “This program is an excellent example of using a national asset like the International Space Station to inspire K-12 students in science, technology, engineering and math.”

More than a dozen middle schools from Colorado’s Front Range will be participating in the educational project, including schools in the Denver Public School system and the St. Vrain Valley School District, said BioServe Payload Mission Manager Stefanie Countryman. Several Texas middle schools also will be participating, she said.

BioServe will downlink video, still images and data from the space station to its educational partners, including the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, Colo., and the Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Education Outeach.

Baylor has provided participating schools with a teacher’s guide containing lesson plans and classroom activities featuring butterflies and spiders, said Countryman. A training session for participating teachers was held Nov. 8 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in partnership with the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster.

The objective of the first experiment is to achieve one full life cycle for painted lady butterflies in the microgravity of space and compare it to a life cycle of the butterfly in normal, Earth-bound conditions in the classrooms, said Countryman. The experiments in space and Earth will begin with four-day-old larvae and include provisions of nectar for butterflies emerging from the pupa stage into adulthood.

The second objective is to compare the ability of an orb-weaving spider to spin webs and catch food in the nearly weightless environment of space and compare it to orb-weaving spiders performing those tasks on Earth, Countryman said. The spiders will be provided with live fruit flies and water to sustain them during the experiments.

The CU payload is made up of habitats designed by BioServe to house the spiders and the butterflies, said Countryman, also BioServe’s business development manager. The experiments will fly on BioServe’s Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus, or CGBA, a suitcase-sized payload that has been used to carry out BioServe experiments in space since the early 1990s.

BioServe also has been working closely with science advisers on the project, including Denver Museum Invertebrate Zoology Curator Paula Cushing, Curator Mary Ann Hamilton from the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster and Mark Stowe, a spider expert and mission spider supplier from Gainesville, Fla. Ken Werner of Gulf Cast Butterflies in Naples, Fla., supplied BioServe with the butterfly larvae for the Endeavour flight.

BioServe flew two educational CSI payloads on shuttle missions in 2006 and 2007 that reached more than 10,000 students around the world, according to Stodieck.

BioServe payloads including biomedical and life science experiments conducted in conjunction with industrial partners have been manifested on every shuttle flight until the space shuttle program is retired in 2011. “Between now and then, we are seeking sponsors for our educational payloads to enhance the learning opportunities for the K-12 community in Colorado and around the world,” said Countryman.

BioServe is a nonprofit, NASA-funded center founded in 1987 at CU-Boulder to develop new or improved products through space life science research in partnership with industry, academia and government. Since 1991 BioServe has flown payloads on 29 space shuttle microgravity space missions, including experiments that have resided on the International Space Station and Russia’s Mir Space Station.

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Movial, the company that inspires rich, intuitive Internet experiences, today announced it has released its innovative Browser D-Bus Bridge open source code into the Mobile Linux community. Movial Browser D-Bus Bridge removes the complexity of Linux User Interface (UI) development and empowers Web developers and designers, operators and device manufacturers for the first time ever, to easily create extremely capable UIs for open handsets. This technology helps transform Web widgets into seamless user driven mobile applications providing new, value-added and differentiated services and superior user experiences.

Browser D-Bus Bridge translates Javascript commands to D-Bus commands (Desktop Bus). The highly popular D-Bus is used by the LiMo Foundation for inter-process communication (IPC) between applications and services. Movial’s Browser D-Bus Bridge makes it possible for Web developers and designers, operators and device manufacturers to add browser-based UIs for the LiMo stack and for applications to easily initiate platform services, like media engines and instant messaging engines on mobile devices.

Using the Browser D-Bus Bridge, developers or designers can create a UI to control NetworkManager using HTML, CSS and Javascript or easily create a browser extension to send URLs to a music player using its D-Bus API. New and innovative User Interfaces can be built on-the-fly that are not only Web widgets, but rich and usable main applications. The applications that can be built using the Bridge blur the lines between local and external services, creating innovative and highly customized on-device mashups.

“Movial is delighted to deliver its Browser D-Bus Bridge to the mobile Linux community,” said Tomi Rauste, president of Movial Creative Technologies. “With Browser D-Bus Bridge, our engineers have designed an incredibly effective solution to spur the development of rich, custom UIs for mobile Linux without requiring the sophisticated skill set of a Linux UI developer and countless hours of coding. Web developers, designers, operators and device manufacturers can now unleash their creativity and we look forward to seeing the mobile Linux community’s inventive applications using Browser D-Bus Bridge.”

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Embolden, one of New England’s premier web design, development and solutions companies, and Ann-Marie Harrington its founder and president were recently selected to receive three prestigious awards.

The U.S. Small Business Administration presented Embolden with the Rhode Island Minority Business Enterprise of the Year Award; the Northern Rhode Island YMCA selected Harrington for a Women of Achievement Award; and, for the third year in a row, Embolden won the Alfred P. Sloan Award for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility.

As part of a Rhode Island salute to small businesses, Embolden, a woman-owned business, received the Minority Business Enterprise of the Year Award for 2008 “in recognition of your success within a highly competitive industry, and your efforts in fostering the development of other minority and women-owned enterprises by having demonstrated a willingness to assist these firms whenever possible.”

The YMCA’s Women of Achievement Awards are recognized nationally and are intended to increase awareness and appreciation of the diverse contributions of women. The 15 award-winners this year were selected for their work toward the economic empowerment of women.

As a 3-year winner of the Sloan Award, Embolden ranks as one of the country’s leading practitioners of progressive workplace policies. The Sloan Award is part of When Work Works, a nationwide initiative to highlight companies that have made real commitments to using workplace flexibility as a tool to enhance the success of businesses and employees.

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EMC, one of the world’s six largest IT corporations, isn’t necessarily seen as an innovator in the data storage industry. In fact, its history has been that of a savvy company that recognizes innovation when it sees it, then uses its considerable power to acquire and go to market with it.

EMC introduced Atmos, its first cloud-building appliance package a combination of software and industry standard x86 server hardware that can result in a multi-petabyte, enterprise-level cloud storage infrastructure.

“This represents about two years’ worth of development,” Jon Martin, director of product marketing for EMC’s Cloud Computing group, told me. “It was designed and built by our global development team completely internally developed product by EMC.”

Atmos was developed in order to help address the unabated growth of unstructured data being compiled, Martin said.

“Over a billion songs are being shared on the Internet, tens of billions of photos are being shared, and so on. What we’re talking about is everything from the smallest ringtones to the largest HD video files that exist,” Martin said.

Atmos is aimed at Web 2.0 and Internet providers, telecommunications, media and entertainment companies so they can securely build and deliver cloud-based information-centric services and applications at massive scale by providing the capabilities of centralized management and automated placement of information globally, Martin said.

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It’s not easy for IT professionals to make a wholesale switch to a different technical discipline to reap the benefits of a hot skills market say, moving from a job as a systems administrator to a Java developer. “It’s very difficult, because those two things just don’t go together,” says Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology.

But that’s not to say it can’t be done, say Spencer Lee and other IT labor experts. For example, a systems or network administrator could take online or classroom courses to hone his Web development and systems life cycle management know how.

Given current cost constraints, most employers have fewer resources available than they once did to retrain IT workers in different technical fields, says David Van De Voort, an IT workforce specialist at Mercer.

Still, there are opportunities for go-getters who are interested in reinventing themselves for potentially higher-paying roles. For instance, IT staffers who work for the city of Suffolk, Va., can pursue three technical certifications of their choice each year and receive 75% reimbursement “with no questions asked,” says Tisa Knight-Chandler, a network coordinator there. Knight-Chandler has taken advantage of the program this year by upgrading her Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer 2000 certification to an MCSE 2003. She’s also pursuing a master’s degree in information systems.

Of course, providing IT staffers with training opportunities can be a double-edged sword for employers. On the plus side, a well rounded technical staff with enhanced knowledge in various disciplines can provide better support. They can also provide IT managers with a deeper bench if an IT specialist goes out sick or has to be temporarily reassigned to another area.

On the other hand, as IT workers become more knowledgeable, they also become more marketable.

Until recently, Tim Watkins was an application support supervisor at Dantom Systems Inc., a Wixom, Mich.-based provider of services to the credit and collection industry. Through the company’s generous training program, Watkins took courses to bolster his supervisory, project management and VMware skills. In addition, Dantom reimbursed him for part of his tuition for an MBA from nearby Walsh College.

But Watkins says he was disappointed when he received a 3% raise earlier this year, particularly after he felt he’d gone above and beyond his job responsibilities by creating, documenting and testing a disaster recovery plan for the company’s customer data collection system.

Watkins says he was recently contacted through one of his LinkedIn connections about an opportunity to become a senior systems analyst at a Detroit-area law firm. After interviewing for the position and receiving an offer, he decided to take the job, since it included a 20% salary increase and good benefits, including profit sharing after two years of employment.

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Yahoo has released an advanced version of its BrowserPlus Web development technology, enabling developers to use it on their own Web sites for better in-browser uploading and desktop notifications.

BrowserPlus offers a plugin framework for building Web applications that contain desktop capabilities; the browser programming environment can be extended with JavaScript APIs to access desktop facilities. An update to the freely available platform was released late last week.

In a blog detailing the improvements, Lloyd Hilaiel, a member of the BrowserPlus team at Yahoo, cited drag-and-drop capabilities for files and folders.

Other new capabilities include client-side storage and “playful” support for motion sensors on specific laptops.

BrowserPlus was described by a Yahoo representative as an attempt to make time spent in the browser more efficient and fun. It is focused on making Web plug-ins easier and safer to develop and use. Yahoo has set up an online developer center for BrowserPlus.

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