OK, I know on the site that we usually talk about the technology that will come into the far future, but today I want to talk about a piece of technology that will come into your life tomorrow, at least if you live in the USA, your voting machine.

As many of us, or at least those of us in swing states, have learned in previous elections that voting machines do not always do what you tell them to do. That is why today, I am posting a little bit on how to make sure that your vote is counted correctly*.

• Bring a marked-up sample ballot to the polling place. This will enable voters to quickly and accurately transfer the information from the sample ballot to the real thing, saving time and cutting down the likelihood of errors due to snap decisions.
• Voters using touch screen or other electronic voting systems should pay careful attention to the review screen. The screen will highlight any races or ballot questions where the voter has not made a selection or has marked the ballot incorrectly.
• Voters using paper ballot/optical scan systems will have to be more vigilant. These systems don’t have review pages that highlight skipped or missing votes. Some vote scanners do have a small screen that alerts voters who did not make a selection in a specific race or who made more selections than allowed in a given race. (It is impossible to make the latter “overvote” error on electronic systems.)
• Once voters realize they’ve forgotten to make a selection on a paper ballot, the remedy is simply to fill in the oval and make the choice. But, the remedy for a wrong selection is to start over with a new paper ballot and discard the old one. Voters who cross out one choice and fill in the oval for another are likely to have that vote nullified because the scanner will treat them as two votes in a single race, an overvote.
• If voting on paper and casting a write-in vote, be sure to fill in the oval, complete the arrow, or do whatever is required to alert the machine that a write-in selection has been made.

How common are voting booth problems? Well Paul S. Herrnson, a University of Maryland political scientist said, “In our experiments, even with the simplest ballot design and the most user-friendly machines, we found voters still cast their ballots for the wrong candidate about three percent of the time,” Herrnson adds. “Depending on which polls you believe, that’s enough of a margin to affect the outcome on Tuesday. Most often, when voters make a mistake, they not only fail to cast their ballot for the candidate they want, they end up voting for the opponent. So it’s a double whammy.”

* These tips come from “Voting Technology: The Not-so-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot”, a publication by Paul S. Herrnson is a University of Maryland political scientist who led a multi-year, multi-state study comparing voter use of electronic and paper/optical scan systems. That means you are getting expert advice here, and ot just my take on things.

Some of you may already be familiar with the concept of Eink, a new way to make digital readers for all kinds of publications, and a way to make all of the publications more cost effective endeavor for the consumers.
You may have already seen Eink and not even known it. In September of this year in celebration of its 75th Anniversary, Esquire Magazine and the new Ford Flex made the first-ever digital magazine cover released to the public.

New prototypes have been released that will show how the Eink technology can be brought to the markteplace at a reasonable cost thanks to the ability for effective advertising on the site. The prototypes shows a video of an interactive ad on the front page of the New York Times, similar to what you may see on many websites currently.

These new generation of readers can help to reduce the costs of readers and of subscriptions to Eink publications by adding these ads to the page. Which means that Einks may not just show up on the front pages of magazines, with plenty of glossy space inside to pay for the technology but in a wider range of applications as the cost model shifts.

This change of costs will, over the long run, make the devices more cost friendly for the general public.

Scientists from one hundred and thirty countries want to redo existing world data centres and services in order to create a World Data System. The group of scientists is know as the General Assembly of the International Council for Science (ICSU).

The reasons cited for this change include:

• More scientific data and information is now available than at any other time in history and the volume
  is increasing daily.
• long-term stewardship availability of this data is largely uncertain and a large amount of valuable scientific data remains in-accessible to many members of the scientific  community.
• To provide  full and open access to scientific data and products for the global community.

What do people in the position to make decisions about the sharing of scientific data have to say about this?

Ray Harris, chair of the expert Committee that produced the report said, ‘Data is the lifeblood of
science and there are many exciting developments, which mean that access to scientific data both for
science and for policy making should be much easier.  However, in many areas there is little order and
the origin and reliability of what one finds on the web can be almost impossible to determine’.
‘A more strategic and systematic international approach, together with significant financial investment
at the national level, is urgently required if we are to realise the full benefit of science for society,’
Harris continued.

Dave Carlson, the Director of the programme office for the International Polar Year (IPY)—a major,
ICSU-sponsored, interdisciplinary research programme that is using and generating enormous
amounts of data—added: ‘There are more than 200 IPY research projects, funded to the tune of 1.5
billion Euros, and its major legacy should be the data that will inform polar research for years to come.
But we still don’t know how most of this data will be handled’.

ICSU will be implementing the recommendations for a World Data System over the next three years. The report cand more information on the General Assembly are available at: www.icsu.org/3_mediacentre/GA_29.html

Who knows what kind of advances this sharing of research might yield.

The head of the Design Team and former world record holder Richard Noble (Project Director of The BLOODHOUND Project) are working to develop the first land speed vehicle that breaks the 1,000 mph barrier and will have its design underpinned through world-class research from some of the UK’s top laboratories.

The team worked with the scientists at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) and Fluid Gravity Engineering (FGE) to advise the world-record bid team on two of the most high-risk aspects of the world record attempt.

Many materials were considered for the wheels including a choice of metals and composites that could be used in the design, providing reports on titanium and aluminium alloys, and metal composites.

Those two aspects are the wheel and rocket designs. To reach 1,000 mph they need to be able to rotate at 10,500 rpm without being damaged by the road surface or any stones that may be in the road. In addition they need to be able to need to be as light as possible to minimise steering and suspension forces, absorb all of the weight, down force loads and stresses and distribute this pressure without causing damage to the vehicle or the surface.

The vehicle will have the first ever mixed powerplant of a hybrid rocket motor and a jet engine that is currently used on the Eurofighter Typhoon. It uses cutting edge jet technology to provide the initial thrust and the novel rocket impulse to achieve the 1,000 mph target. The hybrid engine is being tested by a scale model that is only 6 inches long.

What do they think of the progress so far?

Well Brian Chapman, who is the Project Leader for NPL, said:

“When you’re travelling at 1,000 mph you don’t want to be worrying about your motor holding out or whether your tyres are up to it. That’s why NPL – with FGE and AWE – have spent the last year looking at every eventuality for both the wheel and the rocket motor designs. We have been closely examining the effect that materials properties will have on the rocket performance, the size and weight the wheels need to be to sustain the speed, and environmental effects such as a high speed impact with a small piece of debris could have. We’re confident that our work will help to ensure that Richard and Andy are able to safely oversee another successful world record attempt for the UK, and go faster than ever before.”

Dozens of cars in the Boston area are testing the latest generation of an MIT mobile-sensor network for traffic analysis that could help drivers cut their commuting time and alert them to potential engine problems.  In addition the project, named the CarTel project, will allow automobiles to monitor their environment by sending data from an onboard computer — which is about the size of a cell phone — to a web server where the data can be visualized and browsed. They will do so via pre-existing WiFi networks which the car passes during a trip.

CarTel is also linked to a vehicle’s onboard diagnostics system (available in all cars sold since 1996), so a driver can check various parameters key to maintenance and be alerted to potential problems.

The CarTel project, is being run by Professor Hari Balakrishnan and Associate Professor Samuel Madden of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as well as Jacob Eriksson from the University of Illinois, Chicago.

“Our goal,” Balakrishnan said, “is to make the data behind CarTel available to help you plan and organize your commute and drives. We want to minimize the amount of time spent in your car.”

The system has already been in small scale testing for a while.  The current system, deployed since January on 50 Boston-area cars – including 40 taxis — tracks traffic by monitoring each vehicle’s speed at different points during a trip. Unlike other route-planning systems, “CarTel understands where traffic delays are and recommends routes to avoid them,” Madden said.

Currently out, as a free public download is the java development environment for Blackberry phones.  The download, currently in its public BETA, will enable any developer to make new programs for Blackberry Storm, Blackberry Bold and Blackberry Pearl Flip smartphones, as well as desktop simulators for the Blackberry Storm, Blackberry Bold and Blackberry Pearl Flip smartphones that accelerate mobile application testing.

These tools are known as the Blackberry JDE v.4.7 for short.  New API’s available with Blackberry JDE v4.7 that enables developers to take advantage of the new features of the Blackberry Storm smartphone.

Some of the features that you may see based on these tools include:

• Touch-screen support-receive input from taps, slides and other gestures.
• Orientation and rotation support-support portrait and landscape orientations and re-draw the screen when rotated.
• Camera and Media Integration- Build camera and video recording capabilities into a custom application.
• Set Homescreen Background Image- set the background image on a smartphone’s home screen

What does Blackberry think about that?  “The latest versions of the Blackberry Java Development Environment present developers with opportunities to create innovative, mobile-savvy applications that take advantage of the robust feature sets of the Blackberry Storm, Blackberry Bold and Blackberry Pearl Flip smartphones,”

said Alan Brenner, Senior Vice President, Blackberry platforms at Research in Motion.  “Each new Blackberry smartphone presents an opportunity for mobile developers to create new applications or extend their innovations with the latest advances in mobile technology and application development.”

A new study that comes to us from physicists in the EU has shown that they can create a self assembling computer circuit. This breakthrough, while currently in its lab stages could eventually be brought to the marketplace, and revolutionize how computer parts, and even whole systems are made.

Currently, computer chips are made by etching patterns onto semiconducting wafers using a combination of light and photosensitive chemicals.

In the new study, the scientists took a long organic molecule with mobile electrons, called quinquethiophene that acts like a semiconductor and attached it to a long carbon chain with a silicon group at the end, which acts as an anchor.

They later soaked the circuit board and its preprinted electrodes into a solution of their new molecules.

The experiment showed that the molecules can be attached to the insulating layer that sits between the electrodes,and can make a bridge from one electrode to the next.

The work, appearing in this week’s Nature1.