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The Open University is to host a new centre of excellence for chromatography, a technique used  to help break down samples for analysis.

The Agilent Centre of Excellence in Comprehensive Chromatography will be hosted in the  OU's Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute (PSSRI), where it will be used in space, environmental and medical diagnostic research, as well as being available to companies outside the university.

It will utilise capillary flow technology hardware developed by Agilent Technologies which will make it  simpler and more cost-effective to analyse complex substances.

PSSRI's Dr Geraint Morgan, who is Centre Director of the Agilent Centre of Excellence in Comprehensive Chromatography, said: “Comprehensive chromatography is an important component of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial research at The Open University. The establishment of the Agilent Centre of Excellence provides our researchers with a unique opportunity to access world-leading technology and expertise, in addition to providing a vehicle for raising the profile of our research and analytical infrastructure with the analytical community.”
 
Sarah Corbin, UK Sales Manager, Agilent Technologies, said: “For more than ten years, multidimensional gas chromatography has been largely confined to the research laboratory, used only by skilled practitioners of gas chromatography. With reliable, easy-to-use hardware integrated in to the chromatograph, the technique is now ready for more routine laboratory settings.”

Anyone interested in the services provided by the new Centre should contact Science-Agilent-Centre@open.ac.uk

For the full story, with more technical information, see OU News.

Image shows a sample being prepared in a PSSRI clean room

In one small street in Brighton residents have cut their electricity use by 15 percent in just three weeks.

Brighton's Tidy Street has gone greener thanks a deceptively simple application of 'nudge technology' by Dr Jon Bird of the Open University Computing department.

The word is literally on the street with a giant graph on the road surface recording day-to-day electricity consumption.

The project has been so successful that Dr Bird and his OU colleagues have been approached for help by the United Arab Emirates, which has the biggest per capita carbon footprint in the world.

Read the full story of what lies behind the Tidy Street project in the May issue of Open Eye, the Open University bulletin in the Independent newspaper.

 

An Earth-imaging camera developed by the Open University will form part of the payload of UKube-1, one of a new generation of CubeSat satellites promising greater access to space.

The CubeSat concept involves satellites of fixed dimensions which will be  cheaper to deploy, opening the possibility for far more people to get involved in space experiments.

UKube-1, which is due to launch early 2012, is the first UK CubeSat, and is funded by the UK Space Agency, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), and the Technology Strategy Board.

There will be five payloads on board, chosen by competition. The OU's contribution is the CMOS Imager Demonstrator, which is based on new sensor technology being developed and evaluated for space use.

It is designed to perform a variety of imaging tasks and will take images of the Earth and test the effect of radiation on instruments in space.

"UKube-1 will allow scientific discoveries, demonstrate technological innovation and throw open the doors of space experiments to the UK school and university population, all from a 4.5kg satellite," said Dr Ronan Wall, UKube-1 programme manager and Astrium systems engineer.

For more details go to Electronic Weekly.

 

Christian Payne, aka @Documentally, is a videographer and regular contributor to Platform. He was among tens of thousands who descended on this year's SXSW meet in Austin, Texas But as big business moves in, where does that leave technology's pioneers? 

I didn't just go to SXSW for the free cocktails, late night parties, and spontaneous meet ups.

No, I had work to do and a part of that was my own research. Simply put, I was really interested to know if anyone had any idea as to what 'the next big thing' might be.

The conference centre was where most people would gravitate towards, yet personally I found it repulsive. Not initially. I got to the conference centre before everybody other than security and it was a space full of potential. The corridors were wide and inviting. The barriers set up for registration zigzagged the great hall and everything seemed geared up for conversation.

As soon as the circus kicked off though the punters (of which I was very much one) were penned in and sold to: whether it be the constant bombarding with brands hanging in the air, brands in your food, brands asking you to scan a QR code so they could infiltrate your phone or brands on napkins you could wipe your disgust on. There was no escape.

Mainstream

For a large chunk of the festival I played the same game. After all, I owe much to my own accidental brand and the very fact I was walking the Austin streets was down to sponsorship from forward-thinking British brands.

I soon realised I was not alone in my discontent. Not just for the massively monetized conference but for the scene itself.

Perhaps now social media appeared mainstream (this was after all the first year SXSWinteractive had outsold the music festival).. perhaps now everyone was doing it.. those that really cared had lost their niche. The early adopters surfing on the edge of a wave were not prepared for it to crash on the beach.

I am not a regular but I still had 2008 to compare with and this year certainly seemed to be some kind of tipping point. Where were the breakthroughs? Where were the new memes that will carry us into and through the next innovation horizon? 

All the panels I wanted to attend seemed to be on simultaneously. Then when there was 10 minutes between events there was 20 minutes of travel to get to a distant hotel conference room.  As a result I struggled to cover half of what I wanted to see. I took little comfort in the fact that in order to find out more, chasing people up who'd been to these panels returned the common response "meh". 

Soggy

With all the tech saturation everything felt... well, wet and soggy. I was proud to be asked to talk about location based app LoveFre.sh  as it's based on discovering local produce and the people around it. Just using the app dropped me into peoples lives that were passionately going about their business because they cared.

It was this same theme of local that took me into the streets meeting  the local community and those living locally during the festival. 

There was also great insight to be had from the SXSW old timers: they knew where to go to find the pockets of reality amongst the cash-encrusted carnival.  One of the high points of the week was being introduced to the Frey Cafe tucked away in the back of the Red Eye Fly bar. Ewan Spence led the way and the night was filled with magic. In it's 11th year Frey cafe was unbranded & untouched since it's origins. It was real life storytelling at it's finest. But for how long? Just the presence of the festival in the city pushes the rents up on all spaces no matter how small and hidden away. These gems are being driven underground. 

Also my conversation with Adriana Lukas on Self Hacking went a long way to restoring my faith in humanity...

At least the humanity that was in attendance. We need more disruption, more disrupters and do-ers.  If the masses are now going to be shovelling data into the web like everyone else.. Where are the artists,  the chefs who will make sense of it all and present us up beautiful bite-sized chunks that we can not only share with those around us... but that we can get excited about as we dwell upon relevance?

Empathy

All this relentless shovelling is just leaving a hole where meaning used to be. Show us how these technologies make life better. That is all. Because it can you know.

The free alcohol-induced hedonistic nights left a bitter taste in my mouth when I woke to hear the news in Japan. It was mobile tech and social platforms that were getting the news to me.

In talking to those around me on the streets of SXSW I found an empathy I felt was lacking in the halls and auditoriums. It wasn't easy to reach out across the world to a nation in need other than to chuck money in their direction in the hope that would make their problems go away.

Offline

This is just the beginning. We have the users: let us hone the use. Buzzwords of Game Layers and the Gamification of education are just words without the social interaction these mechanisms seem to rely on. My offline interactions were way more rewarding than my online ones. The social tools I used enabled me to find the people I wanted to share physical space with. 

I came away from SXSW 2011 with realisations very different to what I'd expected.

Our fate seems to be in the hands of the digital shepherds, the designer/developers who in my opinion need to display our time-based data intertwined with our geographic data. I think it's been given a fancy name like Geotemporal Visualisation.

Easily accessible time/space data sets done well are necessary if innovative collaborations are to create some kind of empathic strands that span out to link our online relationships.

The SXSW interactive festival made me want to unplug and turn everything off. Only for a moment though. I found that turning on just a few channels, a back channel, a transmission frequency and a slight turn of the 'squelch' dial to allow just enough background conversation in ...and I was re-engaged.

I am still looking for the balance of on vs. off. I am still looking for the niche.

Words and pictures by Christian Payne

The OU’s Institute of Educational Technology is pleased to announce the first winners of the (2010) Robin Mason Prize. Phil Greaney and Mark Curcher are joint winners and each will receive a cheque for £50. The prize was established in 2010 to commemorate Professor Mason’s contribution to the Masters in Online and Distance Education programme (Award F10).

The competition was open to those who studied the OU Masters in Online and Distance Education (MAODE). Entrants were asked to submit a piece on what MAODE has contributed to the field of Technology Enhanced Learning and what studying meant to them.

The prize is named after OU Professor Robin Mason, an international expert in online and distance education and one of the founders and outstanding contributors to teaching on the courses.

• Find out more about the MA in Online and Distance Education

A project to make it easier to compare and choose between different university courses has won a £50,000 prize for Open University Telematics lecturer Tony Hirst .

Tony (pictured) came first in the OpenUp competition with his proposal to make the course information on UCAS  (the university places clearing scheme) course search website publicly available as open Linked Data.

"At present it is very difficult for anyone outside UCAS to build a course choice website that has coverage of all UK undergraduate courses," he told Platform. "So you are limited to the UCAS website.

"My proposal is to build a platform that makes the information available as Linked Data, and then perhaps build a few applications on top."

He said the end result for students will be a course choice site that is easier to use and richer in information. "It will make it possible to compare courses between institutions, which you can't do at the moment.

"We can also pull information in about student satisfaction, employment rates off the back of courses and so on. It can be used as the basis for building comparison services between different courses at one university, and the same courses across different universities."

Tony will be using the £50,000 prize to bring the project to fruition, which he hopes to do by the time the next set of students begins their UCAS applications in October 2011, he says. "There is no reason why it shouldn't be done quickly if we can get hold of the data in a timely fashion."

Tony is a member of the T151 Games and gaming  module team

Useful links

• Tony's winning project
•  
• Story in wired.co.uk

 

How do you warn people that a natural disaster is on its way? Japanese who carry phones serviced by country's dominant mobile phone carrier can opt to have alerts about earthquakes pushed straight to their mobile phones, but this isn’t yet the case for tsunamis.

OU graduate Mark Wood BSc (open) has been studying warning systems for tsunamis, earthquakes and other disasters as a member of the UN think tank The Working Group on Emergency Telecommunications (WGET) for 10 years. He has previously served as a UN disaster telecommunications co-coordinator and senior lecturer in mobile network design. Following the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan, he explains how communicating to a nation in danger is possible…

“A typical phone system is designed to be able to serve about 10 per cent of its customers at any one time. To build a system capable of serving all of them at once would be possible but not economical. Since telecommunications is de-regulated and privatised, the bottom line is always the most important driver, and so systems such as mobile phones, the internet and websites are built only with enough capacity to serve the typical ‘most busy business day’ case.

“If you tried to use SMS or email to warn everyone in London of a disaster, the result would be to crash the networks, and it could take hours for them to recover, just at the moment when they are needed more than ever before.  In the case of a tsunami, you need to warn millions or hundreds of millions of people within a few seconds, and do so even if all lines are busy, so how do we do that? That is the challenge I was set by the UN 14 years ago.

Mass-scale notification

“My research showed that mass scale SMS texting was going to be very dangerous to the networks, as it would put a heavy strain on the signaling network which would create a Tsunami of load and bring the networks control system down. Many disasters since then, and the official London 7/7 enquiry, have showed this to be so.

“But when mobile phones were first invented, the engineers knew this, so they also included a system for sending the same text message to everyone at once, a system called Cell Broadcast. Cell Broadcast is still installed in all base stations and all phones, so it would cost almost nothing to install. It works during disasters because it uses control channels to send the same message once to everyone and not a separate copy to everyone, one-by-one.  Also, it cannot easily be hacked by unauthorised users; a secure system controls who has access to it and what they can say and where.

“Many countries who have studied this, such as Holland, South Korea, Japan, USA and Sri Lanka, have discovered that it works, and that it would be ideal for public warnings. So why is it not commonplace?

"Cell Broadcast is not commonplace because it has never been commercially viable. SMS messages are generally acknowledged by industry experts as a very profitable service for the wireless industry. This is so in part because both the sender and receiver of an SMS message can be identified for billing purposes. Unlike SMS text messages, billing records cannot be created for Cell Broadcast message recipients. Also, while the sender of a Cell Broadcast message can be identified, there is no technology in place to document which handsets have actually received any given message. Because SMS systems are offered by almost all mobile network companies, many emergency notification companies have up until now only been able to offer SMS solutions to government as a solution for mass scale notification.  However all experience shows that this is a disappointment at the best of times, and a colossal shoot-in-the-foot disaster at the worst case. 

“I became an engineer because I believe that our technology should be our servant and not our master. I think the use of Cell Broadcast for emergency messaging can serve humanity by efficiently delivering timely, life-saving messages to millions or billions of our world’s citizens.”

 

Useful links

• Study with the OU - Volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis
• OU expert on Japan's nuclear power plant crisis

 

As the world waits to gauge the full impact of the large earthquake that struck Japan on Friday 11 March, many of the headlines have focussed on the emergency situation at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The incident has led to the precautionary evacuation of more than 150,000 residents living within a 20-km radius of the Fukushima plant.

“The plant will have been designed to withstand earthquakes in terms of both structure and safety devices,” says Professor Mike Fitzpatrick at the OU, whose research interests are in the areas of nuclear structural materials and residual stress analysis.

“The fact that the plant experienced a major explosion following the earthquake, during the operation to cool the core, shows just how robust the main pressure vessel containment system is.

“Once the reactor was shut down, it was still necessary to remove residual heat from the core. The failure of the cooling pumps meant that this was not happening effectively, hence there was an increase in temperature and pressure.

"Venting steam from the core, which was initially proposed, would release some radioactivity but would not cause long-term contamination. What must be avoided is the release of parts of the fuel assemblies, which is what happened at Chernobyl, although the sequence of events was very different there, with a lack of coolant whilst the reactor was generating power.

"The reactors that are being proposed for construction in the UK are much more advanced in terms of design and safety systems, and can cool passively following a shutdown which makes them inherently safer.”

At the time of writing borated sea water was being pumped into the stricken reactors to provide cooling and also to minimize further nuclear reaction in the core.

 

Useful links

• The World Nuclear Association on nuclear power plants and earthquakes
• OU course Structural integrity: designing against failure (T357)
• OU graduate and disaster telecommunications expert on mass-scale notification
• OU academics talk to OpenLearn about the Fukushima incident
   

 

Renewable sources could supply most, probably all, of the world’s energy needs by 2050, says solar and wind power expert Godfrey Boyle.

He outlined how this is possible in his inaugural lecture as the Open University's Professor of Renewable  Energy.

Godfrey(pictured) is a member of the T206 Energy for a sustainable future course team.

Replay the lecture online at the OU's Berrill Stadium.