TJantunen.com

By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A team of fire-fighting robots has been unveiled by defence contractor QinetiQ at a demonstration in London.

The display showcased a quartet of robots aimed at tackling the particular risk of fires involving cylinders of the industrial gas acetylene.

The robots range from a nimble, stair-climbing reconnaissance unit to a diesel-powered robot with a large claw.

The two-year project is funded by Network Rail, the Highways Agency and Transport for London.

Organised in conjunction with the London Fire Brigade, the project has been on trial since last year, with the team of robots – and their operators – on call for incidents that happen in London and the Southeast.

So far in 2009, the robots have been involved in 10 incidents.

‘Tremendous results’

Acetylene gas poses a particular risk to emergency services when a fire is suspected to involve cylinders of the gas.

When subjected to heat, the cylinders’ contents can undergo a chemical reaction that creates even more heat. As a result, acetylene cylinders can become a time bomb even after a fire has been extinguished, putting emergency responders and the public in danger.

Standard procedure when a fire is suspected to involve acetylene is to cordon off an area of 200m around it for 24 hours.

"In the last five years we’ve had 471 cylinder incidents in London, 91 of which involved 128 acetylene cylinders," Gary Gunyon, group commander for hazardous materials and environmental protection with the London Fire Brigade, told BBC News.

"We’ve had tremendous results [with the robots] in London. They used to take more than 24 hours to resolve, now we get them resolved in under three hours.

"Three years ago we were shutting down parts of London for over 24 hours every other week. Now it doesn’t even make the news."

The scale of the cordon and the time that once was required is a particular concern for transport infrastructure.

"If we have an incident involving acetylene cylinders on what we call the ‘line side’, it means that we have to stop trains on that line," Peter Guy, head of operational security for Network Rail, told BBC News.

"You’re stopping the travelling public from getting to their destinations, and the rail network from providing that service. Anything to reduce the amount of time that any of our lines are closed can be nothing but good news," he added.

Meet the team

The demonstration has a cylinder trapped inside an empty van, and a number of operators are on hand to send the team into action.

Talon is a small and highly manoeuvrable robot that runs on tracks. It can climb stairs, and the video and thermal imaging cameras on board can be folded up, allowing it to sneak into tight spaces.

It has already proven its worth considerably in Iraq, where it has been used for bomb disposal; typically it is used first in fire scenarios, sent in to assess the situation.

Behind it comes Bison, a slightly larger, more dextrous robot that uses grippers and cutting tools to gain access to, for instance, gas cylinder storage sites.

It is also fitted with a small jet of water to do a simple test on the cylinders. If a water jet directed onto them creates steam, the operators watching through Bison’s video and thermal cameras know they are dealing with a hot and potentially dangerous cylinder.

Then, Black Max can take care of the traditional fire-fighting task. It is a squat, four-wheeled, remote-controlled vehicle that carries a fire hose, wheeling in and wetting and cooling any dangerous finds.

Brokk is simply a modified piece of industrial digging equipment, modified to be remotely controlled and fitted with a giant claw that can pick up and move the cylinders.

While the current use of the robot team is for the specific risk posed by gas cylinders, it is clear that the robots could be used in a wide range of applications where fire presents a particular danger.

Simon Christoforato, business manager for robotic systems at Qinetiq told BBC News that a number of sensors for other dangers, such as chemical spills or biological contamination, are commercially available and would be easy to implement on the team of robots.

"At the moment we’re only being funded for this project, but (the robots) could be useful anywhere there’s a fireman getting into danger," he said.

"I think it is clear that as the utility of these systems is proven, then other applications will come."

Mr Gunyon of the London Fire Brigade agreed, saying that he would like to see more of the robot teams on call in London.</p

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

from BBC News | Technology | Full Feed

A Briton fighting extradition to the US for hacking into top-secret computers claims he was morally justified in breaking the law.

Gary McKinnon, 43, from Wood Green, north London, admits hacking into 97 US government computers, including Nasa’s and Pentagon’s, during 2001 and 2002.

He told the BBC he was on a "moral crusade" to prove US intelligence had found an alien craft run on clean fuel.

Results of judicial reviews into Mr McKinnon’s case are due on Friday.

They focus on whether Mr McKinnon should have been allowed to face trial in the UK and whether the decision to extradite him should have been reconsidered in light of his diagnosis as having Asperger’s Syndrome last year.

His lawyers say he is "eccentric" rather than malicious and that he should be tried on lesser charges in the UK to protect his mental health.

"It is actually a completely unbalanced extradition treaty"

Gary McKinnon

Mr McKinnon is accused of hacking into the computers with the intention of intimidating the US government.

His legal team fear he could be treated as a terrorist and face up to 70 years in jail.

The US government says his actions caused damage costing $800,000 (£500,000) at a time of heightened security in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks.

Mr McKinnon told BBC Radio 5 live’s Victoria Derbyshire show: "I’m not blind to criminality but I was on a moral crusade at the time.

"There was good evidence to show that certain secretive parts of the American government intelligence agencies did have access to crashed extra terrestrial technology which could… save us as a form of free, clean, pollution-free energy.

"I thought if someone was holding on to that, that was actually unconstitutional under American law."

‘Two-way street’

Mr McKinnon also criticised arrangements between the two countries that meant the US only had to prove "reasonable suspicion" to force extradition of a British citizen.

To extradite an American from the US, the British must prove "probable cause".

"It is actually a completely unbalanced extradition treaty. It should be a two-way street," said Mr McKinnon.

Earlier this month, the Conservatives failed in a bid to force a review of the law when their Commons motion was defeated by 54 votes.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson told them the 2003 treaty had simplified extradition procedures while safeguarding defendants’ rights.

The burden of evidence required on each side is "essentially" the same, he added.</p

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

from BBC News | Technology | Full Feed

Hey Guys,

If you have been reading IBB for long you probably know that I try things and test things all the time to try and make more money online.

Today I wanted to ask you the question “Are you testing / trying?” what are you currently testing and trying out?

What is your success or failures?

Comment below and let us know what you have been testing lately, maybe we can all find a gold mine!

I know this is a short post but it should make for an interesting discussion!

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from InfectedByBugs

People often write blog posts with their regular readers in mind. They write quick posts which are of the moment and then forget about them when they drop off the front page of the blog. But these posts don’t cease to exist.

Every blog post is a potential route into your website. Every post has a web page with its own URL and this page will rank for certain search terms. No matter what the page, there is a chance that at some point or other a visitor will arrive at this page via the search engines. This post will be their first experience of your site and you want it to be a good one.

In essence, every post you write has a secondary purpose as an advert for your site. Good, informative articles will keep visitors from search engines on the site and may even encourage them to subscribe to the blog, whereas poor articles will only see them leaving. This shouldn’t deter you from producing content, rather it should inspire you to produce more and more of these ‘adverts’ and you should ensure that they are of a high quality, offering value to the reader, drawing them in.

Alex Bowden
Writer/editor

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from Just Search | Search Engine Optimisation & Internet Marketing Journal

Now that YouTube has officially dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 it seems to have started a bit of a trend.

Many other popular websites are starting to follow suit and hop on the bandwagon of greeting users of the once popular browser with a message advising them to upgrade and refusing entry, or presenting the user with a heavily restricted version of the website in question.

As a web designer, I welcome the change as it gives me a lot more freedom when it comes to working within web standards. As you may or may not know, the more advanced you get with your web development projects, the more likely Internet Explorer 6 will concede and make parts of your website look incorrect. This is due to it not following web standards as closely as it should do.

If you are one of the unlucky IE6 users, don’t panic as it’s quite simple to upgrade. Simply run Windows Update and it will pick out the correct updates for your current windows installation. It will either upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or more recently, Internet Explorer 8.

As more and more online services start to deprecate, IE6 support, like YouTube mentioned above and also most Google services including Gmail, we advise upgrading to avoid any interruptions in your web browsing experience!

Chris Hutchison
SEO Programmer

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from Just Search | Search Engine Optimisation & Internet Marketing Journal

by Stoney deGeyter

We often come to the SEO table thinking that it’s going to be relatively easy. While SEO isn’t inordinately difficult (neither is changing the car oil, building a fence or painting a house) it is often time consuming and rarely ever “simple.” What appears to be a small task on the surface can often become a much larger task once properly researched and considered. Like an iceberg, the bulk of SEO is behind the scenes and requires hours upon hours of labor.

I only need a little bit of text!

Not long ago I was performing a cursory site audit for an e-commerce site. On the surface, the site looked pretty minimalistic. There were only four main product areas, each having anywhere from 5-20 categorical divisions. Each of those divisions contained only a handful of products, many that fit into multiple categories. By all measures, this is rather small for an ecommerce site.

But as I began to analyze the site more carefully, paying attention to it’s optimization needs, a whole new world opened up before me.

The site totaled around 50 category pages, and close to 100 individual products. Each of these pages needed optimized content, titles and description meta information written. We are talking anywhere from 40 hours (10 minutes per page, making superficial edits) to 150 hours (60 minutes per page with full content rewrites) of writing needed on this “small” site alone.

Before you can start writing keyword research needs to be performed. The research for each page wouldn’t be that difficult but good research is time consuming to ensure you find all potentially relevant terms. Then it’s a matter of determining which keywords have the most value and will generate the most sales-driven traffic. Such determinations are an ongoing process, that is confirmed and re-confirmed only when properly analyzed by tracking performance.

On the surface, what appeared to be a quick and easy site to optimize became much more involved and time consuming upon closer inspection.

I don’t see a problem with the navigation!

Another site I recently reviewed was even smaller. Only a couple dozen pages, all outlining the various benefits of a single product. And again, on the surface, all appeared pretty simple. But once I got investigating, a nice and clean navigation was revealed to be anything but.

This site requires a significant architectural overhaul to create a more search friendly site architecture and eliminate what amounts to at least a dozen and a half pages of duplicate content.

Once that is fixed then the keywords will need to be carefully researched and implemented. The site has great content, just needs to be keyword focused and targeted. This site is a case-in-point to why SEOs should be consulted with throughout the site development process. Instead of paying to have the site re-developed to be search engine friendly, the company could have saved money having it done right the first time.

These keywords are gonna be easy!

A few years back I took on a client in a very niche, yet extremely competitive, industry. There wasn’t a lot of other businesses competing for the same keywords, but those that were invested heavily in the SEO making getting good search results much more difficult that initially thought. This can happen if you do not adequately investigate the competition, which I admit I was guilty of. It looked easy and I made some assumptions.

While we were able to achieve results for a decent number of keywords, the cost and time involved didn’t quite bring about a strong ROI for the client. Over the long-term the ROI will improve. Less work will be needed to maintain their places in the rankings, but the initial year was a near break-even for the client. The client then moved on to other forms of advertising and marketing and received similar low-ROI results.

The allure of SEO is a double-edged sword. There are promises of better ROI than other advertising, but that ROI is never instantly achieved, especially in competitive markets. SEO takes time to work and, as it is commonly said, time is money. Some company’s have enough to invest, but not quite what it takes to succeed. This is to no fault of the business owner, other than ensuring expectations are in line with reality. The SEO must do his part to keep expectations in check as well.

Optimizing most sites is generally never as easy as it appears on the surface. There are almost always delays by either the client or SEO, or more issues get uncovered than was found in the original analysis. But when it’s all said and done, SEO is about time. Time to write compelling copy, time to build a good site architecture, time to research keywords, and time to keep pushing rankings up in the results while pushing the competition down.

The next time you think you’ve got an easy optimization project, take a second and even a third look. It may not really be as simple as you think.

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from Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing