Technology Archives

The Navy's new online system for leave requests aims to reduce paperwork and expedite processing.

The service's E-Leave system is not only faster than paper, it also speeds up recordkeeping with the Defense Finance and Accounting Service. Manual leave requests submitted into DFAS run late about 20 percent of the time, the Navy says.

All shore commands are supposed to be using E-Leave as of today, and ships will phase it in over a two-year period, which started in October.

That's how David Last, a consultant to the outfit which operates all the aids to navigation in the United Kingdom, described the effects of jamming on GPS and related systems in tests last December conducted on a buoy tender offshore Newcastle, England.

The General Lighthouse Authorities of the U.K. and Ireland ran the tests to determine the effects a cheap GPS jammer anyone can buy over the Internet would have on the GPS navigation system installed on its THV Galatea buoy tender. The results, Last said, were "literally all over the map."

The jammer, which output a signal measured in milliwatts (one thousandth of a watt; by comparison, radio station WETA in Washington transmits 75,000 watts) skewed position results so much that over the course of the tests, the GPS receiver reported that Galatea -- which did not stray far from its position offshore Newcastle -- was anywhere from the northwest coast of Ireland, a distance of about 250 miles, to St. Petersburg, Russia, some 1,200 miles away.

Last told me that the most dramatic results of the Galatea tests showed the jamming crippled not just the ship's main GPS receiver, but multiple systems on the ship, all of which use GPS. It affected the radar system on board the Galatea, which included both a signal from the radar and a signal from an Automatic Identification System. The results were two different locations for nearby ships displayed on the Galatea's screens, Last said. Last reported those results last week at a meeting of the multi-agency U.S. Space Based Position, Timing and Navigation National Executive Committee in Washington.

Other systems on the Galatea crippled by the jamming that depend on GPS included the electronic chart display system, satellite communications systems and emergency distress systems, which rely on GPS for either location or timing, Last told me.

The Galatea was able to get an accurate position from a ground transmitter located 80 miles away in Anthon, using a technology called eLoran, not susceptible to GPS jamming and all but abandoned by the United States.

The Coast Guard started shutting down the Loran stations that transmit the eLoran signal last year, but then-Coast Guard commandant Thad Allen said the service would continue discussions to use eLoran as a backup to GPS. Last said the Newcastle tests proved both the vulnerability of GPS and the need for eLoran as a backup.

And it looks like eLoran is not dead. The 2010 Coast Guard Authorization Act signed by President Obama last Friday directs the Homeland Security Department to establish eLoran as the supplemental navigation system for the United States and the Coast Guard to modernize its Loran stations to transmit the eLoran signal.

At the very least, this should keep the Coast Guard from blowing up any more Loran stations, though I think it still will be a tough fight to make eLoran a reality.

The Army continues to push into the Buck Rogers Age.

The service tested eight displays that are worn like a watch. At Fort Dix in New Jersey, the soldiers used the devices to watch a real-time video from an unmanned air vehicle and other images sent from computers, UPI.com reports.

The Army has been testing other technologies in its ongoing effort to build a digital Army.

Be forewarned: This is a shameless plug.

I'm moderating a Government Executive webinar on Tuesday on the use of smart phones and smart phone apps, in the Army. I hope you can join me.

We'll get the 10,000-foot view from Carol Wortman, acting director of the Army
Architecture Integration Center, and the grunts' test perspective from Col. Marisa Tanner, chief of the mission command capability division of the Future Force Integration Directorate, and Mike McCarthy, director of the Mission Command Complex at the directorate. Tanner and McCarthy are Fort Bliss in Texas.

I believe this will be informative -- and because I'm involved, fun, too.

You can register here.

White Sands Missile Range, N.M. -- The Army is conducting pass-or-fail tests here of battlefield communications systems, including wideband versions of the Joint Tactical Radio System, and robots and sensors, said Paul Mehney, a spokesman for the service's integration operation.

The tests run through the end of September but have already attracted a bunch of high level visitors, including Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey. If successful, the equipment could provide some truly advanced and proven battlefield gadgets and gizmos.

On Friday, the Army hosted uniformed and civilian VIPs, reporters and analysts from the Government Accountability Office. I'll report back on Sept. 20 on what I saw and learned.

And, in case I forgot the Army still likes to do things real early in the morning, the press tour kicked off at 0600.

Google's new instant search feature promises results instantaneously with every letter typed into the search bar. But I find it more annoying than useful.

Google Instant also performs searches based on your location. A search for federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, using just his last name, pops up different letter-by-letter results in Washington and New Mexico.

The location specific default of Google Instant became apparent when I typed in a "K" into the search bar field here at What's Central in northeast New Mexico. The "K" prompted Google Instant to pop up three Albuquerque TV stations by their call letters as the top results: KOAT, KRQE and KOB.

When Nextgov executive editor Allan Holmes typed "K" into his computer located at the Watergate in Washington, the first result he saw was the Kings Dominion amusement park just north of Richmond, Va.

This location-skew continued when both Allan and I typed in a "U" after the "K." My first hit for those two letters was KUNM, the public radio station in Albuquerque, with a local translator I can pick up here in The Original Las Vegas. Google decided Allan really needed to know about the Kushi Izakaya & Sushi restaurant several blocks away in Washington.

Google Instant seemed to drop its geo-mania once Allan and I both typed the third letter in Kundra's name: We both got "Kung Fu" and a Wikipedia entry for Kundalini, some sort of yoga thing.

Google finally delivered results on the federal CIO only when Allan and I typed the fourth letter of his name, making all the results beforehand an interesting intellectual exercise, but neither relevant nor useful.

But if your mission is to make money by organizing all the world's information, developing a location specific way to display it sure can help the bottom line by steering folks to restaurants, amusement parks and TV stations.

Knowledge, however, has no boundaries, and we need to keep that mind as Google takes us down the instant search rabbit hole.

Ahh, computers keep getting faster and smarter, but thank goodness they still don't match up to the power of the human brain -- or I'd be out of work.

But what if someone could figure out how to come up with the direct brain-machine interface that harnesses the power of that organ to tools such as robot limbs?

That was the theme of a 2004 project the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency worked on in 2004, the details of which were released on Wednesday by the Defense Department's FOIA website.

DARPA, based on this report, managed to harness the power of a rat's brain to a machine interface, but so far has not managed to turn the robo-rat into a robo-writer. For a while, at least, I have job security.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency tweaked on Wednesday its original announcement from last week to award a sole-source contract to Google for geospatial visualization services so outfits such as Microsoft can apply.

The NGA added language that said, "All responsible sources may submit a capability statement, proposal, or quotation which shall be considered by the agency."

That does leave a bit of room for competition compared to the original notice, which said, "Google is the only source that can meet the Government's requirement. . . . A request for solicitation will be considered as nonresponsive."

Although Microsoft says its Bing Map Server could do the job, in the amendment posted on Wednesday NGA went to great lengths to clarify that only Google Earth meets it requirements, which include "compatible capability across networks, global access, unlimited processing and software licenses, and access to the Google Earth hosted content through widely used Open Geospatial Consortium service interfaces."

NGA also pointed out it has made a "significant investment" in Google Earth technology, which runs on both secret and top secret networks. The agency added, "DoD and Intelligence Community have made additional investments to support client and application deployment and testing that use the existing Google Earth services provided by NGA."

Maybe Microsoft should concentrate on Mars.

A prolific -- and popular -- blogger at the Transportation Security Administration is also now spreading his insight to the Defense community. Bob Burns, a.k.a. Blogger Bob, wrote his first post for the Armed With Science Blog, which appears on the DoD Live website.

Blogger Bob launched his gig as a periodic contributor to the Tech Tuesday posts on the science blog. His first effort covered the technologies TSA uses to fight terrorism.

Blogger Bob is building off his work on the TSA Blog, which routinely receives dozens of comments from the public on its posts -- many of which can be quite testy. When Blogger Bob announced he would be contributing to Armed With Science, for example, he received both congratulations and sarcastic comments:

Bob, I'm sure you can you see the irony here. You work for an organization that has, for over a month, completely ignored an extensive analysis in the top scientific journal Nature stating that there is no Science behind the SPOT program. You work for an organization that believes that the liquid state of matter dangerous if not contained by ziplock baggies. You work for an organization that obsesses over every single object passengers carry, but does nothing about all other people who have contact with airplanes.

There is absolutely no Science in what the TSA does.

and

If TSA is, as you allege in this blog post, "armed with science," why have you refused to acknowledge or respond to Nature's evisceration of your "BDO" program as complete nonsense?

To TSA's credit, their blog has consistently posted these rants on its posts. Wonder if the DoD Live site will follow the same policy.

Those smart techie folks at Carnegie Mellon University have put together a program aimed at boosting young students' interest in computer science with the hopes that they can convince more teenagers to enter scientific and technological careers.

The school launched on Tuesday an educational initiative, with $7 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to develop tools that allow middle and high school students to interact with robots to learn about computer science, science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- you know, CS-STEM. Carnegie Mellon officials hope the initiative can reverse what it calls "a significant national decline in the number of college students majoring in" the sciences.

The program is called Fostering Innovation through Robotics Exploration, or FIRE, as in fire up your interest in computer science. It will support the creation of programs such as "game-like virtual worlds where robot programs can be tested, as well as computerized tutors that teach mathematics and computer science in the context of robotics," according to a press release.

"The idea is that these programs must be rigorous, but fun -- what we call 'hard fun,'" said Robin Shoop, director of FIRE and of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Academy, an international leader in the development of K-12 robotic education curriculum. "Robots provide a great teaching tool. Kids like robots and are innately curious about how they work and how they make decisions. Finding answers to their questions is fun, but technically challenging, and that makes robotics uniquely suited to teaching students computer science, engineering and mathematics."