UKM’s Early Warning System For Landslides In The Pipeline

By Siva Selvam
BANGI, 26 May, 2011 - Even more lives could have been lost than the 16 people in the May 21, 2011 landslide tragedy at an orphanage in Hulu Langat near Kajang but for a timely warning from UKM’s expert on geological hazards, Associate Prof Dr Tajul Anuar Jamaluddin.
          He is the Coordinator of the Geological Hazards Programme at UKM’s Southeast Asia Disaster Prevention Research Institute (SEADPRI) and is now developing an early warning system for landslides that will alert the authorities and people in the vicinity of an impending disaster. Several prototypes are ready and tested at four slopes between Gerik and Kuala Kangsar in Perak and a movement was detected on one slope. 
          The Geoseismic Wireless Extenso Sensor System, or Geo-WES, was originally developed by Rapid Matrix Sdn Bhd. Rapid Matrix had no geological expert and Dr Tajul Anuar was invited to join. UKM is currently drawing up an MoU with the company to develop the slope movement monitoring system that can be used at all slopes.
          The sensor system will alert control centres on even minute soil movements. The centres will then trigger SMSes to residents in the vicinity and other relevant parties. Dr Tajul Anuar said the equipment is able to detect even one millimetre of soil movement on a slope, said.
          In the Hulu Langat incident, Dr Tajul Anuar did an extensive survey of the hilltop and surrounding terrain by Sunday morning after the Saturday afternoon incident when he saw heavy machinery being used to remove debris and earth from the site.
          He advised them to immediately stop the clearing work. “Just as there are aftershocks following an earthquake, there can also be subsequent landslides. The danger signs were all there – trees uprooted, soil fissures, water seepage from the earth. The slope was still at a very dangerous angle and the movement of heavy machinery could trigger another collapse,” Dr Tajul Anuar said.
          The clearing work stopped and resumed only two to three days later and even then beginning from the top of the slope as advised. UKM set up SEADPRI on June 1, 2008 to oversee holistic research activities related to disasters regionally as well as on a global scope.
          The programme is to help governments arrive at a decision when considering policies on climate, geological and technological disasters and in increasing the required number of human resources needed as well as improving the ability of the work force at the local, state, national and international levels, especially in Southeast Asia.  

Dr Tajul Anuar and his team is involved in providing expertise, consultations and advice to various government bodies as well as the public and house owners when selecting sites for building construction. The unit have gained recognition with many construction companies regularly seeking its advice, particularly on hill slope development.
At Hulu Langat, Dr Tajul Anuar ended up providing critical expert input thereby helping to avert a worsening situation. He has submitted a comprehensive report to the government on the incident. This is one example of how UKM, as a premier research university, is contributing towards national wellbeing and development.
Dr Tajul Anuar said: “In Malaysia, focus has been on gauging rainfall to indicate potential landslides, but the best way is to check the actual soil movement,” he said.
While it costs about RM10 million to repair a slope after a landslide, such a monitoring system costs only about RM100,000. One objective of SEADPRI’s Geological Hazards Programme is to change the focus of current practices in disaster management from a responsive approach to a more preventive one, in order to prevent or reduce the impact of disasters.
          SEADPRI sees the need for proper management in a holistic manner to replace the current ad hoc emergency response. The Geological Hazards Programme is working on such a management plan. It includes analysing landslips with regard to risk assessments, the elements involved such as communities and infrastructure and areas to be given priority to curb wastage of costs and resources.
          The non-structural mitigation strategy includes policies as well as one-stop centres at local government level to process hill slope development that should include the involvement of technical government agencies. The structural mitigation strategy includes the construction of retaining walls, studying and coping with debris flows and placing greater emphasis on public awareness.
“The education effort must start at the school level. The media must also be more involved in informing about the dangers of hill slope development and the safety measures that needed to be taken,” Dr Tajul Anuar said.
          Studies have shown that between 1973 and 2007, there were more than 200 landslides in Malaysia that resulted in the loss of about 500 lives and an economic loss of about RM3 billion. 

           UniKL – Gigatech Engineering Sealed an Industrial Pact in HVACR. An industrial pact was ascertained between Universiti Kuala Lumpur and Gigatech Engineering Sdn. Bhd. (GESB) on January 13, 2012 focusing on Heating, Ventilating, Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration (HVACR).

        UniKL through its branch campus UniKL Malaysia France Institute (UniKL MFI) inked the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Gigatech Engineering Sdn. Bhd., a well established M&E (Mechanical & Electrical Engineering) contractor in designing, installing, testing and commissioning of Heating, Ventilating, and Air-Conditioning systems for commercial buildings, at UniKL City Campus.

      The treaty will open doors for UniKL MFI’s final semester undergraduates in the programme Bachelor of Engineering Technology (Hons.) in Air Conditioning and Industrial Refrigeration to undergo On-Job Training (OJT) at GESB for 16 weeks. The OJT will equip Final Year Students with industrial exposure as well as a platform for them to carry out their Final Year Project (FYP).

“We believe this is a win-win partnership between UniKL and GESB. We are committed in setting the new trend for the market by providing specific services that caters the unique needs of our clients. Our ambition is to change the market and the industry, and at the same time, we are offering opportunities for UniKL students to contribute in the process.” remarked the Managing Director, GESB, Mr. Wong Cheok Gid who represented GESB for the signing.

                 UniKL was represented by its President/CEO, Prof. Dato’ Dr. Abdul Hakim Juri for the signing and Dean, UniKL MFI, Assoc. Prof. Haron Abas as witness. Apart from giving industrial exposure to the students and delivering technology transfer programme, this cooperation is also expected to enhance and boost the research (R&D) in the field of HVACR.

               Also present during the ceremony were, UniKL Deputy President (Management & Services), Dato’ Haji Mohamed Hisham Che Abdul Ghani, Deputy President (Technopreneur & Student Affairs), Prof. Ahmad Zahir Haji Mokhtar and Mr. Barry Khoo, General Manager, GESB who was also the witness of the signing.

Reported by,
Syaidatul Ehya Nadzeri
Corporate Communication Division

centre for green technology ans sustainability

The Centre for Green Technology and Sustainability at the Malaysia University of Science and Technology (MUST) was founded in July 2011 with a mission to foster the study and practice of sustainable green technologies. As a hub of the university’s green initiatives, the centre actively promotes the research and development of sustainable green technologies and systems in agriculture, environment, energy, transportation & logistics and construction engineering.

The centre aims to bring together the public, industry and scientists to address critical issues ranging from climate change to the degradation of the environment and the depletion of natural resources. By engaging industry players and the public in providing input and ideas through activities and projects, and with the contribution of technical expertise from the academic staff members of MUST, the centre is poised to generate new technologies and solutions that are both people friendly and environmentally friendly.

Limkokwing students showvent in Singapore - case innovative mobile applications at Nokia

Limkokwing team at the Nokia Connection Showcase 2011 held in Singapore last month. They displayed several mobile applications such as MathsFrenzy and Otokhanta among other innovations.

Nokia gave Limkokwing students the rare opportunity to showcase their mobile applications at the prestigious Nokia Connection Showcase 2011 held recently in Singapore from 21st June to 24th June.
Four students and three lecturers from the Faculty of Information & Communication Technology (FICT) and Faculty of Multimedia Creativity (FMC) respectively made the trip across the causeway to represent Limkokwing University of Creative Technology at Marina Bay Sands where ten entries were presented before the select committee of judges from Nokia.
The students - Edwin Koh Boon San, Harry Kho Yong Hua, Yong Cheng Fei and Theodorus Christian - impressed the judges with their ingenious creations.

Ingenious ideas

One of the entries, MathsFrenzy, developed by Edwin and Harry is a mathematical game aimed at kids to develop their thinking and reasoning skills through questions on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. 
To date, MathsFrenzy has fetched over 48,107 downloads, which indicates the potential of the application.

The Limkokwing booth drew a steady flow of IT enthusiasts from all over the world. The University provides avenues for student creativity to help them explore new ideas to reinvent the industry.

Another version of the game - Otokohanta - produced by the Faculty’s Yong and Theodorus has since garnered more than 120,000 downloads. This is a simple shooting game developed in FlashLite comprising five different levels with each stage featuring exciting characters and backgrounds. 

Smart, profitable applications

SmartKids is another interesting application for children below five years of age. Developed by Rebecca and Kevin Ragui, it features maths quiz flash cards, alphabets, shapes and colour charts to provide toddlers with simple basics of arithmetic. 
The applications are attractive because of their usability in providing services and one example is the rapidKL LRT Route Finder, a widget that provides encoded traveling schedules and ticket fares besides calculating the time of traveling to help users plan better. 
Other intelligent applications include: Cornea Digital Eye Centre, Vitamin Widget, 1 Malaysia Language, Mobicar, Quick Qibla and Cook-Lah! 

Special invitation

In selecting these students, Nokia was acknowledging the creativity of Limkokwing students in general. According to Nokia “this showcase opportunity is extremely rare for universities. We seldom get students to showcase at any such Nokia major event”.
Recently Limkokwing University signed a MoU with Nokia Pte Ltd for the development of mobile platforms, training of staff and students as well as widgets creation.
Through the MoU, Nokia gave a financial grant of USD$15,000 (RM48,000) to help Limkokwing in the field of widgets development and the University’s presence at the Nokia Connection Showcase 2011 is ample testimony of progress made.

Creative freedom

Limkokwing University Vice President of Corporate Relations, Dato’ Fajura Juffa Mohd Kamal is optimistic of the partnership between Limkokwing and Nokia.
“We like to provide avenues for student creativity and this arrangement with Nokia creates an exciting platform and provides highly potential prospects for students to fully explore the medium that is becoming a primary vehicle for communication”. 

Flying Windmills

Flying Windmills

A small company is taking an unusual tack to produce cheaper wind energy. Ted Greenwald

Wind harvester: The Makani Airborne Wind Turbine sits on a runway outside of Oakland, California. The craft generates electrical power during flight.
Makani PowerMultimedia

          In a concrete control tower of a decommissioned naval air base just outside Oakland, California, a team of engineers is building what might best be called a hybrid of an unmanned aerial vehicle and a wind turbine. The 120-pound craft has rotors on its wings to lift it into the sky helicopter-style; a thin tether attaches it to a platform. Once in the air, the craft begins to glide like a kite, its 26-foot wingspan tracing circles 250 feet overhead. Now the propellers become generators, spinning freely and generating electricity that flows down the taut tether—and, someday, into the local grid.

         This craft, developed by Makani Power, is a long-shot bid to tackle one of the world's toughest problems: getting clean, cheap energy. Currently, wind power costs from five to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour—but the price of electricity from burning coal can fall below four cents per kilowatt-hour. Makini Power, however, aims to bring down the price of wind energy to three cents per kilowatt-hour. 

         With wind energy, most of the cost of generating power is tied up in building and maintaining huge blades and turbines. Makani believes its vehicle will cost less to build than conventional turbines and will harvest wind energy more effectively, because its flying pattern lets it generate energy under more wind conditions. "The magic is in flying crosswind," says CEO Corwin Hardham, referring to how the vehicle moves perpendicular to the wind like a kite. "We use aerodynamics to move the rotors many times faster than the actual wind speed."

         The company has carried out a series of test flights, including a flight this fall during which the carbon-fiber prototype with a 26-foot wingspan generated five kilowatts of power. Within two years the company hopes to have an 88-foot wing that generates 600 kilowatts—around a third what a large conventional wind turbine can generate. A gargantuan wing to generate five megawatts is on the drawing board.

         The company's project has drawn some interest from funders.  Google has put $15 million into the company, and in September 2010, Makani won a $3 million grant from the Department of Energy's ARPA-E program, which funds high-risk ideas that could lead to what the agency calls "transformational and disruptive energy technologies." Hardham is an avid kite surfer, and in mid-2006 he was working for engineering firm Squid Labs when he hit upon the idea of using similar aerodynamics to generate energy. (In kite surfing, the rider stands on a board and is pulled by a large nylon parachute.)

         Today, the 20-person company occupies Spartan, military-issue facilities with a machine shop in the rear and an assembly area up front. Composites are baked in a shipping container outdoors; the old control tower's aerie serves as a lunchroom and occasional bar. Hardham describes the company's situation as both "humble" and "perfect." He says, "There's an obvious advantage to being more nimble than big corporations."

         Makani's technology is designed to take advantage of the relatively consistent winds that blow well above the ground. Conventional wind turbines top out at roughly 300 feet, with blade tips reaching 500 feet, beyond which it becomes prohibitively expensive to build stable structures. Researching the potential for wind power, Hardham came across a 1980 paper by Miles Loyd proposing a tethered wing that could elevate the business end of a windmill to any height.


 http://www.technologyreview.com/business
 Ted Greenwald

blue moon..

          NASA's Kepler space telescope team this month unveiled "Kepler-22b." A planet some 600 light-years away, Kepler-22b circles its star squarely in a "habitable zone" — the orbital distance where a world's surface temperature would neither boil nor freeze water, perhaps allowing oceans to survive as on Earth. Water is widely seen as one of life's vital ingredients by planetary scientists.

Catchy names, clearly, aren't a priority in astronomy. Other proposed habitable zone worlds reported by astronomers (among the more than 700 planets detected in the last two decades orbiting nearby stars) sport monikers such as "55 Cancri f" and "HD 85512 b.

          But at least some solace comes from the Kepler space telescope team's estimate that just in our Milky Way galaxy alone, some 500 million planets likely orbit inside their star's habitable zone. "We have many candidates in that region," said Kepler principal scientist William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., at a briefing unveiling Kepler-22b to his colleagues earlier this month. At his briefing, Borucki showed a chart depicting more than 50 possible habitable zone planets, as well as Kepler-22b, among the 2,326 planetary candidates detected by Kepler since its 2009 launch.

         How has Kepler piled up so many planet candidates? The $591 million space telescope gazes unblinkingly at roughly 170,000 stars within 3,000 light years (one light year is about 5.9 trillion miles) along the "Orion Spur" of stars in our Milky Way. Kepler detects planets by spotting dips in starlight, eclipses called "transits," that they cause when they circle in front of their stars.Science fiction fans hoping that Kepler-22b is another Earth may need the solace that many more habitable planets may be out there. That's because the early indications are that Kepler-22b's habitable zone isn't all that habitable for that particular world.

         For one thing, Kepler-22b isn't really Earth-like. At 2.4 times the width of Earth, Kepler-22b seems more like a smaller version of the gas-shrouded world Neptune in our own solar system, according to planet hunter Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley. Where Neptune is about 17 times heavier than Earth, Kepler 22b is likely about 14 times heavier than Earth, estimates astronomer Francesco Pepe of Switzerland's Geneva Observatory, who attended the Kepler briefing. At that weight, Kepler-22b likely has an atmosphere nothing like Earth, likely making it uninhabitable.

         The Kepler team for example estimated that Kepler-22b, if it had an atmosphere like Earth's, would enjoy balmy average temperatures of 72 degrees Fahrenheit, "a little warmer than a nice day here in California," Borucki said. But even the draft paper written by Borucki and colleagues describing the discovery admits this is "not very likely." 

         "No, too big," says planetary scientist Lena Noack of Germany's Institut für Planetenforschung (Institute for Planetary Research), for at least one other reason. In research presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco the same week as the Kepler briefing, Noack found that planets need to weigh less than five times as much as Earth to possess plate tectonics, the continental movements that characterize our world.

         Plate tectonics causes earthquakes, but also releases volatile gasses, nutrients and minerals important for life. Pointing in our own solar system to Venus, which is almost Earth's size but seems to lack plate tectonics, Noack says: "Earth might be unique."

Looks pretty bleak, science fiction fans. But hold on, there is some hope still for Kepler-22b. Earth, after all, has a moon, one about one-fourth as wide as our planet. And so might Kepler-22b, or the other habitable-zone candidate planets."Kepler-22b is certainly a great target for moon hunters," says astronomer David Kipping of The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler (HEK) project, which already rates the newly-discovered world a "high-priority" target . "Any moon of mass greater than about a third of the Earth's mass should be massive enough to hold onto its own atmosphere and thus be a habitable exomoon," Kipping says, by e-mail.

         Basically, if a planet and its moon are spaced far apart, Kepler might see two transits, at least in cases where the space telescope is sensitive enough to detect Mars-sized planets, ones about half-as-wide as Earth, Kipping says. But if the moon and planet are close, astronomers might see a "triple eclipse" in their transit data. "This is when during the transit of the planet across the star, the moon passes in front or behind of the planet too," Kipping says.The result would be a camel-backed double bump in the amount of starlight blocked from a star during a transit by a planet, resulting from the time when a moon is eclipsed. "So wide or close, the moon tends to always reveal her presence," Kipping says.

          Kepler team scientist Jack Lissauer, also of NASA's Ames Research Center, is a little more cautious, saying, "if the planet (and) moon were very close, it would be difficult to tell the difference between the pair and a single larger planet."We'll see. Kipping hopes to present some preliminary reports from the HEK project early next year at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin. Let's hope he has a HEK of a chance.So hang in there, space fans, "where there's life, there's hope," as folks sometimes note in science fiction films. "I hope so," Noack said, even after pouring cold water on Kepler-22b. "I still hope to find life somehow out there."

 http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science

rocket booster!!

          

 Mission commander Oleg Kononenko and his colleagues, American Don Pettit and European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers are to dock with the space station on Friday. The blastoff from the snowy launchpad in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, took place without a hitch and the spacecraft reached Earth orbit about nine minutes later. Video from inside the craft showed the three crew members gripping each others' hands in celebration as the final stage of the booster rocket separated.

          The three aboard the Russian spacecraft will join three others already on the ISS, NASA's Dan Burbank and Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin. The six are to work together on the station until March. The launch came amid a period of trouble for Russia's space program, which provides the only way for crew to reach the space station since the United States retired its space shuttle program in July.

The launch of an unmanned supply ship for the space station failed in August and the ship crashed in a Siberian forest. 

          The Soyuz rocket carrying that craft was the same type used to send up Russian manned spacecraft, and the crash prompted officials to postpone the next manned launch while the rockets were examined for flaws. The delayed mission eventually took place on Nov. 14. Just five days before that launch, Russia sent up its ambitious Phobos-Ground unmanned probe, which was to go to the Phobos moon of Mars, take soil samples and return them to Earth. But engineers lost contact with the ship and were unable to propel it out of 

          Earth orbit and toward Mars. The craft is now expected to fall to Earth in mid-January. Last December, Russia lost three navigation satellites when a rocket carrying them failed to reach orbit. A military satellite was lost in February, and the launch of the Express-AM4, described by officials as Russia's most powerful telecommunications satellite, went awry in August.

 http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story