Amateur Innovators Construct Hand-Held Thermal Detection Device

Sick of living in a poorly-heated apartment? You can now expose draughty trouble spots by building your own thermal flashlight and painting colourful heat maps on your walls.

The do-it-yourself technology developed by the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, a non-profit group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lets homeowners and tenants document the temperature around their home to reveal inadequate insulation.

Last month, during a hacking session at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, students with little electronics experience gathered to make their own flashlights from a multicoloured LED, a thermal sensor, a circuit board and wire.

A programmed mini-processor was used to control how the unit responds to heat. One student exploited the hackable nature of the tool to develop a wand design as an alternative to the standard exterior made from a VHS tape case.

By the end of the afternoon the flashlights were ready for testing. The students waved frozen water bottles in front of the device while capturing a time-lapse of the light painting with the online webcam program Glowdoodle.

To find out more about the device and potential applications for environmental monitoring, read our full news story: "Thermal flashlight 'paints' cold rooms with colour".

Vijay Kumar showing off palm-sized "agile aerial robots" at TED

In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams -- for construction, surveying disasters and far more.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Vijay Kumar studies the control and coordination of multi-robot formations. Full bio »

Cloud-based Risk Management

Business Stream, the business division of Scottish Water, is to implement a Cloud-based risk management platform which aims to streamline and unify its Risk and Controls activities.

It’s claimed the software, Risk Manager from Xactium, will encourage a “collaborative approach to risk management through its organisation-wide visibility and remote accessibility”.

There are hopes the implementation at Business Stream, which provides water and waste services to over 96,000 businesses and the public sector in Scotland, will also promote better risk culture across the organisation, together with improvements to business efficiency, and “demonstrate Business Stream’s risk management commitment to customers and industry regulators”.

Risk Manager is built on Force.com, the Cloud application platform from Cloud Computing vendor, Salesforce.com.

Paula Louchart, IT solutions manager at Business Stream, said “Xactium’s Risk Manager stood out for us because of the speed and ease of implementation.

We were already familiar with Salesforce, so we know that the platform offers impressive business advantages, such as better visibility and effortless reporting”.

“We are delighted that we have been able to provide Business Stream with a risk solution that matches their forward-thinking ethos,” added Andy Evans, managing director of Xactium.

“It is a very positive sign for us that businesses are now recognising the value of cloud-based risk management. The flexibility and customizability it offers hasn’t been available with traditional systems.”

New App for LinkedIn: Claims to Match Users to Job Openings

LinkedIn announced a new beta feature this week, Real-Time Profile Matches, intended to help make it easier for users to find the right jobs, and for hiring companies to find the right talent.

When a LinkedIn user posts a job opening on the site, LinkedIn's new proprietary technology searches its database of more than 60 million professionals for profiles that best match the job description.

It then returns a list to the job poster of up to 24 matches, displaying candidates in a business-card-style format and rating them on a scale of 1through 10.

Because the search technology is proprietary, Parker Barrile, director of product management at LinkedIn, could not say what the technology looks for in a profile to deem it an appropriate job match but Barrile does say that it "goes a level deeper than just keyword matching."

If you're looking for a new job, Barrile suggests two things to ensure that your profile is appearing as an appropriate job match. First, be sure that your profile is up to date and complete.

That means filling out the experience, summary and professional headline sections, and including comprehensive details about your past and present work positions. Second, utilise the Status Update feature, which can alert your network that you're job searching and inform a job poster that you're an available candidate.

Currently, Real-Time Profile Matches is a free feature, but Barrile couldn't say for how long.