<FONT SIZE=2>For 16 years, the National Library of Medicine has been trying to solve the biggest interface problem between computers and medicine: vocabulary.</FONT>
When terrorists flew a jet into the 90th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, Gregory Burnham, who was in his office on the 71st floor, had one main focus: get out with his staff and let his family know he was OK.
Disappointment. That describes what most of the information technology industry is feeling regarding state and local homeland security spending. Companies are discouraged with the amount of money spent on homeland security, the lack of opportunities in their sales pipelines and the relatively small size of the projects that have been launched.
When faulty routers or denial-of-service attacks plague an Army network, the top brass want to know one thing: How does it affect the ability of Army units to perform their missions?
All the clues were there: Student pilots interested in flying planes but not landing them; Osama bin Laden wanting to hijack a plane; funds being transferred to the United States from known bin Laden operatives.
Firstwave Secure Intelligent Optical Networks Inc., Reston, Va., was awarded $29 million by the Naval Research Laboratory to develop next-generation optical network management software and switches.
After American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, Veridian Corp.'s employees rushed to the windows at their Pentagon City headquarters, where they could see the smoke rising into the sky. Many were ex-military, and they watched, frustrated, champing at the bit for a chance to strike back.
The Pentagon fires were still burning when Tom Buonforte and his team at General Dynamics Network Systems began sifting through the rubble, trying to figure out how they would rebuild the computer and telecommunications networks in the damaged wing.
In June, the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva set the equipment standard for metropolitan-sized optical networks, those networks less than 31 miles long.
Using migration software from Altiris Inc., Lockheed Martin Corp. has cut to one-third the time needed to move files and settings from old computers to their replacements. And for an operation that replaces 3,500 NASA computers a year, this translates into some real time savings, both for the government and the integrator.
The Rolm CBX 9000 telephone switches at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., had been humming along since 1986 ? a long life for such equipment.
<b>Emergency alert</b><br>A promising device that alerts drivers of approaching emergency vehicles has run into trouble in its pilot stage, according to New Scientist magazine. The Warn-Tone, introduced by Leicester, U.K.-based Petards Civil Systems, overrides the outputs of car radios and cassette and compact disc players with spoken warnings. Issues about signal strength, which emanates from the EMS vehicles, still need to be resolved. The Radio Authority of Britain refuses to grant a test license, fearing signals will spill into neighboring homes and buildings. Petards is the government systems integration division of Screen Plc., Maidenhead, U.K., a security and surveillance solution provider.
The U.S. Geological Survey might be the only agency that measures its Web traffic on the Richter scale. In the minutes after Gilroy, Calif., was rocked by a quake with a magnitude of 4.9 last May, the USGS earthquake site averaged 3,000 hits per second, up from the normal three to six hits per second.
Has this ever happened to you?<FONT SIZE=2> Just as you reach a critical stage in your work, your computer slows to a crawl because the server is overburdened or, even worse, a "disk full" error shuts down applications before they can write their results to disk. Both problems are the result of poor resource provisioning, an issue of increasing importance as organizations field more and more servers and storage devices.</FONT>
<FONT SIZE=2>TEAC America, the Montebello, Calif., division of Tokyo-based TEAC Corp., has sold 25 airborne video recorders and two integrated debriefing stations to an Army Apache helicopter unit at Fort Bragg, N.C. The stations play, synchronize and display up to four aircraft video flight logs simultaneously to provide immediate post-mission debriefings. The recorders come with global positioning system cards to time-stamp footage.</FONT>
<FONT SIZE=2>	The United Kingdom, through the Office of the e-Envoy, has established a procurement policy for open source software, or software with its source code available for modification. The policy directs agencies to consider open source solutions alongside proprietary offerings, and to use products that support open standards. Open source software "is the start of a fundamental change in the software infrastructure marketplace," said an introductory Web page on the policy, online at www.e-envoy.gov.uk/news/ newonsite/oss-policy.htm.</FONT>
<FONT SIZE=2>PKC Corp., Burlington, Vt., is marketing medical software that, when given a list of patient symptoms, can return a probable diagnosis. Called Problem-Knowledge Couplers, this software collects and organizes patient data and compares it against medical knowledge databases. It is used by the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and West Virginia. </FONT>
<FONT SIZE=2>General Dynamics Corp.'s aggressive moves to position itself as an information technology provider to the Defense Department are well known. But the company also has been quietly working to win more business with civilian agencies, especially by leveraging its engineering and network talents developed for defense customers.</FONT>
