In conjunction with the show, The Weather Channel also built an iPad app which synchs with the program as it airs. It apparently provides some show extras but I am most curious how the app synchs with the show and what it delivers once synched.

Finally, The Weather Channel is running a photo contest in parallel with the show. You can submit your photos here to enroll in the contest. The winner gets a free trip to Las Vegas. It’s an interesting use of mobile and social to assist in the rollout of a new program.

The competitions are not only a show of science and engineering. The event is peppered with performances, cheer leading, dancing and overall team spirit. There was even a first ever (at least as seen by me) performance of a live iPad2 GarageBand. There were 4 guys all plugged in playing music off their iPad2s.  The three day event is quite a production and getting a chance to witness the student and audience energy is well worth the visit to Stan Sheriff Center on the UH campus.

This year’s event was also streamed from the NASA Robotics site. You can also read more about the various robotics competitions coming up during the rest of the year in this robotics Special Feature. Here is a set of photos I shot on during the Friday, March 24th qualifying heats. Hope to see you at the next robotics competition.

This year’s Hawaii State final took place on March 5th on the campus of Leeward Community College. As its name implies, the Science Olympiad is an olympics-styled competition but rather than physical activities student teams compete in topics like astronomy, optics, geology, biology, etc. Although most of the competitions are closed to public viewing (to minimize participant distraction) there are several like the bottle rocket launch where the public is welcomed. In this exercise, plastic soda bottles are used to design a rocket that gets pumped with 75 lbs of air pressure and launched into the air. The competitive measure was how long the rocket stayed in the air. Students could use basic materials to design fins and a cone as well as the right water to air mixture for propellent.

Two other publicly viewable competitions included the mousetrap vehicle and tower building, each intense in its own way. This year’s competition drew 48 teams, up from 23 last year. Teams came from all over the state, both public and private schools. Congratulations go out to Iolani School and Maui Preparatory Academy who placed first in the the high school and middle school divisions, respectively.  Both teams will represent Hawai‘i at the National Science Olympiad Tournament at the University of Wisconsin in May.

Franklin Allaire is the tireless director of this program and along with him is an army of coaches, judges, mentors and volunteers that make this program the success that it is. This group of people deserve a big round of thanks for encouraging a new generation of kids to explore and discover the limitless world of science and technology.

Joe Ciotti is the master of ceremonies for each of the showings. He adds a key dimension you won’t find in other traditional theaters. He is there as a greeter, mood setter and subject matter expert. He warmed up the opening night viewing of Tales of the Maya Skies with a demonstration of the new features of the Definiti 4 system. He flashed a 3D rendering of the Space Shuttle and then showed how, through the marvel of 3D modeling, you can venture into the bone structure of the human skull. It is easy to imagine worlds of the extremely small to those of galactic proportions opening up for viewing.

Opening with Tales of the Maya Skies introduced the audience to the capabilities of the system and the intricacies of putting a show like this together. In addition to a program rich in culture, images included animations of Mayan characters, 3D renderings of Maya structures and a story woven in science and legend. Tales of the Maya Skies is a Chabot Space & Science Center production with major funding provided by the National Science Foundation.

Judging from the Sky-Skan catalog of shows, there are a lot of interesting programs to look forward to. Titles like Solar Storms, Awesome Light and Black Holes: Journey into the Unknown need little fanfare to attract my attention. Awesome Light includes an entire episode from the telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea:

Voyage into Subaru, Gemini, Keck, and Canada-France-Hawai‘i observatories to explore an exo-planet, supernova, and stars orbiting at the centre of the Milky Way and galactic survey.

Exo-planets, sign me up! Viewings of Tales of the Maya Skies continue through January 2011:

For tickets reservations and more information about the show, call Windward Community Collage at 808-235-7433.

Nolan Kamitaki from Waiakea High School and his project, Gene Dosage and Expression in Human Lymphoblastoid Cell Lines took the Best of Category and First Place in the category of Cellular and Molecular Biology.

Second Place Grand Team Award went to Megan Kurohara and Hannah Rojeski of Hilo High School for their project “A New Spin on Green Energy: Increasing Hydrogen in Spirulina Derived Photobiological System.”

A Fourth Place Grand Award went to Mali’o Kodis, Waiakea HS, Senior for his project: Diversity of Foliar Fungal Endophytes in Wild and Cultured Metrosideros polymorpha Inferred from Environmental PCR and ITS Sequence Data.

A Fourth Place Team Award went to Michael Flynn & Taylor Nakamura, Maui HS, Juniors for their project: Muon Detection at Elevation. In addition Michael Flynn won an all expense paid trip by the European Union to CERN and perhaps lucky enough to visit the Hadron Collider.

The photos here were taken at the Hawaii Science and Engineering Fair back in April 2010 at the Hawaii Convention Center. It’s quite a spectacle to see all the students immersed in their projects and a testament to the skill level of Hawaii’s students. As reported last week the Hawaii Academy of Science received funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to the tune of $425K. Enough to keep things running for another year and then some.

Benny Ron on Finding a Way for Aquaculture in Hawaii from Jay Fidell.

During Bytemarks Cafe last week (Apr. 14, 2010) we covered the story about FWW’s report and asked Bill Spencer, CEO of Hawaii Oceanic Technologies Inc. to weigh in on the report. He wrote:

A highly funded, Washington, DC lobby organization, Food and Water Watch (FWW), is mounting a frontal attack on Hawaii State policy that supports open ocean mariculture. They have rallied a motley crew of rag tag environmental groups, paid many of them to attack a growing sector of our economy that is on the verge of showing the world a way to produce seafood that is environmentally responsible. This group of activists are disseminating miss-leading information that paints a picture of Hawaii’s small ocean farming businesses as harbingers of huge factory fish farms that pollute our ocean with horrible chemicals, antibiotics and fish poop. Food and Water Watch purports a host of problems with mariculture even though the industry is in its infancy in Hawaii, and none of their claims can be proven, only imagined by creative writers and spin doctors. The opportunity for a company to grow fish in Hawaiian territorial waters has been a matter of law for ten years. It has been seen as a potential economic engine that could put fishermen back to work, create thousands of jobs and even new businesses in support of the effort.

Federal policy is also being crafted that will affect the aquaculture industry and NOAA is touring the country soliciting public feedback on the issue. They were here this week and Ben Markus from Hawaii Public Radio did this piece. Jay Fidell also wrote this article that ran in Sunday’s Honolulu Advertiser.

Hawaii could potentially offer a lot to Hawaii’s food security and the diet of fish eating public with a viable aquaculture industry. The reality is, the oceans are being fished out and novel ways need to be established to sustain this food source. Why not aquaculture and why not here in Hawaii. The steps we take at this formative stage of the industry could mean the difference between success and failure.

As I started to call around I noticed that the seriousness of this tsunami threat was considerably more than the one in Sept. Roads were being closed, businesses and shopping centers were shut down, sirens were being sounded, news coverage went into full time mode, people were making runs on gas and food and the clincher for me was that Kapiolani Community College was ceasing their operations. Without a facility, the decision to postpone the Unconferenz was a relatively easy one.

The remaining Saturday was spend watching the news coverage of the tsunami. As natural disasters go, a tsunami is like a spectator sport, at least ones like these that have a long lead time and happen in the middle of the day. For the most part its a normal day with full electrical power, Internet access and phone service. I even went for a run along Pearl Harbor around 9am. Everyone is watching and reporting what they see. As a result there are some very interesting views of the tsunami as it unfolded on the social media aware. Here are a few of my favorites;

Roxanne Darling posted this on her blog: Hawaii Tsunami Proves Social Media Power Again: Information is a Tonic. It’s a great sampling of new and traditional media views of the tsunami as a news event.

Most of us were glued to the television watching the various news casts. KGMB, the CBS affiliate had full time coverage as did the other stations. In the case of KGMB, they had a camera pointed at Hilo Bay with a great vantage point of the ocean. With a clear view you could tell when the ocean tides changed. In this series of photos taken by Ryan Ozawa, you can clearly see the current of the water as it recedes and then flows back in. If the tsunami created a flooding this would provide a perfect view of it. Luckily that didn’t happen. From this view you could see how the repetition of the tsunami waves would enter the bay then recede, an awesome sight to see.

Local blogger John Garcia created a site that streamed the hashtag #hitsunami found at http://hitsunami.info/. This was a realtime view of twitter posts aggregated in one place. Granted you could get something similar by searching the hashtag on Twitter but you would not have gotten the Ustream.tv feed or the Civil Defense updates.

During the tsunami warning, TV cameras were pointed at Waikiki beach. Everyone was cleared from the waters and the beach area. In spite of this there is always the oddball who disregards the warnings and goes into the water anyway. This guy was caught on camera wading out into the surf appearing to taunt the ocean with his arms. This has now been immortalized in a Facebook fan page called: The idiot who was swimming in Waikiki during the tsunami warning.

Obviously this is just a small sampling of the various views of the events as they occurred on Saturday. Finally, I must include this image of the energy created by the earthquake. This NOAA image captures it for me and validates the concern expressed and actions taken by the Tsunami Warning Center and the Civil Defense.

Our Bytemarks lunch group also got treated to a visit to the collections area where row after row, cabinet after cabinet are filled with the Museum’s insect collection. If you are into bugs this is the place to be. It is interesting for a place that contains so many bugs, they take extra care to keep all the live, local varieties out. The Museum provides the service of identifying species to other organizations and the public in general. This could involve sending the specimen to the Museum for identification as New York City did to identify the Asian Longhorn Beetle. Or it could be as simple as sending a photo to the Bishop Museum Flickr group: Ask a Bishop Museum Scientist. Our Bytemarks Lunch outing was obviously too short to experience but a small portion of the collections but it gave us a sense of the vast resource housed at the Museum, the 4th largest in the US. We did get to see what I wanted to personally witness, the giant rat from New Guinea. It was the culmination of a great science outing!