briefs

CMU professor plans to compete in competition to land private rover on moon

The… CMU professor plans to compete in competition to land private rover on moon

The Google Lunar X Prize, which rewards up to $30 million to the first private team to land an operable rover on the moon, was announced at Wired’s NextFest in Los Angeles, California on Sept. 13.

Less than an hour later, Carnegie Mellon University’s William Whittaker, director of the field robotics institute, became the first participant.

“We have spent decades building and testing robotic technologies for just this purpose,” Whittaker said in a press release.

The Google X Lunar Prize requires the landing and operation of a rover on the surface of the moon.

The instrument must travel at least 550 meters and transmit a high-resolution Mooncast; an additional $5 million will be awarded if the rover exceeds 5,500 meters and completes ancillary feats, such as capturing images of Apollo 11 or finding water.

The prize is a part of the Moon 2.0 program – Moon 1.0 denotes the government-funded model – that envisions returning man to the moon via non-governmental programs focusing on private research.

“We believe that a small group of people with passion for a cause can achieve that which has never been attained,” reads the X Prize Foundation website.

Whittaker has worked at CMU for over 20 years.

His primary focus has been directing and coordinating research at The Robotics Institute and Field Robotics Center. The latter has been developing a variety of robots designed to navigate different environments. One such robot is Hyperion, a prototype exploration lunar robot tested in the harsh environment of Antarctica.

Whittaker’s initial plans for the project are on display at www.lunarrover.org.

James McAdams, For The Pitt News

Illegible prescriptions one of leading causes of medical errors

(MCT) FORT WORTH, Texas – That indecipherable scribbling on the official notepaper you hand to your pharmacist is a prescription your doctor wrote during your office visit.

And while experts such as Dr. Nancy Dickey, president of the Health Science Center at Texas A’M, agree that doctors’ handwriting is the source of numerous jokes, this is no laughing matter.

Illegible prescriptions are a primary cause of medication errors, a condition that J. Lyle Bootman, dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Arizona, calls “a silent disease in America.”

“The economic consequences of medication errors,” he said, “are as costly as diabetes, and close to cancer and heart disease.”

In fact, estimates are that it costs $3.5 billion annually to treat medication errors in hospitals alone.

Bootman is a member of the Institute of Medicine, a Washington D.C.-based advisory board that issued a comprehensive Medication Errors Report 13 months ago that should make Americans pause on their next trip to the pharmacy.

The principal conclusions are that, on average, a hospital patient is subject to at least one medication error daily and that as many as 1.5 million Americans are victims of medication errors.

Estimates are that more than 7,000 people die from medication errors every year.

How serious is this situation?

“It’s huge,” Bootman, one of the report’s editors, said. “The estimates we gave are probably conservative.”

Experts say there is no way to eliminate human error entirely. Obviously, however, a computer printout is preferable to a handwritten script.

In a perfect world, a countrywide medical network would facilitate treatment of patients and considerably reduce the chances of errors being made.

That day might not be around the corner, but as Pace said, “We’re on the right road. There are a lot of detours, but we have to be careful of locking the patient out.”

Pete Alfano, McClatchy Newspapers