Technology

West Virginia's public schools will get free computer operating system upgrades for five years under a new agreement with Microsoft.
 
The Charleston Daily Mail reports that schools will enter the agreement with Microsoft on July 1.
 
Under the agreement, schools can upgrade their computers' operating systems without cost if the hardware can handle the upgrade.

The West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and Blind is controversially changing the job description and requiring more education for the house parents who watch children living on campus. New technology is being used to track the population of deer around the state. Wheeling Jesuit University celebrates Appalachia through a series of lectures.

West Virginia’s got a lot of deer within its borders, and they can be a burden. For instance, the state’s vehicle collision rate with deer is one of the highest in the nation, according to a study by State Farm Insurance. In Morgantown, new technology is being used to monitor these animals.

You see them while driving along the interstate. You’ll catch them in your residential neighborhoods, eating vegetables from your garden.

Three West Virginia-based companies have received grants to help commercialize new technologies.
 
The Chemical Alliance Zone's Chemical and Materials Commercialization Fund awarded $20,000 to Liberty Hydro Inc. for a portable water-filtration pilot unit. The unit will be used to demonstrate the company's clean-water technology at customer sites.
 

Federal officials have rejected West Virginia's proposal to spend about $2.5 million in funds leftover from a broadband stimulus grant.
 
     State chief technology officer Gale Given tells the Charleston Gazette that the state likely will have to return the unspent funds to the federal government.
 

A new tool to train riverboat workers allows trainees to smack into bridges and barges without risking millions of dollars in damages.

The tri-state port of Huntington is the largest inland port in America—bigger than Baltimore and bigger than Philadelphia, based on the tonnage that travels through. That river activity accounts for more than a billion and a half dollars of West Virginia’s economy, as well as some 10,000 jobs. And the inland maritime industry is projecting 1.5 percent in job growth annually over the next decade.

Charleston native and West Virginia University graduate student Scott Cushing is in pursuit of one of the holy grails of energy sourcing: instead of using gasoline, or other fossil fuels with harmful emissions, he aims to use water and the sun to harvest hydrogen gas.

A Fairmont attorney is days away from making judicial history in West Virginia.

Students at South Charleston High School are working on their own satellite.  It will be launched into space by NASA on a Soyez rocket sometime next year.  The satellite will gather all kinds of data and beam it back to the school for five years.  This is what it means to talk about STEM – science, technology, engineering and math and the students are pretty excited about it.

The term “TransTech” has been floating around for about five years, according to Carl Irwin, creator of the TransTech Energy Program at the National Research Center for Coal and Energy.

It refers to technologies that try to transition the nation’s energy portfolio into something that’s more economically sustainable, while at the same time, being competitive and using lower amounts of carbon. Carl Irwin says the public plays an important part in recognizing transitional technologies.

Google Glass. It’s a new computer right out of a James Bond film or a science fiction novel. You wear it like you would wear glasses, but you peer at the world with technologically reinforced eyes.

Like Iron Man.

…Without the suit.

Maybe the suit will come next, but, in the meantime Google Glass is being tested by thousands of people including students at West Virginia University. Professor Mary Kay McFarland got wind that Google was looking for ‘Glass Explorers’ and now she’s incorporated the technology into her class.

  The Greater Huntington Park and Recreation District is banking on the idea that if WiFi is available, people will come to the park.

An internet service provider based in Huntington pipes a signal directly to antenna’s located at strategic locations in the park. That signal is turned into WiFi; available to connect to mobile devices in the park. At 50 megabytes per second the Park District thinks they’re on to something that the public will enjoy. Kevin Brady is the Executive Director.

Over the summer West Virginia University got a new system of transmitting internet wirelessly up and running. AIR.U, named after the Advanced Internet Regions consortium, is the name of the system that is using vacated television spectrums to broadcast the internet to students and the public.

John Campbell, associate provost and chief information officer at WVU explains that a couple of years ago the Federal Communications Commission made the decision to move to high definition broadcasting.