Lab Lines
ORNL assesses drunk driver discourager
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| Pat Hu uses an electronic card to start the Kittelock-equipped Volvo. Photo by Curtis Boles. |
In 1997 the alcohol-related traffic toll was 16,200 dead.
The Energy Division’s Pat Hu, who has seen acquaintances lost to drunk drivers, is currently testing and assessing a Swedish inventor’s device that could, in the future, provide a solution. The “electronic driver’s license” is a card with programmed information on the driver. It acts as a key that starts the car—if the driver’s data check out OK. The system also includes a breath analyzer.
“If your license has been suspended or you have alcohol on your breath, the card will not let you start the car,” Hu says.
The electronic driver’s license can be retrofitted onto autos. Hu, in fact, is currently testing the system on a car the Swedish automaker Volvo has provided for six months.
There are, of course, barriers. “This is a feasible idea, but when you think it through there are issues to overcome, such as public acceptance, institutional barriers and details like having emergency access to a vehicle,” Hu says.
The system also could be defeatable. A suspended driver might use someone else’s card, for example. “That’s why we need to test it in the field, to use it in real driving situations and to see how it performs under different conditions and how often it fails,” she says.
NHTSA and the Center for Transportation Analysis in the Energy Division jointly sponsored a workshop this September to discuss the feasibility of and barriers to implementing an electronic driver’s license device. The more than 40 international attendees of the by-invitation-only workshop ranged from vehicle manufacturers to the law enforcement community.
Hu met the inventor, Fred Goldberg, at another traffic safety workshop. Goldberg calls the device the KitteLock, after his daughter, Kitte, who was killed by a drunk, and unlicensed, driver in Stockholm.
Lab assumes reins of AMSE
ORNL’s new role of managing the American Museum of Science and Energy in downtown Oak Ridge is official. Management of the museum, long a cultural landmark and an attraction for kids throughout the region who are interested, or potentially interested, in science, has been assigned to ORNL under the auspices of DOE’s Office of Science (SC), formerly the Office of Energy Research. Kaye Johnson, a Washington assignment veteran who most recently has served as deputy director of ORNL’s Transportation Technologies Program, has been appointed ORNL’s first program manager for the AMSE.
Through the years thousands of kids, including future Ridgelines editors, have been given their first hard look at real science at the museum—experiences that have included electrified hair and the old souvenir “radioactive” dimes.
Associate Director Jim Ball, whose directorate will include the AMSE, says that SC Director Martha Krebs wants the AMSE to showcase science performed by the SC labs. “One of the major thrusts of the the museum is to get more of what we’re doing at this and other DOE labs out into the public arena,” Ball said. “We’ll also continue the museum’s outreach with school-age children.”
Assistant to the Director Tom Row coordinated the museum’s transition to the Lab.
Awards: Materials, computing, service
ORNL staff members have collected several major awards in the past weeks.
An ORNL team shared this year’s Gordon Bell Prize, awarded annually for the best achievement in high-performance computing. The ORNL team, led by Malcolm Stocks of the Metals and Ceramics Division, collaborated with scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the University of Bristol (UK).
“This project is part of a DOE Grand Challenge in Materials Science,” said Stocks. “The code was originally developed on the ORNL Paragon, and the performance runs for the Bell prize were performed on various Cray T3E machines.”
The other ORNL staff involved are ORISE postdoc Balazs Ujfalussy, Don Nicholson and Xaioguang Zhang of the Computational Physics and Engineering Division and Bill Shelton of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. A previous postdoc now at Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, Yang Wang, and a previous Wigner fellow, Xindong Wang, also were part of the award team.
ORNL received two of this year’s Materials Sciences Awards from DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Science. C.T. Liu and E.P. George of the Metals and Ceramics Division received a sustained outstanding research award for their work titled “Advances in Scientific Understanding of Mechanical Behavior and Alloying Effects in Intermetallic Alloys.” Herb Mook and Pengcheng Dai of the Solid State Division received an outstanding scientific accomplishment award for their work titled “Universal Behavior of Spin Fluctuations and High-Tc Superconductors.”
Finally, Mylissa Buttram of ORNL’s Human Resources Division and Elizabeth Peelle of the Energy Division were winners in the Knoxville area YWCA’s Tribute to Women ceremony. Buttram won in the human services category; Peelle took the top honor in the volunteer community services category. Another Energy Division researcher, Kathy Savage Gant, was a finalist in the science and technology category.
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