City of Boston Receives Awards for Technology Achievement from the Public Technology Institute

Mayor Martin J. Walsh and the Department of Innovation & Technology (DoIT) announced today that the City of Boston has won two distinguished awards from the Public Technology Institute (PTI). The awards recognize the city’s BostonMaps as the winner in the Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) category and the Boston Goes Google Project as the winner in the IT & Telecommunications category.   This annual competition recognizes PTI members who demonstrate how they use technology to innovate, solve problems, reduce costs, and improve services and internal operations.
“Boston is recognized as a leader in technology and innovation,” said Mayor Walsh.  “We continue to find creative ways using technology to collaborate, improve services and increase efficiency. These awards represent the City moving forward with an innovative open GIS Mapping platform available to all, and a new communications system that provides access anytime, anywhere.”
An independent panel of judges has identified the recipients of PTI’s 2013–2014 Technology Solutions Awards. This year, the competition featured a wide array of interesting and innovative entries.
Winner in (GIS) category: BostonMaps:
The City of Boston’s Mapping Platform - Creating a Spatially Aware Workforce
BostonMaps represents a modern platform for the City of Boston to allow access to GIS and maps for improved communication, collaboration, and decision-making. Mapping and location-based analysis are a fundamental aspect of the City’s efforts to enable all City staff   access to a common set of tools and resources, and help transform the way GIS is used to support businesses.  BostonMaps also provides a mapping platform to support external stakeholders such as civic coders, as well as the general public.  BostonMaps is the City of Boston’s branding for its Esri ArcGIS Online implementation.
Winner in the IT & TELECOMMUNICATIONS category:                                                          
Boston, MA Boston Goes Google                                                                                              
In December 2013, Boston successfully moved 76,000 city employees and students to the cloud with Google Apps. This includes all City departments, the Boston Police Department, Boston Public Schools, teachers, administrators, and over 50,000 students, each with an individual Google apps account.
In less than four months since the start of the project, the Boston Goes Google team successfully converted all users from their legacy accounts to new Google Apps accounts. Over twenty million email messages were securely migrated to the cloud. For the first time the same platform is in use across the City, allowing for a consistent, positive user experience.
The Google Apps platform enhances the City’s delivery of key services allowing for anywhere, anytime, access to email, calendar, and files. Anywhere, anytime access also increases effectiveness and provides greater efficiencies through the ability of employees to respond in real time to urgent situations or meet tight deadlines.

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PHP Development with Netbeans

A dedicated PHP coding environment and complete integration with web standards, with full support for HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 development, as described on the HTML5 Web Development Support page

Powerful PHP Source Code Editor

The NetBeans PHP editor provides code templates and code generation tools, such as "getter and setter" generation, refactoring, such as "instant rename", parameter tooltips, hints, and quick fixes, and smart code completion.

Benefit from syntactic and semantic code highlighting, pop-up documentation, code formating and folding, marking of occurrences and exit points, clever try/catch code completion, smart method parameter pre-filling, and rectangular selection.

PHP 5.4 Support

NetBeans IDE for PHP 7.3 offers a number of features specific to developing with PHP 5.4. You can set up your PHP 5.4 project to run on PHP 5.4's built-in web server. The IDE's PHP code completion supports PHP 5.4 array styles such as array dereferencing and short array syntax. NetBeans IDE also recognizes Traits and anonymous object variables (also called "fluent instantiation"). Finally, NetBeans IDE for PHP 7.3 includes minor features such as callable type hints, binary notation for integers, and Class::{expr}

PHP Projects

The NetBeans project offers a version of the IDE tailor-made for developing PHP web sites that comprise a variety of scripting and mark-up languages. The PHP editor is dynamically integrated with HTML, JavaScript and CSS editing features.

Focus on the code and speed up code scanning by excluding individual directories in the Project properties. The NetBeans IDE fully supports iterative development, so testing PHP projects follows the classic patterns familiar to web developers.

Debugger

Debug PHP code using Xdebug: You can inspect local variables, set watches, set breakpoints, and evaluate code live. Navigate to declarations, types and files using Go To shortcuts and hypertext links. Use a global PHP include path for all projects or customize it per project.

The NetBeans IDE for PHP also offers command-line debugging: The PHP program output appears in a command line display in the IDE itself and you can inspect the generated HTML without having to switch to a browser.

You can debug scripts and web pages, either locally or remotely. The NetBeans PHP debugger integration allows you to map server paths to local paths to enable remote debugging.

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Wearable Goose Bump Sensor May Detect Some Emotions

Could a tiny, flexible patch on your skin read your emotions and change things in your environment accordingly? Not yet, but it might know when you get the chills.

Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in South Korea have developed a wearable sensor that can detect goose bumps, which are caused by sudden changes in body temperature or, sometimes, emotional states.

The flexible, electronic sensor is a small square patch, measuring less than 1 inch (2 centimeters) in height and width; it's made of conductive polymer material with embedded spiral-shape capacitors.

Goose bumps can change the shape of the patch, causing alterations in its capacitance, which is the patch's ability to store an electrical charge. By analyzing those alterations, the researchers can determine the height of the goose bumps and how long they persist. The scientists described their work Tuesday (June 24) in the journal Applied Physics Letters, a publication of the American Institute of Physics.

To test the device, the researchers attached the sensor to the inside of a person's arm and had him grab ice cubes to induce a sudden cold shock. The resulting goose bumps, which deformed the sensor's surface, caused the capacitance to notably decrease, the researchers said. 

The researcher said they plan to miniaturize the part of the device that processes electrical signals, so that it can be mounted on the skin along with the small patch.

It's not clear exactly how much goose bumps can tell about a person's emotional state
s, but they are often signs that someone is experiencing intense emotions. For example, goose bumps can happen involuntarily with feelings of extreme fear, shock and euphoria.

Beyond goose bumps, many emotional states have been shown to have other subtle, but measurable effects on the skin as well. For example, fear or anxiety can induce a slight increase in sweating, which would also change the skin's conductance. Devices to detect these changes exist, but are used primarily in science experiments.

But researchers say someday the technology could be integrated in wearable devices to detect users' emotions and relay them in real-time, for example, to advertisers or personalized music stations.

"In the future, human emotions will be regarded like any typical biometric information, including body temperature or blood pressure," study researcher Young-Ho Cho said in a statement.

source: Livescience

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