Met with much less public fanfare than Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier in 1947, this year’s flight was nevertheless a giant step for the aviation industry and a small Tullahoma company, Micro Craft, which was commissioned by NASA in 1997 to build the X43, now recognized as the world’s fastest aircraft in its class. (Micro Craft has since been sold to ATK GASL, a Honeywell spinoff that currently manages the project. The sale made former Micro Craft owner and Tullahoma businesswoman Fran Marcum a millionaire and helped bankroll her unsuccessful congressional bid in 2002.)

First contemplated by U.S. aviation strategists in the 1950s, the scramjet technology, which uses air instead of fuel as a catalyst to reach supersonic speeds, was shelved until better times, partly due to its high cost and partly as a result of the typical tension between the interest of pure science versus policy and politics. Some military analysts say scramjets could have sidestepped the entire Shuttle program if there had been enough resolve within the Pentagon to stick it out from the start, or enough wiggle room in the space race with the Soviet Union.

For a few years in the 1990s, NASA appeared finally ready to develop scramjets when it gave the multi-million-dollar, five-year contract to build the X43 to Marcum and her closely held company. But now, after a successful flight at Mach 7 and all systems go to reach Mach 10 by year’s end, the Hyper-X program appears in jeopardy as NASA has just cut $250 million earmarked for further development of the technology.

Lowell Keel, a vice president at ATK who has managed the X43 project since its inception, says he is still hoping Congress will restore $25 million in funding to allow the project to continue. Some industry veterans, however, say on conditions of anonymity that it is uncertain which powers will prevail in the debate over utilizing this promising technology. As one former engineer puts it, “each time we developed a fundamentally new technology, it was a significant emotional event that drove us, whether World War II or the threat of World War III. We know we need to go there. A number of us who are in the business realize supersonic speed is the next logical step in aerospace technology because it means such a plane could reach any location in the world within two hours.” It’s clear such strategic decisions cannot be rushed, but there isn’t much room to wait for bigger, better budgets, either. It takes 12-15 years to develop a supersonic vehicle, and the same time to develop both ground and flight test facilities for it. That means a new breed of aircraft like the X43 requires 25-30 years of research (though well worth it to anyone who wants to be able to fly from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco in twenty minutes).

Whether or not X43 becomes the platform for Pentagon’s future aircraft, Tullahoma engineers already deserve kudos for the March test flight, which one project manager termed “the Wright Brothers flight” of the 21st century.

COMPUTING EDGE
HCA’s Productivity Software
The year was 1999, the end of the dot-com boom era, when Nashville- based HCA conceived of a magical software program that would allow the company to calculate staffing needs for all of its 200 hospitals in the United States and Europe. The program would result in what insiders called a “bare-bones” staffing structure—and save wads of cash on its books. Completed within one year and operational by 2001, the generically titled Productivity Labor Management System (PLUS) began saving the nation’s largest hospital chain on average $250 million a year—not a bad return on a $1.5 million investment in the software.

While using computer wizardry to improve productivity was not a new concept to companies, HCA’s edge was—and still is—in the sheer speed and efficiency with which PLUS crunches all the important numbers. Every morning between the hours of eight and ten, PLUS gets the metrics from hundreds of departments at each of the 200 hospitals to HCA’s secure data center in Nashville, figures out how many patients require help the next day and assumes the least amount of staff needed to cover those chores. Then, PLUS scales the information and spits out a report of staffing needs for tomorrow, which highlights the most cost-effective number of nurses, surgeons and all manner of medical professions required on hand at HCA facilities.

Few people knew of PLUS until the spring of 2004, and perhaps HCA would have preferred to keep it that way. But the news of the secret software got out in the spring after two of HCA’s former software developers, Alexander Batsuk and Ryan Howard, won a $26.5 million jury award in a Nashville court after HCA sued them in 2002 for attempting to appropriate their trade secrets.

The trouble began when Batsuk and Howard, who were instrumental in shaping PLUS into what it is today, realized one day having lunch at an HCA cafeteria that they could save hospitals, insurance companies and patients tons of money if they created a labor productivity software that would work for all health care companies nationwide. The duo wrote a business plan and began scouting out potential investors for their software, Criterion. HCA got wind of the plan, fired the two developers, escorted them out of the building by security guards and instructed their former colleagues that the two were simply “no longer with the company.”

During a lengthy discovery process that culminated in an eight-day jury trial, HCA tried to convince the court that its software was a one-of-a-kind project and that Batsuk and Howard threatened to illegally appropriate its source code. At one point during the litigation, evidence indicated that HCA was able to maintain a 20% cost-saving advantage over other hospital chains in labor productivity—all thanks to PLUS. The duo countersued the health care giant claiming unfair competition and malicious prosecution. Batsuk and Howard said PLUS, which was written in Visual Basic 6 programming language, was effective only for HCA member-hospitals, while they planned to employ a fundamentally different programming language and benchmarking techniques to lower labor costs at all U.S. hospitals. They also claimed benefits for the insurance industry and overall reduction of health care costs for patients.

Even though a Nashville jury cleared the names of the two programmers, it’s unknown if Batsuk and Howard will get any money from HCA, which they could use to fund their business plan. A few months after the duo celebrated their $26.5 million win in compensatory and punitive damages, Chancellor Claudia Bonnyman quietly vetoed the $25 million punitive damages portion of the verdict.

In the meantime, HCA has charged its internal Synergy Group with rewriting the source code for PLUS by 2008, the year Microsoft plans to stop supporting all software written in Visual Basic. HCA wants to hang on to its PLUS software, as well as the perks it brings to the company’s bottom line.

BIG BROTHER'S EYE
IPIX Camera Lens
“One nation… under surveillance,” said bumper stickers across Tennessee during the weeks leading up to the November presidential election. Granted, the sticker might yet be a bit hyperbolic. Twenty years past the year George Orwell chose as the time of his dystopic vision, Big Brother hasn’t arrived here yet. His camera, on the other hand, has. And the technology was born right in Oak Ridge, the fruits of the work of the firm TeleRobotics International, whose progeny is IPIX.

It started in 1986 with the invention by Oak Ridge engineer Steve Zimmerman of a nifty camera with a fish-eye lens, which for the first time could record 360-degree images without distortion. In patents filed in the United States and across the world, the camera is recommended for all manner of surveillance, such as in areas where movement can be conspicuous or constrained by obstructions. It also can be used for close-up tracking of multiple objects in the field of view or to break an image into sectors for simultaneous viewing, thereby replacing several cameras.

Whether you’re car-shopping online, booking a hotel room in Vienna, or standing in front of an ATM in South Africa, IPIX products are there to serve your shopping needs, but they are also ready to record your facial features for police in case an ATM is burglarized.

Jim Phillips, who ran IPIX between 1997 and 2001, calls the camera technology a new-century time machine because of its ability to store images digitally and replay on demand any point in time during which it operated. “In effect, it’s the closest thing to a Big Brother camera. It doesn’t miss anything.”

Phillips, who has since moved on to found the FedEx Institute of Technology and most recently became CEO-in-residence of Morgan Keegan in Memphis, takes pride in his tenure at IPIX. “Lee [Martin, co-founder of Telerobotics with Steve Zimmerman] came to me [in 1997] and said the company was in bankruptcy; it had hardly any sales,” says Phillips, who at the time was contemplating the future of the Internet as president of the cellular division at Motorola. He didn’t take long to realize the potential of Zimmerman’s invention and came on board. Within a year, he reworked the lens technology, raised $60 million from various investors, including Motorola and his friend John Hendricks of Discovery Channel, only to find himself on the cusp of the dot-com boom, where it was a no-brainer to take the company public.

So Phillips spearheaded a $70-million IPO, and then a secondary offering of $72 million, but the technology bust that followed prompted a reverse stock split and the firing of 1,000 employees at IPIX. Still, the company persisted, turning to a private capital infusion of several million each time it was threatened.

Despite successfully defending its patents against knock-off companies in the late 1990s and earning accolades among technology experts, IPIX sales of security equipment are still rather limited. In another diversion from its initial model—selling to Internet companies software allowing 360º views—IPIX lost its primary customer, eBay, in 2003, which supplied 87% of its revenue.

In September, IPIX president and chief executive of three years Donald Strickland quit without explanation and was replaced by 20-year technology industry veteran Clara Conti. This change did little for IPIX shares, which have bounced between $7 and $8 for three months after very briefly touching $27 in April.

Though IPIX’s road remains rocky, its investors are hanging on, hoping for a rise in demand for fish-eye cameras amid the seemingly irreversible rise in demand for round-the-clock global surveillance.

VEGETATION BY DAY...
Phyto-Sensors
To the human eye, plants seem peaceful enough. There are exceptions—the Dionaea Muscipula, or Venus Flytrap, for example—but in general we look to plants mainly for viewing or culinary pleasure, or perhaps shade on a sunny day. But don’t be fooled. Thanks to University of Tennessee professor Neal Stewart, some plants may soon lead a more proactive existence—fighting crime, pollution and even international terrorism.

Stewart calls them “special plants.” The U.S. Department of Defense probably calls them something else, but they’re not telling—they are simply funding the down-to-earth research in Stewart’s laboratory of 20 people at UT’s Department of Plant Sciences and Landscape Systems. Raking in roughly $700,000 a year from various sources of funding, Stewart, who coined the term “Phyto-sensor” last year, specializes in engineering plants capable of detecting anything from toxic environments, explosives or attributes of chemical warfare to plant diseases and water distress in the soil. His work cross-pollinates law enforcement and precision agriculture, an art of producing the maximum amount of crop with minimum losses to weather calamities and pests.

Stewart utilizes commonplace weeds to accomplish complicated tasks—for instance, protecting a human life from being in harm’s way. Currently, analysis of explosives in the ground is done by humans, or by machines with humans nearby who analyze soil samples with a spectrometer. Once Stewart’s work is finished (in roughly two years), he hopes to minimize the risk to humans in this line of work. For a law enforcement unit investigating a terrorism cell or checking for explosives in the ground, all it will take is throwing a couple of seeds on the ground and a few days later shining a special light on them. If the plants fluoresce, dangerous chemicals are in the soil. “We talk about using plants as a first path-sensor. After they analyze contents of the soil, you would send down a guy with a mass-spectrometer,” Stewart says.

Recognized as one of the founding fathers of phyto-sensory science, Stewart started his career as a middle-school teacher and a singer before deciding in 1990 to combine environmental science, ecology and molecular biology in one field while working in a post-doctoral practice at UT. Now his laboratory has garnered a celebrity status of sorts among UT’s agriculture students. “Along with biochemistry post-docs and technicians we have some [sorority] sisters on the floor. I didn’t anticipate that,” he says.

However pastoral it might seem with sorority sisters tending to small green leaves under fluorescent lights, Stewart’s research, which started three years before Sept. 11, 2001, gained serious attention from the Department of Homeland Security as it began looking for innovative ways of preventing terrorism. “First, they turned to things that could be deployed immediately,” Stewart admits. For now, Stewart is working on getting his special plants to fluoresce a bit brighter. When that is achieved, Stewart and his vegetative taskforce are poised to prevent the crimes of tomorrow.

KEEPING THE LEVEE DRY
Flood Prevention
Pity the poor sandbag. For decades the low-tech, first recourse for flood damage prevention, the unassuming sack of sand may finally have been made obsolete thanks to the invention of Charles Shankles.

Not that it was easy. For years, the Knoxville electrician would think he had invented something new only to find his ideas already taken and nicely filed away at the patent bureau—by other people. Finally, in 1997, Shankles designed a triangular polyethylene bag that takes in floodwater to prevent further flooding—letting Nature do much of the work of containing itself. More importantly, it was new, unpatented. As simple as it sounds, Shankles’ invention was a technological leap forward. Until then, no one had ever really thought outside of the bag when it came to transportable flood barrier design. (There was a design involving oval-shaped plastic bags, but they were prone to rollovers as floodwaters advanced.)

The timing of Shankles’ newest effort couldn’t have been better. For years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engi- neers had been searching for new technologies to prevent flooding, writing in its 1997 report that “rapid placement and filling will save critical time and resources.” Compared to Shankles’ design, sandbags are much heavier, require longer to assemble and are not always environmentally safe. (If sand gets contaminated with floodwater, it has to be shipped to a landfill, which just increases spending on flood prevention.) Shankles’ design seemed to be exactly what the Corps needed.

Though he knew he was on to something, Shankles also knew he lacked proper business savvy to get it off the ground. He turned to longtime friend and Knoxville entrepreneur Don Wittenberg for help. Wittenberg, a New Jersey transplant who moved to Knoxville in 1973, and Shankles formed Aqua Levee to manufacture the pilot product. With the help of Bruce Knobloch, an engineer who later joined Shankles and Wittenberg, Aqua Levee’s pilot was stitched together and successfully tested.

As they solicited contracts from potential buyers, the men encountered an unexpected dilemma. How do you gauge proper compensation for something that prevents an unknown amount of damage? This uncertainty led to some unwanted vagueness in Aqua Levee’s initial dealings with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

As Hurricane Isidore was wreaking havoc in Louisiana in September 2002, Aqua Levee eagerly answered the call when FEMA workers officially gave up trying to prevent several floods with the conventional methods at their disposal. “They threw their hands up in the air and said ‘There’s nothing we can do,’” Knobloch says. The trio set up camp and, to FEMA’s amazement, successfully prevented flooding in several bayous. But because there was no written contract, just a handshake deal, it took Aqua Levee more than a year to get reimbursed for their work.

“Getting our government, which I love dearly, to change their philosophy is a horrendous job,” Wittenberg says. Now the company, which is still trying to get money from the state of Tennessee for flood prevention work they did in Chattanooga last year, uses a different approach to improve its modest revenue, signing up-front, or pre-emergency contracts with federal and state agencies. So far, they have agreements with North Carolina and Indiana. (Aqua Levee products were not on hand during the 2004 hurricanes in Florida, despite some inquiries from local officials). However, Aqua Levee’s technology is already under review in England, where floods have become a recurring problem in recent years.

Still, it will take time to break the sandbag habit in emergency situations. “People will grab a sand bag before they grab anything else,” Wittenberg says. Habits may die hard, but the sandbag’s days seem numbered. In addition to its other advantages, Aqua Levee’s products cost the same initially—roughly $1 million for a 1-mile stretch—but are reusable up to five times.

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