The experiment used NASA’s Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol, which is based on the delay-tolerant networking architecture developed in part by Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist. In the newest experiment, DTN was used to simulate an astronaut in an planet-orbiting vehicle controlling a robotic rover on a planet’s surface.

“The demonstration showed the feasibility of using a new communications infrastructure to send commands to a surface robot from an orbiting spacecraft and receive images and data back from the robot,” said Badri Younes, deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation at NASA Headquarters . “The experimental DTN we’ve tested from the space station may one day be used by humans on a spacecraft in orbit around Mars to operate robots on the surface, or from Earth using orbiting satellites as relay stations.”

DTN enables standardized communications similar to the internet, but over interplanetary distances and through the time delays in communication with spacecrafts orbiting other planets or soaring out in deep space. The protocol accounts for disconnections and errors, and data moves through the network by hopping. Bundles of data are temporarily stored in nodes, and then forwarded to the next node when a link becomes available.

(via co.Design)

“[It's] one of the biggest changes to a pillar product in LinkedIn’s history,” said Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn CEO. Weiner introduced today’s event, which was a rare Apple-style live announcement for LinkedIn.

After Deep Nishar, senior VP of products at LinkedIn, highlighted how quickly LinkedIn is growing (50 million new members this year), Aaron Bronzan, product manager at LinkedIn, took the stage to announce the new LinkedIn profile page

Bronzan stated that LinkedIn’s design goal was to simplify the page and provide new tools to provide relevant insights to LinkedIn members so that they will use the service every day.

At the beginning of the event Weiner made the point that LinkedIn users are now updating their profiles even when they are not currently looking for work. The biggest change to the LinkedIn profile page, streamlined profile editing, reflects this.

“We’ve taken profile editing and re-built it from the ground up,” said Bronzan.

Members can now edit their profiles in-line, changing things on the fly. The skill endorsements that LinkedIn rolled out last month have also been made simpler, and members can now endorse specific skills for people in their network with one click.

To provide members with those relevant insights Bronzan mentioned, LinkedIn has provided new tools that display profile information and network connections in a more visual style. Activitiy is now front-and-center at the top of the profile, to encourage members to interact on a more regualr basis. There is also a tool that compares members’ interests and skills when visiting the profile of someone they’ve connected with, or other other helpful information to help connect with people they do not yet know. Members can also now filter through their connection’s connections with a search feature, allowing them to find people with specific skills to network with.

The new LinkedIn profile rolls out to members starting today.

Over on the LinkedIn Blog, LinkedIn Product Manager David Breger explained how the new feature will work. Users will be able to see their connections’ recommended endorsements at the top of their profile and confirm that the person actually has those skills. Users can also add areas of expertise they believe their connection possesses. Endorsements can also be given from the Skills & Expertise section of a connection’s profile. From the blog post:

Want to see who has endorsed you? We’ll notify you via email and on LinkedIn whenever you are endorsed. You can scroll to the bottom of your profile page under “Skills and Expertise” to see the faces of people who think you’re great at what you do. You can also accept any new skills recommended by your peers that you may not have thought to include on your profile. Or you can also add a new skill by clicking on “add a skill” on your profile page

The Endorsements feature launches today in English, but LinkedIn stated it will be available in all LinkedIn-supported languages in “the next few weeks.” A Slideshare presentation accompanies the blog post and shows how the feature is meant to work:

The tool is called Goalee and, according to its co-founder James Brown, is a combination of LinkedIn and eHarmony. Although it’s not geared toward either online dating or professional networking in particular, it is designed to help people find the connections that they need to meet specific goals.

“Who you are as a person can help you build new connections,” said Brown. “We pull in who you are as a person and your professional background from LinkedIn and the people that you follow [and] the things you talk about on Twitter… all those things combined to help you build new connections.”

As he explained to us, Goalee is necessary because both LinkedIn and Facebook are effective in bringing users’ existing network online, but can be tough to use when trying to network with brand new people. He believes that they lack a rich recommendation system that helps users discover people they’ve never met, but should, based on their networking goals.

“You can’t really do what we’re doing if you use just LinkedIn or just Facebook,” Brown pointed out.

“We’re not trying to be the new LinkedIn or the new social network for networking,” he continued, “we’re trying to help you have a better experience on the sites that you’re already using by recommending the best people for you to meet.”

In a nutshell, Goalee creates a persona of each person based on the data it has aggregated. From there, users can list goals that they hope to meet. In return, Goalee’s natural language processing matches users with each other, ranking them according to the most common interests that they have.

“It’s all about getting you as quickly as possible to the best people for you to meet,” said Brown.

Aside from its Web efforts, Goalee is also utilizing mobile and is integrating with services such as Foursquare and TripIt. At this point, the service is free, but later this year, it will be also offering a paid service that will give users the opportunity to have unlimited goals and receive unlimited connections.

If you don’t already have a LinkedIn profile, however, the prospect can be daunting. You could simply transfer the information on your resume to the site, but that alone isn’t likely to land you a job. As with any social network, the key with LinkedIn is to be social. Make contacts, and inquiries to build your social network of possible employers or co-workers. Show off your previous work and market yourself. Using the site is much the same as other social networks, but if you need some help with the details, the folks at mindflash have got you covered. They have prepared a cheat-sheet full of all the tips you need to make your LinkedIn profile effective:

(mindflash via Daily Infographic)

This next infographic from OnlineDegrees.Com addresses the issue of being seen in a job market full of applicants. How do you get recognized? You have to be found in the same circles your prospective employers travel in. It used to be called networking, now we call social networking. All kidding aside, you have to make connections with the right people. Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter make networking easier than ever.

If you’re looking for a new job or you want to shed the shackles of your current position, you need to study this graphic. Knowing the ins and outs of social networking as part of your job hunt is literally going to put you at the head of the pack. If you don’t have a presence on the same social media sites potential employers are using, you won’t get that vital opportunity to appear on their radar. Take a look:

A team from Lnx Research developed an extraction engine, which used text mining technology, to produce a network of subject experts, and find people, organisations and locations associated with a specific heath topic from research articles. The three sets of results from the search were combined, and, using simple rules, people with the most ‘hits’ who were most likely to be the opinion leaders were identified. Social network analysis was then used to generate a ranked web of linked experts, based on the number of times they were mentioned together in news articles.

The team tested their program, using the topic ‘obesity’, and generated a network of over 16,000 experts with 100,000 links between them. The people at the heart of the network, with the most connections, tended to be the subject experts. In about an hour this ‘find a friend’ system found experts on obesity with an accuracy of about 90%.

Dr Siddhartha Jonnalagadda who led this research explained, “This amount of data would be impossible to sort through without the help of a computer. However when we analysed the results from the program we found that the top twenty obesity experts had all contributed significantly to the advancement of science in the literature and in the news, many having won awards for their work.”

Dr Jonnalagadda continued, “We were also able to identify a group of people who, although they were not publishing scientists, were still experts, most likely involved in public education or in science reporting.”

So although the system was designed with the aim of finding scientific experts it was also able to find celebrities, and people with a high media profile, who support a particular cause. This information would be invaluable to scientists, students and people wanting to get straight to the heart of a subject.

The company owes its success primarily to users from the younger generations. According to Appdata.com, current Identified users average just 23.5 years-old, with 90 percent under 35 and nearly 60 percent under 25 years-old. Users under 35 years-old make up only 40 percent of competitor site LinkedIn, which appeals more to older demographics.

“The Facebook generation does not exist on LinkedIn, which is dominated by more experienced professionals, or on outdated job boards, which are not in tune with the social generation,” said co-founder and co-CEO Brendan Wallace. “Identified’s young users love that they can create and control their professional profile online separate from their Facebook profile. This is clearly resonating with them. At this rate of growth we expect to hit 25 million active users by June, predominantly under age 35.”

A two-way street serving both job seekers and HR departments, Identified’s driving concept is the Identified Score, a metric derived from the work history, education, and demographic data of 247 million Facebook users, as well as the hiring behaviors of thousands of companies. In short, when you create an Identified profile and link it to your Facebook account, the company’s algorithms digest your life’s details and let you know where you fall–from 0 to 100–on the hiring desirability scale. Recruiters then use this score to identify likely candidates, and to rank applicants based on their qualifications. If you don’t like your score, you can add further information to your account and see if that makes a difference. Participating companies are also assigned an Identified Score.

Identified looks to have identified a market niche pretty well in choosing to go after Millenials. Members of this generation are already at home in their existing social profiles, and are pretty shrewd about emerging social platforms. To gain their patronage, a new platform has to be intuitive, useful, and–generally–easily linked to their other accounts. Identified has made it easy for Millenials to integrate their data into the new platform.

The company is also aggressively marketing their services at events that attract talented young professionals, like this year’s Game Developer’s Conference.

What about industry leader LinkedIn? I wouldn’t delete my profile just yet. Identified may be making waves early in its young life, but even its projected growth to 25 million users will be a drop in the bucket compared to the older, more experienced platform’s 150 million. LinkedIn’s profits may have slumped in 2011, but the company will likely dominate user share for quite a while yet.

Meeteor is a networking service that uses Facebook to help users get introductions with professionals to help their career, discover new work connections, and create an employer friendly Facebook profile.

Normally the service asks users which companies and industries the user wants to connect with when creating new networks. They have now launched a unique version, specific to SXSW, that asks users what their interests are in relation to the conference, to help create these connections.

Topics include Mobile, Web, BBQ/Booze/Swag, Dating Services, Startup Analytics, and Gamification, among others. Just enter in your interests and Meeteor takes you to profiles of other professionals that share them, even Meeteor founder Philip Cortes.

Meeteor's founder, Philip Cortes

Just click “Introduce Yourself”, leave a personal message and make plans to meet at the conference.

“We connect you with the best possible people,” Cortes says, “not just people who happen to be around you.”

The couple had no idea how many people they would be able to reach because Seth only had 40 friends on Facebook at the time. John, a FB friend shared the post and within weeks the distraught couple were given the lead that they had been hoping for. Lisa, an employee of one of John’s friends, confessed that she was pregnant and could not afford to care for her unborn child; she had several other children and was considering giving the baby up for adoption.

In a frenzy, the couple phoned the 8 month pregnant Lisa as soon as they heard about her situation. The parties decided to meet at a local Starbuck’s to exchange profiles and review medical and health histories. Lisa liked the couple and decided to start the adoption process with them.

Weeks later Lisa, gave birth and the couple became the parents of one bouncing baby boy, Noah Benjamin.

Noah is now three and the couple is hoping to find a brother or sister for him. The happy family plans to use social media to advertise their hope to adopt again.