Author Archives: curiouscat

JMU Adds School of Engineering

JMU to create engineering program next fall by Kelly Conniff:

The research group focused on material from several areas that had shown that engineering is in great demand at JMU. The commonwealth of Virginia has also identified the top three labor shortages areas as nursing, education and engineering. JMU decided to respond to this need by creating a program that will produce close to 50 graduates per year, starting with the first graduating class in 2012.
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The school of engineering will also focus on incorporating business elements into the curriculum. The Steering Committee created two new business courses designed for engineering students. The courses, called Management of Technology I and II, will be specially constructed in order to allow students to pursue post-graduate studies in business or engineering upon graduation.

“The addition of business skills is really important to our program,” Prins said. “Having our graduates be able to speak both engineering and business is key to their success.”

Ocean Foam

Cappuccino Coast: The day the Pacific was whipped up into an ocean of froth

One minute a group of teenage surfers were waiting to catch a wave, the next they were swallowed up in a giant bubble bath. The foam was so light that they could puff it out of their hands and watch it float away. It stretched for 30 miles out into the Pacific in a phenomenon not seen at the beach for more than three decades.

Scientists explain that the foam is created by impurities in the ocean, such as salts, chemicals, dead plants, decomposed fish and excretions from seaweed. All are churned up together by powerful currents which cause the water to form bubbles. These bubbles stick to each other as they are carried below the surface by the current towards the shore.

As a wave starts to form on the surface, the motion of the water causes the bubbles to swirl upwards and, massed together, they become foam.
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As for 12-year-old beachgoer Tom Woods, who has been surfing since he was two, riding a wave was out of the question. “Me and my mates just spent the afternoon leaping about in that stuff,” he said. “It was quite cool to touch and it was really weird. It was like clouds of air – you could hardly feel it.”

First Year of Google WiFi

First year of Google WiFi

Our Mountain View WiFi network just celebrated its first anniversary, and we thought you’d appreciate a few data points. The network’s 400+ mesh routers cover about 12 square miles and 25,000 homes to serve approximately 15,000 unique users each week month. Since the beginning of 2007, traffic has grown almost 10 percent each month, and the network now handles over 300 gigabytes of data each day, sent to over 100 distinct types of WiFi devices. Virtually the entire city has been taking advantage of the network, with 95 percent of the mesh routers being used on any given day.

Around the globe and across the U. S., many people are still not able to access the online services that are increasingly helpful, if not essential, tools for our daily lives. This is why we’re committed to promoting alternative platforms for people to access the web, no matter where you are, what you’re doing or what device you’re using.

Financial Engineering

In addition to this blog I also run the Curious Cat Investing and Economics blog. Still I don’t really understand what financial engineering is. Here is an article from the author of an excellent economics blog – Reverse engineering financial engineering:

Call it the downside of complex financial engineering. That engineering took some risks off the banks balance sheet (literally in some cases), but it also means that no one quite knows where the subprime losses are. And there is a suspicion that some of those losses are hiding in funds that haven’t offered adequate compensation for the risk.

A few months ago a lot of subprime debt could be packaged into a security that was worth more than the sum of its parts (with a bit of help from the credit rating agencies. And this process was widely lauded. The IMF argued that the United States unique skill at creating innovative fixed income “product” was pulling in the capital needed to finance the US current account deficit. The Fed argued that financial innovation allowed the banks to sell risks that they previously might have held on their balance sheet — though it is also worth noting that the banks themselves were big buyers of MBS as well. Risks were divided and then sold to those best able to manage them.

I understand there has been a large move toward using highly complex math for financial strategies. I understand many derivatives and other investment vehicles have been created. I just don’t really get what makes some of it engineering. Creating new financial instruments, I can come close to understand the argument for calling that engineering but still… And I don’t understand why complex accounting often seems to be called engineering instead of accounting. And the portion that is mainly about changing legal classification then isn’t it more legal than engineering (it seems much financial engineering are gimmicks or tricks or… to gain favorable legal classification for tax… purposes).

Studying Martian Soil for Evidence of Microbial Life

Study: Martian soil may contain life

The search for life on Mars appeared to hit a dead end in 1976 when Viking landers touched down on the red planet and failed to detect biological activity. But Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, said on Friday the spacecraft may in fact have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface.

His analysis of one of the experiments carried out by the Viking spacecraft suggests that 0.1 percent of the Martian soil could be of biological origin. That is roughly comparable to biomass levels found in some Antarctic permafrost, home to a range of hardy bacteria and lichen. “It is interesting because one part per thousand is not a small amount,” Houtkooper said in a telephone interview.

“We will have to find confirmatory evidence and see what kind of microbes these are and whether they are related to terrestrial microbes. It is a possibility that life has been transported from Earth to Mars or vice versa a long time ago.”

Interesting, certainly far from convincing evidence but still fun speculation. Claim of Martian Life Called ‘Bogus’:

Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, is skeptical of the new claims. “It sounds bogus to me,” Pace told SPACE.com. “I don’t consider the chemical results to be particularly credible in light of the harsh conditions that Mars offers.”

Lunar Landers X-Prize

Crash destroys rocket ahead of X Prize contest

The front-runner for a $2 million NASA competition to build mock lunar landers has lost one of its two main vehicles in a fiery crash. The company, Armadillo Aerospace, says it will enter a smaller vehicle instead, but outsiders say the upset will level the playing field and add suspense to the upcoming contest.
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The challenge has two ‘levels’ that involve a vehicle lifting off at one launch pad and hovering – for either 90 or 180 seconds, depending on the level – at an altitude of 50 metres as it moves to a second launch pad 100 metres away. Then the vehicle must do the same thing in reverse. If more than one vehicle achieves this, then the vehicle that can repeat it the greatest number of times in a given time period of time will win.
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He notes that the front-runner for the first solo, non-stop transatlantic flight of an aircraft in 1927 was not Charles Lindbergh but Richard Byrd, “until he crashed on take-off, and just like that, was out of the race.” That left Lindbergh to win the $25,000 prize for the flight.

The X prize contests continue to be an interesting method of encouraging research and development. Previous posts: $10 Million for Science Solutions – Autonomous Vehicle Technology Competition – Lunar Lander X-prize site

Vertical Rotation Personal Windmill

New wind turbine spins success for winning student

Ben Storan, a student graduating with an MA in Industrial Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art (RCA), has been working for the past year in conjunction with Imperial College to design an affordable personal wind turbine suited to the urban environment.

The result is a unique design which uses vertical, rather than traditional horizontal, rotation. This feature gives a slower rotational speed, which allows the turbine to capture more energy from turbulent air flow, common to urban environments. It also means quieter operation. As a result, it is able to generate more energy than domestic models currently on the market. Similarly sized existing personal wind turbines claim to generate 1kW at a wind speed of 12 m/s, but typically produce just 40% of what is claimed. Ben’s design should realistically produce 3 times that (1.2kW) of those currently on the market.

Sexy Math

Mean Girls:

British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5.” These numbers, though Kolata doesn’t say so, are means, not medians. In this case, it’s indeed mathematically impossible that the numbers are correct. The medians in the British sample? Seven and four, same as in the American study—so you can stop worrying about a transatlantic promiscuity gap.

“It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women,” she explains. “Those survey results cannot be correct.” Kolata even quotes a theorem to this effect, backed up by mathematician David Gale of Berkeley: The average number of partners has to be the same for men and women.

This article makes several good mathematical and scientific points, including the dangers of trusting reports by participants. Also I can see if this page is more popular than some of the other math posts. For awhile now I have noticed “sex 100” showing up as one of the terms guiding the most visitors to this site. I wondered what that could be – I just took a look: Bdelloid Rotifers Abandoned Sex 100 Million Years Ago. I think maybe those searchers didn’t exactly find what they wanted.

Mining the Moon

Mining the Moon by Mark Williams:

At the 21st century’s start, few would have predicted that by 2007, a second race for the moon would be under way. Yet the signs are that this is now the case. Furthermore, in today’s moon race, unlike the one that took place between the United States and the U.S.S.R. in the 1960s, a full roster of 21st-century global powers, including China and India, are competing.

Even more surprising is that one reason for much of the interest appears to be plans to mine helium-3–purportedly an ideal fuel for fusion reactors but almost unavailable on Earth–from the moon’s surface
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But a serious critic has charged that in reality, He3-based fusion isn’t even a feasible option. In the August issue of Physics World, theoretical physicist Frank Close, at Oxford in the UK, has published an article called “Fears Over Factoids” in which, among other things, he summarizes some claims of the “helium aficionados,” then dismisses those claims as essentially fantasy.

As I stated in January in Helium-3 Fusion Reactor: “This sounds pretty incredible to me and I find the claims of using fuel from the Moon economically to power our needs on Earth. Still it is interesting and just because it sounds fantastic does not mean it can’t be true. But I am skeptical.”

Revolving Doors

Every day I go into work I see about 15 people by bypass a revolving door (those using the revolving door average about 1.5 – including me) and use a standard door (and in fact 90% of those use an automatic handicap door open button – which leaves the door open for a good 5-10 seconds). MIT students have a page about the waste caused by people too lazy to use a revolving door:

On average 8x as much air is exchanged when a swing door is opened as opposed to a revolving door. That’s 8x as much new air that needs to be heated or cooled and that’s why using the revolving door is a great way to reduce energy requirements on campus.
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You’ve probably seen the signs around campus saying “Help MIT save energy. Please use the revolving door.” But does it really make any difference? Absolutely. Our estimates show that if everyone used the revolving doors at E25 alone, MIT would save almost $7500 in natural gas amounting to nearly 15 tons of CO2. And that’s just from two of the 29 revolving doors on campus!

As noted previously, for energy savings (greenhouse gas reduction…), not-so-glamorous conservation works best.