Author Archives: curiouscat

Boeing CEO’s Speech to Engineering Students

Boeing CEO offers UM students advice about careers, innovation:

He explained the reality, as it applies to the corporate world today, is that innovation is a team sport, not a solo sport. It (innovation) depends on a culture of technical sharing and openness to others not a reclusive environment, innovation can and should occur in all areas of the business, incremental doesn’t mean insignificant, eureka moments are rare, and in a business environment, creativity cannot exist without discipline.

“It takes people working together across different groups, disciplines, and organizational arms to make it happen,” Mr. McNerney said. “It also takes real leadership to charter the course and (inspire) people to reach for the highest level of performance supported by a never ending focus on integrity.”

According to McNerney business has become focused on measuring value practically, which causes engineering-based companies like Boeing to innovate more frequently than they invent all-new products.

Learning About the Human Genome

You Don’t Miss Those 8,000 Genes, Do You? by Carl Zimmer:

Science moves forward by flow. One experiment leads to another. Observations accrue. What seem like side trips or even dead ends may bring a fuzzy picture further into focus. Yet science often seems as if it moves forward one bombshell at a time, marked by scientific papers and press conferences.
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When Craig Venter and his colleagues published their rough draft of the human genome in 2001 they identified 26,588 human genes. They then broke those genes down by their functions. Some were involved in building DNA, some in relaying signals, and so on. Remarkably, though, they classified 12809 genes–almost half–as “molecular function unknown.” Last week I wanted to know if those numbers still hold.
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They weren’t so easy to find. In 2003 some reports came out to the effect that the genome had shrunk down to 21,000 genes. But I couldn’t turn up much news in the past four years.
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The pie shows that we’re now down to just 18,308 genes. That’s over 8,000 genes fewer than six years ago. Many sequences that once looked like full-fledged genes, capable of generating a protein, now don’t make the grade. Some genes turned out to be pseudogenes–vestiges of genes that once worked but have been since wrecked by mutations. In other cases, DNA segments that appeared to be parts of separate genes have turned out to be part of the same gene.

Today scientists still don’t know the function of 5898 genes in the human genome. In other words, over the past six years about 7,000 genes either have been figured out or have vanished into the land of nevermind.

Great post. Read it.

248-dimension Math Puzzle

248-dimension maths puzzle solved:

What came out was a matrix of linked numbers, which together describe the structure of E8. It contains more than 60 times as much data as the human genome sequence.

Each of the 205,263,363,600 entries on the matrix is far more complicated than a straightforward number; some are complex equations. The team calculated that if all the numbers were written out in small type, they would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

In addition to facilitating further understanding of symmetry and related areas of mathematics, the team hopes its work will contribute to areas of physics, such as string theory, which involve structures possessing more than the conventional four dimensions of space and time.

Relationships Among Scientific Paradigms

Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers; node proximity and darker links indicate how many papers are shared between two paradigms. Flowing labels list common words unique to each paradigm, large labels general areas of scientific inquiry.

See the site for a interesting graphic display of the relationships.

Google Summer of Code 2007

Google Summer of Code will pay about 800 students $4,500 to work on open source software development projects this summer at over 50 open source organizations including: Gaim, Drupal, EFF, Haskell.org, OpenOffice.org, Subversion and WordPress. Applications opened March 14th and are due by March 24th.

While the majority of past student participants were enrolled in university Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs, GSoCers come from a wide variety of educational backgrounds, from computational biology to mining engineering. Many of our past participants had never participated in an open-source project before GSoC; others used the GSoC stipend as an opportunity to concentrate fully on their existing open source coding activities over the summer.

See the site for many more details. Find internship opportunities via externs.com (a curiouscat.com web site): engineering internships – science internships.

China Leads in Producing Post Graduate Engineers

Highly recommended for those interested in the macro view of engineering education in the USA, India and China. Where the Engineers Are is an excellent article building off the work mentioned in previous posts including: Worldwide Science and Engineering Doctoral Degree Data, USA Under Counting Engineering Graduates and House Testimony on Engineering Education. The data they have collected and interpreted shows that China has moved ahead of the USA in doctoral degrees in engineering and India has not been growing there doctoral graduate counts.

In the United States, close to 60% of engineering PhD degrees awarded annually are currently earned by foreign nationals, according to data from the American Society for Engineering Education. Indian and Chinese students are the dominant foreign student groups. Data for 2005 that we obtained from the Chinese government show that 30% of all Chinese students studying abroad returned home after their education, and various sources report that this number is steadily increasing. Our interviews with business executives in India and China confirmed this trend.

The bottom line is that China is racing ahead of the United States and India in its production of engineering and technology PhD’s and in its ability to perform basic research. India is in particularly bad shape, as it does not appear to be producing the numbers of PhD’s needed even to staff its growing universities.

Researchers Learn What Sparks Plant Growth

Researchers Learn What Sparks Plant Growth:

“How do organisms decide when to grow and when to stop growing? These questions are especially important in plants because they are rooted in the ground and must alter their shape and size in response to their local environment. Thus, it’s a question of survival,” added Chory. “It took us 10 years to develop the tools to ask the question. It is very satisfying for me to see the results.”
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“It’s been a matter of some debate for a very long time if one of these tissue layers controls plant growth or if all three layers have to work together,” Chory said. “Our paper shows very clearly that the epidermis is in control—in both driving and restricting growth. In addition, our studies show that the cells in the epidermis “talk” to the cells in the inner layers, communicating that they too should expand.”

In January we had a long stretch of warm weather. Shoots for early blooming flowers sprouted in my front yard. Then we had about 6 weeks of winter weather. I was wondering how the flowers would do (they do fine with a few days of freezing weather after sprouting – since they have evolved to bloom early). They did fine, photo above (by John Hunter, March 11th).

Â£25 Gadget Saves Energy

Â£25 fridge gadget that could slash greenhouse emissions by David Adam:

Invented by British engineers, the Â£25 gadget significantly reduces the amount of energy used by fridges and freezers, which are estimated to consume about a fifth of all domestic electricity in the UK. If one was fitted to each of the 87 million refrigeration units in Britain, carbon dioxide emissions would fall by more than 2 million tonnes a year.
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Because air heats up much more quickly than yoghurt, milk or whatever else is stored inside, this makes the fridge work harder than necessary. With the cube fitted, the fridge responds only to the temperature of the food, which means it clicks on and off less often as the door is open and closed. Trials are under way with supermarkets, breweries and hotels. One of the largest, the Riverbank Park Plaza hotel in London, fitted the device to each of the hotel’s 140 major fridges and freezers. David Bell, chief engineer, says energy use decreased by about 30% on average – enough to slash the hotel’s annual electricity bill by Â£17,000. The Park Plaza group plans to fit them throughout its UK hotels, and to recommend them overseas.
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Mr Freedman said the devices would have the biggest impact in the large freezers and open chill cabinets used in the catering and supermarket industries. They do reduce the energy consumption of domestic fridges, but the saving is not so great because the door is not opened very often.

Magnetic Switching Data Storage

New Magnetic Switching Method Could Dramatically Speed Up Data Storage

Scientists of the Research Centre JÃ¼lich, Germany, have found a fundamentally new magnetic switching method which achieves the fastest speed ever reported by applying an external magnetic field. The results that are presented in a current article in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters could introduce new possibilities for future data storage applications with ultimate speeds.
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Besides its extremely high speed, a remarkable aspect of this finding is that it unfolds automatically: The applied field only perturbs the magnetization, which then under-goes these complicated changes as it recovers equilibrium. “These findings represent a promising leap towards smaller length scales and shorter time scales in magnetic data storage applications”, affirms Prof. Claus M. Schneider, director at the IFF

Immense Amount of Ice Found on Mars

Dense Ice Revealed at Mars’ South Pole

Radar scans of Mars have unveiled a vast reservoir of nearly pure frozen water around the planet’s south pole, a deposit so rich that if it were spread evenly on the surface it would be 36 feet deep.
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For now, it’s one of the many question marks that dot Mars research initiatives. Scientists still can’t explain what happened to all the water that must have been needed to carve Mars’ surface features.