Author Archives: curiouscat

Nanoscale Universe Experience

Riding Snowflakes is a production exploring the nanoscale universe projected on digital-domes (planetariums) funded by NSF and created by RPI. A teacher’s guide provides experiments and activity-based lessons for to introduce, reinforce and expand upon key concepts presented in the show.

Generating the molecular worlds described in the screenplay entailed a wide range of challenges in statistical mechanics, molecular modeling, and simulation. To create a truly immersive portal into the nanoscale universe required simulations of a massive scale and complexity – an entirely unusual request for the chemical and biological engineers and scientists involved in the project. The creation of a believable and cinematic molecular landscape to visualize the plot twists and dramatic tension of the story posed a host of new creative challenges for the collaborating scientists. Their involvement in this work has brought about insights that will hopefully spark a breakthrough in the very real worlds of energy, environment, and health.

Scientists and Engineers Without Borders

Building on the Doctors without Borders organization are two organizations: Science without Borders and Engineers without Borders.

Science Without Borders:

Scientists may not provide emergency relief in times of disaster, but the discipline has a major role to play in meeting the chronic needs of our planet: health, agriculture, environment, energy, and many more. By creating Scientists Without Borders, the Academy aims to facilitate synergies among institutions already committed to the UN Millennium Development Goals as well as to unleash the energy of thousands of scientists in academia and industry. With the benefit of the best and most current information, they can apply their efforts to training health workers and researchers in developing countries or devote part of their research efforts to address underserved global challenges.

Engineers Without Borders (USA):

The activities of EWB-USA range from the construction of sustainable systems that developing communities can own and operate without external assistance, to empowering such communities by enhancing local, technical, managerial, and entrepreneurial skills. These projects are initiated by, and completed with, contributions from the host community working with our project teams.

Educating the Engineer of 2020: NAE Report

Educating the Engineer of 2020:

The BS degree should be considered as a pre-engineering or “engineer in training” degree.

I am not convinced of this idea. It seems to me a BS degrees in engineering should be a full degree not some “pre” degree like pre-law. Obviously no engineering degree is an invitation to stop learning; life long learning is a requirement whether the engineering degree is earned in 4, 6, 8… years. Improving the life long learning methods is where effort should be focused in my opinion not in making the original degree take longer to earn.

The engineering education establishment should participate in efforts to improve public understanding of engineering and the technology literacy of the public and efforts to improve math, science and engineering education at the K-12 level.
NSF should collect or assist collection of data on program approach and student outcomes for engineering departments/schools so prospective freshman can

These seem like good ideas to me.

Other than trying to get people to buy the content that they provide for free I can’t understand why they present the material so poorly online. Once again basic web usability principles are lacking on their site.
Continue reading →

A ‘Chunnel’ for Spain and Morocco

From the bustling waterfront of this African port city, Europe appears tantalizingly close: The coast of Spain shows on the horizon just nine miles away. Despite decades of dreaming, no one has been able to bridge the physical divide that opened between the two continents more than 5 million years ago, forming the geological bottleneck to the Mediterranean Sea.

In recent months, however, the governments of Morocco and Spain have taken significant steps to move forward with plans to bore a railroad under the muddy bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar. If built, the project would rank among the world’s most ambitious and complex civil engineering feats, alongside the Panama Canal and the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France.

Anger at Anti-Open Access PR

Blog posts angry at the anti open access moves by science journals are exploding. Which is a good thing; hopefully the momentum will keep up and some real changes will take place.

Those with money to lose will fight against freedom of information by Bora Zivkovic, is pretty representative:

While the world is moving towards an Open Science model of exchange of scientific information, there are, as expected, forces that are trying to oppose it. Whenever there is a movement to change any kind of system, those most likely to lose will make a last-ditch and nasty effort to temporarily derail the progress.

More: My advice to the American Chemical Society – Big Content’s ‘pitbull’ and the AAA – Science Journals Hire “PR Pit Bull” – Traditional science publishers hire PR firms to scuttle open access – The Open Access “Debate” – A quick bit on the future of Open Access Publishing, Anthropology, and Public Relations – More on the AAP PR campaign – Anti-Open Access Propaganda: An Institution Under Siege – Science publishers get stupid

Good. Go blogosphere, Go Open Access and Go Badgers, too.

Germany’s Science Chancellor

The Science Chancellor:

Angela Merkel, a physical chemist-turned-G8 leader, is putting science on the European and global agenda
…
Merkel touted a new â‚¬6 billion fund for innovative “beacon projects,” plus an increase in R&D funding to 3 percent of Germany’s $2.5 billion GDP through 2010. She’s also made an impact on the German science community. “They’re all impressed that a scientist, a real scientist who really did scientific work and didn’t just get a degree and move on, finally made it to the top of the political ladder,”

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Excellent articles on eating healthy but also provides a nice insight in the practice scientific inquiry: Unhappy Meals by Michael Pollan:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

That is the advice on how to eat more healthfully by Michael Pollan the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

Interactions are critical in many experiments. That is why multi-factor experimentation is so important (One-Factor-at-a-Time Versus Designed Experiments) though even using these techniques the complexity of interactions provides an incredibly challenging environment.

Continue reading →

More Microchip Breakthroughs

Intel, IBM separately reveal transistor breakthrough

In dueling announcements, Intel Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. separately say they have solved a puzzle perplexing the semiconductor industry about how to reduce energy loss in microchip transistors as the technology shrinks to the atomic scale.

Each company said it has devised a way to replace problematic but vital materials in the transistors of computer chips that have begun leaking too much electric current as the circuitry on those chips gets smaller. Technology experts said it’s the most dramatic overhaul of transistor technology for computer chips since the 1960s
…
The problem is that the silicon dioxide used for more than 40 years as an insulator inside transistors has been shaved so thin that an increasing amount of current is seeping through, wasting electricity and generating unnecessary heat. Intel and IBM said they have discovered a way to replace that material with various metals in parts called the gate, which turns the transistor on and off, and the gate dielectric, an insulating layer, which helps improve transistor performance and retain more energy.

Feedback Within the Context of Systems Theory

Good read – Lengthening the Feedback Loop: A History of Feedback Within the Context of Systems Theory by Julia Evans:

Once you start looking for feedback loops, you see them everywhere. As I write this, my refrigerator clicks on, reminding me that negative feedback from its thermostat is responsible for keeping my food from spoiling.
…
The purpose of this paper is to show how feedback developed from an engineering principle to part of a unifying theory that helps to shape the way we look at the world. I will trace the concept of feedback through history within the broader framework of systems theory, and demonstrate how it is being applied to business, economics, and society at large.

via: Agile Management

The Dynamics of Crowd Disasters: An Empirical Study

Interesting paper – The Dynamics of Crowd Disasters: An Empirical Study (also see the supplemental materials). Systems thinking allowed the engineers to design a solution that wasn’t about enforcing the existing rules more but changing the system so that the causes of the most serious problems are eliminated.

analysis of unique recordings of the Muslim pilgrimage in Mina/Makkah, Saudi Arabia. It suggests that high-density flows can turn “turbulent” and cause people to fall. The occuring eruptions of pressure release bear analogies with earthquakes and are de facto uncontrollable.
…
entrance of the previous Jamarat Bridge, where upto 3 million Muslims perform the stoning ritual within 24 hours.
On the 12th day of Hajj, about 2/3 of the pilgrims executed lapidation even within 7 hours.

Continue reading →