Author Archives: curiouscat

Seeing Machine from MIT

View from photo: an image (of a staircase) created to approximate the view through a seeing machine

MIT poet develops ‘seeing machine’ by Elizabeth A. Thomson

The work is led by Elizabeth Goldring, a senior fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. She developed the machine over the last 10 years, in collaboration with more than 30 MIT students and some of her personal eye doctors. The new device costs about $4,000, low compared to the $100,000 price tag of its inspiration, a machine Goldring discovered through her eye doctor.
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The pilot clinical trial of the seeing machine involved visually impaired people recruited from the Beetham Eye Institute. All participants had a visual acuity of 20/70 or less in the better-seeing eye. A person with 20/70 vision can see nothing smaller than the third line from the top of most eye charts. Most participants, however, had vision that was considered legally blind, meaning they could see nothing smaller than the “big E” on a standard eye chart.
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Goldring and colleagues are now working toward a large-scale clinical trial of a color seeing machine (the device tested in the pilot trial was black and white).

House Testimony on Engineering Education

Testimony of Vivek Wadhwa to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce,
May 16, 2006.

Vivek Wadhwa has continued the work published in the Duke study: Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate. In the testimony he provides an update on the data provided in the report.

Contrary to the popular view that India and China have an abundance of engineers, recent studies show that both countries may actually face severe shortages of dynamic engineers. The vast majority of graduates from these counties have the qualities of transactional engineers.

Differentiating between dynamic and transactional engineers is a start, but we also need to look at specific fields of engineering where the U.S can maintain a distinct advantage. Professor Myers lists specializations such as systems biology and personalized medicine, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics that he believes will give the U.S a long term advantage.

Our education system gives our students broad exposure to many different fields of study. Our engineers learn biology and art, they gain significant practical experience and learn to innovate and become entrepreneurs. Few Indian and Chinese universities provide such advantages to their students.

The dynamic and transactional differences were mentioned in his business week article: Filling the Engineering Gap.

The conclusion he presents seems wise to me.

The numbers that are at the center of the debate on US engineering competitiveness are not accurate. The US may need to graduate more of certain types of engineers, but we have not determined what we need. By simply reacting to the numbers, we may actually reduce our competitiveness. Let’s better understand the problem before we debate the remedy.

Microsoft Wants More Engineering Students

Microsoft Marching For More Engineering Students:

“We believe it is in the best interests of our industry, to have a continuing stream of high-quality, well-educated students in the sciences and technology. Software is a people-intensive business. Microsoft is committed to technical innovation, research is a primary arm of that, and we, therefore, want to continue to hire technically innovative people,” Roy Levin said.

Webcasts from the event with National Science Foundation, National Academy of Engineering and Microsoft representatives.

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Donald Knuth – Computer Scientist

photo of Donald Knuth playing his home organ

Love at First Byte by Kara Platoni:

In the early ’60s, publisher Addison-Wesley invited Knuth to write a book on compiler design. Knuth eagerly drafted 3,000 pages by hand before someone at the publishing house informed him that would make an impossibly long book. The project was reconceived as the seven-volume The Art of Computer Programming. Although Knuth has written other books in the interim, this would become his life’s work. The first three volumes were published in 1968, 1969 and 1973. Volume 4 has been in the works nearly 30 years.

Its subject, combinatorial algorithms, or computational procedures that encompass vast numbers of possibilities, hardly existed when Knuth began the series. Now the topic grows faster than anyone could reasonably chronicle it. “He says if everyone else stopped doing work he would catch up better,” deadpans Jill Knuth, his wife of nearly 45 years.

Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms – Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms – Art of Computer Programming, Volume 3: Sorting and Searching

Usually a lone wolf, Knuth collaborated on his typography programs with some of the world’s best typographers and his students. He produced two software programs, the TeX typesetting system and the METAFONT alphabet design system, which he released to the public domain. The programs are used for the bulk of scientific publishing today. “He made everybody’s life so much better and made the scholarly work so much more beautiful,” Papadimitriou says. “He has exported a lot of good will for computer science.”

See photo:

He likes to hide jokes in the index, as in Volume 3, where “royalties, use of” leads you to a page with an illustration of an organ-pipe array, a little wink to the 16-rank organ that dominates his home. He plays four-hands music with Jill, who swears that the neighbors tend to complain that the music emanating from their house is in fact not loud enough.

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Golden Buckyballs

In the hunt for golden buckyballs:

Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland and at the University of Nebraska report in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have discovered hollow molecular structures made of pure gold — golden buckyballs.
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“You can put another atom in the center,” Wang said. Depending upon the kind of atom put at the center of the cage, he said, you could create a material with novel chemical, magnetic or even optical properties. “We intend to try that.”

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Mexico: Pumping Out Engineers

Mexico: Pumping Out Engineers

Currently, 451,000 Mexican students are enrolled in full-time undergraduate programs, vs. just over 370,000 in the U.S. The Mexican students benefit from high-tech equipment and materials donated to their schools by foreign companies, which help develop course content to fit their needs. Many of these engineers graduate knowing how to use the latest computer-assisted design (CAD) software and speaking fluent English.

Another country on the engineering education bandwagon for economic growth.

Those figures are quite impressive. I would like to see what Vivek Wadhwa (one of the authors of the Duke study: USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates) says about the comparability of the figures. Still, the number of engineering undergraduate students in Mexico surprises me; this is one more indication of how many people see the value of engineering education.

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Entirely New Antibiotic Developed

Potent antibiotic to target MRSA

A potent antibiotic which kills many bacteria, including MRSA, has been discovered. Scientists with Merck, isolated platensimycin from a sample of South African soil and have developed an antibiotic based on that discovery.

If the compound passes clinical trials it will become only the third entirely new antibiotic developed in the last four decades.

Details in the journal Nature reveal the antibiotic works in a completely different way to all others.

It acts to block enzymes involved in the synthesis of fatty acids, which bacteria need to construct cell membranes.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) is a type of bacteria that is resistant to certain antibiotics, including: methicillin and other more common antibiotics such as oxacillin, penicillin and amoxicillin. Staph infections, including MRSA, occur most frequently among persons in hospitals and healthcare facilities who have weakened immune systems. More information on MRSA is available from the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge

The Synapse Revealed

Image by Graham Johnson, Graham Johnson Medical Media. The Synapse Revealed – Deep inside the brain, a neuron prepares to transmit a signal to its target. The brain contains billions of neurons, whose network of chemical messages form the basis of all thought, movement and behavior.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Science created the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge: “In a world where science literacy is dismayingly rare, illustrations provide the most immediate and influential connection between scientists and other citizens, and the best hope for nurturing popular interest.” The deadline for submissions is 31 May 2006. See information on the 2005 winners (including the image shown here).

Science Education and Jobs

Education Seeds the Ground Science, Technology Meet Light Spectrum by Chris Brunson is well worth reading:

“The course was designed specifically for adult learners and had the challenge of putting a lab-based course online,” said Fenna Hanes, NEBHE senior director, office of programs. “The audience was high school, community college and some four-year college faculty from both science and technology disciplines including physics, chemistry, math, electronics, telecommunications and engineering technologies.”

This article explores another example of NSF funding innovative projects to support science and engineering education – PHOTON2 Program Overview. And the article goes on to explore other activity by institutions building off that work.

In addition to providing photonics technology training to traditional community college students Three Rivers Community College (TRCC) has provided incumbent workers training…
The training was a combination of on-site as well as on-line education.
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Companies in the region regularly call Judy Donnelly, program coordinator of photonics programs, Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, and Nicholas Massa, professor of laser electro-optics technology at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC).

Both get similar calls, quite regularly from companies, with the query: “I need people, I want to hire techs, do you have any students I can hire?” Even on company field trips, the almost-grads of both colleges are asked if they want to come to work for the corporations, that are growing and need skilled, educated people.

“Donna Goyette at Ellis Tech (H.H. Ellis Technical High School, in Danielson) is creating a full-year optics course for her seniors,” said Donnelly. “She is doing a fantastic job. Since they are not far from IPG Photonics in Mass., it also works out to be a good collaboration.” IPG Photonics, incidentally, has hired a number of graduates and student interns from the laser electro-optics and photonics programs at STCC and TRCC over the past several years.

Advances in technology require novel approaches to education.

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Scientific Misinformation

Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles’ Foe, It’s Fuel by Gina Kolata:

But that, it turns out, is all wrong. Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy.
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“I had huge fights, I had terrible trouble getting my grants funded, I had my papers rejected,” Dr. Brooks recalled. But he soldiered on, conducting more elaborate studies with rats and, years later, moving on to humans. Every time, with every study, his results were consistent with his radical idea.

Eventually, other researchers confirmed the work. And gradually, the thinking among exercise physiologists began to change.

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