Category Archives: Education

CMU Wins $2 million in Urban Robot Auto Race

Carnegie Mellon University won the $2 million first place prize in DARPA’s urban robot race this weekend, stealing the thunder from 2005’s Grand Challenge leader, Stanford University. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge awarded a total of $3.5 million in prizes on Sunday, a day after the race. Stanford University took second place, with a $1 million cash prize, and Virginia Tech won $500,000 for third place.

The Urban Challenge was a six-hour test of driverless vehicles on the suburban roads of the former George Air Force Base in Oro Grande, Calif., where the robotic cars were required to complete three missions while obeying traffic laws and avoiding obstacles and collisions with other driverless vehicles. The challenge was the first ever to test robots driving among other robots, and it was significantly harder than DARPA’s 2005 desert Grand Challenge because of that interplay and the urban setting, according to race officials.

Reusable Paper

Xerox’s Reusable Paper

Almost half of the paper used in American offices is for daily use. It is for display, not storage and, at the end of the day, it’s in the trash can. All of the energy that was put into harvesting, processing, and shipping that paper was, in the end, for less than a day’s use. A number of companies are working on alternatives to this procedure.
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The system is based on ‘paper’ that contains light sensitive materials. When exposed to certain wavelengths of light, the paper changes to a darker that then slowly fades. Neither the light-sensitive paper, nor the light printers are ready for consumers

Interesting. It is great to see all the efforts undertaken by scientists and engineers to improve. The more we can have working everywhere in the world the better off we will be.

The Study of Bee Colony Collapses Continues

The attempts to discover the causes of the die off of bees in the USA continues. This effort provides a good example of the difficulty of learning what really happens around us. Often, once things are worked out, and explained they seem simple and even obvious. But while trying to figure events taking place (like the bee colony collapses), scientists have significant challenges. The hard work and the application of scientific concepts by scientists allow us to learn and adapt. I think the difficulty can paint a valuable picture of what science is about. That search for understanding is wonderful to see and something fundamental to the human experience. Disappearing Bee Mystery Deepens

One year ago, beekeepers across the country began to report that worker bees were inexplicably abandoning their hives and leaving the brood to die. Although firm statistics are hard to come by, so-called colony collapse disorder may have afflicted as many as 25% of U.S. beekeepers and perhaps others around the world. Possible culprits included pesticides, parasites, and chronic stress from poor nutrition and the long-distance truck rides that many commercial hives undergo.
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For that matter, no one has yet shown that IAPV can cause colonies to collapse. “Until you have introduced the virus and caused disease, you’re just postulating,” cautions Bruce Webb, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. “The conclusive data are not in.”

Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers

The Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, established in 1996, honors the most promising researchers in the Nation within their fields. Nine federal departments and agencies annually nominate scientists and engineers who are at the start of their independent careers and whose work shows exceptional promise for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Participating agencies award these talented scientists and engineers with up to five years of funding to further their research in support of critical government missions.

Awards were announced today – links to some of the awardees:

Jelena Vuckovic, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
Matthew Rodell, Physical Scientist, NASA
Katerina Akassoglou, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology, University of California, San Diego
Carlos Rinaldi, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering University of Puerto Rico at MayagÃ¼ez
Ahna Skop, Assistant Professor of Genetics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Krystyn J. Van Vliet, Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT
Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Brown University

The Simplest Universal Turing Machine Is Proved

The Prize Is Won; The Simplest Universal Turing Machine Is Proved:

And so as part of commemorating the fifth anniversary of A New Kind of Science on May 14 this year, we announced a $25,000 prize for determining whether or not that Turing machine is in fact universal. I had no idea how long it would take before the prize was won. A month? A year? A decade? A century? Perhaps the question was even formally undecidable (say from the usual axioms of mathematics).

But today I am thrilled to be able to announce that after only five months the prize is won–and we have answer: the Turing machine is in fact universal! Alex Smith–a 20-year-old undergraduate from Birmingham, UK–has produced a 40-page proof.

Vaughan Pratt Standford CS professor, disputes the proofs validity.

Practice First, Theory Later

The best engineering school in the United States?

What makes Olin special – and what puts it at the top of my “Engineering Schools I Wished I Had Gone To” list—is its “practice first, theory later” approach. Olin was designed to make students plunge into hands-on engineering projects on day one. “Instead of theory-heavy lectures, segregated disciplines, and individual efforts,” I wrote in that article, “Olin champions design exercises, interdisciplinary studies, and teamwork.”

Experts say a deep reform of engineering education in the United States is long overdue. We need a new type of engineer trained to face today’s challenges, not those of post World War II, when many curricula were created. Could this new engineer be … the Olin engineer? That’s what I set out to find out when my editors assigned me the story on Olin.
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What I found during my reporting, and what I tried to convey in the article, is that Olin is like no other engineering school I’d ever visited. Pretty much everything about it is unique. The installations are brand new, the faculty is young and motivated, the curriculum innovative. Professors don’t have to worry about tenure, students don’t have to worry about tuition. The students I met were bright, ambitious, outspoken, and diverse in their interests and personalities. They all want to lead, succeed, excel. They behave almost like MBA students training to be CEOs except they’re dressed in pajamas programming robots. For outsiders, it can be an overwhelming experience to meet a classroom full of Olin engineers.

Most Powerful Anti-matter Beam Yet

NC State Nuclear Reactor Program Celebrates Scientific Breakthrough

Success was two years in the making – the positron project began in 2005 as a collaboration between NC State, the University of Michigan and Oak Ridge National Laboratory with the support of the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. “The idea here is that if we create this intense beam of antimatter electrons – the complete opposite of the electron, basically – we can then use them in investigating and understanding the new types of materials being used in many applications,” Hawari said.

Now that the intense beam has been generated, members of NC State’s nuclear engineering program and their collaborators will turn their focus to developing instrumentation such as antimatter spectrometers and potentially long-discussed antimatter microscopes, which would allow for a much more detailed look into materials at the atomic level.

NC State Nuclear Reactor Generates Record Low-Energy Positron Beam

Once the stuff of science fiction, these anti-matter, or positron, beams have a multitude of uses in nanoscience and materials engineering because of the positron’s ability to gravitate toward and trap in defects or pores in a material at sizes as small as a single atom. Positrons are used to detect damage from radiation in nuclear reactors and are impacting the emerging field of nanoengineered materials where nanometer-sized voids control properties such as dielectric constant in microelectronic devices and hydrogen storage in fuel cells.

An intense positron beam means that researchers will have better measurements of a material’s porosity, especially in high-tech thin film applications where traditional techniques falter. This beam will be used in Positron Annihilation Lifetime Spectrometry (PALS) and Doppler Broadening Spectrometry (DBS). Hawari also believes that other positron analysis techniques will become possible. While the spectrometers are not yet built, they are on the books for completion next year.

The World at the End of Time

I finished reading the World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl recently. I really enjoyed the story which involves lifeforms that live inside stars and human space travel. One of the star dwellers set in place a plan to send a few stars away. A human settlement was dragged along as their planet was sent along with their sun on a journey away from the rest of the universe. I really enjoyed it.

A few other science fiction books I have enjoyed: Ender’s Game – A Canticle for Leibowitz– Foundation – Calculating God – The Diamond Age – Doomsday Book – American Gods

The Importance of Science Education

The Science Education Myth by Vivek Wadhwa:

The authors of the report, the Urban Institute’s Hal Salzman and Georgetown University professor Lindsay Lowell, show that math, science, and reading test scores at the primary and secondary level have increased over the past two decades, and U.S. students are now close to the top of international rankings. Perhaps just as surprising, the report finds that our education system actually produces more science and engineering graduates than the market demands.

The study certainly sounds interesting. I can’t find it (update Vivek Wadhwa provided the link – which will work Monday, also see his comment below), but found an article (which wasn’t easy) by the authors of the report: The Real Technology Challenge. The main point of the article, The Real Technology Challenge, seems to be that the USA should focus on globalization (and focus on educating scientists and engineers to work in a global world).

As I have said before I disagree with those that believe the USA is producing more science and engineering graduates than the market demands. Smart leaders know the huge positive impacts of a large, well educated science and engineering workforce.

Countries that succeed in producing more quality graduates while creating the best economic environment to take advantage of technology innovation (follow this link – it is one of the most important posts about what makes silicon valley so powerful a force at doing just that) are going to benefit greatly. My guess is the USA will be one of those countries; not by reducing the focus on science and engineering education but by increasing it. If not, other countries will, and the USA will suffer economically. The USA also needs to continue to push the economic and entrepreneurship advantages – doing that well is very difficult to achieve and the USA maintains a stronger advantage in that realm – but I will be very surprised if other countries don’t continue to make gains in this area. Even so doing so is much more challenging than just improving education (which is difficult itself just not nearly as difficult) and the USA can continue to benefit from this combination with the right policies.

Primary Science Education in California

Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley Science Survey:

California, including the San Francisco Bay Area, is home to much US innovation in science and technology. Recent national reports have illuminated the importance of science education in the elementary grades and described concerns for US leadership in science,1 the importance of fostering interest in science early in life,2 and issues with promoting high quality science instruction in the elementary grades,3 nationally,4 and in California.5

At the same time, this region produces inadequate achievement results among its students. Results of the 2005 National Assessment of Education Progress 4th grade science test indicate that California ranked 2nd lowest of all states on eighth grade science achievement, only above Mississippi. During spring 2007, results on the 5th grade California Standards Test (CST) in Science indicate that only 37% of California students and approximately 46% of Bay Area students scored proficient or above6. This means that even in the Bay Area, over half the 5th graders are failing to reach proficiency in science.
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Eighty percent (80%) of K–5th grade multiple-subject teachers who are responsible for teaching science in their classrooms reported spending 60 minutes or less per week on science, with 16% of teachers spending no time at all on science.