Category Archives: Education

Two Screens Are Better Than One

3072x769 monitor

Microsoft researchers haven’t perfected the genie, but they’ve found a tool that can increase your productivity by 9 to 50 percent and make your work day easier. And you can begin using it right away. The researchers conducted user studies that proved the effectiveness of adding a second or even third monitor to your workstation, creating a wide-screen effect. In addition, they found out how the operating system needs to change to accommodate a larger screen area.

I must say when moving to two screens I was surprised how much of a difference it made. I look forward to my huge screen.

In the photo (from Photo from: Women Go With the (Optical) Flow – pdf) three projectors, show screens on a curved Plexiglas panel, resulting in a 3072 x768 resolution display. The display was curved to avoid distortion at the farthest fields of vision. Gary Starkweather, who also invented the laser printer, is the designer behind this effort.

What do Engineers Need To Know?

What do Engineers Need To Know? by Pradeep K. Khosla, dean of the College of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon:

In 1995, close to 40% of the world’s engineering work hours were based in the United States. By 2010, only 10% will be.
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The change has been accelerated by other nations’ massive investments in engineering and science education, first in Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, and now in India and China. They all understand what America already knows: Knowledge creation drives future economic growth, and an educated labor force is essential for participation in the global economy.

So true, the economic benefit of science investment is a big theme in our economic posts.

We also are revamping the engineering curriculum. We still will emphasize depth in engineering knowledge, of course, but our graduates also must understand innovation, entrepreneurship, product development, and systems integration. Those skills will enable our graduates to lead organizations and manage effective teams. Graduates also will require greater knowledge of the world outside the United States and have experiences in working effectively with individuals from other cultures.

A good plan and one repeating what has been discussed here before: Benefits of Engineering and Innovation Education – MIT Undergraduate Changes – Harvard Elevates Engineering Profile – Improving Engineering Education. Also remember more S&P 500 CEOs majored in Engineering than anything else. Tour the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab.

Eco-Vehicle Student Competition

photo of Los Altos High School's Academy of Engineering vehicle

Most miles, least fuel wins

Los Altos High School‘s Academy of Engineering was one of more than 20 high schools and colleges from across the U.S. and Canada whose engineering students came together Saturday to compete in the Shell Eco-Marathon Americas. The race is designed not to see which vehicle could go the fastest, but which one could travel the farthest on the least amount of fuel. The grand prize: $10,000 to the winning school.

Participating schools included Purdue University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Grand Rapids Technical School, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Rose- Hulman Institute of Technology and Mater Dei High School.
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By the end of the day, it was Cal Poly San Luis Obispo that took the grand prize for combustion-engine vehicles. The team’s vehicle traveled 1,902.2 miles to the gallon. Rose-Hulman took second place with 1,637.2 miles to the gallon, and Mater Dei High School in Evansville, Ind., came in third at 1,596 miles per gallon. Los Altos High School took first place for the hydrogen-engine group. The group’s vehicle traveled 1,038 miles to the gallon.

Photo from Shell Eco-Marathon Americas site (see more photos, results, webcasts…).

Dark Cosmos

I just finished reading Dark Cosmos: In Search of Our Universe’s Missing Mass and Energy by Dan Hooper. I found it an enjoyable read. The author writes well for a general audience, that like me, doesn’t have much of an knowledge of the topic. I think he did a good job of providing enough connection to the science but at a level that most interested in science could understand.

Some people think it is a bit too folksy, without enough science. I can see how some might feel this way, I think the balance is good but for those that want to dig into the details around dark matter and dark energy this is probably not the right book. For those that want to get a good idea of the basic concepts though I think this is a good choice. I like discussion of the process of scientific discovery – the uncertainly the adaption of ideas to new experimental results etc.. The tone is similar to Chaos and The Elegant Universe.

Related: science books – Dan Hooper

T-rex Treasure

T. rex remains yield new treasure

Already, the breakthrough has yielded a payoff. Schweitzer and the Harvard scientists found molecular similarities between the Tyrannosaurus rex and modern chickens. They say the finding strengthens a growing case that birds are living relatives of dinosaurs. More tests are needed to see whether the bits of dinosaur proteins match those in other living creatures — including alligators and crocodiles, which, by outward appearances, seem closely related to the ancient species. Molecular maps of proteins in those reptiles are not yet available.
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The very existence of the molecular relics had been unimaginable. Until now, scientists thought such soft stuff survived no more than a million years in animal remains. Usually, tissue degrades and bone gets replaced by mineral, yielding fossils molded precisely like the originals. Although the fossils enable scientists to piece together a skeletal sketch of ancient life forms, they tell only so much.

The discovery of the protein fragments, detailed in the journal Science today, suggests that new molecular clues may be buried in other well-preserved fossils around the world. And those clues could help explain the biology of dinosaurs and other extinct animals. The newly discovered microscopic fragments are not DNA — the inherited code stored in billions of cells that defines every living creature. As a result, no one should expect any Jurassic Park-like replicas of dinosaurs to result from Schweitzer’s finding.

Report on Faculty Salaries

Report on Faculty Salaries:

Law professor’s top the pay charts, full professors averaging $121,301. Engineering full professors come in second averaging $102,954 (Business, management… was third at $98,384). More full professor averages: Computer Science $91,181; Math and Statistics $77,963. See report for more details. If I read the report right Engineering has the 3rd highest rate of full professors (full professors/all professors) at 45% – I find that surprising.

The figures are shown for what the report calls “un-weighted” average. Essentially this is an average by institution. Which are lower than the average for professors (as the big institution who have more professors also pay more on average). For Engineering he “weighted” average is $112,530. Others: Computer Science $102,427; Math and Statistics $87,281; Business $106,828.

Quake Lifts Island Ten Feet Out of Ocean

Quake Lifts Island Ten Feet Out of Ocean:

Residents of Ranongga island in the South Pacific Ocean sit on a massive coral reef that was exposed by the magnitude 8.1 earthquake that struck in the Solomon Islands last week, sparking a deadly tsunami. The quake lifted Ranongga ten feet (three meters) out of the sea, widening beaches by up to 230 feet (70 meters), according to news reports. The uplift has left some of the island’s pristine coral reefs fatally exposed.

“These are not unusual occurrences for an earthquake of this magnitude,” said Rick MacPherson of the Coral Reef Alliance in San Francisco, California. “During the Asian tsunami two years ago, Banda Aceh [in Indonesia], stretching down almost the extent of the peninsula, experienced similar uplift.”

Universal Blood

Universal Blood by Katherine Bourzac:

Red blood cells have complex sugars on their surfaces; it is these sugars that determine whether the blood is type A, B, O, or both A and B. People with type A red blood cells carry antibodies against type B blood cells. If they are given a transfusion of type B red blood cells, their body will attack and kill the cells. Similarly, people with type B blood will mount an immune attack against a transfusion of type A blood.

Researchers led by Henrik Clausen of the University of Copenhagen have discovered two enzymes that efficiently chop the A and B sugars off of red blood cells, making them universal. The company ZymeQuest, based in Beverly, MA, has licensed the enzymes and developed a machine that can simultaneously treat eight units of blood with the enzymes in 90 minutes.

ScienceMatters@Berkeley April 2007

As usually the latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley includes several intersting articles including, The Protein Machine by Kathleen M. Wong

A large percentage of known antibiotics target bacterial ribosomes, including tetracycline, erythromycin, and streptomycin. Many of these antibiotics have been isolated from microbes themselves. “It’s a byproduct of the chemical warfare that’s been going on among bacteria for hundreds of millions of years,” Cate says. “We want to understand how these natural products inhibit translation. Then, based on what we understand about the ribosome mechanism, we should be able to come up with new ways to stop bacterial translation based on the old compounds.”

Self-Tuning Genes:

Researchers such as UC Berkeley’s Adam Arkin have found that regulatory feedback is associated with chance fluctuations in mRNA or protein levels—a phenomenon called expression noise. “Even though they’re all genetically identical, and grown under the same conditions, yeast clones don’t express certain proteins at exactly the same level,” Brem says. “Some genes are noisier than others. That makes people think the cell is actively tuning the distribution around an expression level set by the regulatory network.” Noise may ensure that a few individuals can handle abrupt changes in their environment. In other words, if a colony is suddenly assaulted by toxic chemicals or high heat, a few individuals will already have expression levels suited to those conditions.

Software Patents – Bad Idea

MIT League for Programming Freedom on Software Patents, including: Why Patents Are Bad for Software, No Patents on Ideas by Thomas Jefferson and letter from Donald E. Knuth to the U.S. Patent Office

In the period 1945-1980, it was generally believed that patent law did not pertain to software. However, it now appears that some people have received patents for algorithms of practical importance–e.g., Lempel-Ziv compression and RSA public key encryption–and are now legally preventing other programmers from using these algorithms.

This is a serious change from the previous policy under which the computer revolution became possible, and I fear this change will be harmful for society. It certainly would have had a profoundly negative effect on my own work: For example, I developed software called TeX that is now used to produce more than 90% of all books and journals in mathematics and physics and to produce hundreds of thousands of technical reports in all scientific disciplines. If software patents had been commonplace in 1980, I would not have been able to create such a system, nor would I probably have ever thought of doing it, nor can I imagine anyone else doing so.