Category Archives: Education

Open Access Legislation

25 provosts from top universities jointly released a letter supporting current legislation to require open publication of scientific research. Good.

Open access can also match the missions of scholarly societies and publishers who review, edit, and distribute research to serve the advancement of knowledge. Sharing the fruits of research and scholarship inevitably leads to the creation of more research and scholarship, thus highlighting the need for publishing professionals to manage the selection and review of the highest quality research, both publicly and privately funded. Open access to publications in no way negates the need for well-managed and effective peer review or the need for formal publishing.

via: e3 Information Overload, Rallying Behind Open Access:

The Federal Public Research Access Act would require federal agencies to publish their findings, online and free, within six months of their publication elsewhere.

It seems to me most grants for scientific research should require open publication. I can imagine exceptions, but it seems to me that the expectation should be for open publication, in this day and age, and only allow non-open publication with a good reason.

For public funded research this open access expectation seems obvious. For private foundations in most cases I would think open access publication makes sense also. What business model is used to allow open access is not important, in my opinion. The important factor is open access, how that is accomplished is something that can be experimented with.
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If I were making the decision for a university I would have expectations that we publish openly.

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Cancer cell ‘executioner’ found

Cancer cell ‘executioner’ found:

Healthy cells have a built-in process which means they commit suicide if something is wrong, a process which fails in cancer cells.

The University of Illinois team created a synthetic molecule which caused cancer cells to self-destruct.
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They found the molecule PAC-1 did trigger the transformation, and cancer cells from mice and from human tumours could be prompted to self-destruct – a process called apoptosis.

Beneficial Bacteria

Sick of Getting Sick? Embrace Your Inner Bacteria!, NPR:

Over there, one type of bacteria has settled into a tidy corner of your intestine and is helping to synthesize vitamin K from last night’s dinner. That’s an important blood-clotting substance. And without the help of a neighboring microbe, the broccoli you downed would be no more digestible than a fallen log.

Right this minute, in the moist, warm grottos throughout your body, encounters with friendly bacteria are teaching your immune cells how to recognize dangerous invaders. The ability to distinguish friend from foe is crucial to keeping you healthy. And by acting as a thick ground cover, these benign bacteria crowd out truly noxious germs — salmonella, say, or dangerous versions of E. coli.

The title of NPR’s article is a bit misleading as the focus of the story is really on the potential harm from antibiotics. Bacterial Evolution in Yogurt provides some additional information on the benefits of bacteria. Here are more good bacteria articles:: Friendly bacteria ‘target ulcers’ – Over-sixties advised to boost daily diet with ‘good’ bacteria – USC researcher underscores the benefits bacteria can provide – Bacteria Added to Gum, Toothpaste and Deodorant – How ‘good’ bacteria could counter overuse of antibiotics

via: Take care of those microbes in your gut

Bell Labs Graduate Research Fellowship Program

The Bell Labs Graduate Research Fellowship Program (link broken by idiots) is designed to increase the number of minorities and women in the fields of science, math, engineering and technology. Fellowships are awarded to women and members of a underrepresented minority groups who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

The program is primarily directed to graduating college seniors, but applications from first-year graduate students will be considered in the following fields: Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Communications Science, Computer Science/Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Information Science, Materials Science, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Operations Research, Physics and Statistics.

Update: Why are huge companies not even able to follow the most basic web usability concepts. It is amazing to me how incompetent these people are. This link works (even just looking at the url you can tell this is likely to die soon – I have yet to see a well planned web site that uses such a completely lame url) – for who knows how long. Would someone please hurry up and replace idiots that can’t follow the simple web practices with someone who does and let those who don’t copy textbooks by hand or whatever they are able to do.

Research Career in Industry or Academia

In, Working in Industry vs Working in Academia, a computer scientist (software engineering) shares their experience and opinion on research career options. He discusses 4 areas: freedom (to pursue your research), funding, time and scale, products (papers, patents, products).

In academia, you’re under a huge amount of pressure to publish publish publish!
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In industry, the common saying is that research can produce three things: products, patents, and papers (in that order). To be successful you need to produce at least two of those three; and the first two are preferred to the last one. Publishing papers is nice, and you definitely get credit for it, but it just doesn’t compare to the value of products and patents.

Civil Engineers: USA Infrastructure Needs Improvement

Experts warn U.S. is coming apart at the seams by Chuck McCutcheon:

The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation “D” for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem.

“I thought [Hurricane] Katrina was a hell of a wake-up call, but people are missing the alarm,” said Casey Dinges, the society’s managing director of external affairs.

It will take much longer than 5 years: there is no way over $300 billion is available each year to catch up. Infrastructure is not an exciting area to invest in but just like skipping preventative maintenance on equipment will cost organizations more in the long run, failing to invest in maintaining the infrastructure will cost more.

“Infrastructure deficiencies will further erode our global competitiveness, but with the federal budget so committed to mandatory spending, it’s unclear how we are going to deal with this challenge as we fall further and further behind in addressing these problems,”

These “grade” evaluations are a bit flaky: what does a D mean for the USA (they define it as “poor” which still doesn’t mean much)? Still, it is clear the ASCE sees a need for improvement. Related: 2005 ASCE report – Concord Coalition

Open Access Education Materials

Watch a video of Richard Baraniuk (Rice University professor speaking at TED) discussing Connexions: an open-access education publishing system. The content available through Connexions includes short content modules such as:

What is Engineering??:

Engineering is the endeavor that creates, maintains, develops, and applies technology for societies’ needs and desires.
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One of the first distinctions that must be made is between science and engineering.
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Science is the study of what is and engineering is the creation of can be.

and: Protein Folding, as well as full courses, such as: Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering I and Physics for K-12.

Related: Google technical talk webcasts (including a presentation by Richard Baraniuk at Google) – podcasts of Technical Talks at Google – science podcast posts – Berkeley and MIT courses online

Scientific Innovation and Economic Growth

Reform, Innovation, and Economic Growth by President Levin, Yale University president, speaking at the University of Tokyo:

Performance scores in mathematics, problem solving, science, and reading for Japanese students are significantly ahead of their peers elsewhere; and the Japanese public and private financial commitment to education is also among the strongest. Taken together, the result has been that Japan has one of the best-educated workforces in the world, particularly in science and technology.

The superior education of the labor force and a large and well-trained pool of engineers contributed mightily to Japan’s rapid growth from 1945 to 1990.
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In fostering science-based innovation, the United States has drawn upon two national characteristics that have long been a source of advantage: the ready availability of capital and the relative absence of barriers to the formation of new firms. These institutional features help with the rapid translation of science into industrial practice. But the United States government also recognized, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, that public investment was essential to generate steady progress in basic science. Scientific discoveries are the foundation of industrial technology.
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A recent study prepared for the National Science Foundation found that 73% of the main science papers cited in industrial patents granted in the U.S. were based on research financed by government or nonprofit agencies and carried out in large part in university laboratories.

Extreme Engineering

Discovery Channels’ Extreme Engineering explores audacious engineering possibilities. The Extreme Engineering web site (broken by phb organization that can’t even keep a web page alive forget actually doing amazing stuff, so I removed it) provides a view of some of the exciting projects engineers have worked on like the new subways for New York City and Hong Kong’s airport. And it also shows some possible future projects like a transatlantic tunnel (image above) which would float in the ocean and carry trains, pipelines…. Trains could run in a vacuum and travel at 6-8,000 kph (taking under an hour to travel from New York City to London. Of course there are quite a few engineering and economic factors to deal with to make something like that a reality.

Wind Power

Wind Power graph

Graph of wind power capacity in the USA from 1981 – 2005 (from 10 Megawatts to 9,149 megawatts).

From the American Wind Energy Association:

The only other countries around the world that have more wind power installed are Germany (19,140 MW as of the end of June), and Spain (10,728 MW).

AWEA expects the U.S. to pass the 15,000 MW mark by the end of 2007 and can have 25,000 MW installed by the end of 2010, with the proper policies in place. At this growth rate, the U.S. could have 100,000 MW installed by 2020, which would provide the nation with approximately 6% of its future power needs, about as much as hydropower provides today.