Category Archives: Students

Items for students and others, interested in learning about science and engineering and the application of science in our lives. We post many of the general interest items here.

Engineering Graduate Job Market

Employers find there are few graduating engineers left to hire as dot-com debacle of five years ago fades into history by Mark Savage, Cornell University:

Average B.S.-level salaries for engineering graduates, which had dropped by 10 percent to $52,503 in 2002 from $56,072 in 2001, grew slowly. By 2006 (the most recent year for which validated data is available), salaries had finally surpassed 2001 levels with starting salaries averaging about $57,000 and $66,000, respectively, for engineering undergraduate and master’s degree graduates.
…
the marketable skills that engineering graduates bring to the workplace are also of strong interest to a broad range of industries and functions not typically associated with engineering, from consulting and financial services to sales and marketing. Nearly 50 percent of Cornell’s engineering students embrace these nontraditional career paths.

To be sure, these students are eager to use their technical skills, but they want to practice them in a business applications environment, often found in the financial services or consulting sectors. They are less attracted to the traditional “hard core” engineering roles that defined engineering graduates a generation ago. Thus, it is not surprising to find IBM Business Consulting Services, Goldman-Sachs and Capital One standing alongside Microsoft, Lockheed Martin and General Electric among the top 10 employers of Cornell engineering graduates.

Engineering graduates continue to receive excellent salary offers, as I have mentioned previously: Highest paying college degrees. And don’t forget more S&P 500 CEOs are Engineering graduates than are graduates of any other discipline.

Reducing the Impact of a Flu Pandemic

Model for tracking flu progression could reduce flu pandemic’s peril – Engineer who survived pandemic of 1968 focuses on reducing influenza’s death toll:

Nearly 40 years ago, MIT Professor Richard Larson spent a week sick in bed with the worst illness he’d ever had–the particularly virulent strain of flu that swept the globe in 1968. “That was the sickest I’d ever been,” Larson recalled. “I really thought that was the end.” It took him two or three months to recover fully from the illness.

Known as the Hong Kong flu, the virus killed 750,000 people worldwide, the second worst influenza pandemic the world has seen since the infamous 1918-1919 epidemic of so-called Spanish flu.
…
The findings strongly suggest that influenza emergency plans should include measures to reduce social contact, such as encouraging people to work from home and avoid large gatherings, Larson said. This is especially important because it generally takes at least six months from the time of an outbreak to develop an effective vaccine.

Making Robots from Trash

Mr. Woo creates robots (in China) using trash – without any formal education. Cool engineering – who needs Lego Mindstorms? Not Woo.

Awesome Cat Cam

CatCam - photo of the famous cat photographer CatCam - cat photographer on the run CatCam - cat photographer get picture of another cat

CatCam by Juergen Perthold – this great project involved taking a digital camera and some additional equipment to create a camera that his cat wore around his neck which took pictures every 3 minutes. The pictures are great. The cat got photos of several other cats and seemed to like cars.

See more cool gadgets, See our other popular posts and our cat related posts.

Sometimes I have some challenging ideas, or crazy like some other people would say. This time I thought about our cat who is the whole day out, returning sometimes hungry sometimes not, sometimes with traces of fights, sometimes he stay also the night out. When he finally returns, I wonder where he was and what he did during his day. This brought me to the idea to equip the cat with a camera. The plan was to put a little camera around his neck which takes every few minutes a picture. After he is returning, the camera would show his day.
…
The VistaQuest made it very easy for me, because it is able to supply my circuit also if switched off. This is because of an internal DC/DC converter which boosts the voltage from the 1.5V battery to 3.3V. The DC/DC converter is always working because of the internal SRAM which holds the pictures. I just had to hook the microcontroller to the internal camera supply.
…
Well, I thought the hardest part is done by developing the software and soldering the controller board. But it is more the housing to protect the camera. You can not imagine what kind of requirements have to be fulfilled if you want to equip your cat with a camera. I built a small housing out of plastic plates and put it on the collar of the cat for evaluation purpose. This housing was last seen as the cat walked out of the door… Probably the wires I used for attaching were not strong enough. Or someone released the cat from the interesting looking piece.

For the second try I used the plastic package of a child toy (Kinderueberraschung), put a stone in it for loading it with some weight and attached it again to the cat collar. This time the part returned – dirty and scratched outside, water inside. What the hell is the cat doing !? This raised the requirements for the camera protective housing a lot
…
Big moment no. 1: attach the collar with the camera to the cat. The reaction was not very happy but finally accepted. Reality check passed 🙂

This is my favorite home engineering project. The concept is great. The explanation of the technology is great. The adjustment to real life situations is great. The end result (the photos) is great. This wins the non-existent Curious Cat Cool Contraption award. If someone doesn’t start selling prefabricated cat cameras I will be very surprised (if I was more enterprising I would do it myself). Maybe J. Perthold will, in any event he should inspire many to try making their own.

Tuberculosis Risk

We have posted about the Tuberculosis risks previously: Extensively Drug-resistant Tuberculosis (XDR TB), May 2007 – Deadly TB Strain is Spreading, WHO Warns, Mar 2007 – Tuberculosis Pandemic Threat, Jan 2007 – ‘Virtually untreatable’ TB found, Sep 2006. One USA citizen, while infected with XDR TB, flying to Europe and then to Canada and driving back into the USA has created a huge amount of publicity on this topic in the last week.

The risks are well known, given the extreme mobility in the world today, for TB, and other communicable diseases, becoming more troublesome, costly and deadly – often due to improper antibiotic use. But we continue to avoid giving this risk near the level of attention it seems to deserve. Deaths due to these diseases is likely to be very high in the next 20 years.

In fact there were 1.6 million TB deaths in 2005 (see WHO fact sheet below). Even if you only care about deaths in the USA (I am not advocating such a position, but even for those that hold such a position…) failing to address these issues will greatly increase the odds of large numbers of deaths in the USA (for TB and other diseases that become difficult or impossible to treat with antibiotics).

The current news will do little in my opinion (though it will help raise awareness). It will take a significant number of deaths in the USA, for significant policy changes to be implemented. Luckily scientists and policy makers have been giving these risks thought and so possible actions are already fairly well know. Unfortunately we seem very inclined to ignore problems for those out of sight (either continents away, or in the future) so until the consequences of the current action forces people to confront this issue little has been done (well actually good action is being taken, but much more is left to do).

One huge issue is quarantine. Personally, I try to use as a guide that people have the right to do what doesn’t infringe upon others rights. This allows plenty of room for debate about what level of trade-off is acceptable but I find it a useful guide to shape my thoughts. People don’t have the right to drive drunk and endanger others. People don’t have the right to pollute the air of others by smoking (or polluting the air with dangerous chemicals, CO2…). People don’t have the right to expose others to dangerous communicable diseases. Doctor’s don’t have the right to proscribe antibiotics when not medically justified (creating risks to those in the future)… But how society decides to define the social contract that everyone must agree to (rather that a way I find useful to help me analyze what is reasonable) is in need of some increased clarity in the light of health care issues today.

World Health Organization fact sheet on Tuberculosis:
Continue reading →

Freeware Math Programs

3 awesome free Math programs

Maxima – A general purpose CAS (Computer Algebra System) is a program that’s able to perform symbolic manipulation for the resolution of common problems. As a matter of fact, modern CAS covers an extremely wide range of functionalities
…
Scilab – Matlab is the standard for numerical computing, but there are a few clones and valid alternatives that are entirely free. Scilab is the closest that you can get to Matlab without spending a penny. It’s very compatible with Matlab (albeit not 100%) but it’s really flexible, powerful and comes with a Matlab converter and Scicos which is a block diagram modeler and simulator.

R – For statistical computing and analysis in the Open Source world, it doesn’t get any better than R. It is a programming language and environment that enables you to do pretty much anything that the commercial software (S-Plus) does. It is so widely adopted that it can be considered a standard in the field.

lpsolve is another one that I like for linear (integer) programming. LaTeX is also a great tool – a typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation (many will already be familiar with it but if you are not, check it out).

Radical Life Extension

The near-term inevitability of radical life extension and expansion by Ray Kurzweil:

It took 15 years to sequence HIV and from that perspective the genome project seemed impossible in 1990. But the amount of genetic data we were able to sequence doubled every year while the cost came down by half each year.
…
If we think linearly, then the idea of turning off all disease and aging processes appears far off into the future just as the genome project did in 1990. On the other hand, if we factor in the doubling of the power of these technologies each year, the prospect of radical life extension is only a couple of decades away.

KurzweilAI.net includes many articles on Kurzweil’s ideas, by him, and others. Major topic areas include: Nanotechnology, Will Machines Become Conscious? and Singularity. The ideas can seem crazy but as Kurzweil discusses the ability to predict with the tremendous increase in the power of technology. I still think many things like radical life extension is unlikely so soon but the ideas presented are interesting and worth thinking about.

Inner Life of a Cell: Full Version

This is an extremely cool 8 minute movie on the inner workings of a Cell. The earlier version we posted about back in September of last year has been one of our most popular posts – see our most popular posts. They have added the scientific explanation that I mentioned I would love to see in the last post.

update: Unfortunately Harvard seems to want to prevent people from seeing this educational webcast. Why they don’t want to promote science education is beyond me. I guess they have better uses for their $35 billion endowment than promoting science. I sure wish they would hurry up and realize this isn’t the 18th century. They say their mission is “The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the … youth of this country…” (Jun 2008). You don’t have to just educate a few privileged soles in ivy covered buildings. You can do that any provide great education material for others around the globe.

Animation created for Harvard’s Molecular and Cellular Biology program:

Harvard University selected XVIVO, LLC, a Connecticut based scientific animation company, to customize and develop an animation that would propel Harvard’s Molecular and Cellular Biology program to the next level of undergraduate education. XVIVO’s recently completed animation, titled “The Inner Life of the Cell”, has already won awards. The eight minute animation transports Harvard Biology students into a three-dimensional journey through the microscopic world of a cell.

Winter Air Refrigeration

From Freeaire:

“Free Cooling” In colder climates, the Freeaire taps into the greatest source of refrigeration ever created: winter. The Freeaire can use cold outside air to cool the space, simply using what Nature has so kindly made available, to give the entire compressor system a winter vacation.
…
In cold climates, this innovative option allows you to utilize a natural resource we have in abundance up here in the North: outside winter air. Rather than relying on the compressor system to produce cold air it simply moves the cold from outside to inside, using just a fraction of the energy.

Seems like a smart idea to me. Their systems are for large walk in freezers.

DNA Repair Army

Analysis Reveals Extent of DNA Repair Army

Elledge’s group studied human cells in culture and mapped their response to ionizing radiation and ultraviolet light. Specifically, the group looked to see which proteins in the cell were chemically altered by the enzymes ATM and ATR, finding 900 sites on 700 proteins that changed in response to DNA damage. The discovery that so many proteins are involved in the process, Elledge said, was a big surprise.

Also see: Cell Cycle Regulation and Mechanisms of DNA Repair:

Despite the abuse our DNA endures, our individual genomes usually stay basically intact because DNA has a remarkable capacity for repair. Our cells have built-in, highly efficient machinery that finds and fixes “genetic typos.”
…
Researchers have learned much about the complex genetic machinery that cells deploy to fix broken, cut, mutated, and misplaced genetic materials. Out of that evolving understanding has emerged a deeper awareness that DNA is truly dynamic and that responses to genetic damage are nearly as fundamental to life—and health—as is the genetic code itself.