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.

Art of Science at Princeton

spreading of a surfactant over a thin liquid film on a silicon wafer Image: illustrates evolving dynamical patterns formed during the spreading of a surface-active substance (surfactant) over a thin liquid film on a silicon wafer. Larger photo and more information.

Princeton University: Art of Science Exhibition (the web site doesn’t seem to work in Internet Explorer but does in Firefox) includes images from the 2005 exhibition.

‘Art of Science’ exhibition bridges disciplines by Teresa Riordan on 2006 competition selections announced today:

  • Jennifer Rea, a senior in the history of science, who took first place for her painting titled “Mitosis,” which depicts cell division superimposed on a floral fabric
  • Melissa Green, a graduate student in mechanical and aerospace engineering, who was awarded second place for “Isolated Hairpin,” a computer simulation of turbulent air flow
  • Qiangfei Xia, a graduate student in electrical engineering, who won third place for “Easter Bonnet,” a photograph taken with an electron scanning microscope of a tiny piece of metal melted by a laser onto a silicon chip.

Demystifying Technology for High School Students

Demystifying technology for high-schoolers by Greg Rienzi, Johns Hopkins University News:

The Engineering Innovation program, which Hopkins will initially offer at three JHU campuses and five California universities, will allow high school sophomores, juniors and seniors to enroll in the college-level course What is Engineering? taught by Johns Hopkins or other university-accredited faculty.

The initiative is based upon a successful program the Whiting School developed five years ago for students in Montgomery County. The program was expanded last year to include students in Baltimore City and Baltimore County.
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The participants in the program will spend four weeks learning the basics of engineering as they conduct hands-on laboratory experiments and complete assignments that range from building a better mousetrap to assembling a digital circuit that operates a robot.

Johns Hopkins will continue to accept applications until June 1st, or until classes are full.

For more information see: Engineering Innovation from The Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Top degree for S&P 500 CEOs? Engineering

See more recent post with data from 2005-2009: S&P 500 CEO’s: Engineers Stay at the Top

The most common undergraduate degree for CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies is Engineering: with 20% of all CEOs (from 2005 CEO Study: A Statistical Snapshot of Leading CEOs

Another interesting point from the report (at least to those of us who grew up in Madison with a father who taught at the University of Wisconsin (teaching Chemical Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Statistics, in my father’s case, by the way):

For the second year in a row, the University of Wisconsin joins Harvard as the most common undergraduate university attended by S&P 500 CEOs. Prior to 2004, Harvard alone was the most common school attended.

Engineering the Boarding of Airplanes

Airlines Try Smarter Boarding

“An airplane that spends an hour on the ground between flights might fly five trips a day,” he explains. “Cut the turnaround time to 40 minutes, and maybe that same plane can complete six or seven flights a day.” More flights mean more paying passengers, and ultimately, more revenue.
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Convinced that there was a statistical solution to the problem, Lindemann approached Arizona State University’s industrial engineering department. “We have a great university in our backyard, and hoped they could help,”
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Professor René Villalobos and graduate student Menkes van den Briel began reviewing boarding systems used by other airlines. “The conventional wisdom was that boarding from back to front was most effective,” says van den Briel. The engineers looked at an inside-out strategy that boards planes from window to aisle, and also examined a 2002 simulation study that claimed calling passengers individually by seat number was the fastest way to load an aircraft.

The two then developed a mathematical formula that measured the number of times passengers were likely to get in each other’s way during boarding. “We knew that boarding time was negatively impacted by passengers interfering with one another,” explains van den Briel. “So we built a model to calculate these incidents.”

Villalobos and van den Briel looked at interference resulting from passengers obstructing the aisle, as well as that caused by seated passengers blocking a window or middle seat. They applied the equation to eight different boarding scenarios, looking at both front-to-back and outside-in systems.
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Villalobos and van den Briel presented America West with a boarding approach called the reverse pyramid that calls for simultaneously loading an aircraft from back to front and outside in. Window and middle passengers near the back of the plane board first; those with aisle seats near the front are called last. “Our research showed that this method created the fewest incidents of interference between passengers,” Villalobos explains, “and was therefore the fastest.”

A nice example of industrial engineering. And a clear example of the benefit of industry higher education cooperation.

Nanowired at Berkeley

Nanowires

Photo: Cross-sectional scanning electron micrograph image of vertically-grown silicon nanowires off of a silicon substrate. (courtesy the researchers)

Nanowired by David Pescovitz:

“We’re attacking three fundamental issues,” Yang says. “Can we make these building blocks of nanodevices? Can we identify and harness useful physical properties in them? And can we integrate them in parallel? Individual devices are fundamentally interesting. But more importantly, we need massive numbers of them to work together as one system.”
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The researchers demonstrated that minute voltages could control the flow of ions through the nanoscale plumbing system. In the future, the same technique might be used to shuttle proteins or pieces of DNA from a biological sample through the tubes in a lab-on-a-chip. Yang is currently developing a technique to conduct optical sensing within the nanofluidic channels so that the whole lab is self-contained in one device.

What Makes People Successful?

A Star Is Made – The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt (authors of Freakonomics (an interesting book):

If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this quirk to be even more pronounced. On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months. In Germany, 52 elite youth players were born in the first three months of the year, with just 4 players born in the last three.

Why? Read the article by the Freakonomics authors for an explanation. In reading the article you get an example of why scientific thought is so important. The data can lead to all sort of conclusions, the article offers several:

a) certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; b) winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania

The ability to examine such questions effectively is one of the benefits of learning to think scientifically. Then we can find sensible explanations instead of accepting crazy explanations. In this case the scientist, Anders Ericsson, is looking to learn how people become successful in a field. He concludes we far overestimate talent and far underestimate training and desire.

More information on the topic of the article from the Freakonomics web site.

Electron Clouds

From my favorite science teacher blog, Ms. Frizzle, the Electron Cloud Analogy:

Okay, so suppose we wanted to draw a map of where Tiana is at 10 am on a Wednesday. We could draw the school, because we know exactly where that is, and we could draw this classroom inside the school. But how do we show where Tiana is? Is she always in exactly the same place at that time? No…. but we know where she is most likely to be: in this classroom, in science class, in her seat. But she sometimes changes seats, or gets up and moves to a different part of the classroom. And once in a while, she leaves the room
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This is kind of like the electron cloud diagram – the darker areas tell you that the electrons are more likely to be there, although we don’t know that for absolutely certain, and the lighter areas are places where electrons could be, but more rarely.

Learning science from Ms. Frizzle sure seems like it would be fun.

Score One for Sports Science

Score one for science (link broken so removed)

Bray has analyzed memorable games over the past 50 years and applied research in physics, biology, computing and psychology to the beautiful game.

Using biomechanics to calculate the absolute reach of a goalkeeper diving to try to save a penalty, Bray has identified an area near the posts and in the top corners where the goalkeeper cannot reach as the “unsaveable zone.”

“If a player were to place the ball in those regions, which are 28-30 percent of the goal area, there is not a sniff that the goalkeeper can do to get across to them,” explained Bray, from the University of Bath in England.

Related posts:

Invention Machine

John Koza Has Built an Invention Machine by Jonathon Keats:

Now 62 and an adjunct professor at Stanford University, Koza is the inventor of genetic programming, a revolutionary approach to artificial intelligence (AI) capable of solving complex engineering problems with virtually no human guidance. Koza’s 1,000 networked computers don’t just follow a preordained routine. They create, growing new and unexpected designs out of the most basic code. They are computers that innovate, that find solutions not only equal to but better than the best work of expert humans. His “invention machine,” as he likes to call it, has even earned a U.S. patent for developing a system to make factories more efficient, one of the first intellectual-property protections ever granted to a nonhuman designer.

Yet as impressive as these creations may be, none are half as significant as the machine’s method: Darwinian evolution, the process of natural selection. Over and over, bits of computer code are, essentially, procreating. And over the course of hundreds or thousands of generations, that code evolves into offspring so well-adapted for its designated job that it is demonstrably superior to anything we can imagine.

Great article from Popular Science magazine.

Home Page of John R. Koza. His latest book: Genetic Programming IV: Routine Human-Competitive Machine Intelligence by John R. Koza, Martin A. Keane, Matthew J. Streeter, William Mydlowec, Jessen Yu and Guido Lanza.

Previous posts on popular science articles: Bannanas Going Going Gone and Colored Bubbles.