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.

Country H-index Rank for Science Publications

The SCImago Journal and Country Rank provides journal and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database. As stated in previous posts these types of rankings have limitations but they are also interesting (such as the best research universities 2007). The table shows the top 6 countries by h-index and then some others I chose to list.

Country	h-index	% of World Population	% of World GDP	total Cites	% Top 500 Schools
USA	793	4.6%	27.4%	43,436,526	33%
United Kingdom	465	0.9	4.9	9,895,817	8
Germany	408	1.3	6.0	8,377,298	8
France	376	0.9	4.6	5,795,531	4
Japan	372	2.0	9.0	7,167,200	6
Canada	370	0.5	2.6	4,728,874	4
Additional countries of interest
20) China	161	20.1	5.5	1,629,993	3
20) South Korea	161	.7	1.8	1,018,532	2
24) Brazil	148	2.9	2.2	752,658	1
25) India	146	17.0	1.9	994.561	.4

Read more about the h-index (Hirsh index). Country population and GDP data taken World Development Indicators 2007, by the World Bank.

via: Stat freaks, are you ready to play with the SCImago Journal & Country Rank?

Who Killed the Software Engineer?

Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? by Dr. Robert B.K. Dewar and Dr. Edmond Schonberg

Over the last few years we have noticed worrisome trends in CS education. The following represents a summary of those trends:
1. Mathematics requirements in CS programs are shrinking.
2. The development of programming skills in several languages is giving way to cookbook approaches using large libraries and special-purpose packages.
3. The resulting set of skills is insufficient for today’s software industry (in particular for safety and security purposes) and, unfortunately, matches well what the outsourcing industry can offer. We are training easily replaceable professionals.
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As faculty members at New York University for decades, we have regretted the introduction of Java as a first language of instruction for most computer science majors. We have seen how this choice has weakened the formation of our students, as reflected in their performance in systems and architecture courses.
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Every programmer must be comfortable with functional programming and with the important notion of referential transparency. Even though most programmers find imperative programming more intuitive, they must recognize that in many contexts that a functional, stateless style is clear, natural, easy to understand, and efficient to boot.

An additional benefit of the practice of Lisp is that the program is written in what amounts to abstract syntax, namely the internal representation that most compilers use between parsing and code generation. Knowing Lisp is thus an excellent preparation for any software work that involves language processing.

This is an excellent article: any CS students or those considering careers as programmers definitely should read this. Also read: Computer Science Education.

via: Who Killed the Software Engineer?

Dewar, a professor emeritus of computer science at New York University, believes that U.S. colleges are turning out programmers who are – there’s no nice way to say this – essentially incompetent.

Bacteria Race Ahead of Drugs

Bacteria race ahead of drugs

Dr. Jeff Brooks has been director of the UCSF lab for 29 years, and has watched with a mixture of fascination and dread how bacteria once tamed by antibiotics evolve rapidly into forms that practically no drug can treat.
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“We are on the verge of losing control of the situation, particularly in the hospitals,” said Dr. Chip Chambers, chief of infectious disease at San Francisco General Hospital. The reasons for increasing drug resistance are well known:
– Overuse of antibiotics, which speeds the natural evolution of bacteria, promoting new mutant strains resistant to those drugs.
– Careless prescribing of antibiotics that aren’t effective for the malady in question, such as a viral infection.
– Patient demand for antibiotics when they aren’t needed.
– Heavy use of antibiotics in poultry and livestock feed, which can breed resistance to similar drugs for people.
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Terry Hazen, senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and director of its ecology program, is not at all surprised by the tenacity of our bacterial foes. “We are talking about 3.5 billion years of evolution,” he said. “They are the dominant life on Earth.”

Bacteria have invaded virtually every ecological niche on the planet. Human explorers of extreme environments such as deep wells and mines are still finding new bacterial species. “As you go deeper into the subsurface, thousands and thousands of feet, you find bacteria that have been isolated for millions of years – and you find multiple antibiotic resistance,” Hazen said.

In his view, when bacteria develop resistance to modern antibiotics, they are merely rolling out old tricks they mastered eons ago in their struggle to live in harsh environments in competition with similarly resilient species.

We have written often about the misuse of anti-biotics. This is a serious problem. And it is sad to see yet another example of well know scientific facts being ignored and by so doing threatening the healthy lives of others. i just finished a great book on bacteria and human health – Good Germs, Bad Germs.

Sails for Modern Cargo Ships

photo of Sky Sail in action

Kite-powered ship sets sail for greener future

A cargo ship pulled by a giant, parachute-shaped kite will leave Germany on Tuesday on a voyage that could herald a new “green” age of commercial sailing on the high seas.
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During the journey from Bremen to Venezuela, the crew will deploy a SkySail, a 160 square metre kite which will fly more than 600ft above the vessel, where winds are stronger and more consistent than at sea level. Its inventor, Stephan Wrage, a 34-year-old German engineer, claims the kite will significantly reduce carbon emissions, cutting diesel consumption by up to 20 per cent and saving Â£800 a day in fuel costs. He believes an even bigger kite, up to 5,000 square metres, could result in fuel savings of up to 35 per cent.

From the Sky Sails site:

The planned product range contains towing kite propulsion systems with a nominal propulsion power of up to 5,000 kW (about 6,800 HP). On annual average fuel costs can be lowered between 10-35% depending on actual wind conditions and actual time deployed. Under optimal wind conditions, fuel consumptions can temporarily be reduced up to 50%.

Go Engineering!

20 Things You Didn’t Know About Snow

20 Things You Didn’t Know About Snow by Susan Kruglinski

1 Snow is a mineral, just like diamonds and salt
5 At the center of almost every snow crystal is a tiny mote of dust, which can be anything from volcanic ash to a particle from outer space.
7 Freshly fallen snow is typically 90 to 95 percent air, which is what makes it such a good thermal insulator.

Google India Women in Engineering Award 2008

The award is open to full time woman students at recognized institutions majoring computer engineering or related fields in their 2nd to final years of a bachelor’s program and all students from a master’s or PhD program. Student must have a cumulative of at least 4.0 on a 5.0 scale, 8.0 on a 10.0 scale, or equivalent. The application deadline is January 31st. Apply online for this new award.

Palm Tree Flowers After 100 Years and Self-destructs

New Genus of Self-destructive Palm found in Madagascar

It has an unusual and spectacular lifecycle; growing to dizzying heights before the stem tip converts into a giant terminal inflorescence and bursts into branches of hundreds of tiny flowers. Each flower is capable of being pollinated and developing into fruit and soon drips with nectar and is surrounded by swarming insects and birds. The nutrient reserves of the palm become completely depleted as soon as it fruits and the entire tree collapses and dies a macabre death.
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Madagascar is home to more than 10,000 plant species and 90% of Madagascar’s plants occur nowhere else in the world. The country has a highly diverse palm flora with over 170 known species, all but six of which are endemic. Scientists predict that there are less than 100 individuals of this palm in Madagascar. Only 18 percent of Madagascar’s native vegetation remains intact and a third of Madagascar’s primary vegetation has disappeared since the 1970s.

The self-destructing palm tree that flowers once every 100 years

Kew botanist Mijoro Rakotoarinivo: “It’s spectacular. It does not flower for maybe 100 years and when it’s like this it can be mistaken for other types of palm. “But then a large shoot, a bit like an asparagus, grows out of the top of the tree and starts to spread. “You get something that looks a bit like a Christmas tree growing out of the top of the palm.” There are thought to be only be 100 of the trees that are believed to be about 80 million years old.

Chess Match of the 20th Century

Bobby Fischer made chess popular in the USA when he burst upon the chess scene and gave the USA a world champion. He become a grand master by 15, the youngest ever to do so. He died today in Iceland the site of “match of the century.” View the Fischer v. Spassky games, including the match of the century, which was played in 1972.

The genius who re-invented chess

After he beat Boris Spassky in Iceland in 1972 to become world chess champion, the game would never quite be the same again. A lone American had defeated the might of the Soviet chess machine.

Chess was suddenly on newspaper front pages across the world. In New York a reporter went from bar to bar and discovered that of the 21 he visited, 18 had their televisions tuned to the chess – and only three to the Mets baseball game.

Here is a game of Donald Byrne vs Robert James Fischer when Bobby Fischer was 13 years old when he played this game.

Parasite Rex

Parasite Rex is a great book by Carl Zimmer (one of the bloggers listed in the Curious Cat directory of science blogs). This is the first book read as part of my specific plan to read more about bacteria, cells, virus, genes and the like.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of writing this blog is that I have focused much more on cool things I read. And over time the amazing things I posted about related to these topics made me realize I should put some focused effort to reading more on these topics. Some of the posts that sparked that idea: Tracking the Ecosystem Within Us – Inner Life of a Cell: Full Version – Where Bacteria Get Their Genes, People Have More Bacterial Cells than Human Cells, Biological Molecular Motors – Energy Efficiency of Digestion – Old Viruses Resurrected Through DNA – Midichloria mitochondrii – Microbes – Using Bacteria to Carry Nanoparticles Into Cells – How Bacteria Nearly Destroyed All Life – New Understanding of Human DNA – Soil Could Shed Light on Antibiotic Resistance – Symbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria

Parasite Rex was a great place to start. Carl Zimmer is a great writer, and the details on how many parasites there are and how interconnected those parasites are to living systems and how that has affected, and is affecting, us is amazing. And the next book I am reading is also fantastic: Good Germs, Bad Germs. Here is one small example from Parasite Rex, page 196-7:

A person who dies of sickle cell anemia is less likely to pass on the defective gene, and that means the disease should be exceedingly rare. But it’s not – one in four hundred American blacks has sickle sell anemia, and one in ten carries a single copy of the defective gene. The only reason the gene stays in such high circulation is that is also happens to be a defense against malaria.

Malaria is a parasite. One of the amazing things with repeated examples in the book were parasites that seemed to have extremely complicated life cycles (that don’t seem like a great strategy to prosper but obviously work). Where they grow in one life form (an insect or mammal or whatever) but must leave that life form for some other specific life form for the next stage in life (they cannot have descendants without doing so…). Seems like a crazy way to evolve but it happens over and over again.
Continue reading →

In Tunguska, Siberia 99 Years Ago

Just What Happened 99 Years Ago in Tunguska, Siberia?

in the morning of 30 June 1908, a few native peoples in Siberia reported seeing a blue light in the sky that was as bright as the sun and hearing a series of loud explosions, accompanied by fierce winds and fire. These explosions, which flattened the pristine Siberian Taiga for 770 miles (2,000 kilometers) around, are estimated to have had the power of 2000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. However, this area is so remote and Russia was experiencing so much political turmoil that no one was able to investigate the scene until 1927
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Gasperini’s team says their data suggest that a 10 meter (33 foot) wide fragment of the celestial object was blasted free by the explosion and continued traveling in the same direction that the original object was moving in. This fragment traveled slowly, about 1 kilometer a second (0.6 mile) per second. When the fragment plowed into the marshy terrain five miles north of the explosion epicenter, it created a long, trenchlike depression.

“It splashed on the soft, swampy soil and melted the underlying permafrost layer, releasing CO2 [carbon dioxide], water vapor, and methane that broadened the hole, hence the shape and size of the basin, unusual for an impact crater,” argues Gasperini, adding that “our hypothesis is the only one that accounts for the funnel-like morphology of Lake Cheko’s bottom.”