Category Archives: Universities

CMU Professor Gives His Last Lesson on Life

photo of Randy Pausch

CMU professor gives his last lesson on life by Mark Roth:

“If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you,” said Dr. Pausch, a 46-year-old computer science professor who has incurable pancreatic cancer. It’s not that he’s in denial about the fact that he only has months to live, he told the 400 listeners packed into McConomy Auditorium on the campus, and the hundreds more listening to a live Web cast.
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In his 10 years at Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Pausch helped found the Entertainment Technology Center, which one video game executive yesterday called the premier institution in the world for training students in video game and other interactive technology. He also established an annual virtual reality contest that has become a campuswide sensation, and helped start the Alice program, an animation-based curriculum for teaching high school and college students how to have fun while learning computer programming.

It was the virtual reality work, in which participants wear a headset that puts them in an artificial digital environment, that earned him and his Carnegie Mellon students a chance to go on the U.S. Air Force plane known as the “vomit comet,” which creates moments of weightlessness, and which the students promised to model with VR technology.
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“A recent CT scan showed that there are 10 tumors in my liver, and my spleen is also peppered with small tumors. The doctors say that it is one of the most aggressive recurrences they have ever seen.”
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“I find that I am completely positive,” he wrote. “The only times I cry are when I think about the kids — and it’s not so much the ‘Gee, I’ll miss seeing their first bicycle ride’ type of stuff as it is a sense of unfulfilled duty — that I will not be there to help raise them, and that I have left a very heavy burden for my wife.”

An inspirational story. For me personally, it reminds me of my father: Bill Hunter who honestly believed, as he was stricken with cancer, he was luckier than most people that have ever lived. He was able to do many things that no-one, not even Kings, could have dreamed of even a hundred years before. I can’t manage such an outlook most of the time, but I do try and keep that spirit alive in me at times. William G. Hunter: An Innovator and Catalyst for Quality Improvement by George Box.

Google 3D Campus Competition

The seven winning teams
Purdue University – Depts of Computer Graphics Technology and Education, Concordia University
Loyola Campus – Dept of Civil Engineering
Stanford University – Dept of Architectural Design
Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne – Depts of Engineering and Computer Science
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering – Dept of Engineering
Dartmouth College – Depts of Computer Science and Digital Art
University of Minnesota – Dept of Architecture
of Google’s Build Your Campus in 3D Competition will get to visit Google’s Mountain View Headquarters. It is nice to see Google continue to provide opportunities for students.

Stanford team puts campus on map; wins Google Earth 3-D modeling contest – view the Standford buildings:

In addition to having their entries displayed on Google Earth, the winners were invited to the Google headquarters for four days, Aug. 6-9. They attended workshops, met with professional 3-D modelers, got a grand tour of the compound and enjoyed the famous free lunch.
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We’d initially planned to do nearly all the buildings on campus,” Lehrburger said. “But we underestimated the time it was going to take. I think we thought the learning curve was going to be a little bit better than it actually was, so we had to readjust our plans.”

Though they were proud of their final outcome and hard work—Lehrburger and Bergen worked late into the night as they got closer to deadline—neither of the team leaders was overly optimistic. They had modeled 94 out of the 300 or so buildings on campus and worried their model of Stanford would be considered incomplete.

Google contest motivates students to ‘rebuild’ WMU (Western Michigan University designs):

A group of seven WMU students answered an invitation by the Internet giant Google to participate in its Build Your Campus in 3-D Competition. The teams’ submission placed among the top 30 out of some 350 entries from across the United States and Canada and will be incorporated on Google Earth, the company’s popular geographic information feature.

Programming Grads Meet a Skills Gap in the Real World

Ari Zilka, chief technology officer at Terracotta, in San Francisco, said he knows very well about the skills gap, as he worked his way through college in the high-tech business while attending the University of California, Berkeley. “I found that UC Berkeley had an excellent curriculum but not only was my schooling lagging behind work, it became very hard to even go to school because work had me learning the concepts and their applicability and nuances that teachers didn’t even seem to know.”

Zilka noted that many of the new hires he’s seen during his career continue to echo the same sentiments as he did. Some of the things the school didn’t teach Zilka and many who are now entering the work force include issues around communication, development skills, and business and product design. On the communication front, Zilka said, “Presentation skills are critical, and selling and influencing peers is critical.”
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“When graduates join organizations [after college] they are often shocked to realize they are dealing with limited resources, deadlines, fuzz requirements, requirements that change weekly, applications that scale, the use of frameworks and libraries, existing code—that may be bad code with bad design decisions, issues of interaction within and among teams, and having to develop code that is secure,” Scherlis said.

via: Sean Stickle. Related: High School Students Interest in Computer Programing – A Career in Computer Programming – Hiring Software Developers – software programming posts on our management blog

Does Which College Matter?

Another essay by Paul Graham packed with great thoughts – this one on hiring, colleges, measuring the performance of people, etc..

Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believe it. But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? We’re talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds.
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At most colleges you can find at least a handful of other smart students, and most people have only a handful of close friends in college anyway. The odds of finding smart professors are even better. The curve for faculty is a lot flatter than for students, especially in math and the hard sciences; you have to go pretty far down the list of colleges before you stop finding smart professors in the math department.
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What matters is what you make of yourself. I think that’s what we should tell kids. Their job isn’t to get good grades so they can get into a good college, but to learn and do.

Great article. I believe that setting up an educational environment can create a situation where people have much greater odds of flourishing: engineering schools and silicon valley – Innovative Science and Engineering Higher Education. So those responsible for creating those environments should continue their work. And student everywhere should know they can learn a great deal by making the most of their opportunities.

YouTube+ for Science from PLoS

SciVee is a new site by the great people at PLoS, with support from NSF and San Diego Supercomputer Center. It is very early in the launch of this effort but it looks very promising.

SciVee allows scientists to communicate their work as a multimedia presentation incorporated with the content of their published article. Other scientists can freely view uploaded presentations and engage in virtual discussions with the author and other viewers. SciVee also facilitates the creation of communities around specific articles and keywords. Use this medium to meet peers and future collaborators that share your particular research interests.

Of course plenty of great videos are already online but this looks like another great effort at helping improve communication of scientific ideas by the Public Library of Science. And there are advantages to a community lead by scientists that not only posts videos but encourages scientific discussion on the related matters. I am hopeful (and confident) this will become a great resource.

Related: Science and Engineering Webcast Directory – Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Public Lectures – Google Engineering and Technology Webcasts
Originally I posted this to my employers blog: Engineering and…. It turns out it was made public prematurely – SciVee update.

Science Journal Publishers Stay Stupid

Science publishers get even stupider by Andrew Leonard:

The American Association of Publishers and everyone associated with it should be ashamed of trying to protect their profit margins by slandering the open access movement as government intervention and censorship. Research paid for with government funds should be freely accessible to the general public.

I wish it was amazing that these people have so little grasp of what has been going on in the world the last 5 years (but I must say such failure to adapt seems to be a common trait in too many organizations). Previously I have posted on the importance of continuing the scientific tradition of open debate and open access. In the past there have been distribution complexities that made paid journals an acceptable compromise. That people working at journals don’t see that the internet changes that is going to lead to their rapid irrelevance. They had to figure this out a couple of years ago. Given they still haven’t, I must say that they really don’t seem to have much understanding of science or modern communication methods. Given their industry that is sad. It is time for the scientific community to give up on these journals and start looking to move to work with new organizations that will encourage scientific communication and advancement (PLoS – arXiv.org – Open Access Engineering Journals) and leave those that seek to keep outdated practices to go out of business.

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” Dr. W. Edwards Deming

I do object to scientific knowledge being kept out of the scientific and public community. The ability to use the internet to more effectively communicate new knowledge should not be sacrificed to protect the old model journals had for sustaining themselves. They should find a way to fund themselves and make their material available for free on the internet (I think some delay for free public access would be fine – the shorter the delay the better). Or they should be replaced by others that do so.

JMU Adds School of Engineering

JMU to create engineering program next fall by Kelly Conniff:

The research group focused on material from several areas that had shown that engineering is in great demand at JMU. The commonwealth of Virginia has also identified the top three labor shortages areas as nursing, education and engineering. JMU decided to respond to this need by creating a program that will produce close to 50 graduates per year, starting with the first graduating class in 2012.
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The school of engineering will also focus on incorporating business elements into the curriculum. The Steering Committee created two new business courses designed for engineering students. The courses, called Management of Technology I and II, will be specially constructed in order to allow students to pursue post-graduate studies in business or engineering upon graduation.

“The addition of business skills is really important to our program,” Prins said. “Having our graduates be able to speak both engineering and business is key to their success.”

Textbook Revolution

Textbook Revolution is a resource on free textbooks and free related course materials. In general, I must say the prices of textbooks seem crazy. This is another tool great open access resource.

At Textbook Revolution, you’ll find links to textbooks and select educational resources of all kinds. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable only online as e-books. Most books are aimed at undergraduates, but there are at least a few resources at every level, from kindergarten to post-doc. All of the books are offered for free by their respective copyright holders for online viewing. Beyond that, each book is as individual as the author behind it.

Some examples: The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing by Steven W. Smith; Light and Matter by Benjamin Crowell; A First Course in Linear Algebra by Robert A Beeze; Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide by
Dave Thomas and Introduction to Statistical Thought by Michael Lavine.

While on the subject of textbooks, I will plug my father’s book: Statistics for Experimenters – it is my blog so I get to do what I want 🙂

‘Looming Crisis’ from NIH Budget

‘Looming crisis’ from NIH budget by Ted Agres:

“Promising research is now being slowed or halted,” said Edward Miller, dean of Johns Hopkins Medicine. “We are seeing veteran scientists spending time not in labs but on the fundraising circuit. We are seeing young researchers quitting academic research in frustration, having concluded that their chances of having innovative research funded by NIH are slim to none,” Miller told a Capitol Hill news conference yesterday.

The scientists released a report prepared by 20 leading researchers from a consortium of nine academic institutions and universities, that outlines the benefits of increased NIH funding on biomedical innovations, and warns of the negative implications should the present budget be left unaddressed. The report cited threats from unexpected new diseases, such as SARS and pandemic influenza, as well as obesity, HIV, and bioterrorism.

While Congress and the White House doubled NIH’s budget from 1998 to 2003, funding has failed to keep pace with inflation. NIH’s budget has hovered at around $28 billion, but once inflation is factored in, its purchasing power has fallen 13% over the past four years. According to the report, an average of eight out of ten NIH grant applications currently go unfunded, while at the National Cancer Institute, only 11 percent of grants are funded. “This is a recipe for disaster,” Miller said. “The number of termination letters at Johns Hopkins is up three-fold.”

Microchip Cooling Innovation

New technology has dramatic chip-cooling potential for future computers

The Purdue University researchers, in work funded by Intel Corp., have shown that the technology increased the “heat-transfer coefficient,” which describes the cooling rate, by as much as 250 percent. “Other experimental cooling-enhancement approaches might give you a 40 percent or a 50 percent improvement,” said Suresh Garimella, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue. “A 250 percent improvement is quite unusual.”
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The experimental cooling device, which was fabricated on top of a mock computer chip, works by generating ions – or electrically charged atoms – using electrodes placed near one another. The device contained a positively charged wire, or anode, and negatively charged electrodes, called cathodes. The anode was positioned about 10 millimeters above the cathodes. When voltage was passed through the device, the negatively charged electrodes discharged electrons toward the positively charged anode. Along the way, the electrons collided with air molecules, producing positively charged ions, which were then attracted back toward the negatively charged electrodes, creating an “ionic wind.”

This breeze increased the airflow on the surface of the experimental chip. Conventional cooling technologies are limited by a principle called the “no-slip” effect – as air flows over an object, the air molecules nearest the surface remain stationary. The molecules farther away from the surface move progressively faster. This phenomenon hinders computer cooling because it restricts airflow where it is most needed, directly on the chip’s hot surface.

via: Purdue University’s Ionic Wind Engine