Article on Sergey Brin

The Story of Sergey Brin by Mark Malseed:

In the summer of 1990, a few weeks before Sergey’s 17th birthday, Michael led a group of gifted high school math students on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. He decided to bring the family along, despite uneasiness about the welcome they could expect from Communist authorities. It would give them a chance to visit family members still living in Moscow, including Sergey’s paternal grandfather, like Michael, a Ph.D. mathematician.
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When he won a prestigious National Science Foundation scholarship for graduate school, he insisted on Stanford. (M.I.T. had rejected him.) Aside from the physical beauty of Stanford’s campus, Sergey knew the school’s reputation for supporting high-tech entrepreneurs. At the time, though, his focus was squarely on getting his doctorate.

He provides another example of someone born outside the USA providing great benefit to the US. The United States has done very well allowing others to flourish here.

Shouldn’t Google Toolbar spell check have Sergey and Brin as words?

Undersea Restaurant

Take a vacation and visit this cool engineering project: Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa Rangali Island (they broke link so I removed it).

More Lego Learning

Let Go of My Legos:

The eighth-grade Physics by Design class at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Mass., has a reputation for being downright fun. But most students don’t refer to it by its conventional title, they just call it Lego. That’s right. Lego. You won’t find students here nodding off to sterile terms in a textbook; instead, they’re elbow-deep in bins of colorful plastic bricks building cars and movable robotic arms. And because they’re learning to program whatever they build with the help of Robolab software and a microcomputer embedded in a Lego brick, they really understand the meaning of torque, velocity and momentum.

Having fun is good, but the real key is creating environments where learning is fun, as is the case here. I believe people naturally learn and the largely learn to suppress that desire when subjected to bad formal education as they learn to equate learning with bad experiences.

Bionanotechnology Future

Commercialization and Future Developments in Bionanotechnology by Marcel P. Bruchez:

The lack of specifiability of our modules was a key challenge to commercialization. Specification will require detailed basic investigations of the properties and chemistry of nanoparticle materials in biological systems. In addition, we will have to establish analytical tools and quantitative descriptors to detail the distribution of properties present in a population of nanoparticles. This is categorically different from specification for organic molecules and proteins, in which properties can be effectively described by an average. In nanomaterials, performance properties may be dominated by a relatively small population of particles, so averaging cannot always be used.

Interesting paper, from The Bridge, an open-access publication of the National Academy of Engineering. This issue includes papers from the 12th U.S. Frontiers of Engineering including: New Mobility: The Next Generation of Sustainable Urban Transportation and Creating Intelligent Agents in Games.

Catnap Benefits

The health benefits of 40 winks

A six-year Greek study has just concluded that people who took a 30-minute siesta at least three times a week had a 37% lower risk of heart-related death.

Too tired to work? Then have a snooze:

The state-backed siesta is part of a â‚¬7 million (Â£4.7 million) campaign begun yesterday by the Health Ministry to encourage the French to sleep more and better. A third of the population does not sleep enough, experts say. Tiredness is blamed for 20 per cent of road and domestic accidents, and for low efficiency at work and school, obesity, depression and many other ills.

A nap a day keeps lost productivity at bay

According to a Cornell University study, sleep-deprived workers cost U.S. industry $150 billion a year in reduced job productivity and fatigue-related accidents.

Chimps Used Stone “Hammers”

Ancient chimp-made ‘hammers’ fuel evolutionary debate:

The stone hammers that the team discovered, essentially irregularly shaped rocks about the size of cantaloupes – with distinctive patterns of wear – were used to crack the shells of nuts. The research demonstrates conclusively that the artifacts couldn’t have been the result of natural erosion or used by humans. The stones are too large for humans to use easily and they also have the starch residue from several nuts known to be staples in the chimpanzee diet, but not the human diet.

Using so-called “percussive technology” to free the edible parts of nuts is more complicated than it sounds. “We know that modern chimpanzee behaviour regarding nut-cracking is socially transmitted and takes up to seven years to learn,” Mercader says. “Some of the nuts require a compression force of more than a thousand kilograms to crack. And the idea is to crack the shell but not smash it – it’s not a simple technique.”

The discovery suggests that a ‘chimpanzee stone age’ reaches well back to ancient times. “Chimpanzee material culture has a long prehistory whose deep roots are only beginning to be uncovered,” the authors write.

The Avocado

I bought an avocado a the supermarket yesterday. While eating some today I decided to search the internet for some nutritional information. That info wasn’t that interesting to me, but I did find this interesting: the avocado fruit does not ripen on the tree. When it is harvested it will ripen. If the fruit is picked once it reaches maturity, and will then ripen in a few days. This can be speed up by putting the avocado in a paper bag and speed up more if other fruit such as bananas are included, because of the influence of ethylene gas.

Feeding avocados to any non-human animal should be avoided completely. There is documented evidence that animals such as cattle, horses, goats, rabbits, birds, dogs, cats, and even fish can be severely harmed or even killed when they consume the leaves, bark, or fruit. Avocados contain a toxic fatty acid derivative known as persin. Many animal organizations recommend total avoidance of all parts of the plant.

Anyway I found the information interesting 🙂 Related: Bannanas Going Going Gone – Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. – Drinking Soda and Obesity

Patenting Life – a Bad Idea

Patenting Life by Michael Crichton (new book = Next, also The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park…):

Gene patents are now used to halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor. Gene patents slow the pace of medical advance on deadly diseases. And they raise costs exorbitantly: a test for breast cancer that could be done for $1,000 now costs $3,000.

Why? Because the holder of the gene patent can charge whatever he wants, and does. Couldn’t somebody make a cheaper test? Sure, but the patent holder blocks any competitor’s test. He owns the gene. Nobody else can test for it. In fact, you can’t even donate your own breast cancer gene to another scientist without permission. The gene may exist in your body, but it’s now private property.

This bizarre situation has come to pass because of a mistake by an underfinanced and understaffed government agency. The United States Patent Office misinterpreted previous Supreme Court rulings and some years ago began — to the surprise of everyone, including scientists decoding the genome — to issue patents on genes.

This has to be fixed, and here is one way that might help: Continue reading →

Pakistan Engineering Education

HEC’s Unconvincing Mega Projects by Pervez Hoodbhoy:

The on-going efforts at reforming higher education are turning into a disaster. Billions are being spent on mindless mega projects. The 15-fold increase in the funding of Pakistani universities over the last six years may have delivered a marginal improvement, but it is superficial and likely to be temporary.
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a realistic and modest course of action with real chances of success would have to be designed differently. We should initially aim for, at the very most, two properly planned new engineering universities under the collective authority of the European Union. We also need external help for adding engineering departments to existing universities, and to massively upgrade existing ones. It is still not too late to ask for this.

While I have no knowledge of the this situation in Pakistan the thoughts expressed in the essay make sense to me. I support investing in science and engineering education as a aid to economic growth and societal well being. But that investment must work with the existing local situation.

Water in Earth’s Deep Mantle

3-D seismic model of vast water reservoir revealed:

n analyzing the data, Wysession first saw large patterns associated with known areas where the ocean floor is sinking down into the earth. Beneath Asia, the fallen Pacific sea floor piles up at the base of the mantle. Right above that he observed an “incredibly highly attenuating region, that is both very damping and slightly slow,” he said. “Water slows the speed of waves a little. Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well.”

Previous predictions calculated that a cold ocean slab sinking into the earth at 1,200 to 1,4000 kilometers beneath the surface would release water in the rock that would escape the rock and rise up to a region above it, but this was never previously observed.

“That is exactly what we show here, the exact depth and high attenuation amounts right above it,” Wysession said. “I call it the Beijing anomaly. Water inside the rock goes down with the sinking slab and it’s quite cold, but it heats up the deeper it goes, and the rock eventually becomes unstable and loses its water. The water then rises up into the overlying region, which becomes saturated with water.

“If you combine the volume of this anomaly with the fact that the rock can hold up to about 0.1 percent of water, that works out to be about an Arctic Ocean’s worth of water.”