Educational Institutions Economic Impact

I believe investing in creating an environment where science and engineering endeavors will flourish will greatly benefit the economy. Some previous posts discussing these ideas include: Great Engineering Schools and Entrepreneurism, Engineering Future Economic Success, Science Research and the Economy and China’s Economic Science Experiment.

Wisconsin’s effort is hardly unique, but I grew up in Madison and my father taught Chemical Engineering, Statistics, and more at the UW so I pay attention to the efforts in Madison. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has been one of the most successful attempts to take academic work and create successful business efforts to benefit the university, the professors and the economy overall. Their mission: “Moving inventions arising from the university’s laboratories to the marketplace for the benefit of the university, the inventors and society.”

Building Wisconsin’s Economy illustrates how the University of Wisconsin at Madison attempts to focus on creating economic benefit, which I think is a good idea. Economic benefit is not the only purpose, but it is worthy of focus.

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Meteorite, Older than the Sun, Found in Canada

Older than the sun, the meteorite scientists call ‘the real time machine’

The Tagish Lake meteorite was already regarded as exceptional because its mineral composition linked it to the earliest days of the formation of the solar system, more than 4.5bn years ago. The fragments of meteorite that still exist are among the most pristine in the world, as they were protected from contamination when they became wedged in blocks of lake ice. The latest research shows that peppered throughout the meteorite are grains that formed even earlier, in a frigid cloud of molecules, possibly at the edge of the swirling disc of dust that ultimately collapsed to form the sun and all the planets of the solar system.

The discovery suggests that while the first light from the sun fell on the fledgling Earth, as the dinosaurs rose and died out and humans gained dominance, the meteorite was hurtling around the heavens on a billions-of-years-long journey destined to terminate with a thud in Yukon territory. Researchers at Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston examined a two gram fragment of the meteorite and focused on tiny, hollow, carbon spheres embedded within it. Each “globule” measured just a few thousandths of a millimetre across.

Interesting stuff.

Zero Ink Printing

Zink – zero ink printing:

Dye crystals are embedded in the ZINK paper and are activated by heat from a ZINK printer. The crystals then colorize, producing high quality, long-lasting, durable, and affordable images.
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The ZINK printing technology will enable a new mobile printing market. Later this year, ZINK Imaging’s partners will launch the first products using ZINK technology. These products are designed to take printing where it has never before been possible – into the pocket of every camera phone and digital camera user.

This is from a company press release but it sounds interesting. A digital son of Polaroid:

The Zink technology also uses heat, but the dyes are embedded into the paper itself — hence the company’s name, which stands for zero ink. Bonded inside the paper are three dye layers, colored yellow, magenta, and cyan, a shade of blue. Properly mixed, these three colors can produce the entire spectrum. Each of the dyes is in crystalline form, and each is formulated to melt into liquid at a certain temperature.

A Zink printer pulls the special paper under a thermal print head. This device has hundreds of heating elements that can each heat a tiny portion of the paper. The Zink software controls the print head, so that its heat pulses activate the correct dye colors and produce the finished photograph. A single photo can be cranked out in about a minute, at a cost of about 25 cents.

Over 100 Dinosaur Eggs Discovered

Over 100 fossilised eggs of dinosaur found in Madhya Pradesh, India

three amateur explorers have stumbled upon more than 100 fossilised eggs of dinosaurs in Madhya Pradesh. The eggs, belonging to the Cretaceous Era (approximately 144 to 65 million years ago), have been discovered in Kukshi-Bagh area of Dhar district, some 150 kms south-west of Indore. The rare find is a significant step in the study of pre-historic life in the Narmada Valley.

“All the eggs were discovered from a single nesting site in a start to end exploration for 18 hours at the site in Kukshi-Bagh area, 40 kms from Manavar. As many as 6-8 eggs were found per nests,” an excited Vishal Verma of the Mangal Panchayatan Parishad, a group of amateur explorers, told Hindustan Times from near the site.

“The eggs are from upper cretaceous era… These eggs can be categorised in three types of soropaud dinosaurs, which were herbivorous. These animals used to come from far away areas to lay eggs on the sandy banks of the rivers in this area, identified scientifically as Lameta bed,” Verma said. The dinosaurs were 40-90 feet in length, he added.

via: More than 100 Dinosaur Eggs Discovered in a Remote Area of India

African Union – Science Meeting

Local heroes

Despite these successes, many African scientists feel neglected by their politicians who, they suspect, do not understand that geeks as well as businessmen are crucial to economic development. That, however, might be about to change. For the first time, the theme of the twice-yearly African Union Summit (held on this occasion in Addis Ababa) was science, technology and climate change.

An afternoon of science in Africa – African leaders set guidelines for scientific growth – African Union, Jan 2007 meeting on “Science, Technology and Scientific Research and Climate change”, objectives:

• To show case innovative S&T projects in AU member States
• To demonstrate the role that S&T can play in Africa’s socio-economic development
• To demonstrate the potential investment return in S&T and innovation
• To encourage African policymakers to invest in science education
• To encourage African youth to take up careers in S&T
• To encourage skills and capacity building in S&T

Contour-Surface Drawings

The Best Homework Ever?

Although the lecturer said he knew a great deal about this function from the point of view of calculus and linear algebra, he regretted that he could not visualize its geometric shape. I thought our graphics team could help him out. I telephoned my sophomore assistant, Ed Chang ’91, who rendered the surface on a computer using a contour-surface algorithm developed by Steve Ritter ’85 and Kevin Pickhardt ’85 in Professor Andries van Dam’s computer-graphics course. Thanks to overnight mail and one-hour film developing, we had slides of the surface in Berkeley in time for Professor Hirzebruch’s next lecture. He was delighted, and he has used our computer-graphics illustrations in his lectures and publications ever since.
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This is not only the best freshman math homework I have ever received. I contend it is the best overnight homework any teacher has ever received in any course at any level at any place in any subject at any time, ever, ever, ever. That is an extreme claim, but I’m still waiting for another teacher to produce a worthy challenger.

Nanotech Engine Research

Tiny engine boosts nanotech hopes:

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have created a tiny engine powered by light that can be made to sort molecules. The device may one day find a role in nano-scale machines. It emerged from research into similar tiny machines in nature that power well known processes such as photosynthesis.
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“We have a new motor mechanism for a nanomachine,” said Prof Leigh. “It is a machine mechanism that is going to take molecular machines a step forward to the realisation of the future world of nanotechnology,” he said. Because the rotaxane can be made to do useful work in a predictable fashion, ie sort particles, it could become a key component for anyone designing nano-scale device.

LEGO Sumo Robotic Championship

Lego Sumo Robotic Championship photo

DivX LEGO Sumo Robotic Championship – Round 2

DivX is a proprietary video player which can be downloaded for free. The quality of the videos is great which is offset by the annoyance of having to download another plugin to view the videos. The improved quality is quite nice though it does seem a bit buggy still. See more such videos via their No Screwdriver Needed channel.

via: Big Wheel Spikey – Lego Sumo Robotic Championship

Engineering a Start-up

Engineering a start-up at University of California at San Diego:

Fifteen von Liebig-supported projects have been converted into startup companies. In the past two years alone, start-up companies that received von Liebig support have raised more than $10 million in capital. And even more discoveries have been licensed to telecommunications, biotechnology and other industry companies that are using the UCSD science to make new products or make their existing products better.

The center, started with a $10 million grant, has awarded a total of $2.4 million to 56 projects. An additional 25 projects have benefited from the center’s advisers. The return on investment has climbed steadily. The revenue UCSD received from the commercialization of discoveries out of the Jacobs School of Engineering has grown from $57,563 in 1999 to $602,713 in 2004, the most recent year for which figures were available.

Great stuff – this is the kind of thing that allows the ingenuity of engineers to benefit the economy and the engineers. Small focused efforts like this can have a huge long term impact, I believe. For those interested in building economic advantage through engineering education creating an entrepreneurial environment is a very important factor.

Leah Jamieson on the Future of Engineering Education

Leah Jamieson’s address, 2007 IEEE President and dean of the Purdue Engineering school, to DesignCon 2007. (link broken by DesignCon, so removed. How are organizations that seek to have people come to them to learn how to adopt good engineering practices still failing to basic things like keeping urls live forever?).

The future of engineering education: More questions than answers by Michael Santarini:

In addition, many academics estimate that the half-life of engineering knowledge is between two to seven years, Jamieson said. “I can tell you for us at the universities, if it’s less than five or certainly less than four [years] we’re going to get scared because it means students come in as freshmen and by the time they are done, half of what we’ve done for those first couple of years may or may not be relevant?” she said. “It’s a frightening thought, and so it means we have to keep asking ourselves, what are the parts that stay relevant, so that in fact the education is current after the students graduate or at least current on the day they do graduate.”