A New Ocean?

Secrets of ocean birth laid bare:

Geologists say a crack that opened up last year may eventually reach the Red Sea, isolating much of Ethiopia and Eritrea from the rest of Africa.
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“We think if these processes continue, a new ocean will eventually form,” he told the BBC News website. “It will connect to the Red Sea and the ocean will flow in.”

When do they expect this? “in about a million years.” Just around the corner geologically speaking, though for me that still seems a long way off 🙂

A New Engineering Education

Engineering a new way by Amy Hetzner

The crux of Olin’s effort is a “do-learn” model that stresses teaching students through projects and a student-focused environment aimed at heading off the high dropout rates at other engineering schools around the country, said Sherra Kerns, Olin’s vice president for innovation and research.

See our previous posts: Olin Engineering Education Experiment – Improving Engineering Education

UW has been able to turn around a dismal attrition rate in the early 1990s, when two-thirds of engineering students didn’t stick with the program. Today, close to 60% of engineering students graduate with a degree in the field, he said.

Wow, 33% of engineering students graduating sure wasn’t very impressive. Frankly I don’t think 60% is very good but I believe comparatively it is reasonably good. Overall that rate really needs to be improved. Olin College does have some advantages being small and providing a full scholarship: their first class graduated 66 of the 75 that started 4 years ago.

Primary Science Education in China and the USA

Should the US Take a Page Out of China’s Schoolbook?

China consistently performs well on international benchmarks despite having to serve 20% of the world’s students with only 2% of its educational resources.

Pretty impressive.

But mimicking China’s system is by no means a blanket solution for American education woes.

Mimicking is almost never a successful strategy. What can be successful is learning from what others do well and adopting the good ideas in ways that makes sense in your system.
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Robot Learning

photo of robot dog playpen

This is very cool stuff:

Indeed, as opposed to the work in classical artificial intelligence in which engineers impose pre-defined anthropocentric tasks to robots, the techniques we develop endow the robots with the capacity of deciding by themselves which are the activities that are maximally fitted to their current capabilities. Our developmental robots autonomously and actively choose their learning situations, thus beginning by simple ones and progressively increasing their complexity. No tasks are pre-specified to the robots, which are only provided with an internal abstract reward function. For example, in the case of the Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity which we developped, this internal reward function pushes the robot to search for situations where its learning progress is maximal.

Very interesting article from Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris (Developmental Robotics): Discovering Communication by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Frederic Kaplan, abstract:
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Berkeley and MIT courses online

Huge amount of University of California Berkely webcasts of course lectures. Subscribe to RSS feeds and listen to podcasts or listen online.

Courses include: General Biology, Solid State Devices and Introductory Physics. Course websites include handouts for the lectures.

A great open access resource.

I can’t believe I have mentioned MIT open courseware before but a search didn’t find anything. MIT’s effort is an excellent resource, many on science and engineering: Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, etc..

MIT also includes the excellent: Visualizing Cultures – a gateway to seeing history through images that once had wide circulation among peoples of different times and places by John Dower (author of National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II) and Shigeru Miyagawa.

Evolution in Darwin’s Finches

“Instant” Evolution Seen in Darwin’s Finches, Study Says by Mason Inman

In 1982 the large ground finch arrived on the tiny Galápagos island of Daphne, just east of the island of San Salvador (map of the Galápagos).

Since then the medium ground finch, a long-time Daphne resident, has evolved to have a smaller beak—apparently as a result of direct competition with the larger bird for food.

Evolutionary theory had previously suggested that competition between two similar species can drive the animals to evolve in different directions.

But until now the effect had never been observed in action in the wild.
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Jonathan Losos is an evolutionary ecologist at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved with the Grants’ work.

“This study will be an instant textbook classic,” he said.

Science 2.0 – Biology

OpenWetWare (OWW) is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology and biological engineering.

“OWW provides a place for labs, individuals, and groups to organize their own information and collaborate with others easily and efficiently. In the process, we hope that OWW will not only lead to greater collaboration between member groups, but also provide a useful information portal to our colleagues, and ultimately the rest of the world.”
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NSF Funds Center for Quality of Life Technology

Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) have been awarded a $15 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish an engineering research center that will develop technologies to help older adults and people with disabilities live independently and productively.

“The purpose of our new center is to foster independence and self determination among older Americans and people with disabilities,” said Kanade. “If the technology we develop at the QoLT ERC can delay the need to send people from their homes to assisted living or nursing facilities by even one month, we can save our nation $1.2 billion annually. We need to apply the same ingenuity that we’ve used for military, space and manufacturing applications to improve the human condition.”

Japan has also been investing heavily in such technology including robots. Japan’s population is more elderly and the needs and benefits to Japan have lead them to invest heavily in technology to assist an aging population.
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Engineers in the Workplace

Vivek Wadhwa again addresses the question: Engineering Gap? Fact and Fiction. This is a question that deserves a continued look – I still believe we do need more focus on educating more engineers:

Additionally, the positive macro-economic effects of a strong scientific, engineering and technology community to an economy are not necessarily directly correlated to high salaries for those workers. That is one positive factor, but even if those salaries were not high the other benefits of innovation, manufacturing leadership, invention, etc. would still benefit the economy. So a country that is investing in the future could sensible target investments in science and engineering education even without increasing salaries pointing out that the supply and demand in the market was indicating a shortage of those workers.

From Vivek Wadhwa’s most recent article:
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Semiconductor Paint

Paint-on semiconductor outperforms chips

Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a semiconductor device that outperforms today’s conventional chips — and they made it simply by painting a liquid onto a piece of glass.

The finding, which represents the first time a so-called “wet” semiconductor device has bested traditional, more costly grown-crystal semiconductor devices, is reported in the July 13 issue of the journal Nature.

Like so much advance research funding by government, in this case the Canadian government, is crucial:
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