Tag Archives: Technology

Technology in the Classroom

UD faculty member teaches sociology and statistics with technology

Victor Perez, an assistant professor in the University of Delaware’s Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, has found multiple ways to reach students using diverse technological approaches. Perez makes his classroom presentations highly interactive by combining a tablet with an engaging PowerPoint presentation.

Using the Wacom Bamboo tablet and its accompanying app, Perez creates illustrations of statistical formulas and distributions in class. “Bamboo Dock is something that I’ll use pretty frequently in the statistics course, and it looks literally like a journal. What’s great about this is that you can write any statistical formula, and it’s what students will see directly on the screen,” Perez said. (more…)

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Fish-tailing Robots

Robotic boats track radio-tagged common carp in area lakes

As a stiff breeze sweeps across Staring Lake in suburban Minneapolis, a five-foot, antenna-sporting robotic boat plies the water in a back-and-forth pattern.

On the shore, Volkan Isler follows the action as two graduate research assistants launch a second boat.

Today Isler, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota, and graduate students Pratap Tokekar and Josh Vander Hook have come to the lake to test the newer of the boats. Their mission: developing a new technology to track invasive fish. (more…)

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Killing of Bin Laden Offers Insight into “The Business of Martyrdom”

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The way the U.S. military killed Osama bin Laden sent a message every bit as powerful as the fact that he was killed in the first place, according to the author of a new history of suicide bombing.

The fact that bin Laden was killed by a team of highly trained soldiers – and not by a drone or bomb – spoiled the grand narrative of brave Muslim fighters vs. U.S. technology that bin Laden and al Qaeda had developed in their war against the United States.

“Bin Laden had built up this image of himself and al Qaeda as a morally superior David against the technological Goliath that is the United States,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a lecturer in the International Studies program at Ohio State University. (more…)

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World’s Top Tech Students Go for It All Down Under

Young technologists are looking to take the world by storm this weekend at the Imagine Cup 2012 Worldwide Finals in Sydney, Australia.

SYDNEY – Wrapped in the flags of their countries, the competitors climb onto the podium, beaming with joy as the cameras flash. They are young, passionate, business-savvy ambassadors of their field.

These aren’t soccer players or high jumpers, but they are no less competitors than the athletes seeking gold medals at the 2012 Summer Games in London. They are the planet’s premiere young technologists. And, to slightly alter an infamous movie line, they’ve come to change the world and chew bubblegum – and they’re all out of bubblegum. (more…)

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In Real Time, Yale Scientists Watch Stem Cells at Work Regenerating Tissue

Scientists have for the first time watched and manipulated stem cells as they regenerate tissue in an uninjured mammal, Yale researchers report July 1 online in the journal Nature.

Using a sophisticated imaging technique, the researchers also demonstrated that mice lacking a certain type of cell do not regrow hair. The same technique could shed light on how stem cells interact with other cells and trigger repairs in a variety of other organs, including lung and heart tissue.

“This tells us a lot about how the tissue regeneration process works,” said Valentina Greco, assistant professor of genetics and of dermatology at the Yale Stem Cell Center, researcher for the Yale Cancer Center and senior author of the study. (more…)

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Nano-Sandwich Technique Slims Down Solar Cells, Improves Efficiency

Researchers from North Carolina State University have found a way to create much slimmer thin-film solar cells without sacrificing the cells’ ability to absorb solar energy. Making the cells thinner should significantly decrease manufacturing costs for the technology.

“We were able to create solar cells using a ‘nanoscale sandwich’ design with an ultra-thin ‘active’ layer,” says Dr. Linyou Cao, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. “For example, we created a solar cell with an active layer of amorphous silicon that is only 70 nanometers (nm) thick. This is a significant improvement, because typical thin-film solar cells currently on the market that also use amorphous silicon have active layers between 300 and 500 nm thick.” The “active” layer in thin-film solar cells is the layer of material that actually absorbs solar energy for conversion into electricity or chemical fuel. (more…)

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EL Wire Brightens Our World

Electroluminescence has come a long way since its discovery at the start of the 20thcentury. For many years the scientists who pioneered its development struggled to come up with practical applications for electroluminescent technology – early uses of the discovery lacked the lifespan to work as practical lamps and light sources, whilst its unreliability made it difficult to use in displays and interfaces.

Undeterred by their setbacks, the boffins working on electroluminescence didn’t give up, and thank goodness, because today electroluminescent light has evolved into a technology that has myriad applications all over the planet. (more…)

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First Commercial IBM Hot-Water Cooled Supercomputer to Consume 40% Less Energy

Leibniz’s “SuperMUC” named Europe’s fastest supercomputer

MUNICH – 18 Jun 2012: The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), in collaboration with IBM, today announced the world’s first commercially available hot-water cooled supercomputer, a powerful, high-performance system designed to help researchers and industrial institutions across Europe investigate and solve some of the world’s most daunting scientific challenges. (more…)

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