On Thursday, January 29th, we had the opportunity to witness a great lecture: Zircons as a Window into the Very Early History of the Earth. It was given by Professor Bruce Watson, a distinguished UNH alumnus, now teaching at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The lecture focused on the use of zircons, a particular type of mineral, in dating and analyzing events in the so called Hadean Eon of Earth’s history. Some scientists proposed that a Mars-sized object collided with Earth to form the Moon within that eon, an event which may have created a deep magma ocean beneath the surface and subsequently inhibited the existence of a liquid water ocean on the surface. Very little of Earth’s surface from this time is preserved, and scientists must rely on information from only the oldest crystals to reconstruct this period of our planet’s history.

Impurities in these minerals allow us to date them (Uranium-lead dating) and use them as thermometers (Titanium content) among other things. Knowing the temperature on the surface of the Earth at certain times in the history of Earth is very important in writing the geological history of our planet. This is a great scientific contribution of Professor Watson, which has an immense geological importance.

This lecture drew a big crowd in the UNH MUB Theater II. It was also visited by the students who signed up for the ECE 900 Seminar course.

Thanks go out to Julie Bryce, UNH Assistant Professor of Geochemistry, for editing the text to be scientifically correct.

Oszkar Palinko

As you may know, Mark Taipan and I have been working on our KLAS Project. Recently we created a quick video demonstrating the KLAS Navigation system. Here it is:

Matt

So apparently in the UK the Department of Transportation is called the Department for Transportation. This means that the acronym is DFT, which is confusing because DFT of course stands for Discrete Fourier Transform. So the question is, when transportation becomes fast in the UK will the DFT become the FFT? OK a little geeky humor there ;)

Anyway, the DFT has a nifty test you can run online to see how attentive you are to pedestrians when driving and listening to a cell phone at the same time. It would be interesting to have participants run the test with and without the sound of the mobile phone call, in order to see how much the phone call affects your ability to count pedestrians.

[via How we Drive]

Andrew Kun

January 19 Dilbert:

And yes, there is in fact a dilbertfiles.com. Well, I don’t think Scott Adams ever claimed to be pure.

Andrew Kun

How many of you

• are curious about entrepreneurship?
• would consider working for a startup after you graduate?
• have an idea and would like to start your own business?

Brad Gillespie, a UNH alum, works with startups and will be visiting UNH this April. If there is enough interest, he’d be happy to talk about

• starting your own company,
• working for a startup,
• engineers as entrepreneurs,
• building a team,
• ideas and execution,
• getting your startup funded,
• things you might consider in the current economic climate, and more.

He could also informally chat with individuals or small groups to discuss questions you might have about startups or talk more about your ideas and next steps you might consider. If this sounds interesting, let us know by either commenting on this post or emailing me (andrew dot kun at unh dot edu) or Dr. Gillespie (b at gillespie dot fm), and please mention if you would be interested in hearing a talk, chatting individually, or both. Also if there are topics you are particularly interested in (or not interested in) please mention those as well.

Brad Gillespie’s biography

Brad Gillespie, a UNH alum, works with early-stage technology companies. His focus is on board and strategic advisory work at the intersection of business and technology. Recent projects include working with the founders of the pioneering online real estate company Redfin,  the augmented reality company Total Immersion, and Allyall among others. Dr. Gillespie is also a mentor at Seedcamp, which focuses solely on European growth companies and their unique challenges and opportunities.

Previously Dr. Gillespie was the Technical Assistant to Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie. Dr. Gillespie worked alongside Mr. Mundie and other senior executives to formulate and drive long-term corporate strategy. He has been involved with many initiatives across the company including health and wellness, robotics, new programming techniques and applications to exploit heterogeneous many-core processors, and a number of yet-to-be announced products.

He received a PhD from the University of Washington where he was both an Intel and Microsoft Graduate Fellow.

This is a follow up to my previous post about automation solution for our experiments. Taking the automation a step further I have designed Experiment Wizard.

Experiment Wizard is a cross platform open source automation tool for scientific experiments. It defines the XML schema for experiment administration, and provides GUI application to execute created experiments. It can be a replacement of a checklist or a complete automation tool. It can be used for human-human or human-computer experiments or any other type of an experiment that uses computers, which can be connected into a network.

Go to Experiment Wizard home page to download the Executable for windows or sources that can be compiled on another operating system. It comes with a tutorial and documentation for the schema file. Any feedback is welcome.

Alexander Shyrokov.

Hey everyone!

My name is Mark Taipan and in addition to working for the fine folks here at Project54, I also am the Microsoft Student Partner here at UNH. One of the topics that I’ve been discussing with students last semester is the ImagineCup competition. So what is the ImagineCup? And what is SDI?

The Imagine Cup is a worldwide competition held by Microsoft that allows students over the age of 16 to create projects that fulfill one of the UN Millennium Goals. There are a total of 9 categories that students can compete in and the Software Design Invitational (SDI) is one of them. The SDI competition allows teams, of up to 4 students, to create software using Microsoft technologies in attempt to make the world a better one to live in. Check out this SDI group who competed last year at the US final.

The competition is broken up into several rounds; most notably, the international final round is in Egypt! However, the SDI first round deadline is fast approaching (Thursday, January 22nd, 2009). Don’t be discouraged if you haven’t started a team/project yet as the First Round involves NO programming at all. If you have a great idea that fulfills the criteria of the competition, take a few hours and submit your idea for the First Round. Think of this round as the proposal of your product; just your idea and a plan is needed here.

Why bother competing?
• If you’re an UNH ECE major, jump start your senior project!
• It’s a great way to bridge the knowledge attained from the classroom with a fun, interesting project designed by you
• Resume builder
• Raffling of prizes for those that UNH students who compete in the SDI competition along wiht the ImagineCup Prize (Overall 1st Place Team wins $25,000)
• Most importantly, use technology for a good cause!

Want more information?
US ImagineCup Website
International Website

Upcoming Dates:
SDI Public Training: Thursday, January 14th, 2009
(Specific information here)

Round1 Deadline: Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
(Register first here)

So if you’re interested in competing in the competition, contact me at mtaipan@gmail.com. I am more than happy to assist you in the logistics of any of the categories in the ImagineCup and help your team brainstorm ideas for the SDI competition. Also, stay tuned in for more info about various Microsoft-related news in the upcoming semester!

Are you using your cell phone while driving? The National Safety Council says you shouldn’t.

Of course, cell phones are just one of the distractions in a car. The NSC recently hosted the International Symposium on Distracted Driving. There are many interesting presentations to review on the symposium website. I really liked Paul Green’s presentation (especially the car-through-the-roof picture!).

Andrew Kun

Microsoft has just introduced a 2D barcode readable by a freely available cell phone application. Read more on the Tag website (they also have a cool video although the ending is cheesy).

With the proliferation of camera phones this seems like a nice way to introduce object tagging. We’ve heard a lot about RFID, but of course our phones usually don’t come with RFID readers. So here’s a barcode that encodes www.eceblogger.com:

Although, is it a barcode if it’s made up of triangles? On a more serious note, I wonder why not adopt an existing standard? Perhaps the new one is easier to recognize than say the PDF417 standard used for example for encoding information on driver licenses? Or does it just look cooler?

Andrew Kun

I really like this video about a Blowable User Interface (BLUI):

OK, I admit I don’t know what the killer app would be, but entertainment sounds like a good bet, something like the Sonic Lighter:

[via UID Teatime Blog]

Andrew Kun