Still, the wind tunnel continues to bring new discoveries. “Aero,” said Michael Simcoe, a veteran exterior designer at G.M., “remains a black art.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/automobiles/21AERO.html?pagewanted=1&8dpc&_r=1
host's Blog
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I am a Regional Sales Engineer with Dantec Dynamics located in Tucson, AZ.
Member For: 1 year, 9 months
Posts: 21
Posts: 21
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For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics
August 6, 2009 by host
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”
The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/technology/06stats.html?_r=1&hp
Tracking News via Cyberspace
August 5, 2009 by host
There are other kinds of media trackers. Cornell University researchers, for example, have developed MemeTracker, which maps the daily news cycle by grabbing repeated quotations from one million online sources. (A meme is anything — an idea, a phrase — that spreads by imitation from one person to another.)
Its graphs, which can be viewed at memetracker.org, display the reports that are competing against one another for attention on a given day, as well as those that have staying power or quickly disappear. A recent paper on MemeTracker’s experience during the presidential campaign was hailed by experts as a landmark piece of work.
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism offers a news-coverage index, which is laboriously compiled by having 14 people sample leading reports produced by 55 outlets. Media Cloud is much less exact, Mr. Zuckerman said, but it can automatically scan hundreds, and eventually thousands, of sources.
When NASA Defined Long Island
July 21, 2009 by host
Still, there’s something bittersweet about it all, particularly as Long Island gropes around for a new economic engine and a forward-looking cultural identity. In the public mind, Long Island was once Gatsby and the shore and the romance of flight. Now it’s ...what? At worst it’s Joey Buttafuoco, the most iconic Long Islander of recent decades. At best, in the vision of Thomas R. Suozzi, the Nassau County executive, it’s the template for modern suburbia desperately in need of a 2.0 upgrade.
What can go wrong with a Pitot tube?
June 11, 2009 by host
Long before the crash, Airbus had recommended that airlines replace parts, called Pitot tubes, that scoop in air to help planes measure their air speed. The company said in its new message that for now, airlines could continue flying with older Pitot tubes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/world/americas/11plane.html?hp
Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration
May 6, 2009 by host
“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.
“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”
Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?
March 30, 2009 by host
That’s a change that may irk users like Ms. Rabban, who don’t like how busy their pages have become. Facebook executives counter that it will help users share more information, and that they will eventually come to appreciate it, just as they have with previous changes that were initially jarring.
“It’s not a democracy,” Mr. Cox says of his company’s relationship with users. “We are here to build an Internet medium for communicating and we think we have enough perspective to do that and be caretakers of that vision.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/technology/internet/29face.html?pagewanted=2&em
Letting Scientists Off the Leash
February 12, 2009 by host
As we think about how to heed President Obama’s call to “put science back in its rightful place,” I wonder if this should also be the time to rethink the basic foundations of how science is funded. Could we stimulate more discovery and creativity if more scientists had the security of their own salary and a long-term commitment to a minimal level of research support? Would this encourage risk-taking and lead to an overall improvement in the quality of science?
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/guest-column-letting-scientists-off-the-leash/
What Life Asks of Us
January 27, 2009 by host
The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations. They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them. A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relation to her land is not an individual choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. Her social function defines who she is. The connection is more like a covenant. There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/opinion/27brooks.html?hp
What Has Driven Women out of Computer Science?
November 17, 2008 by host
What’s particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields. Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys.
Technology Billionaire Offers Advice
November 6, 2008 by host
“The most important thing he’s got to do is kick-start a huge amount of research and innovation in energy,” said Mr. Doerr, who backed Google and Amazon.com and has invested heavily in clean technology for the last few years.
How to do that? Double the number of engineers who graduate from American universities each year to 60,000, Mr. Doerr said. Bring more women into the field, and encourage foreigners who study engineering here to stay here.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/john-doerrs-advice-for-barack-obama-hire-bill-joy/
Better to Be Fat and Fit Than Skinny and Unfit
August 20, 2008 by host
But the most striking finding was that fitness level, regardless of body mass index, was the strongest predictor of mortality risk. Those with the lowest level of fitness, as measured on treadmill tests, were four times as likely to die during the 12-year study than those with the highest level of fitness. Even those who had just a minimal level of fitness had half the risk of dying compared with those who were least fit.
Swimsuit technology
July 22, 2008 by host
To make the LZR, four innovations had to come together. The first is the fabric. The new suit is cut from a densely woven nylon-elastane material that compresses the wearer's body into a hydrodynamic shape but is extremely light. Moreover, there are no sewn seams. Instead, the suit is bonded by ultrasonic welding. Seams act as speed bumps in the water. Ultrasonic welding removes 6% of the drag that would otherwise occur, according to Jason Rance, the head of Aqualab, Speedo's research and development centre in Nottingham, Britain. Compared with Speedo's previous suit, which was used by numerous gold medallists in the 2004 Olympic games, the new material has half the weight yet triple the power to compress the body.
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11529388
How to run a better airline
July 22, 2008 by host
"Each time I delve into airline operations, and I work on that a lot, I’m reminded of the importance of managing and motivating the workforce. We get focused on weather issues, antiquated air-traffic control equipment, airport congestion, spare parts and baggage belts — and all that is important. But the biggest issue in airline performance boils down to airline employees. It’s always that way.
Frequent travelers know this, sometimes better than airline executives themselves. Travelers must live with the employees and their frustrations, failings and fractures. The traveler is the one who’s told “No” for no good reason at all, and the traveler doesn’t even get a sincere apology when left stranded someplace far from home, and the traveler who can’t find anyone to help locate a bag or check on a flight."
http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2008/07/22/how-to-run-a-better-airline/?mod=msn_money_ticker
Phoenix lands successfully on Mars
June 2, 2008 by host
What's better in Tucson, AZ than the Wildcats winning the NCAA tournament?
Being the Principal Investigator and project management team of a successful Mars spacecraft.
The crew from University of Arizona, JPL and Nasa did some nice engineering, successfully landing the Phoenix in hostile conditions. Congratulations to all involved and good luck with the mission.
Being the Principal Investigator and project management team of a successful Mars spacecraft.
The crew from University of Arizona, JPL and Nasa did some nice engineering, successfully landing the Phoenix in hostile conditions. Congratulations to all involved and good luck with the mission.
Boeing Loses $40B Tanker Contract to Northrop Grumman/ EADS
March 3, 2008 by host
In a joint statement, the state's two senators and six of its nine House members said they were outraged by the choice of a European company "and its foreign workers" to provide a tanker to the U.S. military.
"This is a blow to the American aerospace industry, American workers and America's men and women in uniform," said the statement, which was issued by Dicks, Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, and Reps. Rick Larsen, Jay Inslee, Adam Smith, Jim McDermott and Dave Reichert. All but Reichert are Democrats.
http:/
Do you think Boeing should have been awarded the contract even if their bid was not judged to be as good as the competition?
A Welcome Message
February 29, 2008 by host
Welcome to Dantec Forum, a forum for members of the experimental fluids research community.
This is a beta site and you are one of the initial users invited to join. We are exploring the idea of bringing a potentially useful service to our customers and to others in the field by providing a virtual meeting place for the dissemination of ideas, a support group for the fluids community, if you will.
There are a couple of bugs on the site, please be patient. We look forward to engaging you and for the helpful interactions that you can also bring to this community. Thanks for your support!
Sincerely, Michael Kotas, "Host"
Meat eating
February 1, 2008 by host
To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
The Slow Movement
February 1, 2008 by host
In a world on hyperdrive, science is proving him to be right. A 2005 study sponsored by Hewlett-Packard showed that the I.Q.s of workers who responded quickly to the constant barrage of e-mails they received during the day fell 10 points, more than double the I.Q. drop of someone smoking marijuana.
“Fast isn’t turning us into Masters of the Universe,” Mr. Honoré said. “It’s turning us into Cheech and Chong.”
http:/
