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August 4, 2006
This internal publication contains information about recent coverage
of Carnegie Mellon that appeared primarily in national newspapers, magazines
and online publications. Please note that some sources may require registration
or a subscription in order to access their information online.
Please send comments and suggestions to thomas@cmu.edu
The media coverage archive is available at www.cmu.edu/clips
From July 21 to August 3,
Carnegie Mellon Media Relations counted 290 references to the university in worldwide
publications. Here is a sample.
Special Section: Net Neutrality
Center for American Progress | July 25
NPR | July 25
C-SPAN | July 22
National News Stories
USA Today | July 31
Forbes (HealthDay News) | July 28
ABC News (Reuters) | July 24
San Francisco Chronicle | July 24
U.S. News | July 23
The New York Times | July 23
Washington Post (Reuters) | July 21
Science | July 21
Arts and Humanities
Pittsburgh City Paper | July 27
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | July 25
Pittsburgh City Paper | July 20
Information Technology
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | August 1
Computerworld | July 28
BusinessWeek | July 28
FCW | July 24
Network World | July 24
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | July 24
HPCwire | July 21
Environment
Cincinnati Enquirer | July 24
Regional Impact
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | July 26
Pittsburgh Business Times | July 21
Local News Stories
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | July 26
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | July 26
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | July 21
International News Stories
PC Advisor | August 3
The Peninsula | August 3
CSO (Computerworld) | August 2
International Herald Tribune (Bloomberg) | July 31
Gulf Times | July 31
The Times of India | July 29
The Sydney Morning Herald | July 28
India Times | July 26
New Scientist | July 22
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Special Section: Net Neutrality
Center for American Progress | July 25
In navigating the complex issue of "net neutrality," the government should protect consumers' rights amid a rapidly changing and dynamic Internet. Two experts agreed on that much Monday during a panel discussion hosted by the Center for American Progress, but they disagreed on how to do that without stifling innovation. Bringing together two of the Internet's founding figures, the Center welcomed Vint Cerf, Vice-President of Google; and Dave Farber, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Carl Malamud, the Center’s Chief Technology Officer, moderated.
http://www.americanprogress.org/site
/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1852997 | back to top
NPR | July 25
The term "net neutrality" doesn't unleash a frenzy of emotion, but it's grown into an intense debate over how we access our favorite Web sites. Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and David Farber, dubbed the grandfather of the Internet, talk about the two sides of the net neutrality debate and their vision for the future of technology. Guests: Tim Berners Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations with the mission to lead the Web to its full potential; senior researcher at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. David Farber, distinguished career professor of Computer Science and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story
/story.php?storyId=5578594 | back to top
C-SPAN | July 22
This week on "The Communicators", the Center for American Progress hosts "The Great Debate: What is Net Neutrality?" Vinton G. Cerf, Google, V.P. & Chief Internet Evangelist and Dave Farber, Carnegie Mellon University, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy debate the issue of net neutrality. "The Communicators" is a new C-SPAN series that focuses on the people and events that shape telecommunications policy.
http://c-span.org/Search/advanced.asp?Advanced
QueryText=net+neutrality&StartDateMonth=&StartDateYear
=&EndDateMonth=&EndDateYear=&Series=&ProgramIssue=&Query
Type=&QueryTextOptions=&ResultCount=10&SortBy=bestmatch | back to top
National News Stories
USA Today | July 31
It's summer again, season of freak accidents—and widespread freakouts about them. In late June, for instance, a 12-year-old boy died after riding Disney World's Rock 'n' Roller Coaster in Orlando. It made national news and on cue, two days later, Time's web site published a piece called "Too Many Thrills?" reflecting many peoples' concerns. "Another roller coaster death," the teaser said, "prompts speculation that the era of faster, higher and scarier may be coming to an end." Careful readers might notice that similar speculations abound every time there's a ride accident. ... Researchers have identified a few biases that make it hard for us to view risks rationally: First, Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, notes that people are pretty good at monitoring the risks they see and hear about. "What people have difficulty doing is figuring out when appearances are deceiving," he says. "If the news media report a lot on one thing and not on another, it's hard for people to intuitively correct for that."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/
editorials/2006-07-31-vanderkam-edit_x.htm | back to top
Forbes (HealthDay News) | July 28
Experiments where volunteers took an amnesia-inducing drug have brought new insight into how humans form memories. The two-session study examined the ability of people to remember words, faces, landscapes and abstract pictures. The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. ... The study authors noted that this same pattern is found in anterograde amnesia patients, who are unable to form new associations. This severely limits the accuracy of their recognition judgments. "This helps us understand the general functions of memory. It helps us relate, for example, the memory declines seen in old age to those seen in patients with hippocampal damage," study lead author Lynne Reder, a professor of psychology and Carnegie Mellon, said in a prepared statement.
http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds
/hscout/2006/07/28/hscout533926.html | back to top
ABC News (Reuters) | July 24
Power outages that left more than 1.5 million customers without lights this week have fired up criticism that U.S. utilities aren't investing enough to fortify electrical lines against wind, lightning and falling trees. Blackouts in the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic states left neighborhoods without power just as a heat wave settled across most of the country, giving the electricity industry a public relations headache. Utilities blamed violent storms packing hurricane-force winds that snapped trees and downed power lines. But consumer advocates said the outages point to deeper issues that give the U.S. worse power problems than other developed countries like England, France, and Japan. ... Some experts say U.S. power companies are cutting costs by spending less money than many other countries to harden infrastructure against Mother Nature. "U.S. power prices are cheaper than in the rest of the world, but we have lower reliability. It is a choice that we've made," said Jay Apt, executive director of the Electricity Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics
/wireStory?id=2221141 | back to top
San Francisco Chronicle | July 24
The lights are dimmed in the Security Operations Center at San Francisco International Airport, where Kathryn Knoblauch watches a dozen monitors fed by the 1,500 surveillance cameras scattered through this busy and sensitive facility. At the far right of her field of view sits the newest tool in the airport's security toolkit--and the latest worry for civil libertarians. It's a computer monitor that displays images, selected by a new type of software, that sifts through that stream of surveillance video, sending out alerts when it detects certain actions or situations. ... The software being evaluated at SFO represents an emerging technology called video analytics. The idea is to use software algorithms to scan surveillance video gathered by closed circuit television cameras and to search for specific visual patterns--such as two airport workers scooting through a security door at the same time, when they should enter one at a time, or a vehicle parked too long at a place where it shouldn't be. ... Carnegie Mellon University computer vision expert Takeo Kanade said video analytics has promise but should not be oversold. "As long as you don't ask machines to solve outrageously difficult problems, they are useful,'' Kanade said.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
f=/c/a/2006/07/24/BUGEHK1UA21.DTL | back to top
U.S. News | July 23
For more than a decade, UPS has typically spent $1 billion annually on technology--that's against revenues in the last year of nearly $43 billion. The company's expensive tech price tag isn't without detractors, including investors who fret that UPS, a tightly managed company where engineers have long held sway, overly obsesses about shaving seconds off delivery times. The package-flow upgrade also netted disappointing results at about a third of its initial sites, Barnes concedes, and has rolled out more slowly than the company originally predicted. But recent results have been more consistent, and market concerns seem to be easing, helping UPS's stock to bounce back from a dip last year. ... Pushing automation to the fringes of its operations is only possible because of the mass of data that UPS computers have been collecting as parcels move through its central hubs, and thanks to advances in math and computing power. Delivery companies have become leaders in "operations research," a growing field that uses mathematical models to streamline processes, says Michael Trick of Carnegie Mellon University. "It used to be that only airlines could worry about issues like routing," he says.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech
/articles/060723/31best_2.htm | back to top
The New York Times | July 23
Last week, in an effort to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, I withdrew settlements in the Gaza Strip. But then a suicide bomber struck in Jerusalem, the P.L.O. leader called my actions "condescending," and the Knesset demanded a stern response. Desperate to retain control, I launched a missile strike against Hamas militants. I was playing Peacemaker, a video game in which players assume the role of either the Israeli prime minister or the Palestinian president. Will you pull down the containment wall? Will you beg the United States to pressure your enemy? You make the calls and live with the results the computer generates. Just as in real life, actions that please one side tend to anger the other, making a resolution fiendishly tricky. You can play it over again and again until you get it right, or until the entire region explodes in violence. "When they hear about Peacemaker, people sometimes go, 'What? A computer game about the Middle East?'" admits Asi Burak, the Israeli-born graduate student who developed it with a team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "But people get very engaged. They really try very hard to get a solution. Even after one hour or two hours, they'd come to me and say, you know, I know more about the conflict than when I've read newspapers for 10 years."
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article
?res=F60B12FA3D5B0C708EDDAE0894DE404482 | back to top
Washington Post (Reuters) | July 21
Shoe and clothing makers are in a race to offer gadget-ready gear, from jackets with iPod controls to basketball sneakers that pump out digital music. But, as with many consumer trends, the question of acceptance remains key for manufacturers: If we make it, will they buy? ... Peter Boatwright, associate professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business said integrating technology into shoes and jackets makes sense, and noted that large companies usually do a good deal of market research before developing new products. "It's the onslaught of ties, jackets and speakers of various forms in the airline magazines, (that) are probably from companies trying to free-ride off the massive success of iPod and other devices," Boatwright said. "That's where we consumers get inundated and tired."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content
/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072100898.html | back to top
Science | July 21
In part 1 of this series, I described a few general concepts that you need to know about in order to optimize your next job offer.... Job-offer packages are complex, with a lot of ingredients, yet most of us judge an offer solely on salary, or--for the academic--salary and start-up funds. ... I like the laundry list that Laurie Weingart of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, uses in her presentations about job offers. She has granted us permission to reprint it here: As the table indicates, there are lots of issues to be discussed. Study the list and decide which issues are most important to you. Develop a strategy for your negotiation that involves keeping the things you can't live without while being willing to give way on the items you find less essential (as Susan did, above). As Laurie says in her talks, "Give them what is important to them (but not to you), in exchange for something that is important to you (but not to them)."
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development
/previous_issues/articles/2006_07_21/tooling_up
_salary_negotiation_part_2/(parent)/68 | back to top
Arts and Humanities
Pittsburgh City Paper | July 27
Revisiting old haunts is a specialty of Hilary Masters. The acclaimed writer's new novel, Elegy for Sam Emerson (Southern Methodist University Press), is set in 1999 in Pittsburgh, its hero a 70-year-old Mount Washington restaurateur with a dying mother and a younger lover. But half the book unspools in chapter-ending "program notes" exploring Emerson's boyhood and young adulthood. These take place mostly in Manhattan—where Emerson visits his mother, a famous actress, and sometimes his father, a renowned war photographer—and in East Liverpool, Ohio, where he was raised by his waitress aunt. Masters, 78, a longtime professor of English and creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University, is best known for his 1982 memoir Last Stands: Notes From Memory, which chronicles life as the son of poet Edgar Lee Masters. On vacation with his wife, the writer Kathleen George, Masters spoke by phone from Providence, R.I., where he's been visiting summers for more than half a century.
http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/archive
.cfm?type=Book%20Review&action
=getComplete&ref=6483 | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | July 25
Carnegie Mellon University is known for its robotics and software engineering programs. Lesser known is the university's legacy of producing writers. The 2006-2007 season of Carnegie Mellon's Adamson Reading Series will feature an all-alumni line-up. ... All readings take place at 8 p.m. in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall on Carnegie Mellon's campus and are free and open to the public. The program is presented by the university's Creative Writing department.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/
pittsburghtrib/search/s_463218.html | back to top
Pittsburgh City Paper | July 20
"Counter/Mass Culture: the Beats to Hip-Hop" is a six-week advance-placement class for high school students taught by Carnegie Mellon University literary and cultural studies teaching associate Michael Rectenwald. Rectenwald grew up with punk and studied under Allen Ginsberg at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. His son is an aspiring hip-hop artist who goes by J-Rec. "I was trying to understand my experiences with countercultures and my son’s interest in hip hop," Rectenwald says. Although he normally teaches classes in the politics of knowledge, particularly 19th-century cultures of science, Rectenwald developed a class to trace major countercultural movements since World War II, compare them in a historical context and explore their social and literary values. Bob Dylan sits alongside The Clash as assigned listening; visits by local hip-hop performers and emcees are scheduled in.
http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/archive.cfm
?type=Art%20Briefs&action=getComplete&ref=6444 | back to top
Information Technology
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | August 1
When Dan Rossi cooks, there's always a chance he'll grab a wrong ingredient and have to improvise a chef's surprise. "Sure, I have a system of where I put things away, but nobody's perfect," said Rossi of Squirrel Hill, a database system administrator at Carnegie Mellon University, who has been blind since age 7. "A can of corn feels remarkably similar to a can of beans." Engineers at Carnegie Mellon are developing affordable scanning systems to give blind people greater independence in daily activities, such as cooking, grocery shopping or riding a bus. "The single biggest thing to a blind person is to have independence, to never have to ask a sighted person for assistance," said project leader Priya Narasimhan, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. Narasimhan's venture is called Trinetra, a Sanskrit word referring to the powerful third eye of the Hindu god Shiva that provides light even when the two other eyes are engulfed in darkness. Narasimhan thought of the idea for Trinetra two years ago when she noticed blind people struggling to catch a bus on a snowy night in Oakland. She enlisted Rossi and Carnegie Mellon graduate students Patrick Lanigan, Aaron Paulos and Andrew Williams to design a system that would help the estimated 8 million Americans who are visually impaired "read" product labels or even track public transportation.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib
/news/health/s_464203.html | back to top
Computerworld | July 28
The U.S. Department of State is on track to start issuing passports with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips next week, despite warnings from some security experts that such systems could be accessed or tracked by hackers. The new program will start in the Denver passport office and be rolled out across the country over the next several years. All American passports are expected to include RFID chips containing personal information by 2017. ... Some security experts have expressed concern over the use of a chip that doesn't require contact with a scanner. The new passport can be read about four inches from a scanner. ... Other experts downplayed such potential flaws. "The only vaguely legitimate arguments I have heard against E-passports is that they might permit someone two feet away from you to learn that you are American and blow you up, or permit someone two feet away to learn whatever might be stored on the E-passport," said Michael Shamos, a professor who specializes in security issues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?
command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName
=privacy&articleId=9002076&taxonomyId=84 | back to top
BusinessWeek | July 28
If you've been delighted by your iPod, intrigued with your TiVo, or frustrated by your mobile phone, then you have encountered the work of an interaction designer. And an interaction designer, most likely, has crafted the experience we have with many of the products and services we encounter every day. Dan Saffer, a senior interaction designer at Adaptive Path, leads us through an exploration of this emerging discipline. ... My first experience with interaction design took place when I was a teenager in the mid-1980s, about 15 years before I ever heard the term "interaction design." I designed and ran a game "online," meaning users dialed in to my Apple IIe using their 1200 baud modems. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing at the time. But around the mid-1990s, others certainly knew what was happening. Carnegie Mellon established its interaction design program in 1994. Agencies started offering it as service (albeit often mislabeled as "information architecture"), and software companies started hiring people for these roles. Right before the internet bubble burst, interaction design started to come into its own, and it began to get known.
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate
/content/jul2006/id20060728_334148
.htm?chan=top+news_top+news | back to top
FCW | July 24
From Madison, Wis., to Corpus Christi, Texas, hundreds of municipalities nationwide are pursuing a range of strategies for delivering Wi-Fi despite legal challenges from traditional telecommunications companies wary of competition. The flurry of activity, however, belies a Wi-Fi market that remains mostly untapped. A standard delivery model has not emerged yet—if one ever will. ... But how should municipalities provide Wi-Fi? Via a city-owned service? A public/private partnership? A single service provider? Multiple ones? "There is no one way to do this," said Jon Peha, associate director for wireless systems at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Wireless and Broadband Networking. "Do you try to blanket the city? Do you focus on certain areas? If so, which areas? Do you make this an entirely free service run by the city with tax dollars? Do you use advertising revenue? Do you use subscription revenue?" Peha said cities should think hard before ceding control to a single provider that promises free service or other concessions. "Free service is nice, but lack of competition tends to bite you in the long run," he said. "This is a time for experimentation. We don’t know yet what will be effective."
http://www.fcw.com/
article95330-07-24-06-Print | back to top
Network World | July 24
Who needs steel when you've got storage? Not Pittsburgh transplant Greg Ganger, that's for sure. Ganger, a Carnegie Mellon University lab director, has grand plans for creating highly automated and cost-effective ways to manage large-scale storage infrastructures. The backdrop for his research will be Carnegie Mellon's new Data Center Observatory (DCO), the latest evidence that high-tech is becoming as important to Pittsburgh as steel once was. Run by the university's Parallel Data Laboratory (PDL), a renowned storage research center, the DCO will serve another role. Various campus constituencies will use DCO computing and storage resources for computationally intensive projects. After all, says the affable Ganger, to figure out how to build large-scale self-managing (-healing, and -tuning) storage systems that work for complex, sprawling infrastructures, you need firsthand access to such an environment-complete with live production data. Bringing in some university computing operations and creating a full-blown data center made sense, Ganger says. "If the computational clusters were elsewhere, then . . . a lot of the real problems weren't going to show up," he explains.
http://www.networkworld.com/you/
2006/072406-you-workplaces-carnegie.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | July 24
Pittsburgh has already made grim plans to deal with the possibility of a zombie invasion, if George Romero's "Land of the Dead" is to be believed. But maybe we're too focused on the undead, and missing the menace right under our nose. Your laptop, your clock radio, that cute little Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner--they could all be watching you. Waiting. For the signal. Dr. Daniel H. Wilson, 28, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon's world-renowned Robotics Institute, thinks we should get ready for the great "Uprising." ... What started as a goofy conversation at the bar has taken on a life of its own, transforming into a series of books and a movie script, recently optioned by Paramount. At the moment, Mike Myers is attached to star. ... So he snooped around one of the great repositories of robotics research in the world--the professors and researchers at Carnegie Mellon. Wilson knew he could find the latest dope on robot development, and make sure his book of "tips" was scientifically accurate. "It's ridiculous, the reach and breadth of research going on at Carnegie Mellon," says Wilson. "Some of it is really sexy--the biologically inspired robots. They've got water-striders, geckos and bugs, and of course Howie's (Chosett) group with the snake robots that are writhing around and going in water and climbing up cracks in walls. "But there's also a lot of research in vision systems or just good AI (Artificial Intelligence). The Machine Learning Department--they do some really insane fundamental research that makes these machines actually able to learn and solve problems."
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/
pittsburghtrib/living/movies/s_463107.html | back to top
HPCwire | July 21
During our coverage of the High Performance Computing and Communication conference in March, HPCwire conducted an interview with Douglass Post, chief scientist of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program, where he talked about the major challenges currently facing high performance computing. As the HPC community awaits DARPA's selection of the winners of the High Productivity Computer Systems Phase 2 competition, it may useful to review these challenges in order to understand some of the context of the impending decision. Below is an excerpt of this interview. ***Douglass Post is a member of the senior technical staff of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute.
http://www.hpcwire.com
/hpc/734182.html | back to top
Environment
Cincinnati Enquirer | July 24
The FutureGen project will create more than 1,000 construction jobs and at least 100 research and operating jobs. Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania agreed to create the Ohio River Valley Coal Research Consortium, enlisting their major universities-including the University of Kentucky, Ohio State, Carnegie Mellon, Penn State and the University of Cincinnati. The project is all about proving coal gasification can produce electricity cleanly on a large scale and that energy companies can prevent worsening climate change by "sequestering" carbon dioxide in deep underground geologic formations that are plentiful in the U.S.
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article
?AID=/20060724/EDIT01/607240343/1090/EDIT | back to top
Regional Impact
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | July 26
Pittsburgh Public Schools has formed a task force of 23 educators, parents and community leaders to reform its high schools. The group will travel around the country to see the best kinds of high schools, including single-sex schools, schools within a school, those with special themes and those linked to community colleges. ... The task force's goal is to reinvent the district's schools as part of Superintendent Mark Roosevelt's "Excellence for All" plan--a road map for improving student achievement in the district. One of its goals is to improve the graduation rate by 10 percentage points by the end of the 2008-09 school year. A study by the RAND Corp. estimated the district's graduation rate at 64 percent. Task force members are: ... Alan Lesgold, dean of the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh; David J. Malone, president and CEO of Gateway Financial; Indira Nair, vice provost for education at Carnegie Mellon University; Ronald D. Painter, CEO of the Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board; Jeanne Pearlman, senior program officer for education and the arts at The Pittsburgh Foundation.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/
pittsburghtrib/news/today/s_463433.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Business Times | July 21
Conditions locally have never been better for private equity transactions from outright acquisitions to backing management-led buyouts. Or so it seems. ... Even a new type of young entrepreneur has been identified. Not every recent business school graduate can start a software company but many might want to run their own business. Institutions of higher education--notably the graduate schools of business at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University--are preaching the notion of search funds. That means raising money from investors to buy an already thriving business and eventually buying out these backers from the profits. This has been happening for years in Boston and San Francisco, but the first official such local entity is Shadyside-based Reticle Partners, formed last year by two Carnegie Mellon alums who raised their money and are narrowing the field of candidate companies.
http://pittsburgh.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/
stories/2006/07/24/focus3.html?t=printable | back to top
Local News Stories
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | July 26
Dropping from 29th to 32nd on this year's list of the best cities for singles, Pittsburgh once again lagged in job growth, "coolness" and nightlife. A low cost of living, however, was one factor in its favor. ... Forbes.com used seven measurements this year to arrive at its rankings: projected job growth, number of bars and clubs, culture, cost of living, number of singles as a percentage of the metro area population, online dating and amount of "coolness" as measured by Carnegie Mellon University's Kevin Stolarick and Richard Florida, formerly of Carnegie Mellon.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/06207/708521-28.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | July 26
Corporate America wants graduates who've earned master of business administration degrees and is willing to pay more than last year, say local business schools. The average starting salary of a 2006 graduate with an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business is $94,935, almost 7 percent higher than for the 2005 graduates, Ken Keeley, executive director of the Tepper School's Career Opportunities Center, said Tuesday. "Across the board, the economy has definitely emerged from the hiring downturn we saw two years ago," Keeley said. The bad news for those graduate students is the debt they carry into the real world. At Carnegie Mellon, the average student loan debt of the MBA graduate is $59,340, said Geof Becker, a Tepper spokesman. A national survey shows it takes them an average of 2 years and nine months to repay the loan, Becker said.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/
pittsburghtrib/business/s_463400.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | July 21
Since June, "Segway in Paradise" has offered people of all ages a chance to see Pittsburgh from the top of a Segway. With it, Pittsburgh joins a growing list of cities across the country--and the world --that have added motorized, self-propelled scooter tours to their tourism itinerary. "I thought, 'What better place for the tour than Downtown Pittsburgh?' " said Earlene Woods, 48, of Ross, who co-founded the business with a friend. "There's a lot to see, a lot to do, a lot of different terrain, the bridges." Segways, the brainchild of inventor Dean Kamen, are remarkably intuitive, self-balancing electric scooters that were first marketed in 2001, said Brett Browning, a Carnegie Mellon University robotics systems scientist. The device has two wheels and an upright column, with handlebars attached. There is no gas pedal, no steering wheel. It goes in the direction the rider leans.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib
/news/cityregion/s_462801.html | back to top
International News Stories
PC Advisor | August 3
The FBI is stepping up its fight against online fraud with an initiative called Operation Identity Shield, according to a senior official. The project, which is already in operation, is one of a growing number of collaborations between the FBI and the technology industry. "It's sort of an evolution of what we've seen in the phishing area," said Daniel Larkin, chief of the FBI's Internet Complaint Center, speaking at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas yesterday. ... The FBI realized in the late 1990s that the only way to fight cybercrime was through public-private sector alliances like Operation Identity Shield, but it's taken time to build trust between the two sectors, Larkin said. By dedicating an agent to working with Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and signing a memorandum of understanding to make it clear that the FBI would protect sensitive information, the two organizations eventually built a fruitful partnership. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, CERT helped the FBI identify a virus in the email account of one of the 19 terrorists associated with the attacks.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news
/index.cfm?newsid=6738 | back to top
The Peninsula | August 3
Ahead of its opening in mid 2007, the Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP) is to host two fascinating and informative events this August and September in Doha: Insight into Innovation and Explore QSTP. ... While the first day's activities are geared towards the business community, the second day of Explore QSTP will focus on education-based seminars, in line with its strong ties to Qatar Foundation's Academic Institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University Qatar, Georgetown University, Texas A&M University, Weill Cornell Medical College and Virginia Commonwealth University.
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news
.asp?section=Local_News&subsection=Qatar+News&
month=August2006&file=Local_News2006080333727.xml | back to top
CSO (Computerworld) | August 2
The Australian Information Security Summit begins today with the keynote address from Dr. Paul Dorey, member of the Global CSO Council, an IT security thinktank based at Carnegie Mellon's CyLab. Dorey, chief information security officer at global oil company BP and chair of the UK Institute of Information Security Professionals, will detail the latest international trends and developments in information security.
http://www.csoonline.com.au/index
.php/id;1951522350;fp;16;fpid;0 | back to top
International Herald Tribune (Bloomberg) | July 31
Central bankers around the world must be getting envious of China. Some of them might even be feeling a pang of existential guilt as they cash their paychecks. After all, what purpose are they serving by their frequent tinkering with interest rates and their "open-mouth operations" when the world's fourth-biggest economy seems to be managing perfectly well without a monetary policy? China's economic growth has accelerated the past four quarters to reach a jaw-dropping 11.3 percent in the three months ending June 30. ... There is now considerable debate in China's policy-making circles about an April paper written by economists Marvin Goodfriend at Carnegie Mellon University and Eswar Prasad at the International Monetary Fund. The study, titled "A Framework for Independent Monetary Policy in China," recommends operational flexibility for the Chinese central bank subject to explicit guidelines from the government on what it wants monetary policy to accomplish. ... "Bank managers cannot be asked to lend prudently, with an expectation that loans be repaid and bank capital preserved, when managers are rewarded by the political system for directing fiscal transfers to state firms, and then largely excused for loan losses in the state sector," Goodfriend and Prasad said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/
07/31/bloomberg/sxmukherjee.php | back to top
Gulf Times | July 31
As one of the few higher education institutions in the region to offer internship programs, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar goes further in extending employment opportunities for all its students.
This summer, 25 percent of the interns are Qatari nationals, who are currently completing their four-year undergraduate degree in either business administration or computer science at Carnegie Mellon Qatar. "Our internship program provides students an equal opportunity to gain valuable work experience and make business contacts with potential employers, while allowing employers to prescreen the next crop of graduates," said Khadra Dulaeh, director of professional development at the university.
http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.
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The Times of India | July 29
The ambitious 21st century Gurukulams that aim to provide better educational and employment opportunities to rural students, will start functioning from October 2 this year in five centers across the state. The centers at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, Dravidian University, Kuppam and Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Anantapur, will have 100 seats each and the Kakatiya University, Warangal, and Nagarjuna University, Nagarjuna Sagar, centers 50 seats each in the first phase. ... "There is a lot of talent at the rural level, which is not tapped because of lack of proper opportunities to the students. These Gurukulams will be able to find brilliant young minds and provide them the necessary training and preparation that will help them go for higher education or get good jobs," said Prof. Raj Reddy from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
articleshow/1823017.cms | back to top
The Sydney Morning Herald | July 28
You know the kind of day. You set time aside to finish a report, only to be constantly interrupted by crises in the office, whining colleagues, calls from family, gossip at the coffee machine and saucy emails. You end up writing the thing at home, after the kids are asleep. For more and more people, every day feels like this--one long string of interruptions with only the gaps in between to get anything done. ... Predicting an individual's interruptability has become the focus of a great deal of study. ... Scott Hudson at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has tried to figure this out by painstakingly measuring everything from the number of people in an office, to whether a person was typing at their keyboard and whether a door was open or shut, and asking people to estimate the cost of an interruption. After placing microphones and sensors around the office and interrupting at different times, he was surprised to find that the most important single factor in their interruptability is whether or not someone is talking. If they were, he discovered, there was a 76 percent chance they didn't want to be interrupted. That's about as good as human observers, he points out, who on average guess with only 77 percent accuracy that a person doesn't want to be disturbed. "What your mother taught you was correct," Mr. Hudson says. "Don't interrupt when someone is talking."
http://businessnetwork.smh.com.au/
articles/2006/07/27/5398.html | back to top
India Times | July 26
Hyderabad-Based International Institute of Information Technology is joining hands with the Carnegie Mellon University to offer executive program in management of software systems and development. The program, developed by the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon, helps to address issues hampering a software manager's ability to deliver a quality product in the most profitable manner. The course will not only focus on the software or technical aspects but also discuss problems related to people, said Lynn Robert Carter, principal fellow, Institute for Software Research International, Carnegie Mellon.
http://infotech.indiatimes.com/
articleshow/1808961.cms | back to top
New Scientist | July 22
"A picture is worth a thousand words" may sum up how people with autism see the world. Brains scans of people with the condition show that they place excessive reliance on the parietal cortex, which analyses images, even when interpreting sentences free of any imagery. In other people, the image center appears to be active only when the sentences contain imagery. ... Researchers led by Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, scanned volunteers' brains while they were deciding if certain statements were true or false. Some of the statements relied on analysis of language alone, while others could only be understood by considering the imagery they conjured up. "The number 8, when rotated 90 degrees, looks like a pair of spectacles", for instance, needs both arithmetic interpretation and visualization of the rotated number. Just says that the observed over-reliance on the parietal cortex might have arisen to compensate for poor brain connections to the prefrontal cortex, which interprets language.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9593-how
-people-with-autism-miss-the-big-picture.html | back to top
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