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August
25, 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 August 18 to August 24,
Carnegie Mellon Media Relations counted 183 references to the university in worldwide
publications. Here is a sample.
National News Stories
The New York Times | August 23
The New York Times (CNET) | August 22
The New York Times | August 21
The New York Times | August 20
The Wall Street Journal | August 18
Education for Leadership
Uniontown Herald Standard | August 21
Arts and Humanities
House & Garden | September 2006
Scientific American Mind | August 2006
Information Technology
Network World | August 21
Chicago Tribune | August 18
Environment
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | August 20
Regional Impact
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | August 21
Houston Chronicle (AP) | August 17
Local News Stories
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | August 23
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | August 23
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | August 20
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | August 19
International News Stories
Gulf Times | August 23
Builder AU (CNET) | August 21
Trade Arabia | August 19
International Herald Tribune (The New York Times) | August 19
The Peninsula | August 19
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National News Stories
The New York Times | August 23
When AOL researchers released three months' worth of users' query logs to a publicly accessible Web site late last month, Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell, downloaded the data right away. But when a firestorm over privacy breaches erupted, he decided against using it. ... William W. Cohen, an associate research professor in the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, said the AOL query logs could be invaluable for researchers working in the field of personalization. "Someone's past search history can tell you a lot about what they're interested in," he said. Professor Cohen, who takes annual vacations near Charleston, S.C., used himself as an example. "By knowing what someone searched for in the past, you can do a lot better at answering a query,” he said. "If you look at my recent searches, they might have something to do with vacation homes, Folly Beach and car rentals. So if I search for seafood restaurants, it's more likely I'll be looking for one in the Charleston area, and if I say 'Charleston,' it's much more likely to be South Carolina than West Virginia." At the same time, Professor Cohen shares Professor Kleinberg's view about the AOL query logs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/23/
technology/23search.html?_r=1&oref=slogin | back to top
The New York Times (CNET) | August 22
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are using custom computer chips to tackle a problem in speech recognition that software largely hasn't been able to solve. Speech recognition has long been a computer industry dream--but it never has become practical reality for most computer users. But researcher Rob Rutenbar argues that using a custom processor rather than software will improve speech recognition speed and lower its power consumption. "It's time to liberate speech recognition from the unreasonable limitations of software," Rutenbar said here Tuesday at the Hot Chips conference. He likened the situation to the now-widespread use of special-purpose hardware for graphics. Faster chip-based speech recognition will enable video players to search rapidly for Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "Hasta la vista, baby," in a movie, he said. And lower power consumption will enable a cell phone to take dictated notes.
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET
_2100-1008_3-6108417.html | back to top
The New York Times | August 21
As foreign investors blanket the country, India is preparing with a ramp-up of its own: an expansion of its security laws to thwart possible threats from rapid globalization. Amid perhaps overly sensitive concerns that some foreign investments might step into areas of national security, the government is drafting legislation to block overseas companies from doing business in India if they are perceived as security risks. ... Unlike the United States or Europe, India does not have a formal framework for overseeing security concerns in economic decisions. "Because of the rise of terrorism, security clampdowns are intruding on decision-making in most democracies in the world," said Dr. V. S. Arunachalam, a robotics expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a former military adviser to the Indian government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/24/business/
worldbusiness/24security.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref
=slogin&adxnnlx=1156428456-AWQ1lz2VtF4jKSzC1O9yxg | back to top
The New York Times | August 20
It's a truism that in a great many businesses, just a small fraction of the stocked items account for the bulk of sales. But will it always be this way? Chris Anderson thinks not. In "The Long Tail," his best-selling new book, Mr. Anderson says the digital revolution is already making the big sellers less important compared with also-rans, particularly among cultural works, because the cost of storing and distributing movies, music and written matter has plummeted. The argument has broad ramifications because online ordering can obliterate some of the limits traditionally imposed by time and space. ... Mr. Anderson is clearly onto something, but "The Long Tail" has drawn its share of criticism. ... On the other hand, Michael D. Smith, an associate professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon who has studied Amazon.com, asserts that "purchases from the long tail are substantial and represent a big shift versus what we saw in a purely 'brick and mortar' world."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20
/business/yourmoney/20cont.html | back to top
The Wall Street Journal | August 18
For the past 10 years I've pooh-poohed the idea of a digital divide, but now I realize there is one and I'm on the wrong side of it. The phrase itself is more than a decade old, and seems to have morphed in meaning as the years, and the world, have moved on. At first it had to do with whether people had computers; others talked more about whether those computers were in the home (one side of the divide), or somewhere like a school or public library (the other). ... A virtuous circle is being created by an explosion in cheap, fast Internet connections in part of the world, in turn feeding user demand, and user-generated content, for these kinds of services and activities. ... Hidebound by government regulations, expensive satellite links to the Internet or lucrative monopolies, a lot of developing countries in Africa and Asia provide broadband connections only in name, says Rahul Tongia, a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S., who has studied this kind of thing. "I fully agree there is not one digital divide per se," he says. High among the divides, he says, is a decent connection -- or what he calls "meaningful broadband."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB11558329
2871138423-search.html?KEYWORDS=%22the
+need+for+speed%22&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month | back to top
Education for Leadership
Uniontown Herald Standard | August 21
Without knowledge comes lack of prosperity, and without travel, knowledge falls by the wayside. One local student would not be a person without either. Traveling halfway around the world to Asia this summer, Nicholas Yoder of Smock, a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, spent two and a half weeks in foreign countries. He spent time in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Macau, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Yoder traveled to Asia without the trip being a part of a school program or a family trip. He went on his own accord, using his own money to experience the culture and people, and, as a business major, pay attention to the Asian economy. "I worked and used part of my savings to take the trip," said Yoder. The reason for the trip and his extended stay is two-fold. "I went for two and half weeks to familiarize myself with all the aspects of travel," said Yoder. "If you only go for a week or so, you just begin to learn your way around and how to deal with not knowing the language." Yoder will correct that language barrier at Carnegie Mellon University. "I will begin to learn Chinese in the fall," said Yoder.
http://www.heraldstandard.com/site/news.cfm
?newsid=17089097&BRD=2280&PAG
=461&dept_id=480247&rfi=6 | back to top
Arts and Humanities
House & Garden | September 2006
"I had never designed a garden before, but why not try? says artist Mel Bochner, who teamed up with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh to create a garden at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. Perched on the roof of a campus library, the Kraus Campo garden is named for its donors, Peter Kraus and Jill Gansman Kraus, and a campo, an Italian central gathering place. *** This article is not yet available online. The magazine can be accessed at:
http://www.houseandgarden.com/ | back to top
Scientific American Mind | August 2006
Cognitive scientists don't often get a chance to save lives. This summer James Staszewski will continue to do so. The U.S. Army originally approached Staszewski, a cognitive psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, eight years ago to troubleshoot the training program for personnel who would be detecting land mines in war and peacekeeping zones. Trainees had fared abysmally in exercises, catching only 10 to 20 percent of mock mines. Staszewski had been researching how people acquire exceptional memory and calculation skills. His studies upheld the idea that expertise accrues from experience, so in principle good minesweeping should be teachable.
http://www.sciammind.com/article.cfm?articleID
=0001ACA6-C3F8-14C8-826383414B7F0000 | back to top
Information Technology
Network World | August 21
The New Data Center model promises that one day your IT infrastructure will be self-managing. As executive director of Carnegie Mellon University's Parallel Data Laboratory and its state-of-the-art Data Center Observatory (DCO), Bill Courtright is working to make that promise a reality. Under his management, researchers at this Pittsburgh institution are exploring automated storage management. Their test bed, the DCO, also is a live data center serving university users. They call their work the Self-* (self star) Storage project, with the asterisk a placeholder for the words configuring, organizing, tuning, healing and, of course, managing. Courtright first must understand which management tasks consume the most time. *** To read the interview with Bill Courtright go to the following link.
http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2006
/ndc5/082106-ndc-carnegie-mellon-storage-expert.html | back to top
Chicago Tribune | August 18
A hijack attempt foiled. Authorities surely had monitored the suspects' behavior on the Web. Laptops were seized, Internet cafes given a good going over. Worries about privacy vanished, smothered in relief. Privacy as we once knew it is gone and won't come back. It vanished the way America's western frontier did almost 120 years ago--the result of countless individual decisions as much as by government action. The passing of the western frontier would have gone largely unnoticed if historian Frederick Jackson Turner hadn't written an influential work suggesting that with the frontier's closing, a wellspring of American individualism had dried up. ... When public safety is not at issue, regulation carries smaller risks. Carnegie Mellon University's M. Granger Morgan and Elaine Newton proposed a thoughtful list of measures that if applied to databases concerning individuals could preserve some breathing space for privacy and even anonymity. It includes things like using distributed rather than centralized systems for storing information, avoiding making information available to system users in real time and purging data as often as possible.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/
opinion/chi-0608180319aug18,1,3078863.story
?coll=chi-opinionfront-hed | back to top
Environment
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | August 20
It's like pouring money down the drain--or downhill in this case. The Southwestern Pennsylvania Water Authority pipes millions of gallons of water downhill from storage tanks. But the energy generated by the flowing water goes to waste, said Joe Simatic, manager for the past 15 years. "All this kinetic energy dissipates, and we just need to turn it into mechanical energy," Simatic said. To capture that energy, Simatic hopes to construct a mini-power plant that would recover the energy released by the falling water. The authority, which serves 50,000 customers in Greene, Fayette and Washington counties, would then sell the energy to cut its costs. All Simatic has to do is convince the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to grant the authority $309,000 to build the plant, called a "micro hydro turbine energy recovery system." It would be a first in Pennsylvania. ... "Every additional bit of electricity generation that we can get by not burning oil or using coal helps," said David Dzombak, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib
/news/cityregion/s_466875.html | back to top
Regional Impact
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | August 21
Three years after 50 million people were left in the dark, Pennsylvania's power grid operator, which prevented outages from affecting most of Pennsylvania in August 2003, has taken action to prevent future electricity blackouts. PJM Interconnection, the Valley Forge, Montgomery County, company that operates the power grid in 13 states including most of Pennsylvania, has signed agreements to share information with neighboring grid operators, including the Midwest Independent Service Operator, to help reduce the chance of blackouts. ... In the wake of the Aug. 14, 2003, blackout, debate rages over investment in transmission-line upgrades. Transmission lines are high-voltage power lines that carry electricity from the power plant to the utility company that distributes it to customers. "Not a lot has been done in three years to make us more secure than we had been," said Lester Lave, co-director of Carnegie Mellon University Electricity Industry Center. "There have been some improvements on the human side, but nothing else."
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/06233/715125-28.stm | back to top
Houston Chronicle (AP) | August 17
The apparent election of at least one dissident investor to the H.J. Heinz Co. board has raised questions about how a new director might work with incumbents after a brutal proxy fight that cost the food maker at least $12 million. Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz and his Trian Group claim to have won at least two seats on the 12-member board, based on preliminary results. Heinz says the dissidents may have secured one or two seats, but not the five they sought. The tentative results emerged Wednesday at Heinz's annual shareholder meeting at the Pittsburgh Hilton, where about 1,000 investors gathered after months of bickering between the two sides over ways to improve Heinz's performance. ... Proxy fights typically drive up the share prices of targeted companies, regardless of whether dissidents are elected to their boards, according to Robert M. Dammon, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. Only about a third of proxy contests succeed at putting dissidents on boards, but the battles tend to increase share prices by about 10 percent, he said.
http://www.chron.com/disp/
story.mpl/ap/fn/4124740.html | back to top
Local News Stories
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | August 23
Two years ago, the finances of the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts showed more red than the paintings on its walls. Since its Jan. 1 merger with Pittsburgh Filmmakers, however, the center no longer projects a deficit, no longer needs oversight by the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office and has developed what may be a model for other financially struggling nonprofit groups. ... "What got the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in trouble was they wanted to be the Carnegie Museum instead of the focus for artists of Pittsburgh," said Jerry Coltin, director of the arts management program at Carnegie Mellon University. "They were trying to do very upscale exhibitions on a scale of what a museum would do."
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/
pittsburghtrib/news/today/s_466876.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | August 23
The Cultural District would become a destination to visit around the clock--not just to see Tony Bennett or a Broadway show--according to the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's new strategic plan. Under its five-year plan, the trust would add attractions to encourage "impulse" visits in the 14-block area of Downtown called the Cultural District. "An impulse visit would be considered a spontaneous visit rather than to see the Cultural District as a place only to see a performance or an art gallery," said Trust spokeswoman Veronica Corpuz. "We're looking to create a 24/7 neighborhood." ... The trust's goal of developing housing and spicing up the nightlife around the clock drew support from Scott Izzo, director of the Richard King Mellon Foundation, and Jerry Coltin, director of the arts management program at Carnegie Mellon University. ... Coltin's students run an exhibition and performance space, called Future Tenant, in a building owned by the trust on Liberty Avenue, so he's familiar with the scene in the Cultural District.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x
/pittsburghtrib/s_467250.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | August 20
In the past, when students were accused of cheating, harassing a peer or other wrongdoing in a school, administrators, teachers and parents worked together to solve the problem. But in several recent local cases, police were called to investigate matters that used to be handled within schools, and it is a trend reflected nationwide, experts said. ... "It's part of a zero-tolerance extreme kind of trend," said Al Blumstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, who studies crime trends. "What used to be a private matter handled internally is now a public police matter. A child bringing a gun into school is certainly a serious police matter, but some of these other incidents really aren't."
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib
/news/cityregion/s_466885.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | August 19
Almost a week later, state Sen. Jane C. Orie, R-McCandless, will convene the first public meeting of her seven-person Senate panel, charged with exploring how Pennsylvania has spent the $11 billion tobacco windfall it received in 2001. ... Some members of the local technology community will be on hand to offer their perspectives on how the tobacco dollars have been used to grow Pittsburgh's life sciences industry. ... Also scheduled to speak are private equity firm Birchmere Venture's Gary Glausser, and members of the academic community including Carnegie Mellon University Provost Mark Kamlet, Steven Reis, M.D., professor of cardiology at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Pitt/UPMC Cancer Institute's Maryann Donovan, M.D.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/06231/714713-96.stm | back to top
International News Stories
Gulf Times | August 23
Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP) has announced that Qatar Foundation's vice-president for education, Dr. Abdulla al-Thani, and Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar dean, Dr. Chuck Thorpe will deliver seminars during 'Explore QSTP', scheduled on September 4 and 5 at the Ritz. The event is open to the public from 9:30a.m. to 5:30p.m. on both days. The opening ceremony will be addressed by QSTP chairman Dr. Abdulla al-Kubaisi. ... Dr. Chuck Thorpe's seminar is titled 'The Career Path of an Idea: From Classroom to Community'. Pointing out that universities in Qatar like Carnegie Mellon are driven by research, he stated that Carnegie Mellon in Qatar faculty uses their research to embellish their teaching. "Our students are involved in research projects in classes and in internships. In order for our research to have a real impact, we work hard on moving it to commercialization," he said while describing QSTP as a vital link in that process. Activities on day one are geared towards the business community and government, while the second day is aimed at the general public.
http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.
aspx?cu_no=2&item_no=104019&version
=1&template_id=36&parent_id=16 | back to top
Builder AU (CNET) | August 21
While most would agree that Google has set the current standard for Web search, some technologists say even better tools are on the horizon thanks to advances in artificial intelligence. Search is like oxygen for many people now, and considering Google's breakthroughs in Web document analysis, supercomputing and Internet advertising, it can be easy to think this is as good as it gets. But some entrepreneurs in artificial intelligence (AI) say that Google is not the end of history. Rather, its techniques are a baseline of where we're headed next. ... "This is the beginning for the Web being at work for you in a smart way, and taking on the tedious tasks for you," said Alain Rappaport, chief executive officer and founder of Medstory, a search engine for medical information that went into public beta in July. ... Rappaport said one of the more recent progressions in AI has been in moving from relying on humans to catalog connections between various data to programming computers to do the work, or what he calls the automation of knowledge structure. Tom Mitchell, chair of machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, calls it machine learning for statistical language processing, or learning algorithms that allow computers to read text.
http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/
Spying_an_intelligent_search_engine/
0,39028227,39269043,00.htm | back to top
Trade Arabia | August 19
Dr. Jonathan Caulkins, professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, has been awarded the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Investigator Award in Health Policy Research. His project 'Synthesizing Lessons for Drug Policy' and Policy Research, focuses on modeling and analyzing problems pertaining to drugs, crime and violence, and how policies affect those problems, a Gulf Times report said. The Investigator Awards program, established in 1992 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), recognizes outstanding innovations in addressing pressing health care issues, encourages researchers to improve policymaking and has invested more than $27 million in health policy research.
http://www.tradearabia.com/tanews/
newsdetails_snEDU_article109815.html | back to top
International Herald Tribune (The New York Times) | August 19
The latest chapter in America's long war on drugs--a six-year, $4.7 billion effort to slash Colombia's coca crop--has left the price, quality and availability of cocaine on American streets virtually unchanged. The effort, begun in 2000 and known as Plan Colombia, had a specific goal of halving this country's coca crop in five years. That has not happened. Instead, drug policy experts say, coca, the essential ingredient for cocaine, has been redistributed to smaller and harder-to-reach plots, adding to the cost and difficulty of the drug war. ... The lingering question is whether America's drug problem would be worse today had the drug war, nearly 40 years in the making, never been waged. That may be unanswerable. What is clear is that the war on drugs, the original open-ended war against an elusive and ill-defined enemy, has moved inexorably onward, propelled by decades of mostly unflagging political support on both sides of the Congressional aisle. Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, echoing other analysts, estimates that the drug war has cost American taxpayers upward of $40 billion annually in recent years, though there is no comprehensive government tally of all its state and federal spending.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/
08/19/america/web.0819coca.php | back to top
The Peninsula | August 19
RasGas Company Limited held a luncheon celebrating the successful completion of its Summer Internship Program on August 10 at the Four Seasons Hotel, Doha. The Summer Internship Program was launched by RasGas in 2006 with the key objective of providing students with working experience to help them bridge between academics and real life applications. This program was also designed to help support the values and mission of the education reform in Qatar, strengthen the relationship between industry and universities and promote technical development of Nationals. ... To honor the students for their hard work over the summer, the celebration lunch was attended by key RasGas Senior Directors, Members of the University Advisory Committee, and Distinguished Guests from a number of participating higher education institutions, notably Dr. Jehan Al Meer, Director of the Higher Educational Institute, Dr. Hamid Al Midfa, Associate President of Qatar University, Dr. James Holste, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of Texas A&M University in Qatar, Dr. Chuck Bowman, Interim Dean of Texas A&M University in Qatar and Dr. Chuck Thorpe, Dean of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp
?section=Business_News&subsection=Local+Business&
month=August2006&file=Business_News2006081915847.xml | back to top
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