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December
2 , 2005
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 November 18 - December 1,
Carnegie Mellon Media Relations counted 321
references to the university in worldwide publications. Here is a sample.
National News Stories
The New York Times | December 1
BusinessWeek | November 30
Forbes | November 30
The New York Times | November 29
BusinessWeek | November 28
PBS Newshour Extra | November 28
Science Magazine | November 25
The New York TImes | November 22
BusinessWeek | November 22
Discovery News | November 22
The Wall Street Journal | November 21
Student Experience
The Boston Globe | November 30
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 25
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 24
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 18
Arts and Humanities
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 30
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 28
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 27
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 27
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 24
The Guardian | November 22
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 21
North Jersey Media Group | November 20
Information Technology
Inside Bay Area | December 1
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 27
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 26
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 23
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 18
Biotechnology
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 21
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 21
Environment
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 27
Environmental Science & Technology Magazine
| November 2005
Regional Impact
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 26
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 20
Local News Stories
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | December 1
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 29
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 29
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 27
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 21
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 19
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 19
International News Stories
Gulf Times | November 30
The Toronto Star | November 27
The Australian | November 26
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National News Stories
The New York Times | December 1
[Computer addiction] specialists estimate that 6 percent to 10 percent
of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have
a dependency that can be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction,
and they are rushing to treat it. Yet some in the field remain skeptical
that heavy use of the Internet qualifies as a legitimate addiction,
and one academic expert called it a fad illness. ... "I think using
the Internet in certain ways can be quite absorbing, but I don't know
that it's any different from an addiction to playing the violin and
bowling," said Sara Kiesler, professor of computer
science and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon
University. "There is absolutely no evidence that spending time
online, exchanging e-mail with family and friends, is the least bit
harmful. We know that people who are depressed or anxious are likely
to go online for escape and that doing so helps them." It was Professor
Kiesler who called Internet addiction a fad illness. In her view, she
said, television addiction is worse. She added that she was completing
a study of heavy Internet users, which showed the majority had sharply
reduced their time on the computer over the course of a year, indicating
that even problematic use was self-corrective.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/
fashion/thursdaystyles/01addict.html | back to top
BusinessWeek | November 30
I have been teaching mechanical engineers the process of design for
more than 15 years. Traditional engineering design courses focus on
technology and not context. The result is a downstream focus on making
a design work rather than on identifying the best design in the first
place. By teaching engineering students qualitative methods to understand
the market, such as ethnography and task analysis, and then converting
that understanding to a value-based product specification, the downstream
process becomes more efficient and effective. Engineers find their comfort
zone in making technology work. They are very comfortable thinking about
how to refine and improve a design until it is optimized or at least
functions well under a set of given conditions. But a well-optimized
design is worthless if it does not meet the desires, or at least needs,
of the customer. ***This article was written by Jonathan Cagan,
professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon.
http://www.businessweek.com/
innovate/content/nov2005/id200
51128_963473.htm?chan=db | back to top
Forbes | November 30
Government regulators, sensing a major bureau-entrepreneurial opportunity,
are circling around the hedge fund industry. They are eager to wrap
it in the same coils of red tape that have snarled mutual funds, soured
the business climate and savaged the bottom line of investors. As a
general rule, bullishness for bureaucrats spells bearishness for everyone
else. ... And it’s no accident that hedge funds have burgeoned.
Hedge funds are nimble and alert to opportunity. They thrive on their
low overheads, low transaction costs and low regulatory burden. According
to Adam Lerrick, professor at Carnegie Mellon
University, they now account for more than half of the volume on the
New York Stock Exchange, endlessly spotting market failures, providing
efficiency and liquidity to the domestic and international capital markets.
http://www.forbes.com/2005/
11/29/hedge-fund-regulation-cx
_mf_1130hedgeoped.html | back to top
The New York Times | November 29
The question of whether there is a link between stress and cancer has
puzzled and intrigued researchers as well as patients. Study after study
has asked whether people who developed cancer had more stress in the
years before the diagnosis, and conversely, whether people who experienced
extreme stress were more likely to develop cancer. Investigators have
also explored possible mechanisms, asking, for example, whether stress
might suppress the immune system cells that might be needed to squelch
rogue cancer cells. And they have tried to determine whether the immune
system, the body's defense system, protects people from cancer in the
first place. ... It also is unclear whether stress reduction can improve
the prognosis of people who already have cancer. "If the question
is, Have we established it?, the answer is, Absolutely not," said
Sheldon Cohen, a psychology professor at Carnegie
Mellon University who has studied the role of support groups
and stress reduction in cancer. "If the question is, Would it work?,
we don't know that, either."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/
11/29/health/29canc.html | back to top
BusinessWeek | November 28
The Tepper School of Business has reduced the size of its full-time
class, making the admissions process more competitive. So what does
it take to get in? Laurie Stewart knows a lot about
what makes the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh stand out. In addition to serving as the current
executive director of Master's Admissions, she has worked for the school
since 1991, and she earned her MBA there in 1987. In between graduating
and returning, she worked for General Motors (GM ). Stewart says the
students who take the time to look within themselves to fully understand
their goals -- and how Tepper can help them -- tend to fare well in
the application process.
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/
nov2005/bs20051128_1917_bs037.htm | back to top
PBS Newshour Extra | November 28
Serious games [allow] players to act as problem solvers, political leaders
or humanitarian workers while learning information that might otherwise
come from a textbook or lecture. "You can go inside the role instead
of reading about it in a book," said Asi Burak, an educational
game producer, at the Serious Games Summit in Washington, D.C. Burak
is part of a team working on PeaceMaker, a game that seeks to teach
high school and college students about the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Instead of conquest and destruction, players try to achieve
peace and cohabitation -- an arguably much harder goal. The game should
be finished in the spring of 2006 and teachers are already asking for
copies to use in the classroom.***PeaceMaker is a student project from
Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/
features/july-dec05/games_11-28.html | back to top
Science Magazine | November 25
Anger is better for your health than fear, say researchers. The two
emotions are generally lumped together when it comes to stress-related
health risks. But psychiatrist Jennifer Lerner of Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and colleagues
have devised a way to sort them out through analysis of facial expressions.
... Because it's hard to trust the emotions described by a participant
under stress, Lerner says, the facial-analysis technique has "enormous
potential for getting a window on emotion."
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol310/
issue5752/r-samples.dtl#310/5752/1274b | back to
top
The New York TImes | November 22
According to the International Game Developers Association, fewer than
a dozen North American universities offered game-related programs five
years ago. Now, that figure is more than 100, with dozens more overseas.
At Carnegie Mellon University, a drama professor and a computer science
professor have created an entertainment technology program that now
enrolls 90 students and will soon open branches in Australia and South
Korea. ... Most of the game programs are so new that track records hardly
exist, but [Bing] Gordon, [chief creative officer at Electronic Arts]
said that the master's-level program in entertainment technology at
Carnegie Mellon had been the most successful in embracing a
multidisciplinary approach and producing work-ready students. That program,
which helped pioneer the field when it began in 1999, is led by the
odd couple of Donald Marinelli, a drama professor,
and Randy Pausch, a computer scientist.
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/
article?res=F70C17F6345A0C718EDDA80994DD404482 | back
to top
BusinessWeek | November 22
Remember when the computer viruses and worms that infected millions
of computers and brought networks to their knees were authored mainly
by smart-but-sociopathic teens and twentysomethings? Those, it turns
out, may have been the good old days. Attacks have become less widespread,
but they're more targeted, often hitting rather than increasingly protected
operating systems. Instead of kids writing attack code for nihilistic
glory, attacks increasingly are sponsored by criminals attempting to
steal information, whether corporate data or user account information
that can be used in fraud. That's the conclusion of a new survey of
the top vulnerabilities during 2005 by the Bethesda (Md.)-based SANS
Institute and two government-backed security agencies, US-CERT at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Britain's National Infrastructure
Security Coordinating Center.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/
content/nov2005/tc20051122_735580.htm | back to
top
Discovery News | November 22
New kinds of speech recognition and translation systems could one day
lead to tiny mouth and throat implants that would let a person instantly
speak other languages. The technologies are being developed at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of Karlsruhe
in Germany by Alex Waibel, professor of computer science
at both universities. "Our vision is to create technologies that
make the language barrier go away entirely," said Waibel. Recently
at Carnegie Mellon, Waibel and members of his team demonstrated speech
systems that they have refined over the last two years. One prototype
translates unspoken words. An arrangement of tiny electrodes fastened
to a person's cheek and throat track and measure electrical currents
generated by the muscle movement of silently mouthed words and convert
them into audible words in another language.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/
20051121/speech_tec.html | back to top
The Wall Street Journal | November 21
Employers often promote strong individual performers to supervisory
roles with little instruction. But people who excel among the rank-and-file
don't automatically have the skills or knowledge to manage well. Companies
call it "'on the job' training, but it's really trial by fire,"
says Robert Kelley, an adjunct management professor
at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business
in Pittsburgh. New managers mostly learn by trial and error, he adds,
and find the transition difficult. "They're very ill-prepared for
all the routine things that managers do."
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB113252950779302595-search.html | back to top
Student Experience
The Boston Globe | November 30
The 5,200 visitors at the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center
this week are hardly slaves to fashion. They're mostly scientists and
engineers, in town for the annual fall meeting of the Materials Research
Society. But for 20 minutes yesterday afternoon, the only materials
that interested them were made into tight dresses, short skirts, and
abbreviated tank tops, shown off by attractive models who know far more
about chemistry than camisoles. It was a fashion show for geeks, a display
of clothing made from exotic new fabrics. The models were male and female
students from Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University,
Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, most of them engineering or materials science majors. And
their outfits were nearly as smart as they are. ... ''Smart fabrics"
is the catch-all phrase to describe the growing area where the textile,
fashion, and scientific industries converge to produce either more durable
or more multifaceted materials. From sewn-in electronic gadgets to fungus-resistant
materials, the fabrics have found broad new applications in sports,
military, medical, and public safety fields, among others.
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/
articles/2005/11/30/at_this_high_tech_exhibition_
the_outfits_werent_just_fashionable_but/ | back to
top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 25
In the vast digital frontier, just about anything goes. Just ask British
college student Alex Tew. Capitalizing on one of the latest trends,
Web sites that act as an electronic billboard of sorts, he launched
www.milliondollarhomepage.com in August, selling individual pixels --
the tiny dot of color on a computer screen that composes the image --
for $1 each. Mr. Tew claims his scheme, which lets buyers purchase any
number of pixels to display their logo, which then links viewers to
their own Web site, has raised more than $672,000 -- more than enough
to cover his tuition bill. His success has not gone unnoticed. A slew
of copycat sites are popping up on the Web these days, including one
set up last month by Carnegie Mellon University juniors
Steven Kaplan, of Westport, Conn., and Keith Torluemke, of Redondo Beach,
Calif. But Carnegie Mellon students say their goal is more gracious
than simply cashing in on the Web's latest money-making formula -- the
pair simply want to raise funds for Hurricane Katrina victims. "This
is a great opportunity to raise money for people who need it,"
said Mr. Kaplan. The duo are selling pixels on their Web site, www.nickelsforkatrina.org,
for 5 cents each in boxes of 100 -- $5 for a box of pixels. "You
can't display anything meaningful on just one pixel," Mr. Kaplan
noted.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05329/611718.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 24
Ryan Jones, a senior biology major [from Loyola University], has joined
25 other students from the University of New Orleans and Tulane University
at Carnegie Mellon University this semester. Students
plan to transfer back to their respective colleges, transferring the
credits. Despite all that has happened, Jones said he is thankful for
what he has."I have my family and my home," Jones said. Navya
Nair, 20, a senior at Tulane University and native of New Orleans' Metairie
suburb, will not return home this Thanksgiving. Her family's one-story
home was filled with 4 feet of water and mud after the levees broke.
... Nair's family resettled in Houston, where her parents found jobs
and a house they are renting. "It's kind of weird because I've
never seen the house," said Nair, who is spending Thanksgiving
there. Nair said she and several of her classmates were two weeks behind
in school, but they caught up at Carnegie Mellon."It worked out really well,"
she said. "Everyone here's been really good."Holly
Hippensteel, Carnegie Mellon coordinator for student development, said
the displaced students have assimilated gracefully."Everything
that we have heard is positive," she said. "They've incorporated
into the community pretty well."
http://pittsburghlive.com/
x/tribune-review/trib/regional/
s_397661.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 18
College students and their families are always seeking out new sources
for financial aid, but online poker? Jeremy Olisar, 21, a Carnegie
Mellon University student from Naperville, Ill., will receive
a check this month covering his fall tuition from AbsolutePoker.com
after winning the "Win Your Tuition" online poker tournament
in October. Olisar outplayed students from more than 300 colleges in
the free No Limit Texas Hold'em tournament and endured a 5 1/2-hour
final round to win the grand prize. AbsolutePoker.com doesn't just give
money away to any college student. The student must be in good standing
with their college or university, show proof of enrollment and be able
to produce proof of fees for tuition and books. Olisar will receive
about $15,000, Edwards says. And Olisar isn't just any college student.
He's a senior clarinet performance and music education double major,
with four other minors and a 4.0 GPA. He is also involved in Carnegie
Mellon's Kiltie Band, All-University Orchestra, Astronomy Club and the
Pipe and Drum Band. He also finds time to teach every Saturday in Carnegie
Mellon's Music Preparatory School.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/
tribune-review/entertainment/
events/s_395648.html | back to top
Arts and Humanities
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 30
"Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art,"
at Carnegie Mellon University's Regina Gouger Miller
Gallery, is an earnest compilation of art projects that illustrates
the range of issues attracting the concern of environmentalists and
the variety of responses to them. As such, it's representative of the
kind of exhibition that often leaves visitors scratching their heads
and asking whether what is displayed is art. That's also a question
being asked -- at times hotly debated -- by the artists themselves and
by others in the art community.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05334/614404.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 28
Arts groups are spending more on fundraising, but getting less bang
for their bucks, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon
University. Total income for 185 arts and cultural groups in the region
dropped an average of 35 percent from 2001 through 2004, according to
a recent review by the Arts and Culture Observatory, a Carnegie Mellon research
center. The study examined the groups' federal tax returns and applications
for state arts grants. Edna Neivert, executive director
of the observatory, offered two reasons for the decline. "Certainly,
the economy is not helping anybody," she said. "Now that the
government has stopped supporting social services like education and
health care to the degree it has, the arts are now competing with these
other sectors for the same contributed dollars, and that's a tough game
to play."
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
trib/regional/s_398556.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 27
Many poets tend to work from the interior outward, casting emotions
and feelings into shapes via words. Photographers almost always work
by reacting to visual cues. It would seem that the two disciplines might
clash and be at opposing purposes, but Charlee Brodsky,
who teaches photography at Carnegie Mellon University,
felt that poet and writer Jim Daniels, who teaches
creative writing at Carnegie Mellon, shared some of her photographic
tendencies. "One of the things I noticed about Jim early on was
that he was very, very sensitive to visual things," Brodsky says.
The pair collaborated on "Street," which features Brodsky's
photographs, juxtaposed with poems by Daniels. "I think we were
destined to meet because he did stuff with poetry, with words, that
I was doing with images," she says.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
entertainment/books/s_398149.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 27
The Post-Gazette put out a call for Western Pennsylvanians working in
New York City show business, and the following showed up to celebrate
their shared Pittsburgh heritage. They claim Pittsburgh in various ways.
The preferred identification in our list is hometown or home neighborhood;
second is college; third is theater companies. But there are many more
Pittsburgh connections than we have room for, so for the final tallies
of whether Point Park beat Carnegie Mellon or CLO beat
them both, we await the eagle-eyed historians. *** Visit the story online
to view pictures.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05331/611645.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 24
"The moment when art and politics made each other more clever."
This quote describes what artist Margit Czenki set out to capture in
a 1998 film that was inspired by the activities of German artist collective
Park Fiction, but it is also an apt summation of the work in -- and
spirit of -- "Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary
Art." The exhibition is at the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie
Mellon University. "Groundworks" is an important
show, not only because its subject matter has urgency fed by current
geo-socio-cultural-political realities, but also because it challenges
contemporary standards for the nature of art and role of the artist.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05328/611628.stm | back to top
The Guardian | November 22
When a young man masturbates, exactly how distracted does he get? An
experiment performed on students at the University of California, Berkeley
aimed to find out. Full details are in a study that will be published
in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. Dan Ariely, of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and George Loewenstein, of
Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, describe
their arousing achievement in dry, formal terms: "We examine the
effect of sexual arousal, induced by self-stimulation, on judgments
and hypothetical decisions made by male college students." ...
Ariely and Loewenstein say their results are "striking" and
more than confirm what most people believe about young men as a group
- that when aroused, they (1) become sexually attracted to things otherwise
offputting; (2) grow more willing to engage in morally questionable
behavior that might lead to sex; and (3) are more likely to have unprotected
sex.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/
research/improbable/story/0,11109,
1647489,00.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 21
A painting of a black teenager living in an inner-city group home captured
best of show at the 10th annual Southwestern Pennsylvania Council for
the Arts Inc., regional juried art exhibition at the Southern Alleghenies
Museum of Art, Ligonier Valley. Elizabeth Myers Castonguay,
of the South Hills, found inspiration in the young man who joined her
family on an annual camping trip. ... "We were hiking down by a
little stream in dense woods and as I looked at this young man, I was
visibly bombarded by the lights and shadows on him. It was as if he
had morphed from this intelligent handsome young man into a young prince
from Africa whose lines, colors and gestures seemed to meld with nature."
Castonguay took numerous photographs to capture the moment and began
working on the painting when she returned from the trip. She spent more
than 100 hours perfecting the piece. "I kept coming back to it.
It is exactly what I wanted to say," said Castonguay, who teaches
figure drawing and painting at the Carnegie Museum of Art and at a pre-college
program at Carnegie Mellon University.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
entertainment/events/s_396071.html | back to top
North Jersey Media Group | November 20
In the United States, imports exceeded exports last year by $617.6 billion,
a record gap equal to 5.3 percent of gross domestic product. South Korea,
by contrast, ran a $29.4 billion trade surplus last year, or 4.3 percent
of its GDP, and even that paled by comparison with Japan's $132 billion
surplus or the $100 billion-plus surplus China is expected to post this
year. The United States also gets cheap capital from Asia because the
dollars that Asians earn for their exports often end up invested in
the bonds of the U.S. Treasury and mortgage-finance companies such as
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These purchases of U.S. securities help
keep interest rates low, which in turn helps fuel the housing boom and
create new U.S. jobs that replace the ones lost to imports. "We
get cheap goods in exchange for pieces of paper, which we can print
at a great rate," said Allan Meltzer, an economist
at Carnegie Mellon University. However, the mountain
of U.S. bonds that foreigners are accumulating means the United States
is going deeper into debt to fund its import binge, to the tune of about
$3 trillion as of this year.
http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3
dnFlZUVFeXkyNCZmZ2JlbDdmN3ZxZWVFRXl5NjgxOTk1OSZ5c
mlyeTdmNzE3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTI= | back to top
Information Technology
Inside Bay Area | December 1
For 11 years, most states have relied on voting systems tested to minimal
federal standards, the results withheld from public scrutiny and given
the green light by a nongovernmental agency working on a shoestring
budget. The era of approving tools of democracy on the cheap is coming
to an end, and judging by talk at a national gathering of voting experts
here this week, few will be sorry to see it go. Carnegie Mellon
University computer expert Michael Shamos, a state
voting-systems certification official for Pennsylvania, is one of the
staunchest advocates for new, fully computerized electronic voting systems.
But judging by what he has seen emerge from secretive, private labs
known as "independent testing authorities" and approved by
the National Association of State Elections Directors, Shamos said,
"There's stuff in there that's so horrible, I can't understand
it." He found a quarter of the voting systems presented to Pennsylvania
unsuitable for elections, with such "glaring failures" as
an inability to tally votes correctly.
http://www.insidebayarea.com/
localnews/ci_3268257 | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 27
Someday the latest iPod Nano will be as obsolete as the 8-track -- that's
the way technology works. Already, researchers at Carnegie Mellon
University's Institute for Complex Engineering Systems are pushing the
boundaries of wearable tech, creating computer systems that are literally
at your fingertips. There is a watch that can detect when you're busy,
or tell whether you're in trouble. The eWatch senses acceleration, audio,
skin temperature, ambient light and tilt, drawing for itself a digital
picture of your current state. It communicates with your PDA, computer
and cellphone, and can tell whether you're in a meeting, for example,
and don't want to hear your cellphone ringing just now. In that case,
it sends the call directly to voice mail.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/
x/style/fashion/s_398173.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 26
Parents who worry that video games teach kids to resolve conflict through
violence might find hope in a new Carnegie Mellon University project
that uses computer entertainment to promote peace. PeaceMaker isn't
your average shoot-'em-up, kill-the-bad-guy game. The computerized strategy
game developed by graduate students at Carnegie Mellon's
Entertainment Technology Center aims to simulate the Mideast conflict
and calls upon players to negotiate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.
"We looked at what is going on in the gaming industry and we weren't
too happy about it," said Asi Burak, co-producer of Peacemaker.
"Many video games are all about violence and shallow content. We
wanted to make a serious game."
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
trib/regional/s_398150.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 23
A team of fake FBI and CIA agents fanned out across the Internet yesterday,
e-mailing stunned Web gazers to tell them they'd been caught visiting
"illegal" Web sites, instructing them to open an attached
questionnaire and hoping they'd fall for it. A few did. ... At CERT,
a computer security laboratory attached to Carnegie Mellon's
Software Engineering Institute, Nick Ianelli, an Internet
security analyst, said there is no way to measure the extent of the
mailing, which he said is relatively unsophisticated computer science,
but half-decent psychology. "They're utilizing social engineering
techniques," Mr. Ianelli said. "What this one did that I haven't
seen in quite a while was they put a lot of very valid information at
the end of it."... "They seemed to do a decent job of spoofing
the source as to where it came from and they were probably able to prey
on a lot of people's fears," Mr. Ianelli said.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/
05327/611092.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 18
For the callous-thumbed, button-mashing denizens of Video Game Nation,
Tuesday will be a day filled with nervous excitement -- like a new "Star
Wars," a Steelers Super Bowl and the first moon landing rolled
into one. The reason: The opening-day sale of Xbox 360. "This is
going to be about online gameplay," contends Jessie Schell,
a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology
Center. "When you turn it on, it's going to want to know who you
are. It's going to remember which games you've played, and how well
you're doing on each. If you decide to take it online, it's going to
show you a comparison between you and your friends, and you and everyone
else who's on(line)." ... Initially, Microsoft seemed to be hyping
it as a revolutionary convergence of home media. You can connect your
music player, iPod, digital camera and Windows PCs. ... But the company
is not emphasizing its connectivity as much as it was in the beginning.
"There's a question if that's something that the people really
want," Schell says. "There's an old saying that technology
doesn't converge, it diverges. Whenever you make an all-purpose piece
of technology, it's always going to suffer in some ways ... like a Swiss
Army knife. It has all these things, none of them are very great, but
they're all there. Just because it has a fork on it doesn't mean you
want to eat all your meals with it."
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
entertainment/s_395605.html | back to top
Biotechnology
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 21
The double helix is not only the famous shape of DNA, the stuff of which
genes are made, but also could someday be the basis of molecular-scale
electronic circuitry, including wires, diodes and transistors.
Catalina Achim, assistant professor of chemistry at Carnegie
Mellon University, said that double helix shape can be used
to make sturdy three-dimensional structures. And work out of her lab,
published last month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society,
suggests a way that circuit designers may someday be able to make connections
between these twisted ladders.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05325/609899.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 21
Scientific American's annual tally of the top 50 contributions to science
and technology by individuals or groups includes nods to both Sen. Arlen
Specter, R-Pa., and Nathan N. Urban, a Carnegie
Mellon University neuroscientist. The SA 50 are featured in
the magazine's December issue, out tomorrow. ... Dr. Urban, an assistant
professor of biological sciences, was recognized for developing a method
for predicting how neurons synchronize their activity, the basis for
coding and storing information in the brain.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/
05325/609900.stm | back to top
Environment
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 27
A rundown of The Allegheny Conference on Community Development's recently
released a list of accomplishments for the year, along with observations
from individuals and groups involved in the projects. ... Water quality:
The conference paid $115,864 for a January 2005 study from the National
Academies' National Research Council that found serious water and sewer
infrastructure problems in the Pittsburgh area, mirroring findings made
in 2002 by another conference-led committee. Carnegie Mellon
University associate professor Jeanne VanBriesen, who
took part in the NRC report, said the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission
has responsibility for acting on the report's recommendations and said
the council's involvement will give the issue more attention and hopefully
lead to real changes in the region's water quality.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/
05331/612777.stm | back to top
Environmental Science & Technology Magazine
| November 2005
Popular wisdom is that wind power is the best choice for electricity
generation, especially if the goal is to reduce the emissions of mercury,
SO2, NOx, or CO2. However, in a paper published in this issue of ES&T
(pp 8578–8583), researchers report that consumers in Texas paid
about 5.7 cents per kilowatt hour (¢/kWh) more for renewable power
in 2002 than if the same power had been produced by state-of-the-art
coal-powered plants designed to reduce these 4 significant air pollutants.
Researchers find that power from wind turbines provided 87% of the renewable
energy in Texas in 2002. The analysis, conducted by Katrina Dobesova
from the University of Economics, Prague, and Jay Apt
and Lester Lave from Carnegie Mellon
University’s Electricity Industry Center, examined the cost of
renewable power in Texas, the U.S.’s largest power producer. ...
In the end, Dobesova, Apt, and Lave conclude that an energy policy that
is broader than an RPS might provide society with the least expensive,
and least polluting, energy source. “Legislation like that enacted
in Pennsylvania includes IGCC [technology] and thus addresses directly
the issue of carbon control within the framework of a politically palatable
mechanism,” the three write.
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/
esthag-a/39/i22/html/111505news1.html | back to
top
Regional Impact
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 26
A third and last community meeting for North Siders to contribute to
a Carnegie Mellon University "urban lab"
study will be held Wednesday from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at the Children's Museum.
Carnegie Mellon architecture students are proposing ways to "mend
disconnects within the neighborhood," said Flora Bao, one of the
students. The focus this semester has been on Allegheny West, Central
North Side and East Allegheny. Ms. Bao said students will compile a
booklet with the schemes they devise. They will include improvements
to traffic flow around Allegheny Center, possibly breaking through the
isolating circle it creates; boosting the presence of destinations such
as the National Aviary, the Mattress Factory, the Children's Museum
and Allegheny General Hospital; filling in deteriorated lots with homes
to increase population and diversity; and encouraging more retail zoning.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/
05330/612907.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 20
California University of Pennsylvania is participating in a new robotics
program partnership designed to make new career paths available to students.
The Technology Collaborative, a statewide economic development organization
that supports the growth of Pennsylvania's world-class robotics, cyber-security
and digital technologies industries, recently announced the new pilot
program, called 2+2+2, which connects a high school robotics program
at A.W. Beattie Career Center to associate and baccalaureate degree
programs at the university, with guidance and support from Carnegie
Mellon University.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
trib/regional/s_395442.html | back to top
Local News Stories
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | December 1
For the past two years, Bala Murphy has spent at least one evening a
week at class and countless hours on his computer completing homework
and projects for his master of science degree in information technology
from Carnegie Mellon University. And he did it without
ever having to set foot on the Oakland campus -- until last May, when
the Michigan resident showed up for his graduation ceremony. The 42-year-old
global program manager at General Motors Corp. in Warren, Mich., was
one of 22 GM employees who graduated last spring from Carnegie Mellon
with a degree created specifically for the automaker's technology managers.
... The relationship with GM has been so successful and lucrative that
Carnegie Mellon hopes to sell the concept to other corporations. "It's
part of our long-term strategy," said [Karyn E. Moore,
associate dean at Carnegie Mellon's H. John Heinz III School of Public
Policy and Management]. "We would like to replicate the corporate
partnership," adding that the university had held discussions with
companies in the financial, health care and information technology consulting
sectors.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05335/615084.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 29
Carnegie Mellon University expects this spring to become
the first foreign university to gain a foothold in Australia, opening
a branch of its Heinz school with $20 million in startup aid from that
country. Officials yesterday said they have inked a deal in which the
H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management will offer
two master's level programs starting in May -- one in information technology
and another in public policy and management -- at a site in Adelaide,
west of Melbourne. The school hopes by year's end to have 60 to 75 students,
and to have full-time enrollment of between 150 and 200 in four years.
The new branch follows other such initiatives in recent years including
establishment of a Carnegie Mellon campus in Qatar, a branch in Athens
and other programs overseas as well as its Silicon Valley campus. "We
want to train the next generation of leaders. That is what professional
master's programs do," said Mark Wessel, dean
of the Heinz school, explaining the Australian initiative. "We
want to train the next generation of leaders who will influence the
development of the Asia-Pacific region."
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/
05333/613991.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 29
A Korean software developer has decided to locate its global headquarters
and a research and development center in Pittsburgh. 3Ksoft Co., Ltd.,
of Seoul, South Korea, has established an office on the campus of Carnegie
Mellon University in Oakland, where it plans to have 20 people,
including 15 new employees, on staff by March. ... [Young Kun Kim, the
company's chief executive officer] said the company would be working
closely with Carnegie Mellon in its efforts to grow its business, which focuses
on software designed to make it easier for computers to use the XML
programming language. XML, which stands for eXtensible Markup Language,
is designed for sharing diverse data across different systems with a
uniform appearance. 3Ksoft says its products will help clients in such
fields as electronic commerce, government and mobile commerce. Carnegie
Mellon will use the software for educational purposes, said Timothy
McNulty, the school's associate provost for strategic technology
initiatives.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-
review/business/s_398817.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 27
Is the banana about to go the way of the dodo? Hardly. After all, more
than 1,000 varieties of bananas grow around the world. But is the banana
that we know and love, the one we eat almost exclusively in America,
destined to disappear from grocery stores? Possibly, say the experts,
maybe within the next 10 to 20 years. The protagonists in this drama
are the Cavendish banana, the main variety eaten in the United States
for the past 45 years, and Tropical Panama Disease Race 4, a virulent
fungus that has wiped out the Cavendish in several Southeast Asian nations.
... It turns out that we have been through this epidemic disease crisis
once before. The Gros Michel banana is the one that our grandparents
ate and the variety that dominated the American market for most of the
20th century. Banana aficionados say the Gros Michel, pronounced Grow
Me-Shell, was superior to today's Cavendish. It was tastier, bigger
and hardier. In its heyday, the Gros Michel was cut down and shipped
by the entire stalk, said John Soluri, a history professor
at Carnegie Mellon University who studies the banana
industry. ... But almost from the beginning of its glory days, the Gros
Michel was susceptible to an earlier version of the Panama fungus, Dr.
Soluri said, and, by the 1960s, growers switched to another variety.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 21
Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary is three years away, but plans are under
way for an elaborate celebration that could cost as much as $9.9 million
to promote, produce and advertise, according to a report circulating
among potential funders. ... In 2008 and beyond, the consultants said,
"we have the opportunity to launch a new vision of Pittsburgh as
a center of innovation and transformation for the 21st century."
... Pittsburgh 250 begins with the same optimism that accompanied past
campaigns, with nationally known historian and Pulitzer Prize winning
author David McCullough agreeing to act as an honorary chairman, [Executive
Director Bill] Flanagan said. Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato
is behind the idea, and 51 people participated in a feasibility study
last summer, including former Gov. Dick Thornburgh; University of Pittsburgh
Medical Center Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Romoff; Carnegie
Mellon University President Jared Cohon; and
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra President Lawrence Tamburri.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 19
There's a draft blueprint of Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary celebration
floating around town that includes a few tech-focused suggestions, such
as redeveloping the old LTV coke works in Hazelwood and merging local
tech-based economic development groups into a regional umbrella organization,
known as the Technology Development Corp. These aren't new ideas, but
including them as part of the plans to commemorate the city's 250th
birthday is. Donald Smith Jr., university director
of economic development at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie
Mellon University, a key player in much of the region's tech
development strategies, said it was the first he'd heard of such a plan.
Talks about the creation of an umbrella group and on how to redevelop
the LTV site are still "very preliminary," Dr. Smith said.
Still, Dr. William "Red" Whittaker, the Carnegie Mellon
roboticist whose Red Team took second and third place in the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency "Grand Challenge" last month,
said earlier this week that he'd love to locate his Robot City on the
site to develop his robot racers.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05323/609074.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 19
Software developed by a Pittsburgh company is helping Army unit commanders
in Iraq share and analyze battlefield data in seconds instead of hours.
Jake Kolojejchick, chief scientist of General Dynamics C4 Systems Viz,
said the faster analysis allows commanders to make faster decisions
with more complete information. Delay in the middle of a firefight is
as dangerous to soldiers as the enemy, he said. ... Kolojejchick and
Steve Roth co-founded MAYA Viz in 1998 to commercialize
the research Roth did at Carnegie Mellon University
on using computers to visualize data. One of the company's products
is the software that forms the basis of the Command Post of the Future
system that the Army's 1st Cavalry Division started using in 2004 when
it deployed to Iraq. Since then, the 3rd Infantry Division has also
begun using the battlefield analysis system.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
trib/pittsburgh/s_396104.html | back to top
International News Stories
Gulf Times | November 30
Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC),
famed for its ability to bring together computer scientists and artists
into dynamic, meaningful groups, is exploring options to set up a branch
at Carnegie Mellon in Qatar. "With the inter-disciplinary resources of all
the universities here at Education City, I see tremendous potential
for students," ETC co-director and professor of Drama and Arts
Management, Dr. Don Marinelli told Gulf Times in an
interview. Dr Marinelli, who describes himself as an 'aging hippie',
was hailed by Carnegie Mellon in Qatar dean Chuck Thorpe
as the 'prototype of the Carnegie Mellon person who can think with both
his right and left brain', while being introduced to a gathering of
students and faculty. "I am here because the whole field of entertainment
technology, a fairly new field as a genuine course of study, has generated
such response probably all over the world that we are taking it to a
global level," he explained. ETC is going to be renamed ETC Global
in January and new campuses are being set up in Adelaide in Australia,
and Seoul in South Korea. "I am looking to see if there are any
collaborative opportunities here (Qatar)," said Dr Marinelli.
http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp
?cu_no=2&item_no=62790&version=1&template_id
=36&parent_id=16 | back to top
The Toronto Star | November 27
"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger
leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering," [said Yoda]. The idea
that fear and anger are synonymous — and equally harmful —
is deeply embedded in our culture. Psychologists, doctors, researchers
and Jedi knights have long embraced the idea that negative emotions
are not only unpleasant but also harm our health. Now it appears that
anger may not deserve such a bad reputation after all, according to
Dr. Jennifer Lerner, a professor of psychology at Carnegie
Mellon University. ... Lerner and colleagues from the University
of Pittsburgh and the University of California, Los Angeles, hypothesized
that, because of that sense of control, a reaction of anger or disgust
would result in less cortisol being released than a reaction of fear
and anxiety. ... What Lerner found not only confirmed her hypothesis
that the biological reaction triggered by anger would be healthier but
also supported the idea that contrasting facial expressions lead to
different biological responses: The more frequently a participant showed
signs of indignation, the less pronounced their responses were in comparison
to participants who frequently showed fear.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?
pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid
=1132960211051&call_pageid=970599119419 | back
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The Australian | November 26
Elite private American university Carnegie Mellon will
use its first Australian campus as a springboard to Asia when it opens
its H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management in Adelaide
in March. The US institution's provost, Mark Kamlet,
said Carnegie Mellon wanted to establish a unique international presence
in Australia, within reach of Asia, China and India. "We view our
establishment here as important to Asia," Professor Kamlet said.
"We see ourselves as a global player and we see ourselves as very
strong in information management and entertainment technology."
The school and a branch of the university's high-caliber Entertainment
Technology Center is expecting about 50 full- and part-time postgraduate
students in its first intake.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/
story_page/0,5744,17367537%255E12332,00.html | back
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