June 20

Robert Strauss, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, says the city really suffered in the 1980s, when the mills were shut down. The city schools are still troubled, he says, which is why young families move to the suburbs. If you look, you can find plenty of reminders of Pittsburgh's grittier past. East Liberty is gentrifying, but it remains pretty rugged. The working-class neighborhoods on the South Side still cling to the hillsides with their narrow streets, stair-step sidewalks, and worn and sad-looking houses with the kinds of expansive city views that San Franciscans pay millions for.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576363150295506130.html

June 30

Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, said, "The IMF should avoid further entanglement in ECB (European Central Bank) problems ... Putting in more money from China, Japan, the US and others is a waste because more debt will not prevent ultimate default by Greece." While some experts have argued for a reduced function for IMF, Truman believes it has proved its worth time and again over the past 40 years.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2011-06/30/content_12805298.htm

June 30

Kushagra Nayan Bajaj, the Vice-Chairman of the Bajaj Group, has made a USD 2.5 million gift to endow a professorship in the Tepper School of Business of the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University. The gift will be used to endow the Bajaj Family Chair, which will be held by a Tepper School of Business professor to be named by the university''s president and provost. The gift will support teaching and research in a field selected by the chair recipient, the university said in a statement.

http://news.in.msn.com/international/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5251161

June 27

In a speech at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University on Friday, US President Barack Obama announced a plan to inject millions of dollars into university research as a way to develop manufacturing innovations that can employ thousands of domestic workers and hopefully buoy the sluggish economy. Though details of the plan are still somewhat hazy, officials told The Chronicle of Higher Education that six universities will have a chance at $500 million through a National Science Foundation-style granting scheme, and cited initial grants of $100 million for developing new manufacturing materials and $70 million for robotics research.

http://the-scientist.com/2011/06/27/universities-to-the-economic-rescue/

June 29

“No,” said Candace Thille, project director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, which developed the software that Bryn Mawr and 35 other colleges will be using. “We are creating a way for you to spend time in class teaching different things, freed from the burden of teaching basic skills.” The software gives individualized instruction in 12 subjects, using sophisticated tracking of skill development and offering instant feedback and help based on the student’s mastery of concepts. The idea is to use this to teach basic statistics, say, instead of using a professor’s lectures—and time—on the fundamentals.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/liberal-arts-colleges-venture-into-unlikely-territory-online-courses/32029

June 27

The change is evident at some – but not all – of the top computer science programs in the United States. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, down the street from Harvard here in Cambridge, the number of female computer science majors has jumped 28 percent in the past three years. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the share of computer science majors who are women has moved from 1 in 5 in 2007 to 1 in 4 last year.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/0627/Worried-about-jobs-college-women-go-geek

June 27

In the future, more use of renewable energy from the sun and wind will mean more variations in frequency on the grid, McClelland said. Solar and wind power can drop off the grid with momentary changes in weather. Correcting those deviations is expensive and requires instant backup power to be always at the ready, he said. The test makes sense and should not cause too much of a hassle for people, said Jay Apt, a business professor and director of the Electricity Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/27/scitech/main20074627.shtml

June 24

After touring the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University, a high-technology facility adjacent to a rusted factory symbolic of the area’s industrial past, Mr. Obama said federal agencies would invest more than $500 million to seed the initiative. Of that, $70 million is to go to robotics projects like one he viewed at the center: a boom-box-size robot that inspects sewer pipelines, made by a company started by a Carnegie Mellon professor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/us/politics/25obama.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=%22Carnegie%20Mellon%22&st=cse

June 28

"Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of statistical language modeling is the contrast between our intuition as speakers of natural language and the over-simplistic nature of our most successful models," Ronald Rosenfeld, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in a research paper. "As native speakers, we feel strongly that language has a deep structure. Yet we are not sure how to articulate that structure, let alone encode it, in a probabilistic framework."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43562106/ns/business-motley_fool/

June 22

The phased drawdown of American troops beginning this summer will not signal an immediate abandonment of the "protect-the-people-and-bolster-their-government" approach. But it does suggest that with the 2012 presidential election looming, Obama is ready to begin scaling back his war goals. "From the standpoint of the American psyche, I think this will be welcomed," said Kiron K. Skinner, director of Carnegie Mellon University's Center for International Relations and Politics and a former adviser to the Pentagon. She said the White House also calculates that it will help Obama as he heads into a re-election fight.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/06/22/us/politics/AP-US-US-Afghan-War-Analysis.html?_r=2&ref=aponline

June 16

He has since been blamed for contributing to the U.S. financial crisis by keeping interest rates low for too long and failing to regulate the mortgage market, according to critics including Allan Meltzer, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-06-16/greenspan-tells-charlie-rose-default-by-greece-almost-certain-.html

June 19

Can a wallet-sized plastic card really make you feel that different about yourself? Well, an ample body of research does back up the idea that credit has profound psychological effects. "Credit cards effectively anesthetize the pain of paying," George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon explains. "You swipe the card and it doesn't feel like you're giving anything up to make the purchase, unlike paying cash where you have to hand over bills."

http://www.slate.com/id/2297298/

June 21

Anthony Rowe is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who is studying the issue of smart meters and privacy. On the macro level, he said, smart meters are not much of a problem when they help out utilities with billing and power management. Rather, it becomes an issue when smart meters are hooked up to pieces of equipment inside the house so that devices can talk to each other, so, for example, an energy meter and a smart thermostat that talk to each other.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/21/6909776-is-the-smart-grid-too-smart-for-us

June 21

"This isn't just next to where the development is actually happening — the poor person living downwind of the compressor — this is ozone levels in Philadelphia and [Washington] D.C. and New York City and places like that," says Carnegie Mellon University professor Allen Robinson. Industry officials argue that the benefits of natural gas for air quality far outweigh any negatives, but experts caution that much cleaner production practices are needed to prevent the industry from becoming an air quality villain.

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/21/137197991/air-quality-concerns-threaten-natural-gas-image

June 21

Wonders Kaku – when visiting Seth Goldstein at Carnegie Mellon University – whether it would be a programming nightmare to give detailed instructions to billions of catoms so that a refrigerator might suddenly transform into an oven. The response he gets is that it would not be necessary to give detailed instructions to every single catom, because each catom has to know only which neighbors it must attach to. “If each catom is instructed to bind with only a tiny set of neighboring catoms, then the catoms would magically rearrange themselves into complex structures (much like the neurons of a baby's brain need to know only how to attach themselves to neighboring neurons as the brain develops)."

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/eworld/article2116045.ece

June 15
U.S. central bankers already have an implicit goal, which they publish quarterly in the form of a range of long-run forecasts. The goal isn't a binding commitment, and it can change, creating uncertainty in financial markets that can lead to higher long-term bond yields, said Marvin Goodfriend, a former Richmond Fed policy adviser. "There is nothing to be gained by leaving the world safe for higher inflation," said Goodfriend, now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who added that improved credibility would allow the Fed to keep interest rates lower, boosting growth in the long term. "It is beneficial for the Fed to go beyond where it is currently and announce an explicit inflation objective."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-15/fed-officials-said-to-discuss-adopting-explicit-inflation-target.html

June 16
Experts point to myriad factors that have steadily reduced crime since the 1980s and early 1990s, when the crack cocaine epidemic devastated US cities. But Alfred Blumstein, a criminology professor at Heinz College of Carnegie Mellon University, said none would explain the dramatic shift in 2009 alone. "There were two things that happened in 2009. One was a recession, and that should have made things worse, and the other was the election of an African-American president," Blumstein said.
http://www.omantribune.com/index.php?page=news&id=94116&heading=Americas

June 15
Pittsburgh's attractions for employers include Carnegie Mellon and other universities, as well office rents that remain low by national standards. CBRE says it expects annual office rents this year in Pittsburgh to average $18.69 a square foot, compared with a national average of $26.18. Pittsburgh's vacancy rate for offices this year is expected to average about 10%, compared with 16% nationally.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304665904576383863835336904.html?KEYWORDS=%22Carnegie+Mellon%22

June 13
Early in that summit week, Bill Gates of Microsoft dedicated a new computer science complex at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. Apple, Disney, Google and Intel are some of the other high-tech global companies with major facilities in the city. The Economist Intelligence Unit has described Pittsburgh as the most livable city in the United States. The high-stakes 2012 presidential campaign is already underway, with a diverse array of Republicans competing hard for attention and center stage. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who has just formally declared his presidential candidacy, rightly emphasizes substantial senior business experience.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2011/06/137_88838.html

June 13
After International Business Machines Corp.'s Watson computer beat two former "Jeopardy!" champions in a televised match earlier this year, the company lugged its machine to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where it battled students. A major goal: Persuade some of those students to consider a career at IBM.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304392704576377612910711994.html?KEYWORDS=%22Carnegie+Mellon%22

June 12
The elements are the first to be added since copernicium in 2009. They have not yet been named, but are known for now as 114 and 116. "Over the past 250 years, there have been basically 100 new elements discovered," said Paul Karol, a chemistry professor at Carnegie Mellon University and chair of the committee that recommended the additions.
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/life/science-&-technology/2011/06/12/305845/Periodic-table.htm

June 11
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University studied the brain waves of drivers using cell phones — and they found that even just listening to a conversation reduced the amount of brain activity devoted to driving by 37 percent. The quality of driving showed a "significant deterioration," according to a 2008 study. Even hands-free phones appear to contribute to unsafe driving. A 2005 study by an insurance institute for highway safety found that drivers using cell phones — even hands-free — were four times as likely to have an accident involving an injury. Experts feel that there may be a margin of safety using hands-free, but it is still unsafe.
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-06-11/health/29647108_1_cell-phones-mobile-devices-cancer-risk

June 11
Another tech company hackers were watching closely this week was Apple. CEO Steve Jobs announced the iCloud, a new service that will allow Apple users to store all their email, photos, music and documents on an array of servers. "By centralizing their data, they've really painted a target on their back," says David Brumley, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He says Apple's iCloud is a bank of servers in a building the size of two football fields in North Carolina.
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/11/137125799/hackers-and-clouds-how-secure-is-the-web

June 10
Soon, people began using hashtags to add humor, context and interior monologues to their messages — and everyday conversation. As Susan Orlean wrote in a New Yorker blog post titled "Hash," the symbol can be "a more sophisticated, verbal version of the dread winking emoticon that tweens use to signify that they're joking." "Because you have a hashtag embedded in a short message with real language, it starts exhibiting other characteristics of natural language, which means basically that people start playing with it and manipulating it," said Jacob Eisenstein, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in computational linguistics. "You'll see them used as humor, as sort of meta-commentary, where you'll write a message and maybe you don't really believe it, and what you really think is in the hashtag."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/fashion/hashtags-a-new-way-for-tweets-cultural-studies.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=%22Carnegie+Mellon%22&st=nyt

June 10
Earlier this week, I introduced you to Toyota's Ideas for Good Innovation Weekend Event at Carnegie Mellon University. Essentially five technologies used in Toyota's cars were reimagined by five different and turned into innovations that can help people. To get more details on those inventions read my earlier blog. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the innovation process.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/weekend-of-innovation-toyota-tech-part-2-110610.html

June 10
Jay Apt, a summit participant and executive director of Carnegie Mellon University's Electricity Industry Center in Pittsburgh, says it was interesting to watch people of different backgrounds interacting. "The biggest output might be a cadre of people who know how to think about these issues," he says.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110610/full/news.2011.362.html

June 8
In the periodic table, the number of an element refers to the number of protons in the nucleus of an individual atom. Leading the list is hydrogen (H) with one. Sodium (Na) has 11, Iron (Fe) has 26, and silver (Ag) has 47.  In the past 250 years, new elements have been added to the table about once every 21/2 years on average, said Paul Karol of Carnegie Mellon University. He chaired the committee that recognized the new elements.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=13791991

June 7
So what are elements 114 and 116 like? Unfortunately, their properties are still murky because the quantities produced were too small and existed too fleetingly for scientists to measure their chemical behavior, such as what other elements they tend to react with. "The lifetimes of these things have to be reasonably long so you can study the chemistry - meaning, pushing a minute," says Paul Karol of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who chaired the committee that approved the new elements.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20540-heaviest-elements-yet-join-periodic-table.html20110603,0,1305968.story

June 7
Repurposing a Toyota car technology for some other use was the idea behind their Ideas for Good campaign. Last fall, the company solicited ideas from everyday people about how to turn any of five different technologies into some other innovation. Five winners were announced May 9, 2011, and this past weekend those winners participated in a Prototype Weekend at Carnegie Mellon University near Pittsburgh, Pa., to turn their ideas into reality. I went to see what they had proposed and watch them work on their prototypes.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/weekend-of-innovation-110607.html

June 6
Franklin Institute Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computing and Cognitive Science. Carnegie Mellon University professor of psychology and computer science John Anderson won the 2011 award for the development of the first large-scale computational theory of the process by which humans perceive, learn and reason, and its application to computer tutoring systems. Awards were presented in April.
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=ED79643E-1A64-67EA-E4D8059677CC662C

June 6
Ever had a bad day and then found yourself roaming the aisles at DSW or stopping into Sephora on your way home just to cheer yourself up? That's what psychologists call "retail therapy," and it's generally considered a not-so-helpful coping mechanism. For example, sad shoppers are more focused on themselves, and are also willing to spend four times as much on their purchases than not-sad shoppers, according to a 2008 study by Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and University of Pittsburgh researchers.
http://www.allure.com/beauty-trends/blogs/daily-beauty-reporter/2011/06/maybe-shopping-really-can-make-you-happier.html

June 6
Founded in 2006 by a team of Carnegie Mellon computer science graduates, Spongecell previously raised capital in 2007 from Halo Venture Partners, ThePilot Group and SilverHaze Partners. Spongecell actually started out as an Ajax calendar built on the Ruby on Rails platform. CEO Ben Kartzman  says that the team pivoted from this model and started offering ads within widgets, but agencies and marketers didn't respond with the sort of enthusiasm that could build a lasting business.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/eric-schmidt-and-others-invest-in-rich-media-display-ad-startup-spongecell/2011/06/06/AGqeHtJH_story.html

June 3
Employees who were engaged in both legitimate and shady projects at the company conveyed information much differently when their dealings were illicit, organizational theorist Brandy Aven of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh reported June 1 at an MIT workshop on social networks. The distinction is visible in the network of e-mails among employees, which takes the shape of a central hub and isolated spokes when content is corrupt, rather than a highly connected net of exchanges.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/330731/title/Information_flow_can_reveal_dirty_deeds

June 3
Mr. Gad, who grew up Jewish in Hollywood, Fla., the youngest of three boys, made his Broadway debut in 2005 with "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee." He has appeared as the sloppy sidekick in films such as "Love & Other Drugs" and "The Rocker." On TV, he's a correspondent on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and he appears as a bumbling immigrant in the Web comedy series "Gigi: Almost American." The Carnegie Mellon University drama-school graduate is also providing the voice for a character in "Good Vibes," an animated MTV show co-created by "Pineapple Express" director David Gordon Green and slated for the fall.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303745304576361311706259164.html?KEYWORDS=%22Carnegie+Mellon%22