July 31

Want to watch deforestation spread across the Amazon, or witness Las Vegas conquering the deserts of Nevada? A feature on Google Earth lets you explore time-lapse footage from 13 years of satellite data.

The tool -- built by Google, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's robotics institute, and the US Geological Survey (USGS) -- lets you view imagery collected by Nasa's Landsat program between 1999 and 2011.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-07/31/google-earth-timelapse

July 27

The usual definition of a strong password is one that has at least 8 characters (the longer the better), with a mixture of upper and lower-case letters, numbers and, if the site or service allows, special characters, such as "!," "#" and "?."

It turns out the biggest factor in determining the strength of your password is its length, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon. Numbers, capitalization and special characters are all bonuses, but a short password that uses all of these tricks will still be much easier to crack than a long password with real words.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-07-28/techlicious-password-security/56540586/1  

July 25

A new student project at Carnegie Mellon University offers filtered fun for city neighborhoods.
 
Reminiscent of a giant dinosaur skeleton painted bright orange and blue, the PURIFLUME mobile water system features elements commonly found in a municipal spray park, such as a water slide and jet sprays.
 
It offers children and parents (and others) with a way to cool off during the summer heat — while they learn about water conservation in an entertaining way.

http://eponline.com/articles/2012/07/25/student-project-at-carnegie-mellon-university-offers-fun-for-city-neighborhoods.aspx

July 25

Social networking programs like creating community centers to encourage new relationships are implemented to diminish loneliness but these have not been effective.

However, a new study led by Carnegie Mellon University's J. David Creswell has provided the first evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces loneliness in older adults.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-07-25/health/32847129_1_older-adults-mindfulness-meditation-loneliness-scale

July 23

Ultimately, he received multiple job offers and accepted a tenure-track position this year at Carnegie Mellon University, which openly supports outreach projects like the zombie talks. In fact, Michael Tarr has even asked Timothy Verstynen to give his zombie-brain talk to prospective graduate students when they visit campus.

http://chronicle.com/article/Zombies-on-the-Brain/133043/

July 22

George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, and Linda Dezsö from the University of Vienna set out to measure the impact of personal loans on people’s feelings. The researchers said their investigation is the first to academically study the consequences of personal loans between friends, co-workers, siblings, and cousins.

http://articles.boston.com/2012-07-22/business/32762140_1_personal-loans-borrowers-relationships

July 21

The concept is based on research that shows each person has unique feet, and ways of walking. Sensors in the bio-soles check the pressure of feet, monitor gait, and use a microcomputer to compare the patterns to a master file for that person. If the patterns match the bio-soles go to sleep. If they don't, a wireless alarm message can go out.

"It's part of a shoe that you don't have to think about," said Marios Savvides, head of Carnegie Mellon University's new Pedo-Biometrics Lab, in Pittsburgh.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=157161943

July 19

Syria becomes a greater emergency with each passing day. This week Defense Minister Daoud Rajiha and other members of President Bashar al-Assad's inner circle were murdered; opposition groups claimed responsibility.

Last week Nawaf al-Fares, Syria's ambassador to Iraq, resigned from the government and joined the opposition, and the government's militiamen apparently shot villagers in Tremseh at close range.

* This article was written by Kiron K. Skinner, director of Carnegie Mellon University's Center for International Relations and Politics.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/19/opinion/skinner-syria/index.html  

July 18

Excellent at setting the scene for a horror movie, but horrendous to drive through. While those wipers you should have replaced six months ago are furiously trying to keep up with the downpour, your headlights are not helping matters at all. Rather than lighting up the road they’re just illuminating the raindrops, making the already terrible visibility worse.

Smart headlights would shine through the drops, lighting up the road, not the rain. Srinivasa Narasimhan, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, thinks he’s come up with a way to do it. Narasimhan’s concept is still in the very early phases, but the idea behind the technology is simple.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/industry/smart-headlights-will-see-through-the-rain-10788905  

July 14

HOLLY FIRFER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In the movie "Minority Report" robotic spiders are a tool for law enforcement. Here at Carnegie Mellon University, Professor Howie Choset and his students are working on a different kind of robotic tool, snakes.

(on camera): Do you love snakes and have a fascination with snakes?

HOWIE CHOSET, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY: Actually, I don't like snakes. I'm afraid of snakes.

FIRFER: You're afraid of snakes?

CHOSET: Oh, yes. A lot of people are.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1207/14/smn.03.html

July 14

“Why Capitalism?” by Allan Meltzer, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, is an extended response to some of the calls he has received in recent years. The most thought-provoking came from a woman in Germany who, after reading the New York Times, wondered if, only two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she was actually witnessing the implosion of the system that brought it down.

http://www.economist.com/node/21558558

July 2012 Issue

While fashionable and possibly advantageous, the adoption of high-tech envelopes has been slow. Skeptical architects worry that operable components are magnets for value-engineering. Or they foresee them being unplugged and later stripped off their buildings due to poor performance or deficient maintenance. Other firms cite client interests, noting such high-profile failures as the broken actuators on the sun-control diaphragms cladding Jean Nouvel’s 1988 Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris. “Culturally, we have little confidence in what we’re doing, and in systems integration for these hybrids,” says Volker Hartkopf, director of the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. “Yes, these things can break, but so can fans, dampers, thermostats, and so many other things we take for granted.”

http://archrecord.construction.com/features/green/archives/0604edit-1.asp  

July 9

Hans Moravec, an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, however, believes that by 2050 robot “brains” based on computers that execute 100 trillion (10{+1}{+2}) instructions per second will start rivaling human intelligence.
This leads us to the definition of intelligence amongst machines. Alan Turing, widely considered the father of computer science and AI, stated that a computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human. That day doesn’t seem to be far off.

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-in-school/article3618012.ece

July 7

Burying power lines can be as much as 10 times more expensive than suspending them from poles, Amin says. Many states require new developments to use "undergrounding," but the cost and disruption from tearing up streets, especially in big cities, make retrofitting lines impractical. "It's harder to fix (underground lines) once something goes wrong," says Jay Apt, a technology professor at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-07-07/power-grid/56067560/1  

July 6

Obama opens his day with a tour of Summer Garden Food Manufacturing in Boardman, Ohio, about 80 miles southeast of Cleveland. Then it's on to nearby Poland, Ohio, where the president will give a campaign speech at Dobbins Elementary School.
Later, Obama and his entourage will enter Pennsylvania. He will wrap up the bus tour this afternoon with another speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/07/obamas-day-bus-tour-and-a-jobs-reports/1?csp=34news#.T_bP43CHYcB

July 5

“It’s a new creative medium,” said Heather Knight, a Ph.D. student in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University who has created Data, a diminutive performing robot that has toured the United States and Britain with a show full of clever maneuvers and snarky one-liners. (“My programmer hopes that one day I will be an autonomous robot performer, like Justin Bieber,” he announces.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/theater/robot-and-human-actors-take-bows-together.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

July 4

New research led by Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) Sheldon Cohen and Rodlescia S. Sneed provides the first evidence that, when exposed to a common cold virus, parents are 52 per cent less likely to develop a cold than non-parents.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-07-04/health/32536438_1_cold-virus-parenthood-sheldon-cohen

July 3

As China's 500 million Internet users rapidly adopt social media, academics and entrepreneurs are figuring out ways to track online messages and blog posts to better understand what the government censors—and even how to predict its intent. […] He's not alone. Others, like researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science who recently conducted a massive study of Weibo censorship, are trying to find patterns buried in all that Internet chatter that is disappearing from China's Web.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304708604577502872481016502.html?KEYWORDS=%22Carnegie+Mellon%22  

July 3

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have figured out how to thwart the weather when you’re behind the wheel by looking straight through the rain drops or snow that create that white-out effect when headlights meet heavy precipitation at night. By detecting and tracking individual rain droplets or snow as they fall through a car’s headlight beams, they’ve created a system that can “dis-illuminate” them by adjusting the headlight beams to only shine around them rather than on them.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-07/headlights-see-through-downpour-dis-illuminating-raindrops