It has been a tough 12 months for much of the world. Layoffs. Salary freezes. Shrinking retirement plans. Employers everywhere have been forced to look at who and what are necessary and who and what are expendable. It was with that backdrop that Carnegie Mellon Today recently conducted an independent online readership survey to make sure the magazine was meeting its goal of connecting the global university community.

There was no reason to worry, I told myself. Letters to the editor, phone calls, faculty and staff feedback have been mostly positive in the two and a half years since our current editorial team was put in place. In that time, the magazine has also won 13 editorial awards, and, in a June 2007 postcard readership survey, nearly 500 readers gave the magazine good marks, too.

Still, what if...

When an email showed up in my inbox from Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, the firm that conducted the survey, I'd be lying if I didn't concede I was a bit apprehensive. Turns out, my worries were unfounded. The survey (see Inbox: Your Voice Has Been Heard) reconfirmed what I believed to be true—Carnegie Mellon Today is keeping its readers both entertained and informed of the many accomplishments of those associated directly or indirectly with this university.

I was more than a little proud of the magazine team at that moment. Then I read another email in my inbox. It was from the provost, Mark Kamlet, which had been forwarded to me as an FYI:

What we now call "wi-fi" is 15 years old. It all started at CMU in 1994 with "Wireless Andrew." Alex Hills, our Chief Information Officer then and still a distinguished service professor at CMU with EPP, was in charge of building it. It became the model for many, many other networks.

The results of the readership survey paled in comparison with someone who was a part of the wi-fi revolution. Of course, around here, you don't have to look too far to be in awe. In fact, the university now has online what is called The Little Brag Book: www.cmu.edu/brag. There you will find one world-changing contribution after another by the Carnegie Mellon community.

Don't expect to see the results of the readership survey added to The Little Brag Book anytime soon. But in the pages that follow, you will read about some endeavors that may very well give the university even more bragging rights in the not-too-distant future:

  • Researchers Jason Campbell, Seth Goldstein, and Todd Mowry have a plan for revolutionizing communications that could exceed the impact of the wi-fi revolution[see feature: Shakeout].
  • The university's first Marshall scholar, Sheela Ramesh, aspires to reinvent the opera [see feature: Twinkle, Twinkle (not so) Little Star].
  • Protection from terrorists will soon come into much better focus, owing to the efforts of research professor Marios Savvides [see feature: Photogenic].
  • Outsourcing, a seemingly bad word when it comes to U.S. workers, may actually be what helps turn our economy around, as personified by the rags-to-riches story of alumnus and university trustee Sunil Wadhwani [(see feature: The 21st Century Entrepreneur].

These are the kind of compelling, inspiring stories that, hopefully, will make me rest a bit easier during the next readership survey.

—Robert Mendelson
Executive Editor