CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Boulder Startup Week 2013: what we did.
0May 18, 2013
Jann Scott is Boulder’s critical voice
First of all we are not exactly a start up. We are more an old school OG Boulder entrepreneurial company. That is to say Brad Feld and David Cohen didn’t invent the entrepreneurial movement here in Boulder. They joined it in the 90s and capitalized on it. Yes they are modern day Gurus, but Boulder has 100′s of gurus. Boulder’s entreperurship started in the late 1800s during the Colorado Gold rush and it never stopped.
So old timer tech entrepreneurs look at Feld , Cohen and Polis with some bemusement. They’ve seen it all before. This new hippy feel good neo communist business start up scene was really started by Moe Segal and the natural foods biz heads of the 1960s and 70′s. One CU business professor scoffed at the notion of Start Ups. ” Most of it is junk” he said. ” One or 2 out of 100 will be swallowed up by the VCs and make it to market but the other 98 will fail. So this is nothing new and Brad Feld is not that special.” he said.
And this is where I’d like to pick up. So what did we at Boulder Channel 1 do during this years Boulder Start Up Week. ?
We kept working that’s what we did. Part of our work was to send out sales reps to various event s to see where there was an opportunity to make some money by selling our services. What?? yep. We were looking for advertising clients, We were not looking for funding an angel or a VC. But we were looking to deal. We were selling. Overtly and not so overtly. We were looking for one $20,000 client for a year. One advertiser who needed banner ads, video, sm, pr, design, a show series, a web site and who wanted consumers from Boulder to buy their goods. We were on the hunt. We set a goal and went after it. That’s what start Up Week Boulder meant to us. No bullshit. No drinking. No fucking around. No chasing millionaires. Just hard work. Sales.
Did we land anyone. Yep we did. Two. we made $40,000 bucks this week off of Boulder Start Up week from two companies who wanted our services….. who needed our service… and who did not want to be dicked around by a bunch of drunks who are playing at business.
There is a lesson here for those of you who want to be serious business people. ( We have been successfully in business since 1975 here in Boulder. Like everyone else who digs this city, it only keeps getting better) We live in Utopia and we don’t take it for granted. We are truly blessed
What do we do to give back to Boulder?? We have been here for a long long time. We are established and have roots. we give cash to 30 different Boulder charities who help feed and clothe people. We produce videos for free for any non profit. We don’t charge non profits. We mentor homeless techies who need a hand up. We mentor kids of impoverished families.
Jann Scott is the CEO of Channel 1 Networks
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CU study: Melting glaciers are largely responsible for sea level rise
0May 16, 2013
While 99 percent of Earth’s land ice is locked up in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the remaining ice in the world’s glaciers contributed just as much to sea rise as the two ice sheets combined from 2003 to 2009, says a new study led by Clark University and involving the University Colorado Boulder.
The new research found that all glacial regions lost mass from 2003 to 2009, with the biggest ice losses occurring in Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes and the Himalayas. The glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic sheets lost an average of roughly 260 billion metric tons of ice annually during the study period, causing the oceans to rise 0.03 inches, or about 0.7 millimeters per year.
The study compared traditional ground measurements to satellite data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, missions to estimate ice loss for glaciers in all regions of the planet.
“For the first time, we’ve been able to very precisely constrain how much these glaciers as a whole are contributing to sea rise,” said geography Assistant Professor Alex Gardner of Clark University in Worcester, Mass., lead study author. “These smaller ice bodies are currently losing about as much mass as the ice sheets.”
A paper on the subject is being published in the May 17 issue of the journal Science.
“Because the global glacier ice mass is relatively small in comparison with the huge ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, people tend to not worry about it,” said CU-Boulder Professor Tad Pfeffer, a study co-author. “But it’s like a little bucket with a huge hole in the bottom: it may not last for very long, just a century or two, but while there’s ice in those glaciers, it’s a major contributor to sea level rise,” said Pfeffer, a glaciologist at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research
ICESat, which ceased operations in 2009, measured glacier changes using laser altimetry, which bounces laser pulses off the ice surface to determine changes in the height of ice cover. The GRACE satellite system, still operational, detects variations in Earth’s gravity field resulting from changes in the planet’s mass distribution, including ice displacements.
GRACE does not have a fine enough resolution and ICESat does not have sufficient sampling density to study small glaciers, but mass change estimates by the two satellite systems for large glaciated regions agree well, the scientists concluded.
“Because the two satellite techniques, ICESat and GRACE, are subject to completely different types of errors, the fact that their results are in such good agreement gives us increased confidence in those results,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, a study co-author and fellow at the university’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
Ground-based estimates of glacier mass changes include measurements along a line from a glacier’s summit to its edge, which are extrapolated over a glacier’s entire area. Such measurements, while fairly accurate for individual glaciers, tend to cause scientists to overestimate ice loss when extrapolated over larger regions, including individual mountain ranges, according to the team.
Current estimates predict if all the glaciers in the world were to melt, they would raise sea level by about two feet. In contrast, an entire Greenland ice sheet melt would raise sea levels by about 20 feet, while if Antarctica lost its ice cover, sea levels would rise nearly 200 feet.
The study involved 16 researchers from 10 countries. In addition to Clark University and CU-Boulder, major research contributions came from the University of Michigan, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, Trent University in Ontario, Canada, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Boulder, NASA’s ICESat satellite was successfully operated from the CU-Boulder campus by a team made up primarily of undergraduates from its launch in 2003 to its demise in 2009 when the science payload failed. The students participated in the unusual decommissioning of a functioning satellite in 2010, bringing the craft into Earth re-entry to burn up. ICESat’s successor, ICESat-2, is slated for launch in 2016 by NASA.
-CU media release-
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Learning from Boston marathon for BolderBOULDER race
0May 14, 2013
Race organizers from the BolderBOULDER, the Boulder Police Department and the University of Colorado Police Department are asking the public to cooperate with additional security measures that will be in place for the May 27 Memorial Day run.
Race participants and spectators will notice an increased law enforcement and emergency services presence along the 10-kilometer course.
Organizers ask the public for their patience and cooperation with the new rules.
Police request that participants and spectators refrain from bringing backpacks or other bags to the race. If people must bring bags, please pack lightly and keep them in your possession at all times. “Airport rules” will apply, and any unattended bags along the course or at Folsom Field will be subject to confiscation.
On race day, the public is asked to immediately report any suspicious activity or people by calling 9-1-1.
“We realize that the recent events in Boston have created some extra concern for people, and we want to reassure everyone that the Boulder and CU police departments and race organizers are working together to make this event as safe and enjoyable as possible,” said Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner. “We have comprehensive security plans in place. We will not be discussing details or specifics of those plans.”
The public will also see an increased law enforcement presence at the race’s finish at CU’s Folsom Field. For spectators bringing items into the stadium, football game rules will apply. That includes only allowing soft-sided bags smaller than 12x12x12 (such as small purses and backpacks) inside Folsom Field. For a full list of permitted and prohibited items, please see http://bit.ly/FolsomFieldRules.
“The bag checks will be one of the evident changes seen by the public,” said Joe Roy, CU police chief. “But our police departments have added other security measures that will not be obvious to the public, by design, to enhance safety.”
The police departments and BolderBOULDER appreciate the public’s cooperation.
“The safety and security of the BolderBOULDER runners, spectators, volunteers and sponsors is our primary concern,” said Cliff Bosley, BolderBOULDER race director. “We thank everyone for their help in keeping this the fun and safe event we’ve enjoyed for the past 34 years.”
For updates and race-day information, please see www.bolderboulder.com.
MEDIA RELEASE BY BOULDER AND CU POLICE. ONLY A MORON WOULD THINK OTHERWISE.
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Graduating seniors give CU Boulder high marks
0May 8, 2013
About four in five respondents reported satisfaction with their CU-Boulder education. A similar proportion would recommend CU-Boulder to a friend and nearly 98 percent of the seniors reported that their program of study met their educational goals.
The 2012 study is the latest edition of the senior survey, conducted 11 times since 1985 by CU-Boulder’s Office of Planning, Budget and Analysis, or PBA.
“The survey data clearly demonstrate that these students, from their perspective as seniors, judge the university in overwhelmingly positive terms,” said Michael Grant, CU-Boulder associate vice chancellor for undergraduate education. “CU-Boulder routinely invests a lot of time and energy in polling our senior students about their experiences, academic and otherwise, in order to continuously work toward improving those experiences.”
The online questionnaire was sent to 7,646 degree-seeking seniors and was completed by 2,890, or 38 percent, of the recipients. Comprising about 200 scaled items, plus four open-ended questions, the survey collected a massive amount of information including nearly 7,900 written comments.
The 2012 seniors’ ratings of CU-Boulder advising services were higher than those from any previous senior survey. The seniors’ satisfaction with numerous other CU-Boulder services, from libraries to information technology, was high and generally comparable to that of earlier cohorts.
“We use the survey results extensively to look at what’s popular and working well, to set goals to improve services, and even to pass along advice,” said Jim Davis Rosenthal, CU-Boulder director of orientation and director of the Office of Student Affairs Assessment. “Based on one of the survey questions, we are able to let incoming freshmen know what outgoing seniors wished they had gotten involved in. Other departments also use the results to encourage students to try opportunities they might not otherwise have considered. In a way, it’s like older siblings giving advice to their younger siblings.”
Large proportions of seniors said that if they were to start over at CU-Boulder, they would put more effort toward or spend more time on interacting with faculty (60 percent), career exploration (51 percent), and campus-related research projects, internships and applied experiences (45 percent).
Nearly two-thirds of seniors who expected to graduate by summer 2012 reported that their principal activity in fall 2012 was most likely to be paid employment, either full time (48 percent) or part time (15 percent). A combined 15 percent said they were most likely to be enrolled in graduate studies, professional school or other coursework. A combined 13 percent expected to go into military service, or pursue volunteer service, an internship, student teaching or travel.
The thousands of student comments included praise for various aspects of their major programs, suggestions for ways to enhance and improve major programs, and descriptions of ways in which their major program did or did not meet their educational goals.
One student wrote, “I feel that I am prepared to be an exceptional teacher after I graduate. The school had a lot to do with my preparedness.” Another wrote, “Excellent material, mostly great professors, and fantastic facilities all add up to a well-rounded education.”
The survey collects information on seniors’ satisfaction with their educational experiences at CU-Boulder and about their post-graduation plans. The survey’s findings are used primarily to provide systematic information for academic and service units to use in planning and improvement, and for use by prospective and current students, their advisers, and their families.
Preliminary results for the Seniors’ Future Plans Survey, which is separate from the comprehensive senior survey and which has been conducted each year since 2009, show a jump in full-time employment expectations. The initial data show that 54 percent of CU-Boulder seniors in 2013 expect full-time employment to be their principal activity after graduation, an increase from 48 percent in 2012. Expectations for part-time employment were reported by 15 percent of the 2013 seniors.
The 2012 questionnaire and comprehensive data from the senior survey, including summary reports from students in each of CU-Boulder’s schools and colleges and nearly 50 departments, are available athttp://www.colorado.edu/pba/surveys/senior/12/index.htm.
-CU-
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CU: New colleges, including a J-School are proposed. Others are environment and sustainability
0May 1, 2013
University of Colorado Boulder Provost Russell L. Moore today announced the campus will be taking the first steps needed to formally propose the creation of the first new colleges on the campus in 50 years: a college focused on media, communication and information, and a college designed around CU-Boulder’s strengths in the environment and sustainability. Both would require the approval of the Board of Regents.
“These proposed new colleges will create exciting synergies among related disciplines,” said Moore. “They will build on CU-Boulder’s programmatic strengths and excellence, attract new high-quality students and faculty, and facilitate scholarship and teaching that will prepare students for careers in a wide range of exciting fields.”
Moore said the college or school devoted to media, communication and information would house programs in journalism, advertising and design, communication, film production and film studies, media studies and a new department in information studies.
“If approved by the Board of Regents, this college will create exciting opportunities for our students and will bring together a dynamic and creative faculty in these disciplines,” said Moore. “From this college, we will create working journalists, editors and media professionals, communication scholars, media experts, advertisers and media designers, filmmakers and film theorists, and experts in the emerging field of information architecture and design. The possibilities are truly exciting.”
A college of the environment and sustainability, Moore said, if approved, will “bring together some of the finest researchers and teachers on the campus” in disciplines and programs that include environmental science, environmental policy and environmental design while “drawing upon assets from some of the campus’s most dynamic institutes,” including the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI).
“This will bring together in one college a concentration of faculty who represent some of CU-Boulder’s mostly highly ranked, and highly successful, research in environmental sciences,” said Moore. “The graduates of the college we envision will be highly sought after in fields ranging from design of the built environment to alternative energy development to the formation of environmental and energy policy.”
In both cases, said Moore, the move to create the colleges is supported by three years of work, by recommendations from internal and external committees who reviewed existing programs and structures on the campus, and above all, “by the clear economic, workplace and research demands of the world around us.”
“This isn’t adding to an ivory tower – it’s breaking apart the ivory tower and investing in a bright and very real future for our students and our faculty,” said Moore. “This will challenge us to rethink how we teach, how we organize ourselves as a research and scholarly community, how we generate and use resources, and how we deliver graduates into the job market or into realms of further scholarship.”
Moore said the next step in this process is to form implementation committees to create blueprints for forging the colleges, examining such issues as funding and fundraising, administration, curriculum development and how to integrate the work of the institutes with the role and mission of the new colleges. The goal is to submit proposals to form the colleges to the CU Board of Regents within the next 12 months, and to form the new colleges and begin enrolling students by 2015.
Moore also thanked a host of individuals who drove the internal and external processes to help envision the colleges, including “Merrill Lessley, who chaired the ICMT Exploratory Committee, Andrew Calabrese who chaired the Information Communication Journalism Media and Technology Steering Committee, Helmut Muller-Sievers and Bob Craig who organized conversations in the social sciences and the humanities and arts around these issues last summer, Michele Jackson who conducted an online discussion group, and Sharon Collinge who chaired the Environmental Studies Visioning Committee.”
CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip DiStefano lauded the work of the committees.
“Forming new academic entities is no small task,” said DiStefano. “From the volunteer committee members who gave their time, to our faculty who gave their time and input into those committees, we have seen the best of what CU-Boulder is about: passion, vision, energy and ingenuity. We are confident our new colleges and schools will embody these same values.”
-CU press release-
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CU police: Sex assault suspect sketch released
0May 1, 2013
The University of Colorado Boulder Police Department is asking the public for help in identifying the suspect involved in an attempted sex assault. A composite sketch of the suspect is attached. Through interviews with the victim, UCPD has also been able to identify a more specific location and time of the incident. UCPD believes the attempted sex assault occurred between 11:15 to 11:30 p.m. on Friday, April 26, 2013, near Broadway and Pleasant Street.
Below is background from the original April 27 press release:
The University of Colorado Boulder Police Department is investigating a report of an attempted sexual assault on the west end of campus near Broadway. On April 27, 2013 a female CU student reported to police that around midnight she was attacked near the Broadway bike path while walking home from a party on the hill. According to the victim, the suspect approached from behind, pushed her to the ground, placed a pair scissors to her throat, and began to remove her clothing. The female struck the suspect in the face and was able to flee the scene.
The female described the attacker as follows:
- White male
- Approximately 50 years old
- 5’ 6”
- Scruffy beard
- Crooked teeth
- Wearing dark colored athletic shorts and a white t-shirt
The case number is 2013-1059.
Anyone with information about this crime should contact Sergeant Michael Lowry at 303-492-8168. Those who have information but wish to remain anonymous may contact the Northern Colorado Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477) or 1-800-444-3776. Tips can also be submitted via the Crime Stoppers website at http://www.crimeshurt.com. Those submitting tips through Crime Stoppers that lead to the arrest and filing of charges on a suspect(s) may be eligible for a cash reward of up to $1,000 from Crime Stoppers.
-CU police press release-
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CU study: Bug-eyed lenses capture wide view with no distortion
0May 1, 2013
Lenses shaped like the bulging, bowl-shaped eyes possessed by dragonflies, praying mantises, houseflies and other insects can take exceptionally wide-angle photos without distorting the image.
To create the innovative camera, which also allows for a practically infinite depth of field, the scientists used stretchable electronics and a pliable sheet of microlenses made from a material similar to that used for contact lenses. The researchers described the camera in an article published today in the journal Nature.
Conventional wide-angle lenses, such as fisheyes, distort the images they capture at the periphery, a consequence of the mismatch of light passing through a hemispherically curved surface of the lens only to be captured by the flat surface of the electronic detector.
For the digital camera described in the new study, the researchers were able to create an electronic detector that can be curved into the same hemispherical shape as the lens, eliminating the distortion.
“The most important and most revolutionizing part of this camera is to bend electronics onto a curved surface,” said Jianliang Xiao, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at CU-Boulder and co-lead author of the study. “Electronics are all made of silicon, mostly, and silicon is very brittle, so you can’t deform the silicon. Here, by using stretchable electronics we can deform the system; we can put it onto a curved surface.”
Creating a camera inspired by the compound eyes of arthropods — animals with exoskeletons and jointed legs, including all insects as well as scorpions, spiders, lobsters and centipedes, among other creatures — has been a sought-after goal. Compound eyes typically have a lower resolution than the eyes of mammals, but they give arthropods a much larger field of view than mammalian eyes as well as high sensitivity to motion and an infinite depth of field.
Compound eyes consist of a collection of smaller eyes called ommatidia, and each small eye is made up of an independent corneal lens as well as a crystalline cone, which captures the light traveling through the lens. The number of ommatidia determines the resolution and varies widely among arthropods. Dragonflies, for example, have about 28,000 tiny eyes while worker ants have only in the neighborhood of 100.
Imitating the corneal lens-crystalline cone pairings, the camera created by Xiao and his colleagues has 180 miniature lenses, each of which is backed with its own small electronic detector. The number of lenses used in the camera is similar to the number of ommatidia in the compound eyes of fire ants and bark beetles.
The electronics and the lenses are both flat when fabricated, said Xiao, who began working on the project as a postdoctoral researcher in John Roger’s lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This allows the product to be manufactured using conventional systems.
“This is the key to our technology,” Xiao said. “We can fabricate an electronic system that is compatible with current technology. Then we can scale it up.”
The lens sheet and the electronics sheet are integrated together while flat and then molded into a hemispherical shape afterward. Each individual electronic detector and each individual lens do not deform, but the spaces between the detectors and lenses can stretch and allow for the creation of a new 3-D shape. The electronic detectors are all attached with serpentine filament bridges, which are not compromised as the material stretches and bends.
In the pictures taken by the new camera, each lens-detector pairing contributes a single pixel to the image. Moving the electronic detectors directly behind the lenses — instead of having just one detector sitting farther behind a single lens, as in conventional cameras — creates a very short focal length, which allows for the near-infinite depth of field.
The new paper demonstrates that stretchable electronics can be used as the foundation for a distortion-free hemispherical camera, but commercial production of such a camera may still be years away, Xiao said.
The three other co-lead authors of the paper are Young Min Song, Yizhu Xie and Viktor Malyarchuk, all of the University of Illinois. Other co-authors are Ki-Joong Choi, Rak-Hwan Kim and John Rogers, also of Illinois; Inhwa Jung, of Kyung Hee University in Korea; Zhuangjian Liu, of the Institute of High Performance Computing A*star in Singapore; Chaofeng Lu, of Zhejiang University in China and Northwestern University; Rui Li, of Dalian University of Technology in China; Kenneth Crozier, of Harvard University; and Yonggang Huang, of Northwestern University.
The research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation.
CU news release
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CU cops investigating attempted sexual assault
0April 27, 2013
The University of Colorado Boulder Police Department is investigating a report of an attempted sexual assault on the west end of campus near Broadway. On April 27, 2013 a female CU student reported to police that around midnight she was attacked near the Broadway bike path while walking home from a party on the hill. According to the victim, the suspect approached from behind, pushed her to the ground, placed a pair scissors to her throat, and began to remove her clothing. The female struck the suspect in the face and was able to flee the scene.
The female described the attacker as follows:
- · White male
- · Approximately 50 years old
- · 5’ 6”
- · Scruffy beard
- · Crooked teeth
- · Wearing dark colored athletic shorts and a white t-shirt
The case number is 2013-1059.
Anyone with information about this crime should contact Sergeant Michael Lowry at 303-492-8168. Those who have information but wish to remain anonymous may contact the Northern Colorado Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477) or 1-800-444-3776. Tips can also be submitted via the Crime Stoppers website at http://www.crimeshurt.com. Those submitting tips through Crime Stoppers that lead to the arrest and filing of charges on a suspect(s) may be eligible for a cash reward of up to $1,000 from Crime Stoppers.
CU police press release
-CU-
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As the planet warms faster, more species will be increasingly at risk
0April 21, 2013
The Earth’s climate zones are shifting at an accelerating pace, says a new study led by a scientist at the CU’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
The acceleration of change means that the species inhabiting each zone have less time to adapt to the climatic changes, said lead author Irina Mahlstein, a CIRES scientist who works at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. “The warmer the climate gets, the faster the climate zones are shifting. This could make it harder for plants and animals to adjust.”
The study is the first to look at the accelerating pace of the shifting of climate zones, which are areas of the Earth defined by annual and seasonal cycles of temperature and precipitation, as well as temperature and precipitation thresholds of plant species. Over 30 different climate zones are found on Earth; examples include the equatorial monsoonal zone, the polar tundra zone and cold arid desert zone.
“A shift in the climate zone is probably a better measure of ‘reality’ for living systems, more so than changing temperature by a degree or precipitation by a centimeter,” said Mahlstein.
The scientists used climate model simulations and a well-known ecosystem classification scheme to look at the shifts between climate zones over a two-century period, 1900 to 2098. The team found that for an initial 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, about 5 percent of Earth’s land area shifts to a new climate zone.
The models show that the pace of change quickens for the next 3.6 F of warming as an additional 10 percent of the land area shifts to a new climate zone. The paper was published online in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 21.
Certain regions of the globe, such as northern middle and high latitudes, will undergo more changes than other regions, such as the tropics, the scientists found. In the tropics, mountainous regions will experience bigger changes than low-altitude areas.
In the coming century, the findings suggest that frost climates — the coldest climate zone of the planet — will largely decrease. In general, dry regions in different areas of the globe will increase, and a large fraction of land area will change from cool summers to hot summers, according to the study.
The scientists also investigated whether temperature or precipitation had a greater impact on how much of the land area changed zones. “We found that temperature is the main factor, at least through the end of this century,” said Mahlstein.
John Daniel at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory and Susan Solomon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology co-authored the study.
-CU press release
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4-20 fails to appear on CU campus
0April 21, 2013
The University of Colorado Boulder Police Department reports that April 20, 2013, was a quiet day on campus. Chancellor Phil DiStefano ordered the closure of the Main Campus to visitors through most of the day on Saturday. He also ordered the main lawn areas of Norlin Quad closed to everyone during this time. Enforcing the Chancellor’s order required a significant deployment of law enforcement officers.
Those entering campus were required to show their student/employee IDs or approved visitor’s credential. In years prior to 2012, thousands of people would line the Norlin Quad area for several hours on April 20 to smoke marijuana.
But this year, the Police Department can report that no one entered the Norlin Quad lawn area while officers were present. The Police Department made no arrests Saturday and issued no summonses for trespassing. Two CU students did receive petty offense summonses related to public consumption of marijuana around 4:30 p.m. near Baker Hall. The campus reopened at 6 p.m.
The CU-Boulder Police Department would like to thank the public for their cooperation, and also praise the many law enforcement agencies that assisted on Saturday.
CU police release
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CU officers deploy non-lethal weapons to make an arrest
0April 20, 2013
At around 11:30 p.m. on April 19, 2013, the University of Colorado Police Department was dispatched to the area of 30th Street and Baseline Road on the report of a possible hit-and-run accident. Officers found the suspect’s vehicle, an older-model van with heavy front-end damage, at the Bear Creek Apartments parking lot. Officers approached the van and saw Jayme Lee McCoy, 32, of Boulder, seated in the second row with his dog, described as a pit bull. McCoy ignored commands to show his hands, muttered incoherent statements and appeared to be under the influence of drugs.
An officer opened the side door of the van and repeatedly shouted at McCoy to show his hands. Officers saw that McCoy was holding a knife. Officers continued to talk to the suspect and ask for his cooperation, but McCoy remained in the vehicle for a few minutes. McCoy then kissed his dog on the head and unleashed it. McCoy emerged from the van with his right hand tucked behind his right leg as if he might be holding a weapon. The suspect came toward officers and continued to ignore commands to show his hands. An officer deployed a Taser stun gun on the suspect, but it proved ineffective. Two other officers deployed a Taser stun gun and multiple PepperBall projectiles. At the same time, the suspect’s dog ran toward officers in an aggressive manner. An officer fired a bean-bag shotgun round at the dog, but it does not appear the dog was struck. The animal quickly fled the scene. McCoy was placed under arrest and transported to Boulder Community Hospital with minor injuries. A knife was recovered near the location where McCoy was arrested.
McCoy was arrested on the following charges:
- Felony menacing
- Obstructing a peace officer
- Disorderly conduct
- Traffic charges: Driving under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs, failing to remain at the scene after damaging another vehicle, driving a vehicle without a driver’s license and recording a second DUI offense.
According to CU-Boulder databases, McCoy is not a CU student or employee. McCoy has an extensive criminal background in multiple states for charges related to resisting arrest, obstructing a peace officer, burglary, weapons violations and drugs.
The Boulder Police Department is investigating the hit-and-run accident near 30th Street and Baseline Road.
The Case Number is 13-1008. The case report will not be available until at least Monday, April 22.
-CU police press release-
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CU math whizzes are at the top of the heap
0April 17, 2013
Outstanding winners of international competition, again
Two University of Colorado Boulder undergraduate student teams have been named among the 11 top winners from a field of 5,636 teams that entered the 2013 international Mathematical Contest in Modeling this spring.
Only 375 teams, or 6 percent of those entering the contest, were from the United States. The others were from Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
CU-Boulder undergraduate students, from left to right, Fiona Pigottt, Tracy Babb, Christopher Aicher, Gregory McQuie, Yueh-Ya “Sam” Hsu and David Thomas join faculty adviser Anne Dougherty, at center in front row, to celebrate their being named “Outstanding Winners” in the 2013 Mathematical Contest in Modeling. (Photo by Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado)
CU-Boulder had two teams designated as “Outstanding Winners” in 2012 as well, and has had a total of 13 Outstanding Winner designations since 2000.
“I don’t know any other university, from anywhere in the world, that has that track record,” said Anne Dougherty of CU-Boulder’s Department of Applied Mathematics. “This is a testament to our excellent students and exceptionally strong undergraduate program.”
One of the 2013 problems focused on developing an effective, feasible and cost-efficient strategy to meet projected water needs in a given country, while the other challenged students to develop the “ultimate brownie pan” to maximize heat distribution and cooking potential in an oven.
Results of the contest, which took place at the students’ home institutions Jan. 31-Feb. 4, were announced by the Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications on April 5.
One of the two CU-Boulder teams designated as an “Outstanding Winner” was comprised of students Gregory McQuie and David Thomas of aerospace engineering sciences, and Yueh-Ya Hsu of applied mathematics. The team also was awarded the Mathematical Association of America Award.
The other “Outstanding Winner” from CU-Boulder included students Christopher Aicher and Tracy Babb of applied mathematics, and Fiona Pigott, who is double-majoring in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics. The team also was presented with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Award.
Dougherty served as faculty adviser to both teams. Any undergraduate CU-Boulder student was welcome to participate.
A third team of CU-Boulder students entered the contest and was designated a “successful participant.” That team included students Runnan Lou of aerospace engineering, Weiming Zhang of applied mathematics and Xinyu Shen, who is double-majoring in math and physics.
According to the contest rules, the students had 96 hours to decide which of two problems to complete, research their problem, come up with a mathematical model, program a numerical model and write a report.
Official contest results are posted at http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/mcm/contests/2013/results.
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NASA sends CU Boulder big bucks for space weather mission
0April 15, 2013
CU-Boulder to receive $36 million
The University of Colorado Boulder will receive roughly $36 million from NASA to build and operate a space instrument for a mission led by the University of Central Florida that will study Earth’s upper atmosphere to learn more about the disruptive effects of space weather.
The mission, known as the Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD, involves imaging Earth’s upper atmosphere from a geostationary orbit some 22,000 miles above the planet. The mission is expected to have a direct impact on the understanding of space weather like geomagnetic storms that alter the temperature and composition of Earth’s atmosphere, which can disrupt communication and navigation satellites, affecting everything from automobile GPS and cell phone coverage to television programming.
The GOLD mission, which is being led by research scientist Richard Eastes of the University of Central Florida, will launch aboard a commercial communications satellite as a “hosted” payload. Such payloads, which are secondary to the satellite’s main objective, represent the most cost-effective way to reach geostationary orbit, said CU-Boulder aerospace engineer Mark Lankton of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the GOLD project manager.
“LASP is extremely pleased to be working on this mission with Richard Eastes at the University of Central Florida, who we have been collaborating with for seven years,” said Lankton. “This mission is one of the first to involve a science instrument being launched on a communication satellite, which is a terrific idea and exactly the right way to run a quality mission on a smaller budget.”
The LASP instrument, known as an imaging spectrograph, weighs roughly 60 pounds and is about 2 feet long and about 1 foot tall and 1 foot wide – roughly the size of a microwave oven. It will launch aboard a commercial satellite built by SES Government Solutions in McLean, Va. The LASP instrument will be gathering data on Earth’s upper atmosphere in the far ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
“GOLD’s imaging represents a new paradigm for observing the boundary between Earth and space,” said Bill McClintock, the deputy principal investigator on the CU-Boulder spectrograph and a senior research scientist at LASP. “It will revolutionize our understanding of how the sun and the space environment affect our upper atmosphere.”
A geosynchronous orbit is an orbit that completes one revolution in the same amount of time it takes for the Earth to rotate once on its polar axis. “We will be able to view almost a complete hemisphere of the Earth, almost all the time, with this orbit,” said Lankton.
The mission scientists will be looking for the effects of space weather on the upper atmosphere — the ionosphere and thermosphere located roughly 50 miles to 350 miles above Earth – caused by the sun and Earth’s lower atmosphere, said Lankton. “The giant driver is the sun, including geomagnetic storms that can cause bright auroras and the disruption of satellite communications,” he said.
Lankton said the science team also will investigate the effects that atmospheric waves and tides from Earth’s lower atmosphere have on the thermosphere-ionosphere system. The mission will make use of other instruments gathering data on the sun, including LASP’s $42 million Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment flying on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Roughly 40 LASP researchers will be working on the GOLD mission when it is at full strength, including five to 10 students, split about evenly between undergraduates and graduates, said Lankton. Other participants in the GOLD mission include the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the University of California, Berkeley, Computational Physics Inc. of Springfield, Va., and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The GOLD mission is part of NASA’s new Heliospheric Explorer Program designed to provide space observations to study Earth’s ionosphere and thermosphere. The mission is slated for launch in 2017. NASA Explorer missions of opportunity, such as GOLD, are capped at $55 million each.
by CU media relations
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CU business school endowed with $2.25 million chair to promote global enterprise
0April 3, 2013
Advancing global enterprise at the university level by a billionaire seems to make excellent sense.
A better understanding of the core drivers that help great leaders innovate — and avoid failure — is key to advancing global enterprise. The Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder is now better equipped to advance this understanding, thanks to a new $2.25 million gift from the Thomas Stix Guggenheim family to establish an endowed faculty chair aimed at educating new generations of entrepreneurs on the core drivers of successful business design and innovation.
This prestigious faculty post was made possible by Thomas Stix Guggenheim and his wife Pedie, of Cincinnati and Snowmass Village, Colo., and his four children, each of whom also attended CU-Boulder.
The new chair will enhance business education at the Leeds School by offering a broader exploration of the factors that allow some firms to succeed while others fail.
The chair also advances key Leeds priorities, as it will help aspiring innovators develop the critical thinking skills that result in creative solutions to diverse and complex challenges. “Our business experience has demonstrated there is as much, if not more, to learn from business failures as from successes,” Guggenheim said. “One main aspect of our endowed chair is to case-study this belief.”
David Ikenberry, dean of the Leeds School, said the creation of the Thomas Stix Guggenheim Family Endowed Chair in Business Design and Innovation is emblematic of the school’s mission. “We have embarked on an innovation agenda that will enable graduates to evolve in a rapidly changing business climate and ensure their ability to drive value,” he said. “We are fortunate and grateful for the family’s generous support as we pursue this great challenge.”
The concept of business design is an emerging area of business education — exploring the interaction of factors such as strategy, product or service design, and entrepreneurial leadership to solve complex problems and drive economic innovation and successful business creation.
With Leeds and CU’s long-standing reputation for entrepreneurship education along with Boulder’s identity as one of the nation’s most entrepreneurial and creative cities, the new chair is a logical fit for Colorado and its economy.
The Thomas Stix Guggenheim Family Endowed Chair in Business Design and Innovation is a tribute to the successful career and outstanding leadership of the chair’s namesake. After graduating from CU-Boulder in 1950 with a degree in marketing, Guggenheim went on to lead two successful hosiery (sock) businesses.
“It’s exciting to see CU-Boulder graduates giving back to the university in such an important way so future generations of students can succeed in their entrepreneurial endeavors,” said Chancellor Philip DiStefano.
A longtime donor to CU-Boulder, Guggenheim has supported the Center for Education on Social Responsibility, which integrates ethics education across the Leeds School curriculum to develop values-driven leaders, and a popular freshman-level course titled “Profiles in American Enterprise,” which invited top executives to discuss relevant business issues.
An endowed chair gift provides a reliable and perpetual stream of funding for a senior faculty position. It is a public indicator of a program’s prestige and it helps universities recruit and retain top talent.
A global search will launch immediately to identify a candidate to serve as the first Guggenheim Family Endowed Chair. The goal is to fill the tenured post, to be housed within the school’s Division of Management, for the start of the fall semester in 2014.
The gift is one of more than 275,000 gifts made to date during Creating Futures, a $1.5 billion fundraising campaign to enhance CU education, research, outreach and health programs benefiting citizens throughout Colorado and beyond. Visit http://www.cufund.org for more information.
-CU Press Release-
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CU study: 66 million years ago, an asteroid turned Earth into a crispy critter
0March 27, 2013
A new look at conditions after a Manhattan-sized asteroid slammed into a region of Mexico in the dinosaur days indicates the event could have triggered a global firestorm that would have burned every twig, bush and tree on Earth and led to the extinction of 80 percent of all Earth’s species, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.
Led by Douglas Robertson of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, the team used models that show the collision would have vaporized huge amounts of rock that were then blown high above Earth’s atmosphere. The re-entering ejected material would have heated the upper atmosphere enough to glow red for several hours at roughly 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit — about the temperature of an oven broiler element — killing every living thing not sheltered underground or underwater.
An artist’s rendition of the asteroid air strike 66 million years ago
The CU-led team developed an alternate explanation for the fact that there is little charcoal found at the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, boundary some 66 million years ago when the asteroid struck Earth and the cataclysmic fires are believed to have occurred. The CU researchers found that similar studies had corrected their data for changing sedimentation rates. When the charcoal data were corrected for the same changing sedimentation rates they show an excess of charcoal, not a deficiency, Robertson said.
“Our data show the conditions back then are consistent with widespread fires across the planet,” said Robertson, a research scientist at CIRES, which is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Those conditions resulted in 100 percent extinction rates for about 80 percent of all life on Earth.”
A paper on the subject was published online this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. Co-authors on the study include CIRES Interim Director William Lewis, CU Professor Brian Toon of the atmospheric and oceanic sciences department and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and Peter Sheehan of the Milwaukee Public Museum in Wisconsin.
Geological evidence indicates the asteroid collided with Earth about 66 million years ago and carved the Chicxulub crater in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula that is more than 110 miles in diameter. In 2010, experts from 33 institutions worldwide issued a report that concluded the impact at Chicxulub triggered mass extinctions, including dinosaurs, at the K-Pg boundary.
The conditions leading to the global firestorm were set up by the vaporization of rock following the impact, which condensed into sand-grain-sized spheres as they rose above the atmosphere. As the ejected material re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, it dumped enough heat in the upper atmosphere to trigger an infrared “heat pulse” so hot it caused the sky to glow red for several hours, even though part of the radiation was blocked from Earth by the falling material, he said.
But there was enough infrared radiation from the upper atmosphere that reached Earth’s surface to create searing conditions that likely ignited tinder, including dead leaves and pine needles. If a person was on Earth back then, it would have been like sitting in a broiler oven for two or three hours, said Robertson.
The amount of energy created by the infrared radiation the day of the asteroid-Earth collision is mind-boggling, said Robertson. “It’s likely that the total amount of infrared heat was equal to a 1 megaton bomb exploding every four miles over the entire Earth.”
A 1-megaton hydrogen bomb has about the same explosive power as 80 Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs, he said. The asteroid-Earth collision is thought to have generated about 100 million megatons of energy, said Robertson.
Some researchers have suggested that a layer of soot found at the K-Pg boundary layer roughly 66 million years ago was created by the impact itself. But Robertson and his colleagues calculated that the amount of soot was too high to have been created during the massive impact event and was consistent with the amount that would be expected from global fires.
