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CU: New colleges, including a J-School are proposed. Others are environment and sustainability
May 1st
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 study: Bug-eyed lenses capture wide view with no distortion
May 1st
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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Fraudulent website for Parks and Recreation gathering personal information for resale
Apr 25th
The City of Boulder Parks and Recreation Department was notified by the Colorado Parks and Recreation Association (CPRA) that there is a possible fraudulent website offering registration for some Boulder Parks and Recreation activities and classes. Findsportsnow.com, is believed to be posting city programs and offering registration through their site, however, the city has no business relationship or agreements with this entity.
Area residents should visit www.BoulderParks-Rec.org or contact a city recreation center for program and registration links and information.
According to a memo from CPRA to parks and recreation departments around Colorado this week, the website “Findsportsnow.com has been listing several park and recreation agency programs, claiming to be a ‘one stop shop’ for registering for these sports programs. They are collecting personal information, including credit card numbers and charging a $2 ‘processing fee’ for each transaction. Their website claims they are then passing along this registration information to the host agency. THIS has NOT been the case in three instances we are aware of! Several of our CPRA Agencies have been notified by customers that they had registered through this website, only to find out they had been scammed.”
If you believe you may have registered for a City of Boulder recreation program through this website, please contact us. For more information call 303-413-7270.
CITY OF BOULDER NEWS RELEASE
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