Tech & Science
Technology and Science news from Boulder, Colorado
CU: more computers for more kids
Nov 7th
Computers To Youth program
The University of Colorado Boulder Environmental Center is expanding its Computers To Youth program to include more students and more interactive activities.
Computers To Youth provides high school students from underrepresented communities with upgraded used computers and hands-on training from CU-Boulder student mentors. Its purpose is to benefit underserved youth in Colorado and protect the environment. The computer systems received by the high school students through the program are designed to enable academic achievement that will encourage students to attend college.
“Not only do the high school students but also the college student mentors see this as an inspiring learning experience,” said CU-Boulder engineering student and Computers To Youth mentor Rebecca Miller. “The fact that CU-Boulder put together this program that saves resources, prevents waste and enables future scientists and engineers is completely brilliant.”
The next Computers To Youth event will be held Saturday, Nov. 9. Fourteen high school students from the Family Learning Center in Boulder, guided by CU-Boulder student mentors, will go through surplus computer components, bundle parts, load the latest software and take their newly built computer systems with them. The day also will include a new competition in which teams will race to disassemble and reassemble a demonstration computer.
“As technology increasingly becomes a part of daily life, those without computer access risk falling behind,” said Jack DeBell, the CU Environmental Center’s recycling program development director. “This consequence, known as the digital divide, tends to affect economically disadvantaged populations, especially youth. With such a great amount of computer equipment being discarded by a technologically advanced campus, it only makes sense that some of this equipment be “upcycled” to bridge the digital divide.”
The CU-Boulder student mentors are part of the statewide MESA (Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement) program. CU-Boulder’s MESA Center is headquartered in the Department of Pre-College Outreach Services in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Community Engagement (ODECE).
MESA Colorado also refers high school students to the Computers To Youth program.
With two additional Computers To Youth events slated for the spring semester, about 55 youth will be served by the program this academic year. The Denver Area Telecommunications Educational Telecommunication Consortium (DAETC) has enabled the increase in the number of participants, up from 48 last year, according to DeBell.
The CU Environmental Center has held numerous computer-build events since it began restoring and redistributing computers in 2001. In 2005, it received the Dell Higher Education Leadership Award to fund the collection of unused personal computers from the campus community and divert the equipment from landfills.
Also part of the Computers To Youth program is CU’s Property Services department. Other contributors have included the Community Computer Connection and Microsoft Corp.
“Hopefully this project will create additional collaboration with community groups and corporate sponsors in Colorado,” said St. Vrain School District teacher Karen Hunter, whose high school participated in Computers To Youth last year. “The students’ new-found confidence as a result of the amazing folks at CU-Boulder tells it all.”
For more information about Computers To Youth visit http://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/other-programs/computers-youth.
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CU study: Foreign students should stay
Nov 5th
foreign Ph.D. students to stay, CU-led study finds
Encouraging more talented foreign students to study at U.S. universities and encouraging them to launch entrepreneurial ventures here could help “revitalize innovation and economic growth” in this country, a trio of economists led by University of Colorado Boulder Professor Keith Maskus concludes.
Maskus and co-authors Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, associate professor at the Yale School of Management, and Eric T. Stuen, assistant professor at the University of Idaho College of Business and Economics, make this case in the Policy Forum of the Nov. 1 edition of the journal Science.
The economists’ perspective draws on their study of 100 research-intensive U.S. universities in 23 science and engineering fields, which found that both U.S. and foreign students are “essential causal inputs into scientific discovery.” The trio has also found evidence that increased student diversity boosts innovative research.
Maskus and his collaborators have found that high-performing foreign-born Ph.D. students improve the “creation of knowledge” in U.S. universities. When knowledge is created, it tends to drive entrepreneurial investment and economic growth.
In fact, the researchers found, “The productivity of the average American university science and engineering laboratory in generating publications is a bit higher if it has students from 10 different countries than if it has 10 students from one country.”
That might not seem intuitive, Maskus acknowledged. “What it comes down to is that people trained in different traditions tend to have different specialties in terms of how they come to a teamwork environment. And teamwork is more productive, more efficient if you have people with divergent ideas, so they can play off of each other.”
Such diversity of intellect, capacities and specializations makes a measurable difference, Maskus added. “It doesn’t matter so much on a factory line, but it matters a lot in an intellectual sense when you’re trying to be innovative and creative.”
The publication comes as Congress weighs whether and how to change the U.S. immigration system. A bipartisan bill that cleared the U.S. Senate in June but has stalled in the House includes provisions that partly mirror those recommended by Maskus and his team.
Based on data showing that highly skilled Ph.D.s in science and engineering tend to generate new jobs where they work, the bill would pave the way for Ph.D.s in science and engineering who are from foreign countries to gain permanent U.S. residency after graduation.
U.S. law requires foreign students to leave the country after earning their Ph.D.s unless they find employers willing to sponsor their visas, which, Maskus and his colleagues note, might not lead to permanent U.S. residency. In recent years, the percentage of foreign Ph.D.s remaining in the United States after graduation has declined.
The Senate bill would grant a green card, or permanent residence, to foreign students who get a Ph.D. in science or engineering at American universities. The bill would also facilitate green-card status to those who have recently earned doctoral degrees in science and engineering at recognized scientific institutions worldwide.
Maskus and his colleagues also recommend an entrepreneurship visa. Such a visa could be granted to those who have secured a patent and met certain milestones for getting that idea commercialized. The idea is similar to an investment visa—granted based on immigrants’ investment in the U.S. economy.
This year, Canada implemented an entrepreneurship visa that includes inventive foreign Ph.D.s. The program aims to attract science and engineering graduates from U.S. universities.
“Ultimately we think this is an important way of reinvigorating economic growth and technological change in the U.S.,” Maskus said.
Additionally, the trio contends that decisions to grant student visas to prospective graduate students from foreign countries should be granted on more factors than just their ability to pay. Historically, the ability-to-pay requirement has been used by immigration officials as an indicator that foreign students will return to their countries of origin.
In the case of foreign Ph.D.s in science and engineering, such a requirement “is short-sighted,” Maskus said. “The country should welcome people who can contribute in developing innovation and new technology and permit them to stay.”
“You have to have access to the best innovative inputs and resources in the world,” Maskus said. “The Europeans recognize that, the Australians, the Canadians.”
Addressing a commonly expressed fear, Maskus and his collaborators do not find evidence that granting green cards to high-performing foreign Ph.D.s would displace American Ph.D.s.
The research of Maskus, Mobarak and Stuen reinforces recommendations of groups ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the National Academy of Sciences.
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CU study: Global warming no hoax in the Eastern Canadian Arctic
Oct 23rd
Average summer temperatures in the Eastern Canadian Arctic during the last 100 years are higher now than during any century in the past 44,000 years and perhaps as long ago as 120,000 years, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.
The study is the first direct evidence the present warmth in the Eastern Canadian Arctic exceeds the peak warmth there in the Early Holocene, when the amount of the sun’s energy reaching the Northern Hemisphere in summer was roughly 9 percent greater than today, said CU-Boulder geological sciences Professor Gifford Miller, study leader. The Holocene is a geological epoch that began after Earth’s last glacial period ended roughly 11,700 years ago and which continues today.
Miller and his colleagues used dead moss clumps emerging from receding ice caps on Baffin Island as tiny clocks. At four different ice caps, radiocarbon dates show the mosses had not been exposed to the elements since at least 44,000 to 51,000 years ago.
Since radiocarbon dating is only accurate to about 50,000 years and because Earth’s geological record shows it was in a glaciation stage prior to that time, the indications are that Canadian Arctic temperatures today have not been matched or exceeded for roughly 120,000 years, Miller said.
“The key piece here is just how unprecedented the warming of Arctic Canada is,” said Miller, also a fellow at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
A paper on the subject appeared online Oct. 23 in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal published by the American Geophysical Union. Co-authors include CU-Boulder Senior Research Associate Scott Lehman, former CU-Boulder doctoral student and now Prescott College Professor Kurt Refsnider, University of California Irvine researcher John Southon and University of Wisconsin, Madison Research Associate Yafang Zhong. The National Science Foundation provided the primary funding for the study.
Miller and his colleagues compiled the age distribution of 145 radiocarbon-dated plants in the highlands of Baffin Island that were exposed by ice recession during the year they were collected by the researchers. All samples collected were within 1 meter of the ice caps, which are generally receding by 2 to 3 meters a year. “The oldest radiocarbon dates were a total shock to me,” said Miller.
Located just east of Greenland, the 196,000-square-mile Baffin Island is the fifth largest island in the world. Most of it lies above the Arctic Circle. Many of the ice caps on the highlands of Baffin Island rest on relatively flat terrain, usually frozen to their beds. “Where the ice is cold and thin, it doesn’t flow, so the ancient landscape on which they formed is preserved pretty much intact,” said Miller.
To reconstruct the past climate of Baffin Island beyond the limit of radiocarbon dating, Miller and his team used data from ice cores previously retrieved by international teams from the nearby Greenland Ice Sheet.
The ice cores showed that the youngest time interval from which summer temperatures in the Arctic were plausibly as warm as today is about 120,000 years ago, near the end of the last interglacial period. “We suggest this is the most likely age of these samples,” said Miller.
The new study also showed summer temperatures cooled in the Canadian Arctic by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit from roughly 5,000 years ago to about 100 years ago – a period that included the Little Ice Age from 1275 to about 1900.
“Although the Arctic has been warming since about 1900, the most significant warming in the Baffin Island region didn’t really start until the 1970s,” said Miller. “And it is really in the past 20 years that the warming signal from that region has been just stunning. All of Baffin Island is melting, and we expect all of the ice caps to eventually disappear, even if there is no additional warming.”
Temperatures across the Arctic have been rising substantially in recent decades as a result of the buildup of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. Studies by CU-Boulder researchers in Greenland indicate temperatures on the ice sheet have climbed 7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1991.
A 2012 study by Miller and colleagues using radiocarbon-dated mosses that emerged from under the Baffin Island ice caps and sediment cores from Iceland suggested that the trigger for the Little Ice Age was likely a combination of exploding tropical volcanoes – which ejected tiny aerosols that reflected sunlight back into space – and a decrease in solar radiation.
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