Posts tagged San Francisco
CU: The Brazilians are coming! (to study science)
Feb 17th
undergraduates study at CU-Boulder
100,000 Brazilian students, fully funded by Brazil’s booming economy, want to share knowledge
The University of Colorado Boulder welcomed 19 students from Brazil this semester as part of the new Science Without Borders Program and Brazil’s initiative to place and fully fund outstanding students abroad to supplement their studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM.
The students are among approximately 650 Brazilian undergraduates who have been selected to study on U.S. campuses with funding for their tuition, fees and housing from the Brazilian government’s Science Without Borders Program. The program, announced last year, provides scholarships to Brazilian undergraduate students for one year of study at one of more than 100 host colleges and universities, including CU-Boulder. Scholarships are given primarily to students in the STEM fields. After two semesters and an on- or off-campus internship, the students will return to Brazil to complete their degrees.
“Science Without Borders interested me because I wanted to know what it was like to study and live on campus and to learn in a different environment,” said Victor Sabioni, an aerospace engineering student from the Universidade de Federal de minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte. “I am taking two classes that are not offered at home, and everything is great so far.
“The campus is amazingly beautiful and everyone has been so welcoming and polite. CU couldn’t be better. It’s like heaven with homework.”
The Science Without Borders Program at CU-Boulder is offered through a partnership between the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering and Applied Science and the Division of Continuing Education.
“The students are studying with their peers, living in university housing and experiencing life in Colorado and the U.S.,” said Anne Heinz, dean of Continuing Education and associate vice chancellor for outreach and engagement. “Several of the students already have indicated an interest in returning to CU-Boulder for graduate school.
“CU-Boulder students, whether they’re from the San Luis Valley, San Francisco or São Paulo, will benefit from the enriched classroom conversations and experiences enabled by these programs,” she said. “These collaborations foster our future as a global society, and we look forward to CU-Boulder’s continued participation in this program.”
An additional cohort of students is scheduled to arrive later this year for programs beginning in the summer and fall.
The Science Without Borders Program is part of a larger Brazilian government initiative to grant 100,000 scholarships to Brazil’s best students to study abroad at the world’s best universities. The program is sponsored by the scholarship foundation of Brazil’s Ministry of Education, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior. The program is administered by the Institute of International Education, an independent nonprofit specializing in international exchange. The institute has been working closely with the ministry and with CU-Boulder and other U.S. universities to place the students in study programs that best meet their academic needs.
“We are pleased to be partnering with the government of Brazil and with the U.S. host campuses to implement this important program,” said Allan E. Goodman, Institute of International Education president and CEO. “At a time when Brazil’s economy is expanding rapidly, and Brazil and the United States are forging unprecedented ties in trade, energy and scientific development, we look to higher education as another area where our two countries should seek much stronger cooperation.”
CU Boulder researchers: You think it’s cold now?
Dec 5th
DEEP FREEZES, SAYS CU-BOULDER STUDY
Two University of Colorado Boulder researchers who have adapted a three-dimensional, general circulation model of Earth’s climate to a time some 2.8 billion years ago when the sun was significantly fainter than present think the planet may have been more prone to catastrophic glaciation than previously believed.
The new 3-D model of the Archean Eon on Earth that lasted from about 3.8 billion years to 2.5 billion years ago, incorporates interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, land, ice and hydrological cycles, said CU-Boulder doctoral student Eric Wolf of the atmospheric and oceanic sciences department. Wolf has been using the new climate model — which is based on the Community Earth System Model maintained by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder — in part to solve the “faint young sun paradox” that occurred several billion years ago when the sun’s output was only 70 to 80 percent of that today but when geologic evidence shows the climate was as warm or warmer than now..
In the past, scientists have used several types of one-dimensional climate models — none of which included clouds or dynamic sea ice — in an attempt to understand the conditions on early Earth that kept it warm and hospitable for primitive life forms. But the 1-D model most commonly used by scientists fixes Earth’s sea ice extent at one specific level through time despite periodic temperature fluctuations on the planet, said Wolf.
“The inclusion of dynamic sea ice makes it harder to keep the early Earth warm in our 3-D model,” Wolf said. “Stable, global mean temperatures below 55 degrees Fahrenheit are not possible, as the system will slowly succumb to expanding sea ice and cooling temperatures. As sea ice expands, the planet surface becomes highly reflective and less solar energy is absorbed, temperatures cool, and sea ice continues to expand.”
Wolf and CU-Boulder Professor Brian Toon are continuing to search for the heating mechanism that apparently kept Earth warm and habitable back then, as evidenced by liquid oceans and primordial life forms. While their calculations show an atmosphere containing 6 percent carbon dioxide could have done the trick by keeping the mean temperatures at 57 degrees F, geological evidence from ancient soils on early Earth indicate such high concentrations of CO2 were not present at the time.
The CU-Boulder researchers are now looking at cloud composition and formation, the hydrological cycle, movements of continental masses over time and heat transport through Earth’s system as other possible modes of keeping early Earth warm enough for liquid water to exist. Wolf gave a presentation on the subject at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting held Dec. 5-9 in San Francisco.
Toon said 1-D models essentially balance the amount of sunshine reaching the atmosphere, clouds, and Earth’s terrestrial and aquatic surfaces with the amount of “earthshine” being emitted back into the atmosphere, clouds, and space, primarily in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. “The advantage of a 3-D model is that the transport of energy across the planet and changes in all the components of the climate system can be considered in addition to the basic planetary energy balance.”
In the new 3-D model, preventing a planet-wide glaciation requires about three times more CO2 than predicted by the 1-D models, said Wolf. For all warm climate scenarios generated by the 3-D model, Earth’s mean temperature about 2.8 billion years ago was 5 to 10 degrees F warmer than the 1-D model, given the same abundance of greenhouse gases. “Nonetheless, the 3-D model indicates a roughly 55 degrees F mean temperature was still low enough to trigger a slide by early Earth into a runaway glacial event, causing what some scientists call a ‘Snowball Earth,’” said Wolf.
“The ultimate point of this study is to determine what Earth was like around the time that life arose and during the first half of the planet’s history,” said Toon. “It would have been shrouded by a reddish haze that would have been difficult to see through, and the ocean probably was a greenish color caused by dissolved iron in the oceans. It wasn’t a blue planet by any means.” By the end of the Archean Eon some 2.5 billion year ago, oxygen levels rose quickly, creating an explosion of new life on the planet, he said.
Testing the new 3-D model has required huge amounts of supercomputer computation time, said Toon, who also is affiliated with CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. A single calculation for the study run on CU-Boulder’s powerful new Janus supercomputer can take up to three months.
The CU-Boulder study was funded by a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship to Wolf as well as a grant from the NASA Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program.
Toon will be presented with AGU’s Roger Revelle Medal for innovative work on the effects of aerosols on clouds and climate at the 2011 San Francisco meeting. The Revelle Medal is presented annually to a scientist who has shown outstanding accomplishments or contributions toward the understanding Earth’s climate systems
Bruce Borowsky : Boulder Public Access TV
Aug 30th
What’s After Public Access?
Posted: August 30th, 2011 | Author: Bruce Borowsky | Filed under: Community, Film/Video Production | Tags: Public Access TV, storytelling, Video Production | No Comments »
Remember when we were promised 500 channels on TV? Well, it’s funny; now that it’s here, I’m wishing they would take some away. It seems like out of that 500, about 300 of them are “reality” shows of some sort, then another 150 are sports channels, and the remainder show back-to-back episodes of “Law & Order” or “CSI.” Whatever happened to programming of the people, by the people?
Back in the day (meaning about 20 years ago), there was this thing called Public Access television. It was where Zach and I, and many people we work with now, got their start in professional video production. It was a place where you could make a TV show about anything you wanted, and then have it broadcast to the whole city. For free. Did I mention it could be about anything you wanted?
Public Access TV was where you could find people talking about their cultures, their communities, their individuality. There were no class wars, because it was a level playing field: everyone had access to the same equipment, and it was all shown on the same channel. What mattered was how you told your story. And boy, were there a lot of stories! Living in San Francisco in the late 1980′s, there were shows being produced by everyone in that colorful community: on any given day, you’d see Hmong stories, Laotian stories, Vietnam veteran stories – it was a gold mine, a treasure trove of community-based TV programming.
In those days, I used to volunteer on a show called The Doghouse. I was shown how to operate one of the three video cameras in the studio, and then all of a sudden, we’re broadcasting live to the whole city. There’s a great feeling of excitement when working on a live TV show – any mistakes you make are seen immediately, there’s no editing. So it would always be fun, during my several month tenure on that show, to see and hear the wild things guests would do, especially frequent guest-host Jello Biafra, who always had something fun to talk about.
When I moved to Boulder a little over 20 years ago, I started hanging out in the little Public Access facility here, volunteering on a variety of shows, meeting people, learning new equipment. There was a great energy, and it was exciting to see what people were doing in a town a lot smaller than San Francisco. Like most cities, the City of Boulder has a franchise agreement with Comcast, and as part of that agreement, Comcast would provide three TV channels, along with funding (equipment) for those channels! Those channels were to be for what is known as “PEG” programming: Public, Educational, and Government.
Alas, these days in Boulder, Public Access is no more. For a variety of reasons, the wonderful Public Access channel we used to enjoy here is dead. Somehow it got absorbed into the Government channel and the Education channel, so unfortunately people have to go to neighboring cities who still have a local station.
However, one could give the argument that, now in the 21st century, the Internet has made a “TV channel” irrelevant. Now one can make that same program – about anything they want – and the world can watch it, not just a small town. BDA tries to fill the many gaps of Public Access by offering the Filmmaking Incubator that gets people to collaborate on a new short video project every month, a greenscreen production studio at well-below-market rates, and high-quality, professional trainingat very affordable prices.
Since the City actually still gets the money from the franchise fee (it’s just not used for Public Access), perhaps one day BDA will even have equipment to check out to people for free! Boulder Digital Arts would LOVE to be able to do that; as we have the perfect existing infrastructure to make it happen pretty easily. Maybe tell your Boulder City Councilperson, or the Boulder City Manager, if you think it’s a good idea. Maybe they might agree – weirder things have happened in Boulder!
Bruce Borowsky, Co-Founder
Boulder Digital Arts
www.boulderdigitalarts.com
www.bruceborowsky.com