Posts tagged student
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: Spruce beetle infestation in N. Colo. tied to drought
Oct 10th
The new study is important because it shows that drought is a better predictor of spruce beetle outbreaks in northern Colorado than temperature alone, said lead study author Sarah Hart, a CU-Boulder doctoral student in geography. Drought conditions appear to decrease host tree defenses against spruce beetles, which attack the inner layers of bark, feeding and breeding in the phloem, a soft inner bark tissue, which impedes tree growth and eventually kills vast swaths of forest.
Spruce beetles, like their close relatives, mountain pine beetles, are attacking large areas of coniferous forests across the West. While the mountain pine beetle outbreak in the Southern Rocky Mountains is the best known and appears to be the worst in the historical record, the lesser known spruce beetle infestation has the potential to be equally or even more devastating in Colorado, said Hart, lead author on the new study.
“It was interesting that drought was a better predictor for spruce beetle outbreaks than temperature,” said Hart of the geography department. “The study suggests that spruce beetle outbreaks occur when warm and dry conditions cause stress in the host trees.”
A paper on the subject was published online in the journal Ecology. Co-authors include CU-Boulder geography Professor Thomas Veblen; former CU-Boulder graduate student Karen Eisenhart, now at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania; and former CU-Boulder students Daniel Jarvis and Dominik Kulakowski, now at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. The National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society funded the study.
The new study also puts to rest false claims that fire suppression in the West is the trigger for spruce beetle outbreaks, said Veblen.
Spruce beetles range from Alaska to Arizona and live in forests of Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir trees in Colorado. The CU-Boulder study area included sites in the White River, Routt, Arapaho, Roosevelt and Grand Mesa national forests as well as in Rocky Mountain National Park.
The CU-Boulder team assembled a long-term record of spruce beetle outbreaks from the northern Front Range to the Grand Mesa in western Colorado using a combination of historical documents and tree ring data from 1650 to 2011. Broad-scale outbreaks were charted by the team from 1843-1860, 1882-1889, 1931-1957 and 2004 to 2010.
The researchers used a variety of statistical methods to tease out causes for variations in the dataset at 18 sites in Colorado. “The extent to which we could distinguish between the warming signals and the drought signals was surprising,” said Veblen. “These are two things that easily can get mixed together in most tree ring analyses.”
There are several lines of evidence that drought is the main driver of the spruce beetle outbreak. The new study showed when northwest Colorado was in a warm, wet climate period from 1976 to 1998, for example, both spruce beetle reproduction and tree defenses like “pitching” beetles out of tree interiors with resin were likely high. But during that period of warming, outbreak was minimal.
The strongest climate correlation to spruce beetle outbreaks was above average annual values for the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, or AMO, a long-term phenomenon that changes sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. Believed to shift from cool to warm phases roughly every 60 years, positive AMO conditions are linked to warmer and drier conditions over much of North America, including the West.
Veblen said the AMO shifted from its cool to warm phase in the 1990s, meaning the climate phenomenon could be contributing to drought conditions in the West into the middle of this century. A 2006 tree-ring study involving Veblen, his former student, Thomas Kitzberger and researchers from several other institutions concluded that the warm phase of AMO also was correlated to increased wildfires in the West.
In addition to AMO, the researchers looked at two other ocean-atmosphere oscillations — the El Nino Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation — as well as past temperatures, precipitation and aridity to better understand the spruce beetle outbreaks. The team found that another effective predictor of drought conditions was summer “vapor pressure deficit,” a measurement of atmospheric dryness, said Veblen.
In the new study, the researchers were particularly interested in “radial growth” rates of tree rings from sub-canopy trees of various species in the study areas that thrived following outbreaks. One hallmark of spruce beetle outbreaks is that slow radial growth rates in such areas are followed by extremely rapid radial growth rates, an indication smaller trees flourish in the absence of the larger spruce trees because of decreased competition for water and increased opportunities for photosynthesis, said Hart.
The area of high-elevation forests affected by spruce beetles is growing in the West, Hart said. “In 2012, U.S. Forest Service surveys indicated that more area was under attack by spruce beetles than mountain pine beetles in the Southern Rocky Mountains, which includes southern Wyoming, Colorado and northern New Mexico,” she said. “The drought conditions that promote spruce beetle outbreak are expected to continue.”
One big concern about spruce beetle outbreaks is their effects on headwater streams that are important for water resources, said Veblen. “In the short term, trees killed by spruce beetles will lead to less water use by trees and more water discharge into streams. But in the long term, the absence of the trees killed by beetles may lead to less persistence of snow and earlier runoff.”
Veblen said it might seem counterintuitive to some that spruce-fir subalpine forests in Colorado are larger by area than lodgepole/ponderosa pine forests. “It is probably because spruce and subalpine forests are found in more remote areas not as visible to most people,” he said. “But potentially, the current spruce beetle outbreak could affect a larger area than the mountain pine beetle outbreak.”
The study had its beginnings in 1986, when Veblen and his students began compiling spruce and subalpine fir tree rings from various study sites in the Colorado mountains. Tree rings from individual trees — which carry information about weather, climate and even events like volcanic eruptions — can be matched up and read with rings from other trees, much like the pages of a book, from year to year and even from season to season.
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