Aerospace, Science•
on January 5th, 2010•
NASA internships are a perfect way to launch your future. Most people do not realize how many types of scientific and engineering specialties are employed by the Agency. The great people at NASA really care about your “real world” education. Do not hesitate to apply!
NASA Ames Summer 2010 Graduate Student Internship Programs
The Systems Teaching Institute is offering a 10- to 12-week summer research program for graduate students in fields relevant to the research done at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Selected students will gain hands-on experience working with cutting-edge research and development teams, an increased understanding of the NASA mission, and mentoring in research management skills. Besides working closely with Ames scientists and engineers, students will have the opportunity to attend seminars tailored to their level of expertise, career development workshops, and an end-of-summer symposium where they can share their results with other student interns. Awards (in the form of travel support to a national conference) will be given for the best symposium poster presentations.
For further information about this opportunity, visit http://uarc.ucsc.edu/sti/grad_10.shtml. Questions regarding this opportunity may be submitted by e-mail to Dr. Natalie Batalha at nbatalha@science.sjsu.edu or Amy Gilbert at amy.gilbert@adm.ucsc.edu.
2010 NASA Planetary Biology Internship
The NASA Planetary Biology Internship Program provides opportunities each year for 10 interns to undertake research at NASA research centers, NASA-sponsored laboratories, and academic institutions. The pursuit of such studies is expected to broaden the base of this new science by encouraging people in many different fields to take part. Applicants must be enrolled in graduate school.
Students accepted in the PBI program will be expected to carry out research with a NASA-sponsored investigator for eight weeks, usually during the summer months. Typical programs in which interns may become involved include: global ecology and remote sensing; microbial ecology and bio-mineralization; advanced life support; and origin and early evolution of life.
Applications are due Feb. 15, 2010. For more information, visit http://www.mbl.edu/education/courses/other_programs/pbi.html . Please e-mail questions about this opportunity to Michael Dolan at pbi@geo.umass.edu.
2010 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships
Caltech’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships, or SURF, project introduces undergraduate students to research under the guidance of seasoned mentors at Caltech or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Students experience the process of research as a creative intellectual activity and gain a more realistic view of the opportunities and demands of a professional research career.
Please e-mail any questions about this opportunity to the Caltech Student-Faculty Programs office at sfp@caltech.edu.
Written by Todd Borghesani
Careers, Learning, People•
on December 30th, 2009•
Career Experts Say Positions in Growing Fields Will Require an In-Demand Degree Coupled With Skills in Emerging Trends.
If you’re gearing up for a job search now as an undergraduate or returning student, there are several bright spots where new jobs and promising career paths are expected to emerge in the next few years.
Technology, health care and education will continue to be hot job sectors, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ outlook for job growth between 2008 and 2018. But those and other fields will yield new opportunities, and even some tried-and-true fields will bring some new jobs that will combine a variety of skill sets.
The degrees employers say they’ll most look for include finance, engineering and computer science, says Andrea Koncz, employment-information manager at the National Association of Colleges and Employers. But to land the jobs that will see some of the most growth, job seekers will need to branch out and pick up secondary skills or combine hard science study with softer skills, career experts say, which many students already are doing. “Students are positioned well for future employment, particularly in specialized fields,” Ms. Koncz says.
Career experts say the key to securing jobs in growing fields will be coupling an in-demand degree with expertise in emerging trends. For example, communications pros will have to master social media and the analytics that come with it; nursing students will have to learn about risk management and electronic records; and techies will need to keep up with the latest in Web marketing, user-experience design and other Web-related skills.
Technology Twists
More than two million new technology-related jobs are expected to be created by 2018, according to the BLS. Jobs that are expected to grow faster than average include computer-network administrators, data-communications analysts and Web developers. Recruiters anticipate that data-loss prevention, information technology, online security and risk management will also show strong growth.
A computer-science degree and a working knowledge of data security are critical to landing these jobs. Common areas of undergraduate study for these fields include some of the usual suspects, such as computer science, information science and management-information systems.
Social Media
But those might not be enough. That’s because not all of those jobs will be purely techie in nature. David Foote, chief executive officer of IT research firm Foote Partners, advises current computer-science students to couple their degrees with studies in marketing, accounting or finance. “Before, people widely believed that all you needed to have were deep, nerdy skills,” Mr. Foote says. “But companies are looking for people with multiple skill sets who can move fluidly with marketing or operations.”
Social media has opened the door to the growth of new kinds of jobs. As companies turn to sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to promote their brands, capture new customers and even post job openings, they will need to hire people skilled in harnessing these tools, Mr. Foote says. In most cases, these duties will be folded into a marketing position, although large companies such as Coca-Cola Co. are creating entire teams devoted exclusively to social media.
Energy Technologies
Not surprisingly, green technology, including solar and wind energy and green construction, are also booming areas. Engineers who can mastermind high-voltage electric grids, for example, will have a great advantage over other job applicants, says Greg Netland, who oversees recruiting for the U.S., Latin America and Canada for Sapphire Technologies, an IT staffing firm in Woburn, Mass. that is a division of Randstad.
“Global sustainability will become more important to employers,” Mr. Netland says. “It cuts costs, making experts in the field highly attractive to employers.”
Jobs in alternative-energy systems, including wind and solar energy, will require a variety of skills: engineers to design systems, consultants who will audit companies’ existing energy needs, and those who will install and maintain the systems.
Hospital Upgrades
Health care is expected to continue to see a surge in hiring, with more than four million new openings estimated by 2018, according to the BLS. Hiring for physical and occupational therapists will likely be strongest. But new specialties are popping up, particularly in case management, says Brad Ellis, a partner with Kaye Bassman International, an executive-search firm based in Plano, Texas.
Case managers do everything from managing the flow of information between practitioner and insurance company to mitigating risk to the hospital. “If you’re a licensed nurse, for example, getting a certificate in risk management from the state board of health would make you extremely competitive,” Mr. Ellis says.
Harris Miller, president of the Career College Association in Washington, D.C., says IT will be increasingly important in the quest to drive down health-care costs, too. Students specializing in nursing informatics, which combines general nursing with computer and information sciences, at the master’s degree level will swap a clipboard for a smart phone to manage patient data. Schools like Vanderbilt University are offering nursing informatics degrees via distance learning, and certification is offered through American Nurses Credentialing Center, based in Silver Springs, Md.
The strong push toward making medical records and information more accessible through computerized record-keeping means opportunity, Mr. Miller says. “This is going to require people who are skilled in the hardware and software of nursing informatics.”
Engineering, People, Science•
on December 20th, 2009•
Guess what’s on the U.S. Air Force’s wish list this holiday season. Sony’s popular PlayStation 3 gaming console. Thousands of them. The Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., recently issued a request for proposal indicating its intention to purchase 2,200 PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles.
But the military researchers don’t plan to play “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ or any of the season’s other blockbuster games. They plan to string the consoles together into a massive supercomputer and study how well they can enhance the military’s high-performance computing systems.
Once the researchers configured the hardware, they installed the Linux operating system on them, turning the gaming consoles into a military-grade supercomputer. Linderman said their first PS3 cluster was used in applications such as high-definition video processing and “neuromorphic” computing, which mimics the way the human brain perceives and processes images and information. When the new cluster of 2,200 PS3 consoles arrive in the next month or so, he said they will likely be used for similar projects.
Researchers Across the Country Harness Power of PlayStation 3. David Bader, a professor and executive director of high performance computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been involved in a number of projects involving PlayStation clusters.
When the PlayStation launched in 2006, he said, its processor far surpassed those of its generation. “Sony wanted a processor that they could use inside a game box that would be able to render the games but also incorporate real-world physics, emotion and really new aspects to game playing,” Bader said.
The same chip that enabled high-octane game play also powered Toshiba’s high-end HD TVs and technology created by IBM for oil and gas exploration.
At Georgia Tech, Bader has researched the possibility of using PS3 clusters in aircraft monitoring and financial risk assessment.
One project proposed using PlayStation 3 consoles on board commercial airplanes, he said. Consoles would not only provide in-flight entertainment for each passenger, but also serve as sensors around the aircraft that would alert the pilot to potential problems and failures.
Astrophysicists at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth are using a cluster of PS3 consoles to research gravitational waves and black holes. And even the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Cyber Crimes Center has used linked PS3s to solve Internet crimes.
Soon, you may be able to find information about almost any physical object with the click of a smartphone. Imagine working on augmented reality applications that change that way we use our intelligence; that augment our intelligence. Careers in this area include human computer interaction, computer science, computer vision and biomemetics.
This vision, once the stuff of science fiction, took a significant step forward this month when Google unveiled a smartphone application called Goggles. It allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking keywords, but by snapping an image with a cellphone and feeding it into Google’s search engine.
How tall is that mountain on the horizon? Snap and get the answer. Who is the artist behind this painting? Snap and find out. What about that stadium in front of you? Snap and see a schedule of future games there.
Goggles, in essence, offers the promise to bridge the gap between the physical world and the Web.
Goggles is not the first application to try to create a link between the physical and virtual worlds via cellphones. A variety of so-called augmented-reality applications like World Surfer and Wikitude allow you to point your cellphone or its camera and find information about landmarks, restaurants and shops in front of you. Yet those applications typically rely on location data, matching information from maps with a cellphone’s GPS and compass data. Another class of applications reads bar codes to link objects or businesses with online information about them.
Goggles also uses location information to help identify objects, but its ability to recognize millions of images opens up new possibilities. “This is a big step forward in terms of making it work in all these different kinds of situations,” said Jason Hong, a professor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
When you snap a picture with Goggles, Google spends a few seconds analyzing the image, then sends it up to its vast “cloud” of computers and tries to match it against an index of more than a billion images. Google’s data centers distribute the image-matching problem among hundreds or even thousands of computers to return an answer quickly.
It’s not hard to imagine a slew of commercial applications for this technology. You could compare prices of a product online, learn how to operate that old water heater whose manual you have lost or find out about the environmental record of a certain brand of tuna. But Goggles and similar products could also tell the history of a building, help travelers get around in a foreign country or even help blind people navigate their surroundings.
It is also easy to think of scarier possibilities down the line. Google’s goal to recognize every image, of course, includes identifying people. Computer scientists say that it is much harder to identify faces than objects, but with the technology and computing power improving rapidly, improved facial recognition may not be far off.
Mr. Gundotra says that Google already has some facial-recognition capabilities, but that it has decided to turn them off in Goggles until privacy issues can be resolved. “We want to move with great discretion and thoughtfulness,” he said.
Find the original article posted on the NY Times
Biology•
on December 4th, 2009•
Environmental Health News, one of TDG’s trusted sources of news, today published a story about biomonitoring, the practice of testing real people for exposure to chemicals.
The promise of biomonitoring is great, providing, “a treasure trove of data, one that might help unravel some of the world’s most enduring medical mysteries,” as EHN writer Harvey Black put it. Why? Because chemicals can interact with genes and human development, particularly early in life, to produce sometimes surprising health results later in life. A hormone-mimicking chemical might affect someone’s metabolism, for instance, increasing his risk of developing diabetes; or it might affect a girl’s development, leading to early-onset puberty and a greater risk of developing breast cancer.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to release its fourth report on the subject — the world’s most comprehensive biomonitoring effort. It will include data on 500 umbilical cords tested for 150 different chemicals, the first-ever data on infant exposures, as well as a range of data on adult exposures. It follows on the heels of several similar but smaller studies by nonprofit groups. Here are five facts about biomonitoring to consider:
The CDC’s 2005 report assessed the “body burdens” in 2,500 adults for 148 chemicals, finding that most Americans are exposed to multiple chemicals. Among the most headline-grabbing results was that many women of childbearing age had levels of mercury in their blood at levels that may cause brain damage to their unborn children. (The most common way women are exposed to mercury is through eating contaminated fish.)
- The upcoming CDC report will report on the presence or absence of 212 chemicals — 43% more than in 2005. And it will test more than three times as many people — 8,000 Americans.
- Still, the tests will account for less than 1% of the chemicals most Americans encounter in everyday life. Omitted are most commercial chemicals — including most of the 6,000 the Environmental Protection Agency considers “the most likely sources of human exposure,” according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office.
- Tests by nonprofit groups, though they include many fewer samples, have shown higher rates of contamination. The Environmental Working Group has detected more than 400 chemicals in people, including more than 300 in the cord blood of newborns. (See the results of EWG’s latest cord blood study.)
By Dan Shapley
Biology•
on December 3rd, 2009•
This is a quick look at the state-of-the-art of network visualization in systems biology. It’s an interesting topic on its own (and my day job at the moment), and also as it relates to the visualization of other types of networks, such as social networks (think Facebook). Systems biology is all about looking at proteins, pathogens, and more, within the contexts in which they interact. Naturally, then, the visualizations that tend to be particularly useful are those such as network visualizations that can provide macro understanding of the interactions. Questions such visualizations help with include those of the form “if a drug affects protein X, what else will it affect?”
Quite a bit of interesting complexity is present in these interaction networks (the data). They are often small-world, disassociative (unlike social networks), scale-free, and exhibit modularity. Biologists are usually either interested in looking at larger scale cell level networks, or meaningful sub-networks called pathways, which typically are in the range of 50-500 nodes.
Making life interesting, duplicate nodes representing different states are often included. The edges are directed, and may be hyperedges when multiple nodes necessarily interact together. And, in truth, the edges are often approximations of the actual interactions in the underlying network. These approximations come from experimental findings published in journals.
by A BEAUTIFUL WWW