Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

April 27th, 2011 | 12:38 am

Let’s get digital

Jam My Jam won top place in the university's Mobility Contest and a $3,000 prize. Photo courtesy of Megan Monroe

The Office of Information Technology announced the winners of its Mobility Contest at an April 21 awards ceremony, wrapping up a project that began in October when a contest kick-off meeting was held for interested students. Student leaders proposed 26 apps, and the top four won cash prizes.

The first place app, called Jam My Jam, lets listeners see what songs are most popular and where they’re being played in the campus “Jam Zone.” Computer science graduate student Megan Monroe and senior computer science major Jonathan Speiser created the app together.

“I came up with it just walking around campus,” Monroe said. “All I see basically are other people with their headphones on, and I just can’t help to think, ‘What are they listening to?’ and that’s where the idea for the app came from.”

Monroe said she was surprised to find out her team won since the criteria for entry — the apps were supposed to “improve campus life” — seemed fairly vague.
“I feel like that could literally mean anything,” she said.
An app called Atmo — short for Atmosphere — came in second place, with a prize of $2,000. Created by computer science graduate student Randy Baden, it allows users at a party or similar event to vote on which songs get played by the DJ.

The app is already being used at TerpZone in Stamp Student Union, as well as Justin’s Café in Washington.

Baden said the idea for the app came from the website Pandora, which customizes a playlist for users based on their musical preferences.
“It became this whole system of voting on the music that’s playing in a certain location,” he said.

A team of five students created the third-place app, Tell The Terps, which allows members of the university community to easily alert Facilities Management to any problems on the campus. Four students also created an app called Mobile Blue Light, modeled after the blue-light emergency phones on the campus, and won the $250 honorable mention prize.

The Mobile Blue Light app makes it easier for students to report emergencies by sending the location of the caller directly to University Police.

— Lauren Kirkwood

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March 30th, 2011 | 11:28 pm

A friend in need is a friend indeed

Your calculus exam is tomorrow and you have no idea how to even begin studying. It’s too late for office hours, and you’re mucking your way through each practice problem, slowly but surely realizing failure is all but inevitable.

Too bad there isn’t a math expert floating around the campus who’d be willing to tutor you for a few bucks, right?

Thanks to a new student-designed smartphone application, you may be able to get in touch with just the right guy for the job. Whether it’s finding a tutor for that late-night study crisis or even getting someone to pick up your dry cleaning, the new application, dubbed Beagle, can help to sniff that person out.

Created by four juniors — biology major Philippe Azimzadeh, criminology and criminal justice major Julian Capps, biology major Asif Jamil and University of Maryland, Baltimore County, mathematics major Adeel Kahn — Beagle will allow students to post tasks they need completed and pay other students for each favor.

“It gives you time to do the thing that you’re good at … rather than burdening yourself with petty things,” Capps said.

Users can set their own deadlines and prices for each task and arrange to get paid either in cash or through points on the website, which they can use to pay other people for their own requests.

A preliminary version of the app will launch April 7, and the fully-fledged app will take off a few weeks later. It will be available for anyone with a university ID, and the founders said they intend to expand to other college campuses in the future.

Unlike Facebook and other social networks, Azimzadeh said Beagle presents a unique human dimension because it requires people to ultimately meet in person.
“For Beagle to actually work, people actually have to be together,” Azimzadeh said.

Capps said because of this aspect, the app will help to strengthen the university community.

“It’s better than hiring a random person than you’ve never met before,” he said. “I mean, it might be someone you’ve never met before, but you have something in common.”

The founders said they tried to ensure the app’s safety by requiring a UID to register.

“There’s always risks involved when you connect strangers together,” Azimzadeh admitted.

The group has been working with the business school’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship and has entered several contests, including the university’s Mobility Contest, which challenges students to create a mobile app focused on supporting campus life for a prize of up to $3,000.

To get on the waiting list for the beta version of the app, students, faculty and staff can visit beagleapp.com

— Sarah Meehan

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March 7th, 2011 | 09:52 pm

Reaching the boiling point

Many university research experiments are tucked away in labs on the campus, but mechanical engineering professor Jungho Kim’s work is floating 62 miles above Earth.

Kim has spent the last 15 years at the university researching how water boils in the absence of gravity. He hopes to finally get some answers when his experiment runs on the International Space Station over the next couple of months.

When NASA’s shuttle Discovery launched Feb. 24, Kim’s Microheater Array Boiling Experiment launched as well. The findings from the zero-gravity experiment will help engineers design hardware in space that will run more efficiently with the help of boiling water in cooling systems.

“The goal is to see how boiling is altered by the absence of gravity and determine how much heat can be removed from the [water’s] surface in the absence of gravity,” Kim said.

Kim said boiling water in zero-gravity environments like outer space is difficult because bubbles cling to the water surface and prevent heat transfer instead of bursting.

“If you imagine boiling water on a stove, the bubbles go to a certain size and leave the surface, but if you go into space, there is no gravity source to remove those bubbles,” Kim said.

Kim said understanding how water boils with no gravity will be important in designing more efficient space technologies that require heat transfer.

“Boiling is at the center of a lot of technologies NASA is interested in,” Kim said.

Kim said heat transfer is necessary aboard spacecrafts, which usually have a lot of fans and other equipment that gets hot, so engineers design heat exchangers that transfer heat from equipment to the air.

But Kim said that if the experiment provides enough information about how water boils in space, boiling water could be used to make more compact heat exchangers for shuttle launches and life-support systems for astronauts.

“You always want to make things lighter, smaller and more efficient,” said Kim, adding that it costs $10,000 per pound to launch something into orbit.

Kim said boiling water could also play a critical role in recycling water on spacecrafts — a necessary process for astronauts making a 50 million-mile journey to Mars.

“There’s no way you’re going to be able to provide the astronaut enough water to survive six months going to Mars if the astronaut is just going to pee it out and dump it overboard,” Kim said.

Kim said the experiment, which has already been tested on NASA’s “Vomit Comet” and at the European Space Agency, should provide engineers with enough understanding of boiling water to use it in space journeys both long and short.

“We’re generating data for engineers so they can design these heat exchangers to operate correctly,” Kim said. “There are a lot of big problems with the International Space Station [flight], but if you want to go to Mars, that requires a whole new level of understanding.”

— Claire Saravia

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February 25th, 2011 | 12:16 am

Same-sex marriage, same-sex relationship status

On Facebook, relationships are often an open book. And a new chapter just began, now that users can list a domestic partnership or civil union under “relationship status.”

Though the move has sparked controversy across the nation, it’s also quite timely in this state — the state Senate passed a same-sex marriage bill today and if a similar version passes in the House of Delegates, this will be the sixth state to legalize gay marriage.

Some students said the Facebook status change is a good thing and that such an option is long overdue.

“The way I look at it is there’s a pro and a con to it, the pro being that Facebook now does recognize there is a difference between same sex relationships, and they are recognizing the discrimination and that it is different for same sex couples in a relationship,” freshman criminology and criminal justice and psychology major Mark DeSacia said. “The con is they looked at gay people as second class citizens with these domestic partnerships and civil unions, which I know a lot of gay people look at it as.”

Other students said they believe the statement is insulting to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community.

“The more I think about it, the more it seems like a slap in the face,” said Spencer Brennen, president of the Pride Alliance. “It’s like saying, ‘Since you’re not allowed to be married, here, be in a civil union or domestic partnership — ha!’”

— Maria Romas

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September 16th, 2009 | 11:14 am

Morning Roundup: Other universities are progressive edition

You probably woke up this morning thinking, “Gee, I just love how progressive my university is.” But maybe our beloved university isn’t as progressive as it could be, at least relative to schools that are popping up in the news lately.

Wouldn't you like your next class to look like this? Art courtesy of Nintendo.

For example, wouldn’t it be great if you could get college credit for playing video games? Well that’s what the University of Houston is doing. According to the Houston Chronicle, students are excited about a new class which consists of playing Wii Fit 20 to 30 minutes twice a week. Although studies have shown so far that the original Wii fit and Wii Sports is not a replacement for the real thing, school administrators seem to have embraced the idea that some exercise is better than none at all.

Actually, Wii Fit is being advertised at Ritchie Coliseum as an activity for students, but to our knowledge, there is no “Wii class” available. And no university yet has a Halo 3 class, so you can’t say you’re doing “homework” every time  you plop down in front of an XBox360.

But progressive is not always better: Just look at many universities around the country that have done away with dining trays. The Los Angeles Times reports California schools are dropping trays to serve both environmental and economic interests. In fact, universities as close as Catholic University in D.C. have instituted trayless policies.

But students have complained the measure is an inconvenience, forcing them to balance their plates more precariously and forcing them into multiple trips within their college cafeterias — Northern Michigan recently brought their trays back. More importantly for students, the article points out, without trays, how would they go sledding on snow days?

Quick Hits

  • It is worth mentioning that our university is featured prominently in both the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun websites this morning, but it’s also stuff you’ve already heard about from us here at The Diamondback: Obama and swine flu. How original, right?
  • The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a U.S. Education Department study projecting college enrollment will increase in diversity, and the increase of female enrollment will be almost double the increase in male enrollment by 2018. To break it down for the underclassmen guys out there: Your odds are getting more favorable.

Today at the University

  • President Dan Mote is giving his annual State of the Campus address in room 0200 in the Skinner building. Two presidential addresses in two days — imagine that.
  • The First Look Fair opens today on McKeldin Mall. Go get free stuff, and definitely stop at The Diamondback table.
  • State Attorney General Doug Gansler will be in the Atrium of the Stamp Student Union celebrating Constitution Day from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. He didn’t realize Obama was coming tomorrow.

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