Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Finding Order in Fluid Currents

"Over the past 10 years, scientists have made enormous strides in their ability to identify and make images of the underlying mechanics of flowing air and water, and to predict how objects move through these flows...."

... story continued at nytimes.com "Finding Order in the Apparent Chaos of Currents"

Thursday, September 24, 2009

ICOSSAR 2009 Keynote

This video is of the first 10 minutes of Prof. Kareem's keynote address at ICOSSAR 2009.

Out of Step on the Bridge


(image from Wikipedia)

The Millennium Bridge in London, England, which opened in 2000, became famous for its "wobbly" motions after crowds of pedestrians moved across it. Different theories into the nature of the bridge motion were developed, one of which was highlighted in the May 2009 issue of ASCE's Civil Engineering Magazine in an article entitled "Bio-mechanics Research Yields Clues to Millennium Bridge Wobble." Dr. Kareem has provided some insightful follow-up comments to this article.


Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Making the most of storm damage
















(image from Wikipedia)

In March of 2008, a tornado outbreak made its way through the city of Atlanta, GA. Roofs were damaged on low rise structures, trees were uprooted and glass damage was common to the high rise structures in the tornado's path. A year later, the city and building owners chose to make the best of the situation by rebuilding "Green".

Atlanta rebuilds "Green" after tornado. from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (registration may be required)

Monday, September 21, 2009

ICOSSAR 2009 Keynote Lecture

The Audacity of Change: A Transition to Nonstationary and Nonlinear Era

by Dr. Ahsan Kareem

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Travel through Dubai at 818 mph

Take a quick journey through the cityscape of Dubai from the vantage point of the metro at 818 mph.

Monday, September 14, 2009

224-story Skyscraper

From the Los Angeles Times...

"A Santa Monica architect known for his high-rise designs is working on what may be the ultimate "spec" building -- a 224-story skyscraper with green ambitions that would be the tallest structure in the world."

Click here for the full article

Friday, September 11, 2009

Embedded Documents

Leave it to Google to come up with very useful web features. With Google, it is possible to embed PDF and PowerPoint documents directly into the web page. No need for downloading or opening the document in another program, it can be viewed directly from the web page.


Friday, September 4, 2009

Trust and the Internet

The aim of the "TechnoCrowd" is to amass many different points of view and opinions into one space, giving readers/users the ability to parse that information for new concepts and ideas. However, with the freedom to express those opinions, it is the responsibility of the reader to decide what is true and what is false for themselves.

Sites like Wikipedia are populated by anyone with a computer, while the task of verifying that information falls upon everyone else. To assist with fact checking, researchers at UC Santa Cruz are developing a system to parse common sites, like Wikipedia, and color code information in such a way to give a trustworthiness measure based on the reliability of the person posting and the information itself.

Article: "Adding Trust to Wikipedia, and Beyond"