PolyThinkers Pad

Curious about How Well Your State’s Bridges are Doing? or about the Condition of U.S. Highway Bridges? Have a look and see the data in a visual format. The folks at IBM’s Collaborative User Experience research group use visualization “as an efficient way of transferring a large amount of information from a database into an individual’s head.” They believe that visualizations become even more powerful when multiple people access them for collaborative sense making. They developed Many Eyes, a public web site that allows users to gather data, visualize it, and discuss their visualizations. They use the site as an experimental platform to test our hypotheses about the ability of visualizations to spur communication and social interaction, and how that activity may yield new insights into data. Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. The goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Have a look how it works, and tell us what you think.

An international group of leading technological thinkers identified the biggest challenges for engineers in the 21st century. Their conclusions are now available in the report, Grand Challenges for Engineering. The National Academy of Engineering released the report, which identifies 14 areas awaiting engineering solutions, on February 15, 2008.

Here’s the full list of challenges from the academy’s experts:

• Make solar energy economical
• Provide energy from fusion
• Develop carbon sequestration methods
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Provide access to clean water
• Restore and improve urban infrastructure
• Advance health informatics
• Engineer better medicines
• Reverse-engineer the brain
• Prevent nuclear terror
• Secure cyberspace
• Enhance virtual reality
• Advance personalized learning
• Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

TechXtra is a free service which can help you find articles, books, the best websites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, the latest research, thesis & dissertations, teaching and learning resources and more, in engineering, mathematics and computing.

From the website:

TechXtra searches parts of the Web that Google doesn’t, and TechXtra helps you find subject-based information, which Google doesn’t do very well. Many of the things you’ll find through TechXtra come from the ‘Hidden Web’, and are not indexed by Google.

An important note: Search Dibner’s subscription databases first since we may have paid access to some of the resources you will find on TechXtra. Also remember that if they are not free and we don’t have a subscription, you may always make a request using our online document delivery form.

TechXtra is now available in the list of Research Tools in the blog’s right sidebar. Give Google a rest and check out the other great tools listed there when you want to conduct a more focused search.

This Thursday, Dr. Jill Jonnes, author of Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels, will tell the story of an extraordinary engineering feat - the building of electrified railroad tunnels under the Hudson River, Manhattan, and the East River to Long Island, capping them all off with Pennsylvania Station. You can check out Conquering Gotham from the Dibner Library (call number TF302.N7 J66 2007).

SPEAKER:
Dr. Jill Jonnes earned her B.A. at Barnard College, her M.S. at Columbia Journalism School and her Ph.D. in American History at Johns Hopkins University. She has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar and a frequent recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation. Conquering Gotham (Viking, 2007) is her fourth history book, and the second in a Gilded Age engineering trilogy.

DATE: Thursday, October 4, 2007
TIME: Refreshments start at 5:30 p.m., Lecture is from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.
LOCATION: Polytechnic University Pfizer Auditorium, 5 MetroTech Center
COST: Free to American Society of Civil Engineers members, $15 to non-members to meet PDH award requirements.

Presented by ASCE Metropolitan Section Infrastructure Group in collaboration with Polytechnic University Department of Civil Engineering.

Lecture details available in PDF