May 2006 Archives

The scientific journal Nature, in today's news@nature section, features an interview with UMR's David Rogers on his work to uncover what caused New Orleans' levy system to fail during Hurricane Katrina. (Rogers, pictured at right, has been back to New Orleans 11 times since Katrina.) Some excerpts from the Q&A:

What was it like working in New Orleans?

It was like pictures you see of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the Second World War. Just complete devastation for mile after mile. No people, no bathrooms, no water. Choking dust; very fine dust on everything.

What went wrong with the levees?

We don't think that everything was due to overtopping. We feel a lot more of it was seepage related. When the storm hit, water was forced under the structures, eroding their bases and knocking them down.

This week's PostCards question:

Dickson presents five theories on the etymology of the word “fungo", as in “fungo bat" or “catching fungoes". Define at least one of the following series and for a gold sticker identify which one was advocated by a professor at the University of Missouri-Rolla. The etymological explanations:

1. The ‘Fun/Go’ Theory
2. The Fungible Theory
3. The Fungus Theory
4. The Fangen Theory
5. The Fung Theory

Write postcards@post-dispatch.com with your answers.

UMR's mini-baja vehicle -- "Overkill" -- was in action over the weekend in Wisconsin. While many (most?) of the vehicles broke down under the stress of off-road competition, Overkill ran strong until the end. The UMR team, in its first competition as an official Student Design and Experiential Learning Center team, represented the campus well. They didn't finish among the very top teams, mainly because their vehicle was a lot heavier than the leaders, but they did learn some lessons they think they can parlay into future success. Team members are already looking forward to redesigning Overkill.

It's quiet here at Visions as my colleagues have turned their three-day holiday weekend into a four-day one. So while some are sitting by the pool enjoying Missouri's heat wave, I'll share today's edition of the Friday Five.*

1. Bob Phelan just called in his report from the Mini Baja Team. Turns out our team's vehicle may not be the smallest or most manuverable, but it's dependable. The team is participating in a series of tests today and will race tomorrow. Check back here to find out how they did.
2. Visions is proud to announce it has a new sibling on campus. Check out BLUMR, UMR's gardening and landscape blog, for all the dirt.
3. Research by UMR chemist Nuran Ercal shows that a newly redesigned antioxidant may play a critical role in preventing HIV-1-associated dementia. Her research will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Experimental Neurology.
4. UMR students talk with TechnoFiles this month about their commuter bus feasibility study. Grab the mp3 here. Like what you hear? Go ahead and subscribe directly to TechnoFiles in iTunes, Yahoo or supply the following URL to your podcast receiver: www.mst.edu/podcast/sample.rss. Or browse the episode archive and listen online at Yahoo.
5. Robert Stone, director of the interdisciplinary Student Design and Experiential Learning Center and associate professor of interdisciplinary engineering, is leaving campus for a year, starting in July. He will join the engineering mechanics faculty at the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado Springs, Colo., as a visiting professor. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Stone has been asked to assist the USAFA faculty with their two design competition teams: the Formula SAE race car team and mini-baja buggy team. Good luck -- (and don't be too helpful, ok?)

Amy Edwards emailed Visions the following dispatch detailing her experience as a student in Sweden:

As soon as I arrived at Lund University, I found that students in Sweden have to be much more independent than students at UMR. There's no one to coddle you or baby-sit you through things, no one to hold your hand and let you know where you should be and when. Students have to actually -- gasp! -- work and investigate to discover the basics.

Nucor Corp. has donated $2 million to endow a chair in the materials science and engineering department at UMR. The university will begin a search to fill the endowed chair soon. The selected individual, who should be in place by the start of the 2007-2008 academic year, will be involved in steelmaking research.

Tim Turner of UMR's Mini Baja Team employs power tools during a break in the SAE Baja Midwest competition, which is being held this week in Wisconsin. Yesterday, the UMR team built up some good karma by helping a team from South Africa out of a jam. After spending a bunch of money to get to the states, the South African team realized its vehicle was built to last year's contest specs. UMR loaned them a welder, and they were able to make the adjustments necessary to remain in the competition, which ends this weekend.

The most daunting tasks don't necessarily require the largest work forces; it's tasks on the paths with most resistance that require the most effort, according to Scott Spychala.

And big government projects tend to be full of people who are really good at transferring you to someone else who can't help you. That may or may not be true at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, where the U.S. plans to store nuclear waste for thousands of years. Spychala thinks he has a way to help the various Yucca Mountain stakeholders work together more efficiently. A senior in nuclear engineering at UMR, Spychala is going to present his team's research June 20 at an international conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

Two UMR faculty members were recently recognized for their medical research. Dr. Chang-Soo Kim is trying to find a better way for people with diabetes to check their blood sugar levels and Dr. Mohamed Rahaman is working on new ceramic bearings for use in joint replacements. Read the full story here.

Amy Edwards emailed Visions the following dispatch detailing her weekend in Sweden:

Lundakarnevalen: It’s a huge, weekend-long festival that only happens once every four years, and, luckily for me, I picked one of those years to come to Sweden.

My first introduction to Lundakarnevalen, held May 19-21, came weeks ago during a trip to Österlen in southern Sweden. After a day of hiking at Stenshuvud, one of Sweden’s 26 national parks, I went with a group of students to the home and studio of Swedish artist Gunilla Mann. We were supposed to tour her gallery, eat her apple cake, and have a wonderful chat with her about art, life, and her strange fascination with cats.

Instead, she spent the weekend in Stockholm, and we trudged through her galleries alone, pretending to admire art that seemed inspired by Highlights for Kids.

Swimming at the pool, cruising with the windows down, shooting sticks of dynamite. You know, the stuff most high school kids do during the summer. When June rolls around, it's time for Explosives Camp at UMR. In addition to shooting dynamite, campers will learn about detonators, underground blasts and mining careers. They'll also learn how to set up a big fireworks display.

Explosives expert Paul Worsey runs the one-of-a-kind camp. UMR offers the nation's only minor in explosives engineering.

Most of the major breaches in the New Orleans levee system during Hurricane Katrina were caused by flaws in design, construction and maintenance, according to a report delivered over the weekend by a team of independent investigators led by the University of California-Berkeley.

One of the members of that team, UMR's Dr. J. David Rogers is quoted in today's New York Times. "There's plenty of blame to go around," he says.

But a lot of that blame belongs to the Army Corps of Engineers, if you believe what's in the independent team's investigation report.

According to this morning's Los Angeles Times, the team's 600-page report disputed most of the corps' preliminary findings about what caused levee breaches, saying the corps' investigators had made critical errors in their analysis...The mistakes raise concerns about whether the corps is competent to oversee public safety projects across the nation...The Berkeley-led team found that the defects that caused breaches during Katrina -- including thin layers of soil with the consistency of jelly and sections of levees built with crushed sea shells -- had gone undetected and could be widespread...The team's report makes 11 major recommendations, such as creating a national flood defense authority and increasing the corps' technical strengths.

Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers is doing an official government investigation. With hurricane season approaching fast, that should make the residents of New Orleans feel a lot better.

The campus is quiet. The sun is out. And it's time for another edition of the Friday Five. Here we go:

1. Warren K. (Kent) Wray, professor of civil engineering and former provost at Michigan Technological University (MTU) in Houghton, Mich., will become provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at UMR effective Aug. 1, Chancellor John F. Carney III announced today.


2. Visions got a sneak peek at next year's Opportunities for Undergraduate Research Experiences (OURE) research projects. It's an interesting mix of work, spanning topics from surrogate mothers to lock design. We're looking forward to sharing the details of the research, once students return to campus.


3. Members of UMR's Engineering Without Borders chapter are leaving this weekend for Jerez, Guatemala. The students will try to send us dispatches from the field, likely while they are in Copan and Antigua.


4. For readers who missed last Saturday's commencement address: James Ronald Miller quoted John Wooden, Dr. Seuss and even Yogi Berra, who said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it." Sounds like good advice for this weekend -- and beyond.


5. And finally, last but not least: UMR students are looking forward to taking their 'go-kart on steroids' for off-road competition next week.

The Adsorption Specialist Group of the International Water Association has a new chair this month.

Craig Adams is taking on the new responsibilities, coordinating the activities of international experts that use advanced water treatment technologies to purify drinking water wordwide.

“There are tremendous pressures across the globe, including in the United States, in providing safe drinking water to the public," Adams says. “Adsorption technologies such as activated carbon, synthetic resins, and natural adsorbents need to play an increasingly important role in taking toxic compounds out of drinking water."

By day, Lowe's parking lot in Rolla is congested with fork lifts and pick-up trucks. By night, when all of the customers are gone, the lot becomes a testing ground for an Indy-style racing car that goes 0-to-60 mph in 3.2 seconds. At least, this is what happens during Formula Car season at UMR. Hopefully, all of the moonlighting the UMR team did at Lowe's this spring will serve them well at the annual Formula SAE competition, which is this week in Michigan. Last year, UMR finished ninth overall out of 140 teams. We'll post the 2006 results here as soon as they're available, if you're interested. Eventually, you might even be able to bid on UMR's No. 9 car on eBay.

Today's Kansas City Star notes that engineering students from UMR and UMKC took the top two spots in the Human-Powered Vehicle competition in Charlotte, N.C.

Each student team designed and built a one-person, two-wheeled, pedal-powered vehicle and raced it on a drag strip and then on a 40-mile endurance course. ... The Rolla car was clocked at 42.8 mph and the UMKC car at 36 mph.

One of the best features of events like tonight's Graduation Jubilee, aside from the free food, is that they give visitors a chance to see the unusual research projects UMR students select. If you go over to the Havener Center tonight, you will find students discussing everything from "parental rejection as a pathway to depression" to "neural network based predictions of elephant distribution in a South African game reserve."

For some, today is the last day of the spring semester at UMR. For others, tomorrow's commencement ceremony will mark an end to their UMR journey. For Amy Edwards, a student writer in the UMR public relations office, her time in Sweden as an exchange student is drawing to a close. But before she leaves, she's sent us the following dispatch detailing her experience:

"What did you do yesterday?" my teacher asked in Swedish on the third day of our intense, two-week language course.

"Yesterday..." replied the Australian student next to me, thinking very carefully about his words. "Yesterday, I ate my Swedish class."

When you're speaking in another language, it's easy to make mistakes. It's natural to make mistakes. I've been studying at Lund University in Sweden since January, and I still forget the difference between "glass" (ice cream) and "glas" (literally, a glass) -- which means that when I broke a glass in our kitchen last week and wrote a note to warn my flatmates, I told them to watch the floor for broken ice cream. "How in the world do you break ice cream?" one guy asked.

The strangest word similarity comes from the word "gift," which means marriage. It sounded very sweet, comparing marriage to a gift, until I discovered that the word also means "poison."

Slow research day, I guess, but Dr. Richard Hall (right, previously featured by visions for his pioneering efforts in video blogging and using the web as a teaching tool) did sing a really funny ode/ballad with his wife, Maureen, at a retirement party this afternoon for Dr. Arlan DeKock and Dr. Raymond Kluczny of the UMR School of Management and Information Systems.

An award, by any other name, wouldn't taste as sweet.

MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, has picked MecMovies to receive a 2006 MERLOT Classics Award and the Editors’ Choice Award for Exemplary Online Learning Resources.

Timothy Philpot, associate professor of interdisciplinary engineering at UMR, and three other UMR colleagues created MecMovies with funding from the U.S. Department of Education. From games to animations, MecMovies does more than just show pictures -- it guides students step-by-step through a large number of examples commonly used in Basic Engineering 110, the Mechanics of Materials course.

She's just like the Crocodile Hunter, but with frogs.

Anne Maglia, assistant professor of biological sciences at UMR, studies the tiny amphibians -- specifically the decline in their populations and the malformations that show up in frog development. She recently shared her knowledge on midwestfrogs.com, an online documentary sponsored by the Chicago Herpetological Society.

Maglia hopes to learn how contaminants in the water supply -- from pesticide residue to lead mines -- effects this creature she likens to the "canary in the coal mine." If the junk in the water causes problems in the frogs, it won't be long before it becomes a problem for you and me.

KOLR-10, the CBS-affiliate in Springfield, Mo., talked with UMR's own Jianmin Wang about his fly ash research for its story, "Potential power plant problems," which aired last night at 10 p.m.

A law passed last year says all power plants must reduce nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury emissions by 2009. But researchers at a local university say to do that, there could be some negative side effects. ... And, a team of University of Missouri-Rolla researchers is now focusing in on that gray matter. Several companies, including City Utilities, plan on adding ammonia to their power producing process to meet federal regulations to reduce emissions.

"So, the fly ash will be contaminated with ammonia, so that is another issue," said UMR Assistant Professor Jianmin Wang.

It’s an issue that could cause other toxic materials including arsenic and selenium to leach out of the fly ash into the water supply.

"Eventually our goal is to prevent pollution," said Wang.

Get the rest of the story here.

At UMR, it's fairly common to hear undergraduate students reporting starting salary offers of $50,000 or more. What is not always known is the diversity of their interests outside of the classroom.

Take Greg Raymer, a 1985 chemistry graduate. He exploded onto the poker scene in 2004, beating out more than 2,500 entrants to win the World Series of Poker championship that year and its $5 million purse.

Or Jen Splaingard, a 2000 mechanical engineering graduate and UMR soccer athlete. She now has a day job at Boeing, but she's also putting her athletic ability to use as a wrestler.

Puts a whole new spin on the old UMR "Look to your left, then look to your right" speech, doesn't it?

The excess energy created by the UMR Solar House on Tenth Street in the summer is bought back from the power company in the winter, according to Natalie McDonald, who should know. A UMR Solar House Team member, McDonald is getting a lot of attention from Home and Garden Television. A TV crew was in Rolla all day today to interview McDonald, an architectural engineering major, in her home environment -- she is currently renting the solar house from the university. As promised, we'll let you know when the story is scheduled to air on HGTV's popular Small House, Big Style program. Although it's true that the solar house is pretty small, "it's a lot better than where most students live," says McDonald. It's also a lot more efficient.

UMR recently added Tongji University in China to its growing list of college and university partnerships.

The agreement with Tongji University, which was founded in 1908 in the People’s Republic of China, focuses on graduate student exchange and faculty collaboration in the environmental discipline. UMR officials anticipate the five-year agreement will increase the university’s visibility in China, improving its ability to attract excellent students to pursue advanced degrees and enhancing its research productivity.

Read highlights of the agreement here.

Yes, it's sculling -- not skulling, which might have something to say about why I didn't go to Harvard or Yale. I know it's not cool to go back and fix text after it's been posted (because then there's no proof of the original screw up), but I just couldn't let this one stand. Still, feel free to make fun. Elsewhere, in human-powered vehicle racing (HPV racing for those of us who have spelling challenges), UMR finished second at the West Coast event in California. LF

First, one correction: UMR finished second in the men's concrete canoe endurance race Saturday in Columbia. Oklahama ended up winning the overall. The racing part of the competition featured men's, women's and coed sprints and endurance challenges. The UMR racers included Emily Johnson, Haley McFarland, Emily Miller, Kendrick Callaway, Jesse Scott and Noah Husman. "They did well in the races except for the last one," says Dr. John Myers, the team's advisor. About that last race; here's Noah with the scoop: "In the four-person race, we were neck and neck with SIUE who got second in the race, until the buoy turn, and when we were ruddering to turn left around the buoy, our wake caught up with us and you got to see the boat sink starting with the back end going under and creeping to the front, so we did not finish that race." Oh, well. It wouldn't be a concrete canoe race without a real threat of sinking. Scroll down for more details and some pics...

In sculling, you've got your Harvards, your Yales, your Princetons... Well, in these parts of the Midwest, you've got concrete canoe racing. And UMR has at least two rowers who can paddle with the best of them. In this heat last Saturday at Twin Lakes Recreation Area in Columbia, Mo., the UMR duo of Noah Husman and Jesse Scott dominated canoe teams from Kansas State and Arkansas. UMR finished first in the men's endurance part of the regional competition, which is sponsored annually by the American Society of Civil Engineers. As soon as we figure out the overall standings, we'll let you know where the UMR team ended up. During ASCE's regional conference in Columbia, which coincided with the concrete canoe event, a steel bridge contest was also held. The objective is to build a scale bridge that is flexible and can do all kinds of neat things from an engineering standpoint. The word on the street is that UMR had a really impressive bridge -- but there was some sort of problem with lateral loading, or something like that, which disqualified the UMR team. Finally, on a busy weekend for UMR design teams, members of the human-powered vehicle team are currently on the road back to Rolla after competing for a West Coast championship in California. Unofficial sources have UMR placing second overall in that event.

With all of the rain across the state this past weekend, members of UMR's Concrete Canoe Team must have been thinking about what it would have taken to build an arc. Right, team members haul their canoe from the cold waters at Twin Lakes Recreation Area in Columbia, Mo. Normal concrete used in a construction project would weigh about 150 pounds per cubic foot. The necessary weight of the concrete mix used for this canoe was less than 62.4 pounds per cubic foot, which is the unit weight of water. More pics and stuff from this past weekend's concrete canoe competition in Columbia to follow...