December 2006 Archives

In 1979, Gerald Ford was the first speaker in UMR's Remmers Lecture Series (which has also featured Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger and Lance Armstrong, among others). Ford, who was the first president I really remember, will be remembered by most Americans for pardoning Nixon and being parodied on SNL. He was also quite bald or at least balding. Are there any other American presidents in modern history who had huge foreheads while in office? For some reason, I don't think the American public is willing to elect balding men (or balding women). After all, they never actually elected Ford. Thanks to Spiro Agnew and Tricky Dick, Ford never had to be elected to the vice presidency or the presidency by the American people. And that explains how a very decent man like Gerald Ford could wind up in the oval office.

P.S. I just looked at some presidential portraits. Eisenhower was pretty bald too.

It's another story from the New York Times. (Hey, everyone knows that whatever the Times sees fit to print must be God's honest truth.) Here's the money excerpt:

Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.

This morning, early reports surfaced in Colorado of an explosion at an old uranium mine near Denver. The Associated Press jumped on the story. Details were sketchy, but it still popped up on news sites like USA Today and Forbes. If it had been a mine explosion, we could have turned to UMR's Larry Grayson for reaction. Grayson chairs a federal mine safety comission, which on Dec. 5 released a report containing more than 70 recommendations to improve mine safety.

Fortunately, there was no mine explosion at all, just a broken electrical switch on a transformer that caused loud noises and bright flashes. At least that's the latest word from the Associated Press.

'Twas the day after Christmas and all across campus, not a creature was stirring -- at least not too many of them.

Campus is deserted today. Everyone must be hitting the after-Christmas sales. Wish I was.

Although retired, Josef Podzimek, a UMR professor emeritus of mechanical engineering , remains an active student of atmospheric phenomena. The former researcher at UMR's Cloud and Aerosol Sciences Laboratory has been working with University of Missouri-Columbia student researcher Christina Crowe and a couple of graduate students to figure out how the phenomenon "thundersnow" may affect snow accumulation. Focusing on 22 storms, the researchers discovered that "within a 68-mile radius of thundersnow occurrences, 6 or more inches of snow fell 86 percent of the time, 10 or more inches fell 45 percent of the time and the maximum accumulation in the Midwest that date was recorded 36 percent of the time." The study will be published Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Some members of next fall's freshman class of engineering majors at UMR are getting an early holiday gift from MOHELA, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority.

MOHELA recently announced a loan-forgiveness program for engineering students from Missouri. The program is designed to entice more college-bound Missouri high school students to study engineering. That means student balances on common Stafford loans would be reduced by up to $3,500 for college freshmen enrolling in pre-engineering programs for the 2007-2008 school year.

It's a program UMR Chancellor John F. Carney III fully supports. "This innovative program addresses a critical national problem - the shortage of U.S. engineering talent," he says.

Badrul Chowdhury, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMR, shares his thoughts on whether alternative energy is hype or real.

Although still a magnet for environmentalists’ concerns for bird mortality, today wind power enjoys a state of tremendous appeal to power producers and consumers alike.

Via Today's Engineer.

-- The New York Times says women in science don't get no respect. UMR says climate is responsible.

-- The World's Tallest Man recently shoved his whole arm down the throats of two very disturbed but ultimately very thankful dolphins.

-- Some high school students on the East Coast who have never heard of UMR will soon be hearing about UMR (or whatever we'll be calling it), thanks to this man.

Mechanical and aerospace engineering students at UMR showed off their engineering skills Friday to the ABCs of industry -- Anheuser-Busch, Bosch and Caterpillar, to name a few.

The seniors worked in teams to tackle a variety of real-world problems for the participating companies. Some students worked with Bosch to redesign the current blade lock on the company's reciprocating saw. Other teams worked with Caterpillar to redesign an electrical connector.

The presentations were reviewed by company representatives and members of UMR's Academy of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineers.

In the event of a nuclear explosion anywhere on the globe, the U.S. government wants to know about it right away. Meanwhile, geoscientists are using the government's monitoring stations to record the planet's seismic information (earthquakes) in real time. Dr. Stephen Gao is using the data to study the earth's crust.

From the editors: We asked the three candidates for vice provost of research at UMR to guest-blog about the future of research at UMR. They all took us up on our challenge. Here are some of their thoughts.

Donald C. Wunsch II, the M.K. Finley Missouri Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMR
UMR students, faculty and staff are fortunate to be associated with a remarkable university with exciting strengths in teaching, research, service, and community outreach. We can all thank our 136 years of predecessors for creating a rewarding environment by continually reinventing ourselves. It is now our opportunity and obligation to continue the proud tradition. This is only possible by embracing the challenge of rising to the next level of impact and prominence. Complacency is our worst enemy – our choice is between growth and stagnation. We all recognize this as a common sense principle. How we accomplish growth is the key issue.

My inbox wants to talk to you.

You see, it's a very dedicated worker. It handles 600+ messages a day, easy. Most of them are SPAM. But many others include tidbits about what's going on at UMR. So, in honor of a self-declared "Clean Out My Inbox Day" here are a few UMR stories that have been in the news.

• Fighting words, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 11
• UM-Rolla's stepped-up use of student loan agency is expected to lower cost of borrowing, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 10
• Blanchette Bridge on I-70 needs upgrades, team finds, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 8
• Coal industry urged to build new 'culture of prevention' Insurance Journal, Dec. 6

Today, 65 years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, my dad can tell you exactly where he was when he heard the news. Visions asked UMR military historian John C. McManus to give us a little perspective on the event as the U.S. remembers:

The morning of Dec. 7, 1941 appeared to be like most other mornings at Pearl Harbor. But under strict secrecy, a Japanese fleet of six aircraft carriers sailed to within 300 miles of the Hawaiian Islands. On that sleepy Sunday morning, they launched their planes.

The U.S. is planning to go back to the mooon in Apollo-style rockets. Of course, conspiracy theorists will tell you we've never been to the moon to begin with. Incidentally, UMR has graduated a lot of rocket scientists and astronauts who are experts in faking complicated stuff. We're hoping that a UMR grad plays an important role in faking one of the new moon missions. And, for all we know, a future UMR grad might even be among the first men and women to not really stand on the surface of Mars.

UMR's Jason Baird has helped rig a 10,000-pound bomb of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil in the Nevada desert. (He also likes to blow up frozen chickens, presumably with a smaller bomb.) Read about it online in the Chronicle of Higher Education (free to non-subscribers for five days).

You're probably at home today because of the horrible weather, unless, of course, you live in Miami or something, in which case you're probably at the dog track. I am at work today because, well, I'm a moron. This is the view out of my office window.