Archive for November, 2011

Chaos & Culture FTS Teach “Fractivities”

Students (and Professor) make a Sierpinski Triangle with a sheet of paper and scissors.   The students in Tom LoFaro’s First Term Seminar, Chaos & Culturewere assigned the task of developing and presenting a classroom activity to teach a sixth grade student something about fractals.  The students dubbed these lessons “fractivities.”  Here are a few […]

Building a File System From Scratch

When: Monday, November 20, 2011, 2:30-3:20 pm Where: Olin Hall 321 Presenter: Mark Gritter Designing a new file system isn’t a task to be undertaken lightly, but new technologies and new opportunities continue to drive innovation in file systems. Examples like Sun’s ZFS, Data Domain’s SISL, and the Tintri VMstore are all examples of modern […]

LoFaro to Host Minicourse at Joint Math Meeting in Boston

Tom LoFaro will be hosting the MAA mini course Teaching Differential Equations with Modeling at the Joint Math Meetings in Boston January 4-7, 2012. Tom will be collaborating with Mike Huber of Muhlenberg College and Daniel Flath of Macalester College in this endeavor.

Modeling Actual Evapotranspiration: Using Airborne Remote Sensing to Analyze Agricultural Water Stress

When: November 16, 11:30-12:20pm Where: Olin Hall, Room 320 Presenter: Brandon Furey The objective of the land research group in the NASA Student Airborne Research Program was to develop tools to better monitor crop water status. This is useful to farmers to avoid over-watering so that irrigation can be more efficient. Water is becoming an […]

Screening: IBM’s Watson/DeepQA (David Ferrucci)

When: November 9, 2011, 11:30am-12:30pm Where: Olin Hall, Room 320 We will screen a video of Dr. David A. Ferrucci’s keynote address, “IBM’s Watson/DeepQA,” which he gave at the 2011 Federated Computing Research Conference. (QA stands for “Question Answering.”) Ferrucci is an excellent speaker and provides an explanation of how his group at IBM tackled […]