OctoberIn the month of October, Carnegie Mellon Media Relations has counted hundreds of references to the university in worldwide publications. Here is a sample.
Harrisburg receivership bill shows states becoming faster to seize control | Bloomberg.com
This week, Republican Governor Tom Corbett may declare an emergency that would let an appointee oversee Harrisburg’s finances. In March, Michigan gave emergency managers unprecedented power including ordering tax elections and nullifying union contracts. The state trained more than 250 people, many of them officials from towns that want to keep the state out. In January, New York took control of Nassau County after 11 years of monitoring its finances.
More state takeovers might occur as municipalities’ budgets crumble, said Robert Strauss, professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Combined revenue for U.S. cities is expected to drop 2.3 percent by year’s end, the fifth-straight year of declines, according to the National League of Cities.
How Occupy Wall Street is testing the next US president | The Christian Science Monitor
As the Occupy movement gains strength, politicians will have to strategize carefully, notes Carnegie Mellon University’s Kiron Skinner, co-author of “The Strategy of Campaigning: Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin.”
The role of the growing Occupy movement is important for politicians because it is providing a clear policy alternative to the ground staked out by the tea party position, Ms. Skinner says. The challenge “will entail reconciling two very clear and different positions about the role of government in the economy.”
PopTech: 5 fascinating people you've never heard of | CNN.com
For most people, gaming is a form of entertainment or escape. For Adrien Treuille, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, games can help solve real-world problems. Treuille is the creator of FoldIt, a computer game that has helped solve long-standing puzzles about protein folding. The work of FoldIt is even helping to enhance science's understanding of HIV. His new game, called EteRNA, does the same thing for RNA sequencing. Most important about these games, he says, is the fact that they're fun.
Interactive surfaces could be created on papers and walls | The Engineer
The technology, dubbed ’Omnitouch’, was developed by researchers at Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University. It relies on a depth-sensing camera similar to Microsoft Kinect to track the user’s fingers on everyday surfaces.
Omnitouch claims this allows users to control interactive applications by tapping or dragging their fingers, much as they would with touch screens found on smartphones or tablet computers.
Mind language in your short message | Business Daily Africa
Recently, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science found that regional slang and dialects are now becoming commonplace, and the effect is creating regionalized pockets of badly-spelt words that pass as English.
Jacob Eisenstein, a post-doctoral fellow in CMU’s Machine Learning Department, said the automated method he and his colleagues have developed for analyzing Twitter word use shows that regional dialects appear to be evolving within social media.
Imagine a world with more wireless customers using more data on fewer carriers | Marketplace Public Radio
Jon Peha is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and he compares it to life in the Big Apple. "It's not that we will run out of space, exactly it's like asking if people keep moving to Manhattan, will we reach a point where the area can't sustain any more people? And there will not be a day when that happens in Manhattan. At least I can't imagine it. We can accommodate more people. But we do that by building very large, very expensive skyscrapers. The same is true in the wireless world. If you want to take more and more traffic, you can either pay a lot of money to try to squeeze it all into a certain amount of spectrum or get more spectrum. And because we happen to have a lot of spectrum that isn't being used efficiently by today's standards, that's a much more cost effective way to go."
How to think yourself healthy | FoxNews.com
Your powers of make-believe can help you control cravings, get motivated to work out, and even improve your vision, according to several recent studies.
"If you imagine an experience, the brain stimulates itself in the same way as if you were doing it," says Joachim Vosgerau, co-director of the Center for Behavioral Decision Research at Carnegie Mellon University.
The Good Person of Setzuan | Pittsburgh City Paper
Bertolt Brecht's plays inevitably remain challenges to theater companies and to audiences. But then, Brecht wanted to challenge everyone. Although he aimed for satire, he called upon directors and performers to produce and interpret his material freely. Deliberately breaking down the fourth wall, he sought to provoke the public to self-reflect, to be critical of what's seen and heard. Step back and ponder: He meanwhile protected himself, claiming everyone on and off stage shares responsibility for any production.
On The Good Person of Setzuan, Brecht worked for 12 years and was never satisfied. Nonetheless, Carnegie Mellon's School of Drama assumes the task in Wendy Arons and Tony Kushner's adaptation, inventively and dynamically staged by visiting German director Peter Kleinert. Collaborating with him is German songwriter/musical director Jürgen Beyer. The playing by the entire ensemble and their expertly sung, imaginative songs surge with vitality.
Stanford researcher finds lots of leaky web sites | The New York Times – Bits Blog
Computer scientists at AT&T Research Labs and Worcester Polytechnic University studied 120 Web sites, not including social networks, and found that over half of them leaked what the researchers called “sensitive and identifiable information to third-party aggregators.”
Meanwhile, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist named Alessandro Acquisti has taken photographs of random strangers on a college campus and used facial recognition technology to “re-identify” roughly a third of them from a rich trove of publicly available photographs on Facebook. Even more remarkably, so much personal data now lies scattered online that he was able to glean their Social Security numbers in about a fourth of the cases.
Breeding corruption: Why leaders with ‘alpha’ personalities are chosen | International Business Times
The study, from the Kellogg School of Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, explored the personality types usually associated with leadership.
Researchers analyzed participants in groups, as they managed tokens representing money. Some decided on keeping the tokens for themselves, while others contributed them to a group pool.
The results showed that those who were more generous gained popularity in the groups, but they were also considered weak or gullible and therefore unfit for a leadership role.
Do programs that pay people to lose weight really work? | The Washington Post
George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied financial incentives and weight loss, says the HealthyWage competition is “using all the conditions that have been found in the research to be successful.” In controlled studies of obese veterans, Loewenstein and his colleagues devised ways to include social support and pressure, competition and, of course, money to spur weight loss.
As kids go online, identify theft claims more victims | CNBC.com
A recent study based on identity scans of over 40,000 children in the U.S. conducted by Richard Power, Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon CyLab, found 10.2 percent of the children in the report had someone else using their Social Security number. That figure is 51 times higher than the 0.2 percent rate for adults in the same population.
Prior to the Internet age, child identity theft occurred most often at the hands of a relative who was using the minor’s Social Security number to circumvent bad credit. While the Internet can serve as a wonderful resource tool for children, it can also bring a host of problems right to your doorstep. In addition to cyber-bullying and possible online predators, identity theft is now a problem, and it's going viral.
Digital library aims to expand kids' media literacy | USA Today
YOUmedia is laid out to accommodate all three stages. Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon University notes that he and colleagues designed it with the "hanging out" space by the front door. But even kids who stay put there absorb what's happening in the other two.
"If you're just 'hanging out,' your awareness of the possibilities of the things you could do just gets raised," he says.
On a recent afternoon, most patrons were comfortably "hanging out." Two girls in a beanbag chair shared a MacBook they had checked out at the front desk, tweaking their Facebook statuses; a dozen boys egged each other on as two button-mashers played the video game Infamous.
Carnegie Mellon experiences record enrollment | AMEInfo.com
Reflecting Carnegie Mellon's growing presence throughout the region, the university welcomed a diverse incoming class of 107 new students for the 2011-2012 academic year, including 98 new freshman and nine transfer students. The class included 41 Qatari nationals - a record in university history. This year's incoming class brings the total number of undergraduates to 335.
Here comes anyware | The Economist
They will also need to monitor closely the impact that new kinds of devices have on individual privacy. Concerns have already been raised about smartphones’ location-tracking capabilities, which can reveal users’ whereabouts if data are not properly protected. Wearable devices that track people’s vital signs are also going to be collecting mountains of extremely sensitive information. “We are all part of a brave new experiment in privacy whose outcome is unclear,” says Alessandro Acquisti, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
People say they want to eat healthy – then order junk food | The Globe and Mail
“Conventional wisdom says a few sticky, fat fingers control a disproportionate slice of the world economy’s pie,” says Science News. “A new analysis suggests that the conventional wisdom is right on the money. Diagramming relationships among more than 43,000 corporations reveals a tightly linked core of top economic actors. In 2007, a mere 147 companies controlled nearly 40 per cent of the monetary value of all transnational corporations, researchers report. … ‘This is empirical evidence of what’s been understood anecdotally for years,’ says information theorist Brandy Aven of Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.”
Safe passage | The Economist
Imagine being in your seat on a flight from Houston to Manchester. After the plane takes off, the pilot announces that he has just been radioed to modify the flight path—through Beijing, say. The pilot doesn't know who told him to change course, but he follows his instructions anyway. On the layover in Beijing you might be left alone. Alternatively, you may be frisked and all your documents photocopied. Either way, it is all rather tedious.
Of course, airlines and passengers would never stand for such treatment. Yet this is precisely how data packets shuffle between networks that make up the internet. Fortunately, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have come up with a clever way to eliminate the flaw. What is more, their solution could be introduced piecemeal in a manner that would not require a co-ordinated effort by everyone connected to the vast global network.