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A tree grows in the Mission District
GREEN ENGINEERING: CEE junior Sheena
Patel, CEE senior Albert Lew, City and Regional Planning junior
Carmen Oleksinski, and CEE junior Nathan Langdon put the finishing
touches on a new tree they planted in the Mission District in
San Francisco. The group, members of the Cal chapter of American
Society of Civil Engineers and the civil engineering honor society,
Chi Epsilon, volunteered their Saturday to plant palm trees, cherry
trees and other species to help improve the natural aesthetics
of the neighborhood. "The neighbors and community alike were very
appreciative of our efforts," says Albert Lew. "They offered a
potluck lunch for all the volunteers to show their gratitude.
The planting was a definite success and everyone had a great time."
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Currently, six percent of
undergraduate engineers are from underrepresented minorities, a percentage
that is not representative of California or the general U.S. population.
Through the Pre-Engineering Partnerships (PEP) program, the College
is reaching out to K-12 schools to try and get underrpresented students
prepared for an engineering degree.
The goal is to increase the number of qualified applicants from schools
which have high concentrations of minority populations, but a low number
of eligible applicants. The culprit is often a lack of middle school
and high school math and science courses, resources and preparatory
programs that are crucial to making students competitive applicants.
Freshmen spots are so competitive that over 700 students who applied
last year had 800s on the math section of the SAT, but half of those
didn't get into the College.
"High school students who apply to Berkeley are uber-qualified," says...[FULL
STORY]
"Science
can be pretty cool"
Sixth-graders glimpse robocopters and careers in
engineering
In a big green field at
Richmond Field Station, Mr. Ellensworth's sixth-grade class watches
a helicopter in the sky. It dips and swirls and does loop-de-loops,
flies backwards, stalls, then pops upside down and hovers. Then the
engine shuts off and it glides down to a nearly perfect landing.
"Whoah," the sixth-graders murmur in admiration. The pilot walks across
the field, picks up the helicopter and brings it back to the students.
The helicopter is one of several small-scale robocopter models in the
Berkeley Aerial Robot (BEAR) program run by EECS Professor Shankar Sastry.
The helicopter was remotely controlled by researcher Perry Kavros, but
it also has artificial intelligence capabilities that allows it to fly
autonomously. Kavros and fellow researchers are also testing models
with camera systems. The hope for BEAR is that it can help with military
intelligence gathering...[FULL
STORY]
Last Saturday morning, a
group of volunteers stood on a footbridge above Glen Echo Creek in the
Oakland hills. The creek flows down into Lake Merritt, a man-made lake
in the heart of downtown Oakland. Lake Merritt occasionally gets blue-green
algae blooms (especially after springtime rains), which cause aerobic
bacteria to grow. The bacteria deplete the lake's oxygen and kill off
aquatic organisms as it decomposes the dying blooms.
"It's essentially causing a lake death," says John Nguyen, an environmental
sciences senior in the College of Letters and Science. "So we're collecting
and analyzing water samples from different watersheds to find out the
source." By source, Nguyen means whatever is dumping nitrates into the
water to cause...[FULL
STORY]
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