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Grace and beauty as the earth faintly trembles
ART AND SCIENCE IN MOTION:
On Tuesday, April 4, San Francisco Ballet principal dancer
Muriel Maffre performed an improvised dance to sounds triggered
by seismic movements in the Hayward Fault. Those signals
were transmitted to San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera
House via the Internet from UC Berkeley. “Ballet Mori” is
the brainchild of IEOR and EECS professor Ken Goldberg. The
sounds were measured by a Streckeisen STS-1 seismometer and
transformed in real time by a system that Goldberg developed
with EECS senior Vijay Vasudevan. The signals triggered natural
sounds such as thunder claps, crashing waves and waterfalls. “Mori” refers
to Goldberg’s Memento Mori, his first art project that
presented live seismic data. The ballet was part of a program
commemorating the April 18th centennial of the 1906 earthquake. (Erik
Tomasson photo)
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It was 1982, and Stephanie DiMarco (B.S.’79 Business Administration),
three years out of Berkeley, was in a pickle. She was working as a
financial analyst at her third corporate firm. “I didn’t
like my job, and I thought to myself, ‘Boy, I don’t like
any of these jobs.’ I wanted to work in a place that was based
on a meritocracy, where it didn’t matter who you were as long
as you were successful in your job.”
Then, a door opened. “In the early 1980s, we didn’t have
any computer programs. We had a lot of paperwork and were using typewriters.
I called my friend Steve Strand (B.S.’79 EECS), a Cal engineer,
and asked him, ‘Why don’t you come here and help me automate
this?’”
DiMarco and Strand wrote a portfolio accounting system for a five-megabyte
PDP 11/23. Around that same time, IBM introduced its first single-user
machine, and the light bulb went off: Why not write a program for
the small computer market? When the firm declined to invest in their
system,
DiMarco and Strand left. [FULL STORY]
Seniors, we know you’re on tight budgets, but your extra change will
give students who follow in your footsteps the same quality experience you’ve
had. Now’s the time to donate to the Senior Class Gift Campaign.
A gift of any size will help. But get this: If you give $25, you will receive
a free Berkeley Engineering license plate frame. You can donate online
at http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/giving/seniorgift/ or mail your check to: Nicole Rinetti,
College
Relations, 201 McLaughlin Hall #1722, Berkeley, CA 94720-1722. Senior
Class Gift Committee members will also be tabling in various northside
spots in
the next few weeks to collect donations.
Besides receiving cool gifts, donors will have their names published
on the College website’s honor roll of senior donors and in the Commencement
program. They’ll also receive an invitation to a strawberry and champagne
reception with University Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau.
[FULL STORY]
Here’s a challenge: Build a 30-floor office building that withstands
a large earthquake, is structurally innovative, aesthetically pleasing
and delivers the highest financial return for the building’s
owner over its lifetime. It sounds like a tall order (no pun intended)
but represents a typical situation for California’s structural
engineers.
That’s why this exact assignment was given to eight engineering
teams from around the country competing in the second annual Undergraduate
Seismic Design Competition. The competition, which takes place April
19-20 in San Francisco, is part of the National Conference on Earthquake
Engineering. This year, the conference will commemorate the centennial
anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco quake.
Though a real-world challenge, teams will not use concrete and mortar
to build a building, but balsa wood and Elmer’s glue to construct
a five-foot model. And, while they won’t win a client contract,
the pressure is real. Models will be subjected to earthquakes up to
7.2 on a shake table, and teams must deliver presentations justifying
their design’s feasibility, economics and architectural merit
to a panel of judges. [FULL STORY]
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