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Build ’em and bust ’em
BUILDING CEE BRIDGES: In
December, members of Cal’s chapter of the American Society
of Civil Engineers visited four physics classes at Oakland
High School to speak about civil engineering and to lead
students in the construction (and then destruction) of basswood
bridges. Here, event organizer CEE student Sandy Do measures
an index card tower; CEE student Anu Sridharan watches in
the background. PHOTO PROVIDED
BY ASCE
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By day, Andrea Frome is an EECS Ph.D. student researching
content-based image navigation, retrieval and object recognition of
2-D images in EECS professor Jitendra Malik’s Computer Vision
Group. By night, she is Lady X, lead singer of Lady X and the Positive
Eigenvalues, a somehow, sometime rock band whose repertoire includes
the Rolling Stones and Violent Femmes and who boasts a fair number
of EECS musicians. Frome rocks out with professors Michael Jordan (drums/guitars/vocals)
and Christos Papadimitriou (keyboards/vocals) and other post-docs and
graduate students, depending on individual schedules and the gig.
And Lady X and the Positive Eigenvalues have had three gigs so far. The band
debuted at EECS professor Shankar Sastry’s 50th birthday party last May.
They incited a mosh pit of pogo-ing scientists and engineers with a rendition
of Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” at the 2006 Foundations
of Computer Science conference. And they set Wozniak Lounge in Soda Hall ablaze
at the October opening of the RAD Lab. Engineers can dance. Lady X has seen
it. [FULL STORY]
“Think Global, Act Local” got very local a
couple years ago when MSE Ph.D. students Gabe Harley and Becca Jones noticed
the trash cans around their work areas in Hearst Memorial Mining Building.
The cans were full of dumped paper, copious amounts of to-go cups and
plastic. Of all places, they thought, UC Berkeley should know better. “Reduce,
reuse, recycle” had long ago entered the national lexicon.
But, being scientists, they didn’t jump to conclusions. They collected
data. One day they and other students grabbed all the trash cans in Hearst,
dumped them onto a tarp outside and sorted the contents. [FULL STORY]
Last summer, bioengineering graduate student Javad Golji
and three friends drove from London to China, in a 12-year-old Renault
hatchback christened “Le Car.” They were competing in the
Mongol Rally, an adventure race whose challenge, explains its website,
is to “travel one-quarter of the way around the earth, from London
to Mongolia, in any crap car that has an engine with no more than one
liter of power.” The goal is not to finish first, but to finish,
period, and in the process, raise money for Mercy Corps and Send a Cow
charities. [FULL STORY]
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