Reginald L. Goodwin's Posts (3119)

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Diaspora, 22 February 2012

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on February 22, 2012 at 2:12pm
Percy A. Pierre, PhD Electrical Engineering

Percy A. Pierre is Vice President Emeritus and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State University. He created and directs the Sloan Engineering Program which recruits, helps fund, and mentors domestic engineering doctoral students, with an emphasis on underrepresented groups. Since 1998, he has personally mentored 45 engineering doctoral graduates, including 36 underrepresented minority doctoral graduates.

 

He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at The Johns Hopkins University. He is recognized as the first African American to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering (http://blacksuccessfoundation.org/first_science_phd's.htm).


He subsequently published research on stochastic processes in communications systems. His work focused on characterizing non-Gaussian random processes, including commonly used "linear processes". Results in signal detection, central limit theorems, sample function properties, and conditions for stochastic independence were developed.

 

List of papers: Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (bottom of page)

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Metamaterials, Dams and Powerstations...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on February 22, 2012 at 2:08pm
Physics arXiv - Seismic Metamaterials

In recent years, cloaking technology has taken the world of physics and engineering by storm. The possibility that any object can be hidden from incident waves has numerous applications, both practical and fantastical.

 

One of the more interesting is the possibility of protecting buildings from seismic waves. The idea here is to surround a building, or at least its foundations, with a metamaterial that steers seismic waves around the structure. Various groups have explored ways of doing this.

 

Today, however, Sang-Hoon Kim at the Mokpo National Maritime University in South Korea and Mukunda Das at The Australian National Universityin Canberra, suggest another idea. They point out that while seismic cloaks can protect buildings, they steer waves towards other buildings. "The cloaked seismic waves are still destructive to the buildings behind the cloaked region," they say.

 

Instead, they suggest that metamaterials could instead dissipate the energy in seismic waves by converting them into evanescent waves, which die down exponentially as they travel.


This would have been a good thing for Fukushima Daiichi, or any other reactors in the future...
 

Physics arXiv: Seismic Metamaterials Could Cloak Dams and Power Stations

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A Small, Mighty KABOOM...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on February 21, 2012 at 8:52am
Physics arXiv

Carbon nanotubes offer a number of exotic options for therapies. For example, tubes filled with drugs and sealed with biodegradable caps, could work their way inside cells where they deliver their load.

But the worry is that such a scheme may not target the drugs well enough if the caps degrade too quickly or too slowly.

So Vitaly Chaban and Oleg Prezhdo at the University of Rochester in New York state have a suggestion. Their idea is to fill the tubes with a mixture of drugs and water molecules and seal them with a secure cap.

Inside the body, the tubes enter various types of cell. But a treatment would involve illuminating only the cells of interest with an infrared laser which heats the tubes and boils the water they contain. The resulting increase in pressure bursts the cap and forces the water and drug molecules into the cell, like a grenade bursting.

Physics arXiv: Exploding Carbon Nanotubes Could Act as Drug Grenades

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Diaspora, 21 February 2012

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on February 21, 2012 at 8:30am
Dr. Clifford Johnson
The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone
And I must follow if I can.

Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it meets some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
- J.R.R. Tolkien

Education
B.S. Physics, Imperial College, London University, 6/1989
Ph.D. Theoretical Physics, University of Southampton, 6/1992

Postdoctoral Training
Postdoctoral Researcher
Institute for Theoretical Physics, UC Santa Barbara, 09/1995-08/1998

Instructor and Postdoctoral Researcher
Princeton University, 01/1995-08/1995

Member
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, 09/1992-12/1994


Dr. Clifford Johnson is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Southern California. His work involves research and teaching, undergraduates and postgraduates.

He works mainly on superstring theory, quantum gravity, gauge theory, and M-theory, studying objects such as black holes and D-branes, using a variety of techniques from Mathematics and Physics.

Faculty profile: Dr. Clifford V. Johnson

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Godspeed, John Glenn...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on February 20, 2012 at 7:00am

I guess for my mother, it was t-minus six months and counting (I was happily gestating in her womb)...


It took chutzpah, moxie for a human being to consciously strap (at that time) himself to a large lit stick of dynamite with no guarantee that the procedure, though thoroughly calculated and considered, would not end in disaster.

So was this Marine Corp pilot, who confidently climbed into a Mercury rocket - Friendship 7, and took the first flight by an American to orbit the Earth.

Mercury - Gemini - Apollo: it would change our world with semiconductor-manufactured spinoff technologies that we now take for granted. It would change our focus, our nerve on what was possible. We would look to the stars and listen for signs of humanity's cousins.

50 years later: Godspeed, John Glenn

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Diaspora, 20 February 2012

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on February 20, 2012 at 7:00am
Dr. Derrick Pitts

In Philadelphia, a radio program called Skytalk features a weekly discussion led by astronomer Derrick Pitts, also the chief astronomer at the Franklin Institute of Astronomy. There you can hear Pitts ruminate about astronomical forecasts for 2010, the 400th anniversary of Galileo finding Jupiter's moons with a telescope, and the discovery of new planets in the galaxy.

 

The image of Benjamin Franklin, for whom Pitts' Institute is named, peering out into the universe through a telescope from Philadelphia may have been the prevailing icon of American astronomy since the 18th century, but today it's a black man named Derrick. He's been at the Institute since 1978 and through the years has become a top scientific consultant for entities like Lockheed Martin and NASA.

 

TheGrio's 100: Derrick Pitts, a star among the stars

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Diaspora, 15 February 2012

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on February 15, 2012 at 2:38pm

Dr. Kim Michelle Lewis

Dr. Lewis is an National Science Foundation grant winner ($575,000) to advance electronics used in medicine and toxic sensing technology (important in a post 9-11 world). She graduated from Dillard University, and holds a summer research camp open to HBCU science and engineering majors hoping to learn and advance in the field.

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