When a tiny, quantum-scale, hypothetical balloon is popped in a vacuum, what happens to the particles inside?
This is a deceptively complicated question, the subject of debate among theoretical physicists studying nature at the subatomic level. Predicting if chaos or regularity prevails there is also important to scientists who are trying to harness quantum's bizarre wave and particle like behavior to advance nanotechnology.
Dr. Maxim Olchanyi, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Department of Physics, thinks the answer is chaos … sort of. Writing in the April 17, 2008 edition of Nature, he reported that when an observer attempts to measure the energies of particles coming out of a quantum balloon, the interference caused by the attempt throws the system into a final, “relaxed” state analogous to the chaotic scattering of air molecules. The result is the same for any starting arrangement of particles since the act of measuring wipes out the differences between varying initial states.
“It’s enough to know the properties of a single stationary state of definite energy of the system to predict the properties of the thermal equilibrium (the end state),” Olchanyi said in a press release issued by the University of Southern California, where he began his research.
The measurement – which must involve interaction between observer and observed, such as light traveling between the two – disrupts the “coherent” state of the system, Olchanyi said. In mathematical terms, the resulting interference reveals the final state, which had been hidden in the equations describing the initial state of the system.
“The thermal equilibrium is already encoded in an initial state,” Olchanyi said. “You can see some signatures for the future equilibrium. They were already there but more masked by quantum coherences.”
Olchanyi’s finding level extends into the world of applications, where scientists require reliable predictions in order to develop quantum-scale semiconductors. Quantum computing is gaining attention as manufacturers rapidly reach the limit on how much smaller chips can be. Because quantum particles can exist in multiple states at the same time, they could be used to carry out many calculations at once, factoring hugh numbers in just seconds. But to exploit this power, researchers must prevent coherent systems from falling into the chaos of thermal equilibrium.
Paolo Zanardi, an associate professor of physics studying quantum information at USC College, said in the USC interview: “Finding such ‘unthermalizable’ states of matter and manipulating them is exactly one of those things that quantum information/computation folks like me would love to do. Such states would be immune from ‘decoherence’ (loss of quantum coherence induced by the coupling with environment) that’s still the most serious, both conceptually and practically, obstacle between us and viable quantum information processing.”
Modern technology already operates at a scale where quantum effects are significant. Examples include the laser, the transistor, the electron microscope, and magnetic resonance imaging. But further exploitation at the nanoscale is only in its infancy.
The National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Resarch funded the research of Olchanyi and his co-authors, postdoctoral researchers Marcos Rigol and Vanja Dunjko.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
DId you know that UMass Boston is one of the region’s major employers, a stable economic engine in the community? It educates more Massachusetts residents than any other higher education institution in the region. Each year its graduates provide to the region’s leading industries a steady stream of highly talented, well-educated workers. With their fingers on the pulse of the region and its needs, UMass Boston's researchers create the new knowledge that helps drive the growth of the region’s quality of life and economy.
UMass Boston and the seven other research universities in the Boston area give Boston a special advantage: an enduring economic engine of future growth. Three of the Boston's universities are ranked as the most productive research universities in the entire nation: Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among large universities, and UMass Boston among small.
Beyond the bottom line, UMass Boston strengthens the social fabric of the region by supporting neighborhoods and providing arts and cultural activities for thousands of people.
Stable foundation
While companies in the private sector come and go, UMass Boston remains a stable base in the community. UMass Boston employs just over 1,500 people (excluding students) — more than the number employed in Boston in engineering. It purchases goods and services from Boston area vendors. And the campus renovates its current facilities through the employment of local contractors and construction workers.
In 2007, UMass Boston spent $259 million on payroll, purchasing, and construction. The multiplier effect of UMass Boston’s spending within the region is $558 million in regional economic output – 8% of the $7 billion total of all eight research universities - and more than 4,159 full-time-equivalent jobs.
Talent generator
UMass Boston is developing Boston’s number one resource – talent. With just over 13,400 students, and over 80,000 alumni, more than 60 percent of its graduates choose to live and work in the state. As the pace of economic change increasingly demands that workers become lifelong learners, UMass Boston has emerged as a major provider of continuing education. UMass Boston generates talent in areas that have traditionally seen shortages in the region such as information technology, nursing, education, and business management.
UMass Boston is a gateway to the world. It serves the most diverse student population in New England with 36% of its students indicating that they are non-white and graduates regularly reporting that they speak over 90 different languages at home.
Research
UMass Boston offers doctoral programs in approximately 15 fields of study. It has a wide range of research partnerships that address the gaps in translating innovation between basic university research and the more applied needs of the economy. Student participation in research turns university graduates into the most efficient of all instruments for transferring new knowledge and new technologies from the region’s campuses to its employers. This participation also leads to new funding and partnership opportunities for our faculty and staff that in turn impact the regional economy.
Growing at a double-digit rate, in fiscal year 2007, research spending at UMass Boston reached nearly $35 million. Approximately $80 million was contributed to region’s economy as a result of the multiplier effect of research and development on underlying economic productivity.
Federal funding sources outside the Boston area account for 51% of all research spending at UMass Boston. 21% of extramural funding was awarded by state and local sources. As a result, UMass Boston generates a significant amount of revenue coming into the region.
New business development
Technologies first developed at a university have become an increasingly important source for the development of new products and new businesses. UMass Boston provides extensive support to faculty members, students and others that want to start new businesses based on innovations developed at the university. Through its Venture Development Center, opening in early 2009, reasonably priced lab and office space will help accommodate the growth of companies generated by (or attracted to) the university.
Formal programs aimed at educating student entrepreneurs have also been organized in an effort to enhance the student learning experience at UMass Boston. Budding entrepreneurs in the College of Management compete in the most prestigious regional case competition, the B-School Beanpot, held each spring at Boston University. This year, eighteen teams participated, with one of the two teams from UMass Boston placing fourth overall.
Community partner
UMass Boston is the only university in the region that is classified Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as both a Doctoral/Research and Community Engagement university. It is helping communities meet challenges resulting from the continued growth of a knowledge-based economy. In the area that most analysts believe is the best opportunity for the region’s urban core, life science research and development, UMass Boston is leading the way.
UMass Boston provides a pipeline of diverse talent for the life sciences industry that contributes to novel and innovative science and adds to the robustness of solutions. With Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, UMass Boston will launch a $10 million personalized cancer therapy center within the Venture Development Center’s state-of-the-art facility.
UMass Boston is also engaged in numerous efforts aimed at improving the quality of elementary and secondary education in communities throughout the Boston area. Its $12.5 million Boston Science Partnership award from the National Science Foundation supports science teachers in the public schools. And it provides important cultural resources for the Boston area, myriad concerts, exhibits and lectures open to the public.
Looking to the future
UMass Boston has an ambitious 25-year master plan that calls for rebuilding its infrastructure to serve the needs of the 21st century. Included is an integrated science building that provides space for scientists from the university and industry to develop new products and new businesses. Imagine Dorchester as a high tech hub, a continuous engine of knowledge, culture and economic growth for the future of the region.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Are hard work and persistence the essential ingredients for success in America? Pepi Leistyna, associate professor of applied linguistics UMass Boston, challenges his students to think critically about this question.
His documentary film Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class (Media Education Foundation) examines working class representations from American television's beginnings to today's sitcoms, reality shows, police dramas, and daytime talk shows. Leistyna believes these images reinforce the myth of meritocracy. The film also associates unflattering television portrayals to cultural attitudes and public policies that directly affect the lives of the working class.
“I had been thinking for some time about how television has played a pivotal role in shaping our perceptions of the world and in particular our understanding of social class,” says Leistyna in Radical Teacher, Spring 2008. Through his film, he shows how mainstream media largely ignores a variety of social forces such as inheritance, social and cultural advantages, unequal educational opportunity, changing structure of job opportunities, and discrimination in all of its forms that tend to suppress, neutralize, or even negate the effects of merit in the race to get ahead. These forces of “social gravity” tend to keep people in the places they already occupy, regardless of the extent of their individual merit.
Class Dismissed was conceived as Leistyna was struggling to develop Language and the Media, a course that prepares graduate students to understand the media through a critical lens. He searched for materials that addressed social class and representation to no avail, so he decided to break new ground in exploring the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality intersect with class.
Leistyna believes that corporate-managed media have constructed their own tales about the lives of everyday people. He emphasizes that the purpose of Class Dismissed is not to “beat students over the head” with a particular point of view but to encourage them to think through their understandings. “Whose interests are served by such representations?”
He encourages his students to access, make use of, and even create alternative sources of information that aid in civic mobilization to democratize global media systems. He believes it is in the public interest to have diverse voices in the news sphere in order to foster engaged and informed citizens.
Class Dismissed has taken on a life of its own beyond classrooms across the nation. Most recently it was screened at a film festival at the London Public Library, sponsored by Indymedia, a group of independent journalists offering an alternative to mainstream media. In his Radical Teacher article, Leistyna says he is “energized regarding how a little idea generated in the middle of the night can snowball into international dialogue…and play its little part in working towards global change.”
Speaking internationally on issues of democracy, public education, and social justice, Leistyna's books include Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy; Presence of Mind: Education and the Politics of Deception; Defining and Designing Multiculturalism; and Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action. Leistyna was the 2007 recipient of the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism for Class Dismissed. "That was a really great moment for me given the respect I have for Studs' life work," says Leistyna. Leistyna has a masters and doctorate degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education
More than a few were surprised when in March 2003, UMass Boston appeared in the publication “Engines of Economic Growth: The Impact of Boston’s Eight Research Universities on the Metropolitan Boston Area.” But UMass Boston’s peers clearly knew what others might not – that UMass Boston was on the rise as a research institution, and plays an important role in the region.
Fittingly, last year, in the midst double-digit growth in its research, UMass Boston joined Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the top rankings of the most productive of the nation's research universities. UMass Boston was ranked fifth among small universities, according to a survey, based on the number of book and journal articles published by each institution's faculty, along with journal citations, awards, honors and grants.
Engines of Economic Growth, an unprecedented collaboration, was commissioned by Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts Boston to help them better understand their role in the regional economy. At the time the Boston metropolitan area began to feel the effects of the national recession. The universities noted that they provide the region what no other region could match, and committed to playing an essential role in the region’s economic future and its quality of life.
As the region once again feels the effects of the national economic downturn, it is time to remember that these universities are today providing a foundation for renewed economic growth. As a matter of fact, in the area that most analysts believe is the best opportunity for the region’s urban core, life science research and development, the universities – including UMass Boston - are leading the way.
The research universities are already playing a central role in the region’s economy, contributing more than $7 billion to the regional economy, according to Engines of Economic Growth. They are among the region’s leading employers, and one of its most reliable sources of job growth. Each year they turn out graduates, providing to the region’s leading industries a steady stream of highly talented, well-educated workers. Their research programs are creating the new knowledge that will help ensure the Boston area’s continued leadership in emerging areas. They are a seedbed for creation and growth of the dynamic young companies that over the next decade will drive the growth of the region’s economy. The concentration of major research centers in the Boston area is a magnet for investment by major U.S. and foreign corporations in new research facilities.
But Boston and its research universities are facing growing competition. Places like Bangalore in India, Biopolis in Singapore, and Otaniemi in Finland have been following its recipe for success in organizing talent, innovation and capital.
This is why these universities joined their peers in industry and government to shape the state’s $1 billion life science initiative to secure a leadership role in the twenty-first century.
UMass Boston’s role in the expected regional economic impact may be small – it was 8% of the $7 billion in 2003 - but it’s nevertheless important. First, to address the need for small, reasonably priced lab and office space connected to a university, it is opening in early 2009, an 18,000 SF state-of-the-art Venture Development Center on its campus. Tight space and high rents are driving some biotech firms to the suburbs. Many of the younger penny-counting scientists who start firms already live in the city and want to remain a short subway ride from investors, partners, suppliers as well as the airport.
Second, UMass Boston itself will be a magnet as a result of its collaboration with the Dana Farber Cancer Center to launch a $10 million personalized cancer therapy center, part of the state's life science investment. This program, now in the planning stages, will categorize tumors and generate matching therapies. Entrepreneurial development teams can locate in the Venture Development Center until expansion space opens up in the new integrated science center soon to get underway as part of UMass Boston’s master plan.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, UMass Boston provides a pipeline of diverse talent for the life sciences industry, mirroring the market. Many in industry understand that diverse talent can make for novel and innovative science and add to the robustness of solutions. UMass Boston is the only public university in New England recognized by the National Institutes of Health as a minority-serving institution.
UMass Boston is playing an important role in bringing the innovation economy to a corner of the urban area that has yet to experience much of those benefits. As in The Little Engine that Could, a long train must be pulled over a high mountain. Various larger engines are asked to pull the train; for various reasons they refuse. The request is sent to a small engine, which agrees to try. The engine succeeds in pulling the train over the mountain while repeating its motto: "I-think-I-can".
Saturday, July 5, 2008
“Frightening, which is to say compelling” is what Bennett Simpson, Associate Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, says in a review of Erik Levine’s “More Man,” a film which explores one of the chief rights of male initiation in American society today - football.
Levine is typical of the arts faculty at UMass Boston. They do not just teach the theory and history of art, they live it.
Levine won international recognition in the New York scene of the nineties for his sculpture, owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. He recently shifted into video.
Ann Torke drove across country with sheets of acetate attached to her car. The residue from the trip, including dirt, insects, windshield wiper swipes, a license plate, and dried water droplets, collected on sheets juxtaposed with maps captures the experience of travel. Torke’s “The Residue Series: Everyday Accumulation” at the Boston Sculptors Gallery continues her interest in framing the detritus from everyday life. Her work has been exhibited in venues like Art in General, New York, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo, the Newport Art Museum, Newport, and de Balie Amsterdam.
Cat Mazza's Stitch for Senate, an initiative of knit hobbyists making helmet liners for every United States Senator, just reached number 41. Building on the tradition of wartime knitting, a practice as old as the American Revolution, Stitch for Senate revives this cultural trend by engaging with political officials about the war in Iraq. Using software developed by Mazza, hobbyists knit in solidarity to persuade elected officials to support the troops by bringing them home. All the senators will receive their own helmet liner before the 2008 Senate race, after being displayed in the seating chart of the US Senate at a Washington DC venue.
Elizabeth Marran’s colorful tiny abstractions won the Mary & Maxwell Desser Memorial Award for painting at the venerable National Academy Museum in New York City in the 183rd Annual Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, “an exceptional selection (currently on view) of contemporary works by over 125 of the finest artists from across the country.” She conceptualizes her abstract images within a psychological framework where she references the relationship between order and chaos, discipline and lack of restraint, intention and accident. Her work is owned by collections that include the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Albertina Museum in Vienna, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum and Boston Public Library. “The abstractions of Elizabeth Marran continue to reshape definitions of painting,” according to a review of the exhibition in ArtCal.
Margaret Hart (UMass Boston art department chair) has had an extensive list of exhibitions and involvements across the United States. Identity formation and the nature of the individual have always been central to her work. From this perspective, she uses different technology and materials to explore the interior and the exterior, and what's caught in between. Her “Tying the Knot" series represents the rocky transitional period as a person's emotional identity evolves from a singular perspective to the incorporation of another’s point of view. "The struggles of communication and self-reflection I dealt with are embodied in three key phrases; 'Walking on eggshells', 'Knots in my stomach', and 'On pins and needles',"according to Hart.
Wilfredo Chiesa has shown at over twenty-five solo exhibitions in galleries in the U.S., Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, and Puerto Rico. His mural-sized fresco painting covering the front wall of the 15th-Century Church of San José in Old San Juan turned the front of the church into a spectacle of interplay between color, shadow, and texture, complementing the structure of the church. Chiesa’s paintings appear as a clear manifestation of the abstract artist’s unwillingness to directly reflect the known, but willingness to shed a light to the inner unknown.
The art faculty at UMass Boston often tell their students to treat their art as an author would treat writing - constantly revise their work up to a point where they feel satisfied with it - and then revise it some more. And, just as with writing, they assert that there are no boundaries whatsoever that should constrain what anyone's ideas of beauty and quality in art can be.
Are art professors stuffy academicians? At least not at UMass Boston. The art faculty are dedicated teachers of art and serious and dedicated artists as well. Their work also reveals that they, much like their own students, are passionate, growing artists engaged in the process of experiment and discovery.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Without going too far out on the limb, it's probably safe to conclude that by now every industrial country and major business has announced its plan to pursue an innovation-based strategy.
Innovation, whether in science, technology, manufacturing, or in business practices, is expected to expand economic fortunes, and generate hefty returns in revenue, power, growth and the quality of life. Implementing an innovation strategy requires smart and opportunistic packaging of capital, leading-edge research, talent and infrastructure. Everyone seems to understand this, most especially those in high tech environments.
When University of Massachusetts president Jack Wilson says the road to innovation and sustained economic development for the commonwealth runs through UMass, he's not making an idle boast. Our five campuses -- Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, Lowell and Worcester -- are key contributors in the state's innovation strategy and economy. Whether it's developing new technologies, finding and solving day-to-day problems in the workplace, or producing the kind of talent that is capable of developing new ideas and turning those ideas into reality, the UMass system delivers.
The impact of UMass Boston is particularly noteworthy, for example:
- A recently released Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, produced by Academic Analytics, rates UMass Boston fifth in the nation among small research universities with respect to publications, grants and honors accorded to faculty members. This past fiscal year, the campus was awarded in excess of $41 million dollars in external grants and contracts and had more than 520 sponsored programs under way -- impressive numbers for Boston's public research university.
- With support from the National Institutes of Health, UMass Boston, in collaboration with biomedical research institutions in the Boston region (Children's Hospital Boston, Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center and Harvard School of Public Health) has worked on moving discoveries out of the lab and bringing them to the bedside.
- Through our National Science Foundation-supported Boston Science Partnership, UMass Boston is applying new understanding of the learning process to fundamentally change the way math and science are taught.
- In another NSF-funded opportunity, the college has developed BATEC, the Boston Area Advanced Technology Education Collaborative, which has brought together the region's secondary school teachers, community colleges, regional employers and our IT and computer science faculty in a collaborative project focused on the design and delivery of a new IT educational continuum.
- We played a leading role in the Boston Harbor cleanup through our capabilities in measuring environmental hazards, advancing remediation strategies and establishing marine monitoring systems.
- UMass Boston supplies a large share of the region's skilled work force in areas that have traditionally seen shortages such as IT, nursing, education and business management.
Next year, UMass Boston plans to open a Venture Development Center, a 15,000-square-foot state-of-the-art laboratory and office facility, designed to facilitate the transfer of promising technologies into new commercial enterprises. The VDC is no ordinary academic center, but a new front door to the university's expertise and facilities for innovative collaborations between our faculty and partners. By leveraging campus resources and expertise, the VDC would also provide an enormous learning advantage to our students who would be engaged in the center's work.
As both a research university and as a public university, UMass Boston is an extraordinary place, where innovation in teaching, research and service to the commonwealth happens each and every day. As UMass Boston chancellor Keith Motley has often said, research and development are the cornerstone of our urban mission and a means to grow our region's economic competitiveness and quality of life. We are delighted by Gov. Deval Patrick's call for renewed investments in our infrastructure, faculty and funding for basic research and student scholarships. It's an innovation strategy that's bound to pay continued dividends, as past returns have shown.
(Monday, January 7, 2008 Mass High Tech article by William Brah is executive director of the Venture Development Center and assistant vice provost for research at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Philip L. Quaglieri is dean of the UMass Boston College of Management.)
Posts
