Education Tidbits
Two graduate assistantships are available at the University of California, Santa Barbara on an NSF-funded project using remote sensing, GIS, and computer models to study land use and coupled urban systems. These are PhD positions.
Engineering students at UC San Diego played a critical role in helping the university and the San Diego region secure a total of $154 million in federal bonds for solar installation projects. What did they do? They put together a tool for prospective users of solar installs to calculate cost, energy output, and payback time of solar arrays, data required for the bonds.
“What we did was put addresses into Google Earth and used satellite images to calculate the areas of the rooftops and parking lots where local applicants wanted to install solar panels. We then used an online tool called PVWatts Solar Calculator to help calculate the expected annual output, and a spreadsheet we designed calculated the 10-to-15-year payback of each installation project,” explained Karl Olney, a second-year Ph.D. mechanical engineering student. “The thing that was nice for our projects was that with our tools an individual site’s application could be completed in about 10 minutes.
Another bonus: high school interns were taught to use the system to help file applications.
- PhyOrg
A team from the University of Miami, University of El Paso and University of Rochester have employed Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) images compiled over a decade to study volcanic activity in the African Rift. The study, published in the November issue of Geology, studies the section of the rift in Kenya.
In what is perhaps the longest press release I’ve seen of late, Education Logistics touts the savings by school districts using its school bus routing app. The total savings is over $11 million by 9 school districts. No word on how much the 9 districts spent on the software, so there’s no way to calculate an ROI (even on these handpicked likely high savings clients).
