While docked and onboard the International Space Station, a STS-123 Endeavour crew member captures the glowing green beauty of the Aurora Borealis March 21, 2008. Looking northward across the Gulf of Alaska, over a low pressure area (cloud vortex), the aurora brightens the night sky. This image was taken on March 21, 2008 at 09:08:46 GMT, credit-Reuters.
My favorite story from the whole FIRST Northeastern Regional competition was revealed in the delivery of the “Woodie Flowers” award. Woodie, you see, is the MIT professor who founded FIRST with Dean Kamen of Segway fame, after starting the legendary 2.70 and later 6.270 robotics contests at MIT. In many ways, Woodie was responsible for my attendance at MIT, just as he has now been responsible for inspiring tens of thousands of aspiring technologists across the US through FIRST.
So in thanks and recognition, the Woodie Flowers Award is granted to the team mentor at each regional and final First contest that best exemplifies Woodie’s spirit of contribution, teamwork, and inspiration.
Woodie Flowers and Elizabeth Carruthers
This year’s recipient, Elizabeth Carruthers from the Columbus School for Girls, had a great story. As a high school student, her parents weren’t all that supportive of the time and energy that FIRST demanded, so she had to sneak out of the house to work on her team’s FIRST robot.
She was so committed to the program and her teammates, that when her parents caught her sneaking out, she told them that she was just going to “parties with her friends,” which turned out to be okay with them. You see, they wanted her to be socially well-adjusted, and feared seeing their daughter turned into a nerd.
Given that she has now gone on to a technical undergraduate program, and returned to mentor her old high school’s FIRST team (an all-girl’s team, at that) into the regional finals, (a remarkable accomplishment that takes MANY more skills in communication and leadership and interpersonal relationships than just the technical ones) I’d say she’s VERY well adjusted!
Congrats, Elizabeth. Our nation need more inspirations like you.
With the end of the primary season coming up this summer, I expect a resurgence of the talk about “red and blue states” that dominated the 2004 election as we approach the direct engagement of the Republican and Democratic parties. This morning, I stumbled on a great site by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman from the University of Michigan that uses very nice cartographic representations of the last election results to better visualize the electorate.
Popular publications such as USA today published many maps of this sort showing the winner’s party by county.
But this graphical representation fails to take into account either the population density, electoral votes by county, or how close the vote was. If you process the map topology and scale each county to represent electoral votes, and color the vote results as a continuous scale from red to blue with even results represented as a mixed color of purple, the result is much more interesting.
Rather than the stark red/blue divide of the trivial map above, a more representative view of our nation deemphasizes sparsely-populated geographies with little economic impact and highlights those regions driving tomorrow’s economy. We also look like a much more homogeneous purple nation in this view.
Interestingly enough, in the economic-political view, the most politically homogeneous regions are the blue counties where economic development is the strongest.
Check out the whole site here.
