West Point Bridge Design Contest 2013

I modified last year’s bridge to meet the constraints of this year’s West Point Bridge Design Challenge:

Bridge design costing about $169.9k in the 2013 contest. Note: I’ve deliberately distorted the picture to make it difficult to blindly copy the design, as I had problems with middle-school students using my published designs to cheat on their homework. The truss design I have here can be used as inspiration, but not copied directly.
As of 2013 Jan 16, this design is number 3 in the “open competition”, but I’m sure it will slip a long way, as I don’t plan to do much (if any) tweaking.

I found it interesting that from this year’s version of the code they removed the options to change the viewpoint from which the bridge was viewed, though the included help system still describes the now-missing controls.

Related articles

• West Point Bridge Designer 2011 (gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com)
• West Point Bridge Design Contest 2012 (gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com)
• West Point Bridge Design Contest 2012, again (gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com)

Logo design contest for University of California

designcontest.com is taking advantage of the University of California logo fiasco to advertise their low-cost design site.  They’ve started a design contest for a new UC logo, with a tiny $249 prize.  This costs them very little, but gets them a lot of free publicity (like this blog post or this article in the Houston Chronicle) worth far more than the prize costs.

Of course, since they did not make it clear that the real goal was a favicon (one of the tiny icons that appear in a browser bar), most of the designs being submitted are far too fussy.  None of them are going to be picked up by UC anyway—this is purely a vanity contest.

But the idea of a design contest, with clearly expressed goals, is a good one.  I hope that the UCOP is not so stuck in their not-invented-here mode that they refuse to see the value of an open design competition—one with a big enough prize to get some professionals interested, but not so large that it is a ridiculous amount to spend (i.e., not like the money they waste on business consultants to justify hiring new executives).  Some good designers will be tempted to enter the competition because of the enormous advertising value of winning it.

If UC promised to create a public web site requesting comments on the top 10 designs, there would be even more interest by designers—it is a lot more likely that a good designer would make the top 10 than be selected as number 1 by the arbitrary and unknown tastes of the people at UCOP (especially since they picked such a loser the first time).

Involving faculty, students, and the general public in the decision-making at UC must be scary to the executives (since they go to great expense to avoid it), but it is necessary  to rebuild a public constituency for the University, and contests like this one are a low-cost way to start that. It seems like designcontest.com knows how to go about getting positive publicity, while UCOP is only good at making stupid PR blunders (like the UC logo and raises for executives while laying off lecturers).  Maybe we should replace UCOP executives with the people who run designcontest.com—it’s bound to be cheaper, and they can’t do that much worse a job.

QB3 competition

The Deloitte QB3 Award for Innovation is an annual contest for research which “represents the best life science on the campuses of UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UCSF.”  This year one of the finalists is a first-year grad student in our department,  Michelle Maalouf, who did her work as an undergrad in Nader Pourmand’s lab.  She kindly gave me this description of what she did (which I resisted editing, though the temptation is always strong when student work crosses my desk):

I utilize an injection system based on nanopipette technology, which was pioneered by Professor Pourmand to introduce defined quantities of molecules, such as RNAs, proteins and small molecules, into cells and alter their fate. The fully electrical operation control as well as the ease and low cost of fabrication are unique features that give nanopipette technology enormous potential to alter cell fate. I, as a part of Prof. Pourmand’s team, co-developed a single-cell manipulation platform based on quartz nanopipettes (~50nm) which is fitted with electrodes to mediate voltage-dependent injection into individual cells. Due to the nanostructure/size (<100nm), nanopipette tips cause less disruption to the cell membrane and allows single cell penetration multiple times without compromising cell viability. Furthermore, the use of double-barrel nanopipettes allows independent injection of two separate molecules, one from each barrel.
Nanopipettes improve current injection methods due to its high controllability and high viability of cells post injection. We have shown successful injections into mammalian cells, a technique that is a historically difficult task when using a micropipette. We will use single cell injections to reprogram human skin cells into artificial stem cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Using the nanopipette for injections to create patient-derived iPSCs offers a customized technique to address regenerative medicine by replacing damaged cells with cell therapy. iPSCs have the potential to deliver cell replacement therapy to support regenerative medicine. iPSCs can by-pass the issues of immune rejections when used for a source of tissue for transplantation because the cells can be biopsied from within the same patient (Stadtfeld et al. 2010). Regenerative therapies have the potential to treat many diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Reprogramming of adult cells into stem cells avoids the need to use human embryos to derive stem cells and therefore negates moral and ethical issues connected with this source (Robertson 1999). Present-day methods to reprogram adult cells into iPSCs are inefficient with a success rate of 1-5% of cells within a population (Warren et al. 2010). Nanopipette technology potentially can have a great impact in stem cell research where there is a need for technologies able to inject molecules of reprogramming factors into cells with a great precision in terms of ratio and concentration.

Double-tip nanopipette.

Differentially injected cells.

If you have a University of California e-mail address, you can vote for her project (or one of the other 4 finalists, if you really think that they are better), on the public Facebook page for the contest, but voting only runs until 2012 Oct 12.

The nanopipette work in Pourmand’s lab is pretty cool, and they do a lot with nanopipettes (sensing, injecting, and extracting). For such a cheap technology, it is surprisingly powerful.

USA Computing Olympiad

I’m thinking of encouraging my son to try the USA Computing Olympiad this year.  They have 5 web-based programming contests, each lasting 3–5 contiguous hours in a 4-day (Friday–Monday) window, followed by a proctored exam in April.  They don’t seem to have posted this year’s schedule yet, as they still have up the 2011–12 schedule—probably because the international competition is in September in Italy this year, so they are waiting to get the results from that before starting the next year.

I can’t find out much about the rules, but I believe that students can program in any language that they are proficient in.  Students all start in the “bronze” division, but students who score well are promoted to silver and gold divisions.  I suspect that my son will move quickly into the “silver” division with the correspondingly harder problems, but needs a good deal more learning to get into the “gold” division.

ISCB Wikipedia competition

The International Society for Computational Biology is finally getting serious about improving the coverage of computational biology in Wikipedia.

They’ve announced a competition (running from 2012 Sept 9 to 2013 Jan 10) for improvements to approximately 1100 articles that have been identified as relevant to computational biology.  (It is also possible to start new articles, if a topic is currently missing.)

Contest information can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Computational Biology/ISCB competition announcement – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The prizes are not big (first is $500 (US) and a year’s membership to the ISCB, second is $200 and a year’s membership to the ISCB), but either one would look good on a resume, and the service to the community is useful even for those who get no prizes.