It’s not often that I write about one of Cornell’s finest, but today I will mention Olivia Ong, a senior Textiles and Apparel major. Her invention include a dress treated with silver nanoparticles, which both protect it from getting dirty and kills bacteria. The Cornell Chronicle in Student designer and fiber scientists create a dress that prevents colds and a jacket that destroys noxious gases notes some of the details:

The upper portion of the dress contains cotton coated with silver nanoparticles. Dong first created positively charged cotton fibers using ammonium- and epoxy-based reactions, inducing positive ionization. The silver particles, about 10-20 nanometers across (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter) were synthesized in citric acid, which prevented nanoparticle agglomeration.

Her other invention, a jacket with palladium nanofibers, offers the potential to passively purify the atmosphere. She calls her designer line “something really moving toward the future, and really advanced.”

The only worries are what the side-effects of wearing nano-creations might be. There are probably significant health risks to introducing tiny elementary particles into your system. Sure, they don’t seem to wear off the fabric, but they eventually must. And after that, we’ll have them in the air, in our food, the water supply… and probably evolve them into our basic cell chemistry.

In 1980, if you’d put $1000 into University, you’d now be paying $5905.50. Inflation inflates your $1000 to $2452.37, while the Nasdaq rakes in $5436.02, the Dow $9063.03. Cornell tracks strongly with other University rates, returning $5561.72. The graph makes one thing clear, though–Cornell’s tuition is quickly outstripping inflation, and tracks suspiciously with the higher order return rates common in the stock market. It’s almost like the inexorable rise of our tuition is a hedge against bad investments in the endowment.

In 2020, Cornell University tuition will have skyrocketed:

Right now we’re paying $32,800. In 2020, we’ll be paying $82,440 but our $32,800 will only be worth an $49,613. That’s another $30,000 of 2020 dollars or $20,000 of our real dollars. Therefore, I make this proclamation: In 2020, Cornell University will charge students $53,000 for a year’s tuition–51% more than today!

What this doesn’t take into account, though, is the personal benefit and satisfaction going to a private college gives you. It’s obviously true that Americans with college degrees are more sophisticated, intelligent members of society, even if they don’t make much more than their less-educated counterparts. After all, since it’s the human mind that makes us more than animals, I feel we have an obligation to develop it at all costs.

Still, the evidence isn’t conclusive. Certainly, the College Board thinks it pays off ultimately. However, the exponentially rising costs of private colleges may make the investment not look so promising.

The idea behind the robot is one of exploration and evolution. First, it builds up a set of possibilities of how its parts are arranged. Then, it builds up sets of possible commands to send to those parts. The commands are selected explicitly to try to maximize the differentiation of its internal models of itself. Once the robot has figured out what its made of and how those parts work together, it can attempt to move or accomplish a task. While this “learning stage” is limited to only 16 iterations to prevent a sort of machine epilepsy as it tries out badly performing permutations, it could make a useful fall-back algorithm for accomplishing mechanical tasks in a damaged scenario.

The Cornell News has more information with their article Cornell robot discovers itself and adapts to injury when it loses one of its limbs. What a title.

According to the New York Times, the program is all about what people do with computers:

“The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “It’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the Web.”

As Threadwatch points out, no one is going to respect this useless major. For example, one area of study might be a strange idea of privacy:

Privacy, for example, will be one area of research in Web science. The traditional approach to protecting privacy has been to restrict access to databases containing personal information. But so much personal information is already available on the Web, often given voluntarily on sites like MySpace and Facebook, that the old approach will not work, said Daniel J. Weitzner, technology and society director at the Web consortium.

Studying social phenomena is not science, so the major is ill-named. Also, studying how popular web sites work is not academia–it’s web surfing. If you want to understand how web or distributed systems work, you need a background in computer science and experience building them yourself, not a crappy degree from MIT. When recruiters see Web Science they should think the same thing as Did no work and partied through college.

Lo and behold, Waldman and colleagues found that reported autism cases within certain counties in California and Pennsylvania rose at rates that closely tracked cable subscriptions, rising fastest in counties with fastest-growing cable. The same was true of autism and rainfall patterns in California, Pennsylvania and Washington State. Their oddly definitive conclusions: “Approximately 17% of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s was due to the growth of cable television,” and “just under 40% of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching due to precipitation.”

Ignoring the absurd problems that arise when attempting to confuse causality with correlation, the very idea that watching television, a process which occurs late in a child’s life, causes autism, a condition which is usually there by birth, is ludicrous!

This is a bad PR move on Cornell’s part. Aren’t Ivies supposed to be smart?