University Of Illinois At Urbana

World’s most powerful supercomputer to be unveiled in 2011

April 28, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, April 28 (ANI): Scientists are developing the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Blue Waters.

The Blue Waters project, created especially for open scientific research, is expected to go live in 2011.

It will be the first system of its kind to sustain one petaflop performance – one quadrillion calculations per second – on a range of science and engineering applications.

The project is being developed as a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, its National Center for Supercomputing Applications, IBM, and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, which includes Iowa State.

Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois. (ANI)

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Early attachment with parents affects behaviour in kids

March 25, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 25 (ANI): Kids, especially boys, who are insecurely attached to their mothers in the early years, tend to have more behaviour problems later in childhood, according to a new analysis.

Researchers at the University of Reading, the University of Leiden, the Barnet, Enfield & Haringey Mental Health National Health Service Trust, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted the meta-analysis of 69 studies involving almost 6,000 children ages 12 and younger.

According to attachment theory, children with secure attachments have repeated experiences with caregivers who are responsive to their needs and thus expect their caregivers to be available and comforting when called upon.

On the other hand, kids with insecure attachments have experiences in which requests are discouraged, rejected, or responded to inconsistently, which is thought to make them vulnerable to developing behavioural problems.

The researchers sought to clarify the extent to which bonds between children and their moms early in life affect children”s later behavioural problems, such as aggression or hostility; behaviour problems were measured up to age 12.

The studies resorted to a range of methods for assessing children”s behaviour problems, including parent and teacher questionnaires and direct observations.

“The results suggest that the effects of attachment are reliable and relatively persistent over time. More specifically, children who seem unable to maintain a coherent strategy for coping with separation are at greatest risk for later behavior problems and aggression,” noted Pasco Fearon, the study”s lead author.

The study has been published in the latest issue of the journal Child Development. (ANI)

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Human-like ‘E-tongue’ created

September 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Sept 2 (ANI): Scientists have created an “electronic tongue” that can digitally measure the taste of sweetness.

Under the leadership of Kenneth Suslick, a chemistry professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the revolutionary device, which makes use of a postage stamp-size piece of paper dotted with colored pigments, has been developed.

The study has appeared August 1 in the journal Analytical Chemistry.

“E-tongue” can identify with 100 percent accuracy the full sweep of natural and artificial sweet substances, including 14 common sweeteners, using easy-to-read color markers, reports National Geographic News.

Suslick’s team spent a decade developing colorimetric sensor arrays (PDF), where chemicals in each of the 16 to 36 micro dye spots reacted with sweet substances to produce color changes.

The colors tell not just which types of sweeteners are present, but also how much there is. (ANI)

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Money helps people feel better, but doesn’t necessarily improve quality of life

August 9, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 9 (ANI): Money may help people feel better about their lives, but it may not necessarily improve their quality of life, say two of the world’s leading psychological experts on happiness.

Dr. Ed Diener, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener, of the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology in Milwaukee, said so while speaking at the 117th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association on Saturday.

“People should avoid the trap of over-emphasizing financial matters and consider a complete portfolio of resources. This will help them cope when hard times are imminent,” said Diener.

He also referred to a poll for which the Gallup Organization surveyed more than 136,000 people in 132 countries from 2005 to 2006.

The researcher revealed that the poll looked at several economic factors, such as income and the wealth of the respondents’ countries, in connection with each person’s psychological needs, such as respect, happiness, personal life evaluation and support from family and friends.

The poll showed that the average person was relatively happy and satisfied with his or her life, but a larger income was more directly related to a stronger sense of happiness than with any other factor.

The researchers observed that the people who thought they had a great life reported higher income, but larger salaries die not mean that such persons felt happier on a day-to-day basis.

According to Diener, this may surprise some people who have long heard that money can’t buy happiness.

“Money is an object that many or most people highly desire and pursue during most of their waking hours. It would be surprising if making more money had no influence whatsoever when people are asked to evaluate their lives,” said Diener.

The survey, however, also revealed that a larger income did not necessarily contribute to a person’s day-to-day feelings of happiness, stronger social relationships or feeling of respect.

“Essentially, we have two forms of prosperity: economic and psychological. I don’t know if one is better than the other. But what we’ve found is that while money may be able to make people lead more comfortable lives, it won’t necessarily contribute to life’s pleasant moments that come from engaging with people and activities rather than from material goods and luxuries,” said Diener.

Biswas-Diener said it’s this kind of “psychological wealth” that can help people get through the recent financial downturn.

Some scientifically proven coping methods include learning a new skill, meeting new people, using humour and prayer, and having supportive friends.

“Adaptation to both good and bad events is part of our psychological wealth because it helps us to move forward in life,” said Biswas-Diener. (ANI)

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Bigfoot’s favorite haunts revealed

July 7, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, July 7 (ANI): A team of scientists has applied ecological niche modelling to predict the mythical Bigfoot’s favorite haunts in the United States.

Conservation biologists often need to predict where rare species are capable of living – for selecting the best site for a national park, for example, or forecasting how badly a species’ range will suffer as the climate changes in the future.

The latest technique for making these predictions is so-called ecological niche modelling, in which researchers log the locations of known species sightings, then gather environmental data for those places to define the ecological limits of the species’ range.

Jeff Lozier, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was worried that some people may have been too uncritical in applying the technique.

“Whenever you have these new, shiny, easy-to-use approaches, there’s a temptation to use them even before you know what the kinks are,” he said.

So, Lozier and his colleagues decided to apply ecological niche modelling to an obviously false data set – Sasquatch sightings.

They gathered all reported sightings in the US states of Washington, Oregon and California and used the environmental data to predict the distribution of the mythical Sasquatch or Bigfoot.

They found that the model yielded a perfectly plausible prediction about Bigfoot habitats – a warning to modellers that spurious results will not necessarily announce themselves through obvious warning signs.

“The point of the paper is really well taken,” said Dan Warren, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of California at Davis who is an expert in ecological niche models.

“I think the literature is rife with people who are over-interpreting what comes out of these models,” he added.

The researchers also compared the niche model for Sasquatch to one they developed for black bear.

They found that the two were statistically indistinguishable.

According to Lozier, this suggests that many supposed Sasquatch sightings may simply be misidentified bears – a mistake that has been made on at least one occasion.(ANI)

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Older air traffic controllers perform as well as young peers

March 9, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 9 (ANI): A new study from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has found that older air traffic controllers perform as well as their young counterparts on complex, job-related tasks.

The research, led by psychology professor Art Kramer, has shown that despite certain deficits older people’s expertise on the job enables them to function on a par with their younger peers.

“The question we were interested in was whether older controllers could continue to do the job,” said Kramer, who conducted the study with graduate student Ashley Nunes.

“If so, perhaps we could keep these people on the job for a little longer and this way provide more time for the transition and appropriate training of new controllers,” he added.

During the study, the researchers compared older and younger controllers with one another and with their age-matched peers who were not air traffic controllers.

All of the study subjects performed a battery of cognitive tasks and simulated air traffic control tasks, which varied in difficulty.

On simple cognitive tasks, the older controllers were similar to the older non-controllers.

The research team showed, compared with their younger peers aged 20 to 27, the older subjects were slower on simple memory or decision-making tasks that were not directly related to air traffic control.

But on the tests that simulated the tasks of an air traffic controller, the older and younger controllers were equally capable.

“Despite the fact that these old controllers are not superpeople in a cognitive sense, they still do really well on complex simulated air traffic control tasks that are representative of what they do every day,” Kramer said.

“They do well, one would surmise, because they’ve gained decades of knowledge in their profession that’s allowed them to offset the costs of not having quite the memory they used to have, and certainly not being able to respond as quickly as they once could, ” he added.

Kramer said that the study highlights the distinction between “fluid intelligence” and “crystallized intelligence”.

Fluid intelligence includes memory capacity and speed of recall; crystallized intelligence is the expertise that comes from years of attention and practice.

“Fluid intelligence declines with age, as it did in our controllers. But despite that, the many years of experience, the many years of building domain-relevant knowledge in their area of expertise allows them to offset or compensate for these losses in fluid intelligence and do the job really well, just as well as the younger ones,” he said.

The study appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. (ANI)

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