Tag Archives: technology

Manufacturing the future

Additive manufacturing, sometimes known as 3D printing, is exactly what it sounds like. Working from a computer-generated 3D model, a “printer” puts down layer after layer of plastic or metal or ceramic, adding layers until the design is realized in a finished part.

“You’re reimagining components from the ground up,” says Rich Martukanitz, director of Penn State’s Center for Innovative Materials Processing through Direct Digital Deposition, known as CIMP-3D. “You can manufacture components having features and characteristics that are near impossible to do with conventional processes. And you drastically cut manufacturing time, materials — and cost.”

Continue reading Manufacturing the future

The lure of grandkids draws seniors to social media

If there was ever an example of the viral nature of social media, it’s the creation of Facebook. The social media site went from a site for Harvard students to a global phenomenon.

The slickness and simplicity of the site, along with the ability to share pictures and updates with their friends from around campus — and around the world — have all been mentioned as reasons for using the social media site.

Now, according to work done by Penn State researchers, those same interface features and social media bonding experiences are prompting older adults to join the site.

Oh. And there’s one more reason: the lure of grandchildren…

Our researchers, Eun Hwa Jung, a doctoral candidate in mass communications and S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, explain that lure and more.  Continue reading The lure of grandkids draws seniors to social media

Fascinatin’ Rhythm

Mickey Hart of Grateful Dead fame is known for pushing boundaries. A prime force behind the ethnically diverse genre known as world music, Hart won a Grammy for 2007’s “Global Drum Project.” His brand-new album, “Mysterium Tremendum,” goes way beyond globetrotting to encompass the rhythms of the entire universe. And some of the most far-out sounds on the record, literally, were created by Penn State’s Mark Ballora.

 Ballora, who teaches music technology at Penn State, creates “sonifications,” aural patterns in which data sets are represented as sound. As he explains, they’re “just like visualizations, except they’re aimed at the ear instead of the eye.” His compositions are incorporated as backing tracks on Hart’s new album.

In this fascinating TED talk given in December, Ballora shares examples of his oeuvre, taking rapt listeners on a sonic tour from the surface of the sun through the solar system and beyond, arriving at last at sounds that represent the echoes of the Big Bang. Though we can’t see them, he says, these are “the rhythms of space time that underlie the pulsations of our existence.”

Unlike composers of the late-night “Hearts of Space” genre, Ballora says, he strives to be true to the actual data, to create sonifications that are “both musically compelling and scientifically informative.”

Is it music? Is it science? Does it matter?

Pythagoras and Galileo, Ballora points out to his TED listeners, never saw the two as separate.

“The distinction is a recent imposition.”