CURRENT ISSUE | SUBSCRIBE | ADVERTISE | WRITE TO US | CORNELL AUTHORS | PAST ISSUES

Higher Ground | WITH INSIDE HIGHER ED, SCOTT JASCHIK '85 OPENS A NEW WINDOW ON ACADEMIA

LAST YEAR, ISRAEL WAISMEL-Manor, MA '03, and Daniel Sherman, PhD '04, had a good idea, or so they thought. While graduate students in the Department of Government, the friends had helped to train teaching assistants, and they learned a lot about the ambiguous, not-quite-faculty role that TAs have in the academic hierarchy. As Sherman was starting his first post- Cornell job and Waismel-Manor was wrapping up his PhD, they wrote a how-to article about life in the TA trenches and sent it off to a leading political science journal. They were turned down--the journal wanted them to present empirical evidence instead of draw on their own experience. The two didn't even bother to approach the Chronicle of Higher Education, the weekly journal that has covered education issues since 1966 and is academia's "newspaper of record."

"I love the Chronicle, don't get me wrong," says Waismel-Manor, now teaching at the University of Haifa in Israel. "The content is geared toward faculty, though, and many graduate students can't afford it.We knew that even if the article was accepted, we wouldn't necessarily reach the audience we wanted."

Then Waismel-Manor heard about Inside Higher Ed. Founded by former Chronicle editor Scott Jaschik '85 and two other high-profile ex-staffers--recruitment advertising executive Kathlene Collins and longtime reporter/editor Doug Lederman-- the new online journal had been live only for a few months, but it was already making a splash. Mixing columns from such heavy-hitters as University of Massachusetts, Amherst, president John Lombardi and National Book Critics Circle award winner Scott McLemee with articles, blog entries, and comments from adjuncts, grad students, and junior faculty, IHE positioned itself as the pricey Chronicle's rigorously egalitarian Web rival. In early May, they fired off their draft to IHE and hoped for the best. Two weeks later, on May 17, Waismel-Manor and Sherman saw their article posted on the front page.

"With other publications, it can take a year to three years before your work makes it to print," says Waismel-Manor. "Inside Higher Ed got our article to the right audience quickly. It's a great venue for what we wanted to do."

That's exactly what the upstart journal was designed to do--spark a conversation among academics on every floor of the ivory tower, from the grad students in the basement to the college presidents in the penthouse suite. For editor Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed represents not only a chance to break from the conventions of academic journalism; it's also an opportunity to take his own career in a new direction.

"My friends in journalism call me Mr. Stability," says Jaschik, who went straight from the Daily Sun to the Chronicle--and stayed there for twenty years, working his way up to chief editor in 1999. (Jaschik is also a recent CAM contributor: he interviewed former president Jeffrey Lehman '77 in the September/October issue.) "They were moving from publication to publication, because that's how you build a career these days, and I stayed at the Chronicle because I liked reporting on higher education. It's a field that isn't covered well in the mainstream media, because so many of the debates are about ideas, but higher education involves the economy, government policy, social and cultural issues-- you name it. I got to cover all that at the Chronicle."

What he couldn't do, however, was change the nature of the publication itself. Jaschik is reluctant to discuss the details of his departure, but in a February article the New York Times described the Chronicle's reputation as "stodgy" and suggested that Jaschik and company had left due to disagreements with publisher Corbin Gwaltney. Jaschik says that he was motivated by a different vision of what academic journalism could be. "Higher education and journalism have both been transformed by the Web," he says. "We wanted to respond to those changes and create a different model of how the academic community could communicate with and about itself."

In 2004, Jaschik, Collins, and Lederman started working with focus groups of academics from across the spectrum, from professors and administrators to junior faculty and grad students. "We found that people were starved for information," says Jaschik. "We talked to groups at graduate schools and learned that students didn't feel like they had the tools they needed to get a job, to get tenure, to understand how this complicated community worked.We also talked to college presidents, though, and found out that they wanted more than they were getting, too."

On a typical day this summer, Inside Higher Ed offered an article on family pressures for young tenure-track faculty, an essay by a frustrated parent on the admissions process at selective colleges, a report on how the terrorist bombings in London were affecting American studyabroad programs, and an analysis of the pay differences among faculty in the sciences and the humanities, most accompanied by long--sometimes heated-- threads of commentary from readers. A dig through the archive (new articles appear every day) yields accounts of the kinds of controversies, such as an outspoken professor's failure to get tenure at one private institution, that might be discussed in department lounges but are rarely reported openly.

Because all of Inside Higher Ed's content is free (the Chronicle requires an annual subscription of $82.50 both to receive its print edition and to view most of its online content), the site supports itself with a recruitment service, charging colleges and universities to post their job openings and to use the site's package of services for employers, which includes a searchable database of applicant resumes. Both the recruitment service and the journal itself have been a hit, almost since they became available in January.

"We were supposed to be in a test stage this year," says Jaschik, who notes that the New York Times article drew unexpected attention. "Word-of-mouth took over, and we started getting 100,000 page views a month." That's still a fraction of the 10 million views per month that the Chronicle gets, but for a brand-new specialty publication, it's a strong and surprising start.

The "test stage" is now over, and Inside Higher Ed has launched a major marketing campaign to let academics know that it's ready--more or less. "We don't have a paper clip to our name," Jaschik says. "That's the trade-off, though, when you're starting something new. Sure, it would be nice to have a supply room, but right now, for Inside Higher Ed, anything is possible."

-- C.A. Carlson '93, MFA '96

String Theory | THIS IS NOT YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S CROCHET--OR HER GEOMETRY

dAINA TAIMINA BRINGS A LARGE plastic bag to her dining room table and pulls out handfuls of what look like doilies on steroids. They've got an odd appeal, with ruffled edges like lettuce leaves that make you want to pick one up and take a closer look.

That's exactly what Taimina, a Cornell mathematician and visiting scholar, intended when she crocheted her first model of a hyperbolic plane. "With these," she says, holding up a purple pseudosphere, "you really can play."

The energetic, quick-speaking native of Latvia had hoped to use the dowdy craft to help her students see the complex properties of hyperbolic geometry. She's done that--and more. With just acrylic yarn and a crochet hook, Taimina has not only solved an illustration problem that has bedeviled mathematicians for hundreds of years, she has also hooked the imaginations of a skein of fans, from geometry geeks to artists to crochet enthusiasts.

But this morning, Taimina has something else on her mind--the pain that shoots from her right hand's middle finger, up her arm, and to her spine. "I think it's a nerve, because it goes to the C5 vertebra," she says. The pain is likely the result of crocheting about 175 models for organizations like the Smithsonian Institution and for math professors like Colm Mulcahy, PhD '85, chair of the mathematics department at Spelman College. Since Mulcahy started using these models in 2001, he's seen a notable difference in how well his students understand hyperbolic geometry. "When they see it in a hyperbolic crochet model, they go, ‘Oh, you're right. This really can happen.' " As important, the use of visual aids breaks from the way geometry has traditionally been taught. That,Mulcahy says, was "like taking a cooking class and never actually eating any food."

What exactly is hyperbolic geometry? It's a dramatic departure from the kind that most of us learned in grade school. Whereas Euclidean geometry deals with shapes like triangles and squares on a flat surface, hyperbolic geometry involves a wavy surface, where the space around any point moves exponentially away from that point. The shape of a saddle illustrates the concept,Mulcahy says. "If you're sitting on a horse, the saddle goes up in front of you and up behind you, but it goes down on both sides where your legs go." Taimina creates the wavy effect by regularly increasing the number of stitches in each of the many rows of crochet that make up a model.

In this realm, the rules of "regular" geometry get turned on their heads. While the angles of a Euclidean triangle will always add up to 180 degrees, in hyperbolic geometry the angles always add up to less than 180 degrees, and can even be zero. It's difficult to grasp--until one sees a triangle drawn onto one of Taimina's models. "It has these pinched corners,"Mulcahy says, "so we're clearly not in Kansas anymore."

Mathematicians had been attempting to come up with three-dimensional manifestations of hyperbolic geometry since the early 1800s, although examples in nature, like the curled edges of kelp, were there all along. Henri Poincaré depicted a hyperbolic plane in a circular disc, which inspired M.C. Escher to create his etchings of impossible buildings. It was only in the 1970s that the first hands-on models were created, by the esteemed geometer William Thurston, now a Cornell mathematics professor. Taimina's husband, mathematics professor David Henderson, tried his hand at them as well. But the models, made of thin strips of paper taped together, were hard to construct. "I didn't have the patience for that," Taimina says. And they were too fragile for students to handle.

Taimina's light-bulb moment came in 1997, when she was preparing to teach Geometry 451, she recalls. "I said, I have to make something that can be used and is durable." A life-long knitter, she thought perhaps the medium of yarn might improve on paper's unyielding qualities and, properly manipulated, would offer the curvatures needed to model hyperbolic planes. Knitted models turned out too floppy, but the she tried crochet. "That summer," she says, "I sat next to the pool,my children learned to swim, and I just crocheted planes." Passersby asked what she was working on. "I said, ‘Crocheting hyperbolic planes.' They said, ‘Oh.' "

She has since crocheted models of differential geometry, not only for Henderson's classes but also for a January presentation at the Mathematical Association of America, where for years she and Henderson have been running workshops on teaching methods. They have also co-written a textbook, Experiencing Geometry.

But it was when Taimina and Henderson gave a presentation at the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles this year that people outside the math community came into the loop. Word of Taimina's models has spread from obscure magazines such as Mathematical Intelligencer and Crochet Fantasy to mainstream media like the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and National Public Radio. Taimina has exhibited her work at two art galleries to date and has given many public talks, including one at the edgy New York City performance space P.S. 122. Free-form crocheters like Gwen Blakley Kinsler, founder of the Crochet Guild, a national association, revel in the publicity it has offered the craft. "For years we've been fighting a stereotype as a group of grannies who do nothing but toilet paper covers," she says. "To have crochet help people understand math--I just love that."

Taimina views her recent fame with amusement. "This is nothing I've asked for--it's an unexpected adventure." But she also appreciates the opportunity to make geometric concepts easier for anyone, not just mathematicians, to understand. She tells the story of a teacher in Nebraska who saw her models in Wired magazine and introduced the ideas to her summer school students, who were on the verge of dropping out of high school because they were failing math. Several taught themselves to crochet the models, and all discovered that math could be "cool." "It changed their attitude. For me, that was the greatest," Taimina says. "If I can reach people I have never met, if I can teach them just through this, maybe that's worth the pain I have in my arms."

-- Susan Kelley

Robot Monster | UNMANNED VEHICLE TEAM DRIVES FOR GLORY

oN A BRIGHT SUMMER AFTERnoon, Brian Schimpf '06 descended into the sunless bowels of Rhodes Hall to inspect his robot. The machine was big and black and brutish, a low-slung four-wheel-drive truck with a tubular steel frame and thirty-four-inch tires. It looked like a cross between a military Humvee and a Baja 1000 desert racer. In a former life, it was a light assault vehicle called a Spider, built by a Singapore defense contractor and typically kitted out with a heavy machine gun. Now unarmed and unplugged from its electronic brains, it sat in a cluttered basement garage to await the spark of life.

"This is just a ridiculously capable vehicle," said Schimpf, who was spending his summer break helping to build Cornell's entry in the second annual DARPA Grand Challenge for unmanned, autonomous ground vehicles. Sponsored by the research arm of the Department of Defense, the October 8 race pitted twentythree robotic vehicles in a race against the clock negotiating a treacherous 132-mile route across the Mojave Desert in under ten hours, all without human intervention. Two million dollars went to the eventual winner, a team from Stanford University that fielded a modified Volkswagen Touareg SUV named Stanley. Finishing the course in just under seven hours, Stanley managed to edge the race's two favorites--a pair of Hummers built by Carnegie-Mellon University's acclaimed robotics program that finished second and third--by only minutes. A total of five entrants succesfully completed the contest.

DARPA--the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--devised the Grand Challenge as a way to enlist a volunteer army of high school and college students, backyard tinkerers, and assorted amateur techno-wonks in the race to become the Charles Lindbergh of robotics. Autonomous combat vehicles are poised to be a key "transformational technology" of the new century. Although possible civilian applications might range from improved public transportation to the old World's Fair fantasy of the hands-off commute, right now the DoD is more interested in taking people out of the long, vulnerable supply lines of the modern ground war. In a future conflict, troops could be maintained by driverless convoys of robot trucks racing across the desert.

Unfortunately, building a vehicle that drives itself turns out to be exceedingly difficult." Mimicking human judgment is the hardest part," says mechanical engineering professor Ephrahim Garcia, head of the Sibley School's Center for Intelligent Mechatronics and a faculty advisor for Cornell's Grand Challenge team. "How does it know the difference between a tree and a rock, or a person? What's challenging is fusing all this information from different sensors and then making good decisions. That's where the rubber meets the road."

In 2004, the inaugural Grand Challenge was something of a rolling fiasco, with all fifteen entries either disabled or destroyed before the eighth mile. They crashed, drove backwards, burst into flames, froze before phantom obstacles, and were generally flummoxed by forces their artificial intelligences could not comprehend. The most capable entrant, an earlier version of Carnegie Mellon's second-place Hummer, rolled itself over two days before the race when it glimpsed a passing cow.

"Just about everything that's ever been done has failed, usually spectacularly," Schimpf said in June. An operations research major, he joined with friends Noah Zach '06 and Aaron Nathan '06 to spearhead the Cornell effort.

They started back in fall 2004 by analyzing where the first round of DARPA robots went wrong. First lesson: find an extremely robust platform, so that the vehicle can drive over anything it doesn't see. They also determined that too many entrants relied on their finicky Global Positioning Systems to navigate, rendering the vehicles helpless when they lost contact with the GPS waypoints that defined the race route. Thus their robo-truck was outfitted with a multiplicity of sensors, including a trio of laser rangefinders and both radar and LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) systems to pick up distant obstructions. Decision-making duties were handled by a networked rack of computer servers, with a separate generator riding along to provide power--and run the RV air-conditioner that cools the whole array. "This is basically a rolling supercomputer," said Schimpf.

Cornell doesn't have an official robotics program, but the University is a veteran of many a collegiate robo-war (it's a fourtime champion in the annual Robocup competitions for tiny soccer-playing automatons). Several Robocup alums signed on to the Grand Challenge team, which eventually swelled to accommodate over sixty students divided into four subteams, plus four faculty advisors. And they came to play, running through an estimated $200,000 building their entry--not including the donated vehicle itself (list price: over $100,000) or the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of other hightech componentry, all provided gratis by sponsors such as Texas Instruments and Northrop Grumman. Compared to some other teams, which boasted professional engineers and seven-figure budgets, the Cornell effort was comparatively lowbudget and "very student-driven," Schimpf said. "We have a lot of undergrads and we design a lot of the hardware ourselves. The advantage is that undergrads are insane. That's our secret weapon."

Advisor Garcia agrees. "I think it would take Boeing $30 million to do what these kids did. They're incredibly dedicated."

Alas, that work was not rewarded on race day. After breezing handily through the semifinal rounds, the Spider met an untimely end nine miles into the finals when it took a sharp turn and stopped at a guardrail. Faced with an unclimbable obstacle and unable to reverse--the team had failed to enable the software's "backup logic"--there the Spider sat.

It was an unspectacular early end to the team's day. But, as Garcia had often warned his students, they called it the Grand Challenge for a reason."It's really a tall order," he says. "To do this as an all-or-nothing, oneshot deal.As an experimenter, I look at this and think it's incredibly hard."

-- David Dudley

Red Ink | ROVER SCIENTIST PENS A MARTIAN MEMOIR

steve Squyres '78, PhD '81, is obsessed with time. Watching his restless energy during a September 14 lecture to an audience of alumni in the Space Sciences Building, it's easy to imagine that the adage about not enough hours in the day was designed with him in mind. But thanks to lots of hard work and a little luck, he has been granted extra time. Since the Goldwin Smith professor of astronomy became the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover mission, each of his days has lasted twenty-four hours and thirty-nine minutes--the length of one Martian sol.

As Squyres writes in Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet, "All of us who wanted to work flight operations [had] to shift our sleep schedules constantly, keeping pace with the planet where we worked instead of the planet where we lived." And because the rovers operated in two different Martian time zones, there was also the possibility of Martian jet lag. "Fatigue is part of the experience," he notes.

The book gives the ultimate insider's view of the frustrations and the triumphs-- and the years of work--that went into designing, testing, and seeking funding and approval for the mission. It's not only the story of amazing machines but of the team of more than 4,000 people who worked on the project.

Time is the enemy of the rovers, too. Their mission was to study Martian geology and find out whether the planet could have ever supported life. They were designed for an operational life of ninety days and the ability to drive six hundred meters. "I always understood that Sol 90 was when the warranty would expire for each rover," Squyres writes, "and that an expired warranty didn't mean that the wheels would fall off when the Sun came up on Sol 91." As of this writing, the rover Spirit has been collecting data for more than 600 sols, Opportunity for nearly as many. "When they stop," Squyres says, "it will be like a death."

Return to top of page