World in Brief (9/12/06)

What’d you say? Math sorts out noise

By Scott Canon, McClatchy Newspapers… What’d you say? Math sorts out noise

By Scott Canon, McClatchy Newspapers

COLUMBIA, Mo. — It’s the place where cloak-and-dagger eavesdroppers take a sympathetic seat next to your hard-of-hearing grandmother.

The cocktail party.

It’s tough for a spy to listen in electronically on the mumblings of two people in a crowd when the jabbering of everyone else creates a conversational gumbo. Just ask Granny and she’ll tell you that her darned hearing aids seem to crank up the noise of jangling silverware and whispers in a crowd as much as the person she’s trying to listen to.

Math to the rescue.

Two University of Missouri researchers appear to have struck on a solution — at least as far as algebraic geometry is concerned — to a problem that has vexed scientists for half a century.

“We’ve found that if you sample enough of the sound, you can do this,” said Dan Edidin, one of the MU mathematicians.

That discovery could someday soon dramatically improve how humans bark out orders to machines, let you watch a movie unbothered by the chatty couple in the next row, give crash investigators and crime scene detectives a new tool for recreating events — and enable Big Brother to overhear more of what you say.

The cocktail party problem was first identified in the 1950s. In those days, commercial air traffic controllers would sit together in rooms, with everyone listening to the same loudspeaker to carry on overlapping conversations with scores of pilots.

“Hearing the intermixed voices of many pilots,” wrote one researcher, “made the controller’s task very difficult.”

The problem comes when visual clues disappear and a jumble of other voices is crammed into the sonic mix. It creates what sources call the “blind source separation problem” — meaning when the human brain can rely only on sound, it becomes easily befuddled at sorting out several different sounds. Machines, because they lack the combination of intuition and experience of a lifetime of listening, have an even harder time picking out a single voice.

University building is a lesson in green

By James M. O’Neill, The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS — Engineering students entering their classrooms this fall at Southern Methodist University are learning the latest engineering concepts not only from their professors, but from the classrooms themselves — the walls, the windows, the floors, the cabinetry — as well as from the hallway outside, the bathroom down the hall, even the building’s main lobby.

The University’s new $16 million engineering building is on track to be the first college building in Texas to be certified as environmentally friendly by the leading arbiter of such things, the U.S. Green Building Council. The structure will save the University an estimated $70,000 in energy costs annually, but the bigger impact will be its use as a learning tool for the next generation of North Texas civil and mechanical engineers.

“The hottest thing in engineering is sustainable design, and we felt we couldn’t effectively teach it unless we had a building that represented it,” said Dr. Geoffrey Orsak, dean of Southern Methodist University’s engineering school.

Orsak said members of the Southern Methodist University team decided to shoot for the council’s accreditation when they started planning the building in 2004, but they didn’t know which level they would achieve.

They are now confident they’ll win Gold Level status, the second-highest among four categories of certification in the building council’s rating system, which was unveiled in 2000 and is known as LEED — shorthand for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.”

Only 14 college buildings across the country have Gold Level certification, and some of those are residence halls, athletic centers and offices. Designing an instructional building such as SMU’s has the added hurdle of providing appropriate venting for laboratory space, where students can learn to use lasers and study how different materials interact.

Michigan affirmative action ban isn’t black and white

By Dawson Bell, Detroit Free Press

BERKELEY, Calif. — Michigan has a question for California: Was it a good idea to prohibit, as your voters did in 1996, the use of race- and gender-based affirmative action by public schools and government agencies for hiring, contracting and admissions decisions?

Ten years ago, the issue raged in California just as it does now in Michigan in the run-up to the Nov. 7 election and a vote on the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, or MCRI.

Like backers of the MCRI, proponents of the nearly identical California Civil Rights Initiative, known as Proposition 209, promised a pathway to a colorblind society. Its opponents forecast an end to opportunity for women and minorities.

A decade later, some results are tangible: fewer African-Americans at elite state universities and an apparent reduction in cost for road contracts awarded without consideration of race and gender.

But would California do it again?

“In a heartbeat,” said Ward Connerly, the former University of California regent who led the campaign to pass 209. Connerly is also a principal organizer of the MCRI campaign.

Even opponents agree that Californians aren’t ready to repeal the proposition.

But Eva Paterson, who heads a coalition dedicated to doing away with 209, said she thinks that California voters will someday realize their mistake.

“There are fewer opportunities for minorities and women,” Paterson said. “California is worse off.”

Hard evidence about the effect of 209 is fragmentary and hard to interpret.

After its enactment, black and Hispanic enrollment declined sharply at the University of California system’s elite schools — Berkeley and UCLA.

But other research shows that overall minority enrollment at the elite schools has stabilized at lower levels, that overall minority enrollment is at or above pre-209 levels and that system-wide, California was among the national leaders in degrees awarded to non-white students.