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No Ships, But Power Plus
No, they aren’t building an electric ship in Tallahassee, as has been widely—and erroneously—reported. But what they are doing is research into what no one disputes is the wave of the future when it comes to how electric power will be used and distributed some day not just aboard ships but in towns and cities across the continent.
A $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy awarded his center last January underscores this fact, says Steinar Dale, director of FSU’s Center for Advanced Power Systems. Based at Innovation Park near campus, the center was established in 2000 by a $12.7 million grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
Dale said the new DOE grant is being used to build on one of the center’s main missions, which is to educate and train students in the burgeoning field of power engineering. This is a special branch of engineering that focuses on developing better ways to generate and distribute electricity for a variety of needs in industry, municipalities and in the military.
These days, graduates with advanced training in power engineering can look forward to a wealth of exciting and lucrative careers awaiting them in a variety of fields, Dale said. In its education mission funded by ONR—complemented now by DOE—the FSU center is a partner with engineering departments at the University of South Carolina, Mississippi State University and the University of Texas at Austin.
The center’s founding grant from the Navy accounts for much of the persistent confusion over its role in building the so-called “all-electric ship,” a project that the Navy has been pushing for a decade as the answer to the nation’s defense on the high seas. America’s current fleet of warships still runs almost entirely on fossil fuels. Ships equipped with huge electric motors and power grids based on super-efficient technologies such as superconductive rotors and wiring could offer enormous advantages in terms of requiring less manpower and fuel saving (although onboard power would still need to be generated either by nuclear power, gas turbines, diesel engines or some time in the future, even by hydrogen fuel cells).
Building any part of an electric ship was never part of the FSU center’s mission, but serving as a serious simulation and testing facility for the new marine electric distribution and propulsion systems certainly was. After the center’s 3,600-sq.-ft. testing ground was finished last spring, Dale’s team installed a brand new 5-megawatt superconducting motor, a prototype built and only partially tested by American Superconductor Corporation, a leading superconducting technology firm based in Massachusetts. The Navy’s plan is to use FSU’s data from testing this prototype—the most powerful superconducting motor yet built—to help design and build a massive 36.5-megawatt superconducting motor, a power plant brawny enough to propel a destroyer.
Last fall, Dale’s team became the first to successfully test the 5-megawatt motor at full speed—230 rpm—and, at the same time, under a full load of torque. The torque was supplied by “propellers,” which in reality were two conventional, 2.5-megawatt General Electric motors hooked up directly to the 5 megawatt’s drive shaft. “For all this motor knew, (during testing) it was sitting aboard a ship at sea,” Dale said.
Analyzing the data generated by these tests is the work of a bank of networked computers and simulation equipment sitting in a cool room a floor above the ground-floor test bed. Collectively, this hardware is called a real-time digital simulator, and it’s capable of simulating, even emulating, not only a ship’s propulsion through the ocean but how power is distributed through an entire city or region, Dale said.
In May, the simulator lab was the largest of its kind on any university campus in the world, he said.
“Florida State is emerging as one of the nation’s pre-eminent centers for power engineering and advanced power systems simulation. This new collaboration with the DOE will help us deal with modernizing a system that is critical to all our lives. Without it, we could literally be back in the Dark Ages.”
NPR’s "Science Friday" at FSU
On April 8, National Public Radio’s popular program on science, “Talk of the Nation – Science Friday“ broadcast live from Florida State, marking the first time the New York-based show has visited a Florida university campus.
For his two-hour show, host Ira Flatow introduced two panels of guests that included six members of the FSU faculty—including three from the College of Medicine—who talked about end-of-life care and trends in aging.
For the show’s first hour, Flatow queried panelists about the consequences of the world-famous Terri Schiavo case on national and state policies governing advanced directives, living wills and other facets of end-of-life health care. Panelists from the College of Medicine were Gerry Maitland, M.D., a neurologist and professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences, and Jeffrey Spike, a medical ethicist and associate professor within the Department of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences. Also appearing were Lois L. Shepherd, a professor of bioethics and health law in the FSU College of Law, and Susan Ponder-Stansel, president and CEO of Community Hospice of Northeast Florida in Jacksonville.
A discussion of the sociological and technical aspects of aging in America comprised the show’s second half. Guest panelists from FSU were Jill B. Quadagno, Mildred and Claude Pepper Eminent Scholar and Professor of Sociology; Ken Brummel-Smith, M.D., chair of the Department of Geriatrics in the College of Medicine; and Neil Charness, professor of psychology. Also joining the panel was Sheila Salyer, manager of senior services for the City of Tallahassee and director of the Tallahassee Senior Center.
The show was broadcast before a live audience from the new Nancy Smith Fichter Dance Theatre, a 380-seat addition to the newly renovated Montgomery Hall on central campus. After the show, Flatow commented that the Fichter theatre was among the best remote locations he’s seen in his 14-year history of hosting “Science Friday.“
Known as the “man who brings science to the masses,” Flatow is an Emmy award-winning writer and the creative spark behind “Science Friday“ and other science-oriented programs produced by NPR and the Public Broadcasting System. “Science Friday“ enjoys an average weekly listenership of 2.6 million in the U.S. and is carried by many of NPR’s 140 overseas affiliates. FSU’s Office of Research, led by Vice President Kirby Kemper, sponsored the April 8 program that also was videotaped for subsequent broadcast by WFSU-TV.
—For downloadable audio of the entire April 8 program, visit Science Friday’s online archive at http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2005/Apr.
Hobbit Sized Humans
More than a million years ago, they stood three feet tall and looked a lot like us. Now we’ve got good reason to believe they may have behaved a lot like us, too.
This spring, results of an analysis of a small skull—reported to be human—found last year by anthropologists digging in a cave on an Indonesian island were published by Science Express, the online version of Science, and then appeared in the April 8th edition of Science. FSU anthropologist Dean Falk led the study, funded by the National Geographic Society, that found remarkable similarities between the brain that the skull once contained and modern human brains.
The findings support early supposition that the bones are in fact those of an entirely new species of human beings. If upheld by subsequent research, Falk’s conclusions will add an intriguing new chapter to scientists’ understanding of how humans evolved from lower primates. Essentially, the find suggests that an isolated, dwarf species of humans lived for eons at the same time normal-sized humans were dominating the rest of the world.
Falk’s paper, “The Brain of LB1, Homo Floresiensis,” detailed the findings of a team of specialists at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., who used a special 3-D, computer-modeling process to reproduce electronic and acrylic versions of the small hominid’s brain. The result showed a chimp-sized brain with numerous features that are found only in modern human brains and which are linked to higher thinking abilities.
For example, Falk—whose specialty is paleoneurology, or the study of prehistoric brains and nervous systems—was surprised at the location of a feature called a lunate sulcus. This is a distinctive fissure located near the back of modern brains but located more forward in those of apes. Another key clue that the skull once belonged to a human rather than an ape-like ancestor was the presence of an enlarged temporal lobe—the center of hearing, memory, image identification and emotion in modern brains.
“This is a unique creature,” Falk said. “We found amazing, specialized features across the surface from front to back.
”Last October, news of the discovery of Homo floresiensis, named for the island of Flores in equatorial Indonesia where the bones were found, made headlines around the world. Remains of up to eight individuals—dating to 95,000 years ago—were found, but only a single, fairly complete skeleton possessing a skull was recovered. Also found in the same vicinity as the bones were stone tools, suggesting that “Hobbit”—as the small hominid was quickly nicknamed—may have had the advanced brainpower required to make and use tools, just like the earliest modern humans did.
Before Falk’s study, some anthropologists had assumed that the Hobbit’s skull was either that of a pygmy or the result of a skull deformity known as microcephalism, a disease that produces abnormally small heads in people.
Falk said the new findings settle this argument. The scale of the Hobbit’s brain compared to its body is different than the ratio for pygmies, and the skull’s shape doesn’t fit that found in microcephaly.
“The discovery of this species has flummoxed anthropology,” Falk said. “It equals or surpasses the identification of other ancestors such as the Taung hominin in 1925, which marked the birth of modern palaeoanthropology and sparked an ongoing debate on human evolution.”
—For more on Falk’s research, see the upcoming Fall 2005 issue of Research in Review and visit www.anthro.fsu.edu/people/faculty/falk.html.
The Other Tax Bite
The Other Tax Bite
If Uncle Sam were to rake in a windfall of tens of billions of extra income tax dollars this year, there’s plenty he could do with it—chip away at the budget deficit, bankroll the war effort, or maybe fund health care programs for the nation’s 45 million uninsured.
But that money won’t make it into federal coffers, even though it belongs there. Instead, it will stay in the pockets of investors and entrepreneurs who either could not understand today’s complicated tax codes and failed to understand what taxes they owed, kept sloppy records or simply lied about their true income on their tax returns.
The case of the missing money—estimated at between $8 and $42 billion this year rightly owed the government by people and businesses—is an absorbing tale that begs for a close look, says Joseph Dodge of FSU’s College of Law.
A leading authority on tax issues and author of numerous books and articles on the topic, Dodge outlined the magnitude of this problem in the influential policy journal Tax Notes earlier this year. He co-authored the study with fellow law professor Jay Soled of Rutgers University.
When taxpayers fail to report a sale or overstate the price they originally paid for an asset they sold off, such as stock, an apartment building or piece of art, we all suffer the consequences, Dodge said. Under-reporting capital gains, over the next decade, will short-change the government hundreds of billions of dollars. Since such property transactions play an increasing role in the national economy, the problem will only worsen, Dodge predicts.
Making matters worse is the ease with which such fraud and errors occur. Much of the Internal Revenue Service’s small auditing budget targets low-income taxpayers. Even if Uncle Sam went after the wealthy, government accountants often lack the tools to pinpoint faulty filings. Though the IRS can easily verify your mortgage interest, income and child tax credits, information on how much you paid for your stocks, business or similar investments isn’t readily available.
And that can lead to negligence or greed.
“Suppose you didn’t have a W2 form, and you just declared your salary,” Dodge said. “It would be tempting to fudge, at least.
”Relatively simple changes could help immensely, he said. He and Soled suggest making taxpayers more accountable, requiring brokerages to record stock purchases, and toughening ethics rules for tax lawyers and accountants.
Brokers should have to report gains and losses to the IRS, and taxpayers should be required to track and report assets, a chore that could be made easier with an electronic filing system. After all, tax compliance increases dramatically when a third party verifies the numbers.
“If the IRS really tried to enforce this area,” Dodge said, “it could really smoke out more non-compliance.”
Research Return
No one has ever argued that doing research on a university campus—or anywhere for that matter—is an inexpensive enterprise. Investing in Florida beach property isn’t cheap either—but no one is quibbling about the return on investment in that box-office business.
In April, Florida’s lawmakers and business leaders got a fresh appreciation of the cost/benefit of keeping the state’s universities primed with research dollars. A study released by the Florida Board of Governors showed that for every dollar the state spends in supporting campus research, $11 in increased economic activity is generated for state and local economies. The study also found that the $150 million in Florida tax revenue spent on university research in the 2003-04 fiscal year leveraged an additional $1.2 billion in grants (mostly from federal sources), fees and private expenditures.
All this revenue adds up to a whopping economic development engine for Florida, the study concluded. Over the next 30 years, Florida’s current investment in university research will create more than 75,000 jobs throughout the state, said the economists—all based at Florida State—who did the study.
“We’ve been saying all along that what we do (in research) makes great economic sense for our local economies,” said Kirby Kemper, FSU’s vice president for research and former chair of the university’s department of physics. “When we create jobs that are paid for by research grants, that’s economic development—and universities often don’t get credit for that. This study is the best argument for that.”
The study, commissioned by the Board of Governors, was conducted by the Leadership Board for Applied Research and Public Service, an entity created by the 1998 Legislature to help set strategic direction and planning for research activities at Florida’s 11 public universities. The economic impact study also included five private schools in Florida—the University of Miami, Florida Institute of Technology, Nova Southeastern University, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Bethune-Cookman College. Economists Tim Lynch, Julie Harrington and Carter Doyle conducted the analysis.
—The complete study is available online at http://expertnet.org/subpages/2005-EconImpactReport.pdf. For just the highlights, visit http://expertnet.org/subpages/leadershipb-brochure-2005.pdf.
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