Structural Engineers Quoted in LaFee Story

Last week, Scott LaFee wrote an interesting story in the San Diego Union Tribune that looked at some of the similarities between Chile and California, both in terms of earthquakes and building codes.

Frieder Seible, Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering and professor of structural engineering, provided insights, as did structural engineering professor Jose Restrepo.

The deeper, stronger temblors in Chile often last for up to two minutes, while California quakes typically persist for 10 to 15 seconds, said Frieder Seible, dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego and an international expert on bridge and highway seismic safety.

Still, researchers such as Seible said every strong quake is potentially devastating and that most offer new insights. Both the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta temblor in 1989, which killed 63 people and caused $6 billion in damage, and the 6.7 Northridge quake in 1994, which killed 72 people and caused $20 billion in damage, resulted in significant revisions to seismic standards and building codes.

Read the full story here.

Context in Computer Vision

MIT news quoted computer science professor Serge Belongie last week on a story about context within object identification / computer vision systems. Belongie and a variety of his students have been working on the context issue for a while now.

For related work from Belongie's UCSD Computer Vision Lab check out:

http://vision.ucsd.edu/project/shape-matching

and

http://vision.ucsd.edu/project/weakly-supervised-object-recognition-and-localization

Fuel Cell FYI

UC San Diego's fuel-cell project is mentioned in a fuel-cell overview piece in the San Diego Union Tribune by Onell R. Soto.

The city of San Diego and the University of California San Diego are cooperating on a fuel-cell project. They plan to trap methane that is now being burned off at the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant and clean it up.

It looks like part of the reason the fuel-cell story ran in Sunday's paper is that there are a couple of fuel-cell workshops today.

Fuel-cell workshops
When: Monday March 8, 1 p.m. for businesses and institutions; 6 p.m. for homeowners.

Where: California Center for Sustainable Energy, 8690 Balboa Ave., San Diego.
Information: energycenter.org