Category: Education

UMM students bringing in the big bucks!



Presenting trophy and check, originally uploaded by Nic’s events.

I never got around to posting this at the time, but back in October one of our teams (The Algonauts) from UMM took first in the annual Collegiate Computing Competition hosted by the fine folks at Digi-Key.

The students won tons of swag on the day (including $200 each for the winning team). Curt Huot from Digi-Key came down to UMM today to present the traveling trophy (which we get to have in our display case for the next year) and the check for $3K to the CSci discipline, all because the Algonauts took first!

Front, from L to R: Tyler Hutchison (holding the trophy), me (receiving the check), Curt (passing along the check). In back, L to R, Andy Korth, and Scott Lembcke. Daniel Selifonov (the fourth team member) was (and I’m not making this up!) too pumped about working on a homework assignment with his group to come down and be in the photo. These crazy students… I obviously didn’t take this shot – thanks to Michael Korth for sharing his photo.

I did take a ton of pictures on the day, a few of which I cleaned up and posted on Flickr (including the Victory celebration below). I also dumped a bunch of unedited shots on my events Flickr account.

Victory!!!

Again, big congrats to all the students!

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On the mighty value of the liberal arts


Monkey River Town fun fotos!
We always argue (hope?) that all this wonderful stuff we’re passing along at a liberal arts college will have some value down the road, often in strange and unexpected ways, but it’s awfully nice when concrete examples come our way, as two have done this week.

First, Kirsten Jaglo (UMM ’94) was back on campus earlier in the week as the Latterell Visiting Alumna. She’s gone through a PhD in biology and a post doc at the University of California at San Franciso to her current position in the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Global Change as a American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow.

Her responsibilities include developing, negotiating and implementing U.S. international climate change policy and providing scientific expertise for the United States Agency for International Development.

She became fluent in Danish through multiple study abroad experiences in high school and while at UMM, and apparently found this quite useful in helping get a belligerent Dane to sit down and play nice during a negotation. I can just imagine the look of surprise on his (and everyone else’s) face when she shifted into Danish…

Monkey River Town logo
And just yesterday Cory, one of the fine folks at Monkey River Town, pointed out that some of the computing esoterica he learned from me back in the day has proved useful in the careful crafting of their mighty Philos-O-tron. In a recent response to the truly deep question “r u real?” the Philos-O-tron incorporated ideas from the classic Turing Test, unequivocally demonstrating the value of this sort of broad based education in the creation of on-line oracles.

See, you never know when this stuff might prove useful – Liberal arts rules!

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