New device could help tame quakes

Recent devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Taiwan have lent special urgency to current structural engineering research in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Under study are structural controls in buildings that could reduce the impact of seismic events, thus saving lives and millions of dollars from building and infrastructure damage.

Shirley J. Dyke, Ph.D., assistant professor of civil engineering, has tested a new device on a model building set atop an earthquake-simulating "shake table" and has come up with results that are very encouraging for future safeguards.

Dyke is working with a magnetorheological (MR) damper on a 6-foot tall metal structure in the University's Structural Control and Earthquake Engineering Laboratory, which she directs. She used data from a standard 1940 El Centro, Calif., earthquake and applied the force parameters of the quake to reproduce the effects on the model, comparing the test results with and without the MR dampers.

Measuring responses on every floor of the building, Dyke found that the MR dampers reduce the peak acceleration by 50 percent.

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Mapping brain circuits

Researchers have developed a way to visualize nerve fiber bundles that transmit information between different areas of the living human brain. Their study provides new information on the orderly pattern of these fiber connections and could one day lead to improvements in brain surgery, diagnosis of brain ailments and understanding of neurological diseases.

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Wellness program expands, launches five new initiatives

The status of the fledgling Office of Health Promotion and Wellness is, appropriately, healthy and well.

Less than a year after the hiring of Mimi Weiss as director of the office and the enlistment of Betsy Foy, health educator at the Student Health and Counseling Service, the program is building muscle quickly.

"It feels like a program now," Weiss said with a smile. "Things are happening, and we're starting to have a real and positive impact on students' lives."

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New partnership

Perhaps it was the grill you bought last summer, or the bike with training wheels your child got for Christmas. Instructions were included -- but it didn't read like any English you'd ever seen. You tossed aside the manual and muttered that it would take a team of translators and a roomful of computers to make any sense of it.

You're still out of luck, for now anyway. But a whole lot of customers in Germany and Spain soon will be smiling, thanks to a collaborative pilot project between Washington University and Wave Technologies International Inc., which develops and markets technology training and instructional products.

The result of this new partnership: the Wave-sponsored Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) Lab in Arts & Sciences. Housed in Eads Hall, the CAT Lab will use cutting-edge computer technology to increase dramatically the efficiency and effectiveness of technical translations. Under the terms of the agreement, Wave will provide funding for the computers, software and technical resources; the University will provide foreign language expertise and translation.

The initial focus is narrow. One of Wave's sophisticated information technology training manuals -- for its A+PC Support Career Pack -- will be translated into German and Spanish.

But the eventual applications are virtually limitless, said Randolph D. Pope, Ph.D.,professor of romance languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences and program director for the new endeavor.

"We have new tools, and we have to learn how to use them to make language learning easier and faster and more effective," Pope said. "In the same way that it took some time to get used to things such as word processing and spell-check programs, it will take time for some to get used to the idea that computer-assisted translation is really useful.

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