It takes a lot of computer power to predict where an ocean storm will hit, how high the storm surge will be, and the damage that will ensue. The process starts when meteorologists collect thousands of data points from buoys, satellites, ships, and other sources. The data describe surface water temperature, winds, relative humidity, […]

Um… “Graphic Novel,” sorry.  Poet Deborah Grison responded to the crisis in New Orleans by writing “No Ark,” the story of a man who decided to ride out the storm and ended up trapped on his roof for days, nearing death.  She brought the poem to artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings, who added pictures […]

“You can’t conceive of how big it is until you see it,” said Daryl Williams, director of the Minority Entrepreneurshp Program at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. “As bad as New Orleans was, Mississippi was worse. I drove 75 miles and everything was literally flattened. When I got back to the office, I […]

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is clean and new, well designed and well funded. It sits at the edge of the University of Illinois’s main campus (UIUC), on the border of Champaign and Urbana. Its first floor auditorium is as wired as wired can be. I am sitting with about 40 […]

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A year after hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the Louisiana and Mississippi gulf coasts, rebuilding efforts are finally moving forward. But it’s the remaining, deeper tears in the region’s social fabric that will be the main focus of a unique series of dialogues and events at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign designed […]

A “webinar” is a web seminar — it is what happens when a group participates in a conference call while they interact on a web site. Web conferencing has become a popular way for business people to attend meetings if they do not have the time or money to travel. They are also proving a […]

Brad Edmondson is a journalist who has been writing about NSDL for three years. He is the former Editor-In-Chief of American Demographics magazine and co-founder of ePodunk.com, which provides free and comprehensive profiles of places in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom.