By: Indi Samarajiva

After Colorado and Washington passed referendums in the recent election for the legalization of marijuana, many are asking what exactly that will mean for those states.

Don’t worry—the Seattle Police Department is already on it.

In a blog post titled “Marijwhatnow? A Guide to Legal Marijuana Use in Seattle,” the department tackles the issue Q&A-style. There’s even a “tl;dr” section for those residents who… well, may be too preoccupied to finish the whole thing.

The light-hearted guide, which was written by former journalist Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, includes 13 of the most pressing questions one could possibly have about weed. For example:

“What happens if I get pulled over and I’m sober, but an officer or his K9 buddy smells the ounce of Super Skunk I’ve got in my trunk?”

The post also features a clip from “Lord of the Rings” where Gandalf and Bilbo are smoking “the finest weed” in the land.  Sgt. Sean Whitcomb, a police spokesman, has since taken credit for including the video and believes that blog has been successful in “hitting the appropriate tone” for Seattle residents.

What do you think of the police’s take on this issue? Which state will be next?

By: allisonmseward12

Next to water, tea is regarded as the most widely consumed beverage in the world.

But America is addicted to coffee. What if a good cup of tea is your hot drink of choice?

Now there is hope.

On Wednesday Starbucks announced that it will pay $620 million to buy Teavana, a store chain specializing in premium loose leaf teas. The deal is one of many Starbucks has made to expand beyond mochas and lattes—the Huffington Post reports that last year the Seattle-based coffeehouse purchased La Boulange bakery for $100 million and fruit juice maker Evolution for $30 million.

While it is still unclear how Starbucks will incorporate Teavana’s products into their existing coffee shops, the company has said they plan to add tea bars to Teavana stores and develop packaged versions of the teas to be sold in retail locations.

Howard Schultz, chairman and CEO of Starbucks, says that his company will be able to add something new to the growing tea market:

“We can create very unique brewed teas—customized hot and cold beverages analogous to the espresso bars we introduced in the mid-’80s—and do for tea what we did for coffee.”

Schultz has recognized, though, that coffee and tea have very different audiences and cultures. He insists that Teavana stores will still give people the feeling that they’ve “stepped into a shrine of tea.”

Is Teavana a smart venture for Starbucks? Let us know in the comments below.

UPDATE: 2013 applications are now available!
Priority application deadline: Dec. 17th, 2012 
Final application deadline: Dec. 31st, 2012

The Minority Health and Health Disparities International Research Training (MHIRT) program at CBU provides international research training opportunities to qualified undergraduate, graduate, and medical students from socially or economically disadvantaged groups who have been historically underrepresented in biomedical and behavioral research careers.

• This program offers research sites in Brazil and Uganda. Students spend 10 weeks during the summer at their designated international research site. CBU has partnered with leading scientists and universities in these countries who serve as research mentors for MHIRT students.
• MHIRT students engage in research related to: biomedical science, behavioral science, environmental science, carnivore conservation, and/or public health.
• MHIRT is a paid internship. All expenses relative to travel, room and board, preparation, and workshops are paid.  In addition, students receive a monthly stipend.
• This program has been continuously funded since 2000 by the Fogarty International Center and the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health.
• The Mid-South Coalition For Minority International Research consists of the lead institution, Christian Brothers University, and the following participating universities: LeMoyne Owen College, Rhodes College, Tennessee State University, and  University of Memphis.
• Preference is given to students from participating schools within the Coalition and from the Mid-South Region; however, any US citizen or permanent resident may apply.

All applications materials must be e-mailed to Julia Hanebrink (jhanebri@cbu.edu).

Ph.D. Thesis Defense Announcement

Data Intensive Scientific Compute Model for Multicore Clusters

Phuong Nguyen

10:00am 21 November 2012, ITE 325B

Data intensive computing holds the promise of major scientific breakthroughs and discoveries from the exploration and mining of the massive data sets becoming available to the science community. This expectation has led to tremendous increases in data intensive scientific applications. However, data intensive scientific applications still face severe challenges in accessing, managing and analyzing petabytes of data. In particular, workflow systems to support such scientific applications are not as efficient when dealing with thousands and even more of complex tasks within jobs that operate across high performance large multicore clusters with very large amounts of streaming data. Scheduling, it turns out, is an integral workflow component in the execution often of thousands or more tasks within a data intensive scientific application as well as in managing  the access and flow of many jobs to the available resource environment. Recently, MapReduce systems such as Hadoop, have proven successful for many business data intensive problems. However, there are still many limitations in the use of MapReduce systems for data-intensive scientific problems mainly because they do not support the characteristics of science such as data formats, specialized data analytic tools (e.g. math libraries), accuracies, and interfaces with non MapReduce components.

This thesis addresses some of these limitations by proposing a MapReduce workflow model and its runtime system using Hadoop for orchestrating MapReduce jobs for data intensive scientific workflows. Novel heuristic based scheduling algorithm is proposed in the workflow system to manage the parallel execution of data intensive scientific applications. This thesis has developed a hybrid MapReduce scheduling algorithm based on dynamic priorities, proportional resource sharing techniques that reduce delays for variable length concurrent tasks, and takes advantage of data locality. As a result, a new scheduling policy, Balanced Closer to Finish First (BCFF), is proposed as solutions for some problems of scheduling in MapReduce environment. The scheduling algorithm is implemented in Hadoop 1.0.1 framework and is available as a new Hadoop plug-in Scheduler. The evaluations of the workflow system on the climate data processing and analysis application (several TB dataset) show that it is feasible and significantly improved compared to traditional parallel processing method. The scientific results of the application provide new source of monitoring global climate changes for the near decade 2002-2011.

Thesis Committee:

• Prof. Milton Halem (Chair)
• Prof. Yelena Yesha (Co-Chair)
• Prof. Tim Finin
• Prof. Yaacov Yesha
• Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi at George Washington University