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Tag: Purdue

  • Purdue University T.A. Shot, Suspect Jailed

    Purdue University T.A. Shot, Suspect Jailed

    Purdue University students were shocked when a seemingly normal Tuesday was interrupted by an eruption of violence on campus. A 21 year old senior from West Bend, Wisconsin was shot and killed in the basement of the Electrical Engineering building around noon today. The victim was identified as Andrew Boldt, a teaching assistant for the university.

    According to Campus Police Chief John Cox, the suspect in custody, Cody Cousins, was also a teaching assistant for the university. Both Cousins and Boldt worked within the Electrical Engineering program. Campus and West Lafayette police forces are working together to process the crime scene and investigate a motive for the shooting.

    Although the incident seems to have been specifically targeted to Andrew Boldt, Purdue students were sent a text message warning to seek shelter in the moments following the shooting. Classes were cancelled for the remainder of the day, and will remain cancelled on Wednesday as well.

    Following the trauma of a fatal shooting on campus, counselors are being made available for students, faculty, and staff to consult. Purdue Provost Tim Sands stated,“We’ll provide whatever services we can to assist our students, our faculty and our staff in coming back to a sense of normality.” Purdue has been utilizing social media outlets such as Twitter to keep their student body up to date on the situation.

    In addition, the school hosted a candlelight vigil this evening at 8pm.

    According to jail records discovered by The Chicago Tribune, Cousins will appear in a hearing on Wednesday at 2:30 pm.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Purdue, Maker of OxyContin, Keeps a List of Bad Docs

    Purdue, Maker of OxyContin, Keeps a List of Bad Docs

    Earlier this year, the FDA made headlines when it prevented pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma from continuing to produce generic and crushable versions of the popular opioid OxyContin. The New York Times took note that the company had chosen the opportune moment to release its new tamper-resistant formula: right before the patent on the old formula expired.

    On Sunday, Purdue Pharma, and their headline product, were featured in the news again. Apparently, Purdue has been compiling a company database containing information about the reckless prescription habits of doctors. Although it does not share this list with authorities, Purdue acknowledged the role that physicians play in the abuse of OxyContin.

    Twitter has reacted to the story:

    The list has over 1800 doctor’s names, and Purdue said that it began collecting the information in 2002. Purdue attorney Robin Abrams was interviewed by the L.A. Times, and said that the company had called the cops on about 8 percent of the doctors, but also commented that “we don’t have the ability to take the prescription pad out of their hand.”

    The director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, Mitchell Katz, believes that Purdue maintains “an ethical obligation… any drug company that has information about physicians potentially engaged in illegal prescribing or prescribing that is endangering people’s lives has a responsibility to report it.”

    Abrams counters with the suggestion that several doctors in the database may have stopped prescribing, but declined to provide the Times with a realistic number.

    Prescription drug abuse is rapidly surpassing alcohol abuse and illicit drug abuse as extremely dangerous for anyone involved; an L.A. Times profile from last year found that over half the overdoses in southern California involved doctor-prescribed pills. The danger is especially real for baby-boomers, who are now suffering more hospital visits and drug overdoses than previously recorded.

  • Purdue University Professor Fixes Major Flaw In 3D Printing

    3D printing has come a long way since its humble roots over 20 years ago. The technology has become affordable and people are starting to make some really awesome objects with the technology. Unfortunately, it’s still hampered by a few setbacks. A major flaw is that some objects just don’t have the strength to stay together.

    Purdue University professor Bedrich Benes knows how fragile some 3D printed objects can be. He claims to have a “zoo” of broken 3D printed objects strewn about his office. His newest project aims to create new 3D printing software that can find points of stress in an object before it heads to the 3D printer. The software is being co-developed by Benes and Adobe’s Advanced Technology Labs.

    The new software isn’t only about making 3D printed structures stronger. Benes says that his software can cut down on weight and cost by 80 percent. It does, however, have one caveat – precision. The software’s main focus is structural stability. Benes says that 3D printing can sacrifice precision in the name of stability. Your 3D printed object can have a precise shape, but it’s still worthless if it falls apart.

    For now, the software can only detect grip points on an object and strengthen those parts. I can see this software evolving in the future alongside other 3D printing projects, like housing. It could detect stress points on a house and fix them in the planning stages before the construction begins.

    3D printing is becoming more prominent in all of our lives. We need to have software like this to make sure things don’t break where we need them most. A small plastic figurine is fine if it breaks, but it would be a problem if a 3D printed satellite were to break.

  • World’s Largest Rube Goldberg Machine Pops Balloon In Just 300 Steps

    I’m a big fan of Rube Goldberg machines. There’s just a level of excitement and conversely calm and comfort that comes over me when I watch one function successfully. I guess since so much of my life is punctuated by actions that boil complex tasks down to a simple mechanic – the click of a button, the turn of a car key, etc – it’s oddly refreshing to see the opposite in action. Making something so simple into an incredibly complex series of mechanical happenings just gets me all giddy.

    And this latest attempt by The Purdue Society of Professional Engineers doesn’t disappoint.

    According to the World Records Academy, what you’re about to see is the new official world record holder for largest Rube Goldberg machine – in terms of number of steps. Below, 300 steps are required to achieve the goal, which just happens to be the inflation and popping of a balloon.

    In order to get so many steps into the relatively small space of the machine, they came up with that impressive spinning wheel of stages.

    The team spent more than 5,000 hours constructing the machine that accomplished every task ever assigned in the competition’s 25-year history, including peeling an apple, juicing an orange, toasting bread, making a hamburger, changing a light bulb, loading a CD and sharpening a pencil.

    Packing so many steps into one machine required inventing a novel platform that consisted of two rotating paddlewheels that revealed new sets of modules to chronologically accomplish a quarter century worth of tasks.

    Check it out below:

    This machine broke the old world record, held by – The Purdue Society of Professional Engineers. Last year, they jumped into the record books with a Rube Goldberg device with 244 steps. This year’s device blows that one out of the water.

    [h/t Gizmodo]