Portland State Magazine Spring 2014

SPRING 2014 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 5 Computing the cosmos HOW ARE GREENHOUSE GASES from homes, farms, motor vehicles, manufacturing plants and even forest fires affecting our air quality and ultimately our climate? Scientists at Portland State have a new tool to help find the answers: a supercomputer 10 times more powerful than all other computing on campus. Located in the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, the new computer was named Gaia after the Greek earth goddess. With 20 teraflops of computational power, Gaia will enable advanced modeling of the factors behind air pollution and climate change. Gaia was funded by a $350,000 grant from the Murdock Charitable Trust. Photo from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce. When newspapers die THE VALUE of newspapers to their communities may become most apparent after their demise, says communication professor Lee Shaker. Using data collected by the U.S. census, Shaker discovered that civic engagement in Denver and Seattle dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009 compared to other large cities. He argues that the decline could be explained by the demise in 2009 of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News and the transition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to an online-only format. Shaker concludes that metropolitan newspapers provide communities a unique sense of identification with their cities, “and as dead newspapers are replaced over time by new media, it is possible that citizens’ relationships with each other and their society will fundamentally change as well.” PA R K B L O C K S