Vol. 5 Director's Corner

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There has been a phenomenal amount of activity in the past few months. Quiet summers with everyone away on vacation and the lack of undergraduates on campus has been a distant memory for some time. The summer of 2008 was particularly hectic and condensing this into a short article will be difficult, but I’ll try to give you a sense of some of the high visibility items.

Beginning with a trip to Kentucky to deliver a keynote speech to the KYSTE organization, I found that the collaboration with the Council on Postsecondary Education was in full force in the P-20 community. With the hard work of Dr. Susan Lancaster, MAGPI programs are finding their way into more and more schools as the infrastructure develops. We are thrilled to be working closely with Susan and excited about the original content being developed in that state.

On the research front, Peter Heverin has just completed lighting the fiber between MAGPI and two government labs located on the Princeton University Forrestal campus. The Energy Science Network under the DoE has a 10 Gbps active link between their Plasma Physics Lab and the ESNet node in McLean, VA. As an equal partner, NOAA is currently sharing the link, but intends to bring up their own 10 Gbps circuit in the next two months. Princeton University will be receiving data transmissions from the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva, Switzerland in the Spring of 2009 and additional Gigabit circuits will be built, affording all the participants major economies of scale combined with the performance of optical networks.

In southern Delaware there is a strong movement afoot within health care to use the network to connect hospitals with nursing schools. Continuing nursing education, telemedicine, and patient records are major topics for discussion right now and MAGPI is happy to provide grant language on the technology components that will be necessary for them to succeed.

We are always trying to peek over the horizon to see what new technologies have reached a sufficient level of maturity for us to introduce. Last year it was compressed HD video and this year we have found an affordable virtual reality kit that lends itself to a wide range of applications from virtual museum tours to K12 student projects, to laboratory and operating room education. Visit their website at http://www.wecantakeyouthere.com and then get back to any of us here at MAGPI to explore training and access to our loaner.

All the best,

Greg Palmer
Director, MAGPI

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