The Statesman informing stony brook university for more than 50 years
Volume LVI, Issue 28
Monday, May 6, 2013
sbstatesman.com
Brookhaven laboratories up for grabs in management contract By Will Welch Staff Writer
EFAL SAYED / THE STATESMAN
Members of the women's lacrosse team dump their water cooler over coach Joe Spallina's head. The Seawolves beat the Albany Great Danes 14-3 on Sunday, May 5 to become the America East Conference Champions. The team is also the America East regular season champion with an undeated season.
Campus construction: University home to improvements slow and steady giant Reality Deck By Kristin Behr Staff Writer
Stony Brook is in the middle of undergoing a major facelift. There are a number of projects and infrastructure improvements happening on campus. Some setbacks have delayed the completion of certain construction projects on campus, such as Kelly Dining, which between its delayed opening and a major leak in the roof, seems to be a point of contention among students. Kelly Dining was forced to shut down while a temporary membrane was installed after winter storm Nemo dumped
FRANCES YU / THE STATESMAN
The new building next to the library will be named Frey Hall and will open for classes in the fall.
more than 30 inches of snow on Stony Brook, causing “extensive ceiling leaks in customer areas.” Kelly Dining reopened on March 11 and took three weeks to repair. Media Relations Manager James Montalto offered an explanation for the delays. “West Side Dining, formerly Kelly Dining, is scheduled to open for the upcoming fall semester,” said Montalto. “At the time the construction contract was awarded, the contractor provided an ambitious timeline that was not fulfilled.” “It’s definitely an inconvenience,” said junior Kacy Schounott, a math major at Stony Brook University. “They’ve been working on it for a while now and shouldn’t keep pushing it back.” According to the FSA website, the new West Side facilities will offer an “eclectic coffee house in the center of residential activity” that also boasts Wi-Fi service and a barbeque station, named “Bob’s BBQ” in honor of retired Chemistry Professor Bob Kerber’s advocacy in advancing FSA facilities, services and programs including the renovation of the building. There will also be stations offering rotisserie chicken and
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By Frank Posillico Editor-in-Chief
Stony Brook is home to a new reality: the Reality Deck, a room about half the size of a basketball court whose walls are plastered with 416 Samsung LCD monitors. When they're all turned on and showing one image, the monitors surround the viewer in a near realistic experience. Charilaos Papadopoulos is a PhD candidate who works with the Reality Deck and was one of the few who helped build it. Papadopoulos, along with Kal Petkov, is one of only two graduate students who work with Arie Kaufman, the head of the project and chair of the computer science department. “The fact that this is an immersive
display is something that doesn't exist in the word at this resolution,” Papadopoulos said. This reality deck is the only one of its kind—at least for the next few years. The room, which measures 33-by-19-by-10 feet, holds a 1.5 billion-pixel display that matches the resolution of the human eye. The 416 screens each measure 27 inches with a resolution of 2560 by 1440, a resolution better than that of a home theater display. Each screen is customized and connected to a computer in the back room. The 24 displays—more than other facilities of the same purpose have—are connected to a single Continued on page 5
FRANK POSILLICO / THE STATESMAN
Reality Deck is about half the size of a basketball court.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced on April 18 that it would begin accepting bids for the management contract for the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), currently co-operated by the Research Foundation for The State University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University. Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA), a limited liability corporation formed to operate the lab as a 50-50 partnership between the Research Foundation for SUNY and the non-profit research foundation Battelle Memorial Institute, has held the contract since 1998. “Brookhaven Science Associates will enthusiastically and aggressively compete for the Brookhaven Lab contract,” Ronald D. Townsend, chair of the BSA board, said in a press release following the announcement. BSA’s current contract will expire on Jan. 4, 2015. It is not clear if any other organizations will bid on the new contract. Stony Brook is the largest academic user of BNL, with more than 600 faculty and students carrying out research there. The university runs a shuttle service to the lab, and Brookhaven, in addition to providing critical research facilities to the university, offers almost $50,000 in scholarships to Stony Brook students. Before Brookhaven Science Associates, the lab was operated by Associated Universities Incorporated, sponsored by nine northeastern universities including MIT, Harvard and Yale. It lost the contract in 1998, however, after a tritium leak that contaminated groundwater. In a press release, the Department of Energy said, “Competition allows DOE to elicit new and innovative approaches for planning BNL's future.” BNL is one of 10 laboratories funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science. It employs more than 3,000 and has an annual budget of more than $700 million.