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Rutgers Journalism department may reinstate TV production course Gabriela Amaral staff writer
Three Rutgers alumni collaborated to create Sponte, which helps users organize casual meetups with their friends. It was officially launched in the Apple store earlier this month. JEFFREY GOMEZ / PHOTO EDITOR
3 alumni engineer app for planning meet-ups Max Marcus contributing writer
Three Rutgers alumni have recently released a new app called Sponte, which allows users to informally plan events and coordinate with friends. Josh Block and Isaac Benjamin graduated in 2013 and Josh Yammer graduated in 2014. Yammer said that he had had the idea for the app when he was in college, but did not think about how to implement it until after he had graduated. Sponte went into development about a year ago and was released on the Apple app store about two weeks ago. The team is now working on a version for Android. “In college, I always wished I had this,” Yammer said. “Especially being in a fraternity, tr ying to coordinate with a bunch of guys in a house. It’s such a big University but there’s literally no way to know what’s going on around you,
and I feel like there was always so much going on that I just didn’t know about.” In Sponte, users create events and make them available to their Facebook friends, friends of friends or the public. Users can browse events based on parameters like location, time of day and type of activity. Block said that what makes Sponte different from currently available platforms like Facebook and Meetup is that it is so informal and fast-paced. “It could be, ‘We’re going to (Olde) Queens Bar, I’ll be there at 11 at the door, who’s coming tonight?’” Block said. “You know you’re going anyways. You don’t want to spend an hour talking to your friends about if they’re gonna come or not. You just let them know you’re gonna be there. Then you can invite them through the See APP on Page 4
The Department of Journalism and Media Studies has historically produced graduates who have met success in careers with major broadcasting networks like CNN, Fox News and ESPN. But currently, the University does not offer a course where students can practice television reporting in an actual studio. Notable Rutgers Journalism and Media Studies graduates who have gone on to work in television studios include Natalie Morales, who works as an anchor for the “Today Show” and appears on “Dateline NBC” and “NBC Nightly News.” Also included on this list are Lauren Sisler, who was a three-time Alabama Sportscaster of the Year award winner, and Julia Palazzo, who graduated last May and immediately got a job at the ABC-affiliate in South Bend, Indiana. The school used to have a television production course — first in
the School of Communication and Information building and then on Livingston campus located in the Office of Television and Radio, said Steve Miller, director of Undergraduate Studies in Journalism and Media Studies. In addition to the television production class, there was an advanced class where students were able to work in a professional studio at Rutgers — which produced an Emmy Award-winning show, “Rutgers Forum,” he said. The courses eventually came to a halt when production equipment broke down after being struck during a thunderstorm, Miller said. He said at that point, the School of Communication and Information decided to change the television production course to television reporting, which would not require the purchase of expensive recording equipment. Since then, students have worked for RU-tv independently, Miller said. Students’ experience
with television production has been a result of their own initiative and has resulted in wide-ranging employment opportunities after graduation. “One of the great things that has happened since the 2000s is RU-tv,” he said. “The combination of RU-tv and our courses and in recent years, the addition of R-Vision and the Big Ten Network for the people who do sports has enabled our students to become amazingly successful immediately after they graduate from college.” Even with RU-tv, the School of Communication and Information recognizes the need for a formal TV production course for journalism students, Miller said. Dean Jonathan Potter — who came to the School of Communication and Information three years ago — has been discussing the necessar y steps to implementing such a course. See production on Page 5
While the Department of Journalism and Media Studies has managed to produce a number of successful alumni in the field of television reporting, the program no longer has an official course or studio outside of RU-tv that is dedicated to giving students hands-on experience. Ana Couto
U. discovery could revolutionize computer chip cooling Nikhilesh De correspondent
Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit — what most people refer to as computer chips — will double every year. As the number of transistors on a chip increase so does the amount of heat generated by the computer chip. Removing excessive heat is an ongoing problem, but a recent discovery by a team based partly at Rutgers has found a new solution to this issue. Using graphene — a single molecular layer of carbon — on a substrate of hexagonal boron nitride has prov-
en to be extremely efficient at removing heat from computer chips, said Eva Andrei, an author of a paper published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “One of the main issues in computers (central processing units) is the transistors generate heat, and when the device heats up, it no longer operates properly,” said the professor of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. How are computers normally cooled? Desktop computers and laptops use fans or water-cooling systems
to remove excess heat from their CPUs, Andrei said. This type of solution, while adequate for personal computers, is not that efficient, so her team looked at removing heat directly from the chips that go inside the CPU. “These solutions are kind of marginal at this point so people got more and more interested in going to on-chip solutions where you have refrigeration right on the chip, so you have the ability to carry away the heat,” she said. “That’s where thermoelectrics come in.” Existing methods for cooling computers include diffusion cooling,
convective cooling and thermoelectric cooling, she said. Diffusion cooling uses a material like copper to carry heat away. Convective cooling uses fans or liquids to remove heat. Neither of these methods is particularly efficient, she said, and convective cooling relies on mechanical parts which are prone to breaking. “In thermoelectric cooling, you use electrical current to carry away the hot electrons from the heat source and replace with cold electrons,” she said. “You cool with current, and that is what we did on the chip.”
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What is boron nitride? Andrei said her team’s counterparts in Japan initially discovered that using a material called boron nitride would help graphene transfer heat at a much more efficient rate than existing materials. “It’s a ver y good insulator … it does not interfere with the electronic properties of graphene as most other substrates would,” she said. “So we could carr y the heat away in a much more efficient manner than having to scatter off the substrate.” See computer on Page 4