Three students at the Rochester Institute of Technology took the top software prize this week in a college technology competition sponsored by Microsoft, called Imagine Cup. The students developed a network of sensors that allow people to monitor how much energy their homes or communities consume. The sensors capture readings about temperature, humidity, lights, sound, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and motion — all of which can alert people to appliances and lights they may have left on inadvertently or that don’t work efficiently.
The students who were part of the project are, from left to right: Joe Zhou, a junior, Adam Risi, a sophomore, and Zachery Shivers, a sophomore. The students won a total of $12,000 for their creation and will travel to Paris in July to compete for the Imagine Cup international prize.
The theme for this year’s Imagine Cup was using technology for environmental sustainability. About 16,000 students from more than 125 colleges competed in the event. The finals were held in Los Angeles this week and the winners — a full list of whom is available here — were announced on Tuesday, Earth Day.—Andrea L. Foster
34 Responses to Rochester Institute Students Capture Award for ‘Green’ Software
lizgibbons - May 22, 2012 at 7:36 am
NP–Britain and Canada (and others) have long referred to “going to university”. Think how odd the article’s last sentence in the second-to-last paragraph would sound as, “….preparing for the prom and for the graduation.”
igsdoffice - May 22, 2012 at 7:48 am
Similarly, speakers of British English go to hospital, to market, etc.
tomadams - May 22, 2012 at 8:50 am
To Ukraine, Sudan, Congo can be added Lebanon and Gambia. The shedding of the definite article corresponded roughly to a change in status from geographical areas to nations.
The presence or absence of the article can be a sensitive issue to Ukrainians, for example, who have been known to bristle when the article is restored.
jorieallen - May 22, 2012 at 8:50 am
I have always been curious why some people go out for “a” coffee, when I just go for coffee!
marcleavitt - May 22, 2012 at 8:53 am
When I went to prep school(AmE and BrE), I attended the prom, and luckily, I was never in hospital(BrE), but I planned to go to college(AmE), not university(BrE).
11182967 - May 22, 2012 at 9:05 am
Yagoda: Do you have a hypothesis more explanatory than “usually denoting a degree of familiarity”? I’m wondering if the dropping of the article is a step toward turning the noun into a verb: we’re prom(m?)ing Saturday. Or, perhaps–especially in the case or “prom”–is this a side effect of the abbreviating common in texting? We depend on you for explanation as well as observation.
There’s a town near Athens, OH, by the way, called The Plains. One lives on The Plains rather than in The Plains. Is that an anomaly?
JD Eveland - May 22, 2012 at 9:21 am
It is a well-known idiosyncracy unique to the Los Angeles basin and the Valley that the local freeways all take the definite article, as “the 10″, “the 605, and “the 101″. Few except tourists ever refer to the freeways by their official names. Interestingly, this behavior does not extend south of Orange County or north of the Tehachipis. It’s something that newcomers pick up usually without noticing it. I used to have fun pointing this out to my first-year students at the start of second semester, when they had just come back to LA from elsewhere; many of them hadn’t in fact realized that they had picked up this local quirk until they were back home and not using it. It’s described in Wikipedia in their very interesting article on “California dialect”. Note that this is not to be confused with “Val-speak”, which is another dialect entirely. There will thus always be a home for the definite article here in LA, as long as the roads roll…
Larry_Darrell - May 22, 2012 at 9:48 am
Do you drink more than one? :-)
jffoster - May 22, 2012 at 10:23 am
And that’s absurd because Ukranian doesn’t have a definite article. So the height of prescriptivist political correctness is a people whose language hasn’t got a definite article telling a people whose language does have one how they should use it.
I will not. The country to me is the Ukraine or Ukrania. We are not obligated to placate everybody who wants to be placated.
karenrlow - May 22, 2012 at 10:36 am
I’ve noticed that speakers from Missouri and points south and east will use the definite article AND “pluralize” a noun, as in “going to the Walmarts,” or “ate at the Hardees.”
theart - May 22, 2012 at 10:41 am
The definite article for freeway numbers is also “unique” to Western New York.
theart - May 22, 2012 at 10:48 am
That depends on how you define a discrete quantum of coffee…
jamesebryan - May 22, 2012 at 11:13 am
I wonder if this is regional as well as generational? When I was growing up in the South it was always “the prom,” and it wasn’t until I moved to the Midwest that I heard simply “prom.” Has anyone looked into where the article is still being used, if it is? At any rate, it strikes me that either is grammatical, as “prom” is an abbreviation of “promenade,” which can either be a noun, calling for an article, or a verb, which doesn’t call for one. And as long as we’re discussing British usage of the English language, in London the Proms are a series of concerts given in the summer, and I believe one has a poetry recital connected to it – hardly the same thing as our prom.
The explanation I used to hear regarding dropping the article for the Ukraine was that the Ukrainians regarded the “the” as a holdover from Soviet nomenclature and wished to rid themselves of an offensive Russian imposition. This always struck me as absurd, given that English language usage certainly wasn’t dictated from the Kremlin, and I would bet (although I haven’t done any research) this particular usage predates the Russian Revolution. However, my philosophy is that when people are emotionally invested in something that really is a matter of practical indifference, the most civilized approach is to placate their irrational expectations. I’m pretty sure I have plenty that I would appreciate their honoring.
One more national abandoned article – what is now Argentina used to be “the Argentine.”
jffoster - May 22, 2012 at 11:36 am
Note that neither Russian nor Ukranian have a definite article.
cvangild - May 22, 2012 at 11:49 am
I grew up in NJ and we always said “the prom,” and according to my informal poll, most people in that region still do. I was familiar with the use of the word prom without the article though from movies and tv – isn’t that what they say in “Pretty in Pink”? It sounded weird to me, but that was Hollywood! Then I came to California to go to graduate school, stayed and raised children who talk about “prom” and “the 101.” It still sounds weird to me, as I will buy them dresses for the prom and drive them to the mall that is off route 101. On the other hand, they think it is hilarious that I refer to going to the beach as “down the shore,” jersey-style.
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jimislew - May 22, 2012 at 11:56 am
Do you also favor going back to Peking and Nanking? Constantinople?
Placate, no, but we should try to be correct when we can. Most stateside Ukrainians I’ve talked to have favored dropping “the’ because they are no longer The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, nor do they want to be seen as a region. Some want to drop the traditional preposition of “HA” in front of Ukraine (meaning In Ukraine) and replace it with “B”, the more standard preposition for “in” because the former is used more for meaning “on” something, such as a region, rather than “in” it.
jranelli - May 22, 2012 at 12:25 pm
william saroyan famously said to type “the” as soon as one sits for the day’s writing and if, at the end of the day, nothing’s happened that makes sense, add “…hell with it.”
pianiste - May 22, 2012 at 12:38 pm
The Brits say, “She’s going to university.” We say, “She’s going to the university.” We say, “He’s in the hospital.” The Brits say, “He’s in hospital.” But we say, “She’s going to college.” So what’s wrong with, “She’s going to prom”? Should we put people who omit the “the” in the Coventry?
dank48 - May 22, 2012 at 1:25 pm
And, indefinite though it is, there’s “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
jffoster - May 22, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Yes, I say “Peking”, and “Nanking”. I say “İstanbul” (note the dotted capital ’ İ ’, but when referring to the Ecumenical Patriarch, I say the Patriarch of Constantinople. And I say, “Rome”, not “Roma” (bet you do too) and I pronounce the capital of the French Republic [peris], not [pari ], and I bet you do too. And I say “Moscow” except when speaking Russian (which I do) when it’s Moskva. And Athens is the capital of Greece, not, in Englsih, Hellas. And so on, …..
jffoster - May 22, 2012 at 1:50 pm
Actually, the presence of the definite article here, as I suspect Herr Dank48 that you know might, meant that John F Kennedy was saying “I am a doughnut.” To say that one is a citizen or inhabitant of Berlin is
“Ich bin Berliner.”
Article usage varies rather widely from language to language even among languages that have them. Our neighbors to the North say le Canada when they speak French but just Canada when English. And as has been noted by several commenters above, even English dialects vary in how and whether which article used is.
11182967 - May 22, 2012 at 2:32 pm
Yagoda: Based on the variety of responses you’ve definitely written an indefinite article. I wish thee well.
grendel - May 22, 2012 at 2:55 pm
Or perhaps students are aware that prom, which is short for promenade, can function as both a noun and a verb. Thus, “Do you want to go to prom?” I’m mostly kidding, but it reminds me of another current linguistic trend of using former nouns as verbs (e.g. “People need to parent their children.”) I actually like seeing the way that language evolves. Perhaps students talking about “promming” is just around the corner.
Ponce_de_Leon - May 22, 2012 at 3:55 pm
In British English we can use articles or not, depending on the context. Going to university, going to a university, going to the university would all be acceptable, depending.
She’s going to university in September = she will start a course at university. No article.
She’s going to the university = she will be visiting the university premises. Article necessary.
With the hospital example there are similar nuances. A patient will stay in hospital (no article) but a doctor works at a (or the) hospital. A paramedic will leave the hospital (with an article) at the start of his shift but when he returns later he takes the patient to hospital (no article).
pianiste - May 22, 2012 at 4:30 pm
But the rules for the definite article in Esperanto are perfectly clear. Whew!
jffoster - May 22, 2012 at 5:30 pm
Hello Pianiste,
Actually, I’m not so sure that they are. Esperanto grammar has never been altogether explicitly specified, not even when Dr. Zammenhof was writing about.it. His initial 16 rules, for instance, say nothing about word order in complex sentences, although in use among Esperantists over the decades it has become pretty clearly S[ubmect] V[erb] O[bject] in all clauses, with simple modifiers largely preceeding their nouns and complex ones following, as in English, German, and Russian. But the grammar books (and it’s been a while since I looked at one so this might have changed) generally say things to the effect that the definite article la is used in “ways similar to its use in Western European languages”. This of course doesn’t tell us much, particularly along the lines under discussion in this post and thread.
Here’s a reference you might want to look at if you’re interested in Esperanto.
Comrie, Bernard
1996 Natural and artificial international languages: A typo[l]ogist’s assessment. Journal rnal of Universal Language 3: 35–55.
pianiste - May 22, 2012 at 6:02 pm
Alas, my personal gyrocopter is in the repair shop, so I can’t get to the library.
jffoster - May 22, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Familiar with this from farther South in the Arkansas and in Louisiana I am. There the /-s/ is not plural but genitive / possessive. I wonder if it might be in Missouri too. BTW, when I was young back in the Good Old Days — known to Anthropologists as the Paleoterrific, old folks in the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains said the Arkansas. There’s even a song called Down in the Arkansas.
jffoster - May 22, 2012 at 8:33 pm
Too bad. And of course the mountain won’t come to Muhammed either.
jpminnc - May 23, 2012 at 5:47 am
To market? That raises an interesting possibility. My New England native-speaker intuition says that “[I] went to the market” has a different meaning from “[the pig] went to market.” The expression “going to market” (i.e., to be sold) sounds like something my grandmother (born in Pennsylvania in the 1890s) would have said. Does anyone else get this distinction? Or is it just the New England?
jamesebryan - May 25, 2012 at 12:38 pm
I’m not sure I follow your second and third sentences. The second restates what I pointed out in my last one – the name for Argentina has changed. As to the third, English is known for its numerous irregularities, and I think everyone who used “the Ukraine” would have considered that form as just another inexplicable peculiarity of the language.
jamesebryan - May 25, 2012 at 12:43 pm
Well, if we’re ever stranded on Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld I guess that will be good to know ;)
jffoster - May 25, 2012 at 11:14 pm
I’ll try again: You’re not reporting yourself accurately. I didn’t say simply that the “name for Argentina has changed” and you didn’t either. You said how it had changed but the way you said it –”One more national abandoned article – implies there was only the change of the dropped article when in fact as you actually reporteded, there were two changes. More than just the loss of the definite article was invloved. .
Old way: the Argentine.
New way: ____ Argentina
“The Argentine”, “the Ukraine”, “the Antarctic” …. are English patterns. So are “Argentina, Ukrania”, and “Antarctica”. The change from “the Argentine” to “Argentina” was not just a dropping of the definite article but also an addition of a suffix -a, as I tried to indicate in boldface type. I.e. two changes happened, not just the dropping of the article, and the (-a) converts it from an adjectival to a noun form. Saying “Ukraine” like the Ukranians whose language has no definite article want us to do would be like saying “Argentine” or “Antarctic”.
In general, politically motivated proposals for such piecemeal particular changes in a language by people who do not and often do not know how to think things through in terms of the whole language wind up looking silly. When they are promoted agressively by non native speakers whose language does not even have the characteristic or grammatical form they are proposing to tell speakers of the target language how to use, they look even more arrogant than ignorant. And native speakers of the target language who placate them look like syncophantic ingratiating fools.
What do you suppose American and British reaction would be if the French started insiting we say “the France” and francophone Canadians and Louisianians started insisting we say “the Canada” and “the Louisiana” because that’s the way they say it in French?