June 22nd, 2007 by Isaac Straley
NACS has recently upgraded its password infrastructure to allow for longer passwords. Longer passwords are more secure because it becomes prohibitively difficult to discover a password by computationally grinding through all the possibilities. The “rules” for choosing a good password still stand: use a combination of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and punctuation; don’t use recognizable strings (dictionary words, runs of keys as they appear on the keyboard, multiple copies of the same letter) or personal information (name, UCInetID, birthday, employee ID number). A summary of password guidelines can be found at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/ucinetid/password.html
It is also strongly recommended to change your password at least once a year. Long-lived passwords accumulate risk as the number of times and places they are used increases. One of the major risks today’s users are exposed to are so-called “key loggers,” small programs that hide on a computer and watch everything that is typed. Regular security scans (e.g., virus checkers), applying security patches, and caution with regard to opening email attachments or visiting unfamiliar web sites will help protect you from key loggers.
Security may seem inconvenient, and costs the University resources that we’d rather use in other ways, but it is an inescapable part of providing reliable network services, and much cheaper than the loss of valuable research data or identity theft. NACS will continue to watch the security landscape, make necessary advances in network security, and work with users and departments to help protect UCI.
June 22nd, 2007 by Tony Soeller
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is a technology which is finding ever broader use in the UCI research community. NACS Research Computing Specialist Tony Soeller has been supporting GIS software, teaching workshops, and working directly with faculty and graduate students on research projects to exploit GIS tools. Here are some recent examples.
Professor Bradford Hawkins in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology is tracking global species diversity in birds. GIS was used on a massive spatial data synthesis project on global bird ranges to georegister, digitize and rasterize bird range maps, then to summarize the number of bird species within discrete cells 27.5 to 220 km on a side. Numerous ArcGIS programs (ArcObjects and VBA) were written to help in the processing of the data.
Cristiane Surbeck completed her Ph.D. studies in Professor Stan Grant’s lab in Chemical Engineering and Materials Sciences and is now an Assistant Professor at University of Mississippi. Cris has been analyzing the Santa Ana River Watershed. Her research looked at the biological and sediment constituents of runoff into the Santa Ana River from three storm events within the watershed, and compared these data to rainfall volume and land use types which contributed to the runoff. GIS was used to synthesize land use data with rainfall data from the storm events, to delineate individual storm watersheds, and to determine the area of land within each land use type and the amount of precipitation within each of those land use types.
Satish Vutuku, a student in Professor Donald Dabdub’s lab in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is examining the impact on air quality of distributed power generation.
In one project, Satish assessed atmospheric impact of emissions from distributed power generation (DG) sources. DG refers to “on-site” generation of power using technologies such as fuel cells and micro turbines. Such DG installations emit pollutants in an urban area in a highly dispersed manner, in contrast to conventional huge power plants that emit pollutants as a concentrated plume far away from urban areas. In order to analyze effects of such DG emissions, Satish created a set of “DG scenarios” that would predict the adoption of DG technologies and corresponding emissions. The development of DG scenarios was based upon highly-detailed land-use data and population data. The land-use data were obtained as GIS files and were formatted to fit the model grid and resolution with help from Tony Soeller.
This is just a sampling of the many projects at UCI which are making use of GIS software and Tony’s expertise. Please contact NACS if you would be interested in exploring the relevance of GIS to your research project.
June 22nd, 2007 by Theresa Barnes
You may not realize it, but NACS employs telephone operators as a part of the campus telephone service.
Two operators are on duty Monday through Friday from 8 am to 5 pm. The operators handle calls from campus telephones dialing “0″ and calls to the University from all over the country and the world. The operators are the first contact the public has when calling the general telephone number listed for University of California Irvine (949-824-5011).
Not only do these professionals have to know a great deal about the units, services, structure, calendar, and activities of the University, they are called upon to handle an impressive number of requests.
In the course of a typical year, the operators handle almost 100,000 calls, with a peak day being almost 600 callers. Their goal is to help every caller quickly, and almost 80% of all calls are answered within ten seconds.
Should you ever need to reach someone by telephone while off campus, our friendly Campus Operators are ready to help you.
June 22nd, 2007 by Lyle Wiedeman
In the last issue of NACS News, we reported that the building distribution switches in Aldrich Hall and others were upgraded during the 2005-6 academic year. It was in fact during the 2006-7 academic year. We regret the error.