DO-IT News March 1994: All Articles

Robotics, materials sciences, fisheries biology and more are what was seen in a walk-through tour of the Battelle labs in Richland experienced by two DO-IT Scholars.

Now, another tour is being set-up for the remaining DO-IT Scholars during the month of April. Katie, a fellow DO-IT Scholar, and I are the hosts of the tour. We saw a lot about the Hanford cleanup and all the things that are still being worked on today at Hanford.

Did you know that materials sciences helped a lot during Desert Storm? Materials Sciences is not only very useful, but it is lots of fun and quite interesting, too. Katie and I saw and felt some of the many different parts of an astronauts gear that are developed by materials scientists.

What about water cleanup technology? Everyone knows that clean water is a necessity of everyday life. Have you ever thought about the different cycles the water needs to go through to be considered drinkable?

How about all the salmon in the Columbia River? Did you realize that the Columbia River's fish need to be checked due to the cleanup? Hanford has a large variety of fish that are being tested daily.

All of the labs were very interesting and could certainly be learned from. The fisheries biology lab was lots of fun, and I think all of the DO-IT Scholars will enjoy it and every lab that Katie and I chose to have the Scholars tour. All the labs were fun!

The past two "Tech Tips" columns have mentioned how to find help for UNIX commands (the man command) and how to list files in a directory using ls. The next step is to understand how to create new directories to better organize your file area. For example, you might want to keep information about gopher and ftp sites in a directory called "Internet" while other files such as downloaded pictures might go in a directory called "Images." With a well-organized directory structure, you can easily retrieve information you've saved, with little searching.

As you know by now, you have a directory where you begin when you first login to your UNIX account. This is called your home directory. If you think of the computer as a building, and directories as individual offices, you can consider your home directory to be your very own office. Since this is your office, you can organize it however you like! You can put all your magazines in one drawer of your desk, hang pictures on the wall, or even stack all your stuff right in the middle of the floor. Whatever you do in your office or home directory doesn't impact anyone else.

But as you might imagine, it's easier to have a well-organized directory structure just like it's better to keep your office as efficiently laid out as possible.

So how do you expand and explore your directory area? Use the cd, mkdir, and rmdir, commands to move between, create, remove directories. The pwd command is useful to check your current location.

What directory am I in?
 

The pwd command is quite useful to determine your present working directory. Just type pwd at any time and the operating system will respond with your current location (e.g., /w0/danc/Images).
 

Changing directories
 

The cd (for change directory) command is used to move from one directory to another. For example, if you have a directory called "Images" that is one level down from your current directory, you would type cd Images.

Remember that UNIX is case sensitive. In other words, if a file or directory name has capitalized letters, you must type the name exactly as it's shown in order for the command to be successful.

A nice feature of the cd command is that if you type it without specifying a directory, you will return to your home directory. This is useful if you are many subdirectories away from your home directory and wish to quickly return "home."

Creating and removing a directory
 

Use the mkdir (short for "make directory") command to create a new subdirectory. For example, if you wanted to create a directory called "Gopher" type mkdir Gopher. You may have noticed by now that I capitalize the first letter of directory names. This is a method I've used to help me quickly recognize the difference between file names and directory names when I use the ls command to list the contents of a directory.

If you create a directory that you no longer want, use the rmdir command to remove a directory. The format is similar to the mkdir command, as you must specify the name of the directory you wish to delete. This command removes the directory called "Books": rmdir Books

Note that a directory must not have any files in it in order for it to be removed. This is to help keep you from inadvertently losing files that you may want to save.

Removing a file
 

Use the rm command with caution. Once a file is deleted, there's a good chance that it's lost forever! The structure of the command is simple. For example, if you have a file called "tribbles" in the current directory that you wish to remove, you enter rm tribbles.

For additional information on any of these commands, remember that you can use the man command along with the command in question to get more details and options.

Two of DO-IT's goals are to help students with disabilities hone their interests in science, engineering and mathematics and to encourage them to stay in school, completing their college degrees. Several innovative programs across the country share similar goals.

An example is a program at Howard University that pairs disabled students with engineering students in an effort to keep undergraduate engineers in school. The idea is to give engineering students real-life problems that will peak their interest while providing a service to others in the community. According to an article by Robert Bellinger in December 18, 1993 edition of The EE Times (a weekly newspaper written for electronic engineers), the partnership seems to be working.

Howard's student electrical engineers, working with a $20,000 grant from NEC Foundation of America, teamed up with disabled students from Sharpe School to find out what kinds of products would be most helpful. The engineers then designed and built prototypes of products to fulfill specific needs.

Here are a two examples of some of the working prototypes developed:

• a rapid charger that recharges the battery that powers an electric wheelchair in an hour--a process that usually takes eight hours
• a more sensitive remote control that uses tongue pressure. This device turns appliances on and off

The engineering students learned how to work through all stages of a project--from the design to prototyping to marketing--but more importantly, they learned to think of the end user.

But perhaps the most important outcome of this project was the relationships that developed between the Howard and Sharpe students. Professor Gary Harris, who developed the program, said that the projects helped breakdown perceived notions that the Howard students had about persons with disabilities.

Even after the projects were finished, several of the team members continued to communicate with each other to preserve the friendships that developed over the course of the program.