www.worldwidelearn.com
Summer vacation may be just around the corner, but if you are making plans to learn a new skill, get an MBA, brush up on your Spanish or plan for a new career, you'll find a wealth of information at this site. There are links to online degree and non-degree study programs as well as continuing education and personal enrichment courses.
Scientists at nine Florida universities have joined forces to create a statewide, high-bandwidth research and education internet information network known as Florida Lambda-Rail.
The project will be part of a massive national research network called National LambdaRail. It is designed to allow university researchers to send huge amounts of data from one location to another at high speeds, enabling experts to collaborate on projects much more easily and quickly.
"More and more, the bandwidth requirements on campuses are increasing," says Veronica Sarjeant, chief operations officer for Florida LambdaRail LLC, a consortium of public and private Florida schools developing the project. "This network is going to give them 100 times the bandwidth capability," she says.
Florida State University Vice President for Research Kirby Kemper describes a scenario in which a patient with autism travels to Shands Hospital in Gainesville for a brain scan. "The amount of data contained in a typical brain scan is huge," he explains. Doctors and medical researchers would be able to sit in Tallahassee, for example, and have the data from the scan transmitted to them. "Often you want a big group to look at the data," Kemper explains. With LambdaRail, this could include experts in Atlanta, Cleveland or other network locations.
National LambdaRail eventually will link the nation's technology centers across the U.S., connecting in Florida at Jacksonville. The first segment, from Chicago to Pittsburgh, used fiber purchased from Level 3 Communications and was "lit" in November 2003.
In Florida, LambdaRail will consist of a fiber-optic loop that, like the national project, will use "dark" fiber that's already been laid. Sarjeant says that the consortium is in negotiations to obtain a 20-year lease of 1,493 miles of fiber from a private provider. The Florida network is scheduled to go live by this November.
Each participating university in Florida has purchased between one and four "shares" in the limited liability company, Florida LambdaRail. Sarjeant says the consortium's working budget for the next five years, which includes startup costs, is $19 million.
There are no plans right now to open Florida LambdaRail to non-university members, but the Scripps Research Institute is a participating member of the National LambdaRail project as part of its collaboration with San Diego State University. Scripps recently entered into a long-term research and development partnership with Florida Atlantic University, which plans a campus at the Scripps site in Palm Beach County.
In some ways, LambdaRail is a return to the early days of the internet, when it was primarily a tool of university and government researchers. "Science has been driving this whole thing all along," says FSU's Kemper. "We need to do this if we are to remain competitive in research areas."
Participating Universities
Nine Florida universities have signed on as members of the LambdaRail consortium:
Florida Atlantic University
Florida Institute of Technology
Florida International University
Florida State University
Nova Southeastern University
University of Central Florida
University of Florida
University of Miami
University of West Florida