Horgan Seminar Blog

  Yash Yagnik Professor Horgan HST 401 3 May 2025 From Ocean Floor to Industry Standard: Microsoft’s Cooling Breakthrough The backbone of all technological advancements throughout history, and the current AI race that every company is fighting tooth and nail to win, is data. With the compounding growth of data across industries, its storage relies on massive data centers. These huge facilities spanning hundreds of thousands of square feet house (Microsoft’s 700,000+ square feet facility on right) and manage a company’s vital IT infrastructure. As the central hub for a company’s technological operations, they consist of computer systems, servers, and networking equipment that allow it to support a wide range of functions, like storing user/company data, hosting websites, and maintaining cybersecurity. But the demand for faster, energy-efficient, and cheaper data centers is growing exponentially.  Respectively to the amount of data they have and will continue to gain, major te...

  Ryan Monaghan Professor John Horgan HST 401 Seminar in Science Writing 2 May 2025 Artificially Informed: How AI is Robbing Students of their Critical Thinking As a course assistant for a core Computer Science degree requirement, I saw homework scores that were higher than I have seen in the past—while I saw test scores that dropped to an all time low. What I saw wasn’t due to easy homework assignments and impossible exams, it was due to an ever increasing presence of AI in the education system. I’m not the only one who has seen this, however. Dr. Stephen Rupprecht, Assistant VP and Dean of Students at Kutztown University (and who did his dissertation on academic integrity) suggests that faculty should learn how to use tools to detect AI content effectively when enforcing and upholding academic integrity. He was also “not surprised by [my] experience of seeing high homework scores and low test scores” (Rupprecht). That being said, it isn’t all bad. AI promises huge productivity ...

  HST 401-A Alexander Stapkowitz 5/2/2025 The Death of the Dams: Impact of Recent Dam Removals in NJ               The last time I visited one of my favorite fishing spots on the Pequest River, I noticed something different. The four-foot-high rock dam that spanned nearly seventy-five feet across the river was gone. I later found out that the long-deteriorated dam was the first of four dams on the river to be removed, as a part of the growing effort nationwide to demolish aging dams along our rivers and creeks. So why are we all of the sudden removing dams, especially those in New Jersey?             Well, the short answer is that many dams on our rivers and creeks are DEAD. Of the 1,700 regulated dams in New Jersey (dams over five feet tall), only ten percent are still used for their original purpose such as power generation or flood control. 1 This is...