"Samuel M. Genensky dies at 81; mathematician invented tools for the near-blind"

by Elaine Woo

July 12, 2009

Los Angeles Times

Samuel M. Genensky, a former Rand Corp. mathematician and inventor whose near-blindness led him to help others cope with limited eyesight and become more self-sufficient, died June 26 at his Santa Monica home. He was 81.

The cause was complications of heart disease, said LaDonna Ringering, president and chief executive of the Center for the Partially Sighted, a West Los Angeles facility that Genensky founded in 1978.

Genensky was best known for developing a kind of closed-circuit television that became the prototype for the video magnifiers sold around the world today that enable people with severe visual impairments to read books, magazines and other conventionally printed materials.

"Sam is universally known as a pioneer of assisted technology for people with partial vision," said Tony R. Candela, a deputy director in the California Department of Rehabilitation who oversees services for the blind and deaf. Genensky's magnification machine "ended up revolutionizing the ability of people with partial vision to read printed material," Candela said.

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"George Shor Jr. dies at 86; Scripps geophysicist studied the ocean floor"

Shor's work helped lay the foundation for the theory of tectonic plates and continental drift.

by Thomas H. Maugh II

July 11, 2009

Los Angeles Times

George G. Shor Jr., the Scripps geophysicist whose study of the ocean floor helped lay the foundation for the theory of tectonic plates and continental drift, died July 3 at his home in La Jolla from complications following a series of strokes. He was 86.

He helped develop the United States' fleet of ocean-going research vessels, was a principal in the abortive Project Mohole to drill a hole deep into the Earth and played a key role in the creation of the California Sea Grant program, which funds marine and coastal research.

"He mentored students ashore and at sea, but his strength was teaching people geophysics at sea," said geologist Robert L. Fisher, a professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, where Shor spent most of his career. He was a talented administrator and experimenter, and if he saw something that didn't work in either area, "he would diddle with it to make it better," Fisher said.

Shor joined Scripps in 1953 at the beginning of what researchers have dubbed the golden age of oceanography, in which research vessels from Scripps, Columbia University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Cambridge University explored the oceans, trailing magnetometers and other sophisticated instruments to detect the overall structure of the ocean floor and anomalies beneath it. He began his work in the Gulf of Alaska, a region with a little known geological history, then led expeditions into the Indian Ocean.

During the International Geophysical Year in 1957 and 1958, he led expeditions to the Southeast Pacific.

His work and that of others eventually led to the conclusion that the planet's continents reside on massive tectonic plates that are adrift on an ocean of volcanic magma far below the Earth's surface, pulling apart in some areas to create deep trenches in the ocean and jamming together in others to create massive mountain ranges.

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