Category Archives: Education

2004 Medal of Science Winners

Presidential Medal of Science - USA

President Announces 2004 Medal of Science Winners

Winners included:

Biological Sciences, Regarded as the “Father of the Green Revolution,” Norman Borlaug, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his efforts to feed the world’s hungry through improved farming techniques
Engineering, Edwin N. Lightfoot is Hilldale Professor (emeritus) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was one of the first biochemical engineering professors in the United States and a forerunner in biomedical engineering. He is awarded the Medal of Science for vigorous and sustained leadership in developing the fields of biochemical and biomedical engineering, particularly in the areas of blood oxygenation, oxygen diffusion into tissue, mathematical modeling of biological pathways, bioseparations and studies of diabetic responses
Chemistry, Stephen J. Lippard is the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An expert in the interactions between metal ions and biological molecules, Lippard is considered the leader in inorganic chemistry in living systems. He revealed the mechanism by which the anti-cancer drug cisplatnin binds to DNA and inhibits growth in cancer cells and is currently applying that knowledge along with other chemical and gene-therapy strategies to develop better platinum-based molecules and protocols for cancer chemotherapy.
Behavioral or Social Sciences, Kenneth J. Arrow professor of economics (emeritus) at Stanford University. He made groundbreaking contributions to the pure theory of economics

Converting Emissions to Biofuels

Converting emissions to biofuels at GreenFuel Technologies:

In the unit, non-toxic photosynthetic algae ‘eat’ the carbon dioxide and break the nitrogen-oxygen bonds. Scrubbed gas vents from the chimneys at the unit apex. Inline sensors monitor system performance and provide remote reporting, and a built-in automated harvesting system gathers algae ‘crops’ on a preprogrammed schedule, typically daily. The bioreactors are even self-cleaning.

The technology was tested at the MIT Cogeneration Plant (delivered 86% NOx reduction under all conditions, along with 50% CO2 reduction on rainy days, and 82% CO2 reduction on sunny day) and is now being tested at a commerical power plant.

Read news reports about the technology: Power Plants and How Algae Clean the Air

Read a more detailed report from the company: Air-Lift Bioreactors for Algal Growth on Flue Gas: Mathematical Modeling and Pilot-Plant Studies

Companies Not Countries

Companies, Not Countries, Hold The Key to Innovation Leadership by Lester Craft:

But given the overall trend, I would argue that we are quickly heading toward an era where corporations view innovation almost strictly in terms of their own global self-interest rather than in terms of one nation or another. If this is true, then we need to adjust our thinking about America’s role as an innovation leader. When it comes to innovation and intellectual property, it may be that companies are replacing countries as the entities that make the rules.

I agree the impact of countries is declining and companies increasing. Still governments hold a great deal of power to create environments that are supportive or hostile to innovation and thereby influence where it is done.

One, of many reasons, the Untied States succeed in the last half of the 20th century was wise government support of innovation. Now other countries such as India, Singapore, China, Korea… are taking smart action also.

There is still plenty of room for government policy to influence where innovation will take place. As mentioned in my previous posts (see below) being the country that trains doctoral candidates has many benefits. If any country trains 50% of the science and engineering doctoral candidates in 2050 they will have a huge advantage in innovation. Tax policy also has an impact. Intellectual property rights also have an impact. Many factors that governments largely define (and therefore differences exist between countries in how well these factors support innovation and where investors will choose to invest) will play a role in what countries innovation flourishes in going forward: infrastructure, legal system, primary education system, health care system, financial system, funding and encouraging basis research…

I happen to side with those like Lawernce Lessig that believe we are harming the United States economy by having a government policy that too restrictive about intellectual property. I believe countries that have sufficient clout to stand up to the United States, and who have a more sensible IP policy will gain a great advantage if the United States were not to adjust policies based on the ideas of Lessig and others.

The change that I think should be made is to see the role of government as a influencer of what the future will hold rather than a dictator. The actions the United States government takes will be one factor that determines where innovation takes place (and what geographic location gains the largest economic benefit) but other countries, companies and individuals will also make decisions. It will be a much more interdependent system than in the past. And no one player will be able to dictate the action.

Google’s success is not solely due to the fact it was formed in the United States. But there are many reasons why Google, ebay, Amazon, Yahoo… are based in the United States and have lead the way in internet innovation. The challenge for the United States is to keep those comparative advantages as high as possible even though the advantages are declining and will continue to do so, in my opinion.

Article: Is the US Patent System Endangering American Innovation?

Schoofs Prize for Creativity

Photo of interlocking bowl baby tray

Photo: “Tara Jo Schiltz designed the interlocking bowl and tray system for use with a baby’s high chair. The system locks the bowl in the tray preventing the child from throwing the bowl to the floor.”

The Schoofs Prize for Creativity is open to undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Other winners included:

First place and $10,000 — Nick OBrien, Chandler Nault and Mitch Nick for “The FireSite:” A transmitter/receiver system designed to guide firefighters out of smoke-filled buildings.
Second place and $7,000 — Ben Jaeger, Natalie Meagher, Mark Webb, Lynn Daul, Dominic Kasten for the “Baseboard Booster:” A collapsing stool that fits in the space behind the baseboard of a cabinet
Third place and $4,000 — Sean McHone for “RoboMouse:” A fishing lure that replicates the appearance and movements of a live animal in the water.

More details on the 2005 competition.

July 2005 Wall Street Journal article on the 1996 award winner: For This Inventor, The Perfect Beer Is All About the Tap:

He was not the first college student to dream of ways to get to his alcohol more quickly. What set Mr. Younkle apart is that he chose, soberly, to follow through.

Ten years later, Mr. Younkle, 31 years old, is president and chief technology officer of TurboTap, a company marketing a finger-sized nozzle that attaches to standard beer faucets and pours draft beer at least twice as fast as traditional systems do, and with less spillage. The company, based here, has installed about 1,000 TurboTaps at bars, restaurants and ballparks—including Chicago’s two major-league baseball stadiums and Cleveland’s Gund Arena.

Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology

Photo of the South’s Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology (BEST) Middle and High School Regional Robotics Championship. The event was hosted by the Ginn College of Engineering at Auburn University.

Teams of middle and high school students from across the eastern U.S. headed to Auburn University this month to showcase their prize winning robots and engage in spirited head-to-head competition centered on the theme “Mission to Hubble.” They also had a chance to visit with NASA astronaut Story Musgrave
…
The competition began in September when sponsor-provided kits of standardized parts were distributed, the game challenge was revealed and teams began to design and build their remote-controlled robots. A portion of these teams also chose to compete for the BEST award, which challenges students to market and display their creations.

In October the teams competed at 26 BEST hub sites in 10 states. One month later, the winners of these hub competitions packed up their robots, displays, pep bands, cheerleaders and mascots and headed to Auburn.

We posted a few days ago about less than exciting outreach efforts. This seems like a much more captivating idea to interest students in engineering.

This year’s BEST award went to Wheeler High School, in Marietta, Georgia. Davison High School from Davison, Michigan placed first in the robotics competition.

Two more regional events are scheduled in the next few weeks. Learn more including how your school can participate next year see.

BEST is a non-profit, volunteer-based organization whose mission is to inspire students to pursue careers in engineering, science, and technology through participation in a sports-like, science and engineering-based robotics competition.

Colored Bubbles

The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles by Mike Haney, Popular Science.

Colored soap bubbles! Of course! Everyone loves blowing bubbles. It seemed such a simple and perfect idea, the kind that would leave other inventors slapping their foreheads and saying Why didn’t I think of that? Kehoe says, “I remember walking down to the store thinking, ‘This is so easy. I’m going to be rich!’ “

Well, rich maybe, but not so easy.

The long years of desk jobs and desperate late-night experiments were finally over. He had done what the toy companies had told him to, and now it didn’t matter what they thought. He had his own well-financed company and a washable bubble. It was time to tell the world.

Photo gallery and movie of the colored bubbles.

Red Blood Cell’s Amazing Flexibility

Scientists Discover Secret Behind Human Red Blood Cell’s Amazing Flexibility:

The human red blood cell membrane skeleton is a network of roughly 33,000 protein hexagons that looks like a microscopic geodesic dome.
…
a team of UCSD researchers describe a mathematical model that explains how a mesh-like protein skeleton gives a healthy human red blood cell both its rubbery ability to stretch without breaking, and a potential mechanism to facilitate diffusion of oxygen across its membrane. “Red cells are one of the few kinds of cells in the body with no nucleus and only a thin layer of protein skeleton under their membrane: they are living bags of hemoglobin,” said Amy Sung, a professor of bioengineering at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering

Nanotechnology Education

photo of quantum dots
Bin Yang grows quantum dots (the arrows point to them) as part of his nanotechnology research.

Exploring the Nanoworld from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

The web site aims to “brings the “wow” and potential of nanotechnology and advanced materials to the public.” I think they still have quite a bit of work to do to reach that goal. It is good to see some effort made to do this but I hope we can do much better.

And this is the best sites I looked at today. All the sites were funded by the NSF as education and outreach efforts. They really need to do a much better job with this outreach. I believe we need to spend money to improve education and outreach but we need to do so in a way that is much more engaging.

We need material teachers can use to engage students.

Video podcast on UW Engineering nanotechnology lab

Worldwide Science and Engineering Doctoral Degree Data

graph showing doctoral degrees awarded by region The graph shows doctoral degrees awarded by region in science and engineering (graph from the United States National Science Foundation Science and Engineering Indicators 2004 report). The data used to make the chart is included in this spreadsheet on the NSF site.

It seems to me the claims of the NY Times article discussed in our previous post are wrong. I would trust this NSF data to be fairly accurate. The full report includes a great deal of related data and is worth looking at.

The data from the NSF 2004 report (the data is from 2000 and 2001 [the most recent data they have access to]) show a total of 24,409 science and engineering doctoral degrees granted in all of Asia. How many in the USA? 25,509.

International Mobility of Doctoral Recipients from U.S. Universities by Jean M. Johnson, NSF, 2000, provides some good discussion of related issues. For example, the paper explores country of origin of the students as well as where the students go to work once they receive the degrees.

The percentage of foreign doctoral recipients planning to stay in the United States may
return to the lower 50 percent level that existed until 1992. The 60-70 percent stay rates of the 1993-99 period may have been driven by the expanding U.S. economy and employment opportunities.

In any discussion of the impact of the United States failing behind in science and engineering graduation, and the resulting economic decline, it is critical to understand where the graduates go to work. There are real changes going on:

For example, in the last 5 years, Chinese and Korean students earned more doctoral S&E degrees in their respective countries than in U.S. universities. And in 1999, Taiwanese students, for the first time, earned more doctoral S&E degrees within Taiwanese universities than from U.S. universities.

This is important information. It is also important to see that it was just 1998 when more doctoral degrees were granted in the US than in Taiwan to Taiwanese students.

It seems there are at least two critical issues that people are considering when quoting figures (or related statements about the decline of US science and engineering status). One is getting scientific and engineering workers working in the economy. Another is the actual education of students, which relates directly to the first issue and has many “spin-off” benefits.

One measure used to look at creating future science and engineering workers is the number of those earning degrees (undergraduate and graduate degrees). That is a sensible thing to look at, though it should be noted that such a measure provides a limited view (it is an input measure and not an outcome measure, which would be preferable).

I believe the graduate measure is used as a way to project into the future by many of the future health of the science and engineering success of countries. It seems a sensible measure to pay attention to: we cannot measure today the number of high wages scientists and engineers employed in specific countries 20 years from now (or the jobs those scientists and engineers create for others in the economy or the useful patents written, scientific discoveries made, engineering breakthroughs achieved…).

The number of graduates has some value in trying to predict that outcome years from now but it is only a proxy measure and not at all definitive. The United States has been remarkably effective at getting those who graduate with advanced science and engineering degrees in the United States to say (and even in getting those granted degrees elsewhere to move here during their careers and gaining tremendous benefits to the United States economy). Where students receive degrees (and where they grew up), I believe is correlated to where a person ends up working during their career, but that correlation is not perfect. And that correlation may change in the future – in fact I believe it will do so significantly.

I believe the correlation will decrease – movement will increase and much of this may not even make sense as work flows without much regard for national boundaries (while physical location is one factor if essentially workers in Singapore, India, Mexico and Germany all our working on the same project for a company based in Japan and owned 40% by Canadians… how all this is analyzed gets very confusing).

Looking at where they work immediately after graduation is a sensible thing to do, however we should also look at where they work 10 or 20 years in the later if we are interested in long term impact.

The actual education of the students is also seen as critical to many, and I agree. One reason this is important is you have many good jobs educating the students. But there are many other benefits. The students often do research which if they are in you country is much more likely to benefit your economy than if they are earning there degree elsewhere and supporting research elsewhere.

Also the leading educational hubs create a climate for technological innovation (proximity to the leading experts in the world often provides benefits in tapping that knowledge for purposes that often have economic advantages). If the students are educated elsewhere it is likely those hubs of technological innovation will move also (or at least the lure of the local hub will loose some to another hub that grows in importance). So measuring the number of graduate, post graduate and doctoral degrees granted in your country makes sense (again it is not a perfect measure but a valuable one).

While there is a great deal of worry about the importance of improving science and engineering education to capture economic benefit I think the understanding of the actual situation is lacking. I think we need to have a clearer idea of what the data actual shows. Then I think we can start looking at where we would like to improve. I am to explore related issues with this blog.

Engineering Education and Innovation

Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge? by Timothy L. O’Brien, New York Times:

He fears that corporate and public nurturing of inventors and scientific research is faltering and that America will pay a serious economic and intellectual penalty for this lapse.

See previous post, Leverage Universities to Transform State Economy.

The Industrial Research Institute, an organization in Arlington, Va., that represents some of the nation’s largest corporations, is also concerned that the academic and financial support for scientific innovation is lagging in the United States. The group’s most recent data indicate that from 1986 to 2001, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan all awarded more doctoral degrees in science and engineering than did the United States. Between 1991 and 2003, research and development spending in America trailed that of China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan – in China’s case by billions of dollars.

In a previous post, Science and Engineering Doctoral Degrees Worldwide, I mentioned that I thought the United States was not in fact leading (and if they still were it would not last for more than a few years) in doctoral degrees in science and engineering though I could not find supporting data. I still can’t, but the NY Times claims IRI does have the data (though I can’t find any such data on their web site).

And I find the claim questionable without the data. Do they mean on a percentage of population basis, that seems unlikely with China? On an absolute basis it seems unlikely for South Korea and Taiwan (at least, if not all countries) especially from 1986-2001. On an absolute basis crediting the degree earned to the nationality of the student (so Taiwanese students in American graduate schools count for Taiwan not the US)? The last version seems the most likely basis of the data to me, though even then I find it questionable. And it is not what I think most readers would believe the statement in the article means (instead believing that doctoral degrees granted by American schools were lower than those granted by schools in Taiwan… from 1986-2001).

I find it hard to believe that the United States trailed Singapore on R&D spending on an absolute basis so I would guess the data the NY Times is quoting on a percentage basis (at least for R&D) though that seems unlikely for China, so I am a bit confused about the claims in the article. They really should state what the data says specifically not just that the United States trails on some undefined measure. And they also really should provide the data that backs up their claim.