Category Archives: Universities

A New Engineering Education

Engineering a new way by Amy Hetzner

The crux of Olin’s effort is a “do-learn” model that stresses teaching students through projects and a student-focused environment aimed at heading off the high dropout rates at other engineering schools around the country, said Sherra Kerns, Olin’s vice president for innovation and research.

See our previous posts: Olin Engineering Education Experiment – Improving Engineering Education

UW has been able to turn around a dismal attrition rate in the early 1990s, when two-thirds of engineering students didn’t stick with the program. Today, close to 60% of engineering students graduate with a degree in the field, he said.

Wow, 33% of engineering students graduating sure wasn’t very impressive. Frankly I don’t think 60% is very good but I believe comparatively it is reasonably good. Overall that rate really needs to be improved. Olin College does have some advantages being small and providing a full scholarship: their first class graduated 66 of the 75 that started 4 years ago.

Berkeley and MIT courses online

Huge amount of University of California Berkely webcasts of course lectures. Subscribe to RSS feeds and listen to podcasts or listen online.

Courses include: General Biology, Solid State Devices and Introductory Physics. Course websites include handouts for the lectures.

A great open access resource.

I can’t believe I have mentioned MIT open courseware before but a search didn’t find anything. MIT’s effort is an excellent resource, many on science and engineering: Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, etc..

MIT also includes the excellent: Visualizing Cultures – a gateway to seeing history through images that once had wide circulation among peoples of different times and places by John Dower (author of National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II) and Shigeru Miyagawa.

Science 2.0 – Biology

OpenWetWare (OWW) is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology and biological engineering.

“OWW provides a place for labs, individuals, and groups to organize their own information and collaborate with others easily and efficiently. In the process, we hope that OWW will not only lead to greater collaboration between member groups, but also provide a useful information portal to our colleagues, and ultimately the rest of the world.”
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NSF Funds Center for Quality of Life Technology

Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) have been awarded a $15 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish an engineering research center that will develop technologies to help older adults and people with disabilities live independently and productively.

“The purpose of our new center is to foster independence and self determination among older Americans and people with disabilities,” said Kanade. “If the technology we develop at the QoLT ERC can delay the need to send people from their homes to assisted living or nursing facilities by even one month, we can save our nation $1.2 billion annually. We need to apply the same ingenuity that we’ve used for military, space and manufacturing applications to improve the human condition.”

Japan has also been investing heavily in such technology including robots. Japan’s population is more elderly and the needs and benefits to Japan have lead them to invest heavily in technology to assist an aging population.
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Lucrative college degrees

Lucrative college degrees, CNN article on NACE’s latest quarterly salary survey of recent college graduates.

Once again Engineering is very well represented with average starting salaries for:

Chemical engineering: $56,335
Computer engineering: $53,651
Electrical engineering: $53,552
Mechanical engineering: $51,732

The article lists no other degrees with an average above $50,000. Engineering education continues to pay off well.

Genetically Engineered Machines Competition

Princeton Center for Innovation in Engineering Education post on Genetic Machines Competition.

Find up to date information on the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition:

We believe in the possibility of engineered biological systems, but the only way to test such an engineering hypothesis is to try it practically. The iGEM competition facilitates this by asking students to design and build genetic machines. This generates practical data on the feasibility of engineering biology, and also on best practices. It also provides a powerful educational experience for the students working to overcome the many technical challenges.

This seems like an effort that is properly focused and is applying sensible management and technology to achieve the goals. A very nice things to find.

Previous post on 2005 intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine competition – looking at Davidson College students, where I graduated – John. While Dad graduated from Princeton 🙂

Teams lay BioBrick foundation for genetic engineering article from MIT.

Google Tech Talks

Webcasts of great engineering talks at Google via: Google TechTalks

Videos include:

Open Access Article Advantage

Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles by Gunther Eysenbach:

While more work remains to be done to evaluate citation patterns over longer periods of time and in different fields and journals, this study provides evidence and new arguments for scientists and granting agencies to invest money into article processing fees to cover the costs of OA publishing. It also provides an incentive for publishers seeking to increase their impact factor to offer an OA option.

I agree with all of that. More study should be done. And scientists and sponsors that want the papers they wrote, or funded, to have maximum influence should invest in OA publishing now.

See previous: Britain’s Royal Society Experiments with Open Access