Category Archives: Engineering

Goldwater Science Scholarships

I have mentioned previously, I work for ASEE (the curious cat blog is not associated with ASEE). At ASEE, we have started a science and engineering fellowship blog. The latest post covers the Goldwater Science Scholarships – for undergraduate students in science and math. Approximately 300 are awarded each year.

For 2007, 28 mathematics majors, 223 science and related majors, 54 engineering majors, and 12 computer science majors received awards (many of the Scholars have dual majors in a variety of mathematics, science, engineering, and computer disciplines). The one and two year scholarships will cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.

The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established by Public Law 99-661 on November 14, 1986. The Scholarship Program honoring Senator Barry M. Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. Applications will be available starting in September for next year. Schools nominate up to 4 students for the scholarship, see the web site for details on the application process.

Education, Entrepreneurship and Immigration

Education, Entrepreneurship and Immigration: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs is part 2 of a study by Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and UC Berkeley. Some interesting points from the study:

52 percent of immigrant founders initially came to the United States primarily for higher education, 40 percent entered the country because of a job opportunity, 6 percent came for family reasons, and only 2 percent to start a business.
91 percent of Indian founders, 35 percent of Chinese and 97 percent of Taiwanese founders completed their undergraduate degrees in their home country
Indian and Chinese founders graduated from a diverse set of schools in their native countries, many of which are considered
second- or third-tier universities (only 15 percent of Indian founders were graduates of the IIT).
Immigrant founders of technology and engineering firms have strong backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. 75 percent had completed their highest degree in a STEM field.
Advanced education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is correlated with high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation. The U.S. economy depends upon these high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation to maintain its global edge.

Singapore Students Engineer New Products

Students design products to help environment and disabled people

“Now it’s in the eighth year and we’ve had 5,000 students on the scheme. This year the quality is quite good, I’m quite happy. Some amazing ideas such as the fish scaling device and the shuttlecock launcher,” said Mr Butler. There is no limit to innovation and creativity.

An automated shuttlecock launcher, which can adjust the launching angle of shuttlecocks, came in tops in terms of design. Currently there are no mechanical shuttlecock launchers in the market. But this launcher can not only be produced at a low cost, but also help beginners execute different strokes. Another practical design is a retractable bamboo system that improves safety when drying laundry. It also comes with a plastic cover to keep out the rain. The above are just a few examples of the 52 innovations that may just find their way into our homes and lives, once these young technopreneurs find the right investors.

I like the increasing efforts to engage university students in actually creating useful innovations. It isn’t easy to actually create winning solutions but the efforts to do so I think teach many valuable lessons. Such efforts support a change to our education system to engaging students in actual engineering projects not just problem sets (for example: Educating the Engineer of 2020: NAE Report – Olin Engineering Education Experiment – Changes at MIT for Engineering Education – Educating Engineering Geeks).

Self Healing Plastic

Plastic That Heals Itself

The first self-healing material was reported by the UIUC [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] researchers six years ago, and other research groups have created different versions of such materials since then, including polymers that mend themselves repeatedly when subject to heat or pressure. But this is the first time anyone has made a material that can repair itself multiple times without any external intervention, says Nancy Sottos, materials-science and engineering professor at UIUC and one of the researchers who led the work.
…
the researchers bend it and crack the polymer coating. The crack spreads down through the coating and reaches the underlying microchannel. This prompts the healing agent to “whip through the channels and into the crack,” Sottos says. There, it comes into contact with the catalyst and, in about 10 hours, becomes a polymer and fills in the crack. The system does not need any external pressure to push the healing agent into the crack. Instead, the liquid moves through the narrow channels just as water moves up a straw.

Boston Travel Photos

After I presented the Deming Seminar in Boston last year a spent a few extra days in to enjoy the city. See photos from my Boston visit including: Boston Science Museum (above photo), Boston Fine Arts Museum and Boston Common.

Educating Engineering Geeks

Yossi Sheffi, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Systems, Director, MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, presents his thoughts on engineering education changes at MIT in this webcast.

So MIT must shift gears, and embrace two basic missions: continuing to produce world-class experts (geeks) – practicing engineers who design complicated systems – and generating world-class leaders (chiefs), who will deploy their technological expertise in the real-world. “My hypothesis is that the great leaders of the next century will have to have a technological background, because we’re going toward a technologically innovative society.” These leaders will be problem definers as much as problem solvers, and, says Sheffi, “either we or China will educate them.”

Sheffi suggests a School of Engineering-wide undergraduate program, where all the fundamentals courses are rethought and taught differently. This means sacrificing problem sets for case studies, and “learning how a subject fits into the grand scheme of things.” MIT should integrate humanities with engineering subjects, ensuring undergraduates understand business, ethics, legal language, environmental concerns, organization and process design. There should also be a formal leadership workshop, required time in a foreign culture and along the lines of the European Union, a five-year educational model. If MIT builds it, others will follow, assures Sheffi.

via: Geeks and Chiefs: Engineering Education at MIT

Life-patents

New Life, New Patent by Carl Zimmer:

ETC is right in suggesting Venter might become “Microbesoft”–controlling operating system for anyone who wants to build an organism from scratch. Other researchers, such as Keasling, are promoting a different way of doing synthetic biology–what they call open source biology. Scientists and their students are amassing an open inventory of parts that anyone can use to design organisms of their own. And it’s open source biology, these researchers argue, that will provide the best protection against any evil uses of synthetic biology. Instead of being hidden behind patents, the information about these parts would be available to everyone, and collectively solutions could be found. As this debate starts to unfold, I think open source biology will keep it from becoming nothing but deja vu.

I support keeping science open. Patents are a tax on society that the government grants inventors for their efforts, in order to benefit society, by encouraging the inventors to innovate. The end is benefiting society. The means is granting a right of the patent holder (a right they do not have without patent law) that will encourage them to make the effort to innovate. I support the proper use of patents, but we have perverted the patent process into something that harms society. The system needs to be fixed. And the whole area of patents on life I find very questionable.

National Underwater Robotics Challenge

See the National Underwater Robotics Challenge web site for information on the event in Arizona June 8th through 10th. They offer a remote underwater vehicle kit for $250.

The ROV-IN-A-BOX is intended to help get teams involved that are new to underwater robotics. Buy purchasing this kit, it helps put an inexperienced team, or a team with young students like elementary school kids, into a comfort zone to allow them to take on the Underwater Challenge. It reduces the stress, time and resources needed to acquire all the parts to complete an ROV for the competition. The kit can also be used by a more mature team as a starting point for the ROV they may want to build.

There will be a live video stream June 9 at 8pm MST and will continue to until about 2am MST June 10. The video will come from both the ROV and in the pool with event cameras in and around the submarine. Once the video has been processed and mixed poolside by Arizona State University’s Applied Learning Technologies Institute, it will then be channeled to Chandler High School’s television studio, where it will be broadcast to a view gallery and simultaneously sent to a server at ASU where it will be webcast to the world.

Video of the ROV in a box:
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Inventor TV Shows

I caught some of Everyday Edisons the other day, which looked promising (though I would prefer less fluff and more focus on the process of designing and marketing the products. American Inventor season two premiers tonight on ABC. I saw some of American Inventor last year and it was interesting (though it didn’t grab me enough to get me to watch often). Still compared to the usual TV fair they look interesting and do actually provide some insight into turning ideas into products.

One minor point I find funny and a bit lame. On the Everyday Edisons web site they show a photo with 10 people and then have an image underneath it with text (yes image text like a myspace page – obviously whoever is responsible for this website doesn’t follow the advice of the web usability experts – this image text is just one example, another is that every time you go the home page it starts playing a video with audio – it is annoying to have web sites with so little idea of good web design practices) that states something like “I thought there were 14 inventors, I only see seven. What’s up?” The image actually shows 10 people – not 7, what is up with someone that only sees 7?

Related: Engineering Education Reality TV (which I also note web usability failings) – Help Choose the New PBS Science Program – Japan Project X: Innovators Documentaries
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S&P 500 CEOs – Again Engineering Graduates Lead

2006 Data from Spencer Stuart on S&P 500 CEO (pdf document) shows once again more have bachelors degrees in engineering than any other field.

Field		% of CEOs
Engineering		23%
Economics		13%
Business Administration		12%
Liberal Arts		8%
Accounting		8%
No degree or no data		3%

This data only shows the data for 65% of CEOs, I would like to see the rest of the data but it is not provide in this report. 41% of S&P CEOs have MBAs. 27% have other advanced degrees.