Category Archives: Engineering

Science and Engineering Graduate Data from NSF

NSF presents a large amount of data on the Characteristics of Recent S&E Graduates: 2003. The data covers undergraduates and graduates in 2001 and 2002. The report shows 937,700 bachelor’s graduates (*682,200 in science fields; 112,300 in engineering; and 143,300 in health care). And 246,700 master’s graduates (117,000 science; 47,000 engineering; 82,700 health).

Median 2003 salary for 2001 and 2002 bachelor’s graduates:

all science: $32,000
all engineering: $50,000

Some of the specific areas median salaries: computer and information sciences $60,000; electrical/computer engineering $70,000 and industrial engineering $70,000.

2003 median salaries for 2001 and 2002 masters graduates:

all science: $45,000
all engineering: $65,000

* the report totals do not exactly add do to rounding estimates by NSF.

Digital Camera Photographer of the Year 2006

The Digital Camera Photographer of the Year 2006 site has a large number of great photos. The potter wasp photo above took 3rd place in the animals and nature category.

World Robot Olympiad

This year 195 teams from 17 countries (mainly from Asia) will participate in the World Robot Olympiad next week. The World Robot Olympiad brings together young people to develop their creativity and problem solving skills through challenging and educational robot competitions.

Brunei’s bid to make history at World Robotics Olympiad

Australia Student Formula One Engineering Competition

On November 8 2006 four students from Laverton Secondary College, Victoria, Australia, won the national final of the Formula One Competition held in Brisbane. They will now represent Australia internationally. In 2005 students from the same school, Laverton Secondary College, were runners up in the national competition. The National winners of that year went on to win the international final. Laverton students and staff will be keenly watching their team’s performance in the international event which will be held in Melbourne this time. Last year’s international competition was held in the UK.

Comment sent to us from Jan Van Dalfsen

Mini-F1s take over Technology Park:

“We give them a kit that has a rectangular shaped piece of balsa wood inside it, then the task for them is to design the car in the context of the piece of balsa wood, using CAD software, and having that car machined in a computer-controlled milling machine and then they can test it in wind tunnels and all sort of other exciting gear,”

Engineering Outsourcing Effects

A Business Week article discusses two Duke studies of Engineering jobs in the USA and world: Outsourcing: Job Killer or Innovation Boost?

One finds that companies are going offshore because they are desperate for talent and are shifting more complex work to nations such as India and China for strategic reasons. The other Duke study concludes that the offshoring phenomenon is all about cost and that there is no shortage of engineers in the U.S. Therefore, the labor shift is coming at the expense of U.S. jobs.

The Silent Aircraft Initiative

Conceptual aircraft image

Silent Aircraft gives young engineers a flight of fancy:

these students are not undergraduates. They are budding young engineers, aged 13 to 18, taking part in a three-month design challenge with Cambridge’s Engineering Department to tackle aircraft noise. Working in teams, the students – from schools and colleges across the country, from Bristol to Sheffield – are doing a project related to the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s Silent Aircraft Initiative. This initiative links researchers at Cambridge and MIT with industrial partners to design a radically quieter passenger plane, and includes research into ways to reduce the noise from the undercarriage – one of the major noise sources on a landing aircraft. So this challenge has tasked these young students to design, and make a model of, a quieter undercarriage.

The Silent Aircraft Initiative (SAI) team has succeeded in coming up with a radically quieter plane. Crucially, the SAX-40 is also 35% more fuel-efficient than any airliner currently flying.

Video Goggles

Update: new video goggles

Cool product and nice gift: ezVision Video iWear the iPod Video and DVD Movie Goggles. Using these is like watching a 50 inch screen and you can easily carry them with you anywhere. You can use them to watch videos from your iPod.

Related: Science and Engineering Books

Student Algae Bio-fuel Project

photo of Tessa Churchill, left, and Holly Jacobson

Students take algae-to-biofuel project to MIT by J.T. Leonard. Photo: Tessa Churchill, left, and Holly Jacobson. The students are competing in the regional finals of the Siemens Math, Science & Technology competition.

Holly Jacobson and Tessa Churchill, seniors at Greely High School in Cumberland, are at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, explaining how they would use fast-growing algae to help solve the energy crisis.

In a nutshell, the young women may have found a way to produce more biodiesel fuel while consuming fewer organic resources.

The project got its start two years ago when Jacobson and Churchill began examining natural oils stored in fatty acids — called lipids — in various forms of marine algae. Recently, they identified a strain of algae that produces more oil for a given mass.

Google History

Google History @Google.com

Already Google.com, still in beta, was answering 10,000 search queries each day. The press began to take notice of the upstart website with the relevant search results, and articles extolling Google appeared in USA TODAY and Le Monde. That December, PC Magazine named Google one of its Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998. Google was moving up in the world.
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As 2000 ended, Google was already handling more than 100 million search queries a day — and continued to look for new ways to connect people with the information they needed, whenever and wherever they needed it.
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In February of 2002, AdWords, Google’s self-service advertising system, received a major overhaul, including a cost-per-click (CPC) pricing model that makes search advertising as cost-effective for small businesses as for large ones. Google’s approach to advertising has always followed the same principle that works so well for search: Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Programing Bacteria

Duke Packard Fellow to Examine Processing Speed of “Reprogrammed” Bacteria:

research into the development of synthetic gene circuits, carefully designed combinations of genes that can be “loaded” into bacteria or other cells, directing their activity in much the same way that a basic computer program directs a computer. Such re-programmed bacteria might eventually serve in a wide variety of applications, including biocomputing, medical treatments, and environmental cleanup
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The research now, however, is in its very early stages, You said. So far, E. coli bacteria have been programmed to grow in numbers until a certain population size is reached. The bacteria then kill themselves off, growing again only after their numbers dwindle sufficiently.

The relatively simple program takes advantage of bacteria’s ability to communicate with one another, a process known as “quorum sensing,” and essential genetic pathways that control cell death.