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.

Antibacterial Products May Do More Harm Than Good

photo of a dandelion

Strange but True: Antibacterial Products May Do More Harm Than Good by Coco Ballantyne:

Unlike these traditional cleaners, antibacterial products leave surface residues, creating conditions that may foster the development of resistant bacteria, Levy notes. For example, after spraying and wiping an antibacterial cleaner over a kitchen counter, active chemicals linger behind and continue to kill bacteria, but not necessarily all of them.

When a bacterial population is placed under a stressor—such as an antibacterial chemical—a small subpopulation armed with special defense mechanisms can develop. These lineages survive and reproduce as their weaker relatives perish. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is the governing maxim here, as antibacterial chemicals select for bacteria that endure their presence.

Pretty basic understanding of evolution makes the breeding of very resilient bacteria a fairly obvious result. One thing that might not be as obvious until it is mentioned is that by killing off the “weaker” bacteria you also provide a niche for the more resilient bacteria to multiply and fill the gap left by the bacteria that were not a problem that were killed off. Imagine if, instead of digging out the 3 dandelions you wanted to remove from your yard, you removed all plants from your yard (including those 3 dandelions). I would bet most often that would result in more dandelions not fewer as the dandelions were able to fill in the void of plants in the yard.

In general, however, good, long-term hygiene means using regular soaps rather than new, antibacterial ones, experts say. “The main way to keep from getting sick,” Gustafson says, “is to wash your hands three times a day and don’t touch mucous membranes.”

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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Researchers Create Molecule-Sized Test Tubes

The test tubes are actually bubble-like nanocontainers that are porous to small molecules. Researchers can easily feed needed ions and other chemicals into the ultra-tiny reaction chambers.

Many scientists say that more can be learned about the dynamics of chemical reactions that power biological processes by studying the behavior of individual molecules rather than observing the collective behavior of many molecules, as scientists do now. But techniques for single-molecule studies are limited and often highly specialized. The new nanocontainers, however, will make single-molecule techniques both more accessible and more powerful
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The researchers say their technique can be easily applied in other laboratories, to enable scientists to study individual molecular reactions free of the complications of analyzing reactions in bulk solution. The new approach also improves on other methods used for observing the behavior of single molecules. One of the most common methods required that single molecules be tethered to a surface. With nanocontainers, however, the vesicles themselves are attached to a surface, meaning the molecules inside do not have to be. This simplifies analysis, because the effects of the surface on the reaction do not have to be taken into account, the researchers said.

To bad I can’t find the article online: I. Cisse, B. Okumus, C. Joo, T. Ha, “Fueling protein-DNA interactions inside porous nanocontainers”, PNAS. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is doing great things: $600 Million for Basic Biomedical Research – $1 Million Each for 20 Science Educators

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.

Engineering Graduate Job Market

Employers find there are few graduating engineers left to hire as dot-com debacle of five years ago fades into history by Mark Savage, Cornell University:

Average B.S.-level salaries for engineering graduates, which had dropped by 10 percent to $52,503 in 2002 from $56,072 in 2001, grew slowly. By 2006 (the most recent year for which validated data is available), salaries had finally surpassed 2001 levels with starting salaries averaging about $57,000 and $66,000, respectively, for engineering undergraduate and master’s degree graduates.
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the marketable skills that engineering graduates bring to the workplace are also of strong interest to a broad range of industries and functions not typically associated with engineering, from consulting and financial services to sales and marketing. Nearly 50 percent of Cornell’s engineering students embrace these nontraditional career paths.

To be sure, these students are eager to use their technical skills, but they want to practice them in a business applications environment, often found in the financial services or consulting sectors. They are less attracted to the traditional “hard core” engineering roles that defined engineering graduates a generation ago. Thus, it is not surprising to find IBM Business Consulting Services, Goldman-Sachs and Capital One standing alongside Microsoft, Lockheed Martin and General Electric among the top 10 employers of Cornell engineering graduates.

Engineering graduates continue to receive excellent salary offers, as I have mentioned previously: Highest paying college degrees. And don’t forget more S&P 500 CEOs are Engineering graduates than are graduates of any other discipline.

Reducing the Impact of a Flu Pandemic

Model for tracking flu progression could reduce flu pandemic’s peril – Engineer who survived pandemic of 1968 focuses on reducing influenza’s death toll:

Nearly 40 years ago, MIT Professor Richard Larson spent a week sick in bed with the worst illness he’d ever had–the particularly virulent strain of flu that swept the globe in 1968. “That was the sickest I’d ever been,” Larson recalled. “I really thought that was the end.” It took him two or three months to recover fully from the illness.

Known as the Hong Kong flu, the virus killed 750,000 people worldwide, the second worst influenza pandemic the world has seen since the infamous 1918-1919 epidemic of so-called Spanish flu.
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The findings strongly suggest that influenza emergency plans should include measures to reduce social contact, such as encouraging people to work from home and avoid large gatherings, Larson said. This is especially important because it generally takes at least six months from the time of an outbreak to develop an effective vaccine.

Making Robots from Trash

Mr. Woo creates robots (in China) using trash – without any formal education. Cool engineering – who needs Lego Mindstorms? Not Woo.