Green Cards for Engineering Faculty

With growing foreign faculty, Tech clarifies ‘green card’ policy at Virginia Tech:

There are another 259 Tech employees on H1-B visas. About half of them will be applying for green cards. Berkley-Coats said costs for obtaining a green card usually run between $3,000 and $5,000. The wait usually ranges from two to three years, though it can extend up to five years because of backlogs of immigrants from countries such as China and India.

Under Tech’s new policy, only employees applying for full-time, salaried positions with the potential to keep them at Tech for several years qualify. The position must be considered “significant” by the department and requires approval of the department head, dean or other senior managers, depending on the position. Postdoctoral employees–scholars or researchers paid to do academic study at the university, usually by grants that fund their work for a limited time–are not part of the policy.

Meteorite Lands in New Jersey Bathroom

What Landed in New Jersey? It Came From Outer Space:

The object that tore through the roof of a house in the New Jersey suburbs this week was an iron meteorite, perhaps billions of years old and maybe ripped from the belly of an asteroid, experts who examined it said yesterday.
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The meteorite now belongs to the family whose house it ended up in, said Lt. Robert Brightman of the Freehold Township Police Department, adding that they had asked not to be identified. The family has not yet given permission for physical testing of the meteorite, but from looking at it, Dr. Delaney and other experts were able to tell that the object it had been part of — perhaps an asteroid — cooled relatively fast.

It is magnetic, and reasonably dense, they determined. The leading edge — the one that faced forward as it traveled through the earth’s atmosphere — was much smoother, while the so-called trailing edge seemed to have caught pieces of molten metal. In fact, Mr. Delaney said, it seemed very similar to another meteorite fragment, the Ahnighito, now on display at the American Museum of Natural History.

The meteorite was about the size of a golf ball.

Internet Underwater Fiber

Underwater Peril:

Laying undersea cable systems is a monumental process. After surveying landing sites, studying seabed geology, and assessing risks, engineers plot a route. A company like Corning delivers strands of fiber-optic glass to a manufacturer say, Tyco Telecommunications which encases the fiber in metal. Then gigantic spools of cable, repeaters that transmit signals long distances, and other gear are loaded on cable-laying vessels. For months, the ships lower the cables thousands of feet to the seabed. In congested spots, engineers use robots to dig trenches for the cable that protect it from wayward anchors and fishing nets. Then crews haul the cable ends above water and connect them to land-based stations.
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Engineering experts say the Taiwan incident should persuade all operators to do more to prepare for quakes. It’s not good enough if you have a variety of routes but then bring them into shore at the same location–especially if, as in the Taiwan case, they’re crossing a fault line right there.
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But there’s another lesson: The global telecom network really is quite resilient, even in the face of such a crippling blow. Within 12 hours of the undersea rock slides, at least partial service had been restored to most of the affected networks. This was done by rerouting traffic via land and sea through Europe to the U.S.

The Differences Between Culture and Code

An excellent Lawrence Lessig speech on On Free, and the Differences between Culture and Code (video). I think many find it quite difficult to understand the true power behind these ideas. This speech is a version of one we have mentioned before. He is in excellent form. YouTube and Google video are great services, it will be nice when the quality of the video images are improved, which I am sure will happen over time.

I was able to seem him in person at the ASEE annual conference in Portland, which was great. See photos from my subsequent vacation in the Pacific Northwest.

2007 Draper Prize to Berners-Lee

Timothy J. Berners-Lee will receive the prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering from the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for developing the World Wide Web.

Also, Yuan-Cheng “Bert” Fung will receive the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize — a $500,000 biennial award (since 1999) recognizing engineering achievement that significantly improves the human condition — “for the characterization and modeling of human tissue mechanics and function leading to prevention and mitigation of trauma.”

Timothy J. Berners-Lee imaginatively combined ideas to create the World Wide Web, an extraordinary innovation that is rapidly transforming the way people store, access, and share information around the globe. Despite its short existence, the Web has contributed greatly to intellectual development and plays an important role in health care, environmental protection, commerce, banking, education, crime prevention, and the global dissemination of information.
Continue reading →

MIT for Free

How to go to M.I.T. for free by Gregory M. Lamb:

By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world’s most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won’t have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted. The cost? It’s all free of charge.

The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002 and now spread to some 120 other universities worldwide, aims to disperse knowledge far beyond the ivy-clad walls of elite campuses to anyone who has an Internet connection and a desire to learn.
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MIT’s OCW website features even more glowing feedback from learners. “[B]ecause of money, many good students with great talent and [who are] diligent do not have the chance to learn the newest knowledge and understanding of the universe,” says Chen Zhiying, a student in the People’s Republic of China. “But now, due to the OCW, the knowledge will spread to more and more people, and it will benefit the whole [world of] human-beings.”

Sarah, aged 3, Learns About Soap

A Dialogue with Sarah, aged 3: in which it is shown that if your dad is a chemistry professor, asking “why” can be dangerous [the broken link was removed] by Stephen McNeil.

DAD: Why does the soap grab the dirt?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Because soap is a surfactant.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why is soap a surfactant?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: That is an EXCELLENT question. Soap is a surfactant because it forms water-soluble micelles that trap the otherwise insoluble dirt and oil particles.

Great. I remember such discussions with Dad (Chemical Engineering professor). The only danger I saw was him getting tied of -why? (when I was older). And sometimes giving me answers the teacher didn’t like (a way of doing math problems that wasn’t the way my teacher was teaching).

Epidemic of Diagnoses

Edited version from our managment improvement blog.

What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses by Dr. Welch, Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Woloshin:

For most Americans, the biggest health threat is not avian flu, West Nile or mad cow disease. It’s our health-care system.

True, and probably the biggest economic threat too.

But it also leads to more diagnoses, a trend that has become an epidemic.
This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease.

When I read:

But the real problem with the epidemic of diagnoses is that it leads to an epidemic of treatments. Not all treatments have important benefits, but almost all can have harms.

I just think: tampering!

Boiling Water in Space

Bizarre Boiling, NASA:

The next time you’re watching a pot of water boil, perhaps for coffee or a cup of soup, pause for a moment and consider: what would this look like in space? Would the turbulent bubbles rise or fall? And how big would they be? Would the liquid stay in the pan at all?

Until a few years ago, nobody knew. Indeed, physicists have trouble understanding the complex behavior of boiling fluids here on Earth. Perhaps boiling in space would prove even more baffling…. It’s an important question because boiling happens not only in coffee pots, but also in power plants and spacecraft cooling systems. Engineers need to know how boiling works.

I had trouble seeing what was happening in the first video. Try this video first.

Because a smaller volume of water is being heated, it comes to a boil much more quickly. As bubbles of vapor form, though, they don’t shoot to the surface — they coalesce into a giant bubble that wobbles around within the liquid.

Engineers Week Ideas

Ideas for engineers to use during engineering week, from the Engineering Education Service Center (on the USA engineering week):

Engineers week is a unique time that takes place every February during Presidents week. 40,000 engineers go into classrooms to promote the profession and give students a better understanding of engineering. This is our chance to show the world that engineering is an exciting career and that engineers really can do anything!

If you know of other similar activities in other countries please add a comment.