Copyright © 2003 World Expertise LLC – All rights reserved
A periodic electronic newsletter for engineering education leaders,
edited by Russel C. Jones, Ph.D., P.E., with Bethany S. Oberst, Ph.D.
5 – Employment
6 – Journals
7 – Meetings
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Faculty shortage in
Infrastructure rebuilding in Iraq - An Iraqi civil engineer
living in Baghdad, Ra’ad Ali Abdul-Aziz Al-Hamidi, has written an article
which appears in the August 2003 ASCE
News, describing the state of the construction industry in Iraq. The author
points out that although the construction industry in
Intel goes to China - Intel has announced its plans to invest
over US$ 200-million in a semiconductor plant in Chengdu, China, according to an
article by Jason Dean in the August 27th Wall Street Journal. This investment highlights that country’s
increasingly central role in the global electronics supply chain, and it
delivers a boost to
China to push research collaboration - China’s burgeoning support for research has given its researchers a taste for the latest research tools, according to an article by Ding Yimin in the August 15th Science. But their growing appetite is straining the country’s budget, so the government has launched an effort to stop redundant equipment purchases and to encourage the sharing of costly facilities and instrumentation. To help push institutions into collaborating, the government has formed a joint committee involving 16 organizations that fund research to rationalize access to research facilities. (See http://www.sciencemag.org)
Globalization raises living standards - The Economist on August 21, 2003, extracted a couple of charts from a presentation made by Stanley Fischer to make the point that globalization has, in fact, begun to raise the standard of living for everyone, and does not just make the rich richer. There is evidence on these charts to support the claims of the anti-globalizationists, too, but the writer of the article believes that the bottom line is that more globalization is called for, along with realignment of trade policies and control of corruption, in order to bring about even more economic progress. (See http://www.economist.com)
Plagiarism in
French change research leadership - The French government has fired the director of the country’s main basic research agency, CNRS, and shuffled two other senior research posts, according to an article by Barbara Casassus in the August 8th Science. A statement from the research ministry suggested that Genevieve Berger was not the right person to implement major reforms in French science that the government is expected to propose in the coming months. Observers suggested a darker scenario, noting that the government had been unhappy with her high-profile statements condemning cuts in French research budgets. CNCR’s budget suffered a 33% cut for 2003. Appointed to replace Berger is the head of the information technology research agency, Bernard Larrouturou. (See http://www.sciencemag.org)
Exam selling in
Affirmative action after Supreme Court ruling -
The University of Michigan, as expected, announced its new
approach to undergraduate admissions, acting in response to the recent US
Supreme Court decision that its previous system was not “narrowly tailored”
enough to be legal. According to Chronicle
reporter Peter Schmidt, the new procedure, which will be effective for
transfer students seeking admission to the
NASA heavily criticized in disaster report - The probe into the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster has severely criticized NASA for not absorbing the lessons of the Challenger explosion in 1986, and for relying too much on a complex bureaucracy of external contractors. According to August 27th articles in the New York Times by David Sanger and in the Wall Street Journal by J. Lynn Lunsford and Anne Marie Squeo, the final report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board also criticized four successive US presidents for failing to decide where America’s space program should head after the Cold War, and what it would cost in dollars and risk to human life to get there. Among the Board’s 29 recommendations: start a program to eliminate foam from the external tank thermal protection system; toughen the shuttle skin to make it more impact-resistant; develop a practical way to inspect and do emergency repairs to the shuttle while in space; and establish an independent Technical Engineering Authority that takes a systematic approach to identifying, analyzing, and controlling problems. (See http://www.nytimes.com and http://www.wsj.com)
Engineers deal with failure - In an August 29th
Bush criticized for politicizing science - The Bush administration has repeatedly mischaracterized scientific facts to bolster its political agenda in areas ranging from education to missile defense, according to a report compiled by the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee and released by Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif). The 40-page document, “Politics and Science in the Bush Administration”, highlights simmering anger among scientists and others who believe that President Bush has been spiking science with politics to justify conservative policies, according to an article in the August 8th Washington Post by Rick Weiss. “The Administration’s political interference with science has led to misleading statements by the President, inaccurate responses to Congress, altered web sites, suppressed agency reports, erroneous international communications, and the gagging of scientists” according to the report. The White House quickly dismissed the report as partisan sniping. (See http://www.washingtonpost.com)
Financial woes for California universities - California
Universities have been hit by a new round of budget cuts, and more bad news lies
ahead, according to an article by Erik Stokstad in the August 15th Science.
The governor and legislature have chopped $410-million from the $2.9-billion
previously slated for the nine-campus
Tuition raises concern lawmakers - Public college tuition
increases across the
Terrorism laws negatively impact students - An article by Adrian
Arroyo in the Spring 2003 Transnational
Lawyer reviews the impact of the US Patriot Act and the Border Security Bill
on academic institutions in the
Viruses hit universities at bad time - The Chronicle of Higher Education headline says it all:
“Campus-Network Administrators Say Timing of Sobig.F Virus Couldn’t Have
Been Worse.” Just as
Culture of software programmers questioned - The recent storm of
computer viruses has provoked some serious questions about the nature and
discipline of code writing, according to Robert A. Guth, writing for the
Wall Street Journal on
Spam control legislation debated - Do you opt for opting in or
opting out? Or, is an e-mail
account any more private than a snail-mail box?
Those are some of the questions being asked as the US Congress considers
what to do about spam, according to Saul Hansell writing on
Spam control via probability filters - Saving private e-mail from unwanted messages is discussed in the August 2003 IEEE Spectrum by Stephen Vaughan-Nichols. The author states that in the spam war trenches, clever programmers are trying to stem the tide of unwanted messages. This past May, e-mail reached a distressing milestone – the amount of spam exceeded non-spam for the first time ever. People have been struggling with spam for 10 years or more, using techniques such as blacklisting, not accepting mail from known spammers or from mail servers that harbor them, and filtering by automatically rejecting messages with typical spam key words. False positives lie at the heart of the spam problem, with the criterion that ‘any measure for stopping spam must ensure that all non-spam messages reach their intended recipients’ providing a serious constraint. New strategies are centering on techniques of probability, to analyze entire e-mail messages instead of just the words that jump out in headings (“Viagra”, “cable descramblers”, etc.). The new Bayesian filters are trained by each user, learning the terms usually found in spam messages and the remaining good messages. (See http://www.spectrum.ieee.org)
On-line MBA offered internationally - Universitas 21 Global
began offering its first courses in August to a group of 27 students.
The consortium of 17 research universities in 10 countries is aiming at
students in developing countries, and is beginning with an MBA offered entirely
on-line. Cost and reputation are
important in selling on-line degrees, according to an official at the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation. Universitas 21
Global’s MBA degree costs about $10,000, while the
Instant messaging on campus - Dartmouth College (USA) has a
history of twenty years of intensive and extensive e-mails under its belt,
according to Katie Hafner, writing on
Universities scramble re phone service for students - For some decades, colleges and universities contracted with long-distance providers to offer phone service to dorm rooms and then marked up the cost. As noted by Raymund Flandez writing in the August 8th Wall Street Journal, however, students have recently been abandoning their dorm phones in favor of cellular phones. Schools are responding by revamping their long-distance offerings or by pushing cell-phone service themselves, hoping that the commissions or discounts on the phones that they provide employees will make up for some of the lost revenue from long-distance sales. The average college student spends just under $50 a month for cellular service, and 78% of students currently have cell-phones. Colleges are trying to win incoming students away from their existing plans by offering monthly rates in the $20 range, and selling phone units at about 15% below retail – and earning commissions of around $2 a month for each such conversion. (See http://www.wsj.com)
Microsoft enjoys good campus receptivity - Microsoft is enjoying
a big role on campuses, making donations to fund research and building long-term
connections, according to an article by Ariana Eunjung Cha in the August 25th
Washington Post. In 1999, for example,
it donated software and computers worth $25-million to MIT, saying that it
wanted to jointly develop educational technologies. Although faculty and
students expressed more suspicion than gratitude at the start of that
relationship, today the protests are over and Microsoft technology is firmly
entrenched at MIT: design classes use Microsoft programs, courses use PowerPoint
for presentations, the computer network is being overhauled to use Microsoft’s
.net architecture, and video games have become a subject of scholarly inquiry.
Similar transformations are taking place at university campuses across the
country, escalating the debate over corporate influence on academia. But
Microsoft’s donations are a special case – because students are likely to
keep using the technology after graduation, helping to maintain Microsoft’s
software industry dominance. Microsoft has lavished $500-million over the past
five years on research and teaching projects at 1000 schools, funding research
efforts by 6000 faculty members. These donations have allowed universities to
conduct projects they otherwise could not have dreamed of, given their limited
research budgets. (See http://www.washingtonpost.com)
Short path between any two individuals - The “six degrees of separation” contemporary article of faith was tested by researchers at Columbia University (USA), and depending on who is interpreting the results, has been either affirmed or refuted. The concept, based on a 1967 experiment, is that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by only six “steps” or connections. In this updated attempt at replication, over 60,000 people were asked to try to contact one of 18 people around the world, using e-mail. Only 2% of the e-mail chains reached their intended targets. Many of the chains dropped because a recipient did not bother to respond. Some believe that this response really confirms that we are all connected, but others say that it shows that the “six degrees” concept is akin to believing that alligators lurk in city sewers. More work is scheduled to improve the research design. Kenneth Chang reported for the New York Times. (See http://www.nytimes.com)
The future of technology - The August 25th issue of Business
Week is a special double issue with major coverage of the future of
technology. In the ‘Big Picture’ section, it discusses why tech will blossom
again, productivity – a gift that keeps on giving,
Music piracy fight comes to campus - To fight music piracy, the
recording industry is going to schools to apply pressure on college
administrators to curb illegal file-sharing over their networks. Writing in the
August 28th Washington Post, Rebecca
Dana reports that the industry is also going after individual students with some
800 subpoenas – hoping to terrify cash-strapped students about using
peer-to-peer file-sharing software for music piracy. As a result of 2300 letters
sent to university administrators, incoming freshmen have attended technology
orientation programs on this topic around the country in recent weeks.
Universities have motivation to curb such copying in addition to the music
industry pressure – many have suffered from sluggish connections caused by
widespread peer-to-peer software use. The music industry hopes to recapture a
generation of students who have come to believe that music is free. One
university official stated “We do a disservice to our students if they leave
here without having learned the basics of intellectual property law”. (See http://www.washingtonpost.com)
Annual
Can entrepreneurship be taught? - Entrepreneurship programs at
US colleges and universities have proliferated recently, prompting some to ask
whether entrepreneurial skills can, in fact, be taught.
According to Jeff Bailey, writing for the Wall
Street Journal in an article published on
NSF seeks more diverse scientific workforce - Participants in a
recent daylong workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation discussed
what it will take to produce a more diverse US scientific and technical
workforce, according to an article by Jeffrey Mervis in the August 22nd
Science. It was agreed that a lot of
academic carrots and a few sticks are needed, that universities must take the
problem more seriously, and that there must be good jobs at the end of the
college years. The workshop supplemented a new report from the NSF Board that
laments an inadequate supply of domestic scientific talent. That report
emphasizes increasing the number of women and underrepresented minorities in
science and technology. NSF efforts will focus on universities, since that is
where the agency has the greatest leverage. Among other steps, NSF is cracking
down on grant applications that do not adequately describe the larger societal
impact of the research, including steps to broaden the scientific pool by
reaching out to underrepresented groups. (See http://www.sciencemag.org)
Friday classes are back - Colleges are beginning to push a
five-day work week for their students, bringing back Friday classes to ease up
on a lecture-hall space crunch and cutting down on an extra day of partying.
According to an article by Elizabeth Bernstein in the August 29th Wall
Street Journal, this move is a shift at many schools, which in recent years
have been pampering their students. With tuition at record levels and the
economy still off, school officials say that parents want a full week’s worth
of teaching for their money. Study habits are another issue, with extended
weekends encouraging extra procrastination. To no one’s surprise, the change
is not going over well with many students. One recent study shows that students
who cram information into a three- or four-day period vs. five days do not
retain as much. (See http://www.wsj.com)
University licensing law being reviewed - The Bayh-Dole Act of
1980 allows universities to patent and exclusively license federally funded
inventions. According to Jerry and Marie Thursby writing in the August 22nd
Science, though, because of dramatic
growth in university licensing the Act has become controversial and is the
subject of a policy review. Bayh-Dole advocates argue that in its absence, many
results from federally funded research would remain in the laboratory. Critics
say that exclusive licenses are not needed for technology transfer and that
universities are chasing profits. Evidence suggests that university licensing
facilitates technology transfer with minimal effects on the research
environment, but some effects are not yet understood; for example, does faculty
involvement in licensing complement or substitute for open publication. (See http://www.sciencemag.org)
SAT scores up, but gaps remain - The Wall Street Journal on August 27, 2003, reported that Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs) returned to 1974 levels, but that gaps between whites and blacks, and whites and Mexican-Americans, grew. Reporter June Kronholtz also pointed out that the gap between males and female increased in both math and verbal parts of the test. These issues remain despite huge resources having been poured into closing such gaps. (See http://www.wsj.com)
Ethical issues in education -The September-October 2003 issue of
Change magazine contains a series of
articles on ethical issues in teaching and learning. Articles cover promoting
ethical action through democratic dialogue, moral and political considerations,
ethical issues in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and enabling good
work in higher education. The latter article addresses key questions about the
conditions of excellent, ethical and personally rewarding work in academia, and
how institutions can reshape their missions to enable productive work in times
of change. (See http://www.heldref.org)
Homogenizing by PowerPoint - For anyone who has struggled over
creating a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation to accompany a talk, the article
published on
Media used in the classroom - Time magazine recently published a blurb featuring four university
courses which capture the trends of today. The
University of Texas School of Law, Williams College, UCLA, and the University of
Puget Sound received the honor of seeing their courses on “Cyberlaw,”
“Terrorism and National Security,” “Bollywood
Cinema,” and “Mars Exploration” featured in a national publication as well
as in their list of course offerings. Maggie Shnayerson was writing on
5 – Employment
Chinese graduates find jobs scarce - According to the Washington
Post (
Jobs moving from Eastern Europe to China - Eastern Europe’s
dynamos are losing jobs to Asia, according to an article by Bruce Einhorn in the
September 1st Business Week. Major
multi-national companies that built high tech plants in
AOL has major service center in
Can US engineers compete with low salaries elsewhere - ‘Competing
with the $800 a month (or less) engineer’ is the lead article in the IEEE
National Capital Area Scanner. Written
by Paul Kostek, a past-president of IEEE-USA, the article focuses on the
negative impact of globalization for many engineers and other high-tech
professionals. The author states that engineering jobs are being contracted out
and moved outside the
Pros and cons of outsourcing jobs - The August 25th Business
Week asks whether outsourcing jobs is bad. Kathleen Madigan writes “yes”
– this is no longer about a few low-wage or manufacturing jobs; now one of
three jobs is at risk. Michael Mandel writes “no” –
Congress told of global outsourcing concerns - Two major
engineering groups recently expressed their concerns to Congress about the
growing number of white-collar jobs that are being shipped offshore, according
to an article in the August/September 2003 issue of Engineering Times. In testimony before the House Committee on Small
Business, an IEEE representative said that rising engineering unemployment may
be the result of fundamental changes in the US economy, and that could have
serious effects on the profession’s status as an attractive career. Another
speaker noted that global outsourcing could have negative consequences for
homeland security, as well as hurt small engineering firms. (See http://www.nspe.org)
6 – Journals
International Journal of Engineering Education – A special issue of this journal, Vol. 19 No. 3, is dedicated to Distance Controlled Laboratories and Learning Systems. Guest editor Nesimi Ertugrul has assembled some 20 papers which cover a wide spectrum of electrical and electronic engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and environmental and ecological science. Some papers cover resource sharing software useful in remote experimentation systems and client-server architectures. Other topics covered include Internet mediated integrated learning and teaching laboratories, computer-based instrumentation and control, and studies on mechatronics and robotics. (See http://www.ijee.dit.ie)
IEEE Transactions on Education – The August 2003 issue
contains some fourteen papers on classroom and laboratory approaches in
electrical engineering instruction. One paper of broad interest describes an
international virtual design studio program, used by three universities (
7 – Meetings
ABET Annual Meeting – The annual meeting of the Accreditation
Board for Engineering and Technology will be held in
Colloquium on International Engineering Education – The
Conference for Industry and Education Collaboration – The
annual ASEE CIEC will be held this year in
International Development and Engineering Conference –
International Conference on Sustainability Engineering and Science – The
New Zealand Society for Sustainability Engineering and Science will hold a
conference in
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