May
2004
Copyright © 2004 World Expertise LLC – All rights
reserved
A periodic electronic newsletter for engineering education
leaders,
edited by Russel C. Jones, Ph.D., P.E., and Bethany S.
Oberst, Ph.D.
5 – Employment
6 – Journals
7 – Meetings
___________________________________________________________________
US allows return of suspected Iraqi university faculty, administrators –
The
US, in a reversal of a previous policy, has permitted faculty and administrators
in Iraq’s universities to return to their posts, despite their former
membership in Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, according to Erin Strout writing
for the Chronicle of Higher Education. One
of the first acts of Paul Bremer III, when he assumed responsibility as chief
civilian administrator of the occupying forces, was to dismiss all former
Baathist government workers. The
order swept away thousands of faculty and all deans and presidents, causing
anti-American feelings to run higher. Most
hard hit were the universities of Tikrit and
Election upset in India – India’s economy is booming, but
many have been left behind, according to an article by Manjeet Kripalani and
Pete Engardio in the May 31st Business
Week. It has 2.5 million college graduates annually, but 380 million Indians
are illiterate; its 2003 revenue from software exports was $15-billion, but 300
million live in poverty. The
country’s huge deficit leaves little room for a surge in social spending.
These facts contributed to the change in government in the May elections, as the
disenfranchised unseated the incumbent government in the world’s largest
democracy. The Congress Party, which will form the new government, is expected
to focus on education for the poor, rural infrastructure development,
improvement of rural health, and secularism to end religious discrimination.
(See http://www.businessweek.com)
European universities turn to fund-raising – The Chronicle
of Higher Education recently published a major article by Aisha Labi on the
emergence of fund-raising in European universities.
Until now, the concept of asking graduates for money to support the
functioning of their university was unheard of.
Universities are almost exclusively state-funded and students are
admitted on their credentials, not recruited and courted.
With public funding dropping, and with the very successful US model of
college fund- raising before their eyes, European universities have begun to
engage in building relationships with their graduates and in soliciting money
from them. (See http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i34/34a03901.htm)
European university group plans to increase mobility for doctoral
candidates – The Combria Group of 39 European universities recently
announced plans to promote mobility of doctoral students by creating
comprehensive quality standards which would permit students to take courses
offered by universities other than the one at which they are registered. The
plan is consonant with the principles of harmonization outlined in the Bologna
Declaration, according to Aisha Labi of the Chronicle of Higher Education. While
all member institutions of the Combria Group approved the plan, not all intend
to participate. Some members believe
that harmonization at the doctoral level should be led by other organizations,
and that the Combria Group should concentrate its efforts on masters and
undergraduate degrees. (See http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/04/2004042606n.htm)
Reinventing Europe’s universities – European researchers
wonder why their universities do not have the same researcher star status as
America’s Ivy League, according to an article in the May 14th Science
by Martin Enserink. Of the top 10 ranked universities worldwide, eight are
in the
Turkish government proposes revision of university admission standards
for Islamic-educated students –
Steps needed for US to retain its pre-eminent position in engineering
and science – On May 4 the US National Science Board released its
biennial Science and Engineering Indicators 2004.
The bottom line is that the
Terrorism takes its effect on studies abroad programs
– Jennifer Jacobson, writing for the Chronicle
of Higher Education, described how US colleges and universities are reacting
to terrorism threats around the world in their studies abroad programs.
According to the
US is losing its dominance in science and innovation – According
to a front page article by William Broad in the May 3rd New
York Times, the
Survey reports continuing public support for
NASA expects space shuttle to fly again by next spring – NASA
has made sufficient progress modifying the space shuttle fleet to be confident
that it can safely resume flying next spring, according to an article by Warren
Leary in the May 1st New York
Times. The remaining three space shuttles have been grounded since the
Columbia disintegrated in the atmosphere upon re-entry in February 2003,
apparently due to a piece of fuel tank foam hitting the edge of a wing and
damaging heat shielding tiles during launch. The Columbia Accident Investigation
Board made 15 recommendations, and NASA has to date completed responses to all
but three. Major issues that remain include finding ways to prevent significant
debris shedding from the external fuel tank, and developing a remote inspection
system for shuttles in flight. (See http://www.nytimes.com)
New
Group calls for revisions of visa application process – A
coalition of higher education groups, including engineers, has called for
changes to be made in the way visa applications are processed in the US in order
to reverse the impression that the US is no longer an attractive place for
international students and scholars to study and conduct research.
Their recommendations include such things as permitting foreign students
to pay the $100 fee to support the Student and Exchange Visitor Information
Service (SEVIS) after they arrive in the US, and giving priority to visa
applications that have been in process for over 30 days, writes Kelly Field, a
reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education. (See http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/05/2004051304n.htm)
50th anniversary of key integration ruling – May 17th
marked the 50th anniversary of Brown
v. Board of Education, the landmark US Supreme Court ruling that declared
racially segregated “separate but equal” schools unconstitutional. African
Americans have made major strides since – economically, socially, and
educationally – according to an article in the May 17th Business
Week by William Symonds. But starting in the late 1980’s, political
backlash has brought racial progress to a halt. Courts have been pulling back,
saying for example that heavily black
Engineer receives prize for invention of LED – The world’s
largest cash prize for invention, the 2004 Lemelson-MIT Prize, was awarded to
Nick Holonyak, Jr., of the
Women engineers in high places – A note in the Summer 2004 ASEE
Prism observes that while the number of women in engineering remains small,
several have advanced to high profiles within the profession. Women have
recently been elected to presidencies in five major professional societies:
Teresa Hemlinger at NSPE, Patricia Galloway at ASCE, Susan Skemp at ASME, Dianne
Doreland at AIChE, and Sherra Kerns at ASEE. Hopefully these role models will
make engineering more attractive to young women. (See http://www.asee.org/prism)
Foundations insert anti-terrorism wording in grants – Erin
Strout of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Ford and
Rockefeller Foundations (USA) have added anti-terrorism wording into their grant
agreements, a move that has prompted some university provosts to protest. The
foundations say that these changes are intended to prevent their funds from
falling into the hands of terrorist groups.
The provosts, all from leading universities, claim the language is too
vague to be enforceable and may lead to suppression of some cultural or
political aspects of research projects. The
foundations said they are willing to work with the provosts to resolve these
issues. Together, the two foundations accounted for about $50 million in grants
in 2003. (See http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/05/2004050501n.htm)
Audits reveal security weaknesses in
US supercomputing to be placed in Office of Science and Technology
Policy – The Bush administration has proposed legislation to
reorganize supercomputing programs by placing them under the authority of the
White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The bill also asks federal agencies to develop new software and to
support education in areas such as computer science, applied math, and
computational science. No new money,
however, was attached to the bill. The
Sylvan Learning Systems Renamed – A Baltimore-based firm best
known for operating after-school training centers across the US and Canada has
changed its name from Sylvan Learning Systems to Laureate Education, according
to an article by Bill Brubaker in the May 18th Washington Post. The change reflects the company’s new focus on
running career-oriented universities outside the
Inappropriate use of Internet2? – Internet2, whose main
mission is to support research, is being used for file swapping by students.
Although this use does not threaten the speed of the network, only 15% of
whose bandwidth capacity is in use at any one time, it does violate restrictions
about using the service for illegal purposes.
Internet2 administrators are informing member universities where such
activity is taking place, and leaving it to them to enforce their own policies,
according to Brock Read of the Chronicle of Higher Education. (See http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/05/2004050402n.htm)
Dell discusses computer re-cycling – Dell, Inc., an important
provider of computers at many
Nanotechnology: hype and fear – An eclectic band of scientists
has mapped out a new frontier in recent years – nanotechnology. According to a
special report in the May 6th Business
Week Online, the explorers in this new field come from several disciplines:
biologists, chemists, physicists, chipmakers, and computational experts. The
basic question being addressed is how to control the building blocks of matter
from the bottom up. Nanotechnology arguably shows as much promise in both
science and business as any other technology of the past century, including
nuclear energy and genetics. But before business rushes in with applications of
the developing science, an assessment of the risks it may pose to public health
and the environment needs to be done. Just as nuclear waste and the concern over
genetically modified foods have raised questions about what were hyped to be
transforming technologies, many people are concerned that nanomaterials could
create problems if introduced without thorough testing. (See www.businessweek.com)
Life-expectancy of a link – The life-span of a link is not a
physiological issue, but a technology problem.
Scholars are beginning to do serious research into the time it takes for
a typical web link to disappear, change or become outdated.
Concerns are increasingly being raised about the instability of the
Internet as a medium for research and archiving knowledge.
One study has indicated that the half-life of the links examined was
fifteen months. A study of the
Medline archive run by the US National Library of Medicine showed that links in
its database have a half-life of seven years.
Solutions to this problem include having the publisher or author of an
article archive the content of links, according to Scott Carlson, writing for
the Chronicle of Higher Education. (See http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i34/34a03301.htm)
Tracking tags get field test – Wal-Mart has begun a major
field test of radio tagging on several of its products, according to an article
by Barnaby Feder in the May 1st New
York Times. The field test involves 21 radio-tagged products from 8
manufacturers – a step toward its goal of having its top 100 suppliers using
radio tags to track their shipments by the end of the year. Radio tagging is
intended to reduce theft, better match supplies to demand for particular
products, and speed distribution. Unlike bar codes, radio tags do not have to be
in the line of sight of a reader to be recognized, they can carry far more
information about the product, and large numbers of tags can be read
simultaneously. Concerns have been expressed about the accuracy and cost of the
system, and about privacy of consumers once the products have been purchased.
(See http://www.nytimes.com)
E-voting raises security concerns – The Chronicle of Higher Education published a major article on
electronic and web-based voting systems written by reporter Peter Schmidt.
The report covers the safety of such systems, their vulnerability to
hacking, political corruption, and terrorism, and the role of a group of
computer scientists who have launched a well-organized and effective attack
against the proliferation of such systems. Proponents
of the use of web-based systems say that they will provide more people –
including military and civilians living abroad – with the opportunity to vote
via the internet. They are eager to
expand on a small-scale experiment the US Department of Defense recently
conducted. Critics say that internet
systems are too vulnerable to various kinds of abuse and corruption to be used
reliably yet. The discussion has
moved beyond year 2000 concern about hanging chads and predates it.
Since the 1990s the US Congress and various states have invested large
amounts of money to prompt localities to replace outdated voting systems. This
infusion of money has attracted the attention of scholars, particularly in areas
of computer security. And a core of
those researchers has been able to generate sufficient doubt about the security
of elections when using electronic techniques that the push to implement modern
systems has been thwarted. No one
claims that any voting system is perfect, least of all Larry Sabato, a political
scientist at the
New undersea cable projects – The undersea cable industry has
not had smooth sailing in recent times, according to an article in the May 15th
On-line resources raise concerns among
Blackout question still open – As the
Use of electronic signatures approved – For the first time,
the US Department of Education is accepting electronic signatures for waivers of
privacy laws when requesting personal data about students.
The announcement was to take effect on May 21, although institutions
which jumped the gun will not be reprimanded, according to Andrea L. Foster of
the Chronicle of Higher Education.
(See http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/04/2004042205n.htm)
US engineering faculty among highest paid . . . but – The
annual survey of US faculty salaries conducted by the College and University
Professional Association for Human Resources revealed that in 2003-2004 the
highest paid professors, on average, were from law ($109,478), engineering
($84,784) and business ($79,931). One reason for the high law salaries is that a
higher percentage (60%) of law faculty are at the professor rank.
Overall, according to Scott Smallwood writing for the Chronicle of
Higher Education, faculty salaries increased by 2.1% on average, the lowest
percentage in 30 years. Faculty at
unionized public institutions fared a little better than their counterparts in
non-unionized schools. The complete
data are available at http://cupahr.org. (See http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i35/35a01601.htm)
Expanding the mind – The cover story in the Summer 2004 issue
of ASEE Prism, by Dan McGraw, asks:
“Creativity is such an integral part of being an engineer, but how on earth do
you teach it?” Many engineering schools say that they foster creativity and
innovation among their students. How to teach these two attributes, however, has
almost as many approaches as there are faculty members involved. One faculty
member says that these are skills that can be learned – that every student can
be more creative, better at problem solving and invention, if they are made
aware of their own creativity and how to improve it. The author states:
“Teaching students to be creative liberates them. The mother of invention is
freedom; the father of invention is hedonism”. (See http://www.asee.org/prism)
Off-shoring in the curriculum – The Chronicle of Higher Education recently looked at
off-shoring/out-sourcing as a subject taught in US business schools and found
that it is approached in a variety of ways.
Some universities such as Emory and
More black students in engineering – The US Department of
Education has reported that the percentage of black college students majoring in
engineering has increased from less than 2% to more than 12% in the past 30
years, according to an article in the April 19th USA
Today by In-Sung Yoo. The study compared high school graduating classes from
1972, 1982, and 1992 – with the percentage of black students with engineering
majors going from 1.7% to 6.1% to 12.6% respectively. The study found that 70%
of black engineers from the high school class of 1992 took either pre-calculus
or calculus in high school, and that seven of eight black students who had
strong involvement in math and science courses and activities in high school
went on to get engineering degrees. (See http://usatoday.com)
Harvard recommends changes in core curriculum –
Learning deficit in poor countries – The lack of quality
education programs holds back much of the world, according to an article in the
April 22nd Economist.com. Where
schools do exist in poor countries, there may be no qualified teachers and a
lack of teaching materials and basic equipment. Up to now, the emphasis on aid
programs for such countries has been on the proportion of children who enroll in
schools, with less attention paid to ensuring a decent education and to keeping
them enrolled. In a recent assessment, only 3% of students in
Tuition breaks for some illegal immigrants – The state of
Kansas (USA) has followed the lead of
Statistics on engineering education -
The ‘Databytes’ pages in the two most recent issues of ASEE
Prism contain interesting information on faculty and student patterns. In
the April issue, faculty numbers and student enrollments are listed by
engineering discipline. Electrical and computer engineering is largest, with
6,284 faculty, 114,456 undergraduate students, and 47,818 graduate students.
Following those numbers in decreasing size are mechanical engineering, computer
science, and civil engineering – with ten other branches significantly
smaller. In the Summer 2004 issue of Prism,
engineering enrollments and degrees are shown to be up – bachelor’s
degrees at 70,949 in 2003 compared with 62, 372 in 1999, and undergraduate
enrollments almost 374,000 in 2003, up 13% from 1999. (See http://www.asee.org/prism)
Coalition presses for more responsible investing by university boards –
Representative from 22 elite US colleges and universities have formed the
Responsible Endowments Coalition to promote social progress, including more
stringent world-wide labor standards, responsible investing, and
equal-opportunity personnel policies. In
particular, it is advocating the management of university endowments so as to
promote socially beneficial initiatives through divesting from unsuitable
companies. The coalition urges
universities to vote on shareholder resolutions, which is something that is left
frequently unattended, according to John L. Pulley for the Chronicle
of Higher Education. Trustees of
the institutions, however, are torn between their desire to take guidance from
such a group, and their responsibility to the institution in terms of increasing
funds through investments. (See http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/04/2004042301n.htm)
5 – Employment
Tech jobs come back – After a three-year slump that erased
more than three million jobs, US technology companies have begun hiring again,
according to an article in the April 29th Wall
Street Journal by Scott Thurm. The gains to date are tiny – fewer than
20,000 jobs since late last year – and concentrated among smaller companies,
but they may mark a trend that could brighten the country’s economic outlook.
For the first time in several years, more workers are being hired than fired,
and companies are again raising salaries. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics
reports that after eliminating more than 538,000 jobs in the course of three
years, makers of computer hardware and components added 2000 jobs between
December and March; and computer system design companies added 14,400 since last
July. Despite a strong surge in both revenues and profits, though, many
technology executives remain exceptionally cautious – with layoffs continuing
in some operations, and tech companies still expanding their overseas
operations. (See http://www.wsj.com) See
also a similar article, “Tech Jobs are Sprouting Again” by Spencer Ante and
Ben Elgin in the May 10th Business
Week. (http://www.businessweek.com)
India losing edge for outsourcing – Wages in India’s major
outsourcing areas have been rising by close to 15% a year, due to an increasing
competition for qualified labor, according to an article in the May 2nd
New York Times by Noam Schreiber. The
stiffest competition for offshore labor is for managers in the
business-processing sector, where companies poach from one another for qualified
and effective individuals. To date the heaviest competition for qualified
employees has been in
Startups head overseas – Tech startups are heading overseas
even more eagerly than multinationals, according to an article in the May 17th
Business week by Spencer Ante and
Robert Hof. Venture capitalists are prodding companies they invest in to hire
workers overseas. While some 15% of the 145 large companies recently surveyed by
Forrester Research say they have made offshoring a permanent part of their
strategy, an informal survey of venture capitalists suggests 20 to 25% of the
companies they invest in have a comparable commitment. Motivation includes
lowering costs and finding good talent. (See http://www.businessweek.com)
Employment lagging in
Is Siemens still German? – Siemens employs so many people
abroad that it is reasonable to ask whether it is still a German company,
according to an article by Jack Ewing in the May 17th Business
Week. The company has steadily reduced domestic employment even as total
employment has grown: in 1994 it had 218,000 domestic employees in a pool of
376,000 globally; in 2004, the domestic number has shrunk to 167,000 within a
larger global pool of 415,000. Relocation of assembly line jobs to where the
customers are has been a major reason for this shift – but more recently
software jobs are also moving offshore. Still, Siemens is
Outsourcing predictions increased – The number 3.3 million,
Forrester Research’s predicted volume of US jobs that will move overseas by
2015, has been extensively cited as a mantra for the jobless recovery in the US.
Now the researchers have issued an update of that 2002 prediction, indicating
that job losses will hit a lot sooner than previously expected, according to a
note in the May 24th Time. Forrester
now believes that by the end of next year some 830,000 jobs will have gone
abroad, mainly to
6 – Journals
Journal of Engineering Education – ASEE’s April 2004 Journal
includes four papers from the 2002 Frontiers in Education Conference, and
four additional papers. Topics include description of a nationwide
Internet-based bridge design contest, student-controlled learning,
faculty-student interactions, and a unique approach to assessment. (See http://asee.org/publications)
IEEE Transactions on Education – The May 2004 issue includes
eighteen papers, covering topics such as software modeling techniques, computing
in the classroom, technology transfer, and web-based applications. (See http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/es)
7 – Meetings
Convocation of Engineering Societies – The National Academy of
Engineering hosted its annual Convocation for leaders of the professional
engineering societies on 3-4 May 2004. In a section on Engineering and Public
Policy, Senator Jeff Bingaman outlined current congressional concerns in science
and technology policy, focusing on the issue of whether the
Global Outsourcing Roundtable – Five large engineering
societies held a roundtable on global outsourcing at the US Capital on May 18th,
organized by the ASME Washington staff. Private sector perspectives were
provided by a panel of experts from academia, an economics think tank, and a
council concerned with government procurement practices. Public policy
perspectives were added through presentations by Representative Vernon Ehlers
and Representative Donald Manzullo, followed by a panel of House and Senate
staffers. The final section of the meeting consisted of a panel of engineering
society representatives, describing what their organizations were doing on the
issue of offshoring. Current society positions range from no-action-to date, to
formal policy statements adopted by governing boards. The most extensive society
activity has been by IEEE-USA, which has a formal policy statement on offshore
outsourcing which was approved by its board in March 2004. (See http://www.ieeeusa.org/forum/POSITIONS)
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