Recently added articles from ASEE Prism:
A SMALL WORLD, GETTING SMALLER
Jan 01, 2009; ... SOME 30 YEARS AGO, Marshall McLuhan declared that in the 20th-century electronic age, the world had become a global village. McLuhan, author, communications theorist, and, briefly, an engineer- ing major, wrote that electronic technologies would allow collapse of space and time. Today, the ...
ABCs of Pollution
Jan 01, 2009; ... ENVIRONMENT Scientists call them atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs). They're noxious plumes of soot, sulfates, and other chemicals that are darkening skies over Asia, threatening water and agriculture, disturbing the monsoon system, and shrinking glaciers and snowpacks - not to mention ...
Britannia Rules the Whirl
Jan 01, 2009; ... TURBINES The queen of England already owns countless acres of land in the United Kingdom, and quite a few buildings, too. Now she owns the world's largest wind turbine. Under construction in northern England by Clipper Windpower of California, the 10-megawatt behemoth will tower 574 feet ...
Street Smarts
Jan 01, 2009; ... GEOTECHNOLOGY OK, you're walking down a street, and you point your cellphone at a movie theater. Onto your screen flashes a list of what's playing and the running times. You point it at a restaurant. It shows you the menu. When you point it at an office building, you get a directory of ...
Growing Dry
Jan 01, 2009; ... BIOENGINEERING Drought - partly caused by global warming - is becoming a worldwide plague. The amount of drought-affected land has doubled since the late 1970s. So genetic engineers at universities around the world, as well as at companies like Monsanto and DuPont's Pioneer Hi-Bred, are ...
Women to Women
Jan 01, 2009; ... SOCIAL NETWORKING Call it the Facebook of budding scientists and engineers. Underthemicroscope.com is a new social-networking website geared to young women interested in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM subjects. They can blog, link to resources, read science news ...
Books and More Books
Jan 01, 2009; ... DIGITIZATION When Internet giant Google launched its Book Search project in 2004, it aimed to digitize millions of books, in print and out, allowing readers and researchers to do full-text searches. But the scheme ran afoul of many writers and publishers of books still in copyright. The ...
Boom Amid Gloom
Jan 01, 2009; ... FACULTY HIRING With the economy slowing, many states are forced to cut higher-education budgets. But a handful of mineral-rich states are still booming, and their engineering schools benefit. Texas is one. Last August, Mark W. Spong, an esteemed electrical engineer and roboticist, was ...
Soldiers' Aid
Jan 01, 2009; ... NANOTECHNOLOGY Most soldiers killed on the battlefield die within 30 minutes of being wounded. So the faster they can be diagnosed and treated, the better their chances of survival. At the University of California, San Diego, Joseph Wang is working on a "field hospital on a chip" that ...
Dream Factory
Jan 01, 2009; ... ARCHITECTURE A recession and credit crisis are shutting down U.S. automobile plants, but Ferrari remains confident it can still find 6,000 people a year willing to shell out $200,000 for one of its iconic sports cars. So it's continuing to turn its factory complex in Maranello, Italy, ...
Venice of the East
Jan 01, 2009; ... CONSTRUCTION If you visit Shanghai and get a sinking feeling, you're on to something. China's most populous coastal city has had a subsidence problem for decades. This was due, first, to its swampy terrain. Second, there was too much pumping of groundwater. City officials successfully ...
Shredding Old Ways
Jan 01, 2009; ... AGRICULTURE CAMBODIA - Rice farmers in this Southeast Asian nation have traditionally cleared the land by hand. At the 500-acre farm in northwestern Batta m bang province where Sam Pov works, for instance, 30 people would shred the weeds and trees before planting. But large-scale ...
Sticker Shock
Jan 01, 2009; ... HIGHER EDUCATION At a time when the economy demands a knowledgeable workforce, access to higher education in the United States is slipping, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. A key factor is ...
CASSANDRA OF OUTSOURCING
Jan 01, 2009; ... A professor's warnings draw attention, if not public support, from engineers. IN MAY 2003, Ron Hira addressed a group of Carnegie Mellon University engineers and issued this warning: Globalization and the growing amount of research and development work being shipped overseas by American ...
RECYCLING A BUILDING
Jan 01, 2009; ... Part of American manufacturing passes into history. WHEN A REAL-ESTATE developer read about my interest in the history of wooden-toothpick manufacturing in Maine, he informed me that he had bought the old Forster Mfg. Co. toothpick plant in Wilton. All of its machinery was in place, and ...
Millions Log In
Jan 01, 2009; ... After five years, OpenCourseWare has a dedicated following - and many imitators. But it struggles with costs and copyriyhts. MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE TECHNOLOGY Prof. Hal Abelson and Phillip Greenspun have never met Kwadro Gyamfi Osafo-Maafo. They have never visited Ashesi University ...
a level head
Jan 01, 2009; ... KATHY SYKES, PROFESSOR AND BBC STAR, FOSTERS A RATIONAL DEBATE BETWEEN SCIENTISTS AND THE BRITISH PUBLIC. BRISTOL, England - British papers recently were filled with the kind of "frankenscience" stories that make Kathy Sykes cringe. Parliament was preparing to vote in favor of allowing ...
DESERT ADVANCE
Jan 01, 2009; ... Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf neighbors are importing Western-style teaching and research - at a rapid pace. * BY STEPHEN GLAIN ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates - The best Middle Eastern texts are "written in Cairo, printed in Beirut, and read in Baghdad." That saying, popular in the ...
STORY TIME
Jan 01, 2009; ... A well-told yarn holds students' attention and helps them remember what they're taught. IF DAVID CHESNEY is advising students on how to cooperate during group projects, he offers an anecdote that pokes fun at his own finicky streak: When someone at meeting asked to borrow his Pink Pearl ...
TIME TO REFLECT
Jan 01, 2009; ... Learning specialists help point the way to better teaching. ENGINEERING PROFESSORS' teaching approaches are often rooted in their own experience as students. Conceptions of teaching develop over a lengthy period and are often quite resistant to change. Our study investigated whether ...