Funding reports usually focus on the federal level. This databyte reviews research expenditures at the following levels: individual, industry, state, and local. The period of review was 2011-2015, the last five years of available data in the ASEE Profiles of Engineering an Engineering Technology. The five years’ worth of data reveal differences in funding patterns for research expenditures by source. Data show how individual and local sources for research expenditures have remained relatively flat. There has been a decrease in the amount of state funding and an increase in industry funding.

LSU College of Engineering Halfway Through $110 Million Facility Renovation

Construction Project Slated to Reach Completion By End of 2017

The LSU College of Engineering started the Fall 2016 semester with 1,300 high-achieving new students, 13 talented new faculty and a state-of-the-art new facility.

The College’s main building, Patrick F. Taylor Hall, is currently undergoing an extensive, $110 million renovation and expansion project , thanks to more than 500 alumni, donors and companies and the support of the State. Once complete, at the close of 2017, it will be among the largest freestanding engineering buildings in the nation, with more than 462,000-square feet, and will include modern laboratory space for teaching and translational research, a 250-seat auditorium, approximately 110,000-square feet of classrooms, a new student commons area, an updated graduate student space, an academic support center, a dedicated capstone project area, an interactive “classlab” and a sustainable living laboratory.

What’s more: the facility will be connected to a chemical engineering addition by a continuous atrium, allowing students and visitors to observe teaching and research projects in action.

“This new facility will not only provide a contemporary environment for computer scientists, construction managers and engineers to learn,” said Richard Koubek, current LSU Provost and former Dean of the College of Engineering, “it will inspire a culture of innovation among students and researchers working to solve the world’s toughest engineering challenges.”

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STATES’ EXXON FRAUD PROBES STILL VEX HOUSE CHAIRMAN

Reports surfaced earlier this year claiming that oil-and-gas giant Exxon Mobile has for decades buried internal research linking climate change to the burning of fossil fuels and instead funded groups working to deny the science behind global warming. That’s led attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts to launch civil fraud investigations of the company. But Exxon Mobile has an arch defender in Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican and climate-change skeptic who heads the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. Issuing subpoenas, Smith demanded that the state AGs—as well as environmental groups backing their efforts—hand over a slew of documents. But, as The Hill newspaper reports, both states told Smith he had overstepped his authority and refused to cooperate. New York’s AG, Eric Schneiderman, says Smith’s subpoenas violate the principles of federalism and New York’s sovereignty, and that his investigation is confidential. So Smith has scheduled a hearing later this month to attempt to assert his committee’s authority over the AGs, the paper reports. Smith claims that the AGs are attacking the First Amendment rights of the company and other climate-change doubters. Schneiderman retorted in comments to the New York Times: “The First Amendment doesn’t protect you for fraud. Three-card monte operators can’t say, ‘Hey, I’m just exercising my First Amendment rights.’”

HACKERS TARGET VOTER DATABASES IN TWO STATES

Last July, after Wikileaks published emails pilfered from the Democratic National Committee, U.S. officials quickly pointed the finger at Russian government hackers. The DNC leak, just ahead of the party’s convention, was apparently timed to embarrass Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, and cyber security analysts raised fears that Russia may be trying to influence the election. Now, Yahoo News reports, the FBI has found evidence that foreign hackers recently broke into the voter registration databases of Arizona and Illinois. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has offered states help in making their security systems more secure. In Illinois, the hackers stole data on 200,000 voters in late July, forcing the state to shut its voter registration system for 10 days. In Arizona, no data was stolen, but the intruders introduced malicious software into its system. The FBI is investigating whether these attacks and the DNC leaks are linked, Yahoo News says. The Washington Post reports that intelligence and law enforcement agencies are investigating whether a broad, covert effort by Russia is underway to disrupt the election in some fashion to sow public distrust in the results. But here’s a bit of relief: according to Wired magazine, fully three-quarters of Americans still vote using un-hackable paper ballots. Nevertheless, it adds, many states use electronic voting machines in some capacity, and only half of them have auditable paper trails. While that’s worrisome, Wired also quotes an expert on Russian foreign policy and cyber conflicts as saying that if Russia were trying to tamper with voting machines, it wouldn’t have attracted a spotlight by staging the DNC leak. The Post, too, says the effort may not be aimed at swaying the election, but causing glitches that can feed anti-democracy propaganda.

V. INNOVATIONS

A TIDAL-POWER SUCCESS IN THE SHETLAND ISLANDS Given its locale on the north end of the British Isles, sandwiched between two notoriously turbulent bodies of water—the northern Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea—Scotland has long been seen as a prime candidate for wave and tidal power. Indeed, it’s home to perhaps the world’s most advanced marine energy proving station, the European Marine Energy Center. But harnessing the power of the seas for energy production has proved a challenge. Two wave-power firms that had shown early success, Pelamis and Aquamarine, ultimately had to pull the plug on their efforts because of technological and financing setbacks. Now a Scottish power company, Nova Innovation, says it’s deployed the world’s first fully operational array of tidal-power turbines in Scotland’s Shetland Islands. As the Guardian newspaper reports, the firm switched on one of five 100-kilowatt turbines in July and a second in late August. Both are now sending power to Shetland’s local grid. Nova’s plan is to have an array of many linked turbines providing power to the islands. The Shetland Islands are a good fit for Nova—they’re not connected to the main UK grid and rely on a diesel-fueled power station that’s supplied by tankers. Nova says the two turbines are so far operating at 40 percent of their installed capacity, the paper reports. Nova, which has partnered with ELSA, a Belgian renewables company, hopes its commercial success in Scotland will open up a global market for its tidal-power turbines.

TAKING THE HEAT OUT OF PLASTICS MANUFACTURING Researchers at Georgia Tech and Exxon Mobil have invented a material that can sharply reduce the amount of energy needed to manufacture plastics, thereby cutting not only costs but the amount of carbon dioxide released by the industry. During the production of plastics, molecules of para-xylene, a chemical building block for polyester and plastics, have to be separated from complex hydrocarbon mixtures. Current commercial processes use high levels of heat to separate the molecules. The new method devised by the commercial-academic team uses a molecular-level filter peppered with minuscule holes and reverse osmosis to tease out the para-xylene. Mainly been used for desalination of water, reverse osmosis uses pressure to push a mixture through a membrane. The filtering works at room temperature—so there’s no more need for energy-intensive high heat. The next step is to test the filtration method at industrial-size plants.

ENGINEERS WIN GOLDEN GOOSE AWARD Each year the Golden Goose Awards recognize obscure or seemingly off-the-wall scientific research that has had a major impact on society. Among this year’s recipients are John Hagood Vande Vate,: John J. Bartholdi III, and Craig A. Tovey of Georgia Tech's School of Industrial & Systems Engineering; Atlanta-based data scientist Sunil Nakrani; and Cornell University biologist Thomas D. Seeley. Drawing inspiration from how honeybee colonies organize foraging and storage of nectar, they developed a resource-allocation algorithm that revolutionized the way web hosting servers deal with the variable flow of internet traffic. Their bio-inspired work, funded by the National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research, is used by major web hosting companies in a $50 billion market. Read more here.

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VI. THE K-12 REPORT

FUTURE TEACHERS TO LEARN ENGINEERING CONCEPTS Five years ago, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences set out learning objectives for all K-12 science students. In 2013, it created the Next-Generation Science Standards, which incorporate engineering design in science education. Many states, have already adopted the standards, and Virginia’s planned revision of its science standards will include a review of the federal report. Because of that effort, a group of researchers at the University of Virginia’s schools of education and engineering and applied sciences, have gotten a National Science Foundation grant to develop a model for training student teachers on how best to integrate engineering design in their classrooms. The PI is Frackson Mumba, an associate professor of education, who says “we are investing in the future of science education by investing in our pre-service science teachers. They can’t apply something that they don’t understand. Teachers don’t teach what they don’t know.” The plan is to train a cohort of around 50 education students. The students’ current knowledge of science and pedagogical-content will be assessed with an eye toward helping them develop their know-how of engineering concepts. The team will later assess the K-12 students they teach to determine how well the training has worked. Mumba says it’s hoped that by helping science teachers expose youngsters to engineering design early on, it could help convince more students to seek careers in engineering and science. But overall, he says, the goal is to give students the skills to better take on the problems most people face in everyday life.

NEW TREND: SUMMER SCHOOL FOR WEALTHY, ACE STUDENTS Once upon a time, summer school was a means to help failing students bolster their grades. But nowadays, according to the New York Times, high-achieving students are paying big bucks to spend summers at private schools to “turbocharge grade-point averages or load up on the A.P. courses seen as gateways to top-tier” colleges. Students who plan to repeat the summer courses they take in the fall at their high schools call it “previewing.” Those who hope to use them as a springboard to A.P. classes say they are seeking “forward credit.” Critics of the trend say it’s another example of students from well-to-do families gaining an advantage over their less fortunate peers, who get left behind in the race for college enrollment. While there are no statistics on how many top students are taking the summer-school route, anecdotal evidence suggests it’s a growth market. The Hun School, a 102-year-old institution in Princeton, N.J., enrolled 187 students this summer, 16 percent more than in 2014. Some students can and do opt for online programs that cost less and have more flexible schedules. Those who take the classes in person spend long summer days in classrooms and face many more hours of homework. The experience comes with a big price tag. For example, the summer boarding program at the Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts costs $8,200.

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Job–hunting? Here are a few current openings:

1. Dean -- 1 opportunity

2. Endowed Professorship -- 1 opportunity

3. Mechanical Engineering -- 4 opportunities

Visit here for details: http://www.asee.org/sales-and-marketing/advertising/classified-advertising/job-postings

HERE’S THE LINEUP FOR NEXT EDITION OF PRISM MAGAZINE

COVER: AID - The nation’s main overseas development agency, USAID, is waking up to the contributions university engineers can make.

FEATURE: CARBON - Carbon capture and sequestration is essential to meeting the United Nations’ climate goals. So why isn’t more being done to advance it?

FEATURE: IMPACTS - “Broader impacts,” the second of two criteria used by the National Science Foundation to judge research proposals, has sown confusion for nearly two decades. Here are some successful examples.

IX. COMMUNITY ANNOUNCEMENTS

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