I. DATABYTES |
ENGINEERING SCHOOLS THAT GRADUATE THE MOST FOREIGN STUDENTS
This month’s Databyte focuses on the number of international student graduates at the bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. levels for years 2007-2016. Each degree level highlights the top 10 schools that graduated international students over the past decade. Select schools are highlighted in more than one degree level, perhaps providing a pipeline of international engineering students. The single school with the most graduates was at the master’s level, followed by the bachelor’s. The fewest graduates were at the doctoral level. The school with the lowest number of master’s degree recipients still had more master’s than bachelor’s or doctoral graduates. The source for the data is the annual survey of engineering and engineering technology
administered by ASEE.
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Controller Development Tools for Teaching and Research
dSPACE offers universities and research institutes flexible systems with all the options needed for the model-based development of mechatronic controls.
dSPACE has pioneered and optimized tools for controller development for many years as an independent system partner. Cooperating closely with the industry, we have created a comprehensive development environment that has become a standard in many companies.
dSPACE supports all the development phases, from architecture-based system design and block-diagrambased function prototyping to autocoding and HIL testing.
Offers for Academia
For universities and academic research facilities, dSPACE offers attractive product packages for model-based development and mechatronic controls testing at reduced pricing. The different hardware and software packages let universities introduce their students early on to the established dSPACE development environment:
- Test even the most complex control by real-time simulation
- Demonstrate high-end control development – from block diagram design to online controller optimization
- Let your students gain experience with control development tools
- Implement your Simulink models on real-time hardware within seconds
- Observe the effects of parameter changes on your system‘s behavior
Request more information.
MicroLabBox — Compact Power in the Lab
Discover the MicroLabBox, a compact all-in-one prototyping system for the laboratory. It combines compact size and cost-effectiveness with high performance and versatility. Have a look at this video to learn more: MicroLabBox video.
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SAE MOBILUS™ Cybersecurity Knowledge Hub
Do you have the right resources to prepare your students to meet the growing need for cybersecurity engineers?
The SAE MOBILUS™ Cybersecurity Knowledge Hub is your definitive source for the latest cybersecurity news and standards. For the first time, SAE International is offering a place to find curated content from the web — vetted by cybersecurity experts to ensure its accuracy and relevance to the mobility engineering field — alongside SAE standards, publications, and training materials. In the Cybersecurity Knowledge Hub on SAE MOBILUS, you and your students can find:
- In-person training sessions and webinars in specialized cybersecurity topics to supplement classroom lessons
- Cybersecurity standards, technical papers, magazine and journal articles, books, and more from SAE — your trusted source for mobility engineering content
- Directories of global organizations and events where students and professionals can network and share cybersecurity knowledge
- The latest cybersecurity news from all over the world — pertinent to automotive engineering and vetted by the SAE subject matter expert
Get the first look at the Cybersecurity Knowledge Hub on the SAE MOBILUS platform in booth 922 at the ASEE Annual Conference:
- Get a live demo of the platform
- See how your cybersecurity knowledge ranks against other educators
- Explore how cybersecurity education can help your students differentiate themselves in the mobility industry
For a preview of what you can find on the SAE MOBILUS Cybersecurity Knowledge Hub, visit http://www.saemobilus.org/
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III. POLITICAL HOTLINE |
FEDERAL SCRUTINY OF FOR-PROFIT COLLEGES ’STALLED’
Efforts begun by the Obama administration to crack down on fraudulent practices at for-profit colleges are grinding to a halt under the Trump administration, the New York Times reports. The newspaper says Department of Education staffers have been restricted from scrutinizing the schools. Some state officials told the Times
that joint efforts with the department to bring legal cases against the colleges are stalled. The for-profit sector has been criticized for defrauding students, particularly those from poorer backgrounds, by deceiving them about the costs and benefits of the degrees they offer. The Obama White House put a lot of financial and regulatory effort into policing the sector. But Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has brought in officials who previously worked in the for-profit industry, and who argue that the schools provide boosts to disadvantaged students. Proponents also claim that any abuses involve only a small subsection of the schools. To be sure, some schools have delivered on promised training, but critics contend that tens of thousands of students have been sucked into expensive programs that don’t deliver promised results, due to misleading and illegal recruiting and advertising
practices. Meanwhile, the colleges collect millions of dollars in federal student aid. The nonprofit Veterans Education Success, an organization that advocates for military veterans who claim they’ve been cheated by for-profit schools, regularly met with the department’s enforcement unit last year, but its most recent request for a meeting was denied, the group told the Times. From 2005-10, the Trump Organization ran a for-profit real-estate training school called Trump University. Earlier this year, a federal judge approved a $25 million settlement between President Trump and more than 6,000 students who claimed the courses they paid for were worthless.
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NEW YORK OPENS ITS ROADS TO DRIVERLESS CAR TESTS
New York State is taking applications from companies that want to test self-driving cars on its roadways, The Hill
newspaper reports. Successful applications will receive permits allowing them to test autonomous vehicles until April of next year. Test cars will need to have human drivers inside them at all times, and permit-holders must give reports of their tests to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the paper says. A DMV spokesman told the paper that it’s taking a cautious approach to ensure that the tests are safe, while giving the public a chance to familiarize themselves with the technology. New York’s move follows those of three other states—Michigan, California and Nevada—to allow test driving of autonomous cars on public roads. Uber, the online taxi service, and Waymo, the driverless-car unit of Google spinoff Alphabet, recently accelerated efforts to advance the technology, as have most mainstream carmakers.
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CUTS TO RENEWABLE-ENERGY R&D WILL COST JOBS, EXPERT SAYS
President Trump’s budget outline for 2018 calls for drastic spending cuts at a number of federal agencies. In particular, the Department of Energy would see a loss of $1.7 billion, or 5.6 percent of its budget. But the department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy would lose more than a quarter of its current $2 billion budget, paring it down by $516 million. To be sure, Congress may not go along with that plan, but it’s a sign that renewable energy research isn’t a priority for the administration. That’s a mistake, claims a solar energy expert at Virginia Tech. Saifur Rahman, the electrical and computer engineering professor who heads the school’s Advanced Research Institute, says if the proposed cuts are approved, it would stymie
progress in making solar energy more affordable and creating jobs. ’Deep funding cuts to renewable energy efforts could choke off the growth of the solar industry,’ Rahman says. The cuts, he adds, would force the industry to stick with proven technologies and high-margin projects, and that will stifle innovation. A report last year found that, nationwide, solar industry jobs grew at a torrid pace of 25 percent. Lack of innovation will eventually put a squeeze on that growth, Rahman says.
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IV. INNOVATIONS
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RESEARCHERS RELEASE ’GROUNDBREAKING’ BABY BRAIN SCANS
Researchers at three top UK universities have begun releasing what will be a series of first-ever medical scans that will reveal, step by step, how the human brain develops in babies, the BBC reports. The team — from Imperial College, King’s College London and the University of Oxford — are sharing the images and methods online so that scientists worldwide can use them to further their own research and better understand what healthy growth looks like. The detailed MRI scans will precisely plot how billions of neurons form and connect, the BBC says. The effort’s been very challenging. Even infants’ brains contain trillions of pathways crammed into an organ no bigger than a plum. The researchers also had to deal with problems caused by the movement of the babies
and figure out how to keep vulnerable newborns safe inside scanners. So they developed a new type of MRI technology geared to provide high-resolution images of newborn and fetal brains, as well as computer programs to analyze the images. The team has already released data collected from scanning 40 babies a few days after birth, and it plans to scan many more, as well as babies still inside the womb. The hope is to create a dynamic map of human brain connectivity, the BBC says. It should uncover the wiring and function of the human brain during pregnancy, and how it changes after birth. It will eventually become the largest and highest-quality collection of baby brain development images ever assembled. The team also hopes the data will help scientists better understand how conditions such as autism and cerebral palsy develop, or how problems in pregnancy can affect brain growth.
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KOREAN TEAM SAYS IT CAN CHARGE BATTERIES USING LIGHT
Could light, either sunlight or artificial indoor lighting, be used to charge batteries? Yes, says a team at South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology. The team has developed a photo-rechargeable portable power source that uses super-efficient silicon solar cells and lithium-ion batteries. The researchers say the device fixes two problems: low energy density in batteries, and energy-storage concerns in solar cells. They also note that batteries have relatively higher power and energy densities under direct sunlight, so the technology could potentially be used to provide a ’solar-drive infinite energy conversion/storage system for use in electric vehicles and portable electronics.’
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RESEARCHERS FIND INGREDIENTS FOR A ’MOLECULAR CONDOM’
Two anti-fertility folk medicines actually work, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered. Chemicals taken from two plants—the aloe and the thunder god vine—in low concentrations stop a key part of fertilization: the union of the egg and sperm. The finding could be a step toward a so-called ’molecular condom,’ a plant-derived, non-toxic, non-hormonal compound that stops fertilization from occurring with no side-effects. The chemicals prevent the progesterone-generated ’power kick’ that propels a sperm through the cells that envelope the egg as well as through the surrounding zona pelucida membrane. The chemicals have no other effect on the egg or sperm. The researchers say the chemicals might be developed into an emergency
contraceptive taken before or after intercourse, or as a permanent contraceptive delivered by a skin patch or vaginal ring. There is one problem, however. The chemicals, which are members of a family called triterpenoids, are found in such low concentrations in wild plants it wouldn’t be cost-effective to harvest them. So the team is hoping it can find another inexpensive source for them.
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V. THE K-12 REPORT
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ARIZONA LAW OPENS CLASSROOMS TO UNCERTIFIED TEACHERS
Many states are suffering from tough K-12 teacher shortages. But a new Arizona law aimed at solving the problem could cause problems of its own, the Washington Post
reports. The law allows people with no formal teacher training to be hired if they have five years’ experience in a ’relevant’ field. But, as the Post notes, what’s considered relevant experience isn’t made clear by the law. There’s been a national trend, the paper says, to allow uncertified teachers to go directly into classrooms. It’s based on the view that if someone knows the subject matter, he or she doesn’t need to be qualified in curriculum, classroom management, and instruction. Arizona has been hit by teacher shortages in recent years because of low pay, a lack of classroom resources and too many testing requirements and teaching guidelines. The National Education Association says the state is near the bottom of its list of spending per pupil in 2015-16 with an expenditure of $7,566. The U.S. average is $11,787. Arizona’s
teacher unions and the state’s superintendent of public instruction oppose the law, the Post says.
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VI. JOBS, JOBS, JOBS |
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VII. COMMUNITY ANNOUNCEMENTS |
USC SET TO RECEIVE THE ASEE PRESIDENT’S AWARD
ASEE will present its President’s Award to the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering at the organization’s annual conference in June. The award will be accepted by Dean Yannis C. Yortsos. The award is presented in honor of efforts by Yortsos and Viterbi to promote ASEE’s Deans Diversity Pledge and Yortsos’ subsequent presentation to the White House, in August of 2015, of a signed pledge from nearly 150 deans. (As of this writing, the pledge has nearly 210 signatories.)
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STILL PLACES AVAILABLE FOR JUNE’S NETI-2 WORKSHOP
There are still a few openings for the advanced National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI-2), which will be offered June 23-24, 2017, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Columbus, OH. Drs. Susan Lord, Matt Ohland and Michael Prince will lead each workshop. Participants will include 50 faculty members from all branches of engineering and engineering technology. The registration fee for the 2-day NETI-2 is $1,050.
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THE SIXTH ANNUAL ASEE INTERNATIONAL FORUM
...Will be held on Wednesday, June 28th, 2017 on the final day of ASEE’s Annual Conference in Columbus, OH. The International Forum
brings together engineering professionals from academia and industry from around the globe who are engaged in novel engineering education initiatives to share information on successful models, experiences and best practices. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Mike Murphy, dean of the College of Engineering and Built Environment, Dublin Institute of Technology. Click here for more information.
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