I. DATABYTES |
THE STATUS OF TENURED/TENURE-TRACK AFRICAN-AMERICAN FACULTY
The past decade (2007-2016) has brought a modest increase in African-American faculty, with men far outnumbering women. Men rose in tenure rank (assistant, associate, full) and the number of women grew at the assistant professor level, which will likely lead to an increase in women associate professors. The full professor rank for African American female grew slowly and had the lowest number of faculty. Source: ASEE's annual survey for Profiles of Engineering and Engineering Technology Colleges.
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II. National Instruments Webinar
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Join us for a Live Webinar - Building a Partnership to Tackle the Challenges in Engineering Education & Research
Join us on September 26th, as Andy Bell, Director of Academic Programs at NI explores how partnerships between academic institutions and National Instruments are addressing major trends to drive research funding, improve student outcomes, and enable global impact.
Learn how you can engage with National Instruments to increase student satisfaction, rankings, research funding and global impact.
Building a Partnership to Tackle the Challenges in Engineering Education & Research
Presented by Andy Bell, Director of Academic Programs, NI
Tuesday, September 26th at 1:00 PM CT
Register Today
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III. NCEES Engineering Education Award
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2018 NCEES Engineering Education Award encourages broader participation
New award categories and new award amounts for collaborative projects
The NCEES Engineering Education Award is awarded each year to college programs that connect students, faculty, and professional engineers in collaborative projects. For the 2018 competition, NCEES will introduce new award categories and new award amounts to encourage a broad spectrum of engineering programs to enter and compete for a prize.
The 2018 NCEES Engineering Education Award categories are:
- International projects
- Community enhancement projects
- Public welfare and health services/care projects
- Energy and sustainability projects
- Device/design/prototype projects
- Freshman/sophomore design projects
- Innovation projects
Programs entering the competition will be able to select which category best fits the intent and spirit of their project. In addition to launching new award categories, NCEES is introducing new award amounts and an increased number of possible winners. Award amounts include one $25,000 grand prize winner and seven $10,000 prize winners.
2017 grand prize winner
The 2017 NCEES Engineering Education Award $25,000 grand prize went to the Dordt College Engineering Department for their submission, Liberia Farm Bridge. The team designed and constructed the Liberian Farm Bridge near Harbel, Liberia, in order to connect a farm and three communities to civilization and the market. To ensure that the bridge remains functional long into the future, the design team also created a regular maintenance schedule. A jury selected this year’s winners, which also include five $7,500 awards.
The jury was composed of engineering deans, members of state engineering licensing boards, and representatives from several engineering-related societies.
Looking to 2018
NCEES invites EAC/ABET-accredited programs from all engineering disciplines to compete for the 2018 awards by submitting projects that integrate professional practice and education. Projects must be in progress or completed by March 12, 2018. The entry deadline is May 1, 2018. Learn about NCEES Engineering Education Award project ideas, evaluation criteria, and more at ncees.org/award.
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IV. SAE MOBILUS™ Technical Research Platform
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Power Essential Research & A Productive Classroom
The SAE MOBILUS™ technical resource platform is your single point of access to the engineering research that professors, students, and researchers need to complete projects and learn about the latest aerospace, automotive, and commercial engineering advancements. With it, you’ll be able to better shape the direction of the industry by improving your work and that of your students. The platform provides fast access to trusted content focused on topics critical to the future of aerospace and ground vehicle mobility engineering, including Autonomous & Connected Vehicles, Advanced Performance Materials, Cybersecurity, and more.
- 42,000+ Standards: Give your students the opportunity to complete design projects using the same standards and specifications that practicing engineers use to build today’s and tomorrow’s vehicles.
- 143,000+ Technical Papers: Foster knowledge, collaboration and the exchange of ideas in the classroom with key insight into historical and evolving research by innovative individuals in industry and academia.
- 7,500+ Journal articles: Gain research inspirations with the latest insights on topics essential to the future of transportation in peer-reviewed, non-event-based papers.
- 50+ Magazine issues added each year: Prepare lectures, curriculum, and research papers by reading about transformative breakthroughs, influential trends, and probing interviews as contributed by your most innovative peers.
- 200+ eBooks: Assign timely, authoritative course textbooks with this collection of detailed information related to design, systems, engines, materials, and new technologies.
For more than 110 years, SAE International has been the leader and trusted source for mobility engineering resources and information. See why top engineering universities around the world rely on SAE to provide access to resources required to prepare the next generation of engineers. Discover your critical advantage at https://saemobilus.sae.org/
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V. POLITICAL HOTLINE |
TRUMP’S NOMINEE AS NASA ADMINISTRATOR DRAWS FIRE
After leaving the post of NASA administrator unfilled for nearly nine months, President Trump has opted to nominate Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, to the position, which requires Senate approval. The move immediately drew criticism over Bridenstine's lack of experience, as well as his history as a global-warming skeptic. He would be the first elected politician to head NASA. A former Navy reserve pilot serving his third term in Congress, Bridenstein, 42, is certainly a space advocate. Before winning his congressional seat he served as executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium, and since his election he's sponsored a bill which would require NASA to devise a 20-year space plan, including a return trip to the moon.
He’s also a big fan of the privatization of space exploration that would see NASA even more reliant on companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX. Florida's two senators—Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican Marco Rubio—both indicated they weren’t happy with the choice because Bridenstein’s a politician with no experience in the field. Rubio said putting Bridenstein in charge "could be devastating for the space program." In a 2013 House floor speech, Bridenstine incorrectly stated that "global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago," a claim that countered NASA research. President Obama’s former science advisor John Holdren said in an email to ThinkProgress: "Bridenstine’s stance on climate change reveals him to be a fact-adverse, scientifically illiterate ideologue and a danger . . . to NASA’s leadership in
space science and Earth science alike."
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COLLEGE PRESIDENTS DISMAYED OVER DACA REVOCATION
Earlier this month, President Trump began the process of terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a 2012 President Obama initiative to help people who were brought into the country illegally as young children to remain, if they met certain conditions. DACA will cease to exist in six months, unless Congress passes legislation to replace it. Some 800,000 DACA enrollees, many of whom are college students, now face the real prospect of deportation. The move is not going down well with college presidents. In a statement, the American Council on Education, a higher-education advocacy group that represents 1,800 college and university presidents and other higher-education executives, said it was "extremely disappointed." The group said that those
affected were a group of exceptional young adults and that rescinding DACA "will throw the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people and their families in turmoil." The Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities sent congressional leaders a letter urging Congress to "at a minimum codify the provisions of (DACA) policy into law."
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VI. INNOVATIONS |
DOMINO’S TESTS AUTONOMOUS DELIVERY CARS IN ANN ARBOR
Deliveries from drones and autonomous bots that scoot along sidewalks? Too passe. Domino’s, the global pizza chain, has teamed up with the Ford Motor Co. to test deliveries made by self-driving cars. This month, an autonomous Ford Focus will be used to ferry pizzas to homes and offices in Ann Arbor, Mich., a collegiate town some 40 miles west of Detroit and Domino's corporate home. The Focus is outfitted with radar, lidar, cameras, GPS and a ton of software that enables it to navigate the roads in a neighborhood in the city's northeast quadrant. Customers have to opt in to take a delivery from the robotic car. To get around the lack of a driver—a.k.a a delivery person—customers will have to retrieve their pies themselves using a code (the last four digits
of their phone number) to activate a touchscreen located on the back, passenger-side window. The correct code will pop open the window, allowing them to take their food from an insulated compartment big enough to hold up to five pizzas and four side orders. It's expected to make three to six deliveries a day during the month-long trial. Domino's says it wants to gauge how customers react and relate to deliveries from self-driving cars, and Ford wants to test its hypothesis that there could be a huge market for autonomous delivery vehicles, perhaps as soon as 2021. One perk for customers: no need to tip.
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SICILIAN DESIGNER SPINS LUXURY YARNS FROM ORANGE RINDS
The Italian island of Sicily is famous for its oranges. Thousands of tons of them are juiced every year, leaving behind thousands of tons of waste. Now a fashion designer who hails from the Mediterranean island has come up with a technology that turns the rinds and seeds of juiced oranges into a silk-like fabric. The textile is so lovely that fashion label Salvatore Ferragamo used it in a collection, according to the BBC. Orange Fiber, a company launched by Adriana Santonocito, is based in a juice-processing plant in the Sicilian city of Catania, so it has easy access to the pulpy waste, which it gets for free. Santanocito, 39, got the idea six years ago when she was a design student in Milan. Working in her university's labs, she came up with a patented process to extract
cellulose from the rinds and turn it into yarn using chemical re-agents. The biodegradable yarns can be used to make fabrics on their own or be blended with other yarns, including cotton and polyester. The pure orange fabric, she says, is soft, silky, and lightweight, and can be either opaque or shiny. One extra benefit: the fabrics still retain essential oils and vitamin C that can be absorbed by the wearers' skin, making the clothes a wearable body lotion. Orange Fiber, founded in 2014, now employs a dozen people.
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VII. THE K-12 REPORT
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SCHOOL DISTRICT APOLOGIZES OVER TRUMP T-SHIRT INCIDENT
A Georgia high school teacher found herself in hot water recently after she told two students wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the Trump campaign slogan "Make American Great Again" that clothes bearing political statements were not allowed in school, and told them to leave her classroom. The teacher then shared her personal opinion about the slogan with her class at the River Ridge High School in Woodstock, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, according to the Washington Post. The Cherokee County School District has since apologized to the students and their families. "Her actions were wrong," said a district spokesperson, who stressed that shirts with political slogans are not a violation of the dress code. Not long afterwards, the Post reports,
someone launched a petition at Change.org calling for the teacher to resign. The district did not name the teacher—although a smartphone video of her exchange with the students was captured by another student and ended up on social media—and declined to say what disciplinary action it took. One Republican state representative told a local newspaper that the episode was an attempt to silence conservative free speech. But in August a student who wore a "Black Lives Matter" T-shirt to picture day at her Buckeye, Ariz., high school, was told the shirt was "disruptive in a learning environment" and was told to change, the paper notes. A week later, another student at the school was asked to take off a "Black Lives Matter" shirt, which prompted a small student protest.
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GM FOUNDATION GRANT FUNDS FLINT STEM CAMP
The General Motors Foundation has given Kettering University in Flint., Mich., a $40,000 grant to continue a pre-college STEM camp it's been running with a local elementary school. Kettering is a private tech college in Flint that was once known as the General Motors Institute of Technology. The university offers on-campus robotics and STEM day camps for first through fifth grade students at the Durant Tuuri Mott Elementary School that vary from two to six hours in length, according to T.H.E. Journal. First through third grade students participate in the We Do Mechanical Objects camp, a Junior FIRST Lego League camp that lets the kids work with motors, gears, pulleys and sensors. The fourth and fifth grade students also participate in a FIRST Lego League camp, the
publication says, and use a kit to build an EV3 robot, then program it with Mindstorm software. The school's principal says that "the partnership with Kettering is a great way for the students to get exposure into science and engineering career fields. The more they are exposed generates interest into career fields they might not have known existed." The college hopes the camps will inspire and motivate students and teachers to join or form FIRST Robotics teams. Kettering runs a number of STEM camps at area schools, and its programs have become a national model for introducing STEM fields to underrepresented minorities.
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VIII. JOBS, JOBS, JOBS |
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IX. COMING ATTRACTIONS |
HERE’S THE LINEUP FOR NEXT EDITION OF PRISM MAGAZINE
COVER: HEALTHCARE—Are biomedical engineering startups part of the solution to America's healthcare woes?
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FEATURE: ANTIBIOTICS—New technologies are joining the battle against deadly antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
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FEATURE: CANDY—Sweets can be an effective instructional tool.
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X. COMMUNITY ANNOUNCEMENTS |
ASEE-SPONSORED WEBINAR
Streamlined Course Design
Next month, ASEE is launching a live, four-part online program to help engineering faculty streamline their course design process and design more effective courses. The program will be led by course design experts Karl Smith and Ruth Streveler and will take place in four (4) two-and-a-half-hour sessions over the course of eight weeks.
Learn more about this program here—and sign up for a free info session on September 15. Questions? Email education@asee.org.
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APPLICATIONS ARE OPEN
- The Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program (NREIP) provides an opportunity for college students to participate in research at a Department of Navy laboratory during the summer. The Online Application process closes on October 31, 2017. Learn more here.
- The Science and Engineering Apprenticeship Program (SEAP) provides an opportunity for high school students to participate in research at a Department of Navy laboratory during the summer. The online application process closes on October 31, 2017. Learn more here.
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XI. SOUND OFF |
Do you have a comment or suggestion for Connections?
Please let us know. Email us at: connections@asee.org. Thanks.
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