October 3, 2014
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CONGRESS
AND THE BUDGET
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HOUSE SCIENCE CHAIR keeps up pressure on nsf
 Under
an agreement with National Science Foundation Director France Cordova,
right, committee staffers have made five visits to NSF offices to
examine 20 grant awards that House Science, Space, and Technology
Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) found questionable. Ranking Democrat (and
fellow Texan) Eddie Bernice Johnson contends in a sharp letter
to Smith that nonpublic information contained in the NSF files found
its way to Fox News. "I know that my staff never shared this
information," Johnson writes. The news channel reported
in September that a musical on climate change funded by a $700,000
grant had closed after reaching five percent of its audience and that a
$300,000 grant went to a study of how people interact with bicycles.
Johnson notes that Smith has asked for pre-decision materials on
another 30 grants, something that "looks like a fishing expedition."
She tells Smith that "your actions are sending a chilling message to
the entire scientific community that peer review may, at any time, be
trumped by political review." Smith, in an email to ScienceInsider,
says "Our efforts will continue until NSF agrees to only award grants
that are in the national interest." Science's Jeff Mervis writes: "It's
hard to see a quick ending to this confrontation."
cONGRESS SAID TO BLOCK PENTAGON SAVINGS: Defense Deputy Secretary Robert  O. Work, right, says $70 billion could be saved by retiring planes and ships and making "reasonable" benefit cuts, CQ reports, but Congress won't allow it.
Separately, Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) have jointly issued a report
containing the views of a number of experts on how to improve Pentagon
acquisitions. Among the experts, Norman Augustine urges that Congress
"substantially increase investment in research and in
high-potential-payoff organizations such as DARPA"; J. Michael Gilmore,
director of operational test and evaluation at DoD, says the government
should "actively engage" with university STEM programs "to generate a
pipeline for future qualified T&E and acquisition professionals."
Current funding does not "provide the needed magnitude to greatly
affect the incoming workforce"; Katherine Schinazi, formerly at the
Government Accountability Office (GAO) says "little money is left to
advance technologies. . . . Failures in technology research programs
are to be expected and are orders of magnitude cheaper than failures
once programs have gone into development or even, as is often the case
with DoD programs, into production." Former Pentagon Comptroller Dov
Zakheim says "innovation in the private sector far outpaces that in
DoD." Program managers "tend to point firms toward developing variants
of current systems." As a result, "the prospects for cost savings
arising from revolutionary new technologies are far from
promising."
MISSED CHANCES FOR TECH TRANSFER: The
government could do a better job of commercializing research performed
at federal agency labs, which account for about a third of the $145
billion spent on R&D. So says the Government Accountability Office,
which recommends
that the Federal Laboratory Consortium "work collaboratively with
agency and lab members to increase communication to increase
communication with potential customers . . . and improve its
clearinghouse initiatives."
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DATA
POINTS
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fields where women outpace men in doctorates
GROWTH OF ONLINE LEARNING
Source: President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)
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THE ADMINISTRATION AND RESEARCH AGENCIES
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LIGHTING THE WAY: The Defense Department has launched a contest to establish a P hotonics
Manufacturing Institute, which would get more than $200 million in
public and private investment. It would be the second of four
institutes planned for this year as part of the administration's
advanced manufacturing initiative. The White House
says the technology "has the potential to revolutionize the carrying
capacity of internet networks and to transport information at far
greater densities and much lower costs than can be attained today."
 MANUFACTURING POLICY TWEAKS:
The President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technolgy (PCAST) urges the government to develop a national strategy
with "prioritized manufacturing technology areas"; an "advisory
consortium" to coordinate public-private input; an R&D
infrastructure that includes "manufacturing centers of excellence" and
technology testbeds; and a governance structure for the National
Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) that can ensure "a return
on investment" for the many stakeholders, including academia and
organized labor. Shirley Ann Jackson, left, explains the proposal in
this PCAST transcript. (She will be leaving this particular council to join the President's Intelligence Advisory Board.) Happy Manufacturing Day.
ENGINEERS AND SCIENTISTS HONORED: Harvard
engineering dean Cherry Murray and Mary Shaw, a pioneering computer
scientist at Carnegie Mellon, are among recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
Thomas Kailath, an electrical engineer and emeritus professor at
Stanford, was among those awarded the National Medal of Science.
tutoring tech: A PCAST report on
the "middle skill imperative," the need for training that doesn't
require a four-year degree, touts a Digital Tutor tool from DARPA's
Education Dominance project. It was developed by "interviewing, closely
observing, and digitizing the specific tutoring techniques and
practices of individuals who were experts in both subject matter and
education." To test it, the Navy put novice IT pupils through a 16-week
session with the Digital Tutor and compared their subject mastery and
problem-solving skills against those of students in longer,
conventional educational programs as well as "seven-to-nine-year
veterans in the field." In "all assessments," the Digital Tutor
students outperformed their competition by wide margins.
HOT-SEAT VACANCY: The National Science Foundation is looking for someone to head its Office of Legislative and Public Affairs, a job not without challenges (See first item, above).
DARING INVESTMENT: The
NSF and Air Force Office of Scientific Research, together, have awarded
grants totaling about $28 million "to investigate the promise of 2-D
layered materials beyond graphene." The 2-D atomic-layer research and
engineering (2-DARE) project "will explore fundamental materials
properties, synthesis and characterization, predicting modeling
techniques and scalable fabrication and manufacturing methods to create
new devices for photonics, electronics, sensors and energy harvesting."
See who got the awards.
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NATIONAL ACADEMIES
 GRAND CHALLENGE SCHOLARS . . . participated
in a White House conference this week on the administration's BRAIN
Initiative, launched in 2013. The initiative is aligned with one of the
National Academy of Engineering's 14 Grand Challenges,
"Reverse-engineer the brain." The NAE's Randy Atkins reported that
three participants are or were GC scholars at Duke: Daria Nesterovich
(now a grad student at the University of Utah), who gave opening
remarks and introduced John Holdren, the president's science adviser;
Melina Smith, who gave a 10-minute overview of the scholars program,
and Kevin Mauro. A fourth participant, Kaleia Kramer, is at Arizona
State. The Grand Challenge Scholars Program is featured in the October Prism, coming soon to a mailbox near you. The National Institutes of Health has just announced $46 million in new BRAIN Initiative awards.
FRACKING CONTROL: An Academies report,
"Risks and Risk Governance in Shale Gas Development" summarizes two
2013 workshops that examined "the range of risks and of social and
decision-making issues in risk characterization and governance related
to gas shale development."
SEE THE WINNING VIDEOS . . . from the NAE competition marking the academy's 50th anniversary.
THE ARMY AND black colleges: An Academies report "looks
for ways to enhance [Army Research Laboratory] program impact on
institution-building in the future, confident that more capable black
and minority-serving institutions will, in turn, help America as a
whole develop a more diverse and intellectually capable STEM workforce."
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PUBLIC
POLICY AND HIGHER
ED
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AN ALTERNATIVE MEASUREMENT: The American Institutes for Research graphic above appears in a study
that argues: "Simply comparing the number of doctoral degrees awarded
to women and men can be a misleading gauge of gender imbalance." The
study uses an alternate method it says provides "a more reliable gauge
of gender imbalance at the doctoral level." It finds men are
overrepresented in about three quarters of academic fields, but STEM
fields "are slightly more gender-balanced." Biomedical sciences and the
physical sciences show the greatest overreprentation of males and
"engineering was roughly gender-balanced."
TRANSITION: The University of Arizona College of Engineering has tapped Anthony Muscat to head its department of chemical and environmental engineering and
James A. Field as the assistant dean of graduate studies.
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ASEE
& COMMUNITY NEWS
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VIDEO INTERVIEWS:
Leaders at NSF and the Navy Discuss the Future of
Engineering
Watch interviews with NSF Assistant Director for
Engineering Pramod Khargonekar, left, who talks
about exciting
NSF projects and opportunities for ASEE members, and Rear Admiral David Johnson, who discusses
the
importance of technology to the U.S. Navy and where naval research is
headed. The videos are part of
ASEE’s Advanced
Research Monitor Interview Series.
NCEES
SEEKS LICENSED CIVIL ENGINEERS to
participate in a standard-setting study for the Principles and Practice
of Engineering (PE) Civil exam May 15-16, 2015, in Clemson, S.C. Travel
and lodging will be paid by NCEES. If interested, complete an online questionnaire.
PATHWAYS TO INNOVATION: Engineering deans
are invited to join the Pathways to Innovation program, run by the
Epicenter at Stanford. It's designed "to
help
institutions transform the experience of their undergraduate
engineering
students and fully incorporate innovation and entrepreneurship into a
range of
courses as well as strengthen co- and extra-curricular offerings."
Teams receive "access to models for
integrating entrepreneurship into engineering curriculum, custom
online
resources, guidance from a community of engineering
and entrepreneurship
faculty, and membership in a national network of schools with similar
goals'' See the call
for proposals. For more information, contact Liz Nilsen at lnilsen@nciia.org
THE SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL HISPANIC
ENGINEERS (shpe) Deans’ Summit will take
place in Detroit, Michigan on Friday morning, November 7 as a part of
the
annual SHPE National Conference. The Summit will focus on the
challenge
of building a diverse pipeline of engineering students.
Leaders
from SHPE, the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE),
and the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) will present their
current efforts
and needs for support in this area. The goal is to develop
recommendations and
actions to strengthen the ties between these organizations, academia
and
industry. Please RSVP via http://tinyurl.com/2014SHPE no
later than October 1,
2014.
ENGINEERING EDUCATION FOR
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: The
Seventh International Conference
on Engineering Education for Sustainable Development
(EESD15) "will
explore current and future ways of thinking in the emerging field" and
the groundbreaking worth since 2002. It will be held June 9-12, 2015 at
the University of British
Columbia’s (UBC) Point Grey campus. 7 of EESD and
will celebrate the ground-breaking work accomplishing in EESD since
2002.
The conference will be held from June 9-12, 2015 at the University of
British
Columbia’s (UBC) Point Grey campus in Vancouver. See the conference
themes. Abstracts are due October
13.
start preparing abstracts: The
abstract submission phase opened Sept. 2, 2014 for the 2015 ASEE
Annual Conference and Exposition in Seattle. The Calls for Papers from
various divisions can be found here.
 TAKING THE LEAD: The
Society of Women Engineers (SWE) is hosting a workshop entitled
Academic Leadership for Women in Engineering at the WE14+ICWES16 Annual
Conference in Los Angeles on Oct. 24 and 25. There will be a specific
focus on best practices central to leadership in academia. Click here to learn
more and apply to attend the workshop.
Please complete the participant application by August 25. Funded
through support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the workshop is free to
all who are accepted. Contact learning@swe.org with any questions.
ON-LINE STEM
SUSTAINABILITY LIBRARY: This on-line library of
over 1700 juried articles and 300 videos was developed at James Madison
University with NSF funding. The site provides resources for those
researching or teaching sustainability across contexts.
ANNUAL
CONFERENCE - STORIFY VERSION: ASEE's
Engineering Libraries Division has put together a lively collection of
photos and tweets that captures the collaboration and camaraderie
of the Indy conference. Check it out here.
DEANS' FORUM ON
HISPANIC HIGHER EDUCATION
The
Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) invites
engineering deans and chairs to the Third Annual Deans’ Forum on
Hispanic
Higher Education: Advancing Graduate School Opportunities and Success
for
Hispanic Students, following HACU’s 28th Annual Conference, Tuesday,
Oct. 7,
2014, 8:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. The forum will address issues facing
Hispanic
students in graduate education and highlight promising practices to
enhance
access and success. For more information, see http://www.hacu.net/hacu/Deans_Forum.asp.
‘PROFILES’
IS OUT: ASEE's
eagerly awaited 540-page Profiles of
Engineering and Engineering Technology Colleges has been
published. Call ASEE (202-331-3500) to order a copy.
ASEE DIVERSITY
COMMITTEE NEWSLETTER: The
spring edition of the semi-annual newsletter is now
available. ASEE Past President J.P. Mohsen discusses a proposed
Year of
Dialogue on Diversity and details on safe zone ally training at the
annual
conference are posted, among other items.
VIDEOS
OF
THE PPC: View sessions from February's Public
Policy Colloquium of the Engineering Deans Council dealing with
advanced manufacturing, federal R&D, and K-12 engineering.
STAY
UP TO DATE
on ASEE's Retention Project by
clicking here
for updates.
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EDITOR: Mark Matthews;
CONTRIBUTOR:
William E. Kelly; NEW MASTHEAD DESIGN by Francis Igot,
incorporating the new ASEE logo.
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