Engineering Library Blog

Professor Ed Coyle spoke at the Lunchtime Seminar on Teaching Science and Technology to Nonscientists today. He described a great program which he founded at Purdue University in 1995. His idea is to mutually benefit the community and the university by assessing technology needs with community organizations, and the university proposing solutions by devising engineering projects. Funding is by grant from society or foundation. Professors and students design, develop and manage the project. The projects involve committments of a year anyway, and credit is given for successful completion.

Prof. Edward J. Coyle can be reached at Electrical Engineering in the E-QUAD or ejc@Princeton.EDU He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching of Electrical Engineering and the Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

He is helping to launch projects in Princeton. Prof. Catherine Peters is leading a group of students in “Green retrofitting” an old building at the Stony Brook Watershed Association. Prof. Michael Littman is instructing Princeton Young Achievers in rebuilding a 19th century clock from a tower in Trenton. Here is a link to the Purdue website: http://webscript.princeton.edu/~epics/main.php?section=main&sel=main

It was via today’s SPARC enews , the “Resources for Authors” section that I found an interview with Dr. Zhigang Suo, now at Harvard, and formerly of Princeton, entitled:

“Thoughts on digital scholarship in engineering”

In this piece he discusses the web site iMechnica, which he created with Teng Li.

The mission of the website is twofold:

1. “to use the internet to enhance communication among people in mechanics”
2. “to pave a way to evolve all knowledge of mechanics online”.

IMechanica is free, and completely open access. It has at least 3,600 registers users.

SPARC = Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

“Under the initiative, CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) will work with Wikipedia to help provide accurate CAS Registry Numbers for current substances listed in Wikiprojects - Chemicals section of the Wikipedia Chemistry Portal - that are of widespread general public interest. The CAS Registry is one the most comprehensive collections of chemical substances and the CAS Registry Number is the recognised global standard for chemical substance identification.”

From Knowledgespeak Newsletter, March 18.

“SAE International wins National Science Foundation Award - 12 May 2008

The US’ National Science Foundation has awarded SAE International and Bayer Corporation with the 2008 Public Service Award. Both organisations were recognised for their work to increase the public’s understanding of science and engineering.

In particular, SAE was honored for its A World In Motion (AWIM) (www.awim.org) curriculum and Collegiate Design Series (http://students.sae.org/competitions/). AWIM joins together teachers, students, (elementary through high school) and industry volunteers in an exploration of physical science while addressing essential mathematic and scientific concepts and skills. SAE’s Collegiate Design Series is a series of competitions that provides college students with real-world, hands-on engineering experience by designing, building and testing the performance of real vehicles.

The award presentation took place during a black-tie dinner at the U.S. Department of State on May 6. The presentation was attended by SAE 2008 President Dr. Thomas W. Ryan III, PhD, and SAE International Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Dr. David L. Schutt, PhD.”

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, May 12, 2008