World of Engineering

Chronicle of Higher Ed – Re-Engineering Engineering Education

Ed Eckel — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:24:23 +0000

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article on innovative ways to improve undergraduate retention in engineering.

Fischman, Josh. “Re-Engineering Engineering Education.” Chronicle of Higher Education Blog. February 19, 2012. Access via http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/re-engineering-engineering-education-to-retain-students/28745

NY Times article – Scientists create transistor from single atom

Ed Eckel — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:27:42 +0000

The New York Times’ John Markoff reports on the research of a group of physicists at Purdue University and the University of New South Wales who have successfully created a transistor from a single atom of phosphorus embedded in a substrate of silicon.

Markoff, John. (2012, February 19). “Physicists Create a Working Transistor From a Single Atom.” New York Times Online. Accessed via http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/science/physicists-create-a-working-transistor-from-a-single-atom.html

This research points the way to smaller and smaller computers that perform more powerful calculations than ever before. This research was recently published in Nature Nanotechnology: Lansbergen, Gabriel P. (2012). “Transistors arrive at the atomic limit. [News & Views]” Nature Nanotechnology (2012, February 19). Advance Online Publication. (Not sure if this link will stay open access. We do not subscribe to this journal at WMU, unfortunately. However, I was able to access this article.

For further information on this topic, here are some eBooks in our collection on this topic (you will be prompted for your BroncoNet ID and password to access these):

Reichel, Jakob., Vuletić, Vladan. (2011). Atom chips. eBrary. Weinheim : Wiley-VCH.

Rieffel, Eleanor. (2011). Quantum computing a gentle introduction. eBrary. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.

Williams, Colin P. (2011). Explorations in quantum computing. SpringerLink. New York ; London : Springer.

Undergraduate Reading Groups in Engineering (MIT)

Ed Eckel — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:50:31 +0000

Students in electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have set up voluntary reading groups to discuss scholarly technical papers in their fields. Read about the URGE (Undergraduate Reading Groups in Engineering) program here, and look at their wiki here. Initiated by electrical engineering/computer science senior Cathy Wu, these groups meet five times a semester to discuss papers relevant to their interests. Benefits include developing an undergraduate research community, learning how to read (and understand) a technical paper, and getting a sense of the literature in one’s chosen field. The program began in Fall 2011, and continues this spring. This is a very impressive program that hopefully students at other universities will consider emulating.

SciVerse Hub site now available to general public

Ed Eckel — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:01:21 +0000

For researchers who do not have access to university science and technology databases, there are other options for searching the literature besides the omnipresent Google Scholar. Elsevier (which brought you ScienceDirect and Scopus) has now released the Sciverse platform – SciVerse Hub. This search site which links together the Scopus and ScienceDirect databases, as well as websites, special apps, image and methodology searching capabilities.

For access to full text that is not open access, you will, of course, need to purchase or utilize your local library to obtain the text.

This new site is particularly useful for newly graduated engineers who wonder what they can use to search the literature.

Scholarly article template – courtesy of Wicked Anomie

Ed Eckel — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:41:59 +0000

Just discovered this wonderful template for writing a scholarly article or thesis/dissertation, posted by the pseudonymous Wicked Anomie. It includes the basic questions your research (and your writing) needs to address, and how to structure your writing rhetorically.

URL: http://wickedanomie.blogspot.com/2008/03/academic-manuscript.html

Scitopia search engine to go dark December 31

Ed Eckel — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:25:22 +0000

I am bummed to read a recent email announcement by the Scitopia partner societies (the people who brought you the Scitopia science/technology search engine) that the Scitopia search site will be taken down after December 31, 2011. Apparently the site (created by IEEE in partnership with a number of scholarly societies) was not being used by enough people to justify the expense of upkeep, especially with the competition with other scholarly societies and the big elephant in the room, Google Scholar. So if you use the site, be forewarned that it won’t be around much longer.

While I am sad that it is going, I must admit that I hardly used it anymore, since I’m already at a university with access to Engineering Village, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, etc. I championed this search engine more for the researchers who do not have access to the big expensive databases, like engineers in private companies. However, these researchers do have other options, especially given that sites like Springer, ScienceDirect, IEEE, ACS, among others (not to mention Google Scholar), offer free searching of their content.

Mobile Science and Engineering Apps – databases

Ed Eckel — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:49:08 +0000

Mobile Science Resources – databases etc. in mobile app formats

ACS (American Chemical Society) Publications: http://pubs.acs.org/page/tools/acsmobile/index.html

IEEE Xplore: http://m.ieeexplore.ieee.org/

JSTOR: http://mobile.jstor.org/

MD Consult Mobile: http://m.mdconsult.com/

OSTI Mobile: http://m.osti.gov Coverage includes Energy Citations Database, DOE Information Bridge, ScienceCinema, DOepatents, and DOE Green Energy.

PubMed Handhelds: http://pubmedhh.nlm.nih.gov/nlmd/pubmed/index.html – “Note that PubMed’s has been around a while … the “hh” is for hand-held devices.” – Matthew Marsteller

PubMed Mobile: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/

SciFinder Scholar Mobile: Access here: http://scifinder.cas.org/mobile
Read about here: http://www.cas.org/products/scifindr/sfmobile/index.html

Science.gov Mobile: http://m.science.gov/

SciVerse Science Direct and Scopus Mobile: http://www.info.sciverse.com/sciverse-mobile-applications/overview

Web of Science: http://m.webofknowledge.com/

WorldWideScience Mobile: http://m.worldwidescience.org/

WorldCat: http://worldcatmobile.org/

See other mobile resources at the Mobile Chemist & Chemical Engineer website at http://lib.stanford.edu/swain-library/mobile-apps-chemists-chemical-engineers
and at Dana Antonucci’s libguide at http://sunysb.libguides.com/content.php?pid=79395&sid=1518653

This is not original content, by the way. Thanks to the various librarians on the STS Listserv who suggested these resources (and to Susan Brazer of the Blackwell Library at Salisbury University for asking the original query):
Laura L. Barnes
Tim Byrne
Grace Baysinger
Diane Clark
Anthony Machosky
Matthew Marsteller
Alison Ricker

SPIE Open Access Journals

Ed Eckel — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:10:01 +0000

I just discovered that the optics and photonics professional society SPIE has two open access journals in its SPIE Digital Library. These are as follows:

SPIE Letters (Virtual Journal) – ISSN 1948-7541

http://spiedigitallibrary.org/spieletters/

Open access from 2005 to the present. Provides access to rapid communications from the six SPIE journals.

SPIE Reviews – E-ISSN: 1946-3251

http://spiedigitallibrary.org/spiereviews/

Review articles dealing with optics and photonics. Open access from 2010 onward.

Tele-Present Water – Sculpture By David Bowen

Ed Eckel — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:36:58 +0000

My wife, kids and I drove to Grand Rapids this weekend to attend the ArtPrize city-wide art fair for a day. My favorite thing of the whole day by far was David Bowen’s dynamic, kinetic sculpture Tele-Present Water. A drifting, moving matrix of wires and tubing gently undulates in a wavelet formation that gets its kinetic motion from servo-levers that move on impulse from signals transmitted from a buoy (#51003) out in the South Pacific Ocean. So the sculpture you are looking at is mimicking the undulation of the buoy in that remote location. It is startlingly mesmerizing, as well as an impressive artistic use of technology.

Dr. Bowen is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Physical Computing at the University of Minnesota, in Duluth. You can visit his personal website at: http://www.dwbowen.com/

You can see a photo of this actual version of the sculpture here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsyrba/6187140665/in/photostream/

Apparently there are other permutations of this sculpture in other art fairs and exhibitions. You can read about some of those here:

http://www.triangulationblog.com/2011/06/tele-present-water-by-david-bowen.html

http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrismenning/tele-present-water

You can watch a YouTube video of one exhibition at the National Museum at Wroclaw, Poland.

IEEE Computer Society Books in IEEE Xplore

Ed Eckel — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:34:55 +0000

The IEEE Xplore database now includes 25 recent books in the IEEE Computer Society Press series. Here is a sampling of titles available to you in PDF format from our subscription:

Web Application Design and Implementation: Apache 2, PHP5, MySQL, JavaScript, and Linux/UNIX
Software Testing: Testing Across the Entire Software Development Life Cycle
Software Management
Practical Support for ISO 9001 Software Project Documentation: Using IEEE Software Engineering Standards
IEEE Computer Society Real-World Software Engineering Problems: A Self-Study Guide for Today’s Software Professional
Automated Defect Prevention: Best Practices in Software Management
The Road Map to Software Engineering: A Standards-Based Guide
Software Measurement and Estimation: A Practical Approach
Practical Support for CMMI-SW Software Project Documentation Using IEEE Software Engineering Standards
Jumpstart CMM/CMMI Software Process Improvements: Using IEEE Software Engineering Standards
Trustworthy Systems Through Quantitative Software Engineering
Software Quality Engineering: Testing, Quality Assurance, and Quantifiable Improvement
Knowledge Structures for Communications in Human-Computer Systems: General Automata-Based
Information Security: A Strategic Approach
Open Process Frameworks: Patterns for the Adaptive e-Enterprise
Software Reuse: A Standards-Based Guide

When you navigate to the Books page in IEEE Xplore, these books will be listed alphabetically there. You can download individual chapters as PDF files.