Ok, an article on "Keeping Cars from Crashing". The basic method is adaptive cruise control, wherein the car detects the road ahead and slows down or speeds up automatically. Other than the obvious "what the heck would I want this feature for" question, it is kind of neat. You can use radar or lidar ("light-based radar") or video cameras to scan the road ahead for obstacles and cars, then process the information and adjust speed. I'm not sure if this is a good iead. It doesn't really help an alert driver and if you're not alert you shouldn't be on the road. I'd rather have something that detects cars in my blind spots.

The next article is "China's Big Dams". The Three-Gorges Dam, when completed, will be one of the largest in the world and will have displaced thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of people. It provides power, controls the sediment being washed down the river (which causes floods), and provides water during droughts. But it's not all that rosy. During a dry year (such as the one China is having this year), there won't be enough water to run the generators at full power for more than a month. There's also the sewage that upriver towns dump, it'll have to be treated now since it'll just build up instead of being washed to sea (though that's not a bad thing).

Most importantly though, China needs to do this because it has a growing economy and it's much cleaner than coal plants. Even if they can maintain hydroelectric power at 25% of the total national power supply (an amazingly large amount compared to the 9% that US hydroelectric power contributes), we're talking about a country that has 5x the number of people than the US. Which means at full modernization they'll be producing 3-4 times the pollution the US produces, and we produce a lot. Hence why making sure China and India have the technology and resources to build pollution efficient power plants and clean power plants and energy conservation is so important.

The next article is about Lego Mindstorms. These were introduced a couple of years ago and it's basically a Lego robot kit. You have a CPU Lego, which is fairly sizable, and 700 parts consisting of motors and sensors and wires as well as gears and axels and wheels and the ubiquitous bricks in all sort of shapes and sizes. The CPU has 32k of memory and it's own interpretive language. You use a PC to program the robot, then download the program via infra-red. It's pretty neat, and lots of hobbyists have expanded the idea by hacking the CPU to make it more efficient, adding Forth, C-like, and Java IDE's, making new sensor bricks and such. Way neat I suppose, but since you need a PC running Windows it's not of interest to me.

Then we have a feature article on engineering education "Teching From a Clean Slate". If you've taken science and engineering courses in college chances are you've been exposed to a big hot room full of people while the professor drones on about this or that subject and you wonder to yourself if you can still drop this course and take up Underwater Basking Weaving 101. In other words, engineering education is quite dry and boring, perhaps a reason why graduating engineers are down by 20% overall over the last five years.

One solution is to revamp engineering courses. Teach more hands on, more team oriented projects, real-life situations. And we have four examples here of a trend that will hopefully catch on in more and more schools. Smith College (Northampton, Mass.) has a new enginering program which stresses a low student to teacher ratio and going out to real engineering projects to take a look at engineering in real life. It's a women's college and women are needed in engineering as in any other occupation.

Franklin W. Olin College (Needham, Mass.) is a new enginnering college which opens next year. All the students will receive Olin Scholarships, which pays for their tuition and room and board. Teachers will be hired on five year contracts and business and entrepreneurship will be emphasized. Reminds me of Harvey Mudd College which is a small engineering college that looked intriguing when I was getting inundated with college materials.

The other two examples are much the same. Broaden engineering to show that engineers are part of the real world, not a separate ivory tower profession. Teach more humanities and business -- people skills. Do more real-life projects with groups, show that engineering is a group activity and it's very creative and fun. I know that I probably would have hated that kind of atmosphere as I'm quite introverted, but I can admit that it would produce better engineers.