Archive for the ‘engineering’ Category

Algebra, definitions

Algebra is the branch of mathematics  concerning the study of the rules of operations and relations, and the constructions and concepts arising from them, including terms, polynomials, equations  and algebraic structures. Together with geometry, analysis, topology, combinatorics, and number theory, algebra is one of the main branches of pure mathematics.

The part of algebra called elementary algebra is often part of the curriculum in secondary education and introduces the concept of variables representing numbers (Algebra 1; find Algebra 1 Help and Algebra 1 Answers) . Statements based on these variables are manipulated using the rules of operations that apply to numbers, such as addition. This can be done for a variety of reasons, including equation solving. Algebra is much broader than elementary algebra and studies what happens when different rules of operations are used and when operations are devised for things other than numbers(Algebra 2; find Algebra 2 Help and Algebra 2 Answers). Addition and multiplication can be generalized and their precise definitions lead to structures such as groups, rings and fields.

engineering mathematics – daily usage

From stress analysis of machine components (using finite element packages), to numerical descriptions of the artist-drawn shapes of new gadgets (using CAD packages), to the use of numbers associated with the mundane jobs of production, inspection, and statistical quality assurance(using statistical packages), to the economically critical planning problem of what material to buy in what amount from where (using optimization packages), and so on, applied mathematics is everywhere in the everyday world of software applications in routine engineering.

From calculations of heat and mass flow in steam power plants and car radiators, to calculations of air flow in cooling fans, to calculations of molten metal flowing and mixing in weld pools, applied mathematics turns the wheels of engineering analysis and design.From reliability in electrical power system grids to traffic in networks (both tar roads and optical fibres), mathematics crosses boundaries in a way no other technical subject can.

The applications mentioned above are the subjects of many books. Yet, they collectively fail to convey the excitement that engineering applications of mathematics can have. There is more to the story than a list of applications. some ways those more interesting are online tutoring. With Online math tutoring you’ll get math answers by submitting your math problems. some Precalculus help that we got from online tutoring is very useful. you can also get something like statistics help or even chemistry help. this is a fun and good way to learn engineering mathematics.

Electromagnetic frequency

Given the long use of radio waves, there have in fact been numerous studies investigating the possible health effects of radio frequency (RF) fields in the past 50 years. The health risk due to heating has been known for more than a century; therefore most research conducted in the last several decades has been on possible effects that are not related to heating, so-called non-thermal effects. From the extensive corpus of research, the only established health effects have been related to the well-known heating effects of radio waves. Several hundred studies using mobile phone signals specifically are listed in the research database on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website. The great majority of these studies has not indicated any adverse health effects linked to mobile telephony. Several expert groups and health authorities have reviewed all the available research and the WHO, for example, summarizes the current status as follows: “None of the recent reviews have concluded that exposure to RF fields from mobile phones or their base stations causes any adverse health consequence.”. WHO and several other health authorities and expert groups have clearly stated that is no adverse health effects can be attributed to mobile telephony. However, a consistent message has also been that some additional research would be helpful to increase the knowledge and to ensure the best possible assessment of health risks.

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Research/Resource Sharing

Given the changing direction and magnitude of support for research sponsored by the federal government and industry, coupled with the increased competition from federal laboratories and international groups, engineering colleges must look for new opportunities to establish collaborative research alliances. Some alliances may be local or regional; others will be “virtual,” that is, national or international alliances established through the emerging global information superhighway.

Regional consortia of engineering colleges, for example, may share research facilities, teaching laboratories and faculty. Faculty tenure might even reside with a consortium and not with the individual institutions. Other types of consortia could combine the resources of universities and industry, universities and federal facilities – such as national laboratories – or a combination of all three. The aim is not to create new bureaucracies and expense, but to facilitate high-quality research and teaching that is both effective and efficient.

The National Science Foundation has taken the lead in funding experiments in research and education resource-sharing, and in creation of virtual research and education teams. Such experiments also should be encouraged through the Engineering Research Center (ERC) and Science and Technology Center (STC) programs. Lessons learned by the NSF Engineering Education Coalitions in creating “virtual” research and education teams should be applied to these experiments.

To ensure high-quality research and education, federal funding for science and technology must be distributed through open competition, based on peer review. To enhance technology transfer and industry-university research partnerships, universities, corporations and federal agencies should ensure they have flexible and negotiable policies governing intellectual property rights.

Federal agencies that fund research and education should explore ways of encouraging educational institutions, research organizations, federal laboratories, and industry to share resources. They should provide special consideration for funding projects that are developed by consortia of institutions.

Federal funding for science and technology should be allocated in open competition, based on peer review.

To enhance technology transfer and industry-university research partnerships, universities, industries, and federal agencies should develop flexible and negotiable policies governing intellectual property rights.

Engineering education today is adapting to the changing context of engineering practice, but more can be done to speed and improve the process. A crucial means of accomplishing needed change is through partnerships with industry, government, and the broader educational communities. The policy statements and action items developed in this project are intended to help ensure that engineering education will be RELEVANT, ATTRACTIVE and CONNECTED well into the next century. Get payday advance for make payment when you buy a book.

Across the Campus Outreach

Engineering colleges must be more effective and visible partners within the broader university community. This partnership should be enhanced for non-classroom activities as well as for formal research and education. Engineering colleges, their faculty and students have much to offer the broader campus community. For example, engineers can provide the real-world context to show non-engineering students the applications of the mathematical and scientific concepts they are learning. Engineering educators and their colleagues in science can also provide leadership in helping their campuses initiate computer networking and make effective use of the information super highway. Industry can help foster this cross-campus interaction by bringing multifaceted problems to the university that require the talents of several disciplines to solve. Industry representatives who sit on university advisory boards should also stress this approach in their recommendations to the institution.

Conversely, engineering education programs have much to gain from other disciplines. New insights can be provided, for example, by chemistry in developing environmentally friendly technologies, by political science in teaching the value of issues advocacy, by art in designing new consumer products, by business in aiding the understanding of international trade issues, and by law in treating intellectual property rights. Both engineering students and faculty would benefit from such interdisciplinary collaboration.

Engineers working with other colleagues across the university can also promote technological literacy for all students. Engineering colleges should accept responsibility for providing technical literacy programs to liberal arts students. Activities can include developing and teaching courses that provide laboratory or design experience for non-engineers, examine the history of science and technology, or discuss the interaction of technology and society.

At the same time, student participation in university-wide activities, such as student government, professional societies, athletics, and performing arts can help them develop the leadership and communications skills that are an important part of an engineering education.

Engineering deans should actively encourage their faculty members to participate in research, educational and leadership activities beyond the engineering college. Industrial advisory board members should stress cross-campus interaction in their recommendations to the college. Activities should include connections with such units as the schools of business, medicine, arts, sciences, and education.

Engineering deans and faculty should actively encourage students to participate in university-wide activities. These activities can include participation in student government, student professional societies, athletics, performing arts, debate, study abroad, and similar activities. The aim is to promote leadership and communications skills as well as a sense of the integration of engineering into the broader world.

Engineering deans should take responsibility for helping non-engineering majors on their campuses better understand the importance and relevance of technology in their lives, and seek to better equip those students to prosper in an increasingly technological world. Engineering schools may develop specific courses, seminars, guest lectureships, and cross-campus projects. Use payday loan for better loans management

Lifelong Learning

Employment practices among major corporations are changing dramatically; few future engineers will experience lifelong employment with a single corporation or organization. Many may perform professional work as consultants or serve as contract employees on specific projects. To adapt to this new work environment, engineering graduates must understand that career-long learning is their own responsibility and must acquire the skills for self-learning. Although many engineering colleges offer continuing education, such programs are often degree-oriented and constrained by the academic-year cycle.

To be relevant to new graduates, as well as to practicing engineers at every stage of their careers, engineering colleges must re-think and repackage continuing education programs. They should focus their offerings on providing students with new capabilities, as well as degrees. Courses should take various forms ,with some targeted to business and financial management ,and be adaptable to the time constraints of working engineers. In this regard, it will be crucial that continuing education programs take full advantage of the evolving National Information Infrastructure (NII).

Industry should require and pay for engineering employees to take courses to sustain their technological and managerial competence, just as it pays to maintain its other assets.

Federal agencies that fund education should help universities and their industrial partners identify creative approaches to lifelong learning by funding pilot projects and experiments.

Engineering colleges should create innovative advanced degree programs, including practice-oriented degrees. Such degree programs might include course material on engineering systems; finance and accounting; and technology policy, management and decision-making. Courses should feature team-based activities and case studies. In some instances, engineering schools will develop such degree programs in collaboration with business schools and industry.

Engineering colleges, in collaboration with industry, should develop innovative ways of providing continuing education to practicing engineers by instituting non-degree, career-enhancing programs. This will be facilitated by new communications technologies.

Reshaping the Curriculum

Through its accreditation process, the U.S. engineering education system has continually reexamined and re-energized the engineering curricula. Engineering fundamentals have been and will continue to be the core of the engineering curriculum. But because engineers now operate in a world where their accomplishments are often more limited by societal considerations than by technical capabilities, they are engaging in a wider range of activities throughout their professional lives. Thus, engineering education must take into account the social, economic, and political contexts of engineering practice; help students develop teamwork and communication skills; and motivate them to acquire new knowledge and capabilities on their own. Because many modern engineering projects require a combination of several disciplines, students also need exposure to the integrative field of systems engineering.

In essence, an engineering education today aims to prepare an engineer to be successful in the changing workplace. It aims to equip students with technical knowledge and capabilities, flexibility and an understanding of the societal context of engineering.

Engineering schools should not seek to develop these contextual and process skills through separate courses, but by incorporating them into existing curricula and through non-classroom activities. Coursework should feature multidisciplinary, collaborative, active learning; and take into account students’ varied learning styles.

One factor that will promote development of students’ “process” skills is widespread use of multimedia, worldwide information networks. Using this resource, students can access new information and coursework, as well as interact with other students, researchers, practicing engineers in industry and government, and experts from around the world. These changes in the teaching and learning environment will make engineering education more attractive to both students and faculty, if faculty are given the opportunity to stay up-to-date.

Finally, all engineering colleges must address the issue of ethics. While ethics is a complex and difficult topic, engineering administrators and faculty must help students understand that throughout their careers they will encounter ethical issues which they will need to recognize and deal with rationally. Whether engineers are conducting engineering research, managing a company, or building bridges and office buildings, their decisions affect the lives and property of the greater community. Students must understand the importance of upholding that public trust.

While recognizing and encouraging diverse institutional missions and changing industry needs, colleges of engineering must re-examine their curricula and programs to ensure they prepare their students for the broadened world of engineering work. This process has begun among most engineering colleges and must be accelerated with the aim to incorporate:

  • team skills, including collaborative, active learning;
  • communication skills;
  • leadership;
  • a systems perspective;
  • an understanding and appreciation of the diversity of students, faculty, and staff;
  • an appreciation of different cultures and business practices, and the understanding that the practice of engineering is now global;
  • integration of knowledge throughout the curriculum;
  • a multi-disciplinary perspective;
  • a commitment to quality, timeliness and continuous improvement;
  • undergraduate research and engineering work experience;
  • understanding of the societal, economic and environmental impacts of engineering decisions;
  • and ethics.

Re-Examining Faculty Rewards

In whatever way an engineering college defines its mission, to be successful, it must ensure that its faculty reward system supports its goals. Faculty members often face the difficult task of trying to balance the several activities they need for professional advancement, such as research and undergraduate teaching, with a host of new activities their colleagues, students and the public expect them to accomplish. These can include curricula development, interdisciplinary collaboration, work with industry, development of continuing education programs, community outreach, and mentoring of other faculty members and students. As engineering colleges develop institutional missions, they have an opportunity to recraft their faculty reward system to better synchronize faculty rewards with their new, or re-affirmed, institutional expectations.

Changing the faculty reward system will not be an easy task. Faculty rewards are heavily driven by incentives created across the entire university and are part of a nationwide network. Nevertheless, it is important that rewards reflect the goals of the institution and it is important to begin the conversation now. As each institution establishes its vision and charts new directions, it should ensure that its faculty reward system supports the institutional goals.

Individual Missions For Engineering Colleges

Following the expansion of government resources for university research after World War II, many universities and their engineering colleges aspired to the model of the “research-intensive” university. This model focused on developing research excellence in scientific and engineering fields, and on creating research-oriented doctoral degrees. While not all universities and engineering colleges adopted the research-intensive model, many have viewed it as a standard of excellence.

The world now demands new models. There is greater competition for federal research funding, with fewer current employment opportunities for new, research-oriented Ph.D.s. The nation is shifting the focus of engineering work and research from a heavy emphasis on national security needs and space exploration to a more applications-oriented focus on economic growth and environmental preservation. Moreover, burgeoning communications technologies are enabling engineering schools to expand their reach and accessibility, and to experiment with alternate modes of teaching and learning.

This shift creates new opportunities for redesigning curricula and programs, expanding relationships with industry and educating students who are both technically capable and broadly sophisticated.

These developments have also created a new opportunity for engineering colleges to redefine themselves and to even develop specific niches within the broader engineering education community. While retaining a unified core of knowledge, engineering colleges must become more “context-based,” that is, more relevant to the needs of their constituents.

To accomplish this redefinition, each engineering college, including the dean, faculty and administrators, in concert with the partners discussed previously, must identify the constituents it serves, assess the school’s activities, identify its comparative advantages, and develop an institution-specific vision. Then, from that vision, the engineering school must articulate its mission.

The need will continue for schools that educate engineers with sound fundamentals to practice the profession. But a variety of models in engineering education will result from the process of schools reexamining their individual missions. For example, some colleges may opt to combine elements of traditional technology-based engineering education with a strong emphasis on broader skills such as written and oral communication, management, economics and international relations. This type of program would aim to prepare individuals for technological decision-making and policy-setting as well as for non-engineering professions.

Other engineering colleges may choose to become more like “professional” schools, preparing students for professional engineering practice through the master’s level. Such programs would model themselves after schools of law and medicine, in which engineering practitioners from industry would work on-site, providing clinical training and assistance. Unlike the other models, however, that of the engineering professional school would continue to incorporate undergraduate as well as graduate education.

As some engineering schools are already doing, the practice-oriented master’s degree could be the result of a five- or six-year program that incorporated a four-year bachelor’s degree. This type of master’s program is particularly attractive to high-technology industries that want engineering graduates who understand basic management, manufacturing, large-scale systems engineering and leadership. An issue is whether industry will fund such programs in significant measure, as they now support master’s in business administration degrees for their engineers.

Still other engineering colleges may decide to focus on Ph.D.-related research and preparing graduates for research and teaching careers. This decision must be taken with the full understanding, however, that the nation’s support system for research is changing, and there will likely be fewer research positions a available through industry, the federal government and academe.

Engineering education needs these and other models, combinations of models, and more. No one model suits every engineer or every organization that engineers serve. This diversity in the engineering educational system encourages creativity and satisfies the varied interests and needs of employers and students in the United States and abroad.

Every engineering college should identify the constituencies it serves, establish a clear vision, define its mission through a conscious examination of the school’s current activities and comparative advantages, and then set future strategic directions.

Within the context of the overall institutional vision, every engineering educational program should be driven by a periodically reviewed planning process. This process should identify the program’s objectives and lead to a specific plan, with milestones, for accomplishing them. Internal and external reviews of each engineering education program, which should include industrial participation, should encourage progress toward meeting those stated objectives.

Studies of Engineering Education

Given the national importance of engineering education and the major changes taking place in higher education and society, it is no surprise that in recent years engineering education has stimulated a variety of thoughtful reports. For example, in the late 1980s ASEE published the major study, “Quality of Engineering Education,” and the ASEE Engineering Deans Council produced specific reports on the supply of engineering faculty and students.

In 1991, the National Academies’ National Research Council (NRC) created a Board on Engineering Education, which has conducted a wide-ranging study of the future of engineering education. The Board’s work has included a series of hearings throughout the country and has had a valuable influence on this project.

Those studying engineering education have proposed many ways to make engineering programs more relevant and cost-effective for all students, as well as more attractive to historically underrepresented groups. Their recommendations have created an environment for change and experimentation.

The Action Plan

The aim of this project is to evaluate recommendations of previous studies, combine them with the recommendations of the workshop conducted as part of the present study, and then develop key action items based on a series of policy statements. Because certain key changes in engineering education will be most effective if implemented with the aid of all sectors of the community, this project focuses on action items that require partnerships. Some of the action items are short-term, others longer-term; none is necessarily easy to accomplish. Over the next few years, this project will further refine the action items, assess the accomplishments of engineering colleges toward those goals, and establish a series of milestones for measuring future progress within the engineering education community.

In today’s world and in the future, engineering education programs must not only teach the fundamentals of engineering theory, experimentation and practice, but be RELEVANT, ATTRACTIVE and CONNECTED:

RELEVANT to the lives and careers of students, preparing them for a broad range of careers, as well as for lifelong learning involving both formal programs and hands-on experience;

ATTRACTIVE so that the excitement and intellectual content of engineering will attract highly talented students with a wider variety of backgrounds and career interests, particularly women, underrepresented minorities and the disabled, and will empower them to succeed; and

CONNECTED to the needs and issues of the broader community through integrated activities with other parts of the educational system, industry and government.

Engineering colleges’ ability to make their programs both relevant and attractive will depend, to a large extent, on how well they connect their programs to all community sectors, that is, on how well they build partnerships.

Focusing On Partnerships

While engineering deans are principally responsible for leading engineering education, they work in partnership with their faculties, presidents, senior university administrators, and often, with industry representatives. Such partnerships must also extend to elementary and secondary schools, the broader university, the local community, government and other engineering colleges, and build even closer ties to industry. These sectors make up the broad constituency of engineering education. Collaboration with these groups ensures the vitality and relevance of engineering programs, and enables the sharing of resources in a fiscally-constrained era. Ultimately, engineering colleges ,like their successful counterparts in industry ,must be part of a seamless system that links all of their constituents in education, industry, and the broad public community.