“What will or should engineering education be like today, or in the near future, to prepare the next generation of students for effective engagement in the engineering profession in 2020?”

This report asks how to enrich and broaden engineering education so that technically grounded graduates will be better prepared to work in a constantly changing global economy.

Recommendations include:
* The BS degree should be considered as a pre-engineering or "engineer in training" degree.

Engineering needs to develop iconic images that the public immediately recognize and respond to in a positive way.

MIT President Charles Vest: "This is the most exciting period in human history for science and engineering. The explosive advances in knowledge, instrumentation, communication, and computational capabilities create a mind-boggling playing field for the next generation.

Georgia Tech's Wayne Clough is the chair of the committee that produced this report.

Educating the Engineer of 2020

There is a simplistic inclination to assume that the effectiveness of any intellectual confederacy derives from its cohesiveness, compactness, and presence at the nexus point of media networks.

Intellectual centers of gravity require that a specific place combine with a particular set of circumstances to create an alignment of ideas and actions.

L.A, in the 1940s, in contrast to Paris in the 1930s, merely became a vat for people on the run or needing quick cash.

The two contrary examples dilute the notion that simply bunching public intellectuals together will magically establish a gatekeeper community.

The intellectual only really triumphs if he navigates successfully in the public sphere, which presumably means addressing laymen in a subtle, reciprocal way, while also trying to impress the value of one's opinions.

When Eggheads Gather

Drucker would be deeply saddened ...

... about the troubling state of curiosity ...

In the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. Today, "it's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care about what they don't know."

Upon graduation, we must devote ever more energy to mastering the floods of information that might help us keep our wobbly jobs. Crunched, we have little time to learn about far-flung subjects.

The narrowcasting of our lives is writ large in our culture. The Internet slices and dices it all into highly specialized niches that provide mountainous details about the slightest molehills.

When people only care about what they care about, their desire to know something more, something new, evaporates like the morning dew.

The notion of an aspirational culture, in which one endeavors to learn what is right, proper and important in order to make something more of himself, is past.

Unfortunately, this new freedom has sucker punched the notion of the educated person. Instead of a mainstream reverence for those who produce or appreciate works that represent the summit of human achievement, we have a corporatized and commodified culture that hypes the latest trend, the next new thing.

Curiously, in a world where everything is worth knowing, nothing is.

Lack of curiosity is curious

Peter F. Drucker, 95, who was often called the world's most influential business guru and whose thinking transformed corporate management in the latter half of the 20th century, died Nov. 11 at his home in Claremont, Calif.

A very sad day indeed.

Management Visionary Peter Drucker Dies

It's time to drop the apocalyptic rhetoric about a split root file and start looking beyond the age of a U.S.-dominated Internet. Breaking up is hard to do, but in this case, the alternative would be worse.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Stewart Baker, assistant secretary for policy at DHS, described industry efforts to install hidden files on consumers' computers.

"It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property, it's not your computer," Baker said at a trade conference on piracy. "And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days."

Sony to Suspend Making Antipiracy CDs

To have and to hold every film that guided your artistic and emotional maturation, through adolescence and beyond, is something many will find irresistible.

What was formerly part of a romanticised past, glimpsed infrequently on late-night TV, has become urgently present.

What this means, in cultural terms, is that film now takes its place beside literature, music and visual imagery as an art that can be owned and bookmarked.

Scenes from a Revolution

Wilson invites the serious public to do what far too few of us have done: to read what Darwin wrote.

...with an emphasis on serious -- this book is 1706 pages! On the up side, Amazon is taking orders for $26.

The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument advanced in support of a non sequitur. The designer is seldom specified, but in the canon of intelligent design it is most certainly not Satan and his angels.

...

The inexorable growth of biology continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion. Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable. There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict.

Intelligent Evolution, by E.O. Wilson

Steven Johnson's latest Discover column.

We're not doing our best thinking in front of a computer screen. This is the dark side of the connected age: We have vastly more information at our fingertips than ever before but less time to make sense of it.

... email-free Fridays ... individual employees send and receive, on average, 178 messages each day via email, phone, voice mail, fax, and pager.

What we really need are better screens: interfaces built for focus and contemplation and not a barrage of distractions.

BusyBody, a new software package under development at Microsoft, is designed to sense the “cost of interruption” at any given point in a user’s interaction with the machine.

Email makes you stupid

Should the United Nations control the Internet? That’s the subject of a heated debate slated to take place at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis later this month. The European Union is pressing for a UN role in governing the Internet, which is currently in the hands of a US nonprofit. Lawrence Lessig breaks down the debate and offers his views.

He talks about coexistence of multiple TLD hierarchies, censorship, and more.

The fundamental point I’ve conveyed in my writing and teaching—apparently no policymaker has yet learned this—is that policy is a function of technology. You can’t do policymaking in cyberspace without thinking about the interaction between technology and policy. It’s as ridiculous to be a policymaker and believe that you can make policy without thinking about the technology as it is to be chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and think that you can talk about competition policy without thinking about the economic consequences of the rules you impose. A smart policymaker asks, “What technology will my policy produce?” and “Will the net result of that technology in my policy be the policy result I want?”

Larry Lessig, on Battling for Control of the Internet