The Missing Basics & Other Philosophical Reflections for the Transformation of Engineering Education

The paper starts by reflecting on what senior engineering students don't know how to do when they confront a real-world project in an industrially sponsored senior design project. Seven, largely qualitatively, skills are found to be lacking: questioning, labeling, qualitatively modeling, decomposing, measuring, ideating, and communicating. These skills, some of the most important critical and creative thinking skills in the arsenal of modern civilization, are termed "the missing basics" and contrasted with what engineering faculty usually call "the basics." The paper critically examines the term "the basics" and other terms that are conceptual hurdles to fundamental reassessment of engineering education at this time. The paper concludes that the engineering academy is stuck in a Kuhnian paradigm born in the cold war, that the reflexive belief in the superiority of math, science, and engineering science to the exclusion of other topics is not itself scientific, and that the use of tired code words is not an argument or a rational defense of a paradigm that may have outlived its usefulness. The paper concludes by highlighting the role philosophy can play in clearing away the conceptual confusion, thereby permitting a more reasoned conversation on the needs of engineering education in our times

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964- Seniority Provisions of Union Collective Bargaining Agreement Held Controlling Over EEOC Affirmative Action Hiring Program. Jersey Central Power & Light Co. v. Local 327, IBEW, 508 F.2d 687 (3d Cir. 1975).

Plaintiff, Jersey Central Power & Light Company (Jersey Central), a large public utility, was economically forced to announce a series of plant wide layoffs. The collective bargaining agreement in force between Jersey Central and various unions required that layoffs be conducted in reverse order of seniority, i.e., the last person hired is the first person to be fired. A conciliation agreement among Jersey Central, the unions and the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) called for the company to begin an affirmative action program designed to increase employment opportunities for women and minority workers. Plaintiff sought a declaratory judgment in federal district court as to its rights and obligations under the collective bargaining agreement, the conciliation agreement, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) and Executive Order 11246. Plaintiff named various locals of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (the Union), the EEOC, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC), the General Services Administration (GSA), and the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights as defendants. Jersey Central took no position as to which of the two agreements must govern the proposed layoffs. The district court held that the layoffs could not alter the pre-layoff minority proportion of the work force by more than fifteen percent. On appeal, the Third Circuit reversed and held that layoffs were to be effectuated in accordance with the provisions of the collective bargaining agreement

Convenient stability criteria for difference approximations of hyperbolic initial-boundary value problems

The purpose of this paper is to achieve more versatile, convenient stability criteria for a wide class of finite-difference approximations to initial boundary value problems associated with the hyperbolic system u sub t = au sub x + Bu + f in the quarter-plane x greater than or equal to 0, t greater than or equal to 0. With these criteria, stability is easily established for a large number of examples, thus incorporating and generalizing many of the cases studied in recent literature

Remote Sensing and Problems of the Hydrosphere

A discussion of freshwater and marine systems is presented including areas of the classification of lakes, identification and quantification of major functional groups of phytoplankton, sources and sinks of biochemical factors, and temporal and regional variability of surface features. Atmospheric processes linked to hydrospheric process through the transfer of matter via aerosols and gases are discussed. Particle fluxes to the aquatic environment and global geochemical problems are examined

Microgravity crystallization of macromolecules: An interim report and proposal for continued research

An initial investigation exploring the effects of gravity on the crystallization of macromolecular systems has been completed. Monodisperse poly(ethylene), molecular weight 48,000 was melted and recrystallized under gravitational conditions: 0, 1, and 2 g. No correlations to gravitational environment were noted for the 20 C/min melt, as monitored with a photodensitometer system. However, post-crystallization testing of the recrystallized samples revealed thicker samples with more regions of large, well defined spherulites for the zero gravity crystallization environment. The results of the post-crystallization analysis have been reviewed and the results related to nucleation concerns. Finally, birefringence data, consistent with, but not explained by, the nucleation scenarios is detailed, and further investigations are proposed

Remote Sensing and Problems of the Hydrosphere. A Focus for Future Research

The underly problems of water quality which are addressable with remote sensors are considered. The chemical, biological, geological, and physical dynamics of natural ecosystems are examined