Engineering - what's that?

Engineering the Future (EtF) aims to develop a sustainable model of activities and interactions among researchers, policy makers and practitioners that develops pupils’ understanding of the nature of engineering, embeds experiences of engineering within the school classroom and curriculum and promotes engineering as a career.One barrier to young people entering engineering is inadequate awareness of the nature ofengineering and its diverse career paths. Many pupils in the participating schools had no awareness of engineering or very limited awareness. 65% had never considered engineering as a career choice.1st year electronic and electrial engineering students at the universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow identified family links as a key factor in encouraging them to study engineering. They also traced interest in engineering to particular school classroom experiences. Discussions with careers guidance staff revealed that careers guidance is almost entirely responsive to pupil requests: only occasionally will pupils who are good at science and mathematics be directed towards engineering.The current situation leaves almost all school pupils uninformed about the nature of engineering.The paper describes how the EtF project seeks to redress the situation by developing classroom engineering experiences, working to embed engineering formally in the curriculum and providing resources for active careers advice

Research policy and practice - commitment, complexity and uncertainty: a case study of a government research council funded project, engineering the future

Evidence based policy formation, both at EU and national level, built upon close linkage of research, policy and practice is regarded by many as an optimum solution. However, while there are many examples in European education of any two of these communities collaborating in development, the realisation of meaningful inter-relationships among all three communities is complex (Ball 1997). Evidence is often contested, while policy is determined not only by explicit political philosophies but also by deeply embedded assumptions. This paper examines this complexity through the lens of a case study in one country, Scotland, which illuminates relationships among the policy, research and practitioner communities at national and local levels and the nature of their contributions to national curriculum development. The paper explores potential tensions between the development of participative ways of working and the existing structures and ways of thinking within an education system, and examines limitations on what can be effected within existing governance systems. Since 1999 the Scottish Parliament sets the legal framework for education in Scotland; within this the Scottish government has full responsibility for education policy and provision. Following the outcomes of a government initiated National Debate on the purposes and practices of school education, Scotland?s school system has for the last six years been the locus of an extensive and radical development programme in curriculum, assessment and pedagogy (Curriculum for Excellence)

Dynamic wormholes

A new framework is proposed for general dynamic wormholes, unifying them with black holes. Both are generically defined locally by outer trapping horizons, temporal for wormholes and spatial or null for black and white holes. Thus wormhole horizons are two-way traversible, while black-hole and white-hole horizons are only one-way traversible. It follows from the Einstein equation that the null energy condition is violated everywhere on a generic wormhole horizon. It is suggested that quantum inequalities constraining negative energy break down at such horizons. Wormhole dynamics can be developed as for black-hole dynamics, including a reversed second law and a first law involving a definition of wormhole surface gravity. Since the causal nature of a horizon can change, being spatial under positive energy and temporal under sufficient negative energy, black holes and wormholes are interconvertible. In particular, if a wormhole's negative-energy source fails, it may collapse into a black hole. Conversely, irradiating a black-hole horizon with negative energy could convert it into a wormhole horizon. This also suggests a possible final state of black-hole evaporation: a stationary wormhole. The new framework allows a fully dynamical description of the operation of a wormhole for practical transport, including the back-reaction of the transported matter on the wormhole. As an example of a matter model, a Klein-Gordon field with negative gravitational coupling is a source for a static wormhole of Morris & Thorne.Comment: 5 revtex pages, 4 eps figures. Minor change which did not reach publisher

BOUNDARY CONDITIONS FOR THE SCALAR FIELD IN THE PRESENCE OF SIGNATURE CHANGE

We show that, contrary to recent criticism, our previous work yields a reasonable class of solutions for the massless scalar field in the presence of signature change.Comment: 11 pages, Plain Tex, no figure

Using fractals and power laws to predict the location of mineral deposits

Around the world the mineral exploration industry is interested in getting that small increase in probability measure on the earth's surface of where the next large undiscovered deposit might be found. In particular WMC Resources Ltd has operations world wide looking for just that edge in the detection of very large deposits of, for example, gold. Since the pioneering work of Mandelbrot, geologists have been familiar with the concept of fractals and self similarity over a few orders of magnitude for geological features. This includes the location and size of deposits within a particular mineral province. Fractal dimensions have been computed for such provinces and similarities of these aggregated measures between provinces have been noted. This paper explores the possibility of making use of known information to attempt the inverse process. That is, from lesser dimensional measures of a mineral province, for example, fractal dimension or more generally multi-fractal measures, is it possible to infer, even with small increase in probability, where the unknown (preferably large) deposits might be located

A theoretical investigation of 2-2 composite transducers with high shear attenuation in the passive phase

This paper is about a theoretical investigation of 2-2 composite transducers with high shear attenuation in the passive phase. It was presented at the Étude de la propagation ultrasonore en milieux non homogènes en vue du contrôle non-destructif in 2007

Quantum and Classical Chaos in Kicked Coupled Jaynes-Cummings Cavities

We consider two Jaynes-Cummings cavities coupled periodically with a photon hopping term. The semi-classical phase space is chaotic, with regions of stability over some ranges of the parameters. The quantum case exhibits dynamic localization and dynamic tunneling between classically forbidden regions. We explore the correspondence between the classical and quantum phase space and propose a scheme for implementing the system experimentally