Mastering the Hard Stuff: The History of College Concrete-Canoe Races and the Growth of Engineering Competition Culture

This article details the history of college engineering competitions, originating with student concrete-canoe racing in the 1970s, through today’s multi-million-dollar international multiplicity of challenges. Despite initial differences between engineering educators and industry supporters over the ultimate purpose of undergraduate competitions, these events thrived because they evolved to suit many needs of students, professors, schools, corporations, professional associations, and the engineering profession itself. The twenty-first-century proliferation of university-level competitions in turn encouraged a trickling-down of technical contests to elementary-age children and high schools, fostering the institutionalization of what might be called a competition culture in engineering

Diseases Chasing Money and Power: Breast cancer and Aids Activism Challenging Authority

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the course of American health research was increasingly shaped by politically,aggressive activism for two particular diseases, breast cancer and AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). Even as national stakes rose, both in dollars spent and grow, ing demands on the medical system, breast cancer and AIDS advocates made government policy-making for research ever more public and con, croversial. Through skillful cultivation of political strength, interest groups transformed individual health problems into collective demands, winning notable policy influence in federal agencies such as the National lnsti, cutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Activ· ists directly challenged fundamental principles of both government and medical systems, fighting to affect distribution of research funds and ques, tioning well-established scientific methods and professional values. In the contest for decision-making power, those players achieved remarkable success in influencing and infiltrating (some critics said, undermining) both the politics and science of medical research. Between 1990 and 1995, federal appropriations for breast cancer study rose from $90 million to$465 million, while in that same period, NIH AIDS research rose from $743.53 million to$1.338 billion