Search

Japanese (n=94) and U.S. (n=340) aerospace scientists/engineers described time spent communicating information, collaborative writing, importance of technical communication courses, and the use of libraries, computer networks, and technical reports. Japanese respondents had greater language fluency; U.S. respondents spent more time with written/oral communication, collaborative writing, and computer use. (SK)

Analysis of Strong Interest Inventory Scores from 205 Mexican and 342 U.S. male engineering students/professionals had the following results: (1) interest structure was similar across cultures; (2) Holland's calculus assumption was supported; and (3) a circular rather than an equilateral hexagonal structure was supported. (SK)

Investigated cross-cultural similarity of vocational interests of students and professional engineers in United States and Mexico (total N=557). Results from Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory scales indicated similarity among all groups, but Mexican and United States professional engineers were dissimilar on several avocational interest scales. (Author/NB)

Discusses current and future mathematics requirements of engineers in the United States. Points out that changes in requirements have been accelerated by the computer's role in solving engineering problems as well as the advance of high technology needs in industry and research. (JN)

While many early-career engineers in the United States leave the field of engineering in the first few years of their careers, we know little of their early professional experiences and reasoning for career plans. We conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with early-career engineers, comparing the experiences of engineers across intersections of gender and race. In particular, we examine meaningful early-career experiences and how these connect to the innate needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, as well as career intentions. Top moments on the job were often first-time experiences and milestones that enhanced the engineers' sense of competence. Meaningful moments connected to relatedness were more often positive than negative experiences for White men, whereas experiences undermining relatedness were more common for people of color and/or women. Connections to autonomy emerged more in bottom moments, especially for White engineers. Across different intended career pathways, early-career engineers often evaluated their experiences regarding their ability to work effectively and through social validation from peers and managers (or undermined by a lack thereof). The results indicate the need for a greater understanding of early-career affordances in supporting entry and retention in the engineering workforce by promoting individual effectiveness and social validation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Identifying as an engineer is essential for belonging and student success, yet the social context and professional norms make it more difficult for some students to establish an identity as an engineer. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study investigated whether first‐generation college students' funds of knowledge supported their engineering role identity. Design/Methods: Data came from a survey administered across the United States western, southern, and mountain regions in the fall semester of 2018. Only the sample of students who indicated they were the first in their families to attend college was used in the analysis (n = 378). Structural equation modeling was used to understand how first‐generation college students' funds of knowledge supported their engineering role identity; measurement invariance was examined to ensure that the model was valid for women and men alike. Results: First‐generation college students' funds of knowledge individually supported the components of the engineering role identity development process. Tinkering knowledge from home and perspective‐taking helped inform interest and performance/competence beliefs. First‐generation college students' bids for external recognition were supported through their mediational skills, their connecting experiences, and their local network of college friends. The bundle of advice, resources, and emotional support from family members was the only fund of knowledge that directly supported students' perceptions of themselves as engineers. Conclusions: The relationships we established between first‐generation college students' funds of knowledge and emerging engineering role identities call for engineering educators to integrate students' funds of knowledge into engineering learning and to broaden disciplinary norms of what counts as engineering‐relevant knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering occupations coevolved with industries producing material outputs: mining, construction, manufacturing. Yet wealthy economies have long been moving toward intangible services, the products of industries including finance, wholesale and retail trade, entertainment, travel and transportation, health care, and the public sector (including, e.g. much of education). For the United States the shift is evident in statistical data going back well over a century and services now account for nearly 90 percent of all employment. The job share is lower for engineers, but even so the majority work for service-producing entities. Entanglement and interdependence of services and goods hinders understanding of the dynamics, as does rapid growth in jobs classed in official employment statistics as computer-related even though much of the work resembles engineering. Because of this, field studies that explore actual job content will be needed to develop clearer pictures of the everyday tasks employers assign technical workers in postindustrial economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the evolution of roundabout roads in the northeastern U.S. Topics include the strong resistance of people against the construction of modern roundabout in the northeastern region despite being life-savers, failures of roundabouts in Massachusetts, and New York State Department of Transportation's (NYSDOT's) Roundabouts First property to create roundabout corridors in 2006.

Copyright of TST - Transportes, Servicios y Telecomunicaciones is the property of Asociacion Iberica de Historia Ferroviaria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Contribution: This study contributes to efforts to diversify the field of engineering by studying the influence of co-curricular activities on African American students’ development of key nontechnical professional skills. Background: The 21st Century workforce requires significant collaboration and communication. For engineering graduates to meet workforce challenges, they must graduate with nontechnical skills. This study operationalized these skills using traits identified in the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) “Engineer of 2020” report. The NAE also points to the urgent need for the United States to diversify its workforce; broadening the participation of African American engineers is key to doing so. Co-curricular activities help students develop nontechnical professional skills and are particularly important to African Americans at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Research Question: How do African American engineering students attending PWIs in the United States develop nontechnical professional skills through participation in ethnic-specific co-curricular activities? Methodology: This qualitative study explored the lived experiences of 16 participants from one of six engineering disciplines. Each participant was a member of at least one of the following organizations: a Black fraternity or sorority (termed Black Greek Letter organizations), their campus student chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers, or an institution-sponsored program for racially underrepresented students such as a minority engineering program. Findings: Data analysis revealed significant evidence that involvement in one or more of the studied ethnic-specific co-curricular activities enhanced African American engineering students’ educational experiences by providing resources and opportunities to help them develop professional skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers the first systematic historical evidence on the role of a central actor in modern growth theory: the engineer. We construct a database on the share of engineers in the labor force during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914) at the county level for the United States and the state and national levels for the Americas. These measures are robustly correlated with income today after controlling for literacy, other types of higher-order human capital (college graduates, lawyers, physicians, patenting) and demand-side factors, as well as after instrumenting engineering using the 1862 US Land Grant Colleges program. Differences in engineering density in 1880 accounted for 10% of the higher US county incomes today, while national disparities in engineering density can explain approximately a quarter of the income divergence in the Americas. To document the mechanisms through which engineering density works, we show how it is correlated with higher rates of technology adoption and structural transformation across intermediate time periods and with numerous measures of the knowledge economy today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature argues for the urgent need to improve workplace and professional communication in the engineering field across the world. This paper reports on a study examining Chinese/English bilingual engineers' translanguaging practices in their communications in English-speaking high-tech corporations in the United States. Evidence showed that bilingual engineers translanguaged extensively to construct meaning to meet the diverse communication needs at their workplace, which enables them to demonstrate their professional talents and skills. However, when English was the sole language for the interaction, they struggled to sound like English native speakers to convey their ideas and present their work, which disadvantaged them professionally, socially and emotional as professionals. Therefore, this study calls for a creation of a translanguaging space in the workplace to empower bilingual engineers and also a need to modify engineering education programs that recognize multilingual competence of bilinguals and enhance the development of their English professional communication ability (speaking and writing) in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how professional engineers recognize and make sense of product defects in their everyday work. Such activities form a crucial, if often overlooked, part of professional engineering practice. By detecting, recognizing and repairing defects, engineers contribute to the creation of value and the optimization of production processes. Focusing on early-career engineers in an advanced steel mill in the United States, we demonstrate how learning specific ways of seeing and attending to defects take shape around the increasing automation of certain aspects of engineering work. Practices of sensing defects are embodied, necessitating disciplined eyes, ears, and hands, but they are also distributed across human and non-human actors. We argue that such an approach to technical work provides texture to the stark opposition between human and machine work that has emerged in debates around automation. Our approach to sensing defects suggests that such an opposition, with its focus on job loss or retention, misses the more nuanced ways in which humans and machines are conjoined in perceptual tasks. The effects of automation should be understood through such shifting configurations and the ways that they variously incorporate the perceptual practices of humans and machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Striving to remain a global leader in innovation, the United States continues prioritizing broadening participation in engineering and other STEM fields. For this reason, STEM outreach programs are increasingly popular and vital. However, few programs offer such outreach experiences at a large, national scale and intentionally situate those experiences in locations that enable access for African American youth. In this paper, we present a logic model that showcases the resources and components that can expand the reach of an effective program, outlining the programmatic components involved in executing the National Society of Black Engineers' Summer Engineering Experience for Kids (SEEK) program, which has effectively scaled to cities across the United States. Using SEEK as an instrumental case, we highlight what goes into offering a large-scale community-based STEM outreach program, emphasizing aspects that are most important to preserve during expansion into underserved communities. Key findings illustrate that maximizing the potential of recruiting and engaging youth from underserved populations may hinge on the ability of established programs to scale up their initiatives while establishing appropriate assessment plans to measure effectiveness. Additionally, embracing the ideals of collective impact provides an opportunity for such programs to progress their initiatives by replicating program designs in more communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managers, research administrators, and policy makers need a greater understanding of the factors that drive employment preferences of foreign science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) doctoral graduates of U.S. universities. To address this need, the authors report the results of a large multischool conjoint survey of return-migration preferences among U.S. STEM doctoral students from China. The survey presents the respondents with potential job offers and yields individual-level estimates of each respondent's indirect utility of a job as a function of location, job status, and salary. The authors use a delayed follow-up choice task to demonstrate stability of the preference estimates both over time and across response modalities. The estimated preferences imply that Chinese doctoral graduates tend to remain in the United States because of a large salary disparity between the two countries rather than because of an inherent preference for locating in the United States. Given these estimated preferences, the authors conduct several policy-relevant, counterfactual simulations of return-migration choice and outline effective targeting and positioning strategy for attracting Chinese STEM talent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the aim of mobilizing engineers and scientists to address environmental, climate, and energy justice challenges in the United States, this study examines how engineers and scientists view their incentives, barriers, and potential for community‐based collaborations. Through a purposive convenience sample (n = 281) and an online questionnaire, we investigate the attitudes and experiences of engineers and scientists regarding their community‐based work. Our analyses reveal dynamics of race, class, and experience, suggesting a type of socio‐demographic conditioning informing community‐based collaborations. Engineers and scientists also identify four main barriers to community‐based work: lack of time, lack of funding, lack of rapport, and knowledge deficits. In response, we introduce a field of collaboration with its own set of capitals—economic, cultural, social, and symbolic—and offer recommendations on how engineers, scientists, and community groups might collaborate with each other to address longstanding issues of energy, climate, and environmental injustice in the United States. Key Points: From a sample of n = 281, we examine how engineers/scientists view incentives, barriers, and potential for community‐based collaborationsWe find relations of race, class, and experience that suggests that sociodemographic conditioning informs community‐based collaborationsFour barriers to community collaborations are identified: lack of time, lack of funding, lack of rapport, and knowledge deficits [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign-born scientists and engineers are increasingly present in technology companies in the United States. Some of them are immigrants, that is, aliens admitted to the US for lawful permanent residence; others are non-immigrants, that is, aliens admitted to the US for a specific period of time for temporary work. Whether immigrant or non-immigrant, an overwhelming majority of foreign-born scientists and engineers enter the US technology sector through one single H-1B visa program. Using a case study of Indian engineers, this article shows different sub-paths of the H-1B visa program, which leads to significant differences in their immigration, work, and socio-economic experiences. The article is based on the secondary sources and 40 in-depth interviews conducted with Indian engineers working in US technology companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign-born scientists and engineers in the United States make significant contributions to their fields. While some studies of their career outcomes investigate the internal differences among immigrant scientists and engineers, there is little scholarly attention to how immigration status and gender work together in shaping their career outcomes. This study employs the intersectionality framework and uses National Science Foundation's Survey of Doctorate Recipients 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015, and 2017 to examine how citizenship status and the intersection of citizenship status and gender affect earnings among engineers with doctoral degrees. Findings show that naturalized U.S. citizens do not earn less than comparable native-born citizens, but permanent residents and temporary residents do. In terms of intersectional effects, U.S.-born women experience an earnings disadvantage due to their gender, naturalized U.S. citizen women and permanent resident women face earnings disadvantages because of both citizenship status and gender, and temporary resident women earn less because of their citizenship status. The preceding findings persisted in the period of study with one exception. These findings reveal the internal variations among foreign-born engineers, intersectional effects of citizenship status and gender, and the complexity and persistence of these effects, suggesting the intersectional and enduring nature of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the alleged efforts of Iran to develop nuclear weapons. Nuclear cooperation agreement signed by Shah Reza Pahlevi with the U.S. in 1979; Nuclear training assistance extended by China to Iran; Actions taken by Shah Ayatollah Khomeini to lure experienced scientist and engineers to Iran.

To mark the golden anniversary of the History and Heritage Committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the society commissioned I Chronicles of Mechanical Engineering in the United States i . Chronicles of Mechanical Engineering in the United States Edited by Thomas H. Fehring and Terry S. Reynolds. [Extracted from the article]

Visual design, learning sciences, and nanotechnology may be strange bedfellows; yet, as this paper highlights, peer interaction between a designer and a scientist is an effective method for helping scientists acquire visual design skills. We describe our findings from observing twelve sessions at the Design Help Desk, a tutoring center at the University of Washington. At each session, a scientist (who is expert in his own domain but a novice in design) consulted a designer (who is expert in design but a novice in science) in order to receive advice and guidance on how to improve a scientific visualization. At the Design Help Desk, this pairing consistently produced a momentary disequilibrium in the scientist’s thought process: a disequilibrium that led to agency (where the scientist gained ownership of his/her own learning) and conceptual change in the scientist’s understanding of visual design. Scientists who visited the Design Help Desk were satisfied with their experience, and their published work demonstrated an improved ability to visually communicate research findings—a skill critical to the advancement of science. To our knowledge, the Design Help Desk is a unique effort to educate scientists in visual design; we are not aware of any other design-advice/tutoring centers at public or private universities in the United States or abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most major rivers in the United States are managed by a system of reservoirs; many of which were built more than a half century ago. These reservoirs were designed based on environmental, societal, and regulatory assumptions at the time of construction. Since then, we have learned that climate is not stationary, population growth is being decoupled from energy needs and water demand, and new regulations (such as the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act) affect how river systems are managed. This study explores changing environmental, societal, and regulatory conditions relevant to the design and operation of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoirs across the conterminous United States. Results demonstrate large geographic variability in how these conditions have changed over time. In the south‐western United States, there is an amplified trend towards drier conditions and less reservoir flexibility with warmer temperatures, less precipitation, high sedimentation rates, and large population growth. In the north‐eastern United States, the impacts of increased temperature on reservoirs may be masked by greater precipitation and lower water demand. Environmental, societal, and regulatory changes can reduce the flexibility of reservoir operations and, in some instances, make it challenging for the reservoir to meet its intended purpose as designed decades ago. This study is the first step towards formalizing a process for monitoring broad trends relevant to water resources management for the purpose of moving towards adaptation of infrastructure. An interactive tool was developed for each condition: https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/reservoir‐national‐trends/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of the Technological Arms Race that has dominated the research and development activities of the United States since World War II. It focuses on the historic development of the equipments that has been invented for the management and direction of the country's military technology programs. It also examines the role and functions of scientists and engineers in the military technology programs of the United States. It also cites the organizational mechanisms which controlled and influenced the course of technological developments.

Performance obstacles are factors in the work environment that restrict prod activity by inhibiting employees in the execution of task responsibilities. In spite of their apparent importance, little research has been done to describe, categorize, or assess these obstacles. A research project carried out in 12 United States electronics firms demonstrates that employees in two groups (circuit board assemblers and manufacturing engineers) view performance obstacles as having a significant influence on their performance. Materials and information obstacles emerged as being the most important to the circuit board assemblers, For the engineers, information and control/authority were the most important obstacle categories. Managers tended to agree with circuit board assemblers about the importance of obstacles for that employee group. However, managers tended to disagree with the engineers, giving lower ratings of importance than the engineers did in several categories. The research provides a step toward a typology of performance obstacles, demonstrating similarities and differences between employee groups, and it suggests that at least in some areas managers may not be as accurate as they could be in assessing the influence of performance obstacles on their employees. The findings indicate that the themes that have prevailed in the research on operations management (i.e. materials, quality, scheduling) are viewed by employees as being predominant factors in the productivity equation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study, using data from the Professional, Administrative, Technical, and Clerical Pay Survey and the Current Population Survey, examines how the assignment of responsibility within firms affected the structure of wages of U.S. engineers between 1961 and 1986. Patterns of wage dispersion in this sample mirrored patterns found in broader segments of the labor market during the same period. In engineering, wage dispersion within levels of responsibility fell steadily between 1976 and 1986, while wage dispersion between levels rose. At the same time, engineering jobs began to migrate to lower levels within firms. The author explains the trends in wages and job assignments as responses to changes in the supply of and demand for engineers, within the frame-work of hierarchy models of responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a study of a number of campaigns conducted since 1968 by unions seeking to organize professional engineers. The author draws on the results of interviews with union and management representatives to describe four major causes of the relative failure of unions on this front: employer opposition, the attitudes and values of engineers, the lack of bargaining power of engineers, and union attitudes and organizing policies. The author discusses the way in which these four factors interact to thwart engineering unionization, focussing on the manner in which strong resistance to unionization by employers can thaw on a value system in the United States that is not supportive of unionization. He concludes that the short-term prospects for further unionization of this occupation are very limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the results of a study on employment re-entry decision making among displaced workers in the engineering and science industries in the United States. The influence of salary, geographical location, and employment goals on decision making is discussed. The willingness of displaced workers to change occupations, accept a lower salary, or relocate to obtain reemployment is addressed. The study examined the influence of the length of unemployment on a worker's willingness to accept career changes. The article discusses the application of the study's results to labor laws and personnel management.

This article analyzes a large sample of engineers for whom data are available concerning several dimensions of ability, together with a history of their education and earnings during the 1943-70 period in the U.S. A model incorporating these variables accounts for about 65 percent of the variation in annual earnings within four of the five educational groupings of the engineers studied. The author also compares the internal rates of return to education among these engineers with rates of return among members of other professions and concludes that over the long run, the labor market has tended to produce an equilibrium between the supply of and demand for engineers of similar ability and education. The systematic effects of on-the-job training are thought to be of predominant importance in determining earnings within educational-level groups. A possible explanation for the seemingly erratic behavior of the on-the-job training factor score coefficients is that engineers with different levels of education gravitate to sub-occupations that require the exercise of selective skills.

This article discusses various issues related to the imposition of controls over the free flow of scientific information in the United States and its national security. The article makes specific reference to the views of Bobby Inman, deputy director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, in this regard. There are many reports and proposed regulations that ask to limit openness and free flow of scientific work due to certain national security concerns. Different reviews conducted by different agencies have affected the work of intellectuals including scientists, engineers, students along with university and industrial officials.

The article discusses a study which examined the influence of a reduction in workforce on the work attitudes of engineers in the U.S. The study compared two groups of engineers, one of which was released by a company during a reduction in force while the other was retained. The company, a division of a large corporation concerned with government defense contracts, was involved in two layoffs during the 1970-72 recession in the country. To measure the specific job attitudes of current and terminated engineers, three scales were utilized: indifference; job involvement; and sense of duty. As measured by the three attitudinal scales, there were no significant differences between the terminated and current engineers.

The purpose of this article is to bring together a summary of research on motivation of scientists and engineers in combination with data from interviews with ten scientists and engineers in a large research and development laboratory. Those interviewed were managers, who functioned on various levels. In order to present this summary, the device of a hypothetical clinical study of one George Engineer was chosen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the four studies which investigate how academic specialists in the U.S. view themselves, as well as their roles in technical assistance programs. These studies were conducted by Leonard J. Fein at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies on engineers and scientists, and Clarence E. Thurber, George M. Guthrie, and Richard M. Spencer at the Pennsylvania State University on agriculturists, education specialist, and engineers. Also, C. Wendell King and Edwin D. Driver at the University of Massachusetts conducted studies on teachers in the social sciences and humanities, and William B. Storm and Jason L. Finkle at the University of Southern California on social scientists.

The article discusses the demands of scientific revolution to the government in the U.S. One of them is to correct the inadequate salaries specifically on the executive levels. Another is to provide technical people a suitable environment under the control of professional scientists and engineers. Also urgently needed are more flexible personnel policies in the management levels-similar to those in corporations. Scientists and engineers must face up to three new facts including the inevitability and urgency of their new public service functions, the need for a new and respected career pattern to fulfill these functions and the need to develop methods to maintain the highest technical competence under these conditions.

The article presents a history of the American Association of Engineers which became popular from 1919 to 1923. In 1921, the association became the largest organization with more than 20,000 members. Engineering became a prestigious course but the apprenticeship that follows after graduation makes the students less proud of their chosen field. Worse, there was an oversupply of manpower in this field due to many graduates. Membership in the association was limited to established engineers. Frustratingly for young engineers, they could not ask for assistance from this kind of organization.

Ninety-six open-ended interviews were coded to measure career orientations of scientists and engineers in a formal research organization. Responses were categorized into two career-identification dimensions (institutional-non institutional and technical-managerial) and three career-style dimensions (active-passive, idealistic-cynical, and task-interpersonal). The responses were also categorized with respect to perceptions of rewarded activity, or how one gets ahead, into four variables: technical performance, personality, visibility and organizational circumstances. The low degree of correlation among the career orientation dimensions supports the conclusion that a profile based on these five dimensions may be more accurate and useful than single dimensions. The data show no correlation between the managerial orientation and the institutional orientation, possibly a reflection of the increased professionalization of supervisory personnel. Correlations between career orientations and perceptions of rewarded activity tended to be low, suggesting that these are independent variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the United States Congress passed the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, biologists played an increasingly significant role in scientific studies of water pollution. Biologists interacted with other experts, notably engineers, who managed the public agencies devoted to water pollution control. Although biologists were at first marginalized within these agencies, the situation began to change by the early 1960s. Biological data became an integral part of water pollution control. While changing societal values, stimulated by an emerging ecological awareness, may explain broader shifts in expert opinion during the 1960s, this article explores how graphs changed experts' perceptions of water pollution. Experts communicated with each other via reports, journal articles, and conference speeches. Those sources reveal that biologists began experimenting with new graphical methods to simplify the complex ecological data they collected from the field. Biologists, I argue, followed the engineers' lead by developing graphical methods that were concise and quantitative. Their need to collaborate with engineers forced them to communicate, negotiate, and overcome conflicts and misunderstandings. By meeting engineers' expectations and promoting the value of their data through images as much as words, biologists asserted their authority within water pollution control by the early 1960s., (© 2023 The Authors. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

Directionally distributed steel fibre-reinforced concrete (SFRC) cannot be widely applied due to the limitations of current construction technology, which hinders research on its mechanical properties. With the development of new construction technologies, such as self-compacting concrete or 3D printing, directionally distributed SFRC has found new developmental opportunities. This study tested, compared, and analysed the basic mechanical properties of ordinary concrete, randomly distributed SFRC, and directionally distributed SFRC. The differences between the damage patterns parallel and perpendicular to the direction of the steel fibres were evaluated in directionally distributed SFRC. When the fibre volume fraction is high and the compression is applied perpendicular to the fibre direction, as the loading increases, the transverse deformation of the specimen is constrained by the fibres. When the compression is applied parallel to the fibre direction, the fibre cannot effectively constrain the transverse deformation of the specimens. When the volume fraction of directionally distributed steel fibres was 1.6%, the elastic modulus of the directionally distributed steel fibres was 39% higher than that of ordinary concrete. Comparison of the experimental values of the elastic modulus with those estimated by existing calculation methods revealed that a modification of the current calculation theories may be required to calculate the changes in the elastic modulus of directionally distributed SFRC with a high volume fraction of steel fibres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on the Indian diaspora domiciled in the U.S.A. largely portrays the group as educated, highly skilled migrants in pursuit of theirAmerican Dream, without critically engaging with the regionally particularised migration trajectories that predispose only certain groups to become skilled migrants from the global South to the North. Migration studies bracket skilled migrants as those who make rational choices and choose formal routes to migrate whereas unskilled migrants often rely on informal channels of kinship or ethnicity to migrate. Unsettling this proposition, in this article, based on an ethnographic study of the high-skilled Telugu professionals in the U.S.A. and their families living in Coastal Andhra, India, I show how aspirational and topographical migration pathways from Coastal Andhra to the U.S.A. are created and sustained through networks of kinship, caste and endogamous transnational marriage alliances. These high-skilled migrants (doctors, engineers and scientists) from the dominant castes have successfully manoeuvred spatial mobility and social upward mobility by utilising ‘caste capital’ within a transnational social field. Moreover, decades of migration from the dominant castes have shaped a caste-inflected transnational habitus among its members who see migration of their youth to the U.S.A. as desirable, and at times, also inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender differences in science and engineering (S&E) have been studied in various countries. Most of these studies find that women are underrepresented in the S&E workforce and publish less than their male peers. The factors that contribute to gender differences in experience and performance in S&E careers can vary from one country to another, yet they remain underexplored. This paper is among the first to systematically compare gender differences in the publication productivity of academic scientists and engineers with doctoral degrees in the U.S. and China. Findings from negative binomial regressions show that women publish less than their male counterparts in science but not in engineering in the U.S. In China, women do not differ from men in publication productivity in science but publish more than their male counterparts in engineering. In addition, we find that some background variables affect men's and women's publication productivity differently. The findings are analyzed in the context of the different cultures of the two fields (science vs. engineering) and of the two countries (the U.S. and China). Limitations and policy implications are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States has underinvested in water infrastructure for decades. Outdated water and wastewater systems across the nation are struggling to keep up with their infrastructure needs while utilities are burdened with expanding regulatory requirements and intensifying climate change scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the migration processes and labor incorporation of two professional groups of Mexicans in the United States: engineers and nurses. Certification standards, the ability of migrants to act as agents, and the involvement of various actors in the migratory process are analyzed in order to understand how differentiated labor paths are built within and between each occupational group in the US labor market Other structural factors that helped to understand the processes studied were the motivations to migrate, family and professions networks, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do immigrant faculty trained in American higher education institutions adopt the outlook and practices of native US scientists and engineers (“convergence”), or do they diverge from such practices? The modern science paradigm holds that location will not matter significantly and that immigrants in either place will converge to a common standard of scientific practice. Drawing upon 134 in-depth interviews, this paper compares the scientific practices of two groups of Indian immigrant faculty in science and engineering: (i) those who studied and worked in the United States and then returned to India and (ii) those who continued to work in the United States. This paper shows that the two groups differed in important ways: ease of securing grants, management of grants, research environment, professional autonomy, and research type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fall of 2014, the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver) launched a new interdisciplinary graduate program in the Department of Civil Engineering. The mission of the Construction Engineering and Management (CEM) master's program is to provide the skills necessary to prepare the next generation of construction engineers to be effective leaders and managers in the ever-evolving construction industry. Developing a new program provided unique opportunities. However, developing a truly interdisciplinary program in engineering meant that few models or templates existed. This research documents the preliminary curriculum outcomes and assessment, as well as lessons learned during program development. Specifically, after completion of the program's first year, the faculty assessed student learning in the core curriculum, surveyed industry experts, and interviewed students to gather feedback on the program. A team of faculty and assessment experts met monthly to develop the program's vision, learning objectives, curriculum, and assessment plan. This mixed-method research documents and presents implementation and preliminary outcomes. The primary take-aways include the following: academic preparation of students for professional practice in construction requires diverse, customizable, and interdisciplinary curricula; to accomplish such an objective, it is best to develop curriculum and assessment in parallel; faculty buy-in and commitment is critical; and program- and course-level coordination and iteration are essential. Although the opportunity to develop a new and original program is rare, today many universities are looking to develop innovative interdisciplinary programs. As a result, findings from this research are relevant and informative to engineering departments seeking to improve existing or develop innovative and interdisciplinary programs or curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering remains one of the most highly and persistently sex segregated occupations in the United States. Though extant literature submits thatwomen's increased access to managerial positions in male-dominated occupations should represent an important strategy for addressing sex segregation, my analysis of 61 interviews with industry engineers suggests that increasing women's disproportionate representation in managerial roles in engineering may promote the very sex segregation it is attempting to mitigate. The analysis highlights how organizations reinforce female engineers' movement into managerial roles and foster a form of intraoccupational sex segregation with unintended consequences for women. These consequences include fostering mixed identification with engineering, reinforcing stereotypes about women's suitability for technical work, and increasing work-life balance tensions. The findings further suggest that an inverted role hierarchy in engineering may explain these gendered career patterns and their unintended consequences. By inverted role hierarchy I mean the valuing of technical over managerial roles. Implications for the literatures on occupational sex segregation, women's representation in managerial roles, and the experience of women in male-dominated occupations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineers need considerable understanding of humanities and social science to serve effectively and responsibly as professionals. Undergraduate engineering education faces pressures to add technical and non-technical content and decrease total credit hours, educational costs, and time to degree. This study characterizes how discipline-based engineering programs in the United States distribute required coursework between technical and non-technical areas of study in comparison to math, chemistry, and physics programs; the results could signal consensus or disparity in educational philosophy between and among institutions or disciplines. The distribution of technical versus non-technical coursework was delineated for 103 US News & World Report top-ranked and ABET EAC-accredited undergraduate programs in chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering based on 2013 catalog requirements, as well as chemistry, math, and physics programs at the same institutions. Technical was defined as coursework in engineering, math or natural science; non-technical was coursework outside of those disciplines. Findings reveal a wide range of required technical and non-technical course loads for all disciplines. For engineering, technical requirements ranged from 62% to 86% (median 75%) of total degree; non-technical requirements ranged from 12% to 35% (median 20%). The math, chemistry, and physics degrees were more balanced between technical and non-technical requirements. Differences in requirements suggest that consensus does not exist amongst engineering educators from this sampling of programs regarding the appropriate allocation of technical versus non-technical coursework for an undergraduate engineering education, and there are substantially divergent interpretations of what constitutes adequate "general education" for an engineer. Additionally, students who desire more well-rounded education might select non-engineering STEM majors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]