Have you developed high-quality, non-commercial courseware designed to enhance engineering education? We want to see it! Submissions due July 11, 2008. The Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware, hosted by the NEEDS/ Engineering Pathway, is open to a wide range of submissions of “high-quality, non-commercial courseware designed to enhance engineering education.” Submissions [...]

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Today in History – June 27, 1954 – First nuclear power plant begins operation. In the mid-1950′s, both the Soviet Union and western countries were exploring the non-military uses of the atom. However, even this non-military work was done in secret and not much was known about it in the West at the time. The [...]

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Today in History – June 26, 1974 – First barcode using the universal product code (UPC) was scanned by a cashier at a supermarket checkout counter. A shopper named Clyde Dawson handed a cashier at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio named Sharon Buchanan a 10-pack of chewing gum. The gum’s black and white barcode [...]

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Today in History – June 25, 1903 – Marie Curie defends her doctoral thesis, then gets Nobel Prize five months later. Did she just procrastinate? Or were thesis standards higher a century ago at the Sorbonne? I haven’t seen a good explanation for the delay, other than she was busy discovering new elements. Earlier in [...]

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Today in History – June 24, 1963 – First television video recorder is demonstrated. The Telcan was the first domestic “TV recorder”. The Nottingham Electric Valve Company developed a simple reel-to-reel system, using ordinary 1/4 inch audio tape that recorded linearly with stationary heads. It could only manage a maximum of 20 minutes of low-resolution [...]

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