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1: The National Goal
Pages 9-34

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From page 9...
... The National Goal
From page 11...
... The occasion was a conference of delegations from two dozen economically advanced nations who were invited to Venice by the Italian prime minister to discuss the relationship between technology and employment. The event was spurred in part by the growing divergence between the economies of Europe and those of countries, like the United States and Japan, that have been aggressive in taking advantage of new technologies.
From page 12...
... In the true "Europessimist" sense, they could see only the possibility of jobs being eliminated by new technology and productivity improvements, never the jobs that would be created. Not surprisingly, one of my favorite words, "competitiveness," rarely crept into the discussion; it was as if competition simply were not an element of the industrial world.
From page 13...
... Today we not only have a more realistic view of our competition; we also have a more realistic view of our significant capacity to compete. To the extent that one can characterize a national mood, I would say that the American people and American industry are more optimistic today than they've been in years, and that they are looking forward to a healthy economic future.
From page 14...
... One of the points I found especially interesting was the conclusion by this group, which was composed primarily of industrial leaders, that the United States has only two competitive advantages in today' s international market of low-cost labor, overvalued dollars, high interest rates, and Byzantine trade regulations. Those two advantages are our scientific and technical knowledge base and our talent base.
From page 15...
... The narrow approach to research, in which studies are generally confined to highly specialized subdisciplines, needs to be joined with broader perspectives. The overwhelming response of the universities themselves to this new program there were proposals from virtually every engineering and research university in the country reveals what I can only interpret as tremendous enthusiasm for breaking out of some of the old molds of education and research, an impression intensified by my observation of the many people present at the symposium.
From page 16...
... One major step we have taken to meet this challenge has been to provide such large increases in government support for basic research in universities. We have also increased funding to replace outdated research equipment, improved the access of university researchers and their students to supercomputers, and, together with industry, created special programs to attract the best young engineers and scientists to teaching and research .
From page 17...
... In the United States, as in many other countries, there is a real danger of letting others assume industrial leadership in profitable new fields of technology, even though we have a head start through immense investments in the research which has established those fields. Returning to my earlier anecdote, I wish I could have transported my fellow delegates from Venice to the ERC symposium.
From page 18...
... Keyworth said he "would be very surprised if we didn't see the Engineering Research Centers become something on the order of 10 percent of the National Science Foundation [budget] in a very short period of time." He expressed his belief that the concept of a joint university-industry multidisciplinary research institute is long overdue, and that it will spread beyond the NSF to other agencies.
From page 19...
... But Japan's experience shows that it is possible to succeed in international technological competition while relying on others for fundamental knowledge and for really new ideas. Obviously the Japanese example should not cause us to rush off and blindly imitate their methods.
From page 20...
... It begins in the 1880s with two German physicists, Julius Elster and Hans Geitel, who were studying electrical conduction in gases near heated solids and flames. They discovered that if they enclosed the gas and two metal electrodes in a glass bulb and heated one electrode, an electric current would flow in one direction, but not in the other.
From page 21...
... R Emmet, Benjamin Garver Lamme, Robert Watson-Watt, Frank Whittle, George Campbell, Vladimir Ipatieff, Nikola Tesla, Eugene Houdry, Warren Lewis, Gabriel Kron, Claude Shannon, Karl Bosch, and many, .
From page 22...
... That middle ground they occupied between science and engineering the region where the leading edge of research meets the cutting edge of application-is rapidly becoming the key battleground of international economic competition. The battles over computer-integrated manufacturing, very large scale integrated circuits, communications systems, advanced engineering materials, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, supercomputers, software, and many other fields are just beginning.
From page 23...
... Or else they are trained in a science program, which gives them the appropriate knowledge for research but not the appropriate apprenticeship for making use of that research in the solution of practical problems. It is rare for a graduate student headed for a career in engineering research to be exposed in graduate school to a replica of the working conditions or professional relations that he or she will later encounter.
From page 24...
... The idea is not to create Centers that are, in effect, job shops for industry. The research at the Centers should be fundamental research in the areas of engineering practice being taken on by industry that is to say, its aim is not building robots for factories, but generating new understanding of the fundamentals of robotic vision, touch, and control; not programming expert systems for use in diagnostics or repair, but generating new understanding of knowledge representation, search and logic programming techniques, heuristics, analogies, causality, and the other fundamentals of artificial intelligence; not building biotechnology production facilities, but developing unit operations concepts for biological processes.
From page 25...
... This is an area in which industrial research and defense research, both of which inherently transcend disciplines, have led the way. Look, for example, at the role of a one-man interdisciplinary project named Irving Langmuir and his enormous contributions to surface chemistry and plasma physics, as well as to the invention of better light bulbs and electronic tubes.
From page 26...
... The place where the United States can gain additional advantage over our world competitors is the middle ground between scientific research and engineering-the domain of engineering research. In the past we have relied on chance to produce engineering researchers, and have made no concerted effort to create institutions deliberately designed to have the primary focus on engineering research.
From page 27...
... To the suggestion that some ERCs might be located outside universities, he countered that universities must be the site of all Centers and that the point of the ERCs is to foster the cross-disciplinary approach in engineering research at universities. The focus on the problem rather than the discipline can be instrumental in stimulating inventiveness within the culture of the university.
From page 28...
... This process also creates a body of concepts, techniques, and data. Some scientists believe that discoveries flowing from their work drive engineering and technology.
From page 29...
... These are also intellectual and creative acts, no less so than in scientific research. Furthermore, the existence of basic engineering questions and the pursuit of answers to them through research deny the common idea that engineering is only applied science.
From page 30...
... However, we need not look that far back to see that the experiments of engineers and technology developers drive advances in scientific thought. Modern examples can be found in many areas.
From page 31...
... The modern information era was initiated in 1948 when Claude Shannon published two papers on a general mathematical theory of communications systems. This work was based on his attempts and those of his colleagues at Bell Laboratories to track down and control noise in telephone communications channels.
From page 32...
... Collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries, if it is to work in academia, needs strong nurturing and will require flexibility in attitudes as well as new organizational forms. In my view collaboration should not be seen as a threat to traditional disciplines, as some people fear it to be.
From page 33...
... Quality, not quantity, will be our guide in establishing the Centers. Finally, those universities whose excellent proposals could not be funded because of budgetary restrictions should be urged to work with industry and with state and local governments to start Centers on their own, or to propose a Center to another government agency.
From page 34...
... He noted that the ERCs, as well as cooperative and joint research endeavors among various industries and with universities, are evidence of a "change in the cultures" of government, industry, and academia with regard to engineering.


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