Rahul Choudaha   |   22 January 2012   |   Issue No:205

The centre of gravity of the global economy is shifting eastwards. More than 20 of the world’s top 50 cities ranked by gross domestic product are projected to be located in Asia by 2025, up from eight in 2007, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. It contends that accelerated urbanisation will result in a larger number of households with higher purchasing power.

The two heavyweights China and India alone will see their aggregate urban consumption increase seven-fold and six-fold respectively from 2005 to 2025. What does this projected socio-economic transformation of Asia mean for international student mobility?

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Conventional coal, oil and gas resources used worldwide for power production and transportation are limited and unsustainable. Research and development into clean, alternative hydrocarbon fuels is therefore aimed at improving fuel security through exploring new feedstock conversion techniques, improving production efficiency and reducing environmental impacts.

Advances in clean hydrocarbon fuel processing provides a comprehensive and systematic reference on the range of alternative conversion processes and technologies.

Following introductory overviews of the feedstocks, environmental issues and life cycle assessment for alternative hydrocarbon fuel processing, sections go on to review solid, liquid and gaseous fuel conversion. Solid fuel coverage includes reviews of liquefaction, gasification, pyrolysis and biomass catalysis. Liquid fuel coverage includes reviews of sulfur removal, partial oxidation and hydroconversion. Gaseous fuel coverage includes reviews of Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, methanol and dimethyl ether production, water-gas shift technology and natural gas hydrate conversion. The final section examines environmental degradation issues in fuel processing plants as well as automation, advanced process control and process modelling techniques for plant optimisation

Written by an international team of expert contributors, Advances in clean hydrocarbon fuel processing provides a valuable reference for fuel processing engineers, industrial petrochemists and energy professionals, as well as for researchers and academics in this field.

This amazing book is by our fellow Dr. Rush Kahn, for more info click here.

Link to its amazon.com page is here.

For some of the world’s poorest people, the biggest impact can come from fostering creative problem-solving.

David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

When it comes to really improving the lives of some of the world’s poorest people, the first step can be as simple as handing them sheets of paper. 

That was the first exercise in classes taught by MIT D-Lab founder Amy Smith and graduate student Kofi Taha during workshops they held last year in Uganda, one of Africa’s most impoverished and war-ravaged nations. To get the villagers thinking creatively about addressing some of their own problems and concerns, Smith and Taha posed a challenge for them: They were asked to engineer a way, using just two sheets of ordinary paper, to support several ears of corn up off the ground.

For the workshop participants — rural people being relocated back to their small, remote villages after more than a decade interned in camps for those displaced by Uganda’s internal warfare — the challenge was daunting at first. But they quickly took to it, devising a great variety of clever ways to support the corn with cylinders, cones and cups made by folding (no gluing or cutting allowed) the sheets of paper. Right away, they began to feel more capable, and more ready for their next challenges.

One MIT senior traveled the planet’s most remote areas before landing at the Institute, where he now works on engineering better thermoelectric devices.

Emily Finn, MIT News Office

Plenty of students take a year off between high school and college. Very few of them spend it staving off frostbite and carrying wooden boards across a continent most people will never see.

Yet Antarctica — along with other latitudinal extremes such as Greenland and Siberia — was a stop on senior Ian McKay’s circuitous journey to MIT, where he’ll receive his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering this month. Upon graduating high school, McKay, a native of Seattle, says he was less concerned with attending college than with “exploding out into the world.” 

“I was really, really obsessed with living the exact kind of book that I would want to read someday,” he says. 

An avid ski racer, McKay had heard legendary tales of fellow skiers who had traversed the snowy continent. He spent his savings on a ticket to Denver, where the annual job fair for the U.S. Antarctic Program is held. Having read up on employment needs and conditions in the extreme south, he convinced recruiters to give him a position as a construction worker.

Terri Kim*
11 December 2011 
Issue: 201

The Eurozone crisis seems to be deepening with no sign of clear solutions at the moment. Banks have been advised to make contingency plans for the collapse of the single currency if leaders cannot come up with a last-minute rescue package. "If the euro fails, then Europe fails," warned German Chancellor Angela Merkel. What is happening to higher education during the crisis in Europe?

There are some obvious points to be made. 

First, the crisis in Eurozone is not just a European crisis, but is also entwined with the global financial system. The outlook forecast in the media is that Eurozone cohesion could unravel fast and that austerity, high unemployment, social unrest, high borrowing costs and banking chaos are likely to stay. Clearly, the effects of such a crisis are worth worrying about - but are quite unpredictable.

Second, in Europe policy goals are likely to stay stable in the short term. The European Higher Education Area and European Research Area are bigger than the Eurozone and, therefore, the Eurozone crisis will not necessarily directly affect the vision of Europe 2020 as the world's most competitive knowledge economy.

I. Elaine Allen*
20 November 2011 
Issue: 198

I am co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group which, for the last nine years, has published a survey of online education in the United States. It has yet to see any clear indication of an overall slowdown in the growth of online education but there are changes in the differential growth of programmes and in the belief that, in some areas, online education is superior for students.

The rate of growth of online enrolments was slower over the last year, but it continues to outpace the rate of growth of the total higher education student population in the US. Every year since the first report in this series in 2003, the number of students taking at least one online course has increased at a rate far in excess of the growth of the overall student body.

The most recent estimate, for the autumn of 2010, shows an increase of 10% over autumn 2009 to a total of 6.1 million students taking at least one course online for that semester.

This is an almost four-fold increase in students taking courses online since our first survey in 2002, and represents a compound annual growth rate of 18.3% over the nine-year period. By comparison, the overall higher education student body in the US has grown at an annual rate of just over 2% during this same period.

Thirty-one per cent of all higher education students now take at least one course online.

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Vineeta Dixit

17 November 2011

India's IT sector offers solutions for local problems — but entrepreneurs need help getting innovations to market, says Vineeta Dixit.

In an era where technology has transformed the world into a global village, with mass produced goods for mass consumption, local solutions for local problems may seem like a contradiction.

But scientific tools such as information and communication technologies (ICTs) seem to be bucking the trend. They are being invented, marketed, and some are even making money in India and other developing countries keen to explore local solutions.

They show that grassroots IT innovation works. But to benefit poor people across the world, there is a need to ensure that innovations reach the market fast.

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Mićo Tatalović

18 November 2011

[BUDAPEST] Two key science organisations have launched a programme to promote and develop science diplomacy between the United States and developing countries.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and TWAS (The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World) signed a memorandum of agreement yesterday (17 November) at a side event at the World Science Forum, in Hungary. The agreement will also formally be announced at the TWAS General Meeting, in Italy next week (21-23 November).

The 'TWAS/AAAS Program on Science and Diplomacy' seeks to advance issues at the interface of science and diplomacy globally.

"The overlapping, yet complementary, strengths of the two organizations provide a strong foundation for developing an effective international program for science and diplomacy," the agreement says.

Although projects are yet to be agreed, the broad focus will be on building regional cooperation and networks between the AAAS and TWAS members and associated countries; and increasing the capacity of foreign ministries, international departments in research ministries and international policy organisations in TWAS member countries to build science partnerships.

Kaustuv Basu

WASHINGTON – More than 1,000 new universities and 50,000 new colleges.

Those are the numbers India is looking at if the country is to try to meet its ambitions of more than doubling its higher education enrollment in the next 10 years, said Kapil Sibal, the Indian human resources minister, at the U.S.-India Higher Education Summit at Georgetown University Thursday.

That kind of growth would result in a tremendous need for collaboration with existing colleges in India, the United States and elsewhere, in all kinds of areas, including the search for qualified faculty members, he said.

The daylong summit, jointly hosted by the governments of the two countries, brought together more than 30 Indian leaders from government and higher education and their American counterparts. Opening remarks came from Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, and from Sibal.

By MICHAEL ELLSBERG

 I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.

In a recent speech promoting a jobs bill, President Obama told Congress, “Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin.”

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