A new database from the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau provides the most detailed state-by-state snapshot yet of U.S. engineers and scientists. Collected from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2005 American Community Survey, the database highlights the location, earnings, and education of engineers, as well as participation of minorities, women, and foreign-born workers.

The study was funded by the Sloan Foundation, which says it wants to establish the basic facts about the U.S. science and engineering workforce.

Sloan vice president Michael Teitelbaum writes on the foundation's Web site: "There are many signs of problems: simultaneous claims of both shortages and surpluses, low retention rates in undergraduate and graduate programs, increasing time to degree, movements to unionize graduate students, and rapid growth in post-doc numbers."

Science and Engineering Occupations in the United States

In the past, Teitelbaum has questioned whether there is a shortage of scientists and engineers in the United States. He believes policy makers need better data to make informed decisions about science and engineering education, funding, and work visas for foreign workers.

The data are also significant because scientists and engineers are "important as an engine for higher earnings, innovation, and economic growth," noted the Population Reference Bureau's deputy director, Mark Mather.

The new database found 7.4 million scientists and engineers in the United States in 2005. About 43 percent of them were in information technology and 35 percent in engineering. No other category—physical sciences, life sciences, architecture, math, and social sciences—accounted for more than 6 percent of the total.

Most scientists and engineers were concentrated along the coasts: 457,880 around New York City; 310,035 around Washington, D.C., and 296,065 near Los Angeles. Science and engineering occupations make up 9 percent of the District of Columbia workforce; 8 percent in Maryland; and 7 percent in Colorado, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington.

These are all regions where the high-tech economy flourishes. The highest median incomes for scientists and engineers are in Maryland and New Jersey—$70,000, compared with a national average of $58,760. In North and South Dakota, where engineers make up only 3 percent of the workforce, the median salary is $40,000.

According to Mather, the disparity reflects both the higher cost of living in New Jersey and Maryland and the ready availability of well-paying IT jobs. According to the Population Reference Bureau's analysis, women constitute about one-quarter of the overall science and engineering workforce. The majority of social scientists, 56 percent, are women, but they make up only 13 percent of engineers and 26 percent of IT workers.

People identified with racial and ethnic minorities made up 26 percent of the national science and engineering workforce. African-Americans were best represented in Georgia (19 percent) and Maryland (18 percent). Hispanics were strongest in New Mexico (22 percent), Florida (14 percent), and Texas (13 percent). Asians, who account for 4 percent of the total labor force in the United States, made up 13 percent of the nation's scientists and engineers.

Nearly one-fourth of people working in the life and physical sciences were foreign-born in 2005. In some states, they make up a sizeable and growing share of the workforce. In California and New Jersey, for example, they account for more than one-third of all scientists and engineers. Many were recruited from China or India to work in high-tech firms. Others came to the United States as students and remained here to work or to found companies. Foreign-born workers had a median income of $62,420, 10 percent higher than the $56,685 earned by scientists and engineers born in the United States.

The 2007 ASME Student Design Competition, a challenge to devise the best human-powered water purification system, won't end with the finals at the Society's Congress this month. ASME hopes to leverage the theme of the competition into an open-source project that may be able to provide potable water in the developing world and to disaster areas.

Kemi Oluwanifise, ASME's coordinator for student development programs, said that more than 100 teams entered the competition and 14 will compete at Congress. Members of the finalist teams will be invited to apply to join a group that will work on an open-source human-powered water-purification project.

The Student Design Competition finals are scheduled for Nov. 11. The Student Design Committee will name five students to the open-source team in December. That team will collaborate on a virtual design for several months and then build a prototype at Western Kentucky University, the host school, in June.

According to David Soukup, managing director for ASME centers, which is overseeing the program, their work will be made available to the public on the Society's Web site, www.asme.org.

For purposes of the competition, teams must build a water-distilling system that meets three criteria: The energy to run it must come from human effort; it must be portable for emergency use, and it should be easily assembled from its stored configuration.

The open-source project has fewer restrictions. It aims for a prototype of a water purification system for use under harsh conditions—say, during a flood when power and other services are out, or in remote places without electricity or other sources of power.

The Boeing Co. is the sponsor of the competition. ASME has awarded a $30,000 strategic priority grant for the open-source work. Another ASME competition meant to take ideas into the realm of practicality is Innovation Showcase. Created by the ASME Center for Engineering Entrepreneurship and Innovation, it is the subject of a feature this month exclusively on Mechanical Engineering Online, at www.memagazine.org.

When the new edition of ASME's Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code is published, it will recognize a new, alternative method of assessing weld fatigue. Battelle has issued a statement saying that the method, mentioned in Section VIII, Division 2 of the Code, was developed by one of its scientists, Pingsha Dong.

Neither Dong nor Batelle is named in the text of the Code, but according to Joseph Brzuszkiewicz, ASME staff secretary to the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Standards Committee, two passages in the new Code, "Fatigue Assessment of Welds—Elastic Analysis and Structural Stress" and "Welded Joint Design Fatigue Curves" refer to technology developed by Dong.

Battelle describes it as the mesh-insensitive structural stress method and says it is also called the master S-N curve method, because it can "correlate a massive amount of actual fatigue test data into a single S-N curve." Under the brand name Verity, it is included in fatigue software called fe-Safe, distributed by Safe Technologies Ltd. of Sheffield, England.

Battelle, based in Columbus, Ohio, says the software provides a new high level of predictability for fatigue and fatigue life of structural welds. According to Battelle's statement, the method has undergone years of testing to demonstrate its reliability and its inclusion in the Code "marks a crowning achievement" for Dong.

Inecom Entertainment Co.—a subsidiary of Algor Inc., the FEA software development company—said it will release it latest film, Westinghouse, on DVD in April.

Westinghouse is a feature-length documentary about the life and times of George Westinghouse, his companies, legacy, and achievements.

Westinghouse championed alternating current in competition with Edison, who favored direct current. Westinghouse won, and the world runs on ac. According to the film-makers, Westinghouse invented not only the railroad air brake, automobile shock absorbers, and railroad signaling devices, but also the modern-day weekend. Westinghouse was elected president of ASME in 1910.

Westinghouse was filmed in cooperation with the George Westinghouse Museum, and includes films and photos drawn from the Westinghouse archives.

Preorders for the film are being taken through Amazon.com. A preview of the film is available on the Inecom Web site at www.inecom.com. The DVD will be in stores on April 8.

The nuclear industry in the United States has been gearing up for a new round of plant development, and the first application in almost 30 years to build a new reactor was filed on Sept. 24. NRG Energy, a wholesale energy supplier, and an operating company have filed an application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to add two reactors to a nuclear plant operating in Matagorda County, Texas.

It is the first complete application to be filed in almost 30 years, according to a spokesman at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. NRG and South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Co. are seeking to add a third and fourth reactor that will double the output of a plant called the South Texas Project.

A partial filing—involving environmental and site data, without an application for construction—was filed in July by Constellation Energy Corp. for a reactor in Maryland.

(NRG's filing comes a half-century after the first reactors came on line. Frank Wicks looks at Atoms for Peace and its legacy in "50 Years of Nuclear Power," in this issue.)

NRG is asking to build two Advanced Boiling Water Reactors, developed by General Electric. They have more passive safety systems than older reactors, and are designed for greater reliability and economies of construction and operation. The design has not been built in the United States, but several have been commissioned in Japan.

The two units already in operation at the South Texas Project are Pressurized Water Reactors built by Westinghouse. Together, the new reactors will be capable of generating 2,700 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power more than two million homes, the company said. Reactors 1 and 2 at the plant are rated at just over 1,200 MW each.

According to NRG, the plant is on a 12,220-acre site, which contains a 7,000-acre cooling reservoir originally designed to serve four reactors.

The filing is made under new rules that permit a company to apply for a single permit to both build and operate a nuclear reactor. Referred to as a combined construction and operating license, it differs from old rules, which required a company to apply first for a permit to build a reactor and, only after the plant was built, to apply for permission to operate it. Uncertainty, difficulty, and expense inherent in the system caused many companies that embarked on reactor projects to abandon them, some nearly complete. An exploration of the new rules and their implications was the cover article in the October issue of Mechanical Engineering magazine.

NRG expects unit 3 to come online in 2014 and unit 4 in 2015.

The ASME Innovative Technologies Institute LLC has completed two new sector-specific guidance documents under a contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The documents apply ASME-ITI's risk analysis methodology RAMCAP (Risk Analysis and Management for Critical Asset Protection) to water and wastewater utilities, and to conventional dams and navigation locks.

The Buckeye Bullet 2, a fuel cell-powered car developed by a student team at Ohio State University, has set a land speed racing record for hydrogen-fueled cars by clocking 224 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats in October. The original Buckeye Bullet, also designed by OSU students, surpassed 300 mph in 2004, and set the record at Bonneville for electric cars.

Affinia Group Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., is closing its chassis products manufacturing and packaging facility in Mishawaka, Ind. Production and packaging will be consolidated into its Oklahoma City facility. The transition will begin immediately and is expected to be completed by mid-2008.

Limco-Piedmont Inc. of Tulsa, Okla., received a $4.1 million contract from the U.S. Air Force for the overhaul of heat exchange units for F-15 fighter aircraft. The contract calls for the delivery of 744 units over 36 months.

Peru LNG, one of the largest infrastructure projects in Peru's history, seeking to become a leader in the liquefied natural gas industry, awarded the start of pipeline construction in Lima, Peru, to Techint S.A.C. Construction is expected to start in January.

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