Thayer School
Among the students at Alumni College were John Cogswell '32, Gerry Sarno '51,Don Sisson '48 and George Hartmann '50, all with families. George has just been moved up in General Electric to the corporate headquarters in New York, from Syracuse. Congratulations!
Thayer School was no exception to the busy atmosphere. A number of graduate students remained in residence, and several courses were given to visiting engineers. These included Information Theory, Two-phase Flow, Reverse Osmosis and Desalina- tion, and Computer Applications. A second Bearings Conference, held in early September, was sponsored by the Thayer School in cooperation with the Instrument Precision Bearing Section of the American Ordnance Association. Clark Griffiths '58, Manager of Product Engineering, Split Ball Bearing Div., MPB Corporation, in Lebanon, N. H., opened the conference as Chairman, Eastern Region, IPBB, and Prof. Carl Long was conference chairman in charge of arrangements. Several revolutionary advances in the science and technology of bearings were reported at the conference, particularly in reference to lubricants, materials, and the geometry of bearings.
Dean Myron Tribus traveled to Scotland in late August to present a series of lectures on Information Theory at the University of Glasgow. Myron continues at the front of the development of this discipline. AndyPorteous, D.E. '67, is in charge of the teaching of thermodynamics there, and is conducting ducting research on sea water conversion. Andy and Jon Kropper '56 have combined their efforts to develop a program of cooperation between the University of Glasgow and the Polaroid Corporation to introduce some of the Thayer School educational features into the Glasgow curriculum. Jon has been with Polaroid in Scotland for the last two years organizing and setting up the manufacturing of Polaroid equipment for color and black and white photography.
Thayer School was well represented at the annual convention of the American Society for Engineering Education at U.C.L.A., in June. Dean Tribus participated in several sessions devoted to the design of engineering curricula. His discussions of the core curriculum development at U.C.L.A., in which he had a leading role, and the educational philosophy and curricula at Dartmouth, stimulated a valuable dialog. Prof. Robert Dean presented a paper on engineering design which emphasized the need to provide the student with an opportunity to be creative, while at the same time satisfying the discipline of professional, technical, social, and economic criteria. John Fondahl '48 chaired a joint session sponsored by the Construction Division and the Associated General Contractors. John is Professor of Civil Engineering at Stanford. Bill Kimball '29 and Russ Stearns '38 attended the convention and had a fine visit with Don and Chag Pyke who live in Los Angeles. Don, who is Assistant to the Vice President of Thompson- Ramo-Wooldridge, will be remembered as the Assistant Dean at Thayer School in the early 1950's
Jon Allen '57 was awarded his Ph.D. at M.I.T. last June. His thesis was "A Study of the Specification of Prosodic Features of Speech from a Grammatical Analysis of Printed Text." Jon has remained at M.I.T. as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, but will retain his connection with his old employer, Bell Labs, through research. Jon's work on speech is in the same general area as that of MarkTuttle '66 which hopefully will result in the development of a reading machine for the blind. To accomplish this they must learn how to compute the parts of speech, taking into account confusing, similar word sounds and highly variable prosodic features. Mark is now at Harvard studying for his docto- rate.
Under the coming events category, remember the D.S.E. meetings in New York on October 8, and in Boston on October 30. Also, Bill Kimball will address the System Engineering Seminar to be conducted on October 4 and 5 in the Webster Hall Hotel, Pittsburgh. This seminar will be held in conjunction with the A.S.C.E. annual meeting. Bill is one of the organizers of the seminar and will talk from the perspective of his position as ASCE Assistant Secretary Education.
In a previous column we mentioned that the draft would have a serious effect on the Thayer School graduate enrollment this fall. As of now we can report that instead of the 85 graduate students expected, we now estimate 60. Deferments to complete the full, five-year, engineering program have been difficult to obtain since, for many draft boards, the receipt of the four-year, A.B. degree is considered the completion of an engineering program of study.
