A sequence of six design courses are required in the undergraduate biomedical engineering curriculum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This sequence of courses provide a platform for students to develop and improve their oral and written communication skills. After taking a freshman engineering design course, each student admitted to biomedical engineering in the sophomore year does a team design project each semester for six sequential semesters. The teams work on progressively more challenging real-world projects submitted by clients from around the university and from industry. While advancing their technical and problem-solving skills through successive projects, the students also learn interpersonal and public communication skills through this experience.
Review essay of Ferguson, Niall. 2011. Civilization: The West and the Rest. Penguin Books, 403 pages. Why has the west done better than the rest of the world in terms of economic development? Ferguson (2001) offers six reasons: competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumption and the work ethic. This review agrees with all except for this emphasis on Keynesian consumption, but finds much more with which to disagree.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.