Common Errors in English

We’ve recently discovered a very useful – and somewhat addictive – website, Common errors in English. Although it’s not directly about engineering, the site could be helpful in writing papers, developing presentations, or writing cover letters. It’s full of advice about grammar and spelling quandaries you might find familiar: should you use “an” for a word, like Xray, that starts with a vowel sound, but isn’t a vowel? Should you use affect or effect? E.g. or i.e?
You might even come across a mistake you didn’t realize you had been making – I didn’t know “please RSVP” was redundant.

College Renamed Cockrell School of Engineering

AUSTIN, Texas—The Board of Regents of The University of Texas System today (July 11) renamed the College of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin the Cockrell School of Engineering, honoring the late Ernest Cockrell Jr. of Houston, a 1936 graduate of the university who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in petroleum engineering.

Over a 30-year period the Cockrell Foundation has given almost $40 million to the school, which through investment and matching gifts from other donors has grown to almost $130 million. The Cockrell Foundation’s charter reserves additional funding for the school in perpetuity.

Ernest Cockrell Jr. died in 1972 and in 1974 Ernest Cockrell Jr. Hall, a primary engineering building on the campus, was named in his memory.

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WorldWideScience.org is a global science gateway

A new portal that crosses both international and database boundaries was launched recently for people interested in scientific sources that are unavailable through commercial search engines such as Google.

WorldWideScience.org was developed by the Energy Department and the British Library, along with science and technology organizations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands. It employs federated search technology — a search method that simultaneously executes a query against an array of databases, then aggregates and ranks the results — and gives users a single entry point for searching far-flung science portals in parallel with only one query.


WorldWideScience.org follows the model of Science.gov, the searchable portal for science databases of federal science agencies. WorldWideScience.org was developed and is maintained by Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information, which also played a central role in the development of Science.gov. The participating countries contributed databases that can be searched through the portal.