New dean
TU Delft’s Executive Board has appointed Theun Baller as dean of the 3mE faculty, starting on 1 July 2012. Baller (55) studied physics at the University of Amsterdam and obtained his PhD for fundamental process research at the University of Twente.
Since January of this year, he has been Open Innovation Program Manager at TU Delft. Previously he held various positions at Philips Research, the last ten years of which he was an active member of the management team as Chief Operating Officer and Program Manager. “Theun has always worked at the interface of science and business. He was a researcher and later gained extensive experience working with scientists to stimulate successful research,” said Rector Magnificus Karel Luyben. Baller succeeds Marco Waas, who was dean of the 3mE faculty until the beginning of this year.
Join the Pipe
TU Delft and charity, Join the Pipe, are asking all students and staff to drink tap water and refill their bottles at one of the two new Join the Pipe tap water points on the TU Delft campus. The first water point was presented on 1 June at Sport & Culture during the summer festival. In the coming week, a second water point will be installed outside the Aula. The installation of two water points from Join the Pipe was the initiative of two TU Delft students. Placing these water points outside makes it easier for students and staff to fill up a bottle with tap water instead of buying pre-packaged water. Tap water is also better for the environment as it doesn’t leave behind any waste and doesn’t need to be transported by road using trucks. For every tap water point, Join the Pipe finances a water project in a developing country.
Future education
Will the students still sit in classrooms and lecture halls in future? Two students and a team of two other students are compiling a report that aims to predict the future of education. The will reveal their findings during the opening of the next academic year. The plans of Wouter Verbeek, Hildo Bijl, Veronika Heidegger and Alexandros Christodoulou are less far-fetched and less science fiction than expected, but should be interesting for TU Delft. The conclusions suggest that each student must find the manner of learning that suits them best, be it via online lectures, workshops or study groups, or purely theoretical books or practical how-to books.
Less innovative
A recent report by TNO states that although the Netherlands’ economy is doing well, the country has an average grade in Europe for its level of competition and innovation. This despite the fact that the Netherlands invests more than the EU average in developing its knowledge economy. Nevertheless, with fewer people employed in innovation-linked sectors, the country has dropped below the EU average. The report also states that relatively few Dutch students, especially female students, opt to pursue careers in science and technology. TNO warns that the government and private sector must do more to improve innovation departments within large companies or else the Netherlands will fall further behind leading countries like China and Germany. More controversially, the reports states that some Dutch companies will need to be taken over by foreign multinationals in order to prosper.
Fans for hire
In a stunt aimed at raising money for the UN children’s charity UNICEF, a group of thousands of Belgian football fans offered to cheer for whichever country made the highest bid during the 2012 European Football Championships in Poland/Ukraine. An anonymous Dutch sponsor bid 3000 euros via Ebay and now the Belgians, whose country’s national team did not qualify for the European Championships, will be dressing in orange form head to toe and loudly willing the Dutch on to victory, while also only eating Dutch food for however long the tournament lasts for the Dutch team and learning the words to the Dutch national anthem, Wilhelmus.
Plagiarism
Some 150 Erasmus University law students are suspected of having committed plagiarism during a business law exam. The students however say that they were allowed to draw inspiration from published texts. The exam was an assignment in which the students drafted a corporate acquisition agreement. A standard plagiarism digital check of the exam papers found that 150 of the exams had plagiarized an average 70 percent of the content from other
published sources.
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