Another interesting article in The Economist: the disposable academic – why doing a PhD is often a waist of time.Although the author is mostly right I think she misses the point that PhD students can also become entrepreneurs: they master a technology and, contrary to most academics, they have the incentives to take it to the market.I believe that we must re-structure our doctoral programs to include knowledge valorization together with knowledge creation. All PhD students need to know more about markets and intellectual property protection and acquire basic management skills.http://www.economist.com/node/17723223

Another Engineering Competition organized by the IST group of the Board of European Students of Technology (BEST, http://best.ist.utl.pt/). This time the task was to build a device capable of starting from rest in a given horizontal surface and traveling along that surface and down a given inclined plane, using the energy provided by the materials given by the organization, in the MAXIMUM possible time. The teams could use an external electric fan to provide wind power to the device while in the horizontal surface. My job was very easy since there was a clear winning device. It could have been designed by Leonardo Da Vinci: the rotating wind mills on both ends were used to power the device in the horizontal surface and to slow it down in the inclined plane. (http://best.ist.utl.pt/lisbec).> The competition rules: team_design_doc-1.pdf