Peter Lobner
My 14 March 2015 post provided an introduction to The National Academies Press (NAP), which is a very good source for reports and other documents on the following topics:
- Agriculture
- Behavioral & social sciences
- Biographies & autobiographies
- Biology & life sciences
- Computers & information technology
- Conflict & security issues
- Earth sciences
- Education
- Energy & energy conservation
- Engineering & technology
- Environment & environmental studies
- Food & nutrition
- Health & medicine
- Industry & labor
- Mathematics, chemistry & physics
- Policy for science & technology
- Space & aeronautics
- Transportation
Most of the NAP reports can be downloaded for free as pdf files if you establish a MyNAP account. If you haven’t set up such an account, you can do so at the following link:
http://www.nap.edu/content/using-mynap
With this account, you also can get e-mail notifications of new NAP reports.
For those of you who have not set up a MyNAP account, here are several new NAP reports that I found to be interesting.
Infusing Ethics into the Development of Engineers (2016)
Ethical practice in engineering is critical for ensuring public trust in the field and in its practitioners, especially as engineers increasingly tackle international and socially complex problems that combine technical and ethical challenges. This report aims to raise awareness of the variety of exceptional programs and strategies for improving engineers’ understanding of ethical and social issues and provides a resource for those who seek to improve ethical development of engineers at their own institutions.
Source: NAP
Reducing the Use of Highly Enriched Uranium in Civilian Research Reactors (2016)
Today, 74 civilian research reactors around the world, including 8 in the U.S., use or are planning to use HEU fuel. In the past decades, many civilian reactors around the world have been either shut down or converted from HEU to low enriched uranium fuel. Despite this progress, the large number of remaining HEU-fueled reactors demonstrates that further progress is needed on a worldwide scale.
Source: NAP
Enhancing Participation in the U.S. Global Change Research Program (2016)
The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is a collection of 13 Federal entities charged by law to assist the U.S. and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change. As the understanding of global change has evolved over the past decades and as demand for scientific information on global change has increased, the USGCRP has increasingly focused on research that can inform decisions to cope with current climate variability and change, to reduce the magnitude of future changes, and to prepare for changes projected over the coming decades.
Source: NAP
Frontiers of Engineering – Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2015 Symposium (2016)
This volume presents papers on the following topics covered at the National Academy of Engineering’s 2015 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium:
- Cyber security and privacy
- Engineering the search for Earth-like exoplanets
- Optical and mechanical metamaterials
- Forecasting natural disasters
Source: NAP
There are many other annual reports in the NAP “Frontiers of Engineering” series, dating back to at least 1997, and covering many other engineering topics.
I hope you’ll take some time and browse the NAP library for documents that are of interest to you. You can start your browsing, without a MyNAP account, at the following link: