Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In Search of Technological Excellence analyses the policymaking and policy implementation in the education of engineers and technologists from the 1945 report of the Percy Committee on Higher Technological Education to the conclusion of the Thatcher government’s Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative. Using a plethora of previously unpublished sources, this book focuses on the untold story of what the reports of the three key committees in this fifty-year period—Percy (1945), Fielden (1963), and Finniston (1980)—actually achieved in secondary and higher technological education. Each of these committees wrestled with the same problem, namely how best should the curriculum prepare engineering students for industry. It began in 1956 with an audacious but failed attempt to persuade designated technical colleges to design new degree equivalent programmes for this purpose. However, the curricula developed by the colleges mirrored the curricula of the universities and with the consequence that ten of the colleges became universities. Two decades later the Finniston Committee faced the same problem and proposed the enhancement of engineering programmes to take into account the needs of industry. The problem of curriculum change is examined from a systems perspective. The core themes are curriculum change, the colleges of advance technology, theories versus practice, engineering science versus engineering design, the supply, demand and utilisation of qualified manpower, the structure of sandwich courses and the integration of academic study with work experience, engineers as managers, social class and occupational and social status, engineering in schools.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".