How do we make COES more flat?

Post your ideas and thoughts on changes the College should make.

Feedback from COES Convocation

Post your feedback/comments on the COES convocation on The World is Flat.

Is the world flat or not? How about Ruston, LA or Louisiana Tech? Is the College of Engineering and Science preparing students to enter this type of work environment? Students-what are you doing to prepare yourself?

The World Is Flat

The Flattest Place in the World?

I have been ruminating on the question: what is the flattest place in the world? Where is the flattest place I have ever been ?

The big physics labs I visit are very flat. I say that because 1) they have a highly international workforce, 2) the experiments distribute work among collaborators around the world, even though the data collection is centered at the lab, 3) many of the tools that are cited as flattening the world (email, WWW, GNU software, ...) were either developed intially for these experiments, or first used in data-intensive fashions.

In terms of cities, probably Geneva is one of the flattest. Lots of international organizations, but that alone does not mean they are flat. The "flatness" comes about, I belive, because of all these organization depend on a world-wide network of offices and support groups (medical labs and field clinincs for WHO, individual national patent offices for the WTO, etc.) the Bay Area - San Francisco and silicon Valley - are obviously fairly flat.

Although I passed up the chance to visit Bangalore this spring, I wonder if it is really flat? It seems more like a port in an internet-based mercantile economy. As these India-based firms grow and begin outsourcing some their work to other places (Malaysia? Vietnam? Louisiana?) then Bangalore may become flatter.