Indian students win NASA Contest

WASHINGTON: An undergraduate team from the Sardar Vallabhai Patel
Institute in Gujarat has been declared runner-up in the non-US
category of a NASA competition to design a supersonic airliner.
Named "Rastofust", the design of the supersonic airliner was designed
by Sahaj Panchal and Dhrumir Patel, NASA said yesterday while
announcing the result of its contest.
The top slot in the non-US category was grabbed by students from the
University of Tokyo, Japan.
College students from the US, Japan and India researched technology
and created concepts for a supersonic passenger jet as part of a
competition sponsored by the Fundamental Aeronautics Program in NASA's
Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, NASA said.
The participants were challenged to design a small supersonic airliner
and submit a research paper limited to 25 pages. Designs had to be
efficient, environmentally friendly, low sonic boom commercial
aircraft that could be ready for initial service by 2020.
A team of undergraduates from the University of Virginia in
Charlottesville, and a team of graduate students from the Georgia
Institute of Technology in Atlanta tied for first place in the US
division, it said.
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Chinese and Indian Entrepreneurs Are Eating America's Lunch

 Watch out, Silicon Valley: China and India aren't just graduating bad engineers and stealing intellectual property anymore. They're fostering innovations that will shake the world.

 Earlier this month, Americans woke up to the bad news that their education system was just "average" in the developed world. Worse news, however, was that Shanghai, China took the top spot. For a country already in a declinist mood, this was a blow. Perhaps not even U.S. President Barack Obama thought the future would arrive so quickly: As he told a group of educators at the White House earlier this year, the "nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow." 
India and China now graduate three to six times more engineers than does the United States. The quality of these engineers is, however, so poor that most are not fit to join the workforce; their system of rote learning handicaps those who do get jobs, so that it takes two to three years for them to achieve the same productivity as American graduates. As a result, significant proportions of China's engineering graduates end up working on factory floors; Indian industry has to spend large sums of money on retraining its employees, as my research team at Duke and Harvard learned.
Despite this, India has built a $73 billion-per-year information technology service business and has been offering IT services of steadily increasing sophistication. Its engineering R&D industry is now a $10 billion business -- a three-fold increase in four years. It develops sophisticated products for Western firms in the aerospace and automotive industries, and in telecommunications, semiconductors, consumer electronics, and medical devices. And most significantly, there are thousands of new startups that are building web technologies, clean-tech products like low-power lighting, and mobile applications. . 
China has built world-class universities and state-of-the-art research facilities. The numbers of papers its faculty members publish and patents its researchers file are increasing dramatically. But these numbers are deceptive, as the patents and papers are largely plagiarized or irrelevant. There is also practically no innovation coming from the state enterprises that dominate industry. The big change that has occurred in China, however, is the emergence of technology startups: thousands of them, just as in India.
The first generations of Indian startups focused on selling IT services, and the Chinese developed copycat web technologies such as Baidu, China's Google rival, and Sina, its Twitter clone. But they are going beyond that now. They are gaining the knowledge -- and developing the confidence -- to create innovative products, not only for domestic markets, but also for global ones.

Source : Internet Tech New

America is rightfully worried about its sinking competitiveness, and does indeed need to improve its education system. But it could win the battle and lose the war, because India's and China's successes aren't due to their education systems, but despite them. You've probably heard of Indian outsourcing hotspots like Bangalore and Chennai, but it's not just call centers and software sweatshops Americans now need to worry about: Technology entrepreneurship is booming all over in China and India, and is beginning to innovate; these startups will soon start competing with Silicon Valley. The next Google could well be cooked up in a garage in Guangzhou or Ahmedabad.



Indian and Chinese children are very much like their counterparts in the United States -- intelligent, open-minded, and motivated to change the world. They receive poor education on average, but many are able to rise above that. And the United States is giving an unintended boost to these countries by sending away highly educated skilled foreign workers.