Mekel Awards for Taco Broerse and Ruud Brand (DCT)
13 November 2007 by TNWToday | M&CRector Magnificus Jacob Fokkema awarded the annual Mekel Awards on the first day of the TU Delft''s Lustrum Symposium. The winning students were Taco Broerse (LR) and Ruud Brand (TNW-DCT).
The annual essay awards were instigated by the TU Delft Platform for Ethics and Technology as an incentive to students to add clarity and transparency to moral issues in the engineering sciences.
The overall winner of the 2007 Mekel Awards was Taco Broerse (Aerospace Engineering). He won with an essay on ''Google in China'', in which he gave a moral analysis of the problem of Internet censorship by the Chinese authorities. He also offered recommendations to firms such as Google on how in a country like China they might combine idealism (promoting democracy and free information transfer) with a degree of realism.
There was an additional Mekel Award this year for essays on the subject of ''Sustainability and Developing countries''. This is also the theme of the 33rd quinquennial jubilee and the TU Delft Jubilee Year Symposium on 1 and 2 November.
The winner was Ruud Brand (Chemical Technology) with an essay on ''Ethanol from the pump: just wait a while'', on the desirability of biofuel production. Brand points out that the first generation of biofuels do not have impeccable sustainable credentials, and the Netherlands should focus on the second generation, which avoids using agricultural crops.
The essays by Broerse and Brand can be downloaded from http://www.platformet.tudelft.nl
