Design. Build. Play.

I've moved!

2011-09-14T22:08:00.000-07:00

You still getting my old feed? I've moved over to wordpress! I'm here now. Please, subscribe to my new RSS feed!

Moving

2011-08-01T23:56:00.000-07:00

I'm moving. Hopefully you will all follow me on over to my new wordpress site. You can and should subscribe to my new RSS feed.

If Blogger can't run a decent site they don't deserve my blogging and traffic. So please, come on over to the new locale! Hopefully things will run a bit smoother. And I won't have to click "post" and "preview" 10 times in a row to comment on my own blog.

Blogger v. Wordpress

2011-08-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking about switching to wordpress. Blogger is really torquing me lately. What say you oh hoardes of readers who follow my blog? Will you still read me on wordpress? Commenting will work better, that I guarantee.

Power of Good Mentorship

2011-08-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

I've been re-watching episodes of Star Trek Deep Space Nine lately. In an episode in season 2, Shadowplay, Commander Sisko is talking to his son Jake about future possible plans to join Starfleet. He encourages his son to start training (sort of an internship) under Chief O'Brien.

To me it seems like the kind of opportunity only fostered in a futuristic sci-fi TV show. But in reality, I bet a lot of engineers had similar mentors in their lives. Sysko confesses his son is in the bottom third of mechanical aptitude and O'Brien admits he was as well. That he didn't realize his engineering skills until he was on the front and had to make a critical repair.

In a way it's oddly comforting. I'm not one of those "born an engineer" types though I love it now. I do wonder how many young, aspiring engineers had a Chief O'Brien in their lives. Someone who was an engineer for a living and gave them a pretty good idea of what it was. Or maybe someone who worked in a similar trade. Maybe they taught them a few things and gave them a leg up or a taste of what they might want to do.

Given how many medical dramas there are and how few science or engineering shows, I wonder how many got into the field because of someone they knew growing up or fell into it later and were surprised to learn what it was all about?

Pointless Cat Photo

2011-07-31T15:31:00.000-07:00

TechCat is doing much better since we've come back. She's freaking out less that we'll leave again or send her off again. She's been doing what cats do. Napping during the midday, sharing the fan air with us and trying to stay cool in this heat.

Stylish Saturdays #1

2011-07-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

Due to my aforementioned vacation some casual clothing beyond sweats and bunny slippers was required.

Cowl neck tank from Old Navy

Boot Cut jeans from Old Navy

Fourmal boots by Madden Girl (via Zappos)

Fancy Free Friday

2011-07-29T10:51:00.000-07:00

I've been off the grid this past week. Okay not really, but I have been sort of unplugged and sort of distracted with vacationing. It all started with some insect much smaller than me that's been feasting on my house for who knows how long. Due to financial uncertainties, this was the summer to get stuff done. The last hoorah to buy toys and fix up the place. So I paid a professional to shoot poison through my entire house and skipped off to a locale even warmer than my own to enjoy some time off from MegaCorp. I'm pretty sure I forgot how to be an engineer in the meantime, but oh well I'll worry about that later.

TechCat got to spend the week rooming with three dogs and while she got some love and attention she seems to be pretty happy to be home again. Or, I'm guessing that's why she woke us up multiple times during the night to make sure we were still there and she was still there and we weren't going to ship her off to the doghouse again.

In honor of my absent design fridays post today, I wrote about Lockheed's HALE-D unmanned airship over at EngineerBlogs. Hope you are all as well rested and even keeled as I feel today (even having to go back to earning my paycheck again). I raise a toast to you and your weekend so we can focus on alcoholic beverages or tasty non-alcoholic beverages and fondly remember days when insects are our worst enemies and having no financial ruin that lay ahead and politicians who we can't tent out of our house. Oh I ruined it already didn't I. Have another drink.

Smell of Diesel in the Morning

2011-07-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

What happens when you put sixteen men in a house after asking them not to have drank alcohol for the last 24 hours and no smoking or caffeine in the last 4 hours. No this isn't the next reality TV show. One at a time and every two weeks subjects underwent two hours of testing with a stationary bike in a chamber that may or may not have been pumping diesel engine exhaust fumes into the room with them. 10% of the exhaust gas from a 2.2L diesel engine was diluted with air and fed into the room in such a way that there was a 300 μg/m^3 concentration which is supposedly similar to high traffic areas or especially congested and polluted cities. In another configuration they passed this concentration through a teflon filter and in another they had a concentration of carbon nanoparticles.

It's no secret diesel technology is of great interest to me. Over at Engineer Blogs one of my earliest posts was on the Military's Love Affair with Diesel. I also just talked a few days about how the Chevy Cruze might have a diesel version coming to America. So it's interesting to see where we go forward as we worry about emissions and cardiovascular health. Also what kind of technology might move us forward in the direction we want.

When the research team filtered the exhaust gas they ended up with a much lower concentration. Their exhaust gas averaged 348 μg/m^3 and regular, filtered air was less than 1 but the filtered exhaust averaged 6.

So what's the end result? Well a lot of things were, perhaps surprisingly, not affected by the fumes. No difference in resting heart rate or blood flow. Systolic blood pressure took a hit up, but diastolic did not. What their carbon-only concentration was useful for is that it could be it's not the parts of diesel exhaust that we need be concerned about but something about the whole. Something that's happening in combustion might be making these nanoparticles more harmful.

Their conclusion is this: diesel exhaust fumes in the concentration tested impaired vasomotor vascular function. Filtered exhaust and the carbon nanoparticles did not affect vascular function. What they showed is a filter than can reduce concentration effectively can make a big difference. But they admit at the end that these kinds of filters are pricey and not applicable to a lot of commercial applications where those filters would have to be tested separately. Being an engineer, I keep thinking about the engine sitting in another room idling for two hours. Still the implications for design work on reducing the environmental impact of diesel exhaust is there. And there's the lesson that individual pollutants can't always be used to draw conclusions from as it's important to test the whole system and see what a difference that makes. The combustion was obviously a key factor in making this combination of elements dangerous, and possibly more dangerous than the sum of its parts.

Mills, N., Miller, M., Lucking, A., Beveridge, J., Flint, L., Boere, A., Fokkens, P., Boon, N., Sandstrom, T., Blomberg, A., Duffin, R., Donaldson, K., Hadoke, P., Cassee, F., & Newby, D. (2011). Combustion-derived nanoparticulate induces the adverse vascular effects of diesel exhaust inhalation European Heart Journal DOI: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehr195

Technorati Blogger Drivel

2011-07-20T11:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Technorati,

Stop emailing me random requests to blog for your network. I respect what Technorati does. It's a decent blog aggregator. It does a good job at separating "real" human blogs from bot blogs and links to some interesting stuff. I understand you want your own content so you can make money off of that. That's all fine and good. If you sent me an email asking me to write about something I have a proven skill with and maybe a decent following to show for I would completely understand.

But by your standards my blog's "authority" is not so fantastic. You've also asked me to write about autos which was probably the best guess but still not something I've written about more than a dozen times. Then you decided to ask me to write about books, business, and amusingly enough travel. I have a constantly fluctuating authority level in those topics and pretty much never travel. This leads me to believe you are sending me spam emails.

Which is pretty crazy because otherwise I'd say the request is legitimately from you. Why would a high profile site need to send generically generated emails to random people in the blogging world? Upon visiting your about page I also discover that you all have emails either from gmail, cox, and scarily enough yahoo. Even gmail is pretty unprofessional coming from someone supposedly employed at a business. Also some of your twitter handles are neither your name nor say anything about who you are. That's pretty crazy. Someone too busy to go to the Web 2.0 seminar?

So feel free to invite me to blog for your site in the future. But please ask me to write about something I'm already doing a kickass job at. When I'm way down in your rankings and don't even have an authority level on a topic you ask me to "professionally" blog about it just makes me question you and your business model.

In Development: Detroit Diesel

2011-07-19T08:09:00.000-07:00

So far American car manufacturers have been hesitant to adopt diesel for small cars. That might start to change as technology for clean diesel improves, the US continues to set high fleet standards for MPG, and the efficiency of diesel can sometimes far outdo that of petrol.

GM is planning to bring diesel into the US by having a diesel version of it's Chevrolet Cruze. It's rumored to be capable of 50 MPG and might hit showrooms in 2013.

The Metrics of War

2011-07-18T06:23:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago a bunch of new "snowflakes" were released on the Rumsfeld Library. I almost want to put that library bit in quotes, but really it's somewhat commendable such a controversial public figure would be willing to release so much of his own documentation and leave it open to public debate. I'll let the former SecDef (DefSec?) tell you what a snowflake is:

The term “snowflake” covers a range of communications, from notes to myself on topics I found interesting, to extended instructions to my associates, to simple requests for a haircut. There was no set template; some are several pages and some just a few words. They were all conceived individually and I had never considered them as a set until I started work on the memoir. I then found that when reviewed together, they give a remarkable sense of the variety of topics that are confronted by a secretary of defense.

Paul McCleary over at the Ares blog at Aviation Week already did a very interesting post on these. How Rumsfeld was known as somewhat of a detail oriented micro manager. Yet these new memos show him as being out of touch, slow to respond, and forgetful in following up on issues.

Among some of the older, previously released memos I found this gem from Ryan Henry, the Principal Deputy for Policy under the Secretary of Defense (how do fit all that on a business card?) back in July 2004. He seems to be responding to Rumsfeld asking about certain metrics that a senator had asked be included in the Iraq Weekly Report. Henry states they were already using all of the metrics besides two: number of prisons and number of tv stations broadcasting.

He comes off fairly professional but you can almost hear his incredulous tone as he later explains that they could report number of prisons or number of prisoners but feel that reporting the number of prisons up to international standards would be a more valuable metric. I've certainly got a few politely worded emails under my belt that similarly dance around the "really? you want me to start doing what now?" issue.

If you were wondering what they did track here's some of it:

MW of electricity produced, percentage of Iraqis with power
Numbers of schools open, percentage of boys and girls attending
Number of hospitals open, percentage of Iraqis receiving care
Timetable to democracy (hahaha)
Crude oil production
Number of militia and police, and number in training
Gallons of water available, number of Iraqis with fresh water access
Number of troops from other countries (you'd hope someone's keeping track of this)
Number of US troops (again...)
Food available, number malnourished
Unemployment rate

My favorite part happens in the header of the next page:

I'm curious if 7 years later if we have finally "built justice".

Flashpoint

2011-07-17T09:22:00.000-07:00

When did it all start to fall into place professionally? That's a paraphrase of a question Female Science Professor asked a few months ago on her blog. Or specifically in her case, when did most people start taking you seriously (as a science professor)? I am not and never have been a member of the communist party or a science professor. But I did wonder at what point my career would start to feel more solid. When I would feel like I was being pulled up not dragging my broken body up and clawing my way past obstacles and attacks?

I still wouldn't say I've achieved some magical level of respect. When I started working in a technical field I got treated very differently from my clerical days. And when I first started getting mistaken for an engineer (though I wasn't one at the time) that was a big boost to my confidence.

I'm an ambitious person. I'm not going to be a shrinking violet or hide that under a bushel(which apparently some yahoo named Matt originally coined in something called The Bible, who knew). I mean look at this freaking mandarin fish, do you think he gives a @#$ about what you think?

He doesn't. But moving up can be tricky. I've had to employ an almost reverse psychology method of maneuvering the corporate world. Sound like you are too interested in extra responsibility and a couple of things can happen:

Your immediate supervisor/lead will feel threatened and try to hold you down.
People will think you are an arrogant ass, not want to work with you, and management will think you are demanding.

So I've had to tread water carefully (boy is this post getting fishy with its analogies). But it seems to be working. I've had to focus on projects and pretend like I'm not interested in their promotion potential, visibility, or in any credit I might receive for doing the work (monetary or just the thanks and positive feedback that I think all employees appreciate from their superiors). It seems to be working. If I look glum when they suggest me as a backup, I pretend I am so overloaded and treat it as just another onerous task, the more they seem to make me want to do these things.

I think managers must have some higher level of sadism than ordinary people. Appear too eager for something and they won't give it to you. Only when you grudgingly agree to take it on as a humble and hardworking employee do they suddenly see leadership potential. So nothing yet, but I seem to be having some initial success gaming the system. Which of course means I'm going to be just like them some day: unrepentant, self absorbed, narcissistic, sadistic asshole. So not much will change really.

Conservation Caturday

2011-07-16T04:23:00.000-07:00

Western presence in Afghanistan: now good for more things than just war. Conservationists set up camera traps and caught what they believe to be a sizeable population of snow leopards living in Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor. All this is thanks to efforts by the Wildlife Conservation Society as they've been working under USAID funding to perform outreach to locals and train rangers in wildlife conservation. They've also been working on establishing Afghanistan's first national park, Band-e-Amir.

Larger photo and another photo over at Wired. I guess I fall prey to the urge to protect animals based on their cuteness factor. And snow leopards have a very high cuteness factor that is scientifically proven*. I love that the one above is rubbing its head against the rock just like my cat does against the furniture. Time to go donate to the Wildlife Conservation Society or the World Wildlife Foundation again.

*Citation needed.

Design Fridays: A Successful Design

2011-07-15T10:46:00.000-07:00

Over at Engineer Blogs today I'm talking about the Key to a Successful Design and asking whether confidence plays into presenting your solution and getting it reviewed and approved. Last week I talked about the Army's Biometrics Device they are using in Afghanistan and the week before was compressor design.

I'll pose the same questions here; do you think it's more about being confident than having a good design? Does attitude and how you present yourself factor in to whether people will back you? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Business Friends

2011-07-15T06:22:00.000-07:00

If you're in my line of work you deal with a lot of people at geographically disparate locations and on the phone. Sometimes you're on calls with these people numerous times a week and sending emails back and forth. Sometimes you get rather friendly with them (especially if they're your customer and you're sort of obligated to be nice and polite).

Sometimes I get an overly friendly note in response that if taken on its own sure it makes it look like we are pals. But these people haven't even seen me! It's sort of amusing to think how friendly you can get before you see a person. I'm always a little taken aback. It's like hey I could be Jabba the Hutt for all you know. And I don't just mean large with a penchant for eating live food, but also diabolical and vengeful as well. I'm just sayin'.

Awesome Jabba the Hutt birthday cake courtesy here.

Future of Engineers

2011-07-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

Tom Gillis writes a post on his blog on Forbes today called The End of the Engineer. It's sort of like reverse STEM recruiting we typically see everywhere else. Which would be refreshing if it wasn't so ignorant. He first posits that post industrial revolution the need for better machines and manufacturing has been outsourced (not going to argue manufacturing has been outsourced). Then he talks about how the slight differences in performance that engineers generally strive for are no longer as crucial. He cites Apple as moving away from the engineering model towards one of marketing and customer understanding. Saying instead that that is what makes Apple successful.

He may be right that incremental improvements no longer please consumers. But I think that's always been the case. I think music industry people were surprised when MP3s gained such popularity. Their quality was a lot lower than CDs. However their portability and ease of use with a variety of devices was what had the mass appeal. And the same with cell phones and smart phones. We use them for convenience not because the sound quality is fantastic (anyone remember the old hear a pin drop Sprint commercials?) Now industry executives are surprised that the mainstream way to watch music videos is YouTube. Watch what you want when you want at your own convenience and for free. That's what consumers want rather than the high quality that executives might have assumed consumers would always be demanding. However, these incremental changes are still appreciated when your smartphone or your LCD TV gets slimmer or the next model of car gets a little lighter and a little better fuel economy.

So none of this means engineering is no longer crucial. He mentions the hoardes of engineering graduates from India and China. But for now, whether its societal or level of education, these high numbers have not meant Chinese and Indian companies are always able to compete with equal fervor with western companies. Part of Apple's success is certainly marketing based. But a lot of it is a core product that required a lot of fantastic engineering. And just because Chinese companies have no qualms about stealing IP and churning out cheaper products later doesn't mean they actually have the independent engineering knowledge to make another Apple. And as the sole commenter on his blog alludes to, not every American company that relies on engineering talent is a consumer electronics company.

True we're no longer innovating as much in agricultural machines, but we are in power generation plants, offshore drilling, mining applications, solar and wind energy, automotive design, aerospace, weapons, military technology and medical and biomedical breakthroughs. I think Mr. Gillis has really been sheltered too long in the bubble that is Silicon Valley. Apparently he is a VP at Cisco and his Forbes profile includes such excellent buzz words as "social networking", "new security paradigm", "leverage today's tools", "strategic" and he goes on to claim credit for making Cisco strong in the security market. I hope none of the engineers on his team who helped him position Cisco as a strong security leader read this article and realize their head honcho doesn't appreciate their technological contributions. For all his flattery of Steve Jobs and Apple one can only assume he's trying to get a job there. I hope Cisco recognizes this and lets him go so he can make his move. If I want marketing and social media BS I'll go talk about it on Twitter. If I want a company that makes reliable hardware and services because I know they have a good engineering core I will continue to go to companies like Cisco. When a VP doesn't see what's right beneath his nose he doesn't deserve the job.

Gillis goes on to recommend that people get Liberal Arts degrees and that he will give that advice to his own children. I sincerely hope he's kidding. As a highly paid executive I'm sure he'd have no problems placing his children with jobs after they get their Art History or Communications BA but he's not only living within the soft bubble of Silicon Valley then he's living within the privileged bubble of upper class if he thinks liberal arts degrees are a viable path to a solid middle class lifestyle. Engineering isn't as respected as it used to be (as evidenced by this article) but I wouldn't tell an intelligent young person who had strong math or science skills not to major in it any sooner than I'd suggest a broad liberal arts degree is a good path either. People should follow their passions certainly as success tends to be elusive no matter what path you take. But underestimating the need for some percentage of the population to be engineers is complete ignorance. Just because we aren't always putting these minds to the best use is a limitation of our policies and a focus on short term growth. If we were thinking Apollo Program big again we'd be able to achieve things way beyond what Gillis could imagine. And we'll need engineers to get us there.

How the party started

2011-07-12T20:49:00.000-07:00

Whenever you see a news or documentary clip that talks about the great depression they always show pictures of flappers and 1920s parties. So much of the financial bubble that led to the 1929 stock market crash we seem to portray as a wild party leading up to it.

I can't wait to see how the exuberance leading up to the 2008 recession is graphically depicted. I hope to see photos of those wild parties of the early 2000s.

Productivity

2011-07-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

How much of your day do you think you spend actually doing something that is, we'll say, technical. As in you got your degree in engineering, microbiology, whatever. How much of your day (or week, or month) do you spend actually putting to use that knowledge versus maybe auxiliary skills (implementing a design change, writing up a presentation, writing a grant)?

What do you do for a living?

2011-07-07T14:58:00.000-07:00

I was curious what the most common occupations were in the states and as I started to dig through BLS data I discovered they produced the table already. I'm not surprised to see retail at number 1 and food prep and food service at number 4 and waiters at number 6. I guess I'm surprised elementary school teachers even made the list (this is from 2010, I wonder if it will drop for the current year) and very surprised any management type occupation made the list at all: operations managers at number 12. Given the disparity in mean annual salary between that and everything else it seems like not a bad job to get into.

What do you think, does this look like what you thought it would?

Man Woman Job Recession

2011-07-06T20:03:00.000-07:00

The Pew Research Center put together an interesting report on how the recession and subsequent "recovery" has affected men and women disproportionately. You probably heard all of the media crying about how this was a mancession or some such BS that made it sound like it was women's fault for men losing jobs at the early part of the recesssion.

The story you won't be hearing is that men have been recovering quickly since the end of the recession while women's employment is staying flat or dropping. If men took the brunt of job losses early on maybe it's to be expected they'd be picking up faster. But the report goes into talking about how layoffs in state employment might be contributing overwhelmingly to the loss of jobs for women. And while we hope construction and manufacturing will recover in this country it seems like state employees are the new favorite punching bag of free market junkies. So I wonder if this recession will be more permanently painful to women than it was to men. And probably an ignored storyline.

Wear to Work Wednesdays #13

2011-07-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

Summertime and this tweed dress looked nice for work and nice for the season.

Tweed dress from Anne Klein.

Walnut pumps from Anne Klein (via Zappos).

Rose pearl necklace from Sasina (via Overstock).

Pair with tights or with no tights depending on your office's formality. I always wear tights because nobody wants to see those veins. But that's just me.

Mercenary Engineer

2011-07-05T09:09:00.000-07:00

One of my classmates from undergrad coined the phrase mercenary engineer in place of mechanical engineer. At the time, about to graduate, we were all desperate for employment and opportunities. After years of being sold the bill of lies that is STEM recruiting we'd all felt certain we'd have secure and financially rewarding employment very soon. Whether it was all oversupply or just effects of the recession everyone had become a little less picky and us mechanical engineers were willing to work pretty much anywhere doing pretty much anything. Will engineer for pay.

One of the reasons I went into mechanical rather than electrical or structural or chemical was how diverse the field seemed to me to be. Don't get me wrong there's a lot more to sparkies than I realized at the time. But whether you're developing a box for one application or another a lot of the design can be the same if you're working within your specialty. I knew mechanical engineers worked in the auto industry, industrial manufacturing, wind power, mining, aerospace and aviation, space, defense...you name it! Developing one product can be wildly different from another. I liked that kind of variety though I'm sure it's not easy to jump between industries. So I thought my classmate's description of the mechanical engineer was pretty apt: a broad set of skills and an engineer willing to work in a lot of different fields.

The picture is a miniature from Reaper Minis and is Rosie the Chronotechnician.

Strength in Sisterhood

2011-06-30T21:24:00.000-07:00

There's a discussion over at Corporette about networking with older women. It's a follow up to an older post where they talked about networking with an older man who'd previously acted in a way that I would call "skeevy". Now, Corporette seems mostly written to and commented by lawyers so the advice is not universal. But it is a really awesome community for professional women.

So the original writer wrote in about how to navigate what was both a friendship and a networking opportunity with a group of older women she was working with during an internship. The advice was good but it made me a little pouty and jealous and bitter (which is kind of typical for me anyways).

Yeah I know engineering isn't as gender balanced as law is (though neither has a fantastic track record). But I had to think hard about any older women at work. Forget there being a group. There are a few other women my age. I guess I'm just not outgoing enough to suggest we all grab drinks based on our double X chromosome alone (plus if that got out to the dudes, we'd all be lambasted as hairy legged feminist bitches and probably limit everyone's career). But I am upset that there aren't enough women there that something like that would happen naturally.

I had a female boss back when I worked in health care and since working there I had one female boss as well. But she wasn't much of a mentor. In fact the women I've been closest to there have been striving to get out. To make the money they needed to make so they could go spend their days on the beach. Spending days on the beach isn't my thing and it makes sense not every woman would have enough in common to chat. It's just annoying that there aren't enough women that I can find any other female engineers or higher level people that maybe a few of us do have something in common. Maybe some day.

Mechanical Engineering Employment and Pay

2011-06-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

Continuing this week's theme of jobs jobs jobs for all you hardworking engineers, I was curious what the outlook had been in my own discipline. I already covered employment and salaries in most disciplines between 1999 and 2010 but wanted to zero in on the mechanical engineers.

Mechanical engineers have had a bit of a bumpy past. The general trend is up but it hasn't been easy. My personal theory for the boost is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have acted as stimulus programs for mechanical engineers. Our own Works Progress Administration putting us to work building tanks and humvees and fighter jets and bombs. The first major climb lags us entering the wars but is pretty strong. I give the delay to the delay in starting Department of Defense contracts and actually funding companies.

Maybe the post 2006 boom is due to the surge (I'd have to look it up). Trends in the automotive industry could also be strongly responsible as well as oil drilling, coal mining, etc. I think the strength even in the recession shows the numbers benefit from more than just commercial development alone. For comparison I pulled the civil engineer's chart over the same period of time.

So same boost up from about the same period on. This one has got to be thanks to housing. The quick and consistent line up and the drop right at the housing crash has had a big effect on the employment of civil engineers. How about our friends the sparkies?

It ain't easy being a sparky. The dot com bubble burst and it hurt. A couple of little climbs later and the recession hits and they are knocked back again. Still, given how heavily commercial electrical engineering is it's probably got a much more sustainable path to growth than defense dollars and government bailouts of the auto industry. Something to keep in mind.
Next a quick look at pay for mechanical engineers:

The bottom line is inflation adjusted. Without that the skyrocketing wages look pretty crazy. But even with inflation engineers managed a 10.5% increase to their mean annual salary over the last ten years. What? You're probably thinking. I'm a sprocket and my salary hasn't been going up. Could be what with the recession and choosey employees they're more likely to hang on to somewhat older and more experienced engineers in lieu of hiring younger ones or keeping young ones on. That may not be the personal experience of older engineers, but even if we're taking very minimal trends it can add up. And 10% increase over 10 years for the gain of 10 years of experience seems kind of like a bargain on the employer's side of things.

Still, the war might be to thank (or blame) for the strength in mechanical engineering employment. ME employment is up over 15% from 1999. Despite the bust civil engineers are employed at 19% more than 1999. And as you can see in the graph electrical engineers broke just about even (actually a drop of two tenths of one percent). I don't think engineers should go into a field based on national numbers and national salaries. Locality can make a huge difference. And of course it's important not to chase money but to do something because you think you'll enjoy it.

Engineering Employment Over Time

2011-06-29T08:40:00.000-07:00

How has engineering fared as a career during this recession? How has it been doing over time? Must be jobs week here at Design. Build. Play. Since I was so hard on software "engineers" before I made a separate category from today's Bureau of Labor Statistics data. I'm including programmers separately (but still there) from computer/software engineers (which here includes both systems software and applications). So how do we engineers do?

As you can see computer and software engineers have done particularly well. I'd grant the decline to programmers as being employers are ever more demanding specific degrees from their programmers so it's more just a transfer between categories. The recession has only continued the downward trend from before.

In comparison, civil, electrical and mechanical look almost flat. Of course they aren't really. So maybe you went into engineering for the money, how's that been doing? Here's some not adjusted for inflation salaries over time.

Again it's the same breakdown by discipline and again you see the obvious levelling off of the programmers' salaries. Mechanical and civil seem tied like in the previous graph and now electrical has a definitely higher salary. Is this because it has lower employment compared to the other disciplines as seen in the first graph? Does scarcity drive electrical engineering salaries up?

Engineering Jobs by Discipline

2011-06-28T09:42:00.000-07:00

I talked before about what states are hiring engineers and where all the engineering jobs are. Best estimate there are something like 44,000 engineering jobs open nationally right now. The census says that in 2008 84,000 people graduated with engineering degrees. Engineering shortage? I think not. Probably my 44,000 search was not broad enough to include the kinds of jobs engineering graduates might go into. But still, that's nowhere near a shortage, is it Corporate America?

So what kind of engineers are being hired right now? Software engineers.

Making up almost half of open jobs software engineers have it made. If we have a shortage of engineers, maybe it's that kind of engineer. The problem is we're recruiting people into a very diverse field without specifying what we really want or really need. I was curious how this stacked up to major choice and pulled a some numbers from a local university to give a breakdown:

You can tell mechanical and civil/structural majors are heavily overrepresented. People are probably going into these fields and finding the jobs aren't there. This is all magnified when certain geographic areas (Detroit vs Silicon Valley) have very different focuses even when colleges might be more diverse. Chemical and electrical engineering majors are a little closer to the national average of open jobs and software/computer engineering heavily underrepresented.

I'm a bit torn by including software engineers here. There's a big difference between "computer engineer" and a programmer. Many job openings ask for a degreed engineer when what they really need is a programmer. But if they're asking for an engineering degree that becomes a part of the requirement that job seekers have to meet even when it's unlike other engineering disciplines. Given the low numbers though it's possible those with other degrees, or no degrees at all, are filling the gap for these open software jobs. That is if anyone is even hiring.

Appendix A: Where are the engineering jobs?

2011-06-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

Ask and ye shall receive! A full version of the list available for your ranking/competing pleasure. I only hope this means arguments about whether South Dakota is better than North Dakota (it's not) start erupting. Sorry for the jpg, while I am an excel pseudo-wizard my blogger skills are lacking.

Yes I know Washington DC isn't a "state" and I left out some exciting US territories. Sorry!

Where are the engineering jobs?

2011-06-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

So who's hiring engineers? It's no surprise in raw numbers that the top five states with engineering jobs open* include some of the most populace states with large metro areas and of course the center of automotive engineering in the states.

But how does that compare to the population of those states? Washington DC tops the list at the most engineering jobs per capita. Illinois is still doing pretty good and though it's not the list Michigan pulls in at #6. As for bottom of the list Montana comes in last but no region is left alone here with southern states and northeast also represented. The big population states of California and Texas fell in the middle of the list.

*Total job openings per state were pulled from CareerBuilder as a basis of estimate. Total state populations pulled from Wikipedia.

Future Engineers

2011-06-25T14:07:00.000-07:00

A couple of links for easy weekend reading.
A summer camp in San Jose teaching kids hands on civil engineering skills.
Will there some day be a 5-stroke petrol combustion engine that does better than a diesel engine?
Bob Gower CEO of United Memories gives a tour of the place that does chip testing for the semiconductor industry right in Colorado Springs before he retires. They gloss lightly over outsourcing, the quality of US engineers, and the worth of keeping jobs here.

Engineers good business people?

2011-06-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

Apparently some engineer got booted off some British version of The Apprentice because the British Donald Trump (Lord Sugar?) doesn't think engineers are good at business. The engineer in question goes on to defend himself by citing other successful engineers such as: Bill Gates, James Dyson and Mark Zuckerberg.

Now first of all, I'm not sure a "programmer" is always an engineer. I have mad respect for Bill Gates but neither he nor Zuckerberg completed college. And both are largely known for their programming skills. Given the days of early computers Gates might have more street cred as an engineer since "programming" in its infancy was hardware driven. I'm not saying their both not successful and smart, just that I wouldn't necessarily lump them into an umbrella family of engineers for every single purpose. James Dyson, however, designed the best vacuum I ever used and appears to be like the Tony Stark of vacuum cleaners. Though I'm not entirely sure he has a degree in education that would make all three of them just general genius types. I mean two of them dropped out of Harvard. You gotta figure in many cases have you the advantages to get into Harvard you're already at a good spot (whether that's social upbringing advantages or just pure raw natural talent).

Second of all, this argument always makes me think of Tom Smykowski from the movie Office Space who defends his job by saying he's necessary because engineers aren't good with people. I know a great many liasons and systems analysts and project coordinators who it would seem have the same responsibility: go between from the technical to the customer (one could almost argue the highly paid Program Manager fulfills this role as well). It's not so much I think that engineers and technical folks are not good with people, but that their technical skills are valued in such a way that's how management wants them to spend 100% of their time. Versus you can hire somebody else to be the facilitator or communicator. But it does seem to be the trap that engineers and probably scientists fall into.

What do you think, does that hold technical people back? What about the other way, are liasons and communicators valued in the same way technical employees are?

Movie and a chat

2011-06-22T08:45:00.000-07:00

I guess this week has been one for introspection. I watched The Philosopher Kings on Netflix last night. It's currently streamable and very good. The premise is they interview custodial workers at many top US universities and as expected when you ask somebody for their story there's more than just their exterior or just their job.

The movie was sprinkled with quotes. The kind that seem really brilliant to me and I immediately want to post here or put up on my cube wall for inspiration. Before realizing I am a cynical hag and maybe nothing will change that, even a nice documentary and a couple good quotes. But all in all it's a very interesting movie. It's not surprising maybe that several of the workers have undergone great personal tragedy at some point in their lives, overcome adversity, and have (or are portrayed to have) generally positive outlooks about their lives and their jobs.

This was after a conversation with HerrTech where I was bemoaning my future at MegaCorp and ranting about my jealousies towards the others on the chessboard. He began asking me how much of it was really about partial treatment or what I could be doing to make it up. He asked if I was being proactive and finding problems to solve before people asked me to. He also told me not to get cocky about my job stability. This is all a bit strange coming from HerrTech who doesn't make the world's best optimist and generally agrees there's no reason to give too much to one's job.

So I had all this in mind. This idea that I would bring it at work today. The idea that I've had a relatively cushy and stable upbringing compared to those custodians and maybe I could be doing more. A notion that if they can be satisfied I can certainly be satisfied with my cushy office job. All this is battling the sarcasm the bitterness the cynicism that normally operates in my brain space. Not sure what conclusions I'll come to, if any.

Angst Nostalgia

2011-06-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to Pandora for a while and it's probably the only reason I haven't switched to a Windows Phone yet. If you're not familiar with it, you choose songs or artists and build your own radio stations.

I was sitting and listening to the rock music I listened to as a teenager in one of those rare moments of inactivity in between other moments. With headphones in my ears and sitting on my bed I closed my eyes and remembered listening to these same songs in my angsty youth. I tried to imagine myself sitting on the bed in my parents' house being a teenager and feeling the emotions I felt then. But the emotions I feel now for this music are just echoes. And I can't even get myself to forgot for one second who I am now. I think that's a good thing. I feel stronger and more confident now. Maybe more like an adult than I wish I always was or had to be but there it is. Something in me has fundamentally changed and grown. No going back.

To masters or not to masters

2011-06-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

So I'm going to blame GEARS for getting all my little mind wheels spinning on this. He wrote a few topics at Engineer Blogs firstly to never pay for grad school if you are a US citizen and secondly a post on whether grad school for engineering is worth it. Of course all of this got me thinking. I hadn't planned on going back for my master's. Going through my bachelor's was like going through the gauntlet. I'm still tired just thinking about it. I don't think I'd get to go for free as I'd likely need to keep working through this whole thing. Unless I waited a significant amount of time (like 6 years).

And yet at work I am starting to realize I will have to work twice as hard to achieve the same level. Where in two years from now I might qualify for a promotion if I spent the next two years working on my masters I could easily turn that into two promotions in three years. It's possible that the longer I stick around the more people will have master's degrees and the more that will become the norm for engineering.

But thinking about it really makes me tired. Yes it won't be as long and bitter as the five years of working full time while doing my undergrad, but it'll still be probably a two year minimum commitment while I'm trying to juggle ever growing responsibility at work. I could wait, but if I wait it just seems like time wasted that could've been spent gaining the credential.

SIBQ - Sorry It's Been Quiet

2011-06-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

And sorry I used an acronym for my post title. But hey, I'm an engineer, what'd you expect?

I know the posting has been sporadic here at Haus Tech. But at last it's Friday. Part of the lull stems from craziness at Megacorp. My team is being restructured under a higher level individual and this has meant I'm being asked to take on higher level responsibilities to cover the gap. This is usually a good thing. But I suspect it'll be part of some temporary situation where possibly these duties will flow back upwards on a periodic basis, or since the powers that be haven't exactly been formerly notified they may just assume the next guy up is handling them (as he should be). I don't know, I do tend to overthink these things. Like a lot. So we'll see how it goes.

Some of my energies have gone into keeping up with my posting schedule over at Engineer Blogs and an effort to now always write about communication or workplace dramas I've been trying to post on technical subjects so last week was on bearings and this week is on condensation.

I think I have a partial tendency to avoid writing about technical topics because sometimes I feel like an imposter engineer (which I'm sure doesn't help the confidence issues at work) as well as sometimes the cool stuff I am doing is just way to specific to my field and would a) ruin my pseudonymity and b) get me fired.

But on top of all that I feel like as an engineer I was prepared for having to solve design problems. And even though I know there would be a lot of politics and corporate intrigue, navigating them is still a challenge. Probably a greater challenge than doing an analysis on a failing component. Not to mention they are universal issues (I think).

So if you'd like to see more technical stuff here, pipe up. If you like the workplace whining posts or hate them let me know. If you want to tell me how your day is going or how the weather is please share that too. You know, whatever you feel like bringing to the table here.

Lines of Communication

2011-06-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

This being more than a decade into a new century you'd think we'd have our jet packs and flying cars already. Or more importantly perhaps, weren't we all supposed to be working from home by now?

Telecommuting was supposed to be the future. And I see why corporate America doesn't switch over to that model (both for good and bad reasons). But one of the many drawbacks of working in an office together has to be the tendency to share news and information via word of mouth. This is good for informal chatter or tentative things you can't commit to official writing yet. But it also allows the important folks to procrastinate on making decisions. They can verbally tell a subordinate to go in one direction, and not have to take blame for switching course a few weeks or days or hours later.

It also means there's a plethora of emails that go unanswered. Both because people are slacking and not responding, but also because the official response that can be done in email becomes a lot more serious. It's the new memo or fax of today and while it doesn't always have to be formalized you know that, like what goes out on the internet, it will be there forever. Your words will be around and you will have to commit to what you wrote about or write a retraction email, the great shame giver.

But in my case it means waiting for direction and not getting it because once it's in writing it goes. And the higher ups may have their reasons for delaying, but it can be frustrating when you're dealing with an internal or external customer that expects an answer and you have to tell them your superiors are just sitting around ruminating on it rather than sending a quick yay or nay via email.

Excel-Fu: Selection Boxes and Cost

2011-06-12T10:20:00.000-07:00

I thought it might be handy to post some of the tips and tricks I've been learning lately in various software programs. Because in order to teach myself I had to go scouring the internet for different sources, and maybe someone else is trying to do the same thing (plus the best way to remember something seems to be to teach it to somebody else, or if that fails write it down in the indelible ink of the internet).

Say you're considering building an assembly and have different options for different parts that would result in total cost differences. For my example I'm only using two components, but if you had a lot you might want something more automated. In the end what I needed was several drop down boxes where each option would reflect its cost and then add to a total below.

So here's how you'd do that which should be helpful if you've been trying to implement drop downs in Excel, use a lookup table, or figure out how to pull and use data from a selected drop down value.

In order to use a drop down you need what Excel considers developers tools. In order to turn this tab in, you go to File-> Excel Options. There, depending on your version of Microsoft Office, it might be under the popular tab, or might be under the "customize ribbon" tab. You want to have the "show developer tab" checked.

Then you go into your developer tab, click "insert" and there should be a drop down of various options. The one I'm using is the Form Controls -> Combo Box. But I imagine a lot of this stuff would work on either types of controls and boxes.

This will turn your mouse into a little plus sign. Go ahead and drag how big you want your box over wherever you want it. Then right click it and select Format Control.

But let's backtrack. First you're going to need some data for all this. I have two sets of options for my two widgets. You can locate this in another sheet of your excel document, but here I've stuck mine on the same sheet so it's clear what I'm doing.

Now back to your format control. It gives you three options to fill in in the "control" tab. Input range, cell link, and drop down lines. If I'm building the box for my first widget (options A through C) my input range is I3:I5. You can type this in, or just put your mouse in the box then drag your mouse over the cells you want. For right now, you don't care about the cost, only your "names". Cell link is the actual cell where your drop down value is going to be stored. I usually select the cell that seems most inhabited by my drop down box. Drop down lines is the number of values I have, 3 in this case, and I usually select 3-D shading cause why not, it's pretty.

Now you've got a drop down box that has some values in it that you can select. If it's bugging out at this point, you've probably messed something up in switching between sheets, so re-check your values and make sure they're still calling out the cells you want.

Next you'll need two columns to the right. One I've hidden because its sole purpose is to grab the "name" from the drop down. The problem with excel and drop down menus is it just correlates values to numbers. If you try to copy the value of your drop down it will just be a number of 1 through N where N is the number of options you have. In order to get that number to correspond to the value, you have to use a kind of silly workaround formula, the OFFSET formula.

In this case it's =OFFSET(the cell directly above my "names" table,the cell that my drop down box is storing its info in,0). The 0 is the actual offset value. Or in my case, =OFFSET(I2,C3,0). This is all important too because it means you need a row above your names table as you can see I had above. Now no matter which value you select in drop down, the column should mirror that value. Since you don't really need this column again later you can hide it (right click the whole column, select hide).

Next to callout the price value of your component you'll use the tables I showed a few figures up. This is the next colum over and uses the VLOOKUP function.

So the values I want here are =VLOOKUP(the value I'm converting, my WHOLE lookup table, 2, FALSE) or in my case =VLOOKUP(F3,I3:J5,2,FALSE). The 2 is because the value I want is in the 2nd column. If you were selecting a larger table you could specify any column you want. The F3 cell is where I used offset to grab the "name" value from the drop down. The false is to indicate I want only an exact match (for the name) rather than a partial match.

So now you can have drop downs with selected values, connect them to prices, and of course you can use a sum value (=SUM(G3:G7) ) to nab your costs and make a total further down.

Some of these methods are probably cheap workarounds, but still I hope you learned something. If you didn't and were bored sorry. Maybe you can write in with your badass software tricks.

Design Fridays: Volvo's new flywheel

2011-06-10T10:15:00.000-07:00

Volvo's claiming their new flywheel design will be able to give a four cylinder the equivalent of six cylinder power as well as save 20% of combustion energy.

A flywheel is just a name for a rotational device that's able to store energy. It does this by using inertia and saving rotational energy. The amount of energy that can be stored is based on the moment of inertia and rotational speed, where moment of inertia is based on mass and radius of the wheel. Typical flywheel designs might include differing weights at certain points in the wheel that help keep the rotational speed more consistent and higher.

In your typical automotive application, a flywheel sits on the end of your crankshaft and converts the energy and movement of the crankshaft into a more consistent rotational speed.

Volvo is claiming that their flywheel will be able to store so much energy that when the engine is idling it can actually turn off and the energy stored in the wheel is enough to start combustion again. If so that could explain their 20% fuel savings number as engine idling is a well known waster of energy (why electrical cars and the Prius shut off at a stop). The flywheel also sounds like it is using aspects popular in hybrids and electric cars: regenerative braking. There've been a lot of attempts to incorporate regenerative braking into designs, the idea that you can get back part of the energy you're wasting to brake. But generally these designs haven't been efficient enough to be practical (plus once you add complications, you add more room for failure, and the more components the heavier your car thus reducing your energy savings).

They're supposed to start field testing this sometime later this year.

Bernanke's Economic Outlook

2011-06-09T09:36:00.000-07:00

So on Tuesday Bernanke spoke to some banker's association in Atlanta and covered some important topics: like, is the humidity there not craaaazy?

Okay, not really. He re-iterated the same stuff he always does. That they'd rather pick from their tool belt of regulatory options to affect the economy rather than doing interest rate changes. Why? Does he not crave absolute power? Well the real answer is the interest rate is already so low, it's no longer a tool that the federal reserve really has available to them. But if they admit to this maybe consumer confidence will implode...or something. Not to mention continuing to keep interest rates incredibly low is really working out for the banker elite who's making a killing on borrowing money from the government at 0% and then lending it back to the government via treasury bonds for 3 or 4%.

He mentions trying to keep inflation low, though it's clear from low rates for so long that this is not a priority for the voting majority of the federal reserve board. Instead it's more cheap talk to buoy up certain people (large debtors like banks who have a bunch of mortgages or the government itself) rather than worry about those who are at a critical point (the poor and the elderly living on fixed incomes).

He states that his objective is to keep inflation low and keep the value of the dollar high and his excuse for why this is not actually happening is the importation of oil. Gas prices, something the reserve doesn't even look at in its core inflation index, are wildly inflating and somehow contributing to a falling dollar value. The US actually only imports about 51% of its oil. Something like 350 billion a year. With a 14 trillion GDP, 1 trillion handed to banks as free money, and a looming national debt, Bernanke really wants to blame this one on gas prices? If anything the falling price of the dollar might be contributing to speculation on oil as a commodity which could be one of the main reasons for the rising price of gas at the pump.

His only concessions to the real people is that they are working on achieving "maximum employment" (almost as if he is admitting to a possible future of long term high unemployment rates). I guess he is working on that like I am working on being nicer to rich, elite bankers. Which is to say, not at all. Then he only briefly mentions that the lower growth rate the GDP is seeing is somehow contributing to what people really care about (employment, real wages) because it is "frustratingly slow". I'm not sure why he'd connect GDP with employment. That's like connecting stock market prices, dividends, and shareholder profits with real wage gains for the working class. The two are not correlated. Or if anything, are negatively correlated.

Perspective

2011-06-08T09:54:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of discussion in the news lately about the James Webb telescope. It's planned orbit is about 1.5 million miles from earth. I was curious how this compared to existing space objects so I rigged up a scale representation. The larger dotted circles are just for clarification of finding the much smaller centers and locations of the objects. The moon is about 250,000ish miles out from the earth and the hubble telescope, at 366 miles, would have been visually on top of earth in this view so I left it off. What do you think, does it properly convey the scale and ambition of the Webb telescope?

Leave Your Mark

2011-06-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

An interesting gallery of John Rennie's engineering legacy. A scottish civil engineer in the 18th and 19th centures he was responsible for design of many canals, bridges, waterways, docks and harbours scattered around Great Britain. When we look at great buildings and wonders we don't always think of the engineer who designed it but they are as much a part of it as the society, labor and technology that went into the construction.

Looking for trends in all the wrong places

2011-06-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

I found the above graph here. It's not so important that it doesn't include the last five years or so for my purposes.

I was looking at MegaCorp's new hires and discovered that in the last three months of intense intern hiring (it's the season for interns!) 24% of them have been female. I wondered how this compared to engineers hired. Turns out in the first 5+ months of this year, 10% of our new hire engineers have been female.

Now, my local university says that about 18.5% of engineering degrees are conferred to women. So the intern numbers seem to be, if anything, on the high side.

Compare the new hire numbers to the historical chart at the top and you'd see that we'd have to be averaging 30 years of experience for the engineers we hire for 10% to be a reasonable number. It's unlikely our average new hire engineer is 50 years old or more.

What does this mean? Why is the effort being made on the intern level to bring in more women but we don't see it when it comes down to hiring full-timers? It's possible, I suppose, that women are graduating with degrees, and working internships, but then somehow not going into engineer at all. If they are going into completely different fields after getting an engineering degree, and in high numbers, that could explain it.

Or is it part of the general trend that women tend to work in lower paying occupations so it's easier for a woman to get hired on as an intern than it will be for her to get hired as an engineer. Or maybe HR is trying to push diversity but can only manage to do so as a part of its intern hiring program but can't convince managers to hire more experienced women.

This might make a lot of sense if both numbers were on the low side or on the high side. Then you could draw some conclusion about MegaCorp's particular industry or maybe locality differences. As it is it looks a little strange.

Workplace Politics and the Engineer

2011-06-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

People in general have a tendency to over estimate their own skill level in comparison to their peers. I am guilty of this, likely having seen myself as an "above average" employee since the minute I started working. All this despite struggling with impostor syndrome where I am prone to doubts and being found out as a fraud not as capable as I'm pretending to be.

So this was kind of in the back of my head when I read this article from Evil HRLady at BNET about whether you should dispute a performance review. The employee was marked average on everything, and felt they should be above average on some things and below on others. Evil HRLady's response seemed practical and correct:

Problem: You are, actually, pretty average. Ouch. Sorry. But average is average and if you're better in some areas (as you said) and worse in others (as you said) that is going to average out to be, well average.

Sounds pretty correct. Then the original poster piped up in the comments and tried to stress that they were in fact above average. They pointed out all the things they do (working long hours, helping customers, sorting sections that had been abandoned, volunteering and covering for other employees). This got me to thinking. Their employer doesn't care about all these things. Does an employer really care about your "effort"? Maybe if you're a grad student, beyond that your boss wants to see output, results, to-do lists knocked off. They don't care that you "help" or "share" with your coworkers. It's a known fact that those who are good at working with others and training new employees are rarely promoted.

I suspect parallels in academia would be a professor who is an especially good teacher for which they get no credit for. Their research maybe places them at "average" at their university, and in their eyes exceptional teaching in addition to average research makes them above average.

I think the key is in order to not kill ourselves at work is make sure you're focusing on what's actually important to your boss. Mine likes to see a lot of written output even when the actual problem is not solved. Tracking progress, tasks and investigations look good to who he has to show his numbers to. Theoretically if you make your boss look good, they will value you. They may take credit for some of your actions (though more often in my opinion even a good employee doesn't always realize the value of direction and ideas from superiors that add to their projects). But in the end if you can separate what you think makes you an "above average" employee with what's important to those doing your review you can probably save yourself a lot of angst and heart burn focusing on things you might think matter but your organization doesn't actually value.

Green eyed lady

2011-05-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

There's this idea out there (stereotype?) that women are our own worst enemies. That when it comes to disagreements or getting along with our bosses we tend to fight amongst ourselves. I've only seen the result of this attitude (my last female boss who told me she had trouble working with female bosses, though I had no problems working for her, or male bosses who have assumed females would not get along) rather than the actual playing out of this. I suppose because it's on my mind a lot I struggle with it. When a man and a man don't get along, they are just people. We women don't have that luxury, so I make an effort to speak positively about other women and get along with them in the few instances I get to actually work with another female.

Over a year ago, a more senior female engineer left my group and company for a job where she's doing something that at the time was more "fulfilling" to her. She took a significant cut in pay to do so and left behind a higher level position, pay and respect than someone with her experience would normally achieve. Because of what she accomplished while here, she has a reputation of awesomeness. So when she had an opportunity to take some time of work recently, she suggested coming back on a temporary contract basis for a number of weeks.

I was going to go into the more personal reasons, that I suspect the significant cut in pay she took is hurting her. That the money she could make here could potentially be a lot more, maybe even more if they'd pay her the money they offered her when she tried to leave. But maybe all that's irrelevant.

The problem is me, and my attitude. I feel like in order to get half the level of pay and respect she got I've had to work twice as hard. I've been with the company a lot longer and really had to force my way into positions and demand higher pay while she was sort of guided into a higher level role. So despite the fact that we got along well when she was here, I now resent the fact that she's coming back. That my company would make the exceptions to get her a whole lot of extra money while I struggle to get paid the same as entry level engineers with far less experience. It's tough because I don't want to discourage another woman engineer. But I feel like I've finally staked out my space in the time she's been gone, and her reputation and how well-liked she was could outshine me in a matter of weeks. Even if it was a permanent move, it could undo all the prestige I've been working away to earn in the last year. I could be pushed back to a lower rung on the ladder while the higher level tasks get handed back to her. And it doesn't help that the powers that be would probably never give another female engineer the same chance they gave her. Just because they made her the token female engineer isn't her fault even if it does hurt me and even if her coming back hurts me.

I wonder if it's the attitude of male superiors and the token-ism that really contributes to this idea that women don't get along. We're lucky to get one seat at the table, and then we're expected to compete over it because we won't get any more seats than that. It'd be easier for me personally to rail against this behavior if it was a guy they were doing this for. I wouldn't feel like I'm sabotaging myself when I rage against the differential treatment.

EPA looks at your fuel use

2011-05-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

If you go to www.FuelEconomy.gov you can get a personalized report on your own fuel use, compare government MPG ratings to personal reports, and even look at estimates for your carbon impact and petrol consumption. It's pretty neat. I especially like the crowdsourcing opportunities to compare mileage to individual reports. There are some kinks to be worked out (it says my car is a subcompact right now, maybe subcompact for a boat).

More importantly by 2013 all new cars will expected to come with this label which which shows average MPG in especially large lettering along with a quick EPA snapshot, average money spent on fuel, and how your car ranks on all these things. Kind of like calories on menus I wonder whether this kind of enforced labelling actually results in lower consumption.

Drinking Binge or Company Travel

2011-05-24T13:28:00.000-07:00

Now for a more detailed set of my grievances after my cross country vendor visit. The focus on alcohol as a part of the trip nearly overshadows all other considerations. Restaurants are chosen based on the liquor they serve, and hotels are preferred as to whether they are in walking distance of bars or breweries. I am not a big drinker (and generally prefer my diet coke) so this is always difficult. Telling people you are not a big drinker gets you nowhere. Abstaining from drinking garners too much unwanted attention (does she look pregnant? is she a Mormon?) so I have to get through some beer that I'm not really interested in.

But beyond all this, travelling as a woman in a male dominated industry is difficult. Even the Monday-Friday business flying crowd is mostly male. Here are some of the highlights (or lowlights).

Recently married male engineer invites a lot of talk about how women beat their husbands and are generally no-fun types of hags, all jokes of course
There are no women to engage in similar sexist conversations with though you're not sure why you'd bother anyways.
When you're being taken on a "tour" of the facility you must be ready to run to the front of the group as everyone will stop to let the "lady" through the door. Arguing about it will just draw unnecessary attention or waste more time than you already spent jogging to the front of the pack.
When men and women's bathrooms are not next to each other, you have to loudly ask where the ladies restroom is since you have no examples to follow to get there.
If you are drinking beer at a table with a bunch of people drinking wine the server will mistakenly think the dude with the mustache next to you is actually the beer drinker.
Every time you check into a hotel you have to deal with that awkward moment where the person at the counter tries to figure out if you are "with" your coworker.
People's overconcern for you carrying things will lead to them carrying your luggage around for you even when you'd rather be carrying it yourself.
Guys you meet are more likely to start trying to have conversations with you about their kids rather than about the project.
Dare not to drink and everyone will look at your abdomen and wonder if you pregnant.
People will assume you are junior, or possibly not an engineer.
They will introduce you to the TokenFemale who works at their company, assuming you will all get along with your girl stuff problems and all.
Any desire to go home sooner or actually enjoy spending time with your spouse will be seen as female emotional weakness and you will be criticized for it.

On the other hand, I enjoyed both a body scan and a pat down, and the latter wasn't half as bad as I was afraid it would be. Another woman of course did the patting down and it wasn't very invasive (I could have easily hidden some > 3 oz liquids in my bra had I wanted). So not everyone's security story is a terrible one. I'm not saying it was effective, just that as a person who doesn't have any traumatic experiences with that sort of thing it wasn't that bad. The woman looked someone sympathetic that I had to endure it, and kept checking with me whether I had any pain or any place particular uncomfortable for me. So maybe a ridiculous policy, but the TSA employees handled it well in this case.

Catch a falling engineer

2011-05-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

CNN International has an article up, why would be engineers end up as english majors. They really mean why they end up as non-engineering majors, but that's besides the point. They follow a student, Amenah Ibrahim, on her journey through her education.

"The first thing the (professor) told us was, 'You should expect to see this class dwindle down as the semester goes on.' It was the first thing they told us," she said.

They article references a study showing that STEM majors take students longer to finish. But it glosses over statistics that show that it's disproportionately a deterrence to underrepresented minorities:

Thirty-six percent of white, 21% of black and 22% of Latino undergraduate students in STEM fields finished their bachelor's degrees in STEM fields within five years of initial enrollment.

I think most of us in engineering would agree that a lot of the academic rigor that discourages people is probably a good thing. As some of the commenters put it, it prepares you for the real world. But more importantly maybe, you want your engineer, or your doctor or a number of other professions, to have gone through a rigorous education. You want the weak to go off to other majors where maybe their real life careers won't have such an impact. Though we know we have a problem that the system is encouragin white people better than it encourages people of other races. And that means we probably need better support systems in place and better university understanding. There's ways of making sure we're not booting out talented people without dropping the standards.

On the other hand, people are focusing too much on the "need" for STEM graduates.

James Brown, executive director of the STEM Education Coalition, said a big problem is that educators don't often realize the urgency of fostering the next generation of American scientists and engineers.

I'm sure they realize the urgency. They realize that the jobs that were available years before are no longer available. That even before this recession, getting a STEM job was not easy. If we aren't funding science, R&D and infrastructure programs graduating a bunch of scientists and engineers is not going to create a demand in jobs that isn't there. I just talked about this a few days ago, how while engineering is still one of the better employable majors out there at under 70% for 2009 graduates it's not a pretty picture.

The guy at the STEM Education group would be better off reaching out to businesses to start spending more of their reserves on research or to anti-tax politicians to start thinking about how we're going to fund future development in this country. We used to be the world leader in manufacturing. And while some might think manufacturing is coming back thanks to the weak dollar we're no longer the science and space leaders of the world. Like the space program and the interstate highway system that all means spending money. So while that's currently out of fashion, I'm not sure we should be putting the pressure on STEM students and universities rather than where it belongs: business and our politicians.

More on the superiority of engineering

2011-05-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

Today on Engineer Blogs I talked about interdisciplinary engineering which is the theme over there this week. (See posts by Cherish, GEARS, and Paul Clarke as well). There's other engineering in the news today though, again from the NY Times Economix blog college majors that do best in this job market.

A month and a half ago I had a post on some economic news that included the mention of an article about engineering being the best paying college major. You'll notice some discrepancies. The CNNMoney article touting high salaries for engineers says they all had a higher starting salary than $60,000. However the Economix chart is based on earned income in the last 12 months so the median income for someone with an engineering degree employed in a job that requires that degree is...$35,548. Now probably some dinosaur engineers will show up and say that this was quite normal for them and kids these days are too demanding. Probably haven't read any of my numerous posts on inflation.

Hopefully the low number is due to people starting their job more recently than 12 months and only having a partial years earnings to report along with maybe some people who are working part time. Still, the percentage of engineering graduates who are employed in a job that requires their degree is 69.4%. That's the second highest after teaching at 71.1%. Higher than the oft praised "business" degree, health, or physical science (which will surprise no one in the sciences). Communications, humanities and "area studies" (whatever that it is) make up the bottom of the list. So while you shouldn't always hunt the money, hunting a degree that leads to more full employment might be useful. Though even the numbers of employed grads in the top fields are abysmally low. More victims of this brutal job market.

Inflation and Retirement

2011-05-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

There's an article in the NY times Economix blog warning us not to get too over excited about inflation. That at 1.3% it's historically low. Though one could argue the things that inflation does not consider are what's actually important for the people that it most directly affects. Much like federal poverty levels tend to be focused around food as that used to be the most expensive monthly cost to families whereas now housing takes up a huge chunk.

As I was reading the article and thinking about the loose connections to the great depression I wondered whether the poor unemployment numbers were causing fewer people to retire. We've been warned for years about the impending mass retirement of the baby boomers and how that will give us a huge technically educated labor shortage. I've talked about that myth before.

As you can see by the chart above, those 55 and older have been hit hard (as hard magnitude-wise as any other age group) by unemployment. BLS doesn't specifically track retirement, but it does track those "not in the labor force" and "not looking for a job". This was roughly 60% of the over 55 population in 2006 and 59.5% of the over 55 population in 2008. Averaged between 2006 and 2008, the over 55 population grew about 2.7% a year. So you might expect to see similar growth in how many are not in the labor force by choice. Instead from 2006 to 2010 the growth of this possible "retired" population increased 1.4%, 1.88%, 1.06%, 1.42% and 2.20% respectively.

It could be the peak in 2007 was due to the brutality of the recession beginning and a lot of people choosing to drop out voluntarily. Maybe the high number in 2010 can be attributed to people who had wanted to retire sooner but couldn't now being able to once the stock market gains started improving. At any rate, this possible "retired" population is increasing much more slowly than the actual population itself. The question is, as the economy starts to even out, will we see more "older" people trying to return to work or will we see more of these people finally being able to retire? If the stock market finally allows them to drop out of the labor force, will inflation let them have any real security by then?

The friends you make

2011-05-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

I mentioned over the weekend I had just come back from some cross country travel. Met some nice folks over there and ate very well. Somewhere along the way I managed to befriend some sort of virus as well.

At first everyone told me it was allergies, which given that there are four distinct seasons over there and a whole mess of pollen might have been believable. But after coming back it never quite went away. So here we are, my Nyquil and me. My coworkers like to schedule work trips around where the best bars and breweries are so they can drink the most possible alcohol on the trip. Me I like to save my drinking until I get back.

Pretty Fly

2011-05-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

I just returned from my fabulous east coast tour of some of MegaCorp's suppliers. As an aviation enthusiastic, one of the highlights was a little hopper flight on a De Havilland -8 prop driven aircraft.

It was a nine row passenger aircraft with two seats on either side and much more limited space in overhead bins. In fact on one of the flights they asked for volunteers to take a later flight as with checked baggage included they were over the GTOW (that's gross take off weight) for this aircraft. It took me a few to realize the huge pods under the wings are entirely for stowing the landing gear in flight. All in all it was a fun flight.

Standardized Tests & Cabezones

2011-05-10T20:10:00.000-07:00

I can feel the sweaty rage across the cafeteria, where I'm drinking coffee. He hasn't seen me—too busy yelling. His game face is on, and his team is losing. Coach's battle voice pollutes the air. His words slap, bruise and punch in ways you can't see, but will keep me up all night.
"You faaaaaiiiiiled!" He keeps saying it.
The former coach is blaming the students for their poor grades. Some are stupified with shame, smiling, pretending this is cool. They are too old to melt into nothingness and too young to give him the finger.

This is just a snippet from a brilliant article in the Texas Observer on The Testing Machine: or Texas's TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) the standardized test a school is preparing for. The author is Bárbara Renaud González sent from the local university to observe a local public middle school in its effort to prepare for standardized testing that will determine whether it falls into the "low performing" category, lose funding, and possibly lose jobs of teachers and administrators as a result. There are no heroes in this story.

I started to post quotes but you'll just have to go read it, it's that good and I'd end up linking the whole darn article. No seriously why are you still here, click the link, go read the article!

Home is where...

2011-05-06T09:35:00.000-07:00

So I was listening to the radio this morning and then this story came on NPR about a brother and sister, both of whom had had to drop out of college and move into their family home. Their mother had passed away when they were both in high school and the eldest racked up some debt in college before they both decided they'd move home and try to get jobs in order to save the family home and keep up with mortgage payments.

The sister, Natalie, came back and was working as a secretary until she got laid off at the start of the recession.

They both need that one job — the one that will get their plans back on track. But neither of them can find it.
Chris is selling TVs right now, but it's part time. Natalie got laid off again. They pool what income they have, allocating it on a triage — to the credit cards, to Chris's dental work, to the house.
"Natalie and her brother, they don't want to sell the house, or they can't sell the house — if they do, they take a major loss," Rogers says. "So in a way, they're limiting their search options."
But while a lot of people out of work are stuck where the jobs aren't...

So I was thinking about them stuck in their house, in an area where maybe it's difficult to find a job even if you have a college degree. A lot of people are there right now, barely making it on part time income or a lower paying job than they wanted and unable to move to find a job because their underwater in the house. Seems like it's only the upper middle class schemers who are walking away from their homes, maybe the rest are scared about the problems with filing for bankruptcy or hear the stories about banks coming after those who short sold telling them they still owe extra money. Or maybe they don't want to throw away their investment, or maybe they want to do the right thing, or maybe they just want to keep their home.

I stepped outside and scared the bird that's decided to nest above our patio. It's right across from the door so every time we come and go it's a game of trying to not disturb the bird enough that it freaks out and flies away to the trees out front. It probably looked like a good place to settle down. The patio makes it relatively protected against the cats but mostly crows that go after small birds' nests. It might have been setting up on a day we were mostly out for a long day at work, it didn't necessarily know two bipedal mammals would be disturbing it a couple times a day.

So it's a lot like a lot of the homeowners right now. Probably just laid its eggs and can't just move the nest. Not always easy or possible to pick up and move where the jobs are. Sometimes you make the best decision you can at the time and can't predict how things will change. Sometimes it's still a good home and worth keeping even if there are problems.

Synergistic Cross-disciplinary Trending

2011-05-05T17:07:00.000-07:00

I'm inspired. Fluxor wrote a humorous post on some buzz words he heard around the workplace. If you're looking for more than fluff, go over to Engineer Blogs where I talk about subcontracting for dummies or the art of working with your company's vendors on custom products.

In the meantime, the managerialistic my life becomes the more I get involved in this. And even find myself forced to use the same phrases I can't stand in my email correspondence. So here's some crap I get tired of using (and yet, don't know the workaround):

-Get on the same page

-Touch bases with that person

-Follow-up on that or bird-dog that

-Lines of communication

-We need to have a presence there

-Go make nice with them

-Rally the troops

-We need to massage the message

-I'd like to close that one out

Or...

-Are we reading now?

-Oh now we're playing baseball?

-Like that has ever helped do anything but piss someone off, not to mention who the heck in corporate america even knows what a bird dog is?

-Must be a less cheesy way of saying this

-Pointless postering

-Because we're four now?

-Didn't know white collar workers were exactly like battle hardened soldiers

-Shine the shit

-Well we'd all like to clear off our "to-do" lists so yeah, you don't need to tell me

Learn enough phrases and you don't need expertise, you'll fit right in.

Social Networking Mistake or Clever Ploy?

2011-05-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

There have been rumours about HP possibly adopting its own cloud infrastructure similar to the services Amazon provides (that were down not so long ago and shut down a lot of popualr sites and services). But HP has been pretty quiet on details or even admitting to developing it.

So when HP's interim VP of Engineering included it briefly on his public LinkedIn profile it caught a lot of attention: "Website and User/Developer Experience. Future HP "cloud" website including the public content and authenticated user content."

So what do we think, HP's clever way of sneaking some information into the public sphere without taking credit for it? Or bumbling pseudo-executive (let's see if he gets past interim) acting typically. I also love the executive's taking credit for job growth ("ramped from 6 to > 120 in less than one year") like hiring is something difficult to do, as well as apparently listing work experience that he hasn't even done yet. Not sure if that's typical cart before the horse executive pseudo-speak or a really interesting move from HP. Probably the former but the latter is more interesting to believe.

Admitting Our Weaknesses

2011-05-03T15:36:00.000-07:00

I am not entrepreneurial. In fact the whole concept of trying to develop something and sell something is terrifying to me. Academics are even more entrepreneurial than I am in my eyes because they must develop ideas for experiments and apply for grants. Some government scientists and engineers must also do the same.

I was born to be a corporate cog. I'm not saying I've never had an original idea in my life, but the quick flashes of new ideas I've seen in others is not something I possess. Working for myself doesn't sound like a tremendously freeing and rewarding experience. It sounds like an incredibly draining and exhausting experience. I'm also ready to sell my technical soul when asked and go be a highly paid project engineer. I'm willing to do half the work for twice the pay; I'll start whenever you need me.

Sometimes it's a let down. As in sometimes the creative ideas others have in workarounds or new tests we could try make me jealous. But leave me with my spreadsheets and my matlab and I will methodically get to the answer. It won't be new, but it'll work. I can then package that up in a powerpoint or synergistic memo as needed. World needs more cogs. We can't all be snowflakes.

Design Fridays: Engine Runs on your Dreams

2011-04-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

Cyclone Power is developing the Mark V engine and claiming it can run on "almost any fuel." In actuality it looks a little like a lawnmower engine in size. In principle it runs off a rankine cycle or regenerative heat cycle or, they claim, a Schoell Cycle named after the inventor who originally developed the cyclone engine. Rankine follows a four step process:

1 ->2 Fluid in liquid stage pumped to high pressure
2 ->3 Heated at constant pressure, becomes a saturated vapor
3 ->4 Vapor goes through a turbine, generates power
4 ->1 Vapor enters a condenser and becomes a saturated liquid

I'm a bit skeptical as to their claim of this being anything "new" or being able to run on "any fuel." I talked a bit on Engineer Blogs about diesel and the way a compression ignition engine versus a spark ignition engine functions are pretty different. Just because their engine might have some flexibility does not mean it wouldn't lose a lot of its efficiency depending on what the working fluid is. They're claiming they can use algae or waste oil as fuel but honestly this is nothing new. Most diesel engines can be easily (or fairly easily given you have time and know what you're doing and have a little money for parts) modified to run on many other kinds of fuel. That's the whole point of biofuel, it runs in engines we've already designed and are using. Especially in large vehicles and trucks which still account for a huge percentage of our transportation costs for shipping product in this country.

Getting all that aside, I do think it's interesting. You don't see a whole lot of radial engines these days. Combining it with a rankine-type cycle and focusing on growing demand for biofuel power generation devices is probably pretty prescient. But there's reasons we don't use external combustion engines in our cars or airplanes so we need to keep looking for practical solutions for that fit our society for both cost and environmental reasons. And maybe something like this can be a part of it.

I think hydrogen engines are promising (maybe that's a whole future post?) and while small, solar powered stations might work for individual's cars it won't serve as a substitute for the whole power structure. Clearly we need diversity in our power solutions and maybe this clever little engine can be a part of that.

Kissing Up to the Boss

2011-04-27T17:24:00.000-07:00

There was a segment on Marketplace Money last week on the art of sucking up. They remind you to be subtle and give three basic tactics:

Phrase your compliment as asking for advice and guidance
Pretend to disagree at first before coming around to their point of view, supposedly this will come off as more genuine
Pass compliments through a third party

Is it true that the ass-kissers really do move up more? Probably, though it's disappointing. I mean pure flattery probably isn't going to get you somewhere, but as someone in the segment put it, flattery lets someone know what qualities you value in them. It's almost a way of encouraging a certain kind of behavior, especially if it's done to subordinates or colleagues rather than to your boss.

One of the successes in the story when asked for a tip reminds the listener that often when someone gets made a boss they expect others to ingratiate themselves to him. Maybe that's what I tend to forget, that sometimes "the boss" wants you to at least pretend you're kissing up now just because he expects it from everyone. I've certainly seen it after promotion.

How about in your experience, does kissing-up help? What are your strategies for using flattery as a job aid?

Settling

2011-04-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

How do you know when it's okay to settle for something? I mean, I'm relatively happy now at work and while maybe I didn't get everything I wanted I did get something, a lot more than I thought I'd get, better than meeting in the middle. At what point is it okay to just sit back, relax and enjoy that? Especially when everyone else is in my life is telling me to keep job searching and keep striving for stuff elsewhere?

Have you ever settled? Did you regret it?

Great kid, now don't get cocky

2011-04-22T07:39:00.000-07:00

There's something to be said for getting more important and respected in your profession and at your work. You get noticed more, you notice people treat you with more respect and deference than they did before, you're a lot more high profile. There's good and bad to this, obviously the growing plague of more and more meetings and phone conferences being on the bad side. But sometimes you are cruising along like the cat who just ate the canary and someone turns on the vacuum cleaner.

Now you're a scared cat hiding in the corner. Your goofs and mistatements are a lot more high profile now too. You can't hide behind the "well I just work here" when you're supposed to be running a project. Or to quote Spiderman's uncle, with great power comes great responsibility.

And it's tough to take that slap in the face. To know that you, oh great rookie whom much is expected, can also fail and do wrong every now and then. It's a painful reminder of your own humanity. Or to quote from The Philadelphia Story, with the rich and mighty, always a little patience.

You can't let yourself blow up like a balloon just because you're a rising star. That balloon rubber is awfully thin material and punctures easily. You'll need a thick skin for when you get blamed for other people's mistakes as often as you get blamed for your own. I think it's easier getting yelled at for something you didn't do than for something you know you goofed on. Even if you think you didn't know any better at the time you keep telling yourself you should have known better. I had this same problem more than a year ago and I've apparently learned nothing since. I'm trying to tell myself that on the inside a little humility is a good thing. But on the outside, I need to put my shield up and be ready to take no prisoners.

Highest Paid Jobs For Women

2011-04-21T11:31:00.000-07:00

There's an article today in Forbes discussing the highest paid careers for women in 2011. I condensed their very graphical gallery into a clean little graph. You'll notice some of the higher numbers for percentage of earnings as compared to men are also in the same careers where the percentage of women employed is a much lower position. This is a man's world, to quote James Brown. I guess I'm a little surprised some of the more people oriented careers don't have better equality and surprised there's only 31% of doctors and surgeons that are women. I mean we've been hearing for years now about how more women than men go to college and medical school and how that spells the end of dudes. The article quotes one dude who dismisses the pay gap with some great mansplaining:

"We may be witnessing an aging factor," speculates behavioral psychologist Matt Wallaert, lead scientist at compensation website GetRaised. "The highest paid doctors are the oldest doctors. With more women in the field, they may be aging up and earning more."

Right, we also may be witnessing a bullshit factor in which monkeys fly out of your ass. Women programmers make up 22% of the profession and earn a much better 95% salary compared to their male peers. So don't tell me we just need more women or time or some such crap.

They talk a little about "engineers" by which they mean software engineers coming in at #5 on the list:

"Engineers are generally employed by younger tech companies with less entrenched male-dominated cultures," says Wallaert, pointing to Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg as a female leader in the field. "Women need to embrace tech. It's a growing industry, and gender doesn't apply."
Technical occupations may be particularly promising for women because they are high-paying and require clear, objective qualifications. "You can program or not," says Blau.

Yes, technical positions are so clear that's why women kick ass at them. Oh wait, we don't. Any working engineer has known several douchebaggy coworkers who kissed ass and moved up in title and pay despite having no marketable technical skills or even a good understanding of the product they're on. So don't tell me this is a job position that doesn't allow for forms of discrimination. And secondly, looking at software engineers as working only at brightly decorated flip-flop wearing Web 2.0 companies is probably a very small piece of the pie. Some of us are working for dinosaurs who won't be satisfied until we've all sold our souls and self-respect for health care benefits and a 6x6x6 cube (notice a numbers trend?) to spend 80 hours a week in.

Not sure what I'd recommend women go into based off this list. Programming or software engineering where the pay discrepancy is lower but they have to deal with overwhelming numbers and possible dominant and established male culture or maybe healthcare where the earnings are decent though not fair but they'll have more female allies and mentors and superiors. Tough call.

Wear to Work Wednesdays #12

2011-04-20T21:52:00.000-07:00

I was looking around online when I stumbled upon these new 9-5 looks from Nordstrom. This one caught my eye and then my eye caught the price tag and rolled into my head. Something in the range of $700+ not including the pants that apparently aren't for sale anymore.

So this week's outfit is using this as inspiration but hopefully using some slightly more economical choices (though for me still on the pricey side, but a girl can dream.)

This sweater from Banana Republic ($80) with this striped tee underneath from J Crew ($45). I liked the darker shirt underneath, swapped the dark and light emphasis from the Nordstrom look, and dropped the belt in favor of a more fitted sweater.

Pair with these wide leg trousers from Lands End ($20!), this great chunky bracelet from Amazon ($20) and these affordable and comfortable looking platform sandles from Old Navy ($32). All together that's $197. Certainly not on the cheap side of clothing life, but a lot more reasonable than Nordstrom's overpriced outfit and with all the same feel and class. All right you, get back to work!

2012 Mustang's Dials

2011-04-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

Simple, elegant. Almost art deco. Interior lighting can make them blue and more modern looking if that's your thing.

Test drove an SS Camaro and a Mustang GT a few weeks back. More to come, but this camaro-lover really dug the Mustang's design style.

We all make hypocritical mistakes

2011-04-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

I just made a huge mistake. I sent a document to someone that wasn't supposed to see it. We all know email recall doesn't really work, especially outside your own organization. So I had to make some crap up and tell them not to pass it on. Theoretically they are principled and it will be fine.

The funny part is, the document is not incorrect or misleading in any way. In fact its just the direct result of what these people have been involved with for a long time. But apparently we're not supposed to send them the truth, the whole truth, without shining it up for them first. Despite the fact they are equal partners in this we can't send them even draft information in an effort to help ease communication. And when this happens to us, and people won't send us the direct information or the "raw" data before polishing it for us first, we get angry. We get angry they dare slow things down and hold stuff back from us. We're adults, we can handle "draft" forms of stuff that we know might change, we're not going to forward it to our planning people and let them freak out over it.

But this apparently crossed the line. It's okay for us to be adults and see some raw data that might change, but apparently we don't extend the same benefit of the doubt to the other end of the line. We're afraid they'll really see how the sausages are made around here.

Jesus died for your SUV

2011-04-19T09:48:00.000-07:00

If I were a prophet in Israel a couple thousand years ago I'd be pretty psyched to know my name, method of death, and some occasional cryptic messages were not only used to power the capitalist Christian materialism market but also to cover people's cars and minivans. I mean you could donate that money to the poor or work towards a better world, but having a brightly colored bumper sticker is like pretty much the same thing, amirite?

Cost of a college education

2011-04-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

What's it cost to get a college degree these days and is it worth it? The economix blog at the NY Times talks about the rising cost of student debt. Graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000. That might not sound as high as the scare tactic numbers you've been reading everywhere, but of course the concern is that not every college student finishes their degree. So while the total lifetime earnings of a college grad are better than those of just a high school graduate, they aren't always achieving higher starting salaries when they need them to start paying off expensive student loan payments.
Cost of college does seem to be more about choices though than the media makes it out to be, Bankrate has this list of the 10 top most expensive and cheapest private and public colleges. Sarah Lawrence tops out at 30k+ a year (not including room and board I'm guessing) but even the most expensive public colleges range from 8-10k. That's probably in-state tuition, and probably not including room and board, and there's always the top 10 affordable public colleges in the range of 2.6-3.2k a year. Not too bad, and several of them are not bad.

Has college tuition and student loan debt gotten out of control? Or are too many people making poor choices and not attending local and affordable state colleges? Or is that not even an issue when expensive colleges and student loan companies are fleecing parents and students?

Hello there old chap

2011-04-14T17:03:00.000-07:00

How often do you use the phrase "good morning"? And how often do you use the phrases "good afternoon" or "good evening?" I say good morning or, alternatively, mornin' quite often. But good afternoon makes me feel like some old timey gentleman who's taking off his top hat and inviting you to tea and good evening makes me feel like that or like a Bond villain. Sure you might say these things on the phone occasionally, but how often do you say them in person? Discuss.

Can't we all just get along?

2011-04-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

Today over at Engineer Blogs I talk about the age gap in the workplace. What to do when your manager is younger than you, or when you are now the young hotshot boss supervising older employees. Feel free to stop over and pipe up with your experiences with this.

Economic Trifecta

2011-04-13T09:18:00.000-07:00

There's good news and there's good news. But is any of this anything other than corporate bull or unrestrained economic optimism?

According to The Detroit News, the auto industry faces an engineer shortage. Of course if you read the article there's no real data to back this up other than this tidbit:

The nation's auto sector added 32,000 jobs during the past year, and thousands have been among engineers.
General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC announced last fall that they were hiring 1,000 engineers — though some are contractors. Ford Motor Co. is hiring 750 salaried workers in product development this year; many are engineers.

No real numbers on how many of the new hires are auto engineers. Or how that is supposed to backfill all the positions they laid off. Also the assessment that "the future is brighter" is pretty weak compared to their overly optimistic title.

CNNMoney has decided similarly to be optimistic reporting jobs recovery is fo' realz, yo. Yes hiring picked up last month. Not sure where there's any data to show it's sustained. I'd sure like it to be, but I'm also not afraid to be all Debbie Downer on this sunshine and rainbow fest if I need to.

And lastly, CNNMoney is all like engineering is the best paying college major. Fantastic.

Chemical engineers were offered the highest starting salaries this year -- an average of $66,886. Mechanical engineers received salary offers averaging $60,739, and electrical and communications engineering majors saw average offers of $60,646. Computer engineering was the fifth highest-paying major, with offers averaging $60,112.
Rounding out the top ten best-paying majors were industrial engineering, systems engineering, engineering technology, information sciences and systems, and business systems networking or telecommunications.

What, really? Where are these jobs?! I'm pretty shocked EE isn't much higher on this list, or CE as many of those people end up working in software. Which is where I've seen all the jobs lately. I guess this is the average pay if you were lucky enough to actually get a job. If you were part of the 10% unemployed who can't get a job, sorry. Or if you're part of the unknown percentage of engineering graduates who gave up and went into some other field just so you could earn a freaking paycheck not sure what your average salary is there. I'd definitely recommend engineering over art history, but I'm not sure we can celebrate about who has the "highest salary" when it's all moot as no one's hiring anyone anyways.

Next step in space

2011-04-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

SpaceX, a private rocket and space flight company, is designing the second most powerful rocket in history. I talked on here before how disappointed I was when Obama (and congress) cut the Ares Rocket program which was supposed to be the replacement space flight rocket after the shuttle is retired. Nothing compares to the Saturn V rocket that was responsible for the impressive Apollo program, and SpaceX's new rocket is supposed to have about half the power. Meaning we'd need two, or two stages, to get to the moon again. But it's still better than anything we've got now, especially as our soon to be defunkt shuttle program is only a low orbital space program.

To Obama's credit, I guess we do see that private industry is developing and doing amazing things. But of course if we wanted to use these we'd actually have to buy them. SpaceX estimates they'll cost $80-$125 million for each launch. Angry commenters on the NPR article ask what good is it to spend $125 million when we're cutting money on education and social programs every day. And I agree, it's frustrating. I don't think we should educate kids any less just to go to space. But maybe we need to put this $125 million into perspective.

Currently each shuttle launch costs us $1.3 billion. That's including total equipment cost, subcontractors, and support. So that $125 million mentioned above would have to be rolled into a larger number to include a lander, training, ground support, electronics payloads, etc. I've also talked about the alternate engine for the F-35 joint strike fighter in the past. The alternate engine, meaning the one that lost the initial development contract, made by GE has continued to be funded by congress at a total cost since 1997 of $2.5 billion. That's for an engine we haven't actually bought any of and probably will never be able to use or buy. That is pure development dollars for GE. Funding was cut off earlier this year and it was estimated $900 million to complete the F136 development engine. That's right, before we could even buy any.

The estimated total cost of the Iraq war up to 2010 has been estimated to be $704 billion. Combining that with the war in Afghanistan it's expected to cost $2.4 trillion by 2017. One week into our "no fly zone" in Libya we were up to $550 million in additional costs to the department of defense for that effort.

Don't get me wrong, I am pro-defense spending. But like Secretary Gates I'm for smart spending. Spending that supports our troops and develops new and uesful technologies when we need them, and holds defense companies accountable for cost and timetables. But more importantly, this is not an either or situation. We don't have to gut defense or education in order to have a viable space flight program. We may have to stop giving people tax breaks on their second homes or stop taxing capital gains (interest earned) far less than we tax labor income. We may have to raise the edge of eligibility for social security or reduce benefits to those who have assets above a certain amount. But when you put the costs in perspective, especially when you compare it to a few wars nobody really likes, I think it's worth it.

I hope the US develops an earnest interest in science and technology again. I hope, like the title of an excellent book, that we develop a passion for mars.

You Get Stronger

2011-04-11T08:41:00.000-07:00

Heard this on the radio last week, NPR's Fresh Air and felt like it was powerful enough to reiterate. Terry Gross was interviewing columnist and author Dan Savage and his husband and author Terry Miller about their It Gets Better project and their book on the topic (transcript of the interview here).

To quote Terry Gross and give a background if you are unfamiliar:

The project is a collection of videos on their website and YouTube channel addressed to teenagers who are bullied because they are or are perceived as gay, lesbian, bi or transgendered. On the videos, people share their own stories of being bullied and then urge teens to hang in there because things will get better.
Savage and Miller founded the project after reading about two 15-year-olds who were bullied at school and then hanged themselves. Savage and Miller made the first video, in which they talked about how they were bullied in school and how their lives got better, much better. They found each other; they adopted a son.
When they launched the website, they were hoping to get 100 video submissions, but the website went viral, and before the end of the first week, they had 1,000 videos. Now they have a book version of their project, collecting some of the stories from their website. The book is titled "It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying and Creating a Life Worth Living."

Then Gross asked for their favorite ones and Savage described the following (emphasis mine):

One of my favorites is by a lesbian Latina poet in the Bronx named Gabrielle Rivera, who said - really contradicted the message in a powerful way. She writes: As a gay woman of color, I just want to let the youth know that it kind of doesn't get better.
All these straight, rich celebrities, I'm not even going to name them, they can tell you that it gets better because they've got money and people don't care what they do. They're coming from a good place and stuff, and I appreciate that.
But I'm going to be real because I live this life and I'm not rich and I'm brown, and I probably look like most of you. It doesn't get better, but what happens is this: You get stronger.
And I thought that was so tremendous when I watched Gabrielle Rivera's video because it's really the Latina, lesbian, Bronx way of saying it gets better: You get stronger.

I think that speaks to a lot of people and is such a universally awesome message. So wherever you are this week if you're having a tough time or know someone who is: You get stronger.

Coffee Addiction Hardwired?

2011-04-09T19:32:00.000-07:00

Is caffeine addiction in our genes? Maybe. Researchers at Virginia University found a gene that may be responsible for caffeine consumption or at least possibly the ability to metabolize more caffeine.

Miniature: Halfling Rogue

2011-04-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

Well technically the mini is of a dwarf. Unpainted shown first, the character I'm playing right now.

Design Fridays: Ideal Coffee Temperature

2011-04-08T07:42:00.000-07:00

A new entrepreneurial approach to that perfect cup of coffee in the morning: Coffee Joulies.That largish, metallic "coffee bean" is not just a paper weight to say how much you love coffee. Supposedly it's filled with a phase-changing substance that will both quickly cool your coffee to an ideal temperature and then keep it from cooling quite as fast after that. Though I find the reference to it being filled with a phase-changing material a little non-specific and bordering on marketing woo. I mean, water is a phase changing substance.

Some sites have said metal is in it, which is possible, though all the makers are willing to say is that it is an FDA approved substance. Remains to be seen how effective they are (compared to say, little spheres of metal that might have the same affect because they are thermally conductive: soak in the heat of the coffee to cool it to a certain temperature quickly, then retain the thermal heat therby not allowing it to cool very fast). But I do agree they are cool looking which is half the battle, so that's why I'm showing them here. Cooling looking coffee bean paper weights. Maybe they work better any other thermally conductive substance at keeping your coffee in the ideal temperature range. Maybe they don't.

DARPA Thursdays: 3D Holographic Battle Planning

2011-04-07T10:25:00.000-07:00

One of the challenges facing the military is how to effectively communicate a battle plan. If you're going to a physical place it's helpful to have as many visual aids as possible. One of the things DARPA has tried to develop along these lines is a 3D holographic display. And they've succeeded.

Not that 3D holographic display, this 3D holographic display.

It's called UPSD Urban Photonic Sandtable Display. It allows a 3D display that does not require any special glasses and allows up to 20 participants to stand around, look at it, and interact. Or interact so much as freezing, rotating, zooming, etc. Freeze and enhance! (I know mixing my Star Wars metaphors with my Star Trek quotes is just asking for it).

It can be any where from six inches to six feet and is meant to process data (possibly population or medical data) and interpret in like a 3D graph. They're working on incorporating that with previous 3D technology they've developed for mapping that is supposedly being used by troops in Afghanistan.

So what does this mean? Doesn't look too impressive admittedly at the moment but clearly the capabilities and options are there. And while now it's being developed by the military for urban missions I could see it being used by city planners and developers or by aid groups who are going into devastated areas. I can think of a wide range of applications from medical professionals looking at treatment and spread of disease or just basic medical care in a geographical area to a Dilbert-esque style marketing corporate tool who wants to see how well they can sell widgets in a city and monitor real time influence or purchase of their product to find better ways to appeal to the consumer.

The technology and the implications so jaw dropping even Nien Nunb can't keep his mouth closed.

Wear to Work Wednesdays #11

2011-04-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

Time for a nice outfit for the spring and summer. Shirt from Eshakti, pants from the Gap, shoes from Clark (via Zappos), necklace from Urban Outfitters.

Graying workforce, the easter bunny, and other myths

2011-04-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

Apparently one of the popular search terms that brings people to my blog is jobs for older engineers. Not sure why I, total newbie engineer, would draw this crowd of experienced and wise folks looking for answers. Probably because the economy is total trash. I've done my own share of job hunting and been rebuffed and ignored, had only a few phone interviews (I'm beginning to think I get called simply out of curiosity and then no one wants to talk to me anymore). So I'm not really sure who's taking all these lowbie jobs in my stead. If I had to guess based on my internal experience at MegaCorp it would be that we're hiring no one. That we have a ton of jobs open, are totally overworked, interview a bunch of people, and then don't hire anyone. Not sure why this is, remember I'm just a newbie.

I always enjoy the Editor's Desk over at Aviation Week. I've linked to it before, and Tony Velocci is a intelligent writer with contacts in the defense and aerospace world who looks beyond the line his contacts feed him. He's warned the industry can't get too comfortable with itself and assume endless funding for overpriced contracts will continue, that pricing and timetables will become important and that programs need to start operating like businesses rather than government pork. He's also talked about the lack of recruiting women in the industry which when you are a guy who's friends all work in defense is a pretty brave thing to do.

Last year he talked about the expectations of young engineers not being met when they go to work in the industry. And again he's covering similar topics on the attrition rate of young engineers in aerospace and defense.

I have less confidence in industry's appreciation for how challenging it will be to attract, and especially retain, young engineers and technical specialists--the men and women who will develop the technologies the country needs.

In a recent visit to a leading engineering school that also is the alma mater of some of aerospace's most celebrated, most highly accomplished individuals, I was stunned to hear that 80% of the graduates who chose to pursue careers in aerospace five years earlier either had left the field or are on the move. Eighty percent!

He discusses how young engineers leave the challenging environment of university, that employers require to remain increasingly competitive, only to end up not being tested or tried in their jobs.

The one place where Velocci loses me is his concern over all the retiring old people who will leave this big gap of tribal knowledge and experience (where he argues they need to get young people up to speed). In my experience, neither young people nor old people are being encouraged or hired. Well, in fact, no one's really being encouraged, but there's this middle section of people in their 30s and 40s who seem to be getting hired and getting promoted at MegaCorp. I don't see us losing a whole lot of people in their 60s. There are a few, but they aren't the ones with crucial knowledge and none of them seem ready to retire yet. The typical notice to retirement around here seems to be about two to three years and there are quite a few people who've retired on the job. We don't seem to be doing anything to retain these people, and haven't hired anyone over 35 in quite a while.

First, I think the idea of a huge gap arising from a bunch of people retiring is a huge myth, and mostly a scare tactic. Companies have been saying that for years, and so a ton of people I went to school with went in thinking they could get stable jobs and do this for life. Many of them have been jobless and wrong and have left for other careers. Many older engineers working in industry may also have the experience of stagnant wages which I think contributes. I think the only reason companies try to hang on to older workers is because they are actually cheaper than the star player in his 30s who thinks he's going to move up in the company. The older workers still in the industry are less demanding and willing to work for lower wages considering their experience, probably because they've been through too many layoffs.

Second of all, if you build it they will come. If a ton of people leave engineering (like all those nurses were going to retire, right?) we won't have any problem getting bodies in. If there's a demand for engineers it'll lead to better wages and better working conditions and people will be flocking to the industry in droves.

Now if these companies want sustainable recruitment and people with a wide variety of skills and backgrounds that's a completely different thing. If they want new ideas that will save them money and lead to future contracts they're going to have to work hard to recruit, diversify, and raise job satisfaction. But I suspect the government pork buffet they've been enjoying for decades isn't going to force them into any kind of competition over engineers anytime soon. I recommend going to medical school: can't outsource doctors and despite all the bureaucracy and long hours and poor locations and stress and the suffering that is trying to support a family on six figures in this country it's still not a bad job to have. So it's pretty much like being an engineer except you probably won't get laid off and you'll probably make more.

News flash- poor people still poor

2011-04-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

A new article in the NYT is discussing how economic security is beyond reach of ordinary Americans. I'm not sure how this is even news, or why this is any revelation of anything new. I suspect if you looked back at the last 100 years in America you'd discover the same thing with possibly a few years of exceptions here and there. I'm not even sure why we're talking about it when one party in power thinks it's a great idea to cut government funding of everything from infrastructure programs to medical care and food banks for the poor. I mean even that's a misleading term, the poor, the unfortunate, who are we looking at here?

According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year — or just above $14 an hour — to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
A single worker with two young children needs an annual income of $57,756, or just over $27 an hour, to attain economic stability, and a family with two working parents and two young children needs to earn $67,920 a year, or about $16 an hour per worker.

That's no small change. The burger place near my work just put up a sign that they are hiring at $10 an hour which sounds like pretty good pay for flipping burgers. And by pretty good I mean I'm surprised the fast food industry pays any more than minimum wage, not surprised that somebody should earn that much for doing what I certainly wouldn't want to have to do for a living. It's scary to me how much my income is not above that dotted line and I think what it took to get me here. Are we really going to expect every single person in America to get years of education and work experience where they can reach a level that they can actually have a savings account? This doesn't even cover trying to pay for healthcare which I suspect most entry-level jobs are no longer providing.

The numbers will not come as a surprise to working families who are struggling. Tara, a medical biller who declined to give her last name, said that she earns $15 an hour, while her husband, who works in building maintenance, makes $11.50 an hour. The couple, who live in Jamaica, Queens, have three sons, aged 9, 8 and 6.
"We tried to cut back on a lot of things," she said. But the couple has been unable to make ends meet on their wages, and visit the River Fund food pantry in Richmond Hill every Saturday. With no money for savings, "I'm hoping that I will hit the lotto soon," she said.

Medical billing? I remember when that was supposed to be the cash cow for people to train and do for a living. Like nursing it was supposed to be a given that it would provide stable employment for a ton of people. I think there's a misperception that the poor are out of work people who hit their limit of savings and are struggling. But the real case is they've probably been struggling all along. They've been doing all the things that were supposed to grant prosperity: getting training, getting a job, working hard.

To develop its income assessments, the report's authors examined government and other publicly available data to determine basic costs of living. For housing, which along with utilities is usually a family's largest expense, the authors came up with "a decent standard of shelter which is accessible to those with limited income" by averaging data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development that identified a monthly cost equivalent for rent at the fortieth percentile among all rents paid in each metropolitan area across the country.
They chose a "low cost" food plan from the nutritional guidelines of the Department of Agriculture, and calculated commuting costs "assuming the ownership of a small sedan." For health care, they calculated expenses for workers both with and without employer-based benefits.
Ms. Kuriansky said that the income projections do not take into account frills like gifts or meals out. "It's a very bare-bones budget," she said.

They said they are still working on stratifying this to cities and states. Meaning I bet these numbers will rise in what kind of income it takes to live in a city somewhere, which is of course going to be where people have the best chance of getting employed to begin with. We all know the job market is rotten right now and I'm sure we all have that number in our heads about bare minimum to survive. But if we keep cutting taxes for the wealthy and closing off opportunities for the lower middle class and lower class what can we expect for our future? I mean these people did the right things. Medical billing usually requires some training, and frankly building maintenance is not a job without experience and skills needed. I know I couldn't turn around tomorrow and work in that industry successfully.

I think we have our eye on the wrong ball here. We've been worried about the high unemployent rate and the ever growing time it takes the average unemployed person to find another job. But it's not Joe the office worker who's having to dip into his precious 401k who I think should tug at our heart strings here. Compounding all the difficulties of just getting a job in this economy we're ruining the financial futures of those lucky enough to get these "low level" jobs. And that's not really sustainable economic development.

Miniature: Merchant Princess

2011-04-03T21:04:00.000-07:00

My first painted miniature, just a test not a character I'm playing. The unpainted photo first, and please excuse my low quality photos.

Enhance your experience

2011-04-01T13:49:00.000-07:00

Wizards of the Coast, current owners of the D&D property, are having some fun today. Only question is, will they be forced to offer their owlbearskin rug for sale eventually in the same way ThinkGeek was forced to sell the Tauntaun sleeping bag that started off as an April Fool's prank?

Shut 'er down

2011-04-01T09:45:00.000-07:00

It's time to close a chapter in my life. After spending maybe $50,000+ to become an engineer I've decided to find a more lucrative opportunity: plumbing. I've talked about plumbing on this blog before, so you'll know why I have a genuine interest in it. It's not that I can't take the sexist crap or the unfair treatment or the daily battle just to keep my head above water it's that I'm not sure I can do this anymore. Sure, designing things in CAD and testing hardware had its appeal but all this time I've been harboring a secret love of plumbing.

I'm planning to start my own business, maybe something like Keeping Your Water Running Regularly or We Fix Your Shit whichever one does better with the focus groups. I keep reading that plumbers make more than engineers which I think is total bullshit so I'm ready to cash in on that. Plus it can't be all that difficult, right? I mean for heaven's sake, I'm pretty much a rocket scientist so this is going to be easy. A super easy payoff.

I'll still blog here, but it'll all be about plumbing or maybe about golf which I plan to take up as a new hobby. No more adorable pictures of cats because that's probably killing my plumber's cred. Here's to a new life.

Character Arc

2011-03-31T09:16:00.000-07:00

I wanted to step aside from my usual topics and discuss one that I think is deadly serious: the presence of Han Solo in Return of the Jedi.

If you watch as many Star Wars documentaries and "making of" films as I do, you know that Harrison Ford asked George Lucas to kill off his character in The Empire Strikes Back. He (Ford) felt that Han had already made the switch from self-serving scoundrel to supportive rebel. If you watch the DVD commentary from Lucas on Empire you know that Lando Calrissian is meant to be character-wise who Han was in the first (or fourth) film. He's only looking out for his own interests and hasn't yet made the jump to supportive of the rebel cause.

However, at that point in the series Han has not made the jump either. True he's helping the rebels and staying there, but now it's out of love for Leia and friendship with Luke. He still hasn't committed to sticking around beyond having sympathies with these people and doesn't yet see the cause as his own. Not until the last movie does General Solo actually get ready to lead an expedition to the moon of Endor without even asking or volunteering any of his friends. He's so in support of the cause he initiates it on his own. That's full circle. That's why Han Solo needed to be in Return of the Jedi.

Priming and the justice system

2011-03-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

You may have been wondering why it's been so quiet at Haus Tech lately and the answer is I was called in to do my civic duty as a juror. Due to being boring and having no strong opinions on anything they asked I was unfortunately selected to jury service. Four days later I feel I've aged by years. What began as the most boring multi-day episode of Cops ever ended as very angry and frustrated people arguing, patronizing each other, belittling and badgering the minority which was unfortunately where I found myself.

But before all that began I noticed how despite the admonition that an individual is innocent until proven guilty there's a lot going against that individual. The "defendant" doesn't sound particularly encouraging when he's up against "the people". The amount of authority we are willing to grant our police officers also seems boundless. Some of the other jurors felt that a police officer's opinion or viewpoint should be paramount and that because we were all "not on the ground" we shouldn't have an opinion contrary to that. Which of course made me ask the question of why we had a justice system at all if we were going to allow our police officers to be judge and jury as well as enforcer. Sympathizing with the cop or feeling that the cop should be vindicated in their actions led people to side against the defendant rather than be able to separate the two as a difference between an action taken on site or actually feeling a conviction was appropriate. I know I felt badgered and abused, and myself and another minority member had already withdrawn and were no longer able to articulate our viewpoints by the end of the discussion and I wonder how many times someone is convicted because the majority feel a police officer's word or opinion is law and use anger and insults to get the other side to submit to just have it over with. In the end we were a hung jury which I'm sure was a great disappointment to the majority who were surprised we could not come to conclusion by which they meant the minority didn't come around. They were able to see their viewpoint as "fact" whereas the opposing was just "opinion" and felt that because they were in the majority the burden of proof was on the minority rather than on them or the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Several of them opined how sad they were that there were people in this country who felt a police officer's word did not always have to be obeyed and felt we the minority were destroying the criminal justice system. I felt sad that they seemed to have forgotten what the purpose of a justice system was.

Latina Engineers

2011-03-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

In my liberal pinko-commie state (that's desperately slashing education and medical benefits to children and veterans) it's Cezar Chavez day. In a state where there are more hispanics under the age of 18 than any other ethnicity it's probably a quietly underrated day. Ironically Chavez was from the state of Arizona where people perceived to be "brown" are losing their rights every single day. Even here, latinos are a silent soon to be majority. They do not serve in public office in the numbers you would expect, perhaps a result of their not achieving political parity as a voting block quite yet. Despite the ever increasing numbers you won't see them in your university system or working as educated professionals alongside you. However I see signs of hope in community events, in the homogenizing culture that brings us all together and pulls us all away from our roots so we can be closer to one another, and in days that are used to recognize what this silent near majority has contributed to our society and our culture.

As an engineer I thought it would be worthwhile to drop a line in recognition of people who don't get recognized except on days like this where we are reminded to think of them. It's a failing of mine as well and no holiday or single point is going to bring us to parity but one day is better than no days.

On that note, here's a snippet from a magazine last year on three Latina Engineers. They all work for AT&T and as far as I can tell are computer engineers, but besides being featured on a "women of color" magazine cover where would you expect to see a Latina engineer so prominently featured? Shayla Rivera is a somewhat well known comedian but also does keynote speaking events as the "funny rocket scientist". She backs this up with an aerospace degree and years of experience with NASA and the space shuttle program (of course she left the field, leaky pipeline and all).

If you're looking to get involved there's the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. Of course you might be somewhere where the local chapter doesn't have much going on, so you can always start your own thing. I attended an event at Northrop Grumman a few years ago and was impressed to hear they have a whole lot of internal employee groups that are run by the employees and for the employees and encouraged by management (of course this was outside looking in, I don't want to paint an over-rosy picture). I've read a few stories where one woman decided she'd take a few other women at her university out for lunch once a month just to pick their brains and get their perspectives. I'm impressed by this and impressed by the groups at Northrop that had started recreation groups but also people of color groups and latino organizations within the company. It takes a lot of guts to network and stand up and be proud when you are probably "the other" in your professional environment so kudos to those folks.

There's also the Mexican American Engineers and Scientists society and the National Society for Hispanic Professionals which gives this good advice for mentoring latino students. Ask yourself if you've done your part this year and what you can do better in the future. Could you make a group where young people can get involved and network? Could you participate in groups like this that already exist and volunteer your time? If you're in a position of power have you thought about mentoring young students who don't look like you even if they haven't explicity asked you? If you're in a position to hire have you made sure you've done what you can to recruit from underrepresented groups and stood up for minority candidates in the hiring process?

Here's to a year where we make strides and make this world a better place for everyone. We can't let a whole crucial group in our society to be forgotten and ignored day after day whether by ignorance or self-interest. This is our community and by working together we can make it stronger.

The folks driving this bus

2011-03-22T16:57:00.000-07:00

So I'm job searching in this terrible economy and I definitely wouldn't mind working for the feds. True they have a two year pay freeze on but they also get to work with some pretty cool equipment. You may wonder past the terribly long hiring time and low pay why the feds have trouble recruiting good people. You may think it's all the veterans taking your jobs. You'd be wrong.

GS-5: To qualify for GS-5 entry-level engineering positions in the Federal government, you must meet specific education requirements or possess a combination of qualifying education and experience.

SPECIALIZED EXPERIENCE: GS-07 ONLY: In addition to meeting the Basic Requirement, applicants must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to the GS-05 grade level in the Federal service. Specialized experience is experience such as: assisting to resolve technical issues on ship system design, installation, alteration, repair, inspection, maintenance, safety, and life cycle management; assisting to develop and monitor shipboard planned, preventive, and predictive maintenance systems. Only experience acquired after graduation is creditable.

To qualify at the GS-07 level based on Superior Academic Achievement you must have a bachelor's degree in engineering which meets one or more of the following areas listed below. You may be appointed based on claimed academic achievement, pending verification of final grades. However, if the required grades were not maintained through your senior year, you may not be able to retain the GS-07 grade level.
1. A grade-point average of 3.0 or higher out of a possible 4.0 ("B" or better) based on 4 years of education, or based on courses completed during the final 2 years (60 semester hours minimum) of curriculum.
2. A grade-point average of 3.5 or higher out of a possible 4.0 ("B" or better) based on the average of the required courses completed in the major field or the required courses in the major field completed during the final 2 years of curriculum (60 semester hours minimum).

That's right. Feds don't care what kind of internships you had while you were working on your degree. They only care what kind of GPA you got. In fact they're shooting their own vets in the foot. What about a vet who was an aircraft mechanic, reads and understands drawings, goes back to school on the GI bill, and graduates? He/she can not benefit from the experience of their stint in the military (true it does add to their total fed service time, but as the federal retirement benefits were obliterated and turned into a 401k-like system this is mostly useless).

So way to go federal government. Way to hand it to the guys who got the best GPA and didn't have to work while in college. I'm sure more silver spoon engineers is exactly what we need. They can also afford to take the appallingly low GS-7 pay for having an engineering degree.

Future of Spaceflight: No single point sollution

2011-03-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

Too often we look for a single perfect answer to our problems. In the energy crisis people are often disappointed when hybrid batteries are found to be so environmentally unfriendly or that wind power is often incredibly harmful to local bird life or that solar cell arrays often use a lot of water in areas that are pretty arid to begin with.

Researchers looking into the future of space flight looked at combining a rocket propellant with an electric sail. An electric sail has some similarities to a solar sail in that they are both low mass propulsion systems however a solar sail uses the acceleration of photons to create slight accelerations to the apparatus while an electric sail uses an array of long, thin positively charged tethers that repel solar wind protons while attracting solar wind electrons. These arrays have all been proposed as a method of space flight that would require no additional propellant as accelerating and decelerating more mass requires more wasted energy. However an electric sail would only function in space and the gains to acceleration can sometimes be minute.

The researchers used the Hohmann transfer numbers as a starting point for interplanetary travel between Earth and its neighbors. Typical planet to planet rendezvous would include a period of time where the spacecraft was accelerating to give it a necessary velocity delta to escape Earth's orbit, then a period where it would coast to reach the orbit of the planet it's attempting to reach. Minimum flight times were calculated for this basic transfer orbit as between 0.289 years to reach Mercury and 30.613 years to reach Neptune.

The authors looked an ideal thrust-on time in comparison to minimum flight time because while shortest flight would generally be ideal you would also want to reduce your thrust time in case of your propulsion system failure. So it was better to look at a ratio between the two. They looked initially at having a secondary thrust phase after an initial coasting phase but found using the total time and thrust time ratio meant it was always optimal to have only one thrust phase followed by a coasting phase.

Their initial starting point was an object in circular orbit around the earth to which they then simulated times it might take that object to reach planets in the solar system using either a typical rocket propulsion system or the hybrid rocket and electric sail option. In the first option the rocket propellant and inertia allow it to reach the escape velocity. But in the case of the electric sail, the sail's acceleration can contribute during the thrust time towards achieving the delta velocity which of course reduces the amount of propellant the spacecraft would have to carry. I summed up their results in a slightly more clear graph.

Perhaps not surprisingly flights to Mercury and Venus were worse with the hybrid system. Though, an electric sail only system would save considerable fuel and mass and could be considered to Mercury and Venus. The major time savings were seen the farther out into the solar system. The hybrid system doesn't solve long term space flight concerns but it does add another weapon to our arsenal that perhaps future spaceflights will employ multiple methods of propulsion.

Quarta, A., Mengali, G., & Janhunen, P. (2011). Optimal interplanetary rendezvous combining electric sail and high thrust propulsion system Acta Astronautica, 68 (5-6), 603-621 DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2010.01.024

How to network without really trying

2011-03-18T22:54:00.000-07:00

I went to a "technical talk" at another company in a related industry to mine last week. It was put on by the Society of Women Engineers and a local organization of Systems Engineers. I'll admit I had diverse motivations in attending this. The topic interested me, but honestly if I was 100% happy staying at MegaCorp I probably wouldn't have gone.

On the outside it looked much like my own company. Non-distinct white buildings with glass windows several stories high. Grass and other greenery around the perimeter, and the occasional benches and tables for employees taking their lunch. The lobby looked much like any lobby I've ever been in. Then I turn around and see a placard for Women's History Month. A variety of events were occurring, some with the company and some not. Let's just say that this sort of thing would not be tolerated at MegaCorp. Some dude would loudly ask when Dude History Month is and why we have all these "special" things for non-white dudes like himself. I mean, he never got an unfair hand up.

I was further surprised when I realized their women's bathroom had "mother's room" attached. Or I am assuming, a lactation room or whatever you want to call it. I have no experience with motherhood but I probably signed something when I started at MegaCorp where I agreed not to lactate within five miles of any work buildings (see MIL-STD-JK). So all of this was pretty foreign to me.

But besides the obvious advantage we women had going into it, the actual talk was still overwhelmingly male from the local systems engineering group. There was one woman from that group, and two other women both members or officers in SWE. And all of the women there had jobs. There was another probably eight dudes, half of which were currently unemployed. And I couldn't help but wonder that their being unemployed was the only reason they were there.

They looked uncomfortable and awkward as you might expect from a guy without a job who showed up because he hopes he'll meet someone here where he can get a job. Some were "project engineers" (who blog readers will know I have no love for). All were easily over 40. Everyone there was white. I had to wonder as we all introduced ourselves and they heard all the women cite employers if the dudes watching were angrily thinking to themselves how easy it is for a woman to get a job and how difficult for them. And I wonder if there's not a difference there that's leading to this misconception.

I know several graduating female engineers who have job offers already, or at least some place to pay them for a while. I also know several still unemployed graduating male engineers. All the female engineers I know with early job offers worked internships. I'm not sure if this is because of a purely male/female thing; perhaps female engineers knew they would have to work harder to prove themselves and wanted "practical" experience. Perhaps the kind of woman who becomes an engineer is already more devoted to the field than the average undergraduate male. And when they all have job offers, but some percentage of the men do not, that can create a mis-perception that women have an easier time getting jobs.

And I wonder that maybe because of this, that women already in the field know they have to be ever vigilant and stay up to date in order to keep up with their male colleagues. That oftentimes they will be expected to work harder to be treated the same. Or in my case, feeling alienated at my own workplace I reached out to a woman's group just to meet people a little like myself and not feel so alone as a female engineer. So though we all had jobs, we were still there. But the guys clearly didn't need this support system until they were actually job hunting.

Just my observations. I'll wait for the barrage of guys who would like to write in and tell me how easy women have it in getting scholarships (I should know, I never got a single scholarship, as someone who worked full time and went to school part time the deck was stacked against me as well as most scholarships require full time status) or how easy women have in getting jobs (again despite having way more experience than my classmates my job hunting experience has been about average, or slightly below average when you consider I should be doing better). And all that is dangerously anecdotal. But I do think the way men and women treat networking is something interesting to consider, especially in a male dominated field like engineering.

Montag Morgen Katze

2011-03-14T12:56:00.000-07:00

My sister's adorable new kitty.

Smog now in Technicolor!

2011-03-13T16:15:00.000-07:00

One of the undergraduate environmental labs at my university uses colored dye, water and salt to simulate smoke plumes and pollution. In a tank of distilled water a mix of salt water acts like an upside down version of smoke or steam pollution. After time these slightly more dense solutions will settle on the bottom of the tank much like a layer of smog can lay at a fixed altitude over a city.

In the photo below the red layer is a medium density salt water mixture that settled into the bottom of the tank like a layer of pollution. The blue mixture is even more dense and as it billows upwards into the atmosphere (or down into the water tank) it being slightly more dense than the red layer it will settle as a more dense layer below the red layer. Never expected my lab photos to turn out looking so artistic.

Leaky Engineering Pipeline

2011-03-11T09:54:00.000-08:00

You ask managers why they have problems recruiting women they will probably tell you things like well, women just choose to go into other fields. Or they like more fulfilling careers helping people and don't like working with machines. Ask those managers why they have problems retaining women they'll probably tell you because all those women keep having babies and leaving the workplace. My own manager in the same breath as promising to finally help me out here (see me whine about my salary here with a colorful graph to illustrate) asked whether he'd have to worry about me taking a "baby leave" anytime soon. I should have turned the question around as he is equally married, only a few years older than me, and just as likely to produce spawn himself. Instead I just took some Fukitol and shut my mouth. Turns out plenty of other women working in engineering might be taking the same drug.

A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee nearly half of women who leave engineering leave due to the environment and working conditions. Only one in four who left did so to spend more time with family. How many never enter engineering? I know a female student who is graduating and may or may not enter the field. Nothing to do with babies either. According to the study, one third of women who graduate with an engineering degree but don't enter the field do so because of their perceptions about the field being inflexible and having a culture non-supportive of women. Listen to this chilling account from the article:

"Engineering school was pure hell for me," one survey respondent wrote. "My personality inspired much sexist behavior from my male classmates and my teaching assistants. At some point, after many interviews, I decided that I wouldn't want to spend the majority of my waking hours with the type of people interviewing me."

Holy crap. I'm happy to report no discrimination in my university experience. Or at least, none that I witnessed personally or can remember. But it could be my experience is not typical. And it's disappointing to me the cold shower of disappointment that hit after I entered the industry is actually getting to people before they even start working and discouraging them to enter the field. So what about the women who leave after they get started in the field?

Women engineers who were treated in a condescending, patronizing manner, and were belittled and undermined by their supervisors and co-workers, were most likely to want to leave their organizations, according to the study.
Long working hours, unclear work objectives and a lack of company planning also drove women to leave the field.
...
"This study touched a nerve with so many women," Fouad said. "Those who stay in the field differ in that they have supportive supervisors and co-workers, and they have very clear perceptions of their jobs and how they can advance in the field."
Total shock that women probably want the same things from their jobs that men want. We are not all baby making machines ready to leave once the 'mones kick in. Asking too much not to be belittled or undermined in the job, having some vague idea about what your job purpose is, and knowing how to move up? I know you're thinking, "Hey FrauTech, I'm a dude, and I have these same concerns!" You're right sir!
Men could have the same complaints, but they haven't left the field as often.
...
Many companies have struggled with employee retention.
"There are probably quite a few male engineers who aren't necessarily thrilled with the workplace climate," said Charlene Yauch, Industrial Engineering program director and associate professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.
...
It also says companies should have zero tolerance for bad behavior.
"We hope to reach out to men as well," Fouad said about another study she wants to do.
It's kind of sad that for this kind of thing to get traction means they have to "reach out" to men. Like we're two different species. I tend to agree with the statement in the article that states that engineering universities should "give women a more realistic preview of engineering tasks and workplace cultures." But I don't think that's a women only problem. And much as the macho/top-dog/kill yourself working culture hurts women it hurts men too. Only the other societal pressures on men are probably not as heavy as they are on women, hence why women leave the industry more often. But that doesn't mean fixing the workplace culture wouldn't benefit everyone. And it means it's not some crazy niche idea for women only.

But the numbers for women have stayed pretty flat: "Women comprise more than 20% of engineering school graduates, but only 11% of practicing engineers are female, according to the National Science Foundation." I hate to think how much talent we lose when we ignore the low numbers of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering. Or the creativity and innovation we're throwing away when we stick to models of "good old boys" that hurt everyone, women, minorities, even white guys. I guess we need to "reach out" to those white guys to get them to buy into this idea that the system isn't working for them either. And that by working together we can make it better.

At last, validation

2011-03-10T17:52:00.000-08:00

I just received this exciting email. Looks like my job search is over, this sounds like the right opportunity for me.

Hello.
We have vacancy in ---- Inc.
We have reviewed your profile, and concluded you are the right person to become
our employee.

If you meet the requirements, please kindly send your respond.

Please NOTE: You must be US citizen
Best regards

Where do I sign up?! If they want my social security number straight away, that probably just means they're serious, right?

Humanoid Robots

2011-03-07T11:20:00.000-08:00

Or how foolish scientists will open the doors to Skynet and a future in which we run from robots trying to kill us. Perhaps literally so. Boston Dynamics, who brought you the infamous "Big Dog" robot (here's a video) have been in the news this past month for the DARPA funding of their new cheetah robot. Supposedly the thing is designed to chase down human prey. Luckily in CAD form it looks less menacing so far.

I have been thinking about the Uncanny Valley in robot design lately. I like Disney's Wall-E and of course I'm waiting for this KeepOn robot to go on sale so I can purchase him and have more moments of squee in my day. But then robots go past the divide. There are plenty of scary looking singing Japanese robots out there. Even a German company has gotten into the race with their "fembot" that can lift things and do factory work. [As an aside, I hate how we have to sexualize all our robots. "Dude-bots" are not called "man-bots" or whatever, if it looks male it is male and the difficult and that doesn't need to be mentioned. In this case I'm not even sure why the AILA was given some approximation of plastic human female hair and vaguely human female curves. Reminds me of the exec in 30Rock complimenting Liz Lemon on being "a good businessman." "You mean businesswoman?" "I'm pretty sure that's not a word."]

While Boston Dynamics was busy making a robot that would hunt down human prey (I'm not sure what kind, or why...terrorists? illegal aliens? Convicts when we finally implement a "running man" or "the gamer" type of future where falsely convicted hero-types must compete for their freedom and lives on a gladiator-like gameshow that bloodthirsty Americans just eat up?). You might have missed their introduction of a bi-pedal robot, ATLAS.

Boston Dynamics already has a two-legged robot, and the video is seriously creepy. It doesn't help ATLAS looks like a freaking Terminator but imagine it walking around non-chalantly like their existing robot Petman and you'll see what I mean with uncanny divide. When the operator shoves him to the side (see me using masculine pronouns for this thing? dammit) I really expected the robot to finally go psycho after being pushed around one too many times and kill the guy.

It's only missing a nice big HAL light on the front of it. So sure Boston Dynamics I'm impressed. But I'm also creeped out. I'm going to go back to watching your snake robot and this weird climbing robot that looks like a lizard. I bet audiences in the 1980s seeing the movie Terminator for the first time wondered how stupid humanity could be that it created the thing that became self aware and destroyed us. But now I see it! We'll make them for coolness factor! Coolness factor is going to be humanity's downfall. Good thing my fallout shelter doubles as robot defense shelter.

Fool me once

2011-03-04T13:59:00.000-08:00

Everytime I think I don't have to look for a new job and actually have a future at MegaCorp the brutal truth swings around and smacks me in the face. It's like the know exactly how to reel me in every so often to make me feel like I could stay here, just often enough to keep me from focusing as much as I should on the outside job search. At what point do you try more aggressive methods? Is it worth mentioning my unhappiness and pay disparity or is that going to piss them off to the point of me losing my job? I mean, I've mentioned it, but how in their faces do I have to be to get some traction. Or is it pointless to bargain with fools.

More on STEM recruiting

2011-03-03T15:35:00.000-08:00

In BusinessWeek Sophie Vandebroek writes about why the US must promote engineering. She doesn't really do a good job at saying why though and I think her article is more of a how. She doesn't say why the US would be better off with more engineers or with discouraging fewer people from staying away from the field. And while I agree with her general premise, some of her points seem too out of line for me to ignore.

First, kids should experience early on how much fun science is. In my family, we encouraged our children to treat the world as their laboratory. As my now-22-year-old engineer daughter, Nena, can attest, she and her brothers watched minimal television throughout elementary and middle school, so they were left to find more creative ways to spend their time. Their afternoons regularly involved digging for bugs, building furniture for their fort, and constructing makeshift dams across the sidewalk after rainstorms.

Great that she didn't let her kids watch TV but she fails to realize that her own background (she's the CTO at Xerox) enabled her to give those lessons to her children. Being an engineer is a decidedly middle class, sometimes upper class, career. It's true that technicians, and mechanics and carpenters and many blue collar workers do excellent jobs at convincing their kids to go to school for engineering but many more parents don't convey that message. Not because they're too good for it, but because just as many kids don't know what an engineer does many adults don't either. And if you grew up and your parents were nurses or secretaries you may not know anything about engineering. I like getting parents involved, but it's not people working in STEM already whose kids we need to reach. It's the kids who no one bothers to tell them what an engineer does or why they might like it.

Second of all, my sister and I (though we watched TV) had a similarly creative upbringing. But we didn't spend hours building dirt forts, rather we spent hours writing creative stories or writing computer programs. Not everyone's path to engineering is the same and I think the implication that all kids need to build stuff when not every engineering career is even remotely like that is a rather closed minded way of recruiting kids. If you like programming, or like solving problems, or like writing reports it doesn't mean you shouldn't go into engineering because all these skills are in the field as well.

The author also talks about expanding green cards and trying to encourage immigrants to stay here after college rather than going back home. But I have to disagree with her there. It's good to have a flexible immigration policy that allows for new people and new ideas but with our economy still bleeding jobs and with the great many engineers out of work I know I'd rather focus on recruiting underrepresented minorities into the field instead of foreigners.

Over at Under the Microscope they talk about a program to recruit girls into engineering, Spark Talented Minority Girls' Interest in Engineering, Female Recruits Explore Engineering (FREE). A mouthful I know. Funded by the NSF the program follows and guides young women from high school, through college, and into their career.

The FREE project focus group included mostly minority girls from Ohio, Colorado, and Iowa from the following additional demographics: most came from low socioeconomic backgrounds; all were recruited through their schools; all were girls who were strong academically in both math and science; none had family members or extended family members that were engineers (to ensure few preconceived notions of engineering); none had decided with any level of certainty on one field; and all of the girls agreed to simply explore engineering as an option.

I really like how we're showing engineering to people even if they don't choose it as a career. I would love for more professionals to just know about what engineering is not necessarily that everyone needs to pursue it. In this case they were doing a study on these girls so hence their goals of not choosing girls who had family members who were engineers, but I think that goal is fantastic. Not that girls and minorities who are related to engineers don't need the help and guidance, but clearly that's not the demographic we're having trouble reaching. I think perhaps that's a noble goal for outreach programs to target only people who would not otherwise participate.

Geek Bait

2011-03-02T07:04:00.000-08:00

I have a couple geeky things at my desk at work. They're like signals to the people who recognize them. A lot of people I've never met come by to compliment me on them and then we strike up conversation and learn we have something in common besides working together. That's that sort of networking bs the social media sites will tell you to do, but I just like meeting new people and flagging the geeky ones down with my signs. Plus I feel cool in an übergeeky sort of way using symbols in plain sight that are like a code to my comrades in geekitude.

Medical science to the rescue

2011-02-28T17:33:00.000-08:00

Do you suffer from working for total douchebags? Do they ask you to do in five minutes what really takes you five hours? Do they then submit your work to their superiors or to the customer passing it off as their own? Well you need Fukitol.

That's right, medical science finally has the answer for you. We here at BioBlöd labs have been working away at a cure for cancer for twenty+ years now. Then we all got sick of each other's shit and decided to work on this instead.

Friends treating you badly when you fail to live up to their high expectations? Fukitol. Have three days worth of work to do if only you could get the damn machine working in the first place? Fukitol. Some asshole nearly run you off the road because he's not paying attention and definitely not using his goddamn turn signal? Fukitol.

Colleague Fluxor opines about bullshit review rating systems. Afterall, you do good work and you get a little fucking raise and a lot more work. Do totally shitty work and you get a little less than a little fucking raise and no more work. So what is the motherfucking point? We're sending Fluxor a free sample of our excellent new drug.

When your boss is a totally fucking useless douchebag, your coworkers are ignorant pieces of shit, and every other asshole is just pissing you off: Fukitol.

Procrastination bonus +2

2011-02-26T16:13:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd make some progress on my work bench this weekend, but doesn't look like it's going to happen. I'll be working in the shop on campus tomorrow and will post if I get anything interesting. But if I just end up sewing all day again (yes my project is like that) than I won't bother. Meanwhile, love this video which reminds me I might need to go out and buy stuff as I'll soon no longer have access to a campus shop anymore.

Want and want. Btw for you sparkies who read this, is $25 and $200 for a function generator and a oscilloscope respectively good deals? Not sure where everyone gets their stuff, or if I'd even use it (I'd rather have the MIG welder obviously).

But I realize I'm going to have to start thinking about keeping an eye out for these things.

Emails I'd like to write

2011-02-25T13:17:00.000-08:00

Dear Important Douchebag,

You might remember me, I've done a lot of the work that you and members of your group have passed off in communications to the customer as being your own work. I was a bit surprised when a customer contact looking for information came back to little old me. Because it seems like you sent them some instructions to use a piece of equipment provided by us and failed to indicate the part number or anything specific about that equipment. Then when you tell me it was a piece "made by engineering" I really have to wonder. Because I work in engineering and what we typical do here is put a fucking part number or name on something. We don't just make something and send it off to fairy land with nothing telling you what the hell it is or what you're supposed to use it on.

So when you calmly tell me there's no fucking part number I really have to wonder who's driving this thing and why some total fucking douchebag like you gets to take constant credit for my analysis and reports and then sends the customer a fucking instruction to use a fucking part that they have no fucking idea what it is. I'd really like your job because it probably pays 3-4x what I make and I wouldn't have to use my fucking brain which sounds great.

No fucking thanks to you asshole,

Your Mechanical Engineer

Crazy Cat Lady

2011-02-24T22:09:00.000-08:00

The US DoD finally announced a winner for the KC-X tanker contract. The $35 billion contract was hotly contested with two major bids: Boeing and a team of Northrop Grumman and EADS/Airbus. After the USAF initially awarded the contract to the NGC EADS/Airbus team in December 2007 Boeing of course protested this award. This sort of thing is pretty normal in the defense industry. Slightly less normal was the patriotic response initially from Congress but eventually backed up by the Secretary Defense and a reassigning of who would make the final decision. Some stuff about European government support came to light to possibly explain the new award but in the end it was probably congressional pressure and the desire to award an American contract to an American company: Boeing.

In other news, not only do defense contractors manipulate congressmen to get contracts but turns out your cat might be manipulating you.

Turns out the relationship between your cat and you, especially if you are a woman, might be more interesting than you think. Turns out our cats actually form social bonds with us. They control when and how they are fed as do human infants and many cats take the place of a dependent child in families. In other cases, the cats and the humans both exhibit controlling behavior on one another.

Women tend to interact with their cats more meaning cats are more likely to approach women. But the kinds of relationships tend to be the same both with men and women.

Cats could very well be man's -- and woman's -- best friend.

"A relationship between a cat and a human can involve mutual attraction, personality compatibility, ease of interaction, play, affection and social support," co-author Dorothy Gracey of the University of Vienna explained. "A human and a cat can mutually develop complex ritualized interactions that show substantial mutual understanding of each other's inclinations and preferences."

As a lady with several kitty friends in her lifetime I can definitely see this. Unfortunately for me, even my own cat came to prefer HerrTech over me so the preference for women doesn't hold true in personal experience, but I probably interact more with TechCat. And I'm sure we manipulate each other all the time. She's manipulating me right now by looking adorable in exchange for being petted. Tricky cats.

All systems go

2011-02-24T16:34:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to the crew of STS-133 Space Shuttle Discovery for making it safely into orbit. Also a hearty thanks to the crews at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, and the Johnson Space Center in Houston. An extremely historic day being the final launch of a space shuttle.

On which I rant with my ladybrain

2011-02-23T16:22:00.000-08:00

My colleague over at Engineer Blogs wrote a great post on women in engineering. This is one of those cases where the internet both nurtures me and discourages me. It's nice to know there are dudes out there who respect me as a colleague and engineer first. It's nice to know there are guys who think society is largely responsible for the different career tracts men and women take. Before I graduated college I worked in the health care industry part time. And I really had no idea that there were still men out there who felt women were any less capable or intelligent.

But then I met so many excellent women on the internet who had the same experiences I did it was pure joy not to feel so alone. So this is just another rant about all the bullsh#$ floating around on the net and in my life and if you don't like it you don't have to read it.

The dudes on the reddit comments for Fluxor's article talk a lot about how women get all the jobs. That there are all these "big companies" out there who have to hire women to fill their diversity quota. Where are these companies? Perhaps someone could point me in the right direction? I'm job hunting in engineering with significantly more real world experience than my peers while applying for the same level of jobs. And yet, no bites so far. It would be interesting to know how many of my peers have job offers and whether that's overwhelmingly in favor of the perhaps 15-20% of women. But I can rant on what I do know.

In the last n+3 years my department went from having 0 female engineers to then 2, then it lost one, hired another one to bring it back up to 2, lost one, and hired back the one who left initially to push us back up to 2. In recent days we've swarmed to a whopping 4, three of whom are young early 20s and the other perhaps late 30s early 40s. These 4 people make up approximately 4.8% of the department's engineers. That's well below the national average of female mechanical engineers being something closer to 10%. One supervisor once told me until he hired his first female engineer that was the first resume he'd ever received from a woman. I don't know if that's true or not. With, as I said before, 15-20% of the engineers at my school being female one has to wonder why they either wouldn't be applying or would be getting screened out of even entry level positions.

And check this sh@# out, female engineers still earn less than their male counterparts. Glassdoor looked at female and male salaries based on years of experience alone. Looking at the bottom end you wouldn't expect "choices" about childrearing to have any affect on this. And yet, women compared with equally qualified men in the 0-3 years of experience range earn 97% the salary of their male colleages. Once you get into the 4-6 year experience category that gap widens to women earning 91%. Now I'd like to make some conclusions based on the women I know in the workforce but unlike the commenters on reddit, or many of my colleagues, I prefer not to draw conclusions from 4-5 people. When I've known perhaps several hundred engineers where 4-5 of whom are women it would be pretty idiotic to draw conclusions about their capabilities "as women" their relative ease or difficulty in career advancement or ridiculously unrelated things like their perceived level of attractiveness. I'll end this post with some quotes heard in the workplace and in all cases said to my face (not "shop talk" or "locker room talk").

Why isn't this organized? You should organize this, women are supposed to be good at organizing.

Could you go over to the shop and bat your eyelashes and make friends so we can get these parts done?

Did you know that so-and-so slept with her boss to get her job? She also slept with DudeA and DudeB. (All not true, but all none of his business regardless)

Well I had to give DudeX a raise, he has a family to support.

Who do you think is good for this role? Oh? Why would I promote her, she's preganant, right? So we're just going to lose her anyways. No, we'll find someone else. (She came back after the pregnancy and still works there).

What? That applicant didn't tell me she'd just had a kid. Can't believe she hid that one this whole time through the whole interview process.

I'm not sure why we're hiring another woman.

Stop disagreeing with me on this (engineering related discussion) I get enough backtalk at home.

Oh I see you're dressed like a lady today, that's a change. (wore a skirt, my bad)

Why are you working while in school, aren't you married?

And much, much more! Here's to me getting a job elsewhere as at the very least I'll have access to more data. And more data is always better.