That and $5 will get you a cup of Barley

Ever the overachiever I have stretched myself yet again. Not only am I also writing over at Engineer Blogs I'm also enjoying an exciting two weeks on the Scientopia Guest Blog. Myself and Paolo who is a Natural History curator are contributing our scientific observations to the Scientopia empire. Or is it scientific? In my introductory post there I talked a little about who I amand asked is engineering science? I also just wrapped up a post on NASA's Stardust mission and their efforts of marketing vs exploration. My blog colleague (blogolleague?) Paolo discussed a mystery item from his museum collection (I think it's a skull!) and discussed analyzing it to figure out exactly what it is.

 

My EB (that's Engineer Blogs) buddies have also been busy. Fluxor posted a circuit diagram and asked blog readers to pipe in with where the problem is in Part 1. My eyes kinda glazed over but he gives us the punchline in Part 2. Cherish discusses geological engineering and mapping of subsurface layers. Then last week we all discussed how we got into engineering (Cherish, Fluxor, Chris and me). Our two new guest bloggers joined: Paul Clarke and Michael Barr.

 

With all that great reading you shouldn't need me to say anything groundbreaking or interesting or remotely technical here, right? Good. Well I'll tell you something interesting anyways. Linda O'Brien can sell you roasted barley. You might be wondering, well wth can I do with that, FrauTech? Her husband being a farmer she was experimenting with malted barley and found it to have a coffee-like taste. So she's made ground roasted barley you can put in your coffee or espresso machine. She even drinks hers with creamer.

 

Like many serious coffee drinkers I often wonder what the heck the point is of drinking decaf. Either get over the caffeine, or drink something else. But I think this is an even better substitute because decaffeinated coffee still has small amounts of caffeine in it. So if you're trying to get that same coffee taste without the caffeine I'm now going to recommend you brew O'Brien's roasted barley, or RoBarr. Hopefully if she sees this she'll send me a free sample so I can review it. I've shied away from reviews in the past being only an average engineer and less than average at many other things but if there's one thing I'm damn good at it's drinking coffee.

Sell Yourself

I am not good at the interview. I have a tendency to ramble too much, a desire to fill the empty space with my talking. And whilst I am talking I can't think of the things I wanted to say. My elevator speech sounds more like a linear story of my progression rather than a sales pitch. All of the key points I try to remind myself ahead of time to bring up, all the ways to suggest I can really bring something of skill to the hiring manager, are forgotten in the heat of the moment.

 

Obviously next time I need to remember to have handwritten notes. Knowing ahead of time what I want to say is no good when I get nervous and blank out. But what else, how do you sell yourself?

Jet Engine Eats Tax Dollars

Here we again. More infighting and lying and bragging on the "alternate engine" for the F-35. You see, Pratt & Whitney won the initial engine competition for the F-35. The main competitor, a team of GE and Roll's Royce (not the same as the car manufacturer) lost the competition. You would think that would be the end to it. But no. Congress has been diverting program money towards the alternate engine. I talked about this before.

 

On Monday, just in time for a romantic Valentine's Day, the Department of Defense budget will be released. The budget will likely not include funding for the alternate engine. And the two engine manufacturers are trying to get ahead of the story with their own competing press lines.

 

So far Pratt & Whitney is running at 16% under cost per engine. But the new budget is going to include more funding for them, along the lines of a billion dollars more. GE and Roll's Royce are trying to draw plenty of attention to this extra funding as while some of it is for extra delivery of engines and related services, some is also pegged towards improvement. GE and Rolls are trying to demonstrate their engine is more innovative than the P&W engine and both are arguing about how worthy metrics like fuel burn are.

 

I suspect this will be contentious and I frankly don't care which engine is actually better. But we should be angry when competition doesn't fuel (see what I did there?) a better product but instead a hissy fit that serves no one, and congress while cutting budgets everywhere else continues to fund a defense item that is completely redundant and as far as typical defense programs completely unnecessary.

Engineer to Manager?

Does moving up in the business world require sacrificing all your ethical standards? Zuska just wrote a post on a string of crazy bosses.

True that. The comment thread pondered whether this phenomenon might be more prevalent in technical fields or a strategy used by some companies to get rid of low level employees in a particular group. I think these are valid and I also wondered whether the skills required to move up and be a manager don't automatically lend themselves to changing who a person is or self selecting for certain kinds of people.

You do not hear about the white collar, middle to upper middle class people who go shitznutz and instead of bringing a gun to work and shooting up a bunch of folks, just psychologically abuse the hell out of everyone under their control.

I've noticed the more I "move up" on projects the less hands on work I actually accomplish. More of my time is spent in a project management phase. And when you get to that point you're dealing in knowledge and tracking and conveying information. Which often means I've no longer designed the object in question but am just relaying its status. When you're talking to higher level people on a project, and your designers and technicians are not, this can seem to me like taking credit for their work. Or the more powerpoint I am required to do the more information I must "steal" from others to incorporate in a presentation that management will see. There's no decent way to "credit" your fellow employees, or even yourself, in these presentations. I've seen my name go on documents and projects I had very little to do with besides compiling information. But I've also seen comprehensive reports and presentations that I've poured my heart into get sent several levels above me without any mention that I contributed. There doesn't seem to be any logic to it and while I know I am queasy every time I take implicit credit for another person's work I realize my manager, and his manager, do not have the same qualms.

Chris Gammel over at EngineerBlogs just did a post on expectations for electrical engineering starting salaries. He talks about how the starting salary can seem high after being in school but often the growth flattens out over time. Unless of course, one moves into management. Is the tradeoff worth it? Is management self selecting or do people actually change in order to go into it?

Can college teach critical thinking?

Two sociologists wrote a book from a four year study that followed 2,300 students at 24 universities and tried to see what they actually learned. What they found was, in general, college students did not improve on critical thinking and writing skills. They blame a lack of "rigor" in university schoolwork and a system of student evaluations that pressures professors to assign less and less work. Students in liberal arts disciplines did slightly better than students in business or communications.

 

I first read about this over at Historiann's with a longer article on the study here and was reminded about this when one of the authors did an interview on NPR this morning. There's also an article on discussion on this topic over at Higher Education.

 

Personally I feel so much of it is a kids these days kind of attitude. It's in the ruling elite's best interest to prove that today's college students just didn't learn as much or as well as they did back in the day. But what with cutting funding over the last 30 years to public education institutions it's no surprise to me something would suffer as a result. But how about critical thinking or writing? Never once I have seen that directly asked in a job application or been able to deduce that an interviewer was actually looking for it. Especially in engineering there is a tendency to ask what products the person worked with, what kind of designs they can generate, their hardware and software skills. Back in my humanities days I wrote a lot. We had an excellent writing program in my high school which was topped off with a very specific writing program in college. Almost all my humanities classes required papers, easily hitting the 20 pages they discuss in that article. In engineering there was writing, but it wasn't as consistent. There was writing in early introduction and design courses, then again at the end in the senior level classes. But inbetween it's mostly problem solving. The occasional use of a CAD program or a few classes covering software programming whether in C or matlab were the only real take home assignments.

 

And why not? I write better than many of the young engineers I work with. But my writing skills have never come into play with my employers. I have a whole degree that covered writing, analyzing, critical thinking and other "soft" skills. Instead they ask what CAD program I've used, and for how many years, and did I use this other analysis programs? They ask what kind of hardware I've designed or tested looking for application specific knowledge. I think there's an assumption amongst employers that "soft" skills like writing can come in time whereas technical skills they really want new employees to have right away. I think this might be flawed, but it represents the system as it is. A good [designer] can learn to write whereas a good writer can never learn to [design], substitute in whatever the desired technical skill is.

 

But employers like to complain that college grads are not qualified period. That even in this economy they can't get qualified people to hire. Often this is attributed to a back in my day we used to kind of attitude with an assumption that whatever skills that manager learned in school 20 years ago are superior to whatever skills the student is learning now. I'm not saying the bar hasn't lowered for higher education. But a student graduating now is expected to have all the technical knowledge of an engineering degree, with the hands on knowledge of a shop, as well as software skills with programming, CAD, matlab, ANSYS, etc. They're also supposed to be pretty competent with MS Word, Excel and Project. Oh and they want specific application experience. I mean how can they expect to have this memorization and working knowledge combination and come out with a student who can think independently or apply the facts they've spent the last 20 years learning? I think new college grads will never be good enough for employers or for sociologists alike.

 

So much of what makes you who you are and what makes you good at what you do you learn on the job. This holds true for technical skills, application specific knowledge, and tribal knowledge. So why can't it hold true for critical thinking? If we aknowledge technical skills can be learned on the job, why not soft skills? We may not value it as highly but it seems like our employees could improve in many ways and we should stop expecting so much for an education system we've stopped adequately funding.

Engineering Ethics

How do you properly teach ethics in engineering (or for that matter any other discipline) in class? In my experience it gets lumped in with some more report-focused class taught as a few mandatory lectures. It's important, but I'm not sure it's always conveyed very well.

 

Students have seen the same Tacoma Narrows bridge, Challenger explosion, Columbia burnout over and over again. I suspect the Apollo 1 fire was featured more prominently in engineering ethics courses not so many years ago, but now it fades into old news. And the students in these classes are no longer old enough to remember the Challenger. They were probably in middle school or high school when the Columbia tried to re-enter earth's atmosphere. Two years after 9-11, and 17 years after Challenger, I can't help but think this didn't have the same impact that previous disasters did.

 

And college students are notoriously unresponsible immature assholes. I don't like the ethics lectures because when we watch a video on the Columbia taking off and it fades away I hear a few "boom"s from the lecture hall. When somebody comes on to talk about it they snicker at his 1980s mustache. This is a cartoon for them. They're not taking the loss of life any more seriously than they're capable of taking anything else. Sure, maybe some of it is a nervous humor, an attempt to not have to take it seriously. Because that might be too real. But these are America's future engineers.

 

I think my age both in Challenger having a greater impact on the lives of those around me as well as being past the point of making jokes in lecture is what separates me from the vocal minority in these cases. But I try to think about the lecturer and what I would do in his case to try to get through to these students. Mandatory ethics lectures are irritating to many people, myself included. We all have places we'd rather be and other responsibilities in our life. But a brief discussion and a thirty minute video doesn't seem to be reaching these people. I feel like only in remembering these tragedies and especially remembering the pain and terrible loss of life can we hope to do better in the future.

Better Cheese with Machines

Who would have known something so innocuous as cheese would be breaking so many boundaries. I talked last year about the cheese wheel that went into space. Now some research in the Journal of Food Engineering offers some methods for measuring cheese composition. You know an article that begins The cheese industry demands... is going to be good. I picture them to be a 1950s-esque men in black kind of organization setting the requirements for cheese.

But food composition is serious business, after all Taco Bell is being sued for its beef content in its tacos. Using ultrasonics to detect food composition has been around and has advantages over traditional methods. Mostly you don't have to destroy the food you're testing. In this case the experimenters were analyzing eight brands of cheese. They extracted cylinders of the cheese samples and used a pair of narrow band ultrasonic transducers. These devices generate sound waves in the ultrasonic range and in this case send them at the cheese. They rounded out their test equipment with a pulser receiver and a good old oscilloscope.

They then measured the ultrasound velocity of the samples at various temperatures. The receiver measured the time it took the wave to travel through the cheese, six trials each, and they had the cylinders measured to an accuracy of 0.01 mm. What maybe was expected was that the velocity would be based on the fat and water content of the cheeses. The fat behaving differently at various temperatures was what led to velocity measurements at different temperatures.

What they found was the structure of the cheese mattered a lot. The equations for modelling wave propagation based on dairy fat could change based on how the manufacturer made their cheese and the texture of the cheese even if the fat and water composition was very similar. The experimenters also made their own cheese blends using a vacuum to remove extraneous air and found their predictions fared better in this case because the differences in cheese structure and manufacturing didn't have as much of an effect.

So sound waves to test food? Probably not too far around the corner. It's easy to think of industrial applications where this would simplify your quality process or even better a way of making government food agencies much more productive with their limited resources. But there would have to be a lot of development and specialization to get it to be accurate.

Telis-Romero, J., Váquiro, H., Bon, J., & Benedito, J. (2011). Ultrasonic assessment of fresh cheese composition Journal of Food Engineering, 103 (2), 137-146 DOI: 10.1016/j.jfoodeng.2010.10.008