Category Archives: Engineering

No Surprise: Engineering Graduates Continue to Reign Supreme

If you want a high paying job upon graduation choosing to major in engineering is a great choice, for those that enjoy it and are able to meet the challenge. This data is for the USA. My guess is that similar results would show up in most locations, but I am just guessing, I don’t have any specific data.

The top average starting salary paid USA under-graduates by major:

major		2012 salary
computer engineering		$70,400
chemical engineering		$66,400
computer science		$64,400
aerospace/aeronautical/astronautical engineering		$64,000
mechanical engineering		$62,900
electrical/electronics and communications engineering		$62,300
civil engineering		$57,600
finance		$57,300
construction science/management		$56,600
information sciences and systems		$56,100

NACE salary survey

This continues a long term trend of engineering major being rewarded: Engineering Majors Hold 8 of Top 10 Highest Paid Majors – Engineering Again Dominates The Highest Paying College Degree Programs – S&P 500 CEO’s: Engineers Stay at the Top – Career Prospect for Engineers Continues to Look Positive.

Overall starting salaries were up 3.4% to $44,455. Engineering major starting salaries increased 3.9%, to $61,913. Computer science is the 2nd highest paid broad major category at $59,221 (up 3.8%). Next is business at $53,900 (up 4.2%). At the bottom of both average pay and increase was humanities and social sciences with $36,988, up 2%.

The highest-paying industry for Class of 2012 graduates in this report is mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction; employers in this industry offered starting salaries that averaged $59,400.

The mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction industry also has the top-paying occupations for Class of 2012 graduates. Mechanical engineering graduates hired as petroleum, mining, and geological engineers received starting salaries that averaged $77,500.

As I have said before, I believe it is foolish to pursue a career in a field that doesn’t interest you. Pay doesn’t make up for doing something you don’t enjoy. But if you enjoy several things somewhat equally pay is worth paying attention to.

Many Great, Free, Online Courses in Science, Engineering and More

The video, above, provides an overview of an online course, Calculus: Single Variable, via coursera from the University of Pennsylvania. This course provides a brisk, entertaining treatment of differential and integral calculus, with an emphasis on conceptual understanding and applications to the engineering, physical, and social sciences.

Robert Ghrist is the Andrea Mitchell University Professor of Mathematics and Electrical & Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Coursera offers many courses in all sorts of disciplines including: Introduction to Genetics and Evolution (Duke), Scientific Computing (University of Washington), Principles of Economics for Scientists (California Institute of Technology), Game Theory (Stanford University and The University of British Columbia), A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior (Dan Ariely, Duke University), The Modern World: Global History since 1760 (University of Virginia), Microeconomics for Managers (University of California, Irvine), Data Analysis (Johns Hopkins University), Fundamentals of Human Nutrition (University of Florida), Algorithms, Part I (Princeton University), The Ancient Greeks (Wesleyan University), Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (University of Edinburgh) and Epigenetic Control of Gene Expression, (University of Melbourne).

All the classes are free. These courses, and many more, are extremely appealing. I signed up for 2. I would be interested in signing up for much more but I worry about having the time to commit to keeping up with the coursework. I hope the first two go well and I can sign up for more in the future.

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2012 Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education

I have posted on the Olin College of Engineering several times. I really like what they are doing. Innovation in engineering education will pay high dividends, especially providing a focus on the nexus of engineering and entrepreneurship.

Olin College of Engineering’s three founding academic leaders, Richard Miller, David Kerns and Sherra Kerns, received one of engineering’s highest honors – the Bernard M. Gordon Prize. The $500,000 prize is awarded by the National Academy of Engineering to recognize innovation in engineering and technological education.

“This team of educational innovators has had a profound impact on society by improving the way we educate the next generation of engineers,” said NAE President Charles M. Vest. “Olin serves as an exemplar for the rest of the engineering world and a collaborative agent for change.”

Armed with one of the largest gifts in the history of higher education, the F. W. Olin Foundation recruited Richard Miller as Olin’s first employee in 1999. To help build the college from scratch, Miller recruited the founding academic leadership team including David Kerns and Sherra Kerns later that year. Together, they developed a vision for an engaging approach to teaching engineering and a new culture of learning that is intensely student centered.

To insure a fresh approach, Olin does not offer tenure, has no academic departments, offers only degrees in engineering, and provides large merit-based scholarships to all admitted students.

Perhaps the most important contribution the Gordon prize recipients made was the creation of a profoundly inclusive and collaborative process of experimentation and decision-making involving students in every aspect of the invention of the institution. This is illustrated by the decision in 2001 to recruit 30 young students to spend a year as “partners” in residence with the faculty in conducting many experiments together before establishing the first curriculum.

“As entrepreneurs, we learn to listen to our customers. Olin’s innovative approach was co-created by enterprising faculty, inspired students, and a dedicated staff, as well as collecting and integrating innovative approaches from more than 30 other institutions worldwide,” said David Kerns, current faculty at Olin and founding provost and chief academic officer of the college from 1999 to 2007.

With the extensive help of a collaborative team of faculty and students, and the guidance of the late Dr. Michael Moody, a novel academic program emerged. Some of the features include a nearly gender-balanced community, a strong focus on design process throughout all four years, extensive use of team projects, a requirement that students repeatedly “stand and deliver” to the entire community at the end of every semester, an experiential requirement in business and entrepreneurship, a capstone requirement outside of engineering, and a year-long corporate-sponsored design project in which corporations pay $50,000 per project.

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Make Crosswalks More Visible

Good simple idea. And then executed well – for nighttime at least. Crosswalk lights up when in use giving drivers a more visible clue to stop.

Promoting Innovation in Sierra Leone

Another inspirational kid that shows that the potential for human good is much greater than the talking heads and politicians that litter the TV screen so often.

In the video Kelvin says, “That is my aim: to Promote Innovation in Seira Leone, among young people.” See another video as Kelvin explains his homemade battery.

Support these young engineers in Sierra Leone via innovate Salone.

Arduino Introduction Video Tutorial

Arduino is a very cool open source programable hardware engineering initiative. It is great for kids and adults who like to learn and create electronic devices. The Arduino Starter Kit is a great education gift for those interested in such things.

The video explains how to build a basic circuit with the Arduino board, and how to use each of the basic components such as LEDs, switches, and resistors. See more videos on related topics. Massimo Banzi, the co-creator and CEO of Arduino, and seen in the videos, also has a book: Getting Started with Arduino.

Solar Powered Water Jug to Purify Drinking Water

Deepika Kurup, a 14-year-old New York student, won the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge for her invention of a solar-powered water jug that changes dirty water into purified drinking water. She won the top prize of $25,000.

During “the 5 minutes of my presentation 15 children have died from lack of clean drinking water.”

I am thankful we have kids like this to create solutions for us that will make the world a better place. We rely on hundreds of thousands of such people to use science and engineering methods to benefit society.

Capuchin Monkeys Don’t Like Being Paid Less

Quite a fun video. Frans de Waal shows us a task he gave Capuchin monkeys to see if they responded to a sense of fairness. See the rest of the talk.

Frans de Waal is a Dutch primatologist and ethologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler professor of Primate Behavior in the Emory University psychology department in Atlanta, Georgia. His research centers on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing.

Toyota Human Support Robot

Toyota continues to develop their partner robot initiative. Demographics in Japan make a compelling case for the need to provide solutions to those who need assistance to support independent living.

The aim is to contribute to the maintenance and improvement of quality of life.

In cooperation of the Yokohama Rehabilitation Center, Toyota conducted experiments for disabled people, using HSR in their homes, in 2011. Toyota has been integrating the feedback to the design, based on actual user experience.

The Human Support Robot (HSR) can pick up something on and bring it to the person. Also it can do small tasks such as opening the curtains.

Controlling the robot can be done easily, by using the voice recognition function or using a tablet control. In addition, Toyota is designing it to directly assist the person, helping them get into and out of a bathtub, for example.

They are also developing new features for remote viewing and remote operation (to provide off site help to make the robot more useful). They are working with health care professionals, including nurses, and research institutions aimed at practical use for such a robot.

Toyota, along with several other Japanese companies, continue to invest a great deal to create personal care robots.

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Should Giant Viruses Be Included on the Tree of Life?

A new study of giant viruses supports the idea that viruses are ancient living organisms and not inanimate molecular remnants. The study may reshape the universal family tree, adding a fourth major branch to the three that most scientists agree represent the fundamental domains of life. But I am not sure that makes sense. The reason given for viruses not being “life” is that they cannot reproduce themselves – they hijack living cells to reproduce. The research in the past history of viruses as they evolved into current viruses is interesting but I don’t see the reason to classify current viruses as life.

The researchers used a relatively new method to peer into the distant past. Rather than comparing genetic sequences, which are unstable and change rapidly over time, they looked for evidence of past events in the three-dimensional, structural domains of proteins. These structural motifs, called folds, are relatively stable molecular fossils that – like the fossils of human or animal bones – offer clues to ancient evolutionary events, said University of Illinois crop sciences and Institute for Genomic Biology professor Gustavo Caetano-AnollÃ©s, who led the analysis.

“Just like paleontologists, we look at the parts of the system and how they change over time,” Caetano-AnollÃ©s said. Some protein folds appear only in one group or in a subset of organisms, he said, while others are common to all organisms studied so far.

“We make a very basic assumption that structures that appear more often and in more groups are the most ancient structures,” he said.

Most efforts to document the relatedness of all living things have left viruses out of the equation, Caetano-AnollÃ©s said.

“We’ve always been looking at the Last Universal Common Ancestor by comparing cells,” he said. “We never added viruses. So we put viruses in the mix to see where these viruses came from.”

The researchers conducted a census of all the protein folds occurring in more than 1,000 organisms representing bacteria, viruses, the microbes known as archaea, and all other living things. The researchers included giant viruses because these viruses are large and complex, with genomes that rival – and in some cases exceed – the genetic endowments of the simplest bacteria, Caetano-AnollÃ©s said.

Open access paper: Giant Viruses Coexisted With the Cellular Ancestors and Represent a Distinct Supergroup Along With Superkingdoms Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya

The discovery of giant viruses with genome and physical size comparable to cellular organisms, remnants of protein translation machinery and virus-specific parasites (virophages) have raised intriguing questions about their origin. Evidence advocates for their inclusion into global phylogenomic studies and their consideration as a distinct and ancient form of life.
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Results call for a change in the way viruses are perceived. They likely represent a distinct form of life that either predated or coexisted with the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) and constitute a very crucial part of our planet’s biosphere.

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