Category Archives: Engineering

China’s Technology Savvy Leadership

China’s Sci-Tech Savvy Leadership by Jocelyn Ford

Until last year, the top nine members of China’s politburo were ALL trained engineers! And guess what? The Communist Party made innovation and global leadership in science and technology national goals.

Ancient China is famous for its early scientific advances, some of which predated western developments by centuries. Its inventions include paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass.
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Leadership does matter, but so does the system. It seems to me it should take a lot longer for China to build a sci-tech friendly system than for the U.S. to bring in sci-tech friendly leadership. That’s where you come in Ira & co.

If I may make one final comment: in my ideal world, borders shouldn’t matter. Victory by the best system, with the best leaders, will hopefully be a victory for all earthlings.
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CHINA’S POLITBURO (2007): Decline of the engineer. Last fall China introduced a new top lineup that included two law graduates, as well as an economist, and graduates in history, journalism, management and business administration.

I agree that the increase in science and engineering investment around the globe is a positive development. But the USA faces loses that it has enjoyed due to past technology leadership.

China benefits greatly from such scientific knowledge at the highest level of government. The top 9 leaders in China are know as the “Politburo Standing Committee,” the new additions in 2007 were:

Xi Jinping, 54, studied chemical engineering at the Qinghua University and later earned a doctorate in law.

Li Keqiang, 52, obtained MA and doctorate of Economics after attending the on-the-job postgraduate program on Economics at the School of Economics of Peking University.

He Guoqiang, 63, B.S. Beijing Institute of Chemical Engineering.

Zhou Yongkang, 64 “Graduated from the Exploration Department, Beijing Petroleum Institute, majoring in geophysical exploration. With a university education. Senior engineer with a rank equivalent to professor. ” Funny, I don’t remember any U.S. politician exalting their experience as “equivalent to a professor.”

They joined the nine-member echelon with the five remaining members of the previous standing committee, namely Hu Jintao, Wu Bangguo, Wen Jiabao, Jia Qinglin and Li Changchun.

The Man Who Unboiled an Egg

Very cool article on HervÃ© This and the science of cooking: The man who unboiled an egg:

HervÃ© has taught at the universities of Tours and Montpellier, and has his own laboratory at the venerable CollÃ¨ge de France, which, today, is also the base for all four of France’s living Nobel prize winners. One of them, Jean-Marie Lehn, invited HervÃ© to join his department in 1995. In HervÃ©’s laboratory, there is a cupboard full of chemical compounds such as sulphuric acid, sodium carbonate and Mercurochrome, while the shelves are stacked with things you’d normally associate with the kitchen: bottles of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, pots of mustard and cinnamon, bags of salt and shallots, and a bar of chocolate.
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‘I go through ancient recipe books, preferably from the 18th and 19th centuries, jot down what they have to say and test it,’ he says.
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On the morning of our second meeting, HervÃ© measures the pressure inside a chip. He’s aiming to disprove a famous scientific paper which states that oil infiltrates chips during cooking. He heats oil to 168Â°C, measures a chip, hooks it up to a manometer and plunges it in the oil. Unfortunately, the experiment goes wrong and ends up with the chip falling to the bottom of the pan. He is unconcerned. ‘In order to come up with conclusive results, I’ll have to carry it out 100 times.’
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He explains that when an egg is cooked, the protein molecules unroll themselves, link up and enclose the water molecules. In order to ‘uncook’ the egg, you need to detach the protein molecules from each other. By adding a product like sodium borohydride, the egg becomes liquid within three hours.

Very fun read, go read the rest of the article. And try out that uncooking an egg thing and post a comment below – it sounds interesting but I doubt I will actually try it.

Clean Clothes Without Soap

photo of eco washing balls

The Soap-free Green Laundry Revolution by Tania Rabesandratana:

Then, there’s the sheer weirdness of entirely eradicating washing powders in favor of such an intangible washing concept. “The balls are made of a special kind of plastic,” explains Steve Jones, the founder of Ecotopia, which sells a variety of washing balls he believes are top of their league, and a scientific breakthrough. “It is the chemical reaction between the plastic and the agitated water that actually does the washing,” he says. The product’s blurb says the balls “produce ionized oxygen that activates the water molecules naturally and allows them to penetrate deep into clothing fibers to lift dirt away.”

Right. Let’s go back to washing basics. Our machine works by combining three actions. First comes chemical action. Here, detergents act as surfactants: they lower the water’s surface tension, making it more likely to mix with oil, so that yucky grease and grime can be removed during rinsing. Second comes the mechanical action from the spinning of the washing machine drum. And finally, there is heat action, which consists of dunking your laundry in hot water.

The eco balls mostly increase the mechanical action so that you can do without the chemical action, thereby saving money and avoiding the use of evil pollutants. The increase of mechanical action also does away with the need for heat action, which in turn conserves electricity and water, which is good for your wallet and your planet.

Pretty cool, if they actually work. I think I might have to try these out. For the next stage of the process, DryerMax Dryer Balls claim to cut the drying time by 25% and soften the fabric. Some other cool gadgets and gizmos.

Water Pump Merry-go-Round

I wrote about PlayPumps in 2006: Safe Water Through Play. This video by National Geographic gives more detail on PlayPumps and water needs in general. Some facts from KnowH₂O

A child dies every 15 seconds from diseases related to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.

1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water.

40 billion hours each year are spent collecting water in sub-Saharan Africa, equal to over 19 million full-time employees.

Every $1 invested in water yields an economic return worth $8 in saved time, increased productivity and reduced healthcare costs. (UNDP)

In many areas of sub-Saharan Africa women and girls often walk an average of five miles to the nearest water source every day. If a woman only had to carry water for one hour a day, she could earn an additional US $100 a year.

National Science Board Report on Improving Engineering Education

Moving Forward to Improve Engineering Education a report from the National Science Board:

Changes in the global environment require changes in engineering education. Markets, companies, and supply chains have become much more international and engineering services are often sourced to the countries that can provide the best value. Basic engineering skills (such as knowledge of the engineering fundamentals) have become commodities that can be provided by lower cost engineers in many countries, and some engineering jobs traditionally done in the U.S. are increasingly done overseas. To respond to this changing context, U.S. engineers need new skill sets not easily replicated by low-wage overseas engineers.
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Society at large does not have an accurate perception of the nature of engineering. Survey data indicate that the public associates engineers with economic growth and defense, but less so with improving health, the quality of life, and the environment.
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The third challenge for engineering education is to retain those students who are initially attracted to engineering. Attrition is substantial in engineering, particularly in the first year of college. About 60 percent of students who enter engineering majors obtain a degree within 6 years. Although this retention rate is comparable to some other fields, it is especially critical for engineering to retain the pool of entering students.

Energy-Efficient Microchip

Team develops energy-efficient microchip

The key to the improvement in energy efficiency was to find ways of making the circuits on the chip work at a voltage level much lower than usual, Chandrakasan explains. While most current chips operate at around one volt, the new design works at just 0.3 volts.

Reducing the operating voltage, however, is not as simple as it might sound, because existing microchips have been optimized for many years to operate at the higher standard-voltage level. “Memory and logic circuits have to be redesigned to operate at very low power supply voltages,” Chandrakasan says.

One key to the new design, he says, was to build a high-efficiency DC-to-DC converter–which reduces the voltage to the lower level–right on the same chip, reducing the number of separate components. The redesigned memory and logic, along with the DC-to-DC converter, are all integrated to realize a complete system-on-a-chip solution.

One of the biggest problems the team had to overcome was the variability that occurs in typical chip manufacturing. At lower voltage levels, variations and imperfections in the silicon chip become more problematic. “Designing the chip to minimize its vulnerability to such variations is a big part of our strategy,” Chandrakasan says. “So far the new chip is a proof of concept. Commercial applications could become available “in five years, maybe even sooner, in a number of exciting areas”

Internet Undersea Cables

In a previously post we highlighted some of the engineering involved in fixing undersea cables and the challenges in laying internet fiber underwater. Given the recent news those posts might be of interest: Cut undersea Internet cables slow India’s connectivity

Early estimates suggested that half of India’s Internet capacity vanished after the first two cable lines were cut Wednesday. In other countries, such as Egypt, the figure was as high as 70 percent. The two Mediterranean cables cut Wednesday carry the bulk of the region’s Internet traffic
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Much of this traffic has now been rerouted along Pacific cables. Because of the redirected traffic, a third cable cut, discovered Friday in the Gulf region, has had no effect. Some 90 percent of India’s bandwidth has been restored and cable repairs are expected to take two weeks, but bad weather has prevented a repair ship from setting off to mend one of the cables.

For some businesses, the cut meant a slightly degraded service – poorer reception for call-centers that use Internet telephony, for example. But for larger businesses that carry the bulk of outsourcing from the United States and Europe, there was virtually no disruption.

“We have diversity in path and providers globally, and hence we have not lost any connectivity to our offices or customers,” according to an e-mailed statement by Infosys, one of India’s largest Information Technology companies.

While the initial reports talk of the cables being damaged by a ship anchor, at least one new report disputes that, Ships did not cut internet cable:

No ships were present when two marine cables carrying much of the Middle East’s internet traffic were severed, Egypt’s Ministry of Communications has said, contrary to earlier speculation about the causes of the cut.
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“A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time,” said the statement.

Treated Mosquito Nets Prevent Malaria

WHO Backs Free, Treated Mosquito Nets to Prevent Malaria

Long-lasting, insecticide-treated mosquito nets should be distributed free, rapidly and widely in malaria-endemic areas, World Health Organization officials said here Thursday, setting new guidelines for fighting the mosquito-borne disease around the globe.
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The WHO announcement was paired with what Kochi called “impressive” findings by Kenyan health authorities that widespread, free distribution of mosquito nets can effectively save children’s lives.

After several years of using a combination of free distribution and sales, the Kenyan government last year conducted a massive, almost military-style campaign to distribute without charge 3.4 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets over three days in 46 malaria-endemic districts across the country.

Among a monitored group of 3,500 children in four of those districts, the number sleeping under the nets increased nearly tenfold from 2004 to 2006, WHO said, citing Kenyan government figures. The result was 44 percent fewer deaths than among children not sleeping under nets. Insecticide-treated mosquito nets kill mosquitoes on contact. If enough nets are distributed and used, they can have a kind of collective impact of eradicating mosquitoes in a given area.

PLoS Medicine open access article: Increasing Coverage and Decreasing Inequity in Insecticide-Treated Bed Net Use among Rural Kenyan Children

Great Self Portrait

photo of astronaut's faceplate reflecting earth

Photo by, and of, Astronaut Clay Anderson, Expedition 15 flight engineer. He used a digital camera to expose a photo of his helmet visor during the mission’s third planned session of extravehicular activity (EVA) on the International Space Station (15 August 2007). Also visible in the reflections in the visor are various components of the station and a blue and white portion of Earth. During the 5-hour, 28-minute spacewalk, Anderson and astronaut Rick Mastracchio (out of frame), STS-118 mission specialist, relocated the S-Band Antenna Sub-Assembly from Port 6 (P6) to Port 1 (P1) truss, installed a new transponder on P1 and retrieved the P6 transponder.

NASA provides their content, photos etc. online in an open access spirit. When linking to content (especially images) it is best to provide context (and with the internet the easiest way to do is so is relevant links). You can find many low resolution pictures of the image above around the internet. Trying to find the context around the image is not so easy – it took me quite awhile to do so. I try to provide the context and links. Lately some more sites will link to some original sources but this is still done far to infrequently.

There are also still far too many pointy haired bosses (PHB) making decisions to break the web by killing pages: web pages must live forever. Those PHB’s decisions do reduce the great benefit of linking but it is still worth doing for those cases where web sites are managed by people with the knowledge and ability to manage an internet resource properly.

Photo: NASA – high resolution version

Common Ancestor 6-10,000 Years Ago For All Blue-eyed People

Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor

“Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Professor Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. “But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a “switch”, which literally “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes”. The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to our hair, eyes and skin. The “switch”, which is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris – effectively “diluting” brown eyes to blue.