Category Archives: Engineering

Mechanical Hit Counter

I’ve always subscribed to the Rube Goldberg School of Engineering Design, the philosophy of which is “simple, elegant solutions are for the unimaginative”. These are words I can live by. Overengineered designs are where Art and Science meet, eye each other up a bit, sink a few pints, and head off to Science’s apartment to see his etchings. I tip my hat to Mr. Goldberg, using a machine that tips hats in 22 steps, starting with cracking an egg.

Here, then, is my humble contribution to the rich tradition of overengineering – the Mechanical Hit Counter. To operate it, open the webcam window
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So, when you ping salem, you’re actually hitting my firewall, which redirects ICMP type 8 (Echo Request) so the board, whose internal address is 192.168.0.2.The BX decodes the ping request and asserts a TTL output high for 50ms. This turns on the transistor, which fires the relay, which cycles the power, which increments the counter. Then, the webcam takes a picture of it every 5 seconds and stores the image in the www directory. Voila!

Great.

China Leads in Producing Post Graduate Engineers

Highly recommended for those interested in the macro view of engineering education in the USA, India and China. Where the Engineers Are is an excellent article building off the work mentioned in previous posts including: Worldwide Science and Engineering Doctoral Degree Data, USA Under Counting Engineering Graduates and House Testimony on Engineering Education. The data they have collected and interpreted shows that China has moved ahead of the USA in doctoral degrees in engineering and India has not been growing there doctoral graduate counts.

In the United States, close to 60% of engineering PhD degrees awarded annually are currently earned by foreign nationals, according to data from the American Society for Engineering Education. Indian and Chinese students are the dominant foreign student groups. Data for 2005 that we obtained from the Chinese government show that 30% of all Chinese students studying abroad returned home after their education, and various sources report that this number is steadily increasing. Our interviews with business executives in India and China confirmed this trend.

The bottom line is that China is racing ahead of the United States and India in its production of engineering and technology PhD’s and in its ability to perform basic research. India is in particularly bad shape, as it does not appear to be producing the numbers of PhD’s needed even to staff its growing universities.

Â£25 Gadget Saves Energy

Â£25 fridge gadget that could slash greenhouse emissions by David Adam:

Invented by British engineers, the Â£25 gadget significantly reduces the amount of energy used by fridges and freezers, which are estimated to consume about a fifth of all domestic electricity in the UK. If one was fitted to each of the 87 million refrigeration units in Britain, carbon dioxide emissions would fall by more than 2 million tonnes a year.
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Because air heats up much more quickly than yoghurt, milk or whatever else is stored inside, this makes the fridge work harder than necessary. With the cube fitted, the fridge responds only to the temperature of the food, which means it clicks on and off less often as the door is open and closed. Trials are under way with supermarkets, breweries and hotels. One of the largest, the Riverbank Park Plaza hotel in London, fitted the device to each of the hotel’s 140 major fridges and freezers. David Bell, chief engineer, says energy use decreased by about 30% on average – enough to slash the hotel’s annual electricity bill by Â£17,000. The Park Plaza group plans to fit them throughout its UK hotels, and to recommend them overseas.
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Mr Freedman said the devices would have the biggest impact in the large freezers and open chill cabinets used in the catering and supermarket industries. They do reduce the energy consumption of domestic fridges, but the saving is not so great because the door is not opened very often.

Magnetic Switching Data Storage

New Magnetic Switching Method Could Dramatically Speed Up Data Storage

Scientists of the Research Centre JÃ¼lich, Germany, have found a fundamentally new magnetic switching method which achieves the fastest speed ever reported by applying an external magnetic field. The results that are presented in a current article in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters could introduce new possibilities for future data storage applications with ultimate speeds.
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Besides its extremely high speed, a remarkable aspect of this finding is that it unfolds automatically: The applied field only perturbs the magnetization, which then under-goes these complicated changes as it recovers equilibrium. “These findings represent a promising leap towards smaller length scales and shorter time scales in magnetic data storage applications”, affirms Prof. Claus M. Schneider, director at the IFF

Magnificent Flying Machine

A magnificent flying machine

The next time you attempt to swat a fly, remember that you are trying to destroy a flying machine that engenders awe and bafflement in scientists, engineers and professors of aerodynamics. Thanks to remarkable flying skills that make the housefly the Ferrari of the insect world, it is unlikely you will achieve a direct hit. While fleeing a rolled-up newspaper, the insect can change course in as little as 30 thousandths of a second.

This and other flying insects have plagued the worlds of science and engineering ever since the first calculation of bumble-bee flight was attempted at GÃ¶ttingen University in the 1930s. Conventional aerodynamics suggested the insect should not generate enough lift to fly. The sums caused consternation.

In the past few years, however, remarkable advances have been made. The so-called “bumble-bee paradox” was solved by Dr Charles Ellington and colleagues from Cambridge University when, with the help of a robot insect, they highlighted the bee’s secret: extra lift is generated during a downstroke by a spiral vortex that travels along the leading edge of each wing, from base to tip.

Open Source 3-D Printing

3-D Fabrication Goes Open Source

Hod Lipson and Evan Malone of Cornell University have cooked-up a cheap DIY 3-D printer – the Fab@Home – that they believe could lead to the widespread use of fabrication machines by hobbyists and experimenters. Fabrication machines, or fabbers, operate on the same principle as inkjet printers, but instead of squirting out ink onto paper, they squirt plastic or other materials into three-dimensional shapes. Commercial systems average around $100,000, but you can build Cornell’s Fab@Home for about US$2,300 worth of off-the-shelf parts.

Invasive Plants: Tamarisk

To Save the West, Kill a Plant by Josh McDaniel:

The tamarisk, an invasive species introduced to the United States from Eurasia, is a deep-rooted plant that aggressively obtains water from the soil and groundwater. A single mature tree can produce up to 500,000 seeds per year, crowding out native plants along rivers and creeks and reducing wildlife habitat. The species now infests all the major rivers, springs, ditches, and wetlands in ten states—including Texas, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and California—and is rapidly expanding into others.

In the delicately dry ecosystems of the southwestern United States, that is a serious problem, adding up to over 800 billion gallons of lost water per year across the parched region. “That is equal to the water needs of 20 million people or one million acres of irrigated farmland,” said Tim Carlson, an environmental engineer and director of the Tamarisk Coalition, which aims to control the plant.

Living systems include risks for those that attempt to engineer improvement. The past is littered with examples of attempts to intervene that go wrong.

“One night, after I gave a presentation on tamarisk, an older gentleman came up to me and told me that he had earned his Eagle Scout rank by planting tamarisk to prevent soil erosion after the Dust Bowl era in the 1930s,” Carlson recalled. “He said he would gladly earn it again by helping me remove it.”

I don’t think there is a simple answer. We are going to have intentional and unintentional consequences results from our actions. To me the lesson is to learn from our past that we often have unintended consequences that are worse than we envisioned and we need to be careful. We can’t assume there are no risks that we don’t know about. There are risks we can’t predict.

USA Science and Engineering Degree Data – 2007

A huge amount of interesting data can be found in NSF’s report on the USA: Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering (pdf)

Since 2000 women have received more science and engineering bachelors degrees than men. Men still receive more master’s and doctoral degrees in science and engineering.

2004 bachelor’s degrees	Female	Male
Engineering	13,257	51,418
Computer Science	14,406	42,999
Psychology	64,208	18,302
Science and engineering	227,813	224,525
Total non-S&E	583,004	371,667

200,000 more for bachelor’s degrees for women – wow. This is just a continuation of a trend but still is fairly amazing.

2004 Master’s degrees for US citizens	Female	Male
Engineering	7,135	26,737
Computer Science	6,195	13,658
Psychology	11,950	3,348
Science and engineering	51,420	66,631
Total non-S&E	276,782	160,704

2004 Doctoral degrees for US citizens	Female	Male
Engineering	1,014	4,353
Computer Science	195	690
Psychology	2,245	1,042
Science and engineering	9,819	15,728

Some more interesting data: 90% of Asian, 60% of Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islander 40% of Hispanic doctoral S&E faculty were born outside the United States. Over 80 % of white, American Indian/Alaska Native, and multiple race doctoral S&E faculty were born in the United States.

$15 Million for San Jose State College of Engineering

The $15 million gift for the College of Engineering will be used to create endowments to support initiatives and programs in the areas of student and faculty development, leading-edge engineering, innovation and globalization. SJSU will request to officially name the college – the Charles W. Davidson College of Engineering – at the California State University Board of Trustees meeting in March.

“Engineering education has driven the success of Silicon Valley, and San JosÃ© State University has been at the center of this success,” said Belle Wei, dean of the College of Engineering. “Chuck Davidson believes in the college’s mission to enable diverse and promising students to receive a quality, holistic engineering education. His gift will transform the college and help us achieve a new level of excellence in preparing our students to thrive in today’s dynamic and competitive world.”

Electric Cars

The March NSF Cafe Scientifique meeting was about Electric Cars. The presenters were from the Electric Vehicle Association of DC (that site has quite a few links on this topic). In the talk the presenters mentioned Ford had produced electric cars in the 1920’s. PBS on Timeline on Electric Car History:

1893 – A handful of different makes and models of electric cars are exhibited in Chicago.
1897 – The first electric taxis hit the streets of New York City early in the year. The Pope Manufacturing Company of Connecticut becomes the first large-scale American electric automobile manufacturer.
1899 – Believing that electricity will run autos in the future, Thomas Alva Edison begins his mission to create a long-lasting, powerful battery for commercial automobiles. Though his research yields some improvements to the alkaline battery, he ultimately abandons his quest a decade later.
1900 – The electric automobile is in its heyday. Of the 4,192 cars produced in the United States 28 percent are powered by electricity, and electric autos represent about one-third of all cars found on the roads of New York City, Boston, and Chicago.

1893 was the famous Chicago World’s fair where the first Ferris Wheel was constructed and the American Society for Engineering Education was formed (I work for ASEE now). Photo by John Hunter shows a partial view of the meeting space, which is held inside the NSF headquarters.