Engineers Forum

This is a mathematical challenge, and it’s been said that:

* If you’re an engineer, you should be able to solve any engineering problem in one minute;
* if you’re an architect, in two hours;
* if you’re a doctor, in five hours;
* if you’re an accountant, in three months and
* If you’re a lawyer or an economist or a General , probably never.

These facts show that every person is expert in his field and have a command of resolution. If you appoint a person on wrong position under political pressure or special policy, you should expect that actual problem will never solve.

Developing countries which invest in better education, health care, and job training for their record numbers of young people between the ages of 12 and 24 years of age, could produce surging economic growth and sharply reduced poverty, according to a new World Bank report launched at the Bank’s Annual Meetings in Singapore.
With 1.3 billion young people now living in the developing world-the largest-ever youth group in history-the report says there has never been a better time to invest in youth because they are healthier and better educated than previous generations, and they will join the workforce with fewer dependents because of changing demographics.
However, failure to seize this opportunity to train them more effectively for the workplace, and to be active citizens, could lead to widespread disillusionment and social tensions.
The report says that young people make up nearly half of the ranks of the world’s unemployed, and, for example, that the Middle East and North Africa region alone must create 100 million jobs by 2020 in order to stabilize its employment situation. Moreover, surveys of young people in East Asia and Eastern Europe and Central Asia-carried out as research for the report-indicate that access to jobs, along with physical security, is their biggest concern.
Far too many young people–some 130 million 15-24 year olds–cannot read or write. Secondary education and skill acquisition make sense only if primary schooling has been successful. This is still far from being the case and efforts have to be reinforced in this area. In addition, more than 20 percent of firms in countries such as Algeria, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Estonia, and Zambia, rate poor education and work skills among their workforce as ‘a major or severe obstacle to their operations.’ Overcoming this handicap starts with more and better investments in youth.
“Most developing countries have a short window of opportunity to get this right before their record numbers of youth become middle-aged, and they lose their demographic dividend. This isn’t just enlightened social policy. This may be one of the profound decisions a developing country will ever make to banish poverty and galvanize its economy,” says
Emmanuel Jimenez, lead author of the report, and Director of Human Development in the World Bank’s East Asia and the Pacific Department.
Source: www.worldbank.org

The age-old cry of engineers has been that they’re underpaid and overworked and generally unappreciated by the rest of the world. Particularly in the UK. And particularly by the chattering political classes.

Well, one hates to disillusion, but engineers probably couldn’t ask for much more than they’ve got in a report out today from the House of Commons select committee on innovation, universities, science and skills. The report, called Engineering: turning ideas into reality, suggest that not only have MPs got to grips with what engineering is about, but they also recognise that it’s got a lot to offer that isn’t being taken advantage of.

A blog isn’t the right place to go into detail of what the report does and says, so we’ll put up a truncated version – just the summary of what the committee is about and its conclusions and recommendations – that you can reach by clicking here. There’s probably somewhere on the parliament.uk website where you can get the full version of 135 pages.

To my mind, good bits include the fact that the MPs weren’t waylaid by the constant gripe from government that the profession is fragmented: it’s multi-faceted, they said, so there are bound to be lots of different aspects, and besides, the profession didn’t have a problem presenting a pretty united front to the committee.

It’s good, too, that they gave the DIUS minister John Denham and the government chief scientist John Bennington a pretty rough ride about the degree to which government has good engineering advice on tap. Neither Denham nor Bennington wanted to have a “government chief engineer” post; oh dear, that’s just what the committee thinks would be a really good idea.

There’s lots more sound stuff inside this report on the generalities of engineering in the UK and its relations with decision-making, and on specifics such as nuclear power, geo-engineering and plastic electronics. I suspect you’ll find yourself nodding in agreement with much of it.

But that is, of course, all very well. What one would like to think is that this report might have some influence outside the engineering profession. And that’s maybe where you and I come in.

I haven’t read all the national newspapers today, but so far I’ve spotted only one small item on this report, in the FT. There’s a strong likelihood that the committee’s conclusions will bounce around the engineering profession for a while, but not outside. Newspapers will ignore them, government will probably slip out a toe-curlingly anodyne response on Derby day or some other time when attention is elsewhere, and most MPs and decision-makers won’t know anything about any of it.

So it’s up to engineers to keep this high up on the agenda. What are you going to do about it? And if the answer is “Nothing”, then you really do have to stop using that age-old complaining cry of the unappreciated engineer.

BY JOHN PULLIN Source from http://www.profeng.com/PEBlog.htm

Engineering is a rigorous art. Without rigour, it is not engineering.
Some years ago, in a TV documentary, scientists were being asked about the future. Naylor, a Californian Nano-technologist said, “Scientists do not know about the future. It is better to look to engineers. Scientists investigate the way the world works and record their findings. Engineers take what we know and create new things”. Described in this way, taking what we know and creating new things, engineering sounds like an attractive career. What is more it includes industrial design, product design, architecture and many other design jobs. I like the definition.
Engineering is about listening, getting the idea across, operating the wheels of power and motivating people.These are not the images of engineering put across by career advisor’s and the profession looses out as a result.

What do we need to do?

We need to co-ordinate or bring together the multitude of initiatives and to ensure that the message is both right and put across in the right way. We need our university engineering departments to have a critical look at themselves, to change their image and to bring themselves into the 21st Century.
We should find out what ideas relating to engineering capture the minds of young creative people. I believe they are attracted to ideas such as designing, energy use, conservation, making, and entrepreneurialism. This is engineering. We should make it known. These days the discussion of complex issues is part of the curriculum young people are used to. We need to get them involved in the ‘engineering debate’, discussing the issues that interest them and lead them to careers as engineers.

We need to improve the computer based career guides, to bring in young people who like working with other people, creating, making life better rather than the present guides which are geared to encouraging interest only from select mathematics and physics stars. We need to gather interest from career orientated students who want to be engineers because they have an interest in people, in developing our world, touching the earth lightly and treating it as if we intend to stay, and in helping society.

Abstracts from: www.burohappold.com, article by Rod Macdonald “Engineers for the future”

Recently I gone through an article on a website http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/7126/8275.aspx. The article is reproduced for the clients with thanks to the author.

“Here is a brief history of my trying to generate a list of remarkable technology challenges for the 21st century, to be presented to the National Academy of Engineering in 2101, by the first person (a Purdue graduate, of course) to step onto the surface of Mars.

I decided to create this list after listening to Neil Armstrong give a presentation on this topic of the 20th Century Great Innovations, followed by publication of the book, “A Century of Innovation“.  I thought it was such an impressive list and book that I decided to make a list for the 21st century, based on the same criteria; technology that significantly benefits human society.  Incidentally, I have purchased and given away maybe 50 of these books, as prizes for innovation, for recognition of innovation talks and presentations, etc. It is a fabulous book!

Three things impressed me about the 20th century list:
1. The benefits were largely universal, affecting people across the globe and at all economic levels (even if large groups of people were unable to reap these benefits).
2. The technologies were diverse and depended on the timely parallel accomplishments of science, particularly quantum theory, nuclear physics and relativity, along with the outstanding achievements in mathematics and medicine.
3. The devices that enabled all these innovations, telephones, airplanes, computers power plants, automobiles, generators, motors, etc., were made in such quantity and quality that they were affordable by large numbers of people, thus making them relatively universally available.  Their development and exploitation depended for the most part on the economic wealth generated by the capital assets devoted to their manufacture and distribution; oil wells, iron ore mines, factories, ship and railroads, etc.

So I developed my first list, unranked (the 20th century list, given below, was ranked in order of benefit to society over the 100 years of the 20th century).

20th Century Innovation Topics
1. Electrification
2. Automobile
3. Airplane
4. Water supply and distribution
5. Electronics
6. Radio and television
7. Agricultural mechanization
8. Computers
9. Telephone
10. Air conditioning/refrigeration
11. Interstate highways
12. Space flight
13. Internet
14. Imaging
15. Household appliances
16. Health technologies
17. Petrochemical technology
18. Laser and fiber optics
19. Nuclear technologies
20. High-performance materials

I used this list in my talks about innovation, at universities, conferences, industrial seminars, etc.  The list was revised as people made suggestions, and sub-topics being a little more granular in content were added.  I’ve given varieties of this talk at Purdue, Malaysia, MIT, Kansas State, various universities in China, in Israel, as well as at several major professional conferences.  These talks are available if one wants a copy.

Eventually, I presented this list to what we call an Industrial Fellows Forum in November 2006; a forum made up of Fellows and Fellow program managers, representing about 27 industrial concerns and represented by 45 Fellows/program managers.  We then edited the list, added more sub-topics and voted on the list, in terms of TOP, MIDDLE and BOTTOM innovative domains, although realizing that even the BOTTOM topics had much merit in a list of 21 topics for the 21st century (rather than 20 topics for the 20th century.  We actually have 22 topics; when all the votes are in, we will list the top 21 in priority order.

Personally, I see some topics that currently are low on the list, which follows, that seem to me to be too low: AI and robotics, Space Exploration, Preservation of History and Species, for example. But the list is prioritized in voting order.

In parallel to the 20th century list, there are some obvious relationships.  For example, the 20th century list depended on the providing of cheap power through electrification, capital assets such as factories, mines, oil wells and refineries, to be impactful; the 21st century list seems to be dependent on providing knowledge resources through the Internet, and computers and communication devices, to be impactful (e.g., weather prediction and control, traffic and logistics, terrorism and security, etc., all depend on availability of vast sources of knowledge and rapid dissemination of this knowledge to the right, connected people).  So as the 20th century was dominated by physical capital and lots of physical objects, the 21st century will be dominated by intellectual capital and lots of virtual objects.

Of course, this list will be wrong; had the 20th century list been created in 1907, the automobile, airplane, telephone, even nuclear power, might have been envisioned as important, but certainly the Internet, the computer and many appliances would not have been even thought of.  So my list is likely to be wrong; who knows what magic will be developed in 2069 that will be earth-shattering in its ability to improve the quality of life throughout the world!

But the list is what it is, and is given below, in priority order.

21st Century Innovation Topics
1. Energy conservation
2. Resource protection
3. Food and water production and distribution
4. Waste management
5. Education and learning
6. Medicine and prolonging life
7. Security and counter-terrorism
8. New technology
9. Genetics and cloning
10. Global communication
11. Traffic and population logistics
12. Knowledge sharing
13. Integrated electronic environment
14. Globalization
15. AI, interfaces and robotics
16. Weather prediction and control
17. Sustainable development
18. Entertainment
19. Space exploration
20. “Virtualization” and VR
21. Preservation of history
22. Preservation of species 

(I have sub-topics for each; for example, resource protection includes gas, liquid, solid, radioactive, hazardous, etc. components.  And each of these sub-topics can be further subdivided, to specifically identifiable programs.  I have intended to do this in further iterations of the list).

References
Constable, George, and Somerville, Bob. 2003. A Century of Innovation: Twenty Engineering Achievements that Transformed our Lives. Washington, D.C., National Academies Press. With a forward by Neil Armstrong and an afterward by Arthur C. Clarke. Available online at <http://books.nap.edu/catalog/10726.html>.”

Hope your comments will help the author to work on his concepts as well as readers to improve the concepts.