Category Archives: Soapbox

Formula Ocean

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I have had intermittent interactions with motorsport during my engineering career, principally with Formula 1, Formula SAE and Formula Student teams.  The design, construction and competition involved in Formula Student generates tremendous enthusiasm amongst a section of the student community and enormously increases their employability.  As a Department Chair at Michigan State University, I was a proud and enthusiastic sponsor of the MSU Formula SAE team.  However, I find it increasingly difficult to support an activity that is associated with profligate expenditure of energy and resources – this is not the impression of engineering that should be portrayed to our current and future students.  Engineering is about so much more than making a vehicle go around a track as fast as possible.  See my posts on ‘Re-engineering Engineering‘ on August 30th, 2017, ‘Engineering is all about ingenuity‘ on September 14th, 2016 or ‘Life takes engineering‘ on April 22nd, 2015.

There are many other challenges that could taken up by student teams, in competition if that encourages participation, which would benefit human-kind and the planet.  A current hot topic in the UK media is the pollution of oceans by waste plastic [see for example BBC report]; so, engineering undergraduates could be challenged to design, construct and operate an autonomous marine vehicle that collects and processes plastic waste.  It could be powered from the embedded energy in the waste plastic collected in the ocean.  It would need to navigate to avoid collisions with other vessels, coastal features and wildlife, and to locate and identify the waste.  These represent technological changes in chemical, control, electronic, materials and mechanical engineering – and probably some other fields as well.  I have shared this concept with colleagues in Liverpool and there is some enthusiasm for it; maybe some competition from other universities is all that’s needed to get Formula Ocean started.  The machine with the largest positive net impact on the environment wins!

 

A reflection on existentialism

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Detail from stained glass window by Marc Chagall in Fraumunster Zurich from http://www.fraumuenster.ch

I was in Zürich last weekend.  We visited the Fraumünster with its magnificent stained glass windows by Marc Chagall [see my post entitled ‘I and the village‘ on August 14th, 2013] and by Augusto Giacometti (1877-1947).  The Kunsthaus Zürich has a large collection of sculptures by another Giacometti, Alberto (1901-1966), a Swiss sculptor, who is famous for his slender statues of people which portray individuals alone in the world.  He was part of the existentialist movement in modern art that examined ideas about self-consciousness and our relationship to other people.  For me, this echoed a lecture that I contributed last week to a module on Scientific Impact and Reputation as part of our CPD programme [see my post entitled ‘WOW projects, TED talks and indirect reciprocity‘ on August 31st, 2016.  In the lecture, I talked about our relationship with other professional people and the development of our technical reputation in their eyes as a result of altruistic sharing of knowledge. This involves communicating with others, building relationships and understanding our place in the community.  The post-course assignment is to write a reflective essay on leadership and technical quality; and we know, from past experience, that our delegates will find it difficult to reflect on their experiences and the impact of those experiences on their life and behaviour.  Maybe we should help them by including a viewing of existential art in one of the Liverpool art galleries as part of our CPD programme on Science and Technology Leadership?

Why playing the piano might enhance our intelligence?

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By National Institutes of Health [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Students and lecturers leave all sorts of things in lecture theatres, including lecture notes, pens and water bottles, that accumulate around the edges like flotsam on the beach because no one wants to throw away something for which the owner might return.  A few weeks ago, I found the front page of a letter published in Nature which roused my curiosity. Its title was ‘Verbal and non-verbal intelligence changes in the teenage brain’.  My memories of my teenage years are almost uniformly bad; in part because I was unable to reproduce the academic promise that I had shown when I was younger and the pressure to do so was unrelenting.  I suspect that my experience is not uncommon and the research described in this letter offers a potential explanation for my inability to ace examinations regardless of how hard I tried.

The conventional understanding of human intellectual capacity is that it is constant during our life. However, the authors of this article have shown that the statistics, upon which this understanding is based, hide a variation in our teenage years; because some teenagers experience a reduction and some an increase in intellectual capacity, which leaves the population’s average unchanged.

In addition, using structural and functional imaging, they were able to correlate changes in verbal IQ with changes in grey matter density in a region of the brain activated by speech (the left motor cortex), and changes in non-verbal IQ with changes in grey matter density in regions activated by finger movements (the anterior cerebellum).

The timeline of the reported research does not extend far enough to establish whether or not the changes seen in teenagers is temporary; however, my anecdotal evidence suggests that might be the case.  I would conclude that the effort used to apply psychological pressure on teenagers to ace examinations might be better expended on piano lessons and piano practice to enhance sensorimotor skills which are strongly correlated to cognitive intelligence – but I suspect many parents have already worked that one out!

Source:

Ramsden S, Richardson FM, Josse G, Thomas MSC, Ellis C, Shakeshaft C, Seghier ML & Price CJ, Verbal and non-verbal intelligence changes in the teenage brain, Nature, 479:113-116, 2011.

Entropy on the brain

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‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.  Again.  That’s the things about things.  They fall apart, always have, always will, it’s in their nature.’  They are the opening three lines of Ali Smith’s novel ‘Autumn’.  Ali Smith doesn’t mention entropy but that’s what she is describing.

My first-year lecture course has progressed from the first law of thermodynamics to the second law; and so, I have been stretching the students’ brains by talking about entropy.  It’s a favourite topic of mine but many people find it difficult.  Entropy can be described as the level of disorder present in a system or the environment.  Ludwig Boltzmann derived his famous equation, S=k ln W, which can be found on his gravestone – he died in 1906.  S is entropy, k is a constant of proportionality named after Boltzmann, and W is the number of arrangements in which a system can be arranged without changing its energy content (ln means natural logarithm).  So, the more arrangements that are possible then the larger is the entropy.

By now the neurons in your brain should be firing away nicely with a good level of synchronicity (see my post entitled ‘Digital hive mind‘ on November 30th, 2016 and ‘Is the world comprehensible?‘ on March 15th, 2017).  In other words, groups of neurons should be showing electrical activity that is in phase with other groups to form large networks.  Some scientists believe that the size of the network was indicative of the level of your consciousness.  However, scientists in Toronto led by Jose Luis Perez-Velazquez, have suggested that it is not the size of the network that is linked to consciousness but the number of ways that a particular degree of connectivity can be achieved.  This begins to sound like the entropy of your neurons.

In 1948 Claude Shannon, an American electrical engineer, stated that ‘information must be considered as a negative term in the entropy of the system; in short, information is negentropy‘. We can extend this idea to the concept that the entropy associated with information becomes lower as it is arranged, or ordered, into knowledge frameworks, e.g. laws and principles, that allow us to explain phenomena or behaviour.

Perhaps these ideas about entropy of information and neurons are connected; because when you have mastered a knowledge framework for a topic, such as the laws of thermodynamics, you need to deploy a small number of neurons to understand new information associated with that topic.  However, when you are presented with unfamiliar situations then you need to fire multiple networks of neurons and try out millions of ways of connecting them, in order to understand the unfamiliar data being supplied by your senses.

For diverse posts on entropy see: ‘Entropy in poetry‘ on June 1st, 2016; ‘Entropy management for bees and flights‘ on November 5th, 2014; and ‘More on white dwarfs and existentialism‘ on November 16th, 2016.

Sources:

Ali Smith, Autumn, Penguin Books, 2017

Consciousness is tied to ‘entropy’, say researchers, Physics World, October 16th, 2016.

Handscombe RD & Patterson EA, The Entropy Vector: Connecting Science and Business, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2004.