Category Archives: Soapbox

Love an engineer

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beach2

Photo credit: Tom

Some weeks ago I wrote about the benefits being completely disconnected from the ‘grid’ while on vacation [see my post entitled ‘Mind-wandering‘ on September 3rd, 2014].  What one of my colleagues has called going on a ‘deep vacation’.  For most of us our vacation, deep or otherwise, is a distant memory by now and, for many, the demands on our time far exceed the available time.  The temptation to work continuously is huge, particularly with smart phones delivering messages from our co-workers and bosses at all hours of the day and night.  Recent research has shown that if we want to be happy and productive then we should resist this temptation.  A survey of nearly 12,000 white-collar workers found that people feel worse and become less engaged when they work continuously and especially when they work more than 40 hours per week. By contrast workers who take a break every 90 minutes were more focussed (reportedly 30% more) and more able to think creatively (50% more).  The survey also found that being encouraged by your supervisor to take a break increases by 100% the likelihood that you will stay with an employer and also doubles your sense of well-being and health. Perhaps this is why Daimler encourage the equivalent of ‘deep weekends’ by automatically returning and then deleting emails sent to employees while they are off-duty.

These findings tie in with research in psychology reported by Oppezzo and Schwartz that suggests creativity is implicated in workplace success, healthy psychological functioning and the maintenance of loving relationships.  While Martin and Schwartz assert that creativity is ‘an important cognitive dimension of both mundane and specialized  forms of problem-solving’.

Engineers are creative problem-solvers so make sure yours stays successful, healthy and loving by encouraging them to take breaks and work less than 40 hours per week.

Sources:

Why you hate work! By Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath in the New York Times on May 30, 2014:

Oppezo, M., & Schwartz, D.L., 2014, ‘Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking’, J. Experimental Psychology, Learning, Memory & Cognition, 40(3):1142-1152.

Martin, L., & Schwartz, D.,  2014, ‘A pragmatic perspective on visual representation and creative thinking’, Visual Studies, 29(1):80-93.

End the tyranny of 24/7 email. By Clive Thompson in the New York Times on August 28th, 2014

Tidal energy

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Photo credit: Tom

Photo credit: Tom

The world is slowing down! According to Max Tegmark, in his book ‘Our Mathematical Universe’, the rotational velocity of the Earth is being reduced as some of its kinetic energy is dissipated as tidal energy. It is possible to estimate the age of planet from the rate of slow down by assuming that at its birth it was spinning as fast as possible without the centrifugal forces pulling it apart. The answer turns out to be about 4 to 5 billion years which roughly agrees with radioactive dating of the oldest rocks in Western Australia and bits of meteorites that imply the solar system came into being about 4.5 billion years ago.

So does this imply that tidal energy is not really a renewable energy source? I think it is just an issue of timescale. Fossil fuels are seen as non-renewable because the formation of coal and oil substrates happens on geological timescales. Biomass is a bit quicker because we skip the fossilisation process and renewal is measured in months. Fossil fuels and biomass are both ways of storing solar energy in chemical bonds. Nature is much better at converting and storing solar energy than mankind. But, solar energy would appear to be the ultimate renewable energy source. Every morning its there, though often hidden by cloud where I live. The sun will eventually die but again this won’t happen anytime soon but on a long geological timescale.

Mind wandering

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IMG_0116 (2)

Photo credit: Tom

Most of us have returned from vacation by now but I wonder how refreshed you are feeling.  Was you vacation like the character in the cartoon published recently in the New York Times (INYT Friday, August 8th, 2014), i.e. still connected to the grid?  Or did you follow my advice in the posts entitled ‘Gadget stress‘ (April 9th, 2014) and ‘Reading offline‘ (March 19th, 2014) by engrossing yourself in reading a few good books with all gadgets switched off.  I know some of my colleagues did not because I have received automatic vacation replies to my emails followed by detailed email responses a few hours later or even a minute or two later in one case, often including a reminder that they are on vacation!   David Levitin writing in the NYT (on August 9th, 2014) asserts that a ‘vacation isn’t a luxury’ and I agree with him.  We went to an undisclosed location with no telephone, no internet and no mobile phone signal and even then we thought that two weeks was not long enough!

David Levitin goes on to say that we should not skimp on daydreaming.  He describes how our brains have two modes of operation: central executive mode and mind-wandering mode.  We tend to operate in one mode or the other and the switching between them is controlled by the insula, which is located in our brain about 25mm below the top surface of your skull.  Tasks requiring focussed attention, such as learning and problem-solving are performed in central executive mode while day-dreaming and surfing from one idea to another is undertaking in mind-wandering mode.  Scientists believe that switching too frequently between the modes makes you feel tired.  Central executive mode functions better without distractions and in sustained periods spent on single tasks as recommended in my post entitled ‘Silence is golden‘ [January 14, 2014].  Creativity tends arise from mind-wandering, which can be stimulated by listening to music or taking a walk in nature [see my post entitled ‘The Charismatic Engineer‘ on June 4th, 2014], and allowing ideas to shuffle into perspective or the great breakthrough to emerge, apparently miraculously.

So the recipe for intellectual productivity and creativity seems to be to focus on tasks for sustained periods of times, Levitin suggests 30 to 50 minutes with email closed and phones muted.  Take short breaks and go for a stroll, eight minutes is sufficient according Stanford researchers, Marily Oppezzo and Dan Schwartz.  Set aside specific time to deal with email each day and also time for mind-wandering.

For more, see:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/working-vacation

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/maybe-its-just-me/201408/why-you-might-not-want-hit-the-reset-button-in-your-brain

Benford’s law

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We need to learn to think big.  Humans have had a tendency to underestimate the scale of everything that exists.  We have progressed at an increasing rate from believing the earth was the focus of  existence, to understanding that our planet orbits the sun together with a group of other planets, to appreciating that our sun is a tiny speck in a galaxy that we call the Milky Way that is part of a universe and possibly a multiverse.  We have been able to spot mathematical patterns in nature and to describe them using the equations of physics that in turn allow us to predict the existence of phenomena before we have observed them, such as the Higgs-Boson, and also allow us to harness nature to provide goods and services to society.  The former is the role of physicists and the latter of engineers.  So there is a close link between physicists and engineers and it is not unusual to find engineers working in physics labs and physicists working in engineering organisations.  Frank Benford was a physicist working at General Electric in 1938 when he proposed a law that bears his name, though it has also been credited to Simon Newcomb, an astronomer working 50 years earlier.

Benford’s law predicts the frequency with which the numbers from 1 to 9 will appear as the first digit in a collection of numbers from a real-life source.  The frequency declines logarithmically from 30.1% for 1,  17.6% for 2, 12.5% for 3 etc down to 4.6% for 9.  It is probability distribution so you should not expect see the distribution for every collection of numbers but when it does not appear then you should be suspicious about the provenance of the data, particularly when it does not appear repeatedly.  It is used routinely by accountants and is being used increasingly to identify potential scientific fraud.  Of course some people think big and know about Benford’s law, for instance the fraudster Bernard Madoff filed Benford-compatible monthly returns, which perhaps is one reason why it took so long to catch him.

BTW – Benford’s law does not work for reciprocals or square roots, but is does for powers of 2, factorials and the Fibonacci sequence.

 

Sources:

Big Bang to Little Swoosh by Max Tegmark, New York Times, April 11th, 2014.

Look out for No.1. by Tim Harford in the Financial Times, September 9th, 2011.