Category Archives: Soapbox

The Charismatic Engineer

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stanfordcloisterEngineers do not have a great reputation for being charismatic leaders or communicators. In both print and speech we have a tendency towards being precise and concise, which often also means boring. However communicating is probably the most important part of the job for many engineers and for this charisma is important. The German historian and sociologist, Max Weber observed that people voluntarily comply with three types of authority: traditional, rational-legal and charismatic. Traditional authority is the type vested in age-old rules and conventions; so not much chance of engineers possessing much of this type of authority. Rational-legal authority derives from the bureaucratic or administrative system, the ‘laws’ enacted by it and their implementation by those appointed within the system; so again not much hope for engineers except within some engineering organisations. Charismatic authority is possessed by individuals who appear to be extraordinary or have ‘at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’. I think engineers have a decent chance of this last type of authority. As a profession, we have pretty extraordinary powers. Just look at our ability to provide round-the-clock water, food, energy, shelter and transportation in densely populated cities. Never mind adapting systems to cope with natural disasters or designing vehicles to land on Mars. So as individuals we need to develop exceptional qualities of integrity and communication, if we want society, or even just the CEO, to listen to and accept our advice.

Many engineers will shy away from the line that I have expressed above, preferring to hide in the test lab or behind their computer screen. This is in part because engineers are trained as problem-solvers and solving problems often requires a degree of solitude and silence that is not compatible with high profile communication. This conflict is shared by many scientists, who are often judged by their publication profile rather than their scientific achievements in part because it is easier to count publications that to assess the significance of achievements. Some of us enjoy the solitude of writing blogs, lectures and papers. I find the process deepens my understanding and goes a long way to resolving the conflict between communicating and problem-solving. However, it can be difficult in a modern professional life to create the necessary calm for problem-solving creativity.

Marily Oppezzo and Dan Schwartz at Stanford University have shown that taking a walk can stimulate creativity. So perhaps monks knew this when they built magnificent cloisters adjacent to many great cathedrals and monasteries in Europe. However, you don’t need a beautiful set of cloisters, the Stanford researchers found that creativity increased by the same amount whether their subjects strolled in Stanford’s lovely leafy campus or walked on a treadmill opposite a blank wall. So next time you feeling challenged by the preparation of a charismatic talk or you are stuck solving a problem, take stroll. The Stanford team found that eight minutes was enough to produce an appreciable improvement in creativity.

And oh, yes. Don’t forget to leave behind all your electronic devices when you walk. Their silence is crucial. See my post entitled ‘Silence is golden’ on January 14th, 2014.

Sources:

Robert P Crease, ‘Critical Point: Why don’t they listen?’ Physics World, May 2014

Max Weber, ‘Economy and Society’, 1922

Gretchen Reynolds, ‘Take a walk to stimulate creativity’, INYT, May 7th, 2014

Oppezzo, M., J. Schwartz, D., Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking, Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, April 2014.

Felicity Mellor, Shhhh?  Scientists need to talk about not talking, The Guardian Newspaper blog January 15th, 2014 also The power of silence, Physics World, April 2014

Are electric cars back?

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roadchaosDid you know that before Henry Ford developed the Model T Ford motorcar, the nearly 40% of automobiles on US roads were electric vehicles? I think we will be heading back in this direction if we are to have any hope of achieving reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. The implications for the national electricity grid of a major shift to plug-in cars would be very serious and has been the subject of several recent studies including a third year undergraduate dissertation that I have been supervising and from which came the opening factoid.

It is relatively easy, through not without obstacles, to envision a shift to all-electric cars; after all there are several models on the market now. However, an all-electric aircraft seems further in the future, if only because of the weight of the batteries required. Engineers would talk about the energy density, i.e. the amount of energy that can be extracted from a kilogram of kerosene compared to a kilogram battery. However, perhaps the future is not far away because the New Scientist reported earlier in the month [3rd May, 2014] that Airbus had completed the test flight of an electric plane, the E-fan. It is a two-seater plane with a pair of 65 kilogram lithium battery packs driving a pair of 30 kilowatt motors attached to the fans. The E-fan will cruise at 185 kilometres per hour and flies for an hour. Relative to a modern computer jet, this performance is similar to the early plug-in cars relative to their internal-combustion-engined rivals. But, it is an indication of bigger things to come. In the meantime, if you want an E-fan then a new division of Airbus called Voltair will be producing them by 2017.

I mentioned undergraduate dissertations because they have filled a sizeable chunk of my waking hours for a few weeks. This is an annual ritual in the UK during May when final-year undergraduate students are busy submitting and defending their dissertations. I had a pile of twelve dissertations to read and assess. Eight of them belonged to students that I have supervising in weekly one-to-one meetings since last October and the remainder were dissertations for which I was the assessor. All of the students that I supervised were studying either Mechanical or Aerospace Engineering and so the topics of their projects were associated mainly with energy and, or transportation. Some of these projects are provided by engineering companies (those with an asterisk in the list below), which guarantees their topicality and relevance, while others spin-out from my interests and research activities. So many of the topics in the list below will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog.

Dissertation projects supervised during 2013-14:

Investigation into a redesign of graphite re-entrant seals for a nuclear power station*

Conceptual design for a carbon sequestration system for automobiles

Recommendations for achieving a low carbon airline industry

Strain-based defect analysis of industrial pipe-work*

Investigation of random frequency excitation of an aerospace body panel

Assessment of preload control of threaded fasteners in motorcycle production*

Recommendations for technology-based approaches to reduced ecological footprints

Investigation of low carbon power for plug-in electric vehicles

No bots here

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nantucket lightThe number of comments, likes and followers of this blog remains modest, which at times can be disheartening, but then many would consider that I am writing about a boring subject under an uninspiring title.  Thumbing through the back copies of the International New York Times that had accumulated during my trip to China, I found two articles that seemed relevant.  One by John Grossman on April 25th, implied that I should use a risqué or funny name, such as the scaffolding company in Toronto called Mammoth Erections, but I suspect that this might attract the wrong sort of attention!   I was encouraged by a second article, on April 21st by Nick Bilton, to abandon the competition for ‘likes’, ‘page views’ etc., since Nick reported buying 4000 new followers for $5.  These new followers are not real people but pieces of virtual engineering, known as ‘bots’.  They are pieces of computer code designed to mimic the behaviour of people on the internet and they are getting better and better at it so that they are harder to spot.  The internet is populated by millions of them inflating the popularity of many celebrities and companies, and perhaps most worryingly political parties.  You can buy software for less than $1000 to create and control your swarms of bots.

This is one type of virtual engineering that I will not be espousing.  Instead, I am resigning myself to perpetually low statistics for this blog by attempting to keep it a Bot-free zone.

 

70,000 trees needed

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backyard‘70,000 trees needed to print graduation papers’.  This was a headline that I spotted in the China Daily (Thursday 24th April, 2014) while I was travelling in China last moth.  The article reported that the trees would be cut down to provide the graduation papers for this year’s 7.27 million university graduates in China.  Superficially, these are very large numbers, both of trees and graduates.  However,  China has a population of 1.38 billion, which is almost 20% of the global population, so the annual graduation rate is only about 0.5% of the population compared to about 1% in England.  There are concerns in China that there are insufficient graduate-level jobs for all of the students graduating this year, which is a familiar situation in the UK.  The idea of following the Finnish approach to higher education, with more universities of applied sciences than multi-disciplinary universities, is gaining ground in China.  In the UK, EngineeringUK has estimated the number of engineering graduates needs to double by 2020 in order to sustain our engineering industry whose turnover was £1.1 trillion in 2011-12, or 24.5% of UK turnover. The shortage of engineering graduates is reflected in average starting salaries that are 20% higher than for all graduate.

Back to those 70,000 trees; they would absorb between 2 and 20 kg of carbon dioxide per tree per year if they were not felled for the graduation papers.  Carbon dioxide sequestration by trees depends on their size, age and species, see for example the sources below.  The CO2 emissions in China are currently about 7  tonnes per capita, which is about the same as the UK and about 40% of the per capita emissions in the USA, according to the EDGAR or the World Bank, so that means that 70,000 trees might balance the emissions of between 20 and 200 graduates, i.e not many of the 7.27 million!

Sources:

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/6_planting_more_trees.pdf/$FILE/6_planting_more_trees.pdf

http://www.nature.com/news/carbon-sequestration-managing-forests-in-uncertain-times-1.14687

http://sustainability.tufts.edu/carbon-sequestration/