Depressed by exams

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I am not feeling very creative this week, because I am in middle of marking examination scripts; so, this post is going to be short.  I have 20 days to grade at least 1100 questions and award a maximum of 28,400 marks – that’s a lot of decisions for my neurons to handle without being asked to find new ways to network and generate original thoughts for this blog [see my post on ‘Digital hive mind‘ on November 30th, 2016].

It is a depressing task discovering how little I have managed to teach students about thermodynamics, or maybe I should say, how little they have learned.  However, I suspect these feelings are a consequence of the asymmetry of my brain, which has many more sites capable of attributing blame and only one for assigning praise [see my post entitled ‘Happenstance, not engineering‘ on November 9th, 2016].  So, I tend to focus on the performance of the students at the lower end of the spectrum rather than the stars who spot the elegant solutions to the exam problems.

Sources:

Ngo L, Kelly M, Coutlee CG, Carter RM , Sinnott-Armstrong W & Huettel SA, Two distinct moral mechanisms for ascribing and denying intentionality, Scientific Reports, 5:17390, 2015.

Bruek H, Human brains are wired to blame rather than to praise, Fortune, December 4th 2015.

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 school trip to Japan

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Teachers, students and the parents gather outside their high school one Saturday at the beginning of August.  They chatter anxiously as they wait for everyone to arrive and while bags are loaded into the school mini-bus.  Four teachers and eight students are wearing specially-made name badges with a small silicon chip in one corner.  There are lots of hugs and kisses as these twelve people climb into the mini-bus for the journey to Charles de Gaulle airport.  At Charles de Gaulle airport they go through the usual security procedures, taking off their jackets and coats, which then go through the scanner, before boarding the 12-hour flight to Tokyo.  They arrive tired and bedraggled early on Sunday afternoon.  The following day they visit the French embassy in Toyko and are given a guided tour after passing through a security scanner in the entrance.  On Tuesday they are driven from Tokyo, northwards along the Pacific coast, through Iwaki City to the railway station at Tomioka, which was completely swept away by the tsunami in March 2011.  They have all seen the pictures of the wave overwhelming everthing in its path; but it’s difficult to imagine it as they are shown around.  The next stop is the Miyakoji district of Tamura City whose residents were the first to be allowed to return in April 2014 after being evacuated following the incident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.  The students and teachers stay for two nights in the homes of students from Fukishima high school.  Their hosts are wearing matching name-badges with little silicon chip on them.  On Wednesday they visited Aizu and then a peach farm in northern Fukushima Prefecture on Thursday; before starting their journey home on Friday.

As they leave Fukushima Prefecture, their name badges were collected, and the silicon chips sent off for analysis.  The chips were sensors that detect gamma rays with a sensitivity of 0.1 uSv/hr [micro Sieverts per hour] which record hourly dose rates with a date stamp.  The results for the French school party are shown in the graphic – my account above describes an actual visit mage in August 2015.  The name badges with an onboard sensor are known as D-shuttles and the students were participating in a study that has been published recently by Professor Hayano of the University of Tokyo.  The events described above are highlighted in the D-shuttle data in the figure on-line here.  The highest reading from the D-shuttle, on August 2nd, is due to cosmic radiation received during the 12-hour flight from Paris to Tokyo.

There has been extensive monitoring of Fukushima residents.  In 2012, more than 30,000 people were given full-body scans at Hirata Central Hospital and 100% of children and 99% of adults were below the scanner’s detection limit of 100 Bq per body, which compares with the average body burden of an adult male in Japan of 535 Bq per body found in 1964.  For more on types of radioactivity see my post ‘Hiding in the basement’ on December 18th, 2013.

Source:

Hayano R, Measurement and communication: what worked and what did not in Fukushima, Annals of the ICRP, (45):14-22, 2016.

Hayano RS, Tsubokura M, Miyazaki M et al, Internal radiocesium contamination of adults and children in Fukushima 7 to 20 monts after the Fukushima NPP accident as measured by extensive whole-body-counter survey. Proc. Japan Acad. Ser. B 89:157-163, 2013.

Uchiyama M, Nakamura Y, Kobayashi S, Analysis of bidy-burden measurements of 137Cs and 40K in a Japanese group over a period of 5 years following the Chernobyl accident, Health Phys., 71:320-325, 1996.

Footnotes:

A Sievert is the ionising effect of 1 Joule of energy on 1 kilogram of biological tissue.

A Becquerel is a measure of radioactivity equivalent to the  quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second.

Image: http://www.fukushima-dialogues.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/schema-D-shuttle-porte.png

Brave New World

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERATerm has started, and our students are preparing for end-of-semester examinations; so, I suspect that they would welcome the opportunity to deploy the sleeping-learning that Aldous Huxley envisaged in his ‘Brave New World’ of 2540.  In the brave new world of digital engineering, some engineers are attempting to conceive of a world in which experiments have become obsolete because we can rely on computational modelling to simulate engineering systems.  This ambitious goal is a driver for the MOTIVATE project [see my post entitled ‘Getting smarter‘ on June 21st, 2017]; an EU-project that kicked-off about six months ago and was the subject of a brainstorming session in the Red Deer in Sheffield last September [see my post entitled ‘Anything other than lager, stout or porter!‘ on September 6th, 2017.  The project has its own website now at www.engineeringvalidation.org

A world without experiments is almost unimaginable for engineers whose education and training is deeply rooted in empiricism, which is the philosophical approach that requires assumptions, models and theories to be tested against observations from the real-world before they can be accepted.  In the MOTIVATE project, we are thinking about ways in which fewer experiments can provide more and better measured data for the validation of computational models of engineering systems.   In December, under the auspices of the project, experts from academia, industry and national labs from across Europe met near Bristol and debated how to reshape the traditional flow-chart used in the validation of engineering models, which places equal weight on experiments and computational models [see ASME V&V 10-2006 Figure 2].  In a smaller follow-up meeting in Zurich, just before Christmas [see my post ‘A reflection of existentialism‘ on December 20th, 2017], we blended the ideas from the Bristol session into a new flow-chart that could lead to the validation of some engineering systems without conducting experiments in parallel.  This is not perhaps as radical as it sounds because this happens already for some evolutionary designs, especially if they are not safety-critical.  Nevertheless, if we are to achieve the paradigm shift towards the new digital world, then we will have to convince the wider engineering community about our novel approach through demonstrations of its successful application, which sounds like empiricism again!  More on that in future updates.

Image by Erwin Hack: Coffee and pastries awaiting technical experts debating behind the closed door.