College Credits in High School  By Corporal Willy, Sept. 15th 2010       Project Lead the Way, is a national organizat...

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E2M and Polytron, leaders in helping customers engineer and operate with manufacturing excellence, continue to enhance system delivery with methods th...

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E2M, a leader in helping customers engineer and operate with manufacturing excellence, recently sent Christy Starner, Technical Lead for the Systems A...

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The Morgan Motor Company produces all cars by hand.  They can produce around 600 cars per year with a starting price of around $50000.  A la...

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As the technology of battlefield command shifted from analog to digital, and as both communications and weapons systems became more pervasive and incr...

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  ENTRY # 21 : THE REAL McCOY MaCUBE (Colour-Pattern-Puzzle)   ZERO-LEVEL by Encubator-San   Easy as falling off a log, Or even s()itt...

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  IMSI/Design Delivers a One Two Three Punch By Corporal Willy, October 31st 2010       The people at IMSI/Design LLC, has de...

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  Entry 20 : Something new while waiting for Boulton-Huxley.   A local “professional” Geek managed to restore all my lost files, incidental...

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Forget statistics and Taguchi's method for design of experiments. Quality engineering is about dealing with crappy parts and angry customers while you...

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ENGINEERING.com and Dassault Systemes announced the winners of the Great Science Teacher Video Contest at the USA Science & Engineering ...

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  Entry 19 : ENER-AGRICULTURE & ECOLOGISTICS - a draft-note aimed at any future “Philosophy of Engineering”.   In the previous entry t...

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Webinar announcement Sigma technology to participate in ansys RDO webinar series Multilevel Robust Design Optimization IOSO technology coupled with AN...

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Engineering.com recently surveyed over 800 engineers as part of the 2010 job prospects for engineers article. The purpose of the survey was to analyze...

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 Through thousands of engagements with some of the world's largest manufacturers, our unique partnership has grown stronger, while helping our clients meet their business objectives. And, while we initially began as engineers focused on packaging expertise, we have evolved into an alliance of two companies, who – together manage and meet essentially any customer's needs within the four walls of a manufacturing facility.

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  Renewable Energy engineering : overcoming fundamental constraints     This 18th entry to my blog is conceptual only : I am still wai...

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I suspect that when the plans for the Great Wall of China were presented to the then Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, he might have remarked at the au...

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We test Incandescents, CFLs and LEDs It's not simple to buy light bulbs these days. What's with all these choices? The latest energy bill passed by th...

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Greenwashing is the practice of promoting the green attributes of a product to increase sales, even though that product may have not earned the touted...

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You get to the office 5 minutes late. You don't feel guilty. You were in till 11:00pm last night. There's 3 paper coffee cups and a red bull in the bin. For a position as lowly as the product engineer you are lucky to have a large desk. Looking at it, you know that you don't stand a chance of winning the top 5S work cell and the $20 'home depot' voucher that comes with it.

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  Education Today is not like it Was By Corporal Willy, Sept 22nd 2010       At the Engineering Show Presentation, A-TECH was...

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Since the PCIe Gen3 spec is on the way, we thought we would publish some questions and answers regarding 3.0. For the full list see the PCISIG site at...

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  High School College Credits  By Corporal Willy, Sept. 15th 2010     Project Lead the Way, is a national organization that i...

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This entry is by way of a progress report on my construction of a cost-effective solar concentrator : I have verified that my rosette-emplacement of tilted plane reflectors can concentrate incoming reflection effectively, and that the method of using a scaled ladder-frame with wire-stringers instead of rungs will configure a long strip of aluminium foil into a pre-determined parabola.

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Benchmarking - It's hammer time

In order to align ourselves with the latest styling trends and engineering innovations, automotive car manufacturer and suppliers often engage in benchmarking.


Benchmarking typically involves buying a competitor's product, analysing it's performance and then the fun bit starts: stripping it down. For us geeky engineers, this provides a nearly orgasmic experience as the products' layers are slowly and quasi-sensually peeled away. Ohhhs and ahhhhs follow.

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We recently spoke to 2nd year engineering students at Queens University about their online tools.

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8 Reasons to Design a Custom Rackmount Enclosure

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Well, if you have taken advantage of the information I post from time to time this might be useful to you.  I get many industry newsletters everyday and I do go through them when time permits.  I have been saving a few of them to make a small post out of them when I had enough to do so.

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I know how that might sound but it really does take a lot of people who are real experts in the educational field to plan school subjects properly with well balanced subjects.  Even to come up with curriculum that will help the young student get to where they would like to be someday takes even more careful planning.

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We have all had those moments. Those intense moments when a sudden gush of energy propels your brain into overdrive, creating a delightful mental sensation and voila; an idea is born or a solution to a problem is achieved. Some have termed this moment as the Eureka moment, named after a bathtub utterance by a certain gentleman.

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Opel Ampera styling cues

Something always intrigued me about the styling of the new Opel Ampera (European brother of the Chevy Volt), though I struggled to place what that something was. Then this morning, as I was tending to the Japanese maples, the neighbourhood falcon squawked above me and it clicked...

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The death (and rebirth) of digital advertising as we know it

Here is why the digital media advertising will inevitably be turned upside down (again). You have two incredible phenomenons occurring in the present time:

1. Mobile handsets > PCs by 2014 - the mobile device will be the primary method by which users experience the internet, a vastly different form vis a vis the PC

2. "The one-touch user profile" - people have taken to downloading apps of news services e.g., NYtimes, CNN that already have standard websites. Why do they do this? Two reasons a) you get one touch access to news vs. opening up a browser, looking up a bookmark, etc b) the content is designed specifically for the mobile form, making it much easier to consume

We are now seeing the rise of content aggregator apps (e.g., flipboard) that just repurpose existing content and make them consumbable for mobile form. In the old days, this was a portal; in tomorrow's mobile world, these apps will become the kings for user eyeballs.

Consider two different, yet plausible scenarios:

- What if flipboard or another such app became the defacto place for people to read the NY Times, WSJ, and others? These apps could control, in effect, a good part of the advertising that would normally go to the content provider. Not too mention they would have startlingly rich information on the consumer that any retailer would covet.

- What if Facebook (which recently became the 4th largest source of media traffic behind Google, Yahoo, MSN) starts keeping users within their four walls to read the news instead of linking out to the original content provider. They could attribute the content provider, but keep the user experience within Facebook with some fairly simple RSS programmatic elements.

These will not happen tomorrow, but the trend to me is clear: origination - where the user starts reading content - will become more important than fulfillment - where the content actually is created.

We can sit back, watch the digital dollars, and let the story unfold.

Aveek Guha

President, www.mbadaycamp.com

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A sub/jet ski mix provides alot of good times.

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High speed has been a constant buzzword over the past year or so. Partly fueled by President Obama’s $8 billion commitment in stimulus funding, high-speed rail appears to be headed on the right track. However, there are some who find the idea of a network of high speed rail (HSR) systems to be merely a far-fetched notion, one which will be perpetually stalled by politicians. Others are slightly optimist but unclear on the economical benefits of HSR especially at the municipal level.  It is perhaps for this reason that the U.S. Conference of Mayors launched a report touting the economic benefits of high-speed passenger rail.

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Are you dissolulioned about things?  Are the ecomomic times getting you down?  Are the bills mounting up?  Are you going to give up?  Are you ready to fight back doing something for yourself?  Take a minute and listen to a couple of ideas.  I'm not selling anything here but I do care about what you are doing and could be doing.

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Are we sacrificing quality manufacturing for expensive R&D?

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Design Engineering: the real word

Every time I interview a spring chicken that tells me how they dream of becoming a design engineer, it reminds me how 35 years ago, I had the same aspirations. I used to see myself as being the next Otto Diesel, Ma Jun or Elias Howe within a year of starting my new job designing square boxes for electronic modules.

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Real time condition monitoring has become a well accepted tool for thermal assessment and accurate rating of transmission and distribution assets. However, the use of fibre optics as sensors for distributed temperature sensing (DTS) is a rather complex technology with many parameters to consider.

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Are there enough different types of PCI Express 2.0 COTS option cards available today that will enable us to take full advantage of PCIe 2.0 in various embedded computing applications?

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R&D can work together with the Casino Industry

Diversification is needed to share the risk in your financial portfolio.  But what happens when cities and towns do not share that same risk idea?  There is an initiative to bring different high tech jobs and manufacturing to the desert area we call Las Vegas.  Casinos and Shows can be exciting but jobs are needed for the large work force that is outside of that industry.  A Research and Development Center is being thought about if the right people can get behind it.  A Silicon Valley in the Desert?

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Why we should do it.

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Over the next few months, we will regularly feature profiles of engineers who have made significant contributions to our profession. This exercise is an attempt to not only recognize and educate ourselves about these engineers, but to also remind us of the crucial role that engineers have played and continue to play.
To nominate an engineer to be part of this ongoing list, please email the details to kabaki@engineering.com.

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BP recently made some headway in coming closer to the capping the notorious gusher. Here are some of the images from that effort.

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None of the eight dispersant tested, including the product in use in the Gulf, displayed biologically significant endocrine disrupting activity. While the dispersant products alone – not mixed with oil - have roughly the same impact on aquatic life. 

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What Happens When Oil Coats the Ocean Surface?

By Corporal Willy, June 30th, 2010

        I had to do a little backyard experiment to test out what I was pretty sure I knew already.  It is not surprising that Crude Oil and Ocean Water affect each other, but did you think about this?  The results were alarming.

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This would be used with a Jet Ski as the work horse here. A slow moving scooping action will gather up many, many barrels of oil threatening the near coast line areas. Cleanup crews already have their procedures to use when gathering the oil, tar balls and Blogs and Globs on the beach. But just off shore a hundred meters or yards or even further need to be attacked also. Mr. Crawford’s idea will deal with that.

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With the hurricane season approaching, the members of the Eagle Team remain concerned about the imminent dangers posed by the combination of oil, water and hurricanes. The Gulf region has long suffered the brush of hurricanes, many of which have caused great devastation. This type around, the presence of oil in the water creates yet more reasons for the cleanup effort to happen more quickly.

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Gulf Oil Spill Beach Clean-Up

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I do know something about this field because it has been of great interest to me and to others around the world for many years. This much I do know. A shiny smooth highly reflective surface does reflect away solar radiation very nicely. It can actually be used to concentrate and focus that solar energy to perform useful functions like solar heating that turns water into high pressure steam to drive turbines.

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