Machine Design Blogs

The SIGGRAPH Graphics Pioneers, an organization formed by scientists, engineers, artists, and industry professionals in computer graphics have adopted a house being built by the Make It Right Foundation. The Pioneers are asking you to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina with monetary donations to the foundation.

Make It Right, a collaboration between actor Brad Pitt, Graft Architects, Cherokee Gives Back, and William McDonough & Partners was founded in 2007 to help rebuild the New Orleans Lower 9th Ward, an area wiped out during Hurricane Katrina. The foundation has committed to building 150 energy-efficient, solar powered, storm-resistant homes in that area.

Donate directly to the Make it Right Foundation, The House that SIGGRAPH Pioneers Built.

U. of Maryland engineering Prof. Bruce Jacob makes a point in this short video from the Chronicle of Higher Education that there is a lot that goes into the commercial implementation of an engineering idea, and that engineering students just don’t get exposed to most of it.

What he should have said was that engineering students who are not in his classes don’t get exposed to it.

Jacob teaches a class on designing electric guitars (Why weren’t engineering classes like this when I was in school?) which dovetails with a business he started making add-ins for customizing guitar sounds. One gathers that students in this class get to understand a lot of the factors that go into actually realizing a commercial product once the breadboard is done.

The Chronicle video is a bit unsatisfying because it really doesn’t go into how he teaches these realities. But here it is:

http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-Tech-Transfer-Through/47455/?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Also interesting is Jacob’s home page which gives links to several other articles written about his guitar work:

http://www.ece.umd.edu/~blj/

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, NASA has put online the audio of the conversation between Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong as they piloted the Lunar Lander to the moon surface. The tapes were public years ago but only now are readily accessable. Here they are:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/40th/apollo11_audio.html

The Chronicle of Higher Education carried an interesting item recently describing a study by North Carolina Central University. Researchers there found that most students overestimated their computer skill levels at completing certain tasks.

The tasks in question were on the relatively ordinary programs: Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Though 75% of students thought they had a high skill level in Word, these students could perform only five out of the 10 moderately difficult tasks, like doing word counts or justifying paragraphs, and none of the advanced tasks, which included copying and pasting items from the clipboard, according to the study.

The study said students had the worst perception of their skill at using Microsoft Excel. About 69% thought they had at least an average skill level, but could not perform most of the basic, moderate, or advanced tasks, which included actions that ranged from from copying cells to creating formulas.

Also interesting, the “advanced” Excel tasks they are talking about here don’t seem to include writing even simple Visual Basic routines.

The whole item can be found here, and the comments by educators who have experienced this mythology themselves is also interesting:

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3889/students-may-not-be-as-software-savvy-as-they-think-study-says?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses has put out an interim report on the Air France 447 crash. There are a number of interesting illustrations and findings, including that deformations on structural parts indicate the plane hit the water in tact. Here is a link to the report:

http://www.avweb.com/pdf/f-cp090601e1.en.pdf

AvWeb also did a newsletter item on the report:

http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1409-full.html#200673