How Engineers Create the World

Author: William S. Hammack
Publisher: Bill Hammack
ISBN: 0983966109
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Book Description
In over 200 delightful short essays Bill captures the creativity and impact of engineers. He talks of their spectacular achievements - jets, satellites, skyscrapers, and fiber optics - but draws his deepest insights from the everyday, the quotidian. He finds beauty, elegance and meaning in Ferris wheels, Tupperware, Slinkys, mood rings, waterless urinals and Velcro. Delivered originally on public radio between 1999 and 2006, each essay is a small slice of the world created by engineers. The essays also illuminate and inform about the important topics of our day by showing how intertwined engineering and technology are with terrorism, security, intellectual property and our cultural legacy.

The Perfectionists

Author: Simon Winchester
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062652575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Book Description
“Another gem from one of the world’s justly celebrated historians specializing in unusual and always fascinating subjects and people.” — Booklist (starred review) The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision—in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future. The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras—and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider. Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia. As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?

Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

Author: Guru Madhavan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393248003
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
“Engineers are titans of real-world problem-solving. . . . In this riveting study of how they think, [Guru Madhavan] puts behind-the-scenes geniuses . . . center stage.”—Nature In this engaging account of innovative triumphs, Guru Madhavan examines the ways in which engineers throughout history created world-changing tools, from ATMs and ZIP codes to the digital camera and the disposable diaper. Equal parts personal, practical, and profound, Applied Minds charts a path to a future where we borrow strategies from engineering to find inspired solutions to our most pressing challenges.

Why Engineers Need to Grow a Long Tail

Author: Bill Hammack
Publisher: Bill Hammack
ISBN: 9780615395555
Category : Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 53

Book Description
Often the details of new media get lost in an alphabet soup that usually begins with an "i" - the iPod, the iPad, the iTouch. Yet the essence of new media is not in these devices, but in their use. This short primer shows engineers how to think about new media by focusing on the deeper issues of communicating in this new user- generated era. Readers will grasp the mindset of new media; an under- standing that will long outlast the latest social networking tools. It will empower practicing engineers to develop new, powerful ways to help the public understand what engineers do and why engineering is important; but perhaps most importantly this primer gives engineers the foundation for reaching the next generation of innovative engineers.

A Framework for K-12 Science Education

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309214459
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Science, engineering, and technology permeate nearly every facet of modern life and hold the key to solving many of humanity's most pressing current and future challenges. The United States' position in the global economy is declining, in part because U.S. workers lack fundamental knowledge in these fields. To address the critical issues of U.S. competitiveness and to better prepare the workforce, A Framework for K-12 Science Education proposes a new approach to K-12 science education that will capture students' interest and provide them with the necessary foundational knowledge in the field. A Framework for K-12 Science Education outlines a broad set of expectations for students in science and engineering in grades K-12. These expectations will inform the development of new standards for K-12 science education and, subsequently, revisions to curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development for educators. This book identifies three dimensions that convey the core ideas and practices around which science and engineering education in these grades should be built. These three dimensions are: crosscutting concepts that unify the study of science through their common application across science and engineering; scientific and engineering practices; and disciplinary core ideas in the physical sciences, life sciences, and earth and space sciences and for engineering, technology, and the applications of science. The overarching goal is for all high school graduates to have sufficient knowledge of science and engineering to engage in public discussions on science-related issues, be careful consumers of scientific and technical information, and enter the careers of their choice. A Framework for K-12 Science Education is the first step in a process that can inform state-level decisions and achieve a research-grounded basis for improving science instruction and learning across the country. The book will guide standards developers, teachers, curriculum designers, assessment developers, state and district science administrators, and educators who teach science in informal environments.

Imagine Design Create

Author: Tom Wujec
Publisher: Melcher Media Incorporated
ISBN: 9781595910660
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Imagine, Design, Create offers a wide-ranging look at how the creative process and the tools of design are dramatically changing--and where design is headed in the coming years. Bringing together stories of good design happening around the world, the book shows how people are using fresh design approaches and new capabilities to solve problems, create opportunities, and improve the way we live and work. From the impact of SOM's Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland to the spark that inspired Thomas Heatherwick's U.K. Pavilion in Shanghai; from the new processes fueling Zaha Hadid's extraordinary architecture to the digital tools Ford is using to transform car design, each of these stories explores questions that swirl around the idea of design. How does design change our lives for the better? How is our capacity to produce good design evolving? How will the next generation of designers work? What will they make? What new areas of human experience is design opening for us? Now that designers can do almost anything--what should they do? The Publisher has two cover versions for this title. The books will ship with either a black or white cover. The interior contents are the same.

Engineering Rules

Author: JoAnne Yates
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421440032
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 439

Book Description
The first global history of voluntary consensus standard setting. Finalist, Hagley Prize in Business History, The Hagley Museum and Library / The Business History Conference Private, voluntary standards shape almost everything we use, from screw threads to shipping containers to e-readers. They have been critical to every major change in the world economy for more than a century, including the rise of global manufacturing and the ubiquity of the internet. In Engineering Rules, JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy trace the standard-setting system's evolution through time, revealing a process with an astonishingly pervasive, if rarely noticed, impact on all of our lives. This type of standard setting was established in the 1880s, when engineers aimed to prove their status as professionals by creating useful standards that would be widely adopted by manufacturers while satisfying corporate customers. Yates and Murphy explain how these engineers' processes provided a timely way to set desirable standards that would have taken much longer to emerge from the market and that governments were rarely willing to set. By the 1920s, the standardizers began to think of themselves as critical to global prosperity and world peace. After World War II, standardizers transcended Cold War divisions to create standards that made the global economy possible. Finally, Yates and Murphy reveal how, since 1990, a new generation of standardizers has focused on supporting the internet and web while applying the same standard-setting process to regulate the potential social and environmental harms of the increasingly global economy. Drawing on archival materials from three continents, Yates and Murphy describe the positive ideals that sparked the standardization movement, the ways its leaders tried to realize those ideals, and the challenges the movement faces today. Engineering Rules is a riveting global history of the people, processes, and organizations that created and maintain this nearly invisible infrastructure of today's economy, which is just as important as the state or the global market.

Engineering a Safer World

Author: Nancy G. Leveson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262297302
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 555

Book Description
A new approach to safety, based on systems thinking, that is more effective, less costly, and easier to use than current techniques. Engineering has experienced a technological revolution, but the basic engineering techniques applied in safety and reliability engineering, created in a simpler, analog world, have changed very little over the years. In this groundbreaking book, Nancy Leveson proposes a new approach to safety—more suited to today's complex, sociotechnical, software-intensive world—based on modern systems thinking and systems theory. Revisiting and updating ideas pioneered by 1950s aerospace engineers in their System Safety concept, and testing her new model extensively on real-world examples, Leveson has created a new approach to safety that is more effective, less expensive, and easier to use than current techniques. Arguing that traditional models of causality are inadequate, Leveson presents a new, extended model of causation (Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes, or STAMP), then shows how the new model can be used to create techniques for system safety engineering, including accident analysis, hazard analysis, system design, safety in operations, and management of safety-critical systems. She applies the new techniques to real-world events including the friendly-fire loss of a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter in the first Gulf War; the Vioxx recall; the U.S. Navy SUBSAFE program; and the bacterial contamination of a public water supply in a Canadian town. Leveson's approach is relevant even beyond safety engineering, offering techniques for “reengineering” any large sociotechnical system to improve safety and manage risk.

Engineers Make a Difference

Author: Celeste Baine
Publisher: Bonamy Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
Engineers Make a Difference is about showing the color of engineering and, as a result, capturing students' passion, imagination, curiosity and dreams; to inspire them to create a life of abundance, meaning and satisfaction from such a pursuit. It's about finding ways to attract diversity in traditionally white, male-dominated fields, and it examines how we can use engineering's full rainbow of choices to enhance the public's perception of engineering making it more understandable, captivating and socially desirable.

Leadership by Engineers and Scientists

Author: Dennis W. Hess
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119436591
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Teaches scientists and engineers leadership skills and problem solving to facilitate management of team members, faculty, and staff This textbook introduces readers to open-ended problems focused on interactions between technical and nontechnical colleagues, bosses, and subordinates. It does this through mini case studies that illustrate scenarios where simple, clear, or exact solutions are not evident. By offering examples of dilemmas in technical leadership along with selected analyses of possible ways to address or consider such issues, aspiring or current leaders are made aware of the types of problems they may encounter. This situational approach also allows the development of methodologies to address these issues as well as future variations or new issues that may arise. Leadership by Engineers and Scientists guides and facilitates approaches to solving leadership/people problems encountered by technically trained individuals. Students and practicing engineers will learn leadership by being asked to consider specific situations, debate how to deal with these issues, and then make decisions based on what they have learned. Readers will learn technical leadership fundamentals; ethics and professionalism; time management; building trust and credibility; risk taking; leadership through questions; creating a vision; team building and teamwork; running an effective meeting; conflict management and resolution; communication; and presenting difficult messages. Describes positive traits and characteristics that technically-trained individuals bring to leadership positions, indicates how to use these skills, and describes attitudes and approaches necessary for effectively serving as leaders Covers negative traits and characteristics that can be detrimental when applied to dealing with others in their role as leaders Discusses situations and circumstances routinely encountered by new and experienced leaders of small teams Facilitates successful transitions into leadership and management positions by individuals with technical backgrounds Indicates how decisions can be reached when constraints of different personalities, time frames, economics, and organization politics and culture inhibit consensus Augments technical training by building awareness of the criticality of people skills in effective leadership Leadership by Engineers and Scientists is an excellent text for technically trained individuals who are considering, anticipating, or have recently been promoted to formal leadership positions in industry or academia.