"Oddly, science and engineering play an extraordinarily important role in this state."
Maybe I am uninitiated on the possible meanings of this statement, and prefer not to criticize a well-written article that I personally believe _needs_ to be written again and again. As a native Texan who has always seen technological enterprise as a dominant force, I ask... oddly? Substantiate.
Chuck, that's really interesting. What was car reliability being so poorly engineered back then and apparently, only in that decade? I've heard that residential construction in that decade was poorly engineered and shoddily made. What was going on during the 1970s to encourage or demand such lousy quality in both fields?
Most automotive engineers will admit that vehicle reliability was poor in the '70s. Even the staunchest apologists will admit that the reliability of cars in North America climbed when American automakers realized they were in a dogfight in the late 1980s. That's another way of saying, "We could have made better cars, but we didn't start doing it until we were forced to."
where I mentioned the shift in the mid-70s to smaller Japanese cars, which seemed to me like an '"evolutionary" process at the time. But I was thinking of mileage and small size, not lousy engineering--I didn't realize that was going on at the time. That would obviously add a big impetus to the shift!
Going from the '60s to the '70s, when American engineers were most notable for building lousy cars, there was a precipitous drop in esteem for engineers.
You know, I think this whole thrust towards STEM that occurred during the Sputnik years also gave engineers a lot more respect, to bring in the topic of a thread from another article:
Good point, Ann. Sputnik was easy for the masses to support, especially given the way American politicians were characterizing it. Given the fear of nuclear war at the time, many Americans believed that Russian spacecrafts would be flying overhead, flinging hydrogen bombs down on us from on high. Lyndon Johnson famously said, "I do not believe that this generation of Americans is willing to go to bed each night by the light of a Communist moon." For pure sense of national mission, it's tough to match that.
Alex, that's an interesting point about many Sputniks instead of just one. Not only did the one Sputnik sway public opinion and galvanize US education efforts, its singularity made the whole issue easy to understand for many people, as well as making it easy to believe we could "win". I think the fact that now there are many Sputniks makes it harder to identify the issue--which is basically the same--harder to sway public opinion, and harder to galvanize education efforts.
Dean Orsak closes with the observation that Sputnik catalyzed a whole generation to get going on science and math. The problem today is that there's no such singular issue to sway public opinion, yet a thousand tiny Sputniks are out there undercutting the U.S.'s able to maintain its position. We need to get going on STEM. Here's an interview I did over at InformationWeek with former Intel chairman Craig Barrett on STEM.
Employers, my guess, will tend toward younger engineers, and not just because entry-level salaries may be lower. In plants, management is aware that older workers are resistant to a lot of new technology, including software advances, connectivity that goes outside the plant, wireless networks, integrated safety, and cloud computing. The young engineer is comfy with these advances.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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