Here - IEEE-USA

Transcription

Here - IEEE-USA

IEEE-USA E-BOOKS
The Best of
from IEEE-USA Today’s Engineer Volume 2
By Donald Christiansen
The Best of BACKSCATTER — Volume 2
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Published by IEEE-USA.
Copyright © 2009 by the IEEE. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
Edited by Georgia C. Stelluto, IEEE-USA Publishing Manager.
Cover design by Gregory O. Hill, IEEE-USA Electronic Communications Manager
Layout by Josie Thompson, Thompson Design.
This IEEE-USA publication is made possible through funding provided by a special dues assessment
of IEEE members residing in the United States.
Copying this material in any form is not permitted without prior written approval from the IEEE.
Table of Contents
Introduction............................................................................................................................................................................. 4
All in a Day’s Work.................................................................................................................................................................. 8
Black on Black Design.........................................................................................................................................................11
Picking a Winner...................................................................................................................................................................13
The Hat Trick: Having It Both Ways.................................................................................................................................16
Credit Where Due.................................................................................................................................................................18
Ephemera for Engineers and Scientists........................................................................................................................21
The Collyers and the Web..................................................................................................................................................23
About the MBA......................................................................................................................................................................26
Getting on Prime Time – Mission Impossible?...........................................................................................................28
Irreconcilable Differences?................................................................................................................................................30
Engineers – Mere Mercenaries?......................................................................................................................................32
Ghosts.......................................................................................................................................................................................35
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Introduction
This is the second in what may become a series of collections called The Best of Backscatter.
As in volume one, these essays were first published as individual columns in Today’s Engineer Online.
Some were later excerpted in Today’s Engineer Digest, and others reprinted in one or more of the
IEEE Regional Newsletters.
I found that many of those I chose for this new volume fit the category that publishers call “evergreen.” That is, even though a few years old, they could have been written today with equal validity.
In other words, they have aged well. That is not always good news; in some cases, it demonstrates
that hoped-for progress has not been made.
There is, thankfully, some fun and humor to be had even in a profession with serious objectives.
I trust a bit of that is evident in some of these selections, and that our engineering idiosyncrasies
and nerdiness occasionally show through.
The opening essay, “All in a Day’s Work,” is my response to a high-school senior’s question as to what
a day in the life of an engineer is like. After fumbling for an answer, I summoned forth the trials and
challenges of a team of young Data General engineers so ably retold in Tracy Kidder’s classic, The
Soul of a New Machine. A youngster, I thought, would either be inspired by this saga or sufficiently
deterred so as to pursue some other field.
In “Black-on-Black Design,” I reveal my suspicions that human factors engineering is too frequently
forgotten as an aspect of product design. In it, I begin by lamenting the frequent use of controls
for consumer electronic products that are invisible to the naked eye because they are black against
a black background. I follow that with a plea for fewer computer operating procedures that are
arbitrary and require memorizing. Among the many sympathetic responses to this column was one
from an engineer who said he carries a jeweler’s loupe and uses a MagLite flashlight to help deal with
the predilection for black-on-black by today’s product designers, and another from a programmer
who remembered a rule he followed back in the late 1960s — that a user must never be kept in the
dark for more than two seconds.
“Picking a Winner” deflates any notion that technology forecasting is a science. In it, I offer examples
of far-off-the-mark predictions that may have sounded plausible at the time.
I write about the tyranny of choice in “The Hat Trick: Having It Both Ways.” On the one hand, the
proliferation of new technical products with new features is a driver of the economy. On the other,
they raise issues of rapid obsolescence, compatibility and waste of resources.
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It may be virtually impossible today to be a lone inventor. I discuss the relative prevalence of
individual versus team invention in “Credit Where Due,” and note that even in earlier times, it was not
always easy to identify the real inventor of an important new device, or the discoverer of a significant
new principle.
The next two essays relate to the reliability of the Internet. In “The Collyers and the Web,” I compare
the database of the eccentric Collyer brothers — whose apartment was jammed with literally tons of
books, magazines, and newspapers — to the Internet. I propose, with tongue only partially in cheek,
that the Collyers might have been able to find something more quickly in their archive than we
can today using the Internet. Then, in “Ephemera for Engineers and Scientists,” I bemoan the quick
disappearance of useful material from the Internet, and give some hints on how some of it may be
recovered.
“About that MBA” raises the question of whether business schools know much about running
businesses. Enough said. Read the essay and let me know what you think.
A perennial wish (pipe dream, some might say) of engineers is to see a prime-time television series
about engineers. I treat this subject — not too seriously, I have to admit — in “Getting on Prime Time
— Mission Impossible?” A colleague and I postulated just such a series, trying to think like a sitcom
developer. I included our proposal in the original essay. It centered on a cast of engineers attempting
to win an Air Force missile guidance contract. I described each member of the team and then added
“We put a woman on the team to enhance the romantic interest, and also to be politically correct.
We may introduce some steamy encounters to incite the interest of Fox Television.” Big mistake. At
least in the eyes of two female members of the IEEE who wrote scathing objections, one even threatening to resign from IEEE. I took out the offending sentences. You will find them still absent from the
present essay. Perhaps removing them was a mistake. I did not think so at the time. Yet, I wonder in
retrospect whether leaving them in might have encouraged additional strong but useful responses.
Indeed, one woman Student Member of IEEE did not react negatively, but with an alternative suggestion for a television series — one that involved a variety of engineers and researchers. Among her
enthusiastic comments, she wrote “I couldn’t picture a more woman-friendly career.”
Over the years, I have observed a tendency of engineers and marketing people to go their separate
ways. In “Irreconcilable Differences,” I discuss this engineering-marketing interface and probe some
of the reasons why this traditional communication gap is so difficult to overcome.
In response to the column, “Engineers: Mere Mercenaries?,” one reader wrote “Engineers need to start
looking beyond the excitement of creating. Every effect has a cause, and we cannot build a better
bottle with a Genie and not think that the Genie will not one day escape. He will.” A good point.
But beyond that, in this essay, I cited several cases in which engineers and engineering schools are
undertaking projects that employ technology for the public good, often on a volunteer basis.
The concluding article in this volume resonated with a number of readers. Entitled “Ghosts,” it was
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my recollection with fondness of certain venues in which engineers once labored, including Bell
Laboratories’ famous research facility in Holmdel, N.J. At the time I wrote it, it appeared that the
building would be demolished by a developer, to become another ghost, “hallowed only in the
memory of those who once labored there in inventive splendor,” as I expressed it with a bit of literary flourish. Fortunately, shortly thereafter, I learned that the original 500,000-square-foot building
would be saved, as the result of a blizzard of objections to its demise from scientists (including Arno
Penzias and Robert Wilson) and architects, and the Internet community, from which came hundreds
of e-mails pleading for its preservation. That good news aside, readers responded with recollections
of places they had worked that no longer exist, along with the plea that somehow we ought to be
able to preserve more of our engineering heritage.
I hope you enjoy these essays. I welcome your thoughts and comments.
Donald Christiansen
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to Pender McCarter for first suggesting I write these columns; to Greg Hill for his aid in
getting them into the online version of Today’s Engineer (www.todaysengineer.org) and for creating
the associated artwork; to Georgia Stelluto for selecting and excerpting columns for publication
in Today’s Engineering Digest and for making these Best of Backscatter e-books a reality; and to Nancy
T. Hantman for typing, record keeping, and assuring that I meet my deadlines. Special thanks to the
many readers who e-mail me their comments and suggestions concerning both past and future
essays.
Donald Christiansen
About the Author
Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent
publishing consultant. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. You can write to him at donchristiansen@ieee.org.
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All in a Day’s Work
When a high-school senior recently asked me what a day in the life of an engineer is like, I was
temporarily taken aback. I could not easily respond. It depends, I said, going over the usual range
of possible environments — research, design and development, manufacturing, marketing and
sales — and telling him a few war stories of my own to give real examples of what an engineer
might encounter. I did the best I could in the time I thought a youngster might be willing to spare,
but went away feeling I had somehow missed the mark.
The form of his question had been unusual. Later, I thought, he had probably been wondering
whether engineering, if he chose it as a profession, would be as interesting and exciting as he
believed it to be, or might there be many days of less-than-challenging routine. How many
high-water marks are there in an engineering career, he may have been thinking. To what extent
can you do your own thing, or are you overly restricted by your company or your boss?
Too late, Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine came to mind. Describing the trials and tribulations
of an engineering group at Data General in the late 1970s, striving to develop a fast, inexpensive
machine to better its competition, the book, I thought, would be an excellent choice to recommend
to the young man should I encounter him again. I withdrew a copy from the local library to refresh
my memory.
The Story in Brief
Operating from the basement of the Data General headquarters building in Westborough, Massachusetts, the team was formed in some secrecy, with a tight budget and a close deadline — factors
that guaranteed challenges to all its members. Its head, Tom West, a veteran computer designer, split
the team into two groups: the “Hardy Boys” (hardware design) and the “Microkids” (software design).
Many top engineering graduates were lured to the team by the prospect of having their name on
an important new machine, something the Data General recruiters told them could happen at IBM
only after years of routine experience. Those who were excited at the prospect and showed other
indications that they would “sign on” were hired. Signing-on was an informal process that amounted
to agreeing, with unsolicited enthusiasm, that the project would come first, ahead of friends, family
and pastimes.
The perks were these: they could wear jeans, work any hours they wanted, do anything necessary
short of spending money without authorization, with the proviso that they’d complete their part
of the project in time to bring the whole machine to completion within the specified deadline (one
year!). There was an implication, but nothing in writing, that if you signed on and the project was a
winner (i.e., it went out the door), you’d then be rewarded. Rumors about stock options circulated.
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Imagine how exciting this prospect was to a new graduate! West gave only broad guidelines (The
32-bit minicomputer was to compete with DEC’s successful VAX machines, and no mode bit was to
be used). West took a hands-off approach with the team, communicating only through his two group
lieutenants. “You tell a guy to do [some part of the design] and fit it all on one board, and I don’t want
to hear from him until he knows how to do it,” West said.
Many of the team were overachievers in math in school, and had a history of taking things apart to
see how they worked. To his credit, Carl Alsing, supervisor of the hardware group, was able to recruit
a woman, not easy in those days. Eighty-hour work weeks were not unusual, with weekends and
overnights no exception. When a team member hosted an off-hours party, the talk was exclusively
computers. The term “midnight programmer” came into vogue. One member spent nights alone in
the lab, studying schematics and microcode listings to help him understand the IP, even though it
was not the part of the machine to which he himself was assigned. The members could work alone
or together. If personalities clashed, one could leave notes for the other on the “next shift” to pick
up where he left off. Technical controversies were encouraged. The axiom that no enmity should
proceed from a dispute among engineers generally prevailed.
Problems did surface. The drama deepened. As it was never clear to what extent the company was
prepared to continue support of the project, some programming was done on the sly, adding to the
intrigue and enjoyment by the secret team. One team member who signed on did not stay. After
spending many 80-hour weeks, he left this note one day: “I’m going to a commune in Vermont and
will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.” He later joined another computer company
where he worked an eight-hour day, five-day week. Even so, he had liked the fact that he had a lot of
control over the things he did at Data General.
The independence given to team members led one to complain “There’s no grand design …no one’s
in control ...” The Harvard Business School “would have barfed at the management structure,” he said.
There were no organizational tables or PERT charts to be found in the department. West felt the
minimal bureaucracy to be beneficial, even necessary to the on-time completion of the project. To
contain costs, he had rejected a request by the team for a new logic analyzer, saying, the story went,
“An analyzer costs ten thousand dollars. Overtime for engineers is free.” The team grew used to West’s
aloofness. He would not respond to their greetings in the halls, but acknowledged their individual
contributions to their team leaders.
Success Achieved
Data General introduced the new computer in April 1980. Alsing expressed the team’s feelings, calling it “the most exciting project in the company, the most exciting thing in our lives for a year and a
half.” He gave lots of credit to West, saying “West never bored us.”
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As for West, he was compelled by the challenge of working on a project so complex that no single
person could comprehend it. “It includes some notion of insecurity and challenge, of where the
edges are, and of finding out what you can’t do, all within a perfectly justifiable scenario,” West said.
He likened it to mountain climbing.
Writer Tracy Kidder concluded: “Maybe in the late 1970s designing and debugging a computer was
inherently more interesting than most other jobs in industry. But to at least some engineers, at the
outset, [this computer] appeared to be a fairly uninteresting computer to build. Yet more than two
dozen people worked on it overtime, without any real hope of material rewards, for a year and a half,
and afterward most of them felt glad.” The proper mix of guidance and freedom to invent may have
been the key.
Perhaps if I can get a copy of this tale of extreme engineering to my young high-school acquaintance,
it might convince him that excitement and even drama is possible in an engineering career. But I
should warn him that it doesn’t happen every day. Sometimes he may have to leave the office at
5 o’clock, whether he wants to or not.
For more, see:
Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine, Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1981.
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Black-on-Black Design
“Black-on-black” is a metaphor I use to cover a variety of befuddling design shortcomings at the interface between otherwise sophisticated equipment and the user.
It derives from the proliferation of entertainment products that feature black knobs and pushbuttons
and black cabinetry or housings. Who thought this up? Minuscule icons or alphanumeric callouts
silk-screened or otherwise imprinted on or near the controls in dishwater gray do little to help. In a
dimly lit room one needs a jeweler’s loupe to distinguish one button from another.
I sometimes suspect, perhaps unjustly, that the sleek but user-unfriendly consumer products are
designed by artists hoping to win some prestigious design award. Where are the engineers who designed the sophisticated stuff that’s inside? Have they no input? And who represents the customer?
The solution does not end with the visibility of controls. Their physical layout enters in: they are
seldom standardized in location or sequence. Do you have a new digital watch with the usual
options for time, alarm and resetting? If you think the mini-buttons are in the same place as those
on the watch you just discarded, forget it. Misplace the tiny roadmap that accompanied the watch,
and you’ll have to hack out the programming sequence. It should take no longer than five minutes.
Why do the watch designers do this? Is it not invented here, or do they really think their sequence
and button location is better than everyone else’s?
From knobs and buttons we can segue easily to the topic of computers. Everything that software
designers and programmers do may be based on machine logic, but to many computer users, logic
seems to end at the mouse and the keyboard. This is not a good thing, say the critics, who include
the application designers themselves. With computers we find ourselves in the realm of operating requirements and sequences that are arbitrary and require memorizing. And each application
is generally a new learning experience. What must be learned by rote is easily forgotten and thus
needs frequent refreshing. When something goes awry, troubleshooting is not a logical process. Get
a troubleshooter on the phone and his most useful phrase seems to be, “Now let’s try this…” Average
citizens aren’t the only ones found in the Barnes & Noble computer manual aisle. I think I’ve spotted
a well-known computer professional in dark glasses surreptitiously searching for a guide called
computer something-or-another for dummies.
Is it too late?
Perhaps we are too far into the computer age to stem the proliferation of complex, arbitrary procedures, cryptic nomenclature and rampant acronyms. The younger computer-using generation may
accept it as the norm — a fair price for the computer’s enormous capabilities.
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The human factors engineer is charged with simplifying the interface between machine and user,
but sometimes, perhaps, enters the fray too late to do much to aid a given design project. Concurrent
engineering, too, may leave little time to evaluate and improve the human-machine interface of a
system before it is deployed.
Donald Norman, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University, may have identified
part of the problem. He speculates that in the design process, the design engineers may become
so conversant with the idiosyncrasies of their own designs or their unusual operating requirements
that they do not appear at all troublesome.
Those who believe the user warrants more consideration offer some suggestions:
• Involving customers and potential users early in the design process
• Engaging human factors specialists at an earlier stage in systems design
• Seeking operating sequences in which an action, its effect and confirmation of the expected
consequence are obvious to the operator
Human factors specialists tend to concentrate on health and safety issues, as well they should. But
this emphasis may downgrade the concern for annoying and inefficient operating requirements,
although the two may in fact be linked. In some cases, you can’t have one without the other. Consider
the controls of a modern airliner, the air traffic control system, or a nuclear power plant control room.
At the university level, human factors studies seem generally to be part of the industrial engineering
discipline, so it is questionable whether students specializing in this area find themselves on teams
made up principally of electrical and computer engineering students. It might be a good idea.
Another way to foster an appreciation of user-centered system design would be to assign one
student to play the role of a demanding customer in a design project exercise.
In any event, there is an upside to the downside of human-machine interface foibles. There’s so much
room for improvement that progress ought to be expected, and in many cases, easily accomplished.
Perhaps we should begin with those black-on-black buttons.
For more about human factors engineering and user-centered design, see:
• Norman, D.A., The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books, 2002.
• Chapanis, A., The Chapanis Chronicles: 50 Years of Human Factors Research, Education, and Design,
Aegean, 1999.
• Shaw, R.E., and J. Bransford, Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing, Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ,
1986.
• Norman, D.A., and S.W. Draper, User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human Computer
Interaction, Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1986.
• Mindell, D.A., Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics,
The Johns Hopkins Press, 2002.
• Publications of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, www.ieeesmc.org.
• Publications of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, www.hfes.org.
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Picking a Winner
Part of the joy of being an engineer is working on cutting-edge projects. We all like to be part of an
organization that brings to market new and useful — occasionally even revolutionary — products
and services.
Corporations have parallel ambitions. They hope to bet on technologies that will spawn products
that can move smoothly into the marketplace — on a schedule that is predictable and with a return
on investment that is satisfactory.
Unfortunately, picking a winner is not that easy. Technology forecasting — part art, part science — is
called upon to help. But deciding which technologies will be successful, and how and when they will
be incorporated into commercially viable products is a daunting challenge. Those who try have been
notably unsuccessful. Whether based on mathematical models or experts’ opinions, the accuracy of
such forecasts is often far less than that of science fiction writers.
Here are a few forecasts that were widely publicized in major business publications:
• Huge sun-reflecting satellites to illuminate night-shrouded areas of the earth (NASA said they
would be able to do it by the mid-1970s)
• Human cloning by 1985 (predicted by Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg)
• Nuclear-powered undersea recreation areas and undersea motels by 1990 (postulated by TRW
in 1966)
• Newspapers delivered by facsimile by 1978 (another TRW prediction)
• Superconductors as a billion-dollar industry (In 1967, Fortune reported it could happen by the
mid-1970s)
• The demise of the internal combustion engine (Bill Lear, developer of the Learjet, predicted in
1971 that within 10 years, the gasoline engine would be a collector’s item.)
(I think I remember reading about some of these same predictions in Popular Science magazine in the
1930s.)
Some projections will never materialize, as they will be bypassed by newer technology. Others may
eventually make it, but forecasts having a faulty timeline can be useless to corporate planners, or
worse, turn into a money pit.
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Forecasting Flaws
Forecasts that misfire are frequently based on our fascination with our own technology and the
enthusiasm it generates among market analysts and business magazine writers. The popular business press has often been the first to express unbridled optimism about the expected success of a
new technological development, and, often as frequently, the first to criticize its developers when
expectations were not met.
With the computer field being a notable exception, most forecasts have been much too optimistic.
(We all know that optimism is needed to attract capital!) Steven Schnaars, author of Megamistakes,
warns that in forecasting, “a passionate focus on technology for its own sake spells disaster.”
Instead, you’ve got to be aware of other factors, many of which are exogenous, some in themselves
unpredictable. The poor batting average in technology forecasts can be attributed in part to
over-optimism, “new” forecasts that are retreads of earlier forecasts, unanticipated fads and fashions
(particularly in the consumer marketplace), and, perhaps most dramatic, “disruptive” technologies
(e.g., solid-state technology) that threaten the status quo. A disruptive technology can drastically
shorten the expected life cycles of numerous products and even industries.
On the contrary, the rise of a new technology may be unexpectedly delayed because companies
having a large investment in skills and machinery may be reluctant to abandon a product threatened
by the new technology, and may rely on marketing techniques to retard the threat. With the transistor looming on the horizon, the major manufacturers of receiving tubes banded together to form
the Electron Tube Information Council, whose objective was to define and promote the advantages
of vacuum tubes over transistors. Such advantages proved dubious or transitory at best, but perhaps
the council’s efforts delayed the incorporation of transistors and semiconductor diodes into certain
products and helped some of the receiving tube makers survive longer than they otherwise might
have.
The Tipping Phenomenon
Then there’s the case of two or more manufacturers vying for the same market, exploiting the same
technology but in different formats. It is possible that more than one contender can survive, but the
market may “tip” to a single winner, especially for services or products that involve networks of hardware, software and users. How and when a market will tip to a particular format is not predictable.
Robert Lucky, author of Silicon Dreams, called it “an instance of chaos in group dynamics.”
Sometimes the contest for a market niche will go on indefinitely before a clear winner emerges.
Sony’s Betamax survived for 27 years, selling 18 million units before it succumbed to VHS, though to
many the handwriting on the wall seemed clear long before Sony withdrew.
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Today, people are paying a lot more attention to technology forecasting methodologies than was
the case in the 1950s and 60s, when technology forecasting first gained interest as a management
tool. Once, when an engineer-colleague of mine was assigned to a market research project, he complained that the major tool for technological forecasting was nothing more than a jury of executive
opinion, which he disparagingly termed “circular reasoning.” But that was long ago. Today we expect
more.
Even so, I can’t help but think of the comment once made by a writer for Forbes: “When you get the
urge to predict the future, better lie down until it goes away.”
Resources
For more on technology forecasting, see:
• Kahn, Herman, and A.J. Wiener, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three
Years, Macmillan, 1967.
• Schnaars, Steven, Megamistakes: Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid Technological Change, The Free
Press, 1989.
• Moyer, Reed, “The futility of forecasting,” Long Range Planning, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1984.
• Wise, G., “The accuracy of technological forecasts: 1890-1940,” Futures, Vol. 8, No. 5, 1976.
• Godet, M., “Reducing the blunders in forecasting,” Futures, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1983.
• Toffler, Alvin, Future Shock, Random House, 1970.
• “The future that never came,” Forbes, July 10, 1978.
• Wolff, Michael, “Carlson’s Dry Printer,” IEEE Spectrum, December 1989.
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The Hat Trick: Having It Both Ways
We seem to be living in an era where the past is denigrated. Neighbors are embarrassed if their
home, or its décor, is “outdated.” We must have the latest version of an ISP program or be considered
technically disadvantaged. “My iPod can do more than yours” is an acceptable boast.
Engineers, of course, are agents of change, and so we lay the foundations for disenchantment with
the old, while helping popularize the new.
But our laudable successes bring with them a certain disaffection. The “tyranny of choice” is one
result. Walking through the aisles of cell, answer, and remote-access telephones in Best Buy is like
navigating the breakfast food aisle of a supermarket. What to choose? It is time consuming and enervating to the uninitiated. If Ma Bell and W. K. Kellogg were still in charge, selections could be quickly
made: “I’ll take the black phone and a box of corn flakes.” We could go on to more interesting things.
When the choices for the music enthusiast were but three — 78, 45, or 33 1/3 — life was downright
idyllic. A three-speed record player silenced all concerns about compatibility. Now our DVD recorder
warns us: “Do not play back the following discs: VCD, SVCD, SACD, PD, CDV, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM,
DVD+R/RW, DVD, or audio.”
For a while, some products were produced with the idea that they would not quickly become obsolete. They would be compatible with later versions and easily updated. During its first decade (and
beyond) of instant cameras, Polaroid designed all functional improvements so that they could be
easily adapted to its first camera.
Do we, as individual engineers, hold any responsibility for assuring the compatibility of operation
between generations of products? Perhaps that rests only with industry associations, in which we
may participate, or with regulatory agencies, to whom we may provide advice. Standards-setting can
be contentious, if ultimately advantageous to all players. In a lengthy process involving both industry
competitors and the FCC, a compatible U.S. color television standard was hammered out, forestalling
competing, incompatible systems coming on the market. In contrast, the PAL system was introduced
in Germany and SECAM in France, neither compatible with the U.S. system, or one another.
Industry standards can help avoid the expenditure of time, effort and capital in developing products
that are incompatible with that of a more successful competitor. Undue delay in defining standards
may result in lots of nonstandard products, all claimed by their makers to do the same thing, only
better. Many will not survive, as customers tilt toward a winner. The losers’ users may find themselves
saddled with quality and service problems, and, ultimately, more e-waste.
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A Down Side
On the other hand, prematurely adopting standards can stifle innovation and limit the paths available to designers. It may take the arrival of something truly revolutionary to dislodge an entrenched
standard or make it obsolete. In the computer field, standards and protocols are an absolute requirement. Yet, ironically, their very existence may preclude or seriously impede progress toward a simpler,
more user-oriented computer era. Where systems and their cultural uses are entrenched, it requires
disruptive technologies to advance the status quo.
It would surely be counterproductive to limit design options at the research phase of a new technology. If standards are set too early, or regulatory restraints imposed prematurely, the world might
lose a fabulous new product we never knew we needed. If set too late, product evaluation may, de
facto, fall to those customers willing to take a chance on one among many contenders. The balance
between the two may be delicate — or not. I don’t have an answer.
Not everyone is opposed to shopping the aisles of Best Buy or serving as a test customer for a hightech product that may prove to be short-lived. I must admit that I’m watching the mail for my new
digital watch that also doubles as a TV, DVD, and VCR remote. I’ll probably be the first on the block to
own one, and it’s even possible that the neighbors may feel outdated
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Credit Where Due
Assigning credit to one individual for a particular technical development is harder than it used to be.
So much creative engineering is now done in teams that isolating one member would most likely be
unfair, if not impossible. Nearly parallel work done by teams in competing organizations complicates
the matter.
I always supposed that the very early formulators of electrical science, like Volta and Ampere and
their contemporaries, seldom encountered these questions of priority. For one thing, there were so
few of them. Some were given what is perhaps the highest individual accolade — having electrical
units named for them. Others, like Kirchhoff and Fourier, were immortalized through their identification of physical laws or mathematical relationships. Most of us accept these time-honored credits
as unequivocal. Yet, because these early theorists and experimenters often worked in isolation and
published sparingly, they sometimes pursued similar paths to unknowingly reach similar conclusions.
And because first publication might be in Latin, German, Dutch, French, Italian or English, translation
delays slowed the dissemination of results. Indeed, historians question the absolute accuracy of some
of the “firsts.” Here are a few examples. They are not meant to denigrate the importance of these early
contributors, but rather to illustrate how difficult it was even then to establish priorities and give
credit where it is deserved.
• The Wheatstone Bridge was developed by Hunter Christie, a lesser-known inventor than Charles
Wheatstone. But the configuration was popularized by Wheatstone, who in his lectures gave full
credit to Christie.
• American physicist Joseph Henry appears to have experimentally discovered electromagnetic
induction before Faraday. But Faraday was first to publish, and so was credited with the discovery.
Today, it is generally accepted thet Henry discovered self-inductance, while Faraday discovered
mutual inductance.
• Henry Cavendish, the meticulous British experimenter for whom the famed Cavendish Laboratory
at the University of Cambridge is named, studied electrical phenomena for many years. He left
stacks of unpublished works, and it was not until Joseph Maxwell, nearly a century later, edited
and published a volume of Cavendish’s results that it was found that some of his major findings
had predated similar conclusions by Faraday and Coulomb.
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The importance of publishing
Cavendish’s failure to publish during his lifetime and the consequent failure of the electrical community to credit him with significant findings may be the outstanding example of “publish or perish.” But
there were others:
• Carl Friedrich Gauss would often react to fellow scientists’ disclosures by stating that he had
known these things for years, but had not felt it important to publish them. Historians believe
that some of these claims may be legitimate, as Gauss, a loner, had such a strong reluctance to
publish.
• Hans Orsted’s experiments prompted Georg Simon Ohm to conduct his own. He is thought to
have confirmed Ohm’s Law by 1825 or even earlier, although he first revealed it formally in an
1827 publication. Even so, leading physicists seemed to misunderstand or resist his findings. He
was finally given full recognition when the Royal Society (London) gave him the Copley medal in
1841.
The issue of priority notwithstanding, many of the 19th-century experimenters were able to profit
from their contemporaries’ work, and most gave credit to them. Orsted’s experiments produced a
flurry of experiments by others, including Biot and Savart, Poisson, Faraday, Ohm and Ampere. Ampere pursued a combined theory of electricity and magnetism in the early 1820s, encouraged by
Orsted’s disclosures.
Maxwell, it seems, was little influenced by ego or the Not Invented Here syndrome, open to the findings of both predecessors and contemporaries, and always ready to give credit to them. He agreed
that his mathematical theories on electricity and magnetism were made possible by Faraday’s experiments and his recognition of lines of force. Hertz later confirmed Maxwell’s concepts experimentally,
and he became a great champion of Maxwell.
Changing times
As the electrical engineering profession moved into the 20th century, a new dimension was added.
Patents became a key to establishing priority and gave the holders access to substantial monetary
rewards. Among the notable cases of contentious patent disputes were these:
• Television priorities were the issue between Philo Farnsworth and RCA. Pride of invention and
potential profits were both at stake for Farnsworth, while RCA’s David Sarnoff was concerned
principally with the latter.The storied contest entered the public domain through accounts in two
recent bestselling books.
• A dispute raged on in the courts for years concerning the origin of the regenerative radio circuit.
The principal contenders were its developer, Edwin Armstrong, and Lee de Forest, who claimed
he had thought of it earlier. A technically illiterate Supreme Court decided in favor of de Forest.
Others claiming credit were Irving Langmuir and Alexander Meissner, who sued each other as
well as Armstrong and de Forest.
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• A
bitter legal dispute between Sperry Rand, on the one hand, and Honeywell and Control Data
on the other, was based on who developed the first digital electronic computer. Although John
Mauchley and J. Presper Eckert were issued the first patent, it was disclosed that John Atanasoff
and Clifford Berry had actually built the first computer. Mauchley had visited Atanasoff and studied the details of his computer before applying for a patent on the ENIAC, which was ultimately
assigned to Sperry Rand. Iowa State University, where the Atanasoff-Berry computer was built,
had failed to file for patents, and the ENIAC patent was applied for without citing the earlier
computer. The courts ultimately ruled in favor of Honeywell and Control Data, and thus belated
recognition went to Atanasoff and Berry.
In today’s complex world, determining who’s first has two equally important implications for the
engineer — first, peer and, sometimes, public recognition, and second, potential monetary reward.
Timely recording and publication of work, and holding a first-patent position are both important. But
getting your name on an important design or development will probably be as part of a team. And
the chance of having an electrical unit named after you is nil — I think.
Resources
For more on the pre-20th-century electrophysicists, see:
Dibner, B., Ten Founding Fathers of the Electrical Science, Burndy Library, 1954.
The Electric Pantheon, Eta Kappa Nu, 2005.
Bordeau, S.P., Volts to Hertz, Burgess, 1982.
For more on 20th-century inventors who had to contend for credit, see:
Mollenhoff, C., Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer, Iowa State University Press, 1988.
John Vincent Atanasoff Papers, Iowa State University.
Schwartz, E. I., The Last Lone Inventor (Philo Farnsworth vs. David Sarnoff), Harper Collins, 2002.
Stashower, D., The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television, Broadway, 2002.
Lessing, L., Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong, Lippincott, 1956.
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Ephemera for Engineers and Scientists
I usually think of ephemera as anything at a flea market that would be badly damaged in a sudden
rainstorm — like old copies of National Geographic magazine or a letter signed by Abraham Lincoln.
Mostly paper goods.
But now I find that ephemera appear on — and by definition disappear from — the World Wide
Web. I often run across an interesting article, make a mental note to revisit it, and then find it is gone,
sometimes within a few days, when I search for it again. I have taken to downloading or printing out
anything that I consider of significance.
The problem manifests itself in other ways. Many technical articles now include references to Internet addresses, as opposed to hard-copy resources. Authors and readers alike complain that many
of these URL-identified references seem to vaporize with time. A study led by Robert Dellavalle of
the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center revealed some startling numbers. Summarized in
Science magazine, it reported that in one dramatic instance, 108 of 184 Internet addresses became
inactive within four years. In tabulating the combined results from articles that appeared in three
major journals — Science, JAMA, and NEJM — the study team reported that 3.8 percent of Internet
references were inactive three months after journal publication, 10 percent after 15 months and 13
percent after 27 months.
Why does this happen? Since the URL serves as both the name and address of the referenced information, all it takes is a change in or discontinuance of the URL to lose the link.
Some of us might not think the loss that great, except for the time wasted in fruitless search. Indeed,
some of the reference material that I have been able to locate easily proved to be of such peripheral
relationship to the parent article that I could have done without it.
Considering that those who ought to know estimate that some five million new pages of information
are added to the Web daily, it is easy to understand why so much of it is suspect — not worth reading, much less referencing. In browsing online, I have found technical papers that are undated and for
which the author’s name, but no affiliation, is given. Some do have an e-mail address to which one
and all are invited to respond with comment. Perhaps too many comments will prompt the author to
remove the paper from the Web while it undergoes repair. It might never return.
A corollary issue for the author tempted to cite an e-reference occurs when what appears to be an
appropriate paper — one seemingly worthy of referencing — appears online but without any pedigree. Has the paper been refereed or vetted in any way? What to do? It, too, may disappear.
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Playing Detective
Of course, hard-copy references also have their pitfalls. How often have you tried to retrieve a particular journal paper, only to find the volume number or some other identifier had been misprinted?
Or have you ever had to track down an out-of-print book? While the search for a hard-copy reference
is time-consuming, it is usually successful.
There are also ways to try to recover missing e-references. Internet search engines may cache Web
pages, and the Internet Archive may be helpful. In the study reported in Science, Internet Archive
provided recoverable information for 31 of 60 inactive Internet references. However, it seems we
need a more fundamental solution. Perhaps it will come through the use of Digital Object Identifiers
(DOIs), the Uniform Resource Name (URN) syntax or the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL).
Meanwhile, there is no sure way of guaranteeing that e-references can be accessed. They may prove
to be chiefly decorative, but nevertheless impressive to those readers who never attempt to retrieve
them.
Resources
For more about e-references, see:
• Dellavalle, R. P., et al. “Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References,” Science, 31 Oct. 2003.
• “Preserving our digital heritage: Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and
Preservation Program,” Library of Congress, www.digitalpreservation.gov.
• The Digital Object Identifier System, International DOI Foundation, www.doi.org.
• Persistent URL Home Page, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, http://purl.oclc.org.
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The Collyers and the Web
Remember the Collyer brothers? The well-educated but reclusive pair saved everything. In their
New York City apartment they packed tons of books, magazines, newspapers, and a few typewriters.
Tragically, in 1947 they met their demise there. Investigators could scarcely crab their way through
the narrow aisles that separated rows of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. One of the brothers was found
beneath a pile of books from shelves that had evidently collapsed, and the other nearby.
We shall never know, but I like to imagine that the Collyers were not afflicted with discardophobia
(the morbid fear of throwing anything away) — a syndrome that many of us are believed to suffer
from today — but had actually used and enjoyed their huge archive. “Langley, bring me that copy of
The New York Times — the one on the dedication of LaGuardia Airport,” I can hear his brother, Homer,
asking. And Langley goes right to it, using whatever system he had devised to recall its location. A
bit like researching something on the Internet, don’t you think? Yet the Collyers may have been able
to find something even more quickly. Their database was smaller, and they had put everything in its
place themselves — custom programmed it, I would say.
Of course, the Internet is much more useful and at the same time more problematic. It is huge, adding, some guess, five to 10 million pages a day. (The actual number is as elusive as the national debt.)
Rod Alferness, a specialist in high-bandwidth optical fiber technology at Lucent, suggests that while
enormous bandwidth can bring us loads of information stored in the Web’s data banks, individuals
may become so swamped they can’t process it. “Do you have half a lifetime to look at everything?”
he asks. And what about its quality? Some users suspect that half of what is on the Web is not worth
looking at — but they don’t know which half. Alan Kaye, co-inventor of the graphical user interface
(GUI), is sympathetic. He sees 99 percent of the content on the Internet as “distractive and of no consequence.” Yet he believes the small percentage of worthwhile material can be uplifting and culture
changing. The problem will be to make it as easy for people to find out about the good content as it
is to find out about the distracting stuff, he says.
Information Addiction
Perhaps Langley Collyer was diverted on his way to finding the article his brother wanted. I can
picture him, cross-legged on the floor between shelves, reading something in The Times that had
caught his eye, then perhaps another item, and another, while Homer waited patiently. This kind
of digression often happens to me when I’m online.
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Researching online can become addictive. Caught in the Web may be a good way to express it.
A fellow engineer of my acquaintance admits that he is often up until 2 a.m. following some workrelated trail too intriguing to abandon. A few years ago a TV commercial promoting some computer
product or another featured a young woman at a terminal boasting “It’s already 10 a.m. and I
haven’t yet dressed or taken my shower!” The commercial’s creators must have realized its negative
implications, for it soon disappeared. Vincent Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet, recently noted that
its always-on nature “poses a pretty tough problem for people who feel they have to keep up with
everything — we may all end up suffering from ‘global sleep deprivation.’”
What to Do?
I am afraid that if we cannot somehow slash the amount of material we must search through to find
meaningful results with a reasonable expenditure of time, the nature of our workstations and home
offices will be transformed. Imagine each day mounting an exercycle to which we have permanently
attached a keyboard. TV dinners will give way to computer dinners, warmed in a microwave oven
and served on a tray, both affixed to the exercycle. As we multiprocess our way through the day,
eyes glued to the computer screen, our hands will dart from mouse and keyboard to knife and
fork. We will have to pedal faster and faster to keep in shape, and figuratively, to satisfy our lust
for information.
Help Needed
Today’s search engines and specialized Web sites notwithstanding, the means of precision researching online will continue as an ongoing challenge. Who will meet it? Are library scientists a vanishing
breed? Will Web site and search engine designers (search engineers?) come to the rescue? Are the
former morphing into the latter? A major task will be to design, categorize, classify, and index Web
sites and to certify the degree of quality and legitimacy of what can be found online.
Even Bill Gates agreed recently that “search just isn’t what it should be.” We need better technology
for navigation, and, he said, “answers, not lists of Web sites” as we search. Gates hinted that the much
anticipated Longhorn might help.
Let’s hope so. We want to make it as easy to find trustworthy information as it was for the Collyers,
but minus the claustrophobic and threatening environment.
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For more on the Internet:
Foulke, J. (Ed.), Engineering Tomorrow, IEEE Press, 2000; p. 110, comments by R. Alferness; p. 4,
comments by V. G. Cerf; p. 88, comments by A. Kaye.
Navigation aids:
•
•
•
•
•
•
The Librarians’ Index to the Internet, www.lii.org
Internet Public Library, www.ipl.org
Reference Desk, www.refdesk.com
Hotbot Quick Search Deskbar, www.hotbot.com
Metacrawler, www.metacrawler.com
Altavista, www.altavista.com
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About That MBA
Many of our engineering colleagues have earned MBAs as a follow-on to their baccalaureate or
master’s degrees in engineering. Most of them are glad they did. They confirm that pairing an
engineering and a business education makes good sense. Engineers who intend to follow a research
career path may disagree, believing that time spent in further education might better be devoted
to specialty studies in a technical area.
Notwithstanding their generally good reputation, business schools are coming under criticism,
and not only from employers of their graduates, but from some of the business school leaders themselves. It seems that the curricula have become increasingly focused on business and management
theory and research, and less on real-world considerations like leadership methods, ethical concerns
and multidisciplinary issues. Some business school deans feel that business schools wrongly try to
mimic the curricula of academic disciplines like physics, biology or mathematics. Instead, they say,
business administration is a profession, like medicine, law or engineering, not an academic discipline,
so its curriculum must address not just technical but professional issues.
Until the post-World-War-II years, business schools were notably heavy on practice and light on
research. Then, spurred by critics and aided by foundation grants, they turned their attention to
scientific research. Perhaps the pendulum swung too far in that direction.
Symptoms of the situation today include the difficulty that otherwise qualified professors face in
getting appointments to top-rated business schools unless they have a record of publishing in
scholarly journals. Therefore, they find they must eschew writing articles for unrefereed business
publications or discussing anecdotal experiences in the classroom. Neither gains them career points.
Warren Bennis and James O’Toole, professors at the University of Southern California, writing in
the Harvard Business Review, commend the practices of law schools, where a well-written, welldocumented book or article, published in a serious, practitioner-oriented review is deemed as
valuable as an arcane, quantitative paper published in a journal read only by researchers in the
specialty. In many business schools there seems a widespread discounting, if not disdain, of articles
published in a practitioner-oriented business magazine.
There also is a trend away from the case-study teaching methods, made so popular by the Harvard
Business School. Instead, hypothetical situations are mathematically analyzed. I was once invited
to be an “expert commentator” when Harvard B-school students tackled a case study in which I had
been a real-world participant. The spirited discussion and analysis by the students was commendable
and thought provoking. (I have often wondered why engineering schools have not experimented
with the case-study method of teaching.)
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Business schools tend to avoid discussions of “messy” interdisciplinary problems. The result, or
perhaps the cause, is that it is possible, as Bennis and O’Toole noted, to find tenured management
professors who have never set foot inside a real business, except as customers.
The critics are clearly not calling for a return to the days when business schools were seen as trade
schools, not scientific institutions. They agree that management is both an art and a science, and that
neither should be shortchanged in the educational process.
Running a business
There is also the notion afoot that it might not be a bad idea for business schools themselves to oper
ate businesses. A rare example might be the Cayuga MBA Foundation, established by Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and run by students. An example from another
calling is at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where students, rather than being
confined to learning writing and reporting skills, are challenged to research, design and produce prototype magazines. They are professionally crafted and equal in quality to that of many commercially
published magazines, and thus might easily catch the attention of a publishing house.
Birds of a feather?
Is there a parallel in the evolution of engineering and business education? I think so. The origins of
both were largely practice-based. Both evolved to a strong science base. But now educators in both
professions see the need for curriculum redesign. The goal is to graduate students able to enter today’s complex workplace without facing undue surprises and many unfamiliar options, and to make
them more immediately valuable in their first assignments.
In engineering, ABET’s Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC2000) concepts are designed to do just that. The
notions advanced by business school educators appear to be similar. If both are successful, the value
of a dual MBA/EE education will be enhanced accordingly.
Resources
For more about MBA programs, see:
Mintzberg, H., Managers Not MBAs, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004.
Overview of U.S. Business Schools, Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, 2004.
Bennis, W. G. and J. O’Toole, “How Business Schools Lost Their Way,” Harvard Business Review, May
2005.
Barnes, L. B., C. R. Christensen, and A.J. Hansen, Teaching and the Case
Method: Text, Cases, and Readings, 3rd Ed., Harvard Business School Press, 1994.
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Getting on Prime Time —
Mission Impossible?
The other day I met a newly-retired microwave engineer. Soon we were comparing notes about our
respective careers. Prompted by our exchange of war stories, his wife interrupted: “Why is there never
a television show about engineers?”
We both knew this question has been raised often over the years. Her husband was quick to respond:
“A show about engineers would be as interesting as watching paint dry.” I must say I’ve heard more
optimistic similes, such as watching mold grow on bread, suggestive at least of some nominal action.
Pessimism notwithstanding, my new friend and I picked up on his wife’s challenge. We thought a
TV series would be good. Our first idea was a show about nothing — but Jerry Seinfeld had already
done that.
How about this, we thought: The Air Force puts out a request for proposal for a new, sophisticated
missile guidance system (something to do with a neo-SDI project, perhaps). A large aerospace
systems company assembles a crack engineering group to respond to the RFP. During the first few
episodes, we get to meet the team members. We learn which of them graduated from MIT, and that
another nearly flunked out while spending too much time playing video games in his dorm room at
Stanford. (He will become the project leader.)
As the series progresses, the engineers try to confirm who their competitors are, and to imagine
how each might be attacking the proposal. In the sixth episode, a new member joins the team. He
previously worked for the company’s arch rival, known to be developing its own proposal. The plot
thickens. Ethical issues arise.
Optimistic that they may win the competition, the company enlarges the project group and invests
in supporting experiments. However, we are approaching the end of the TV season and need a
cliff-hanger for the final episode. Here it is: In the midst of near-elation about the likelihood of
winning the contract, a rumor surfaces that one or two members of the Air Force evaluation team
may attempt to subvert the proposal. Will the team win or lose? Stay tuned; you’ll find out next
Fall — unless the series is cancelled. Then the cast will need to find new jobs, just like the engineers.
If you don’t like that idea, here’s another. Donald Trump puts a group of young engineers to a series
of tests, firing one after another until only one remains, who gets to keep his job — we hope. Or how
about this: A detective series called Sam Sigma, Reliability Engineer. (We’ve got more, but you get the
idea.)
Seriously, folks
Facetiousness aside, film and television writers have attempted to deal with the topic of engineering,
with mixed results. The efforts, as reviewed by IEEE Spectrum several years ago, ranged from comic to
“good try.” Among the characters analyzed in the Spectrum article were Scotty, chief engineer aboard
the starship Enterprise; Dr. Brown, the mad inventor who built a time machine out of a DeLorean car
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in Back to the Future; MacGyver, not an engineer but who seemed to have engineering skills; and Gyro
Gearloose, Walt Disney’s engineer/inventor. Most writers perceive engineers as out of the social mainstream and, understandably, they have little idea what we do. Viewers are enticed using characters
who have direct contact with the public, like doctors and lawyers.
The National Academy of Engineering, in a 1986 survey, confirmed that the public perceived engineers as self-absorbed, rigid, and possessing poor social skills. One respondent said engineers were
social misfits with whom he would not want to be trapped in an elevator because they were difficult
to communicate with. Little wonder that entertainment writers steer clear of us except, perhaps, for
comic relief.
To be fair, both Jimmy Stewart (No Highway to the Sky, 1951) and Jack Lemmon (The China Syndrome,
1980) portrayed serious, ethical engineers. But that was decades ago. A recent attempt at science
fiction with a realistic portrayal of engineers is the film Primer, winner of an Alfred P. Sloan prize for
helping advance science and technology. But the writer and director had a leg up — he was formerly
a software engineer.
On the other hand, do we really care that the doctors, lawyers, and cops get all the prime-time
attention? They capture the attention of the viewers in part because they deal with misdeeds by miscreants and other troubled souls. Dr. Sloan of Diagnosis Murder is seldom seen practicing medicine.
Community General Hospital is the scene of weekly mayhem (daily in re-runs), much of it visited on
unfortunate patients. Television characters must be placed in jeopardy to sustain audience interest.
To the entertainment writer, bad news is good news. Accordingly, a TV series on engineers would
have to focus on the foibles of engineers and the engineering failures that result. Do we really want
that?
A more appropriate vehicle for the realistic portrayal of engineers and their work may be the
television documentary. We find the beginnings of such programming on cable channels like The
Discovery Channel and The History Channel. Even so, they are likely to involve subjects with an
“angle” or subject matter that will excite an audience — like technological disasters or war technology — and dismiss or gloss over the engineering options and the personalities involved. Historians
of technology might be encouraged to bring their knowledge to bear in helping write, review, or
otherwise vet such documentaries and thus enhance both factual and emotional accuracy. Furthermore, they could encourage the production of documentaries that expose the technical difficulties
and conflicting personalities involved in bringing to market well-known consumer products, like FM
and color television.
Resources
For more on the public perception of engineers and engineering, see:
• Bell, T.E. and P. Janowski, “The Image Benders,” IEEE Spectrum, October 1988.
• Doble, J. and M. Komarnicki, Report on the Public Perception of Engineers, National Academy
of Engineering, 1986.
• Davis, Lance A. and Robin D. Gibbin, Raising Public Awareness of Engineering, NAE, 2002.
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Irreconcilable Differences?
Why is it that engineers and marketing people so often discount the advantages of talking to one
another? I have observed this in my own career, and colleagues report similar experiences. Sometimes the relationship between engineering and marketing becomes downright adversarial and, no
surprise, counterproductive. Social scientists have earned Ph.D.s studying the phenomenon.
A clash of cultures often seems to be at the root of the problem. It may seem obvious that new product developments are more likely to be successful if R&D and marketing people work together. Yet
engineers may view marketers as middlemen who are not technically qualified to interpret customer
needs. A common belief among engineers is that most marketers are unable to comprehend the
technical niceties of the products engineers develop. Entrepreneur Lawrence Kamm found it to be
typical of a small company that “the entrepreneur is the principal salesman.” This suggests, perhaps,
that we engineers see the direct engineer-customer interface as the ideal arrangement — one that
cannot last, of course, once a company experiences significant growth.
For their part, marketers view us as good analysts, but poor listeners. The Not Invented Here (NIH)
syndrome limits our openness to the thinking of others, they add. A common complaint seems to be
that engineers expect customers to abandon large-scale investments in capital equipment and inplace systems for an incremental improvement that might accrue from adopting “our” new product.
But that’s just one symptom. Traditional corporate structure may foster disharmony. Engineering
is seen as one function. Marketing and sales, another. Separate charters, goals and budgets. One
engineering manager observed “If the powers-that-be [top management] don’t worry about good
partnering of engineers and marketers, it’ll never happen.” The result can be that engineers and
marketers go their separate ways. Joint meetings are viewed as unnecessary, or, at best, as a custom
rather than as a need. Infrequent contact between R&D people and marketing can become the norm,
and newcomers to an organization see no reason to forge bonds that don’t already exist. On the rare
occasion when engineer meets marketer, differences that could be informative may be construed as
disrespectful, and a cycle of disharmony begins.
Another contributing factor may be the matter of credit. When management gives sole credit to
engineers for a successful new product introduction, marketers take umbrage. Likewise, when marketers are lauded to the exclusion of engineers, the latter are offended. The situation is made worse
when neither party makes an attempt to share credit with the other. Such “credit theft,” as Professor
William Souder of the University of Alabama Business School bluntly labels it, results in further diminishment in good communication.
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Differing situations
The more sophisticated the product, the more serious can be the communication gap between its
creators and those who sell it. The more high-tech a product is, the more likely the engineers and
marketers will talk past one another.
The gap is widened for products that have multiple applications and many potential customers.
It is less severe for single-customer, single-application products, as might occur in military systems
procurement. But breakthrough products represent the most dangerous threat to good R&Dmarketing communications, because the variety of possible applications is unknown or speculative.
Engineers tend to discount market research intended to aid in defining markets for breakthrough
products as depending too much on asking customers what they would like. Customers don’t know,
say engineers, because their foresight is constrained by their familiarity with existing products. John
Workman, a marketing professor at the University of North Carolina, reported that even the CEO
of an established supplier of computer equipment and software told his senior managers that “the
biggest danger to us is marketing surveys... Marketers will never come up with a new idea.” Further
discounting customer research, one designer noted that design cycles are significantly longer than
the foresight of customers.
Winners and losers
In a study of nearly 300 new product development projects involving more than 50 companies,
Professor Souder noted that nearly two thirds experienced some degree of engineering/marketing
disharmony. Nearly 70 percent of those projects experiencing severe disharmony were failures. But
where R&D/marketing relationships were classified as harmonious, the new product project failure
rate was only 13 percent.
Once formed, disharmonies are extremely difficult to overcome, the study showed. As in the case
of a disease, prevention is much easier to come by than a cure.
For more about the engineering/marketing interface, see:
Workman, J. P., “Engineering’s Interaction with Marketing Groups in an Engineering-Driven
Organization,” IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 129-139, May 1995.
Souder, W. E., “Managing Relations Between R&D and Marketing in New Product Development Projects,”
Journal of Product Innovation Management, Vol. 5, March 1988.
Gupta, A. K., S. P. Raj, and D. Wilemon, “The R&D-Marketing Interface in High Technology Firms,”
Journal of Product Innovation Management, Vol. 2, March 1985.
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Engineers: Mere Mercenaries?
The standard line goes like this: Engineers are only interested in furthering technical capabilities
and improving design performance. We don’t have much concern for how our resultant systems
will be used in the real world. Or whether our efforts will contribute to the betterment of society, as
compared to merely bringing more dollars to the bottom line. But we have traditionally countered
with the argument that once a technical development is successful, its applications cannot be limited
— for better or worse — by its creators.
Scientists, on the other hand, are often seen as more concerned about the applications of their discoveries. Zellman Warhaft, a Cornell University professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering,
explains this marginalization of engineering by noting that engineers tend to be relegated to
the position of technical servants of corporations, governments and society in general. When he
expressed this view to an MIT professor, the response was, “Yes, we train mercenaries.” Mercenary
might be an acceptable appellation if taken in its obsolete meaning: paid or salaried. But current
usage is in the derogatory vein, namely, serving merely for pay.
While the degree to which engineers can influence the uses of technology is debatable, there are
many who nevertheless believe we should try. Aside from electing to work on projects that have
an obvious positive social value, perhaps the best way we can exert leverage on the uses of our
creations is to influence technology policy at the governmental level. But if engineers are to be
induced to contribute to technology-influenced policy decisions, the value of doing so might best
be emphasized while youngsters are contemplating engineering as a profession, or, a bit later, while
they are undergraduate engineering students.
One modest project, friendly to this objective, is under consideration by the International Council
of Academies of Engineering and Technological Societies. It would inform high school students
about future engineering challenges, which, if solved, would “make a difference and help others
live better — the cool thing to do.” The council plans to elaborate on engineering challenges in
energy and the environment, robotics, communications, security, transportation, climate, and
water availability, among others.
At the university level, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology’s (ABET) EC2000
criteria stress design courses that involve economic, environmental, sustainability, manufacturability,
ethical, health and safety, and social and political parameters. Cornell’s Warhaft, cited earlier, has
himself designed a course, “Components and Systems: Engineering in a Social Context,” that involves
a pair of case studies, one based on ballistic missile defense systems and the other on energy,
transportation and the environment.
32
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Real-World Projects
A pair of programs are designed to involve engineering students and/or young engineers in projects
that help solve pressing societal problems like energy availability and water management, and where
they can observe first hand the beneficial results of their work.
In the first, UNESCO and DaimlerChrysler have partnered to create the Mondialogo Engineering
Award “to generate enthusiasm among young recruits to the engineering profession and to provide
intercultural dialogue and cooperation between educational engineering institutions in both
developing and developed countries.” In 2005, an international jury assessed proposals from
419 multinational teams representing 1700 young engineers and students from 79 countries.
Twenty-one proposals were selected for awards on the basis of sustainability, feasibility and
projected costs. Among the approved projects were ones for land mine detection, solar energy
for health centers in Mali, and a photovoltaic telecommunications center in Malaysia.
Engineers Without Borders conducts the second, an international network that links humanitarian
organizations having a similar mission: to partner with disadvantaged communities to improve their
quality of life through education and implementing sustainable engineering projects. Among several
projects of the U.S. branch of Engineers Without Borders are the following:
• The University of Colorado partnered in a project initiated by the U.S. Ambassador to Mauritania
to install a photovoltaic pump for use in the water supply in the village of Bir Moghrein. Traveling
18 hours through the Sahara desert, students, faculty and industry participants contributed to the
successful project.
• A team from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is developing an inexpensive
charge controller for a pedal power generator and a low-cost inverter circuit to drive compact
fluorescent lamps for use in Maharashta, India.
• A project initiated by Case Western Reserve University will correct inadequacies in a medical
clinic emergency power system in Los Gauricanos, Dominican Republic.
• A team from Rowan University is currently assigned a project to develop natural gas and
geothermal resources for heating, aquaculture and greenhouses to alleviate economic and
employment hardships of the Native American population in Cheyenne River, South Dakota.
Whether those exposed to commendable programs like these will lapse into a passive mode as their
careers advance, or whether they will sustain ways to employ technology for the public good and
help curtail its ill-considered uses remains to be seen.
33
Resources
For more on the societal implications of engineering, see:
• Warhaft, Z., “Teaching Engineering in a Social Context,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol.
24, (Issue 2), pp. 32-39, (Summer 2005).
• Newberry, B., “Engineering Globalization: Oxymoron or Opportunity?” IEEE Technology and Society
Magazine, vol. 24, (Issue 3), pp. 8-15, (Fall 2005).
• Layton, E.T., The Revolt of the Engineers, Johns Hopkins Press, 1986.
• Fouke, J. (Ed.), Engineering Tomorrow, Wiley-IEEE Press, 1999.
• Engineers Without Borders-USA [www.ewb-usa.org]
• Mondialogo [www2.mondialogo.org]
• International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Societies [www.caets.org]
34
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Ghosts
I recently attended a reunion of crew members and airmen who served aboard a World War II aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. San Jacinto. Sailors have a love affair with the first ship on which they served.
This one, an Independence-class light fleet carrier, after the war was transferred to the reserve fleet,
and did not succumb to the shipbreaker’s torch until 1972. Seven of her eight sisters were already
gone, but one, the U.S.S. Cabot, was still afloat in 2000. The attention of historians and crew members
then turned to her, in hopes of saving her as a naval museum. She was declared a National Historic
Landmark. Though millions of dollars were allocated and/or donated for the purpose, government
bureaucracy and salvagers’ greed were too much to overcome. She languished in a Texas ship canal
while vandals and salvagers picked her bones. In 2002, photographed from above, she was a mere
skeleton, and trucks were seen convoying her torched remains to someplace in Mexico. Now all nine
carriers are ghosts — living only in the memories of their surviving crew members.
A Ghost in the Making
The image of my own ghost ship, the San Jac, was in my thoughts as I returned from the reunion,
only to find Bob Lucky’s IEEE Spectrum column on the likely demise of the splendiferous Bell Laboratories Research facility in Holmdel, N.J. The Eero Saarinen-designed edifice, now owned by Lucent,
once employed 6,000. By Lucky’s estimate, 1,200 or so may remain, and Lucent may put the building
on the market, complete with its spacious campus and reflecting pond.
I toured the six-story research palace at the height of its glory, and remember well the glass exterior
and impressive open foyer extending skyward and surrounded by numerous specialized laboratories, many of which I was privileged to visit. So I was sympathetic to Bob’s nostalgic fondness for the
facility, which he saw for the first time as a new engineering graduate even before the structure was
complete, and where he worked for the next 30 years.
If the Holmdel lab, including its 470 acres of landscaped grounds, is sold to a developer it may become another ghost, hallowed only in the memories of those who once labored there in inventive
splendor.
A Happy Ghost
My own first job as a new engineering graduate was in a venerable Newburyport, Massachusetts, mill
building erected in 1880. It had been acquired by Hytron Radio and Electronics Corp. (later the CBS
Electronics Division) in 1941 for the manufacture of proximity fuse components and radio receiving
tubes for the military, and later, television receiving tubes and cathode-ray tubes. Though I went on
to work in the brand-new headquarters facilities in Danvers and the Minoru Yamasaki-designed semiconductor plant in Lowell, my heart remained with the old mill building. When CBS closed it in 1959,
I worried. What would become of it? A number of small enterprises successively occupied it until,
finally, it was abandoned. Upon my visits to Newburyport, I would cautiously approach the block in
which it stood, afraid I would find a town parking lot in its stead. Or worse, what might a developer
have replaced it with?
35
But on my most recent visit, lo and behold, it had been turned into a luxury condominium (“The
Courtyard”) by a sensitive architect who had retained its classic exterior intact and incorporated
its original massive mill beams into a central atrium easily worthy of recognition by McGraw-Hill’s
Architectural Record. When I introduced myself to one of the residents, we discovered mutual interests and are collaborating on a history of the building. I am now partitioning a scale drawing of the
building’s three floors to show its various laboratories, offices and manufacturing departments as
they existed in the 1950s. As I walk through the building today, I can envision a colleague at my side,
discussing the problems of decades past. In one of the apartments, I readily transport myself back in
time, peering at a ‘scope waveform in a long-dismantled darkened screen room.
Why is it that we treasure ghosts like these with great fondness? Some of us are fascinated by the
history of technology, industrial archaeology and the preservation of artifacts. But I think it goes
beyond that, having much to do with the colleagues with whom we were privileged to work and
the accomplishments that we were fortunate to take part in within these memorable, nurturing
environments.
Whatever the reason, our ghosts linger in our subconscious, darting forth full blown at unscheduled
moments to evoke times and events we are glad we did not miss.
Resources
For more on ghosts and ghosts-to-be:
Technology and Society, the quarterly published by the Society for the History of Technology.
IA, the biannual published by the Society for Industrial Archeology.
D. Christiansen, “The Last Survivor (U.S.S. Cabot),” p. 81, The Saga of the San Jac: The Aircraft Carrier
U.S.S. San Jacinto (CVL-30) in World War II, privately published, 2005.
C. K. Hyde, “Ruin and Restoration: The Fates of Two Historic Auto Plants in Detroit,” Society for Industrial
Archeology Newsletter, Vol. 34, No. 3,
Summer 2005.
R. W. Lucky, “Lab for Sale,” IEEE Spectrum, p. 92, North American edition, September 2005.
36
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