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Hydrogen Properties for Energy Research (HYPER) Laboratory Cool. Fuel.

Algorithms vs. heuristics and TEDx talks

WSU is gearing up for a 2nd attempt at running a TEDx event. I was lucky enough to give a talk at last year’s event:

In the process of researching and developing the talk, I dreamed up an interesting question: If TED is indeed where conventional wisdom goes to die, and TED becomes conventional wisdom, then what happens to TED?

While the question was posed in fun, and TED talks are a lot of fun, there is a serious side to this. TED does indeed have it’s own » More …

Why the students act like, well, students

…because you treat them like students and not professionals.

One summer I was lamenting to my friends Dan Bukvich and P.K. the finish of a high school student who worked in my lab as part of the Army’s REAP program. The summer had been fine, just fine. I knew we were capable of much more. Here’s  the dialogue:

Me: “How much can you expect from a high school student?”

Dan: “Did you treat them like a high school student?”

Me: “Damn.”

(Mental note: they are soon to be professional engineers and can begin whenever they choose to. Don’t treat them like students. Definitely don’t ever … » More …

Why WSU instead of higher ranked schools?

Well the rankings are out again, WSU’s College of Engineering ranked 76th out of 215 for 2015 by US News and World Reports for best engineering graduate schools. Ironically, this ranking actually became the lifeblood of US News in the late 1990’s due to popularity. The methodology behind the ranking, no surprise, has evolved over the years due to complaints.

The major score component to the US News rankings is a whopping 25% from a “peer survey”- they send a list of blank lines to program directors around the country who are then tasked with listing the best schools in their area. No surprise, … » More …

Explaining ullage volume collapse

Jim Lovell is famously quoted for saying, “There’s one whole side of that spacecraft missing” after a routine collapse of the liquid oxygen tank ullage volume caused an explosion that infamously rocked Apollo 13. While the explosion was the result of an overpowered motor switch, the ensuing disaster underscores the importance of ullage volume collapse.

Ullage is defined as the volume of vapor above a liquid in a sealed storage tank. Ullage volume collapse is the process of stirring the contents of a cryogenic liquid tank to reduce pressure. That sentence alone should give pause to those of you who have taken thermodynamics.

Not head … » More …

We’re all ambiverts to some degree

Susan Cain’s TED talk entitled The Power of Introverts came up recently (thanks John) and presents a great opportunity to merge many of my prior posts on spiral memes with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) that many of us experienced as youths.

To provide some context, in 1962 Isabel Briggs and her spouse Clarence Myers co-created MBTI as an associative test for the Theory of Psychological type originated by the Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1921. MBTI seeks to inform a person of their “personality type” through four measures:

Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I)
Sensing … » More …

The HOW of a Hydrogen Organized World

In 1964 Nikolai Kardashev, a Soviet astronomer, postulated a method of measuring a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on energy utilization. The resulting Kardashev scale describes these civilizations (summarized by me):

Type 0– Civilization harnesses organically produced and derived sources (fossil fuels, food, wood, etc.) that exist on scales comparable to individuals and small cultures within the society.
Type 1– Civilization evolves to world level energy produced and derived sources (nuclear, wind, solar, etc.) that exist on scales requiring mass efforts of an entire country and world to achieve. The energy sources have potential to simultaneously move effectively beyond the home planet … » More …

Adventures with Statistical Entropy

“The future belongs to those who can manipulate entropy; those who understand but energy will be only accountants. . . . The early industrial revolution involved energy, but the automatic factory of the future is an entropy revolution.” ~Frederic Keffer (~1900?)

Ludwig Boltzmann discovered the nature of entropy. Boltzmann was a physicist from Vienna. His first major contribution to science was derivation of the ideal gas law Pv = RT from purely statistical based arguments – no measurements involved, just free atoms modeled as billiard balls in a container with a statistical distribution of characteristics. This is illustrated in Figure 1.

molecular ratchet example» More …

Evolving Professionalism in Engineering Education

Last Friday in my Systems Design class something incredibly wonderful emerged from the students. It was the first time I’d observed this in an engineering course. In short, it was professionalism– an evolved form of professionalism that I will attempt to describe here. But first, some definitions for context.

For many years I taught “professionalism” in Experimental Design via the standard US-Engineering way, starting with the Attributes of a Profession:

Work that requires sophisticated skills, the use of judgement, and the exercise of discretion. Also, the work is not routine or capable of being mechanized.
Membership in the profession requires extensive formal education, not … » More …

Campbell’s Law and performance evaluations

It’s professional review time here in Academia and I’m engrossed in my now annual routine of pondering the meaning of the statistics we all use to justify ourselves. Enter Campbell’s Law:

“The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Campbell’s original paper can be found here. It’s a similar concept to Goodhart’s law:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to … » More …