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 …

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 Cryogenic Society of America just released a great piece acknowledging the writers of the TV show ‘Criminal Minds’ for accurately describing the difference between cryonics-the pseudoscience of freezing bodies, and cryogenics-the study of matter below 120 K. Read the full article here.

“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.

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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 …

In a prior post I showed that Bloom’s taxonomy, an ok tool for scaffolding student learning, was fundamentally limited to the legalistic-performance shift occurring in society when the taxonomy was developed. I then presented a follow up taxonomy for the performance-communitarian shift that identified important learning ideas that Bloom’s taxonomy doesn’t address, and helps to match our current societal memetic shift. The next step is the community-systemic shift that is already happening in societal niches, areas … » More …

I’m teaching a junior level engineering course and the question was raised as to what units we should be using. Here’s my units rant:
I guarantee you will solve your problems faster, with fewer mistakes if you use base SI as your units system. It’s the only completely self-consistent unit system. Here are the steps:
1) Whatever units your problem is setup as, convert everything immediately to base SI: kg, N, s, K, Pa, m
2) Solve the problem in base SI, check for unit issues with a program like EES
3) Convert the solution back to whatever units you and … » More …

One of my good friends was talking to me about his new class the other day. He was lamenting the amount of work it is responding to homework questions of his 60+ students posted to a discussion forum. I asked him whether the students help each other out in the forum, and he said no, they wait for him to answer. To which I responded, “Don’t feed the bears!”

Having discussion forums for student questions is a great approach for engineering education, one that Chelsea clued me into when I first started teaching. The reason … » More …