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Finding Better Ways To Pour Coffee

Ryan — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:03:01 +0000

courtesy: David Yanko of Virtual Saskatchewan

This blog is about “finding better ways to pour coffee.” At the risk of sounding like a bureaucratically-generated cliche, it’s a little like a more focused “think outside the box,” which I hate. Allow me to explain what I mean, starting with a quick story.

A few years ago, I walked into my office break room. It was early morning and the first pot of coffee was brewing. The coffee pot was about one-third full, so we had a few more minutes before it was finished. My eyes were still glazed over as my brain had not been woken up by the usual caffeine jolt that it requires. It was then that I noticed a co-worker holding his mug underneath the coffee maker spout, directly receiving the brewed coffee. Not a big deal, I thought, he’s just bypassing the temporary holding pot and putting the freshly brewed coffee one step closer to his stomach. Lots of people do this. But then, in an effort to get that caffeine nectar even more quickly, he took the one-third full coffee pot and began pouring it into his mug.

At this point, he’s filling his mug from two sources simultaneously. This took a bit of dexterity, as it is a bit difficult to position the pot at the appropriate pouring angle while still keeping the receiving mug underneath the still-brewing spout. My co-worker had mastered the technique, and he was sipping our cheap, crappy office coffee in no time. I chuckled/marvelled at the maneuver, and had to ask when he got so impatient that he needed his coffee so quickly. He laughed, and told me that a former employee at the company had shown him the trick long ago. Whenever he got to the pot before the coffee was done brewing, he applied his learned skill and reaped the oh-so-important benefit of getting caffeine as early as humanly possible.

At the time, I thought nothing of it. Other than replicating the technique myself, it didn’t cross my mind until recently during an interview. While interviewing prospective candidates, I often ask simple questions just to get the ball rolling, i.e. – What have you done at your current job that you are most proud of? For engineers, what have you implemented that has been universally adopted by the company? Suddenly, the coffee pouring jumped into my head. It occurred to me: I need innovative coffee pourers. Not only do I need innovative coffee pourers, but I need someone who most efficiently pours the coffee.

The point here, and I think this applies not only to engineers but to all professions, high-skill jobs demand complex problem solving. Finding the most creative problem solvers is paramount to leveraging the most competitive advantage in the marketplace. Back in college at the quarterly job fairs, a very successful software company was a frequent visitor. They were looking for the best and brightest programmers, but you would never have guessed it from their 1-on-1 evaluations. They handed each prospective candidate a packet that closely resembled an IQ test. There wasn’t one question about C++ syntax, or any questions on algorithms, or even your quintessential programming problems (write a function to evaluate factorials using recursion). Each question was a brain teaser, riddle, or trick question (three men are on one side of the river, and they all need to get across). The goal was to find the candidates that came up with the best, most innovative solutions. Year after year, this company pulled the brightest kids out of my school.

Now, I would never advocate that you simply hand a candidate some riddles and choose based on the responses alone. The example is well-suited for fresh hires right out of college where the employer can evaluate GPAs, professor recommendations, graduate research, publications, etc. And, I’m certain the follow-up interviews would be purely technical. What I am saying is that hiring managers should place a lot of emphasis on how candidates attack and ultimately solve technical problems. You may just find someone that pours coffee better than everyone else.

What kinds of unusual solutions have you run into in your day-to-day work? I’m really interested in hearing the fun, mundane office-life innovations that people have discovered. I’d love to hear more “coffee pot” stories!

Electrical Engineering Blog – Guest Post

Francois — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:33:55 +0000

This is a guest post by the moderator of the Electrical Engineering Blog. It’s a great blog going into the technical details of many interesting and useful facets of electrical engineering and design.

Electrical engineering BLOG was launched in April 2009 by a group of enthusiasts in the field of electrical installation and energy management (mainly based on IEC standards).

With these passionate people, we have created an environment for collaboration and exchange, and we wish to use this Blog to share our current experience as well as our questions about the future – to elicit reactions from others and to discover new concrete ideas, as well as technical and practical tips.

This blog is not a space to promote products and services.

We believe that we can attract and involve both designers and consultants; suppliers, customers, independent experts, and institutions.

Today there are 11 categories of articles, including 6 in energy efficiency (a major topic for everybody) but also 5 categories on more traditional issues such as electrical distribution and design software. We also feature a Web Tips category, brought to the site by a young web pro.

Our blog is open to trade links with other blogs, forums, and sites provided they are of high quality and relevant. It is an English speaking Blog, but so far we have many exchanges with Asia and Europe; all countries are more than welcome.

You can subscribe to the newsletter that is sent out every month. Go to top of the home page and click on “subscribe”. To post an article, visit our website at http://engineering.electrical-equipment.org/electrical-engineering-conditions or email me at engineering@electrical-equipment.org. Commenting on a posting is simple and can be done without any prior validation.

François B.
Moderator

What other great engineering blogs do you read?

Sustainable Energy: Best. Infographic. Ever.

Ryan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:48:32 +0000

Scientific American has created a ridiculously interesting infographic on sustainable energy sources. The article outlines a plan to get the world off of fossil fuels in 20 years. That’s 100% clean, sustainable energy by 2030. Although not feasible for a number of economic and political reasons, it is still damn interesting to see how the authors (Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi) plan this out. Give it a good read, there are a few surprises in there, particularly re: wind vs. solar.

Here is a wind turbine diagram (courtesy: www.techienation.com) and some other wind turbine pictures to get your green juices flowing:

General Atomics Makes a Very, Very Large Gun

Ryan — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:58:45 +0000

Above is how a basic info graphic explaining how a railgun works. Below is the General Atomic’s new Blitzer Railgun’s test apparatus.

From the PopSci article: “railguns mount the projectile on two magnetized rails (hence the name), which then propel the shell out of the muzzle using electrical conductivity.”

This stuff really fires me up. It was Faraday’s Law of Induction, Lenz’s Law, and the rest of Maxwell’s equations that made me love physics, ultimately driving me towards electrical engineering.

Check out this video demonstration from the Discovery Channel about a Navy railgun prototype:

Widetronix Uses Tritium For 25-Year Power Source

Ryan — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:33:40 +0000

The image above is a simple betavoltaic graphic from medgadget. It shows the beta particles creating an electric field over a pn-junction diode, biasing the device, which thereby causes conduction.

It has been some time since betavoltaic batteries have been used. Lithium Ion has been the battery of choice for awhile, probably because it isn’t, you know, radioactive. Widetronix is looking to change that with its Tritium-based, navy-funded technology. By using more efficient semiconductor materials, they have revamped the self-charging betavoltaic battery.

These tiny power sources are said to last for 25 years! Of course, this technology only works for devices that require minimal amounts of current draw (think pacemakers and small sensors).

Check this VentureBeat article for more on these tiny batteries.

A Stadium Full of Solar Power: Taiwan National Stadium Pictures

Ryan — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:28:45 +0000

We’ve been posting some “green” pictures recently here at Industrial Interface. So, in keeping with theme, check out these amazing pictures of Taiwan National Stadium. The entire roof is covered in at least 8,844 solar panels! In addition to powering 75% of the stadium’s energy needs when in use, it also contributes to the local power grid during times of stadium inactivity.

Here are some photos courtesy of Gizmodo:

And more from Gadget Ophilia:

Dubai’s Technosphere is HUGE

Ryan — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:48:47 +0000

Here is the latest construction monstrosity to grace Dubai’s desert landscape. The Technosphere is built to test new green sustainable energy sources and simulate future climates. Photo Courtesy of VentureBeat. See the VentureBeat article for more details:

Here is a picture of what the inside may look like, courtesy of MENA Infrastructure:

And the prototype at night, also from MENA Infrastructure:

NASA Picture of the Day: Saturn and Moons

Ryan — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:48:53 +0000

Sweet picture of Saturn and Tethys above (one of Saturn’s moons). Thanks to NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, we get to see amazing pictures like this one. It almost looks fake, doesn’t it? I never get tired of these NASA pictures of the day. For more space pictures, follow NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Here are a couple other Saturn pictures from NASA, all courtesy of the Cassini probe. The one on the bottom is a great shot of Saturn’s Titan.

Saturn, Tethys, and Titan

Saturn and Titan

Titan

Here’s a chart of major moons in our solar system to give some perspective on what we’re looking at here. Check out Tethys in the first picture above and then look at it next to our moon and Earth.

Innovative Engineering–Years of Intense Study and Engineering Experience

T. Brian Jones — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:49:51 +0000

There I Fixed It is a tremendous site where users submit images of innovative engineering feats. These range from drawing a warm bath over a camp fire to roasting a dozen hotdogs on the fingers of a metal rake to duct taping flashlights to front bumper of a car.

I’ve embedded a few of the images below to give you a good idea of the genius that is presented here. This site is both hysterical and inspirational. Although there are tremendous displays of stupidity that we can all laugh at, there is something noble about using a little duct tape and a few Pringles cans to repair your engine. Enjoy!

I once fixed my friend’s car stereo with a paperclip and a piece of gum. True story. (It was just a loose wire, but the gum and paperclip insured the connection held up and really perplexed my friends.)

I LOVE LEGOS! Raise your hand if you have some in your house as an adult and they don’t belong to your children.

A little conservation is always good too.

Images courtesy of There, I Fixed It.

What stupid, funny, creative engineering feats have you accomplished?

Top Ten Ways Being An Engineer Improves Your Daily Routine

Ryan — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:06:52 +0000

10. Time Management and Planning
This is only #10 because I think lots of professions train us to be effective time managers.

9. Being Logical
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard two people arguing about something and thought, “That doesn’t make any sense. Actually, neither one of them make any sense.” Lawyers run into this thought constantly as well.

8. Puzzles and Strategic Games
Everything we do at work all day is a puzzle of some sort. Critical thinking to solve complex technical problems is what makes us engineers.

7. Fixing Things
This one applies to most engineers, just not me personally. I am many things, but ‘handyman’ is not one of them.

6. Basic Arithmetic
All engineering disciplines require strong mathematical backgrounds, so it stands to reason that using math every day makes us good at everything from doing taxes to calculating sales tax and tips.

5. Fantasy Sports/Statistics
Take one look at the rules of my 10-team fantasy baseball keeper league. Trust me, the engineering skills come in handy when trying to create the best statistical team possible.

4. Maps and Driving

Engineers don’t get lost. Ever.

3. Personal Finances

The math and organizational skills definitely come in handy here.

2. Setting Up All-Things-Electronic
This goes hand-in-hand with #7, but this one resonates with me personally. Whether it’s computers, tvs, stereos, mp3 players, or clock radios, the engineer knows where the cords go.

1. Making EVERYTHING More Efficient
It’s in the job description to optimize. Whether it’s making lines go faster, appliances save energy, or taking less trips to carry groceries upstairs, engineers naturally look for ways to make everything more efficient.

How has being an engineer helped you with routine tasks?

Top Ten Things That Annoy Engineers

Ryan — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:57:43 +0000

10. The Phone (see our post “10 Reasons Engineers Hate the Phone“)

9. Multiple Office Sites – As if things weren’t complicated enough, I have to try to communicate and solve complex issues over the phone and through NetMeeting, WebEx, and VNC? Maybe if I am especially lucky, I’ll get to travel back and forth for months at a time!

8. Executive speak – Nothing quite like a load of BS from the VP about how great everything is going. Or worse… when it’s quiet, you know it’s REALLY bad.

7. Too Many Bosses – Answering to the boss’s boss, or the boss’s boss’s boss, that really isn’t so bad. There is even a chance to make a solid impression on the higher-ups. But answering to the boss’s colleagues? This can get frustrating. Especially when I know credit for extra work won’t be coming my way.

6. Useless Meetings – Hey, I have an idea. Let’s all meet and discuss the status of our very important work over, and over, and over, and over. Ugh. If what I’m hearing from everyone else doesn’t have any impact on MY contribution to the design, my time is better spent, you know, contributing.

5. Repetitive and Lazy Questions – Repetitive questions (often from other design groups) with obviously accessible answers are annoying. Beware! These questions often come with a price tag: work ownership.

4. Bad IT – I’m complaining for others here. I’ve been flat-out spoiled by fantastic IT. I’ve never had the joy of losing emails, OS crashes, disk reboots, and slow, old computers that can’t get the job done.

3. Tools That Don’t Work – Oh segmentation fault, how come you never show up when I actually HAVE time to waste?

2. The Fear of Blame – Very motivating, yet very toxic when ingrained in company engineering culture.
Teaser: Full blog post coming on this SOON!

1. Marketing – Non-technical marketing decisions/timelines are, without question, the most annoying thing to engineers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat and thought, “They (marketing) think we can do WHAT in HOW LONG? That’s funny. Boy, they are in for a ruuuude awakening.” Following this thought is an endless stream of phone calls, useless meetings with too many bosses, truckloads of blame, and a plethora of stupid questions, all in an effort to justify why schedules are DEFINITELY going to slip to folks who will never understand why. ARGHHHH!

What annoys you while on the job? What can be done to change it?

Cultivate Innovation: What Companies, Managers, and Engineers Can Do

Ryan — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:28:36 +0000

In past blog posts (here and here), I discussed change in the high-tech design workplace. Today’s blog is about innovation: the driving force for profit in this market. Companies who deliver the newest, best-performing, most-reliable products to market are almost always the most successful. This requires an efficient company streamlined to foster, cultivate, and encourage designers to come up with cutting-edge ideas on a daily basis.

1) “Spread The Wealth” – Company Culture

From a company perspective, division of resources is the key to improving design. Listen to a report from a CFO, and you will hear how internal company costs are split between administration, sales and marketing, and R&D. It is unreasonable to expect a company to spend 99% of its money on R&D in order to get the best designs possible. That is an academic exercise meant for university research. The company’s goal is profit, which requires significant overhead and dollars put towards customer development and sales.

However, the company can absolutely allocate its R&D budget so that the newest and best products come from in-house. Dedicating engineering teams to design flow improvements, encouraging engineers to “cross-train” with other departments, budgeting resources (money AND time) for software training, upgrading machines regularly, and, of course, dedicated top-level research to new product lines. Companies that wisely allocate these resources while maintaining a responsible bottom line have the best chance for innovation success.

2) “Follow The Leader” – Management Techniques

The best engineering managers are the ones that efficiently distribute their employees’ time. In my experience, the technical managers that encourage and/or demand a consistent culture of technical learning produce the best engineers that ultimately make the most strides in technical innovation (see my post titled “Why Engineers Resist Change & 4 Ways To Change Their Minds“). Now, certainly a careful balance must be struck here. After all, products have to be designed for profits to be made. Deadlines must be hit, work must be complete, and measurements must be accurate. The key is allocating enough time for learning, while at the same time hitting those stringent time constraints. If time is too tight, it’s obvious that the product comes first and foremost. But the incapacity to learn new design techniques, improve the design flow, and/or cross-train with other groups in the company is a significant sacrifice that should be communicated up the management chain of command. Future innovation will suffer if the team can not improve.

Another potential pitfall is the manager expecting too much from his or her team. In any high-tech industry, there are significant pressures to get design-to-market as quickly as possible. Smart managers know that the team must improve itself concurrently with the product development. (Note: there are ways to cultivate a learning culture while working on a product. Perhaps I’ll address this in another blog.) It’s important not to stretch the team too thin when they’re already working 80+ hour weeks on a project. For one, you can quickly drive away your best talent. In addition, when teams are working that hard on a project, the chances of absorbing substantial information and applying it later to design techniques are minimal.

3) “Down in the Trenches” – Engineers

Bottom line, it is an engineer’s job to innovate. (see my other post titled “When Engineers Should Embrace Change“) At all times, an engineer should be striving to design, create, improve, and optimize. Whether it is making a microchip smaller, a bridge stronger, or a drill consuming less power, it is the consummate goal of those in the trenches to push the envelope and make his or her product better than the guys next door. It seems counter-intuitive, but routine design flows can often facilitate and encourage creative thinking.

Say, for example, an electrical engineer is designing a low-noise amplifier circuit for a wireless phone. If he is unorganized, follows different design techniques at every step of the flow, uses the design software inefficiently, and/or measures circuit performance at unmindful points in the design, how can he be assured that tweaks to the design are actually optimizing the circuit? Engineers with well-defined, organized design flows have an advantage in measuring data and ultimately improving their design in the end. Also, engineers with intimate knowledge of the flow itself (more than just “users”) see opportunities in the details of their routine that can be revamped and rewritten. Engineers that dig into this level of detail are the ones that stand the best chance of creating the next great product.

How do you see innovation cultivated or stifled at your company?

(cartoon courtesy SkyDeckCartoons)

Afrigadget: Solving everyday problems with African ingenuity.

T. Brian Jones — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 03:54:06 +0000

It’s amazing to see how people can make incredible improvements to everything around them often with very limited resources. One blog that consistently appeals to people (especially other engineers) because of this is Afrigadget. This blog highlights innovations in rural African communities, both by local people and outside inventors. These innovations are often surprisingly simple but always technical, and never fail to impress. Engineers of all types and from all locations can learn from the simplicity and creativity highlighted in this blog.

Some of my Favorites

A shopkeeper has recycled old sandals to hang the door to his shop. This creates a sturdy mount that is hinged and spring-loaded by the flexible footwear to ensure the front door closes behind his customers.

Children have developed a method for making soccer balls out of plastic bags and other trash. Not only does this facilitate an entertaining and healthy activity but it helps to clean up and recycle trash, highlighting the effectiveness of non-traditional forms of recycling. Every little bit helps, even on a small scale like this.

This post’s story is my all time favorite for it’s relative simplicity and incredible potential. Getting fresh water to remote communities is a tremendous problem all over the world. So, someone developed an affordable water tank and put the pump inside a children’s merry-go-round. Here’s a link to the international organization, Play Pumps.

These stories remind us of the effectiveness often achieved through simplicity and remind us of the good that can be accomplished when creative minds are applied to the right problems. This blog was featured in Time’s “50 Best Websites 2008.”

Do you follow or author any blogs that would be interesting or useful to engineers and designers in manufacturing? Share them in the comments below. Contact me if you’d like me to review yours (brian@industrialinterface.com).

No related posts.

Share Interesting Resources, Technologies, Websites, Blogs, Articles, News …

T. Brian Jones — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:29:04 +0000

All of us at Industrial Interface are techies at heart. Most of us are also engineers. We love to hear and read about the same things you do. If you’ve got something that you think other engineers, designers, and industrial suppliers will enjoy reading about or seeing, share it with us! We’ll try to share it with our readers.

You can also share with us via our Twitter feeds. Help4Engineers is our feed for engineers and designer and TechSalesLeads is our feed for industrial suppliers and salespeople.

Contact me at (brian@industrialinterface.com) about anything you want.

A blog for Industrial Interface

T. Brian Jones — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:55:47 +0000

We’ve been debating starting a blog for quite some time at Industrial Interface. So why have we started one now?

Three reasons:

Working as engineers and suppliers in the manufacturing industry and researching and building Industrial Interface has provided us with a lot of information about how engineers and suppliers use the internet to do their jobs. We’ve always shared some of this information on our main site but we want to do more with it. Why not share it in a more dynamic environment where we can all collaborate.
We’ve been using Twitter to share some of this information for the past few months via an account called Help4Engineers (a feed for engineers) and an account called TechSalesLeads (a feed for suppliers). We have had a really good response from our followers and have found that we often want to share more information than you can in a tweet.
This blog will hopefully help spread the word about Industrial Interface and help grow the site into the powerful tool we want it to be for Engineers, Designers, and Suppliers.

Through this blog, we plan to share all sorts of knowledge about the online world for the manufacturing industry. We want to talk about the vast collection of online tools that engineers and suppliers use to do their jobs better. We also plan to keep you up to date with our company, Industrial Interface. We look forward to sharing with our community, and we hope this blog will be a great resource for everyone who reads it.

Learn More:
How Industrial Interface is helping Engineers and Designers.
How Suppliers are benefiting from Industrial Interface.

T. Brian Jones
President & Founder
http://IndustrialInterface.com
http://twitter.com/help4engineers
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tbrianjones