Lee Teschler's Editorial Comment

Why johnny can't do algebra revisited

Lee_Teschler — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:08:44 GMT

Our recent editorial on the problem of high school math being taught by unqualified teachers (http://machinedesign.com/article/why-johnny-cant-do-algebra-0925) continues to get a lot of comments. Some of them, remarkably, are from teachers who see nothing wrong with algebra classes taught by a gym teacher having no training in math. So it was personally gratifying to see a recent article in the Wall Street Journal called 'Why we're failing math and science.' In it Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, is asked what it will take to get the American educational system up to the level of some other developed countries in terms of math and science. Here is part of his answer:

"The most important thing is to bring to K-12 education college graduates who excel in math and science. Those countries that are doing best are recruiting their K-12 teachers from the top third of their college graduates. America is recruiting our teachers generally from the bottom third, and when you go into our high-needs communities, we're clearly underserving them."

WSJ: How do you explain that? It doesn't seem to be a function of money. We spend more than any of these other countries.

KLEIN: "We spend it irrationally. My favorite example is, I pay teachers, basically, based on length of service and a few courses that they take. And I can't by contract pay math and science teachers more than I would pay other teachers in the system, even though at different price points I could attract very different people. We've got to use the money we have much more wisely, attract talent, reward excellence............."

The entire article, as well as some videos of the discussion, can be found here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704754804574491180197671224.html

Not Enough Juice: Reality and Alternative Energy

Lee_Teschler — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:43:21 GMT

On the eve of the recently completed Wind Power Conference, Siemens Energy put out a press release trumpeting an order for 33 of its 2.3-MW wind turbines. The units are destined for a wind farm in North Dakota expected to have a generating capacity of up to 75 MW.

You might think a wind farm with 33 wind turbines would make a significant dent in the demand for fossil fuels. But its contribution as a green-power source only comes into perspective when considering the power needs of a big city. Peter Huber, a Manhattan Institute scholar and one-time MIT associate professor, has figured this out. He calculates that meeting New York City’s total energy demand would take about 13,000 wind turbines the size of the Siemens units going into North Dakota, all spinning at top speed. And to meet the Big Apple’s peak energy demands, you’d need about 50,000 of them sprinkled in dispersed locales to give yourself enough reserve margins of power.

Huber’s point in making this calculation is that there is a lot of ignorance floating around about how difficult it is to get a large amount of power out of wind and, for that matter, out of solar cells. And though exhibitors at the Wind Power confab displayed a lot of interesting technology, there was nothing there that invalidated Huber’s projections about getting enough juice from green-power sources to run cities.

Huber also points out that power would still be expensive even if the 50-story-high turbines themselves were free. Proponents of wind generation explain that the technology continues to improve, with more reliable generators, gearboxes, and ancillary equipment coming off the drawing boards. Nevertheless, the infrastructure costs of maintaining wind installations are significant and will remain so. There probably isn’t even enough government subsidy money to make wind more than a niche power source.

Companies supplying the wind industry understand this, but are enthusiastic about wind anyway. It is easy to see why: Capital-equipment manufacturers I spoke to all said their business is essentially dead except for wind-energy contracts.

The facts about wind power are all the more sobering in light of recent proposals to make coal-generated electricity more expensive through cap-and-trade climate bills. Backers of such legislation see it as a way of promoting green-power alternatives. Ironically, the more-likely outcome will be to make the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil. Even if wind farms were on an economic par with coal-fired generators, it would take time to erect enough turbines to make a difference.

For example, Siemens figures it will take about two years to get its 33 wind turbines up and running in North Dakota. At that rate, the 13,000 turbines necessary to meet New York’s average needs would be ready in the year 2797. In the meantime, utilities will be burning more petroleum products to avoid passing onerous carbon taxes onto ratepayers.

Of course, there is an easy way around burning coal or buying foreign oil for electricity, and it doesn’t involve dedicating thousands of acres to wind farming or solar cells. Nuclear power is clean and compact, and it is safely used in countries ranging from France to Japan. It’s just not politically correct, at least in the U.S. But unlike some of the alternatives, it is not a green bridge to nowhere, either. -- Leland Teschler, Editor

Climbing a Ladder of Manufacturing Jobs

Lee_Teschler — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:46:15 GMT

It’s always interesting to review the results of our annual engineering salary survey. We showcased the highlights in our last issue, but this year some of the most-noteworthy findings only emerged as we combed through the data to update our online engineering-salary calculator.

The statistic that sprang out at us was the relatively high salaries reported by workers who are normally thought to be on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. In several parts of the country, engineering related workers who had only an associate’s degree or just a high-school diploma reported earning $50,000 annually and higher, plus benefits. Such compensation doesn’t seem half bad for laborers having no more than two years of formal training past grade 12. And we should point out that, in this era of low-wage/low-skill service-industry jobs, this is income earned without hustling for tips.

The survey results reminded us how jobs in manufacturing can benefit the economy, and particularly how they can benefit minorities. Manufacturing jobs have long been a way for those with perseverance and good work habits to enter the middle class. Unfortunately, econometric research has also found that employment rates for African- American males have mirrored declines in manufacturing employment, particularly in the 1980s when deindustrialization was really gathering steam.

Our survey results likewise seem to validate the findings of Katherine Newman, a sociologist who wrote a book called Chutes and Ladders – Navigating the low-wage labor market. In Ladders, Newman tracked down workers she’d interviewed a decade before when they were toiling for minimum wage in a Harlem fast-food joint. She wanted to see what, if any, economic progress those people had made in the decade of the 1990s.

It turns out that over 25% of them had migrated into the middle class despite having few prospects and little or no education past high school. And one means of getting into better-paying jobs was by finding work in manufacturing.

That was the case for one of Newman’s profiled employees named Jamal, who wound up in the lumber industry. He landed an entry-level position at a laminating factory and showed managers he was a fast learner. Fortunately for Jamal, the lumber business is like many others in manufacturing: People who show they can handle a task competently tend to get ahead regardless of their educational credentials. Eventually, Jamal’s can-do attitude and grit let him move from a graveyard shift to a day job, and finally, to a spot as an assembly crew chief.

Those in Newman’s study who gravitated toward retail sales and other service industries had a much more hit-or-miss record of economic success. Low pay and little chance for advancement was the norm. Sometimes even training didn’t help these people. Educational programs for a number of service-sector jobs prepared students for occupations which were so poorly paid that there was no real advantage to earning the credentials.

All this is one more reminder why growth in the middle class, or the lack of it, may greatly depend on whether we can nurture our manufacturing industries. -- Leland Teschler, Editor

Taken for a Ride: Pros and Cons of High-Speed Rail

Lee_Teschler — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:37:22 GMT

One of the most active topics on the Machine Design forums has been the pros and cons of rail lines. Now that gas prices have begun to creep up again, it might be a good time to revisit the idea. It is all the more interesting in light of the Obama administration's plans for a new national network of high-speed passenger rail lines. Proponents want to put up 10 intercity lines running between 100 and 600 miles long. They say the result will be less traffic congestion, less dependence on foreign oil, and an improvement in the environment.

Yet if the experiences of Europe and Japan are any guide, high-speed rail lines will do none of those things.

Wisdom on this subject comes from Randal O'Toole, an economist and public policy analyst who has studied rail use. He points out that mass transit carries only 1.5% of all urban travel in the U.S. Transit ridership did indeed rise slightly last year when gas prices went to the moon, but the increase was a meager 3.4% over the year before. The effect on traffic congestion was insignificant.

Adding high-speed trains to the mix is unlikely to change things. For proof, says O'Toole, look at Europe and Japan. The average resident of Japan logs only 400 miles/year on bullet trains. In France the figure is 300 miles/year. And despite a lot of subsidized train lines in Europe and Japan, the car is still the preferred mode of transportation in those parts of the world. Europeans drive for 79% of their travel; residents of Japan, over 60%. In the U.S. the figure is about 85%.

Such statistics tend to shatter the American stereotype of Europeans as inveterate train riders. The reality is that in Europe, bus and rail lines are becoming less popular. Between 1970 and 2000, bus and rail travel there lost "market share," dropping from 23.2 to 14.9%, with the difference made up by more travel by air and by car.

And it turns out that rail transport isn't particularly "green." Light rail consumes about as much energy per passenger mile as the average passenger car. Measured this way, neither heavy rail nor commuter rail is as fuel efficient as an ordinary Prius.

The situation is similar for emissions of greenhouse gases. Electricpowered transit is "green" only when its electricity comes from nuclear, hydro, or renewable sources. In places where most electricity comes from burning fossil fuels (as is the case in the vast majority of U.S. locales), rail transit generates more greenhouse gas than cars.

Surprisingly, there is a much simpler way to reduce greenhouse gases and use of petroleum than with expensive and hardly used rail lines: Stick with ever more fuel-efficient cars and coordinate traffic signals. The Federal Highway Administration claims three out of four traffic signals aren't properly coordinated with their neighbors. In fact, one signal coordination project in Silicon Valley that cost $500,000 saved motorists about 471,000 gallons of fuel annually, more than paying for the project in the first year. Figuring 19.5 lb of CO2 emitted/gallon, estimates are the project cut greenhouse-gas emissions at a savings of about $200/ton.

The problem with such common-sense ideas, of course, is that they can't generate the kind of front-page news that trumpets boondoggle rail projects -- Leland Teschler, Editor

Environmental Extremism is a Good Career Move

Lee_Teschler — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:35:01 GMT

Readers interested in changing careers for greener pastures might take a hint from the World Business Summit on Climate Change which wrapped up recently in Copenhagen: Environmental alarmism is a growth industry. The meeting was basically a warm-up for negotiations to replace the Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto is a United Nations treaty that aims to stabilize greenhousegas concentrations in the atmosphere at levels that would prevent “dangerous interference” with the climate system.

But the Copenhagen meeting and Kyoto increasingly seem to have little to do with unbiased science and a lot to do with convincing governments to throw money at the green movement, regardless of whether the funds are wisely spent.

So argues Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and director of a think tank called the Copenhagen Consensus. He says speakers at the World Business Summit seemed to have been picked because of their scary views on global warming — though such views are outside mainstream scientific thinking and don’t mesh with the findings of the U.N. panel of climate-change scientists.

The nightmare scenarios outlined at the conference seemed to be proportional to the amount of money at stake. Lomborg points out that U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists last year and that 50 of the biggest U.S. electric utilities spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months. Lomborg calls the partnership among self interested businesses, grandstanding politicians, and alarmist campaigners an “unholy alliance” and says we “shouldn’t be surprised that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act.”

All the more troubling is that even moderate views on global warming rely on peer-reviewed environmental research that itself may be biased in favor of headline-grabbing conclusions. The problem is explained by Patrick Michaels, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia, and Robert Balling Jr., a professor of climatology at Arizona State University. They point out that global warming science competes for public funding with cancer research, AIDS, and a number of other worthwhile efforts. Because scientific budgets are finite, an issue’s perceived importance determines how much funding it receives. The result is a culture, they say, in which any scientific finding that indicates a less-significant impact of climate change threatens researchers’ livelihoods.

And there is evidence that climate-science authors can stack the deck when it comes to the review process. Michaels and Balling cite a practice of the American Geophysical Union. The Union asks authors to provide the names of five people they think would be desirable reviewers. Authors can also submit names of people they think wouldn’t provide an objective review. Michaels and Balling conclude that, “When the writer can influence the selection of reviewers, peer review is pretty much dead.”

All in all, there’s money to be made by serving up apocalyptic global warming predictions, but at a social cost. Consider that framers of Kyoto proposed world governments spend $180 billion annually for measures that, at best, would reduce temperature by 0.3°F by the end of the 21st century. Says Lomborg, “The U.N. estimates that for less than half that amount, we could provide clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care, and education to every single human on the planet. The same warped sense of priorities will continue to bedevil us this December in Copenhagen.”

— Leland Teschler, Editor

Mass-Transit Myths

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:31:15 GMT

Regular readers of our letters column may have noticed a discussion about people movers and mass transit.

To some, mass transit seems like a good way to conserve energy and fossil fuels. A few writers have argued that properly engineered mass-transit lines would be more energy efficient than even hybrid vehicles.

There have been numerous studies about the realities of mass transit. With gasoline on its way toward $5 per gallon, perhaps it is time to review some of them.

The bad news is that installing new mass-transit lines doesn’t attract many riders. According to a University of California (Irvine) study, no U.S. region has been able to coax more than about 1% of commuters to switch from car travel to rail, for example. The same dynamics that make many rail lines expensive boondoggles would tend to work against any people-moving scheme. This becomes clear when you analyze the few parts of the country in which rail transit does indeed make economic sense.

In Manhattan, for example, most people take a train or bus to work. The reason has nothing to do with well-engineered rail lines but everything to do with population and job density. Manhattan is over 20 times more densely populated than most urban areas. Even more important, there are over 2.5 million jobs to be found within the few square miles of the island. Small wonder, then, that New York City is the only U.S. metro area where bus or rail carries more than 15% of commuters to work.

Contrast New York City with the situation in typical urban areas. No more than 40% of jobs reside downtown or in suburban centers, according to a recent study by economist William T. Bogart. That means any transit system focused on gett ing people into a city will serve well under half the commuters in the surrounding area.

For similar reasons, most people won’t regularly use mass transit for shopping. Economists point out that consumers keep costs low by going to wherever they get the best deal, not just to stores near transit lines. In fact buyers tied to mass transit, such as the poor, are stuck patronizing only merchants close to transit stops and often end up paying higher prices.

It’s not like municipalities save money by installing rail lines instead of more roads. A mile of light-rail transit line typically costs more to build than a mile of four-lane freeway. Heavy rail like San Francisco’s BART or Washington, D.C.’s Metro costs even more.

There have been a few recent press reports of people moving near mass-transit stations to get relief from gas prices. But at least in the stories I’ve seen, these new city dwellers are either golden-agers tired of mowing lawns, or childless 20-somethings. Most consumer surveys continue to show the majority of people prefer to live in a house with a yard. So it is probably unrealistic to expect a mass migration downtown.

But here’s a counterintuitive way to save energy and go easier on the environment: Build more freeways. The Texas Transportation Institute calculates that traffic congestion forces individual drivers to waste 2.9 billion gallons of fuel annually and add 28 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. Those figures would be even higher if the costs to businesses were factored in.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

Hold on to That Resume

Lee_Teschler — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:17:14 GMT

Spring is in the air, and it is time once again for business magazines to begin unveiling their annual “best of ” lists. Get ready to hear about the best companies to work for, most admired companies, best plants, and many more.

Those of us who don’t work for establishments anointed by one of these lists might gaze wistfully at the write-ups. Business-magazine prose often makes”best of ” companies sound like oases of competence in a desert of firms run by dunderheads. In these times of layoffs and stress-filled work environments, no doubt some people are tempted to fire off resumes to such firms.

Think twice before you hit the send key on that resume. There’s reason to believe the companies populating those lists aren’t run much better than businesses with mediocre practices. Jump to a “best of ” company and you may find the same kinds of underachievers who now run your current employer, though they may be luckier.

What’s often at work among companies that make “best of ” lists is the Halo Effect. The Halo Effect happens when people make groundless inferences about specific traits based on a general impression. Scott Adams lampooned the Halo Effect in an old Dilbert cartoon about a guy promoted to upper management because he looked like a CEO. A psychologist in the 1920s first noticed it among army officers rating subordinates.

It turns out the same mental mistake happens with companies. We tend to think a company that performs better does so because it is run better.

More recently the Halo Effect has been popularized in a book of the same name by Phil Rosenzweig, a business professor at the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland. Rosenzweig points to numerous studies that overturn a lot of conventional wisdom about why some companies do better than others.

He says the Halo Effect explains much of what passes for insight about which management practices yield good performance. Business writers tend to seize on habits of companies that happened to post good results in the recent past without considering cause and effect. One revelation from this work: Company financial performance has a more powerful impact on employee satisfaction than the reverse. So tell your HR department to forget about “morale-building” exercises. To maximize your satisfaction quotient, just boost the bottom line.

Which brings us back to the companies populating “best of ” lists. The people who assemble these lists tend to make a critical mistake in that they only examine the traits of outstanding performers. This, says Rosenzweig, is like trying to understand what causes high-blood pressure by only studying patients who suffer from the affliction and not comparing them with people who don’t.

There are, in fact, researchers who have made more scientific comparisons. By looking at both good and bad performers, they’ve found that use of certain business practices explains only about 10% of the variance in company performance. Nor are these practices any guarantee of longterm success.

All in all, if you envy those working at a company on a “best of ” list, consider one of Rosenzweig’s management maxims: Success rarely lasts as long as we’d like — for the most part, long-term success is a delusion based on selection after the fact.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

Engineering is a Risky Business

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:18:41 GMT

Machine Design began publishing in September of 1929. So perhaps it is due to some kind of cosmic cycle that the magazine’s 80th anniversary falls in a year pundits increasingly compare to those of the Great Depression.

No doubt people stumbled around after the stock market crash of 1929 asking how such a disaster could happen. In the intervening years we’ve come to know a lot more about avoiding some kinds of disasters, though perhaps not the financial variety.

Arguably our track record for dodging engineering calamities is better. Wisdom on the subject comes from Mark D. Abkowitz, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University. Abkowitz has analyzed disasters that include the collapse of the walkway in the Kansas City Hyatt Regency, the loss of the Challenger and Columbia Space shuttles, and the meltdown at the Chernobyl reactor. Out of this work came both a book called Operational Risk Management, and a course designed to raise the awareness of risk in engineering undergraduates.

After analyzing the roots of numerous man-made catastrophes, Abkowitz noticed basic risk factors that engineers need to be aware of in any undertaking. Construction flaws are among the most obvious.

“In the Hyatt Regency disaster, construction flaws should have been identified by city officials; (enforcement activities) just got lip service. But the rubber stamping of numerous design specs didn’t help matters,” he says.

It probably comes as no surprise that communication difficulties show up as factors in many disasters. But they are made worse when the organization itself arrogantly thinks it is immune to tragedy, something that crops up surprisingly often. “In some respects there is a limit to what engineers can do to combat this attitude. If you believe there is a problem and have made management aware of it, I’m not sure you have much control of the information as it percolates through the organization,” Abkowitz says.

In the same vein, political agendas and economic pressures frequently contribute to calamities. This is all the more reason engineers should “design for scenarios where things are not going to go their way. That at least puts them in a position to persevere. There is an expression that you make your own luck, and in some respects I agree with that,” he says.

Nevertheless, engineers can’t completely avoid risk, no matter how comprehensive the advance planning. “You’ll never have enough resources to manage all the risks in your organization. So you have to come up with a structured way of making sure you are getting the highest return on your mitigation strategies,” Abkowitz says. Finally, Abkowitz has a message bound to be unpopular among those pushing for Nanny State protection against every conceivable misfortune: Risk is a fact of life.

“We’ve gotten to the point where perceived risks are distorted from reality, but they drive the political and resource allocation process,” he says. “People must accept the fact that sometimes bad things are going to happen even if you are doing things as responsibly as you can.”

— Leland Teschler, Editor

Death, Taxes, and Spam

Lee_Teschler — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:47:49 GMT

It started innocently enough during a late-night online poker game. A flashing sign claimed I could get a free flat-screen TV just by clicking a little pink button.

Normally I wouldn’t fall for a come-on like that, but I was on a reputable poker site. And I was curious how anyone could make money giving away TVs. One click later I found out: Only after signing up for numerous “trial” offers, all of which required a credit-card number, could you expect your TV to be delivered. All in all, that free TV could end up being a pretty expensive proposition.

Needless to say, I didn’t offer up a credit-card number that night, or even an e-mail address. But that didn’t stop what happened next. By the following morning, the address associated with my poker playing had received offers for life insurance, eBay “secrets,” Acai berries, online dating, credit cards, and even a few things that are unmentionable in print.

It was easy enough to figure out this outpouring of spam was not a coincidence. More troubling was why such treatment isn’t covered by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which was widely heralded as a cure for spamming when it was first enacted.

It turns out a lot of commercial enterprises thumb their noses at CAN-SPAM, including some Web sites that cater to engineers. MD doesn’t share reader information with third parties without permission, but a lot of sites do.

We asked a question about unsolicited e-mail on the MD LinkedIn group and got a fair amount of venting: Some people spoke about innocently signing up to download a white paper and getting an inbox full of e-mail from companies they’d never heard of. Ditto for clicking a link in an e-mail newsletter. And heaven help you if you’ve given a phone number as part of a site-registration process. Some sites seem to pass around phone numbers like baseball cards at a swap meet.

“It sounds like those organizations are really stretching the bounds of what’s sometimes called existing relationships,” says Ellen Siegel, director of Technology & Standards at the e-mail marketing firm Constant Contact Inc. and a member of the board at the Email Sender and Provider Coalition. “If you have a preexisting business relationship, there is some legal permission to send e-mail. From a best-practice viewpoint you should be setting the bar much higher. Most legitimate senders want users to actively opt in, not be passively signed up,” she says. Bad Web sites can mangle the definition of “existing relationship” to include something like what happens between two people on a bad first date. Siegel relates her experience partially filling out an online form that she then abandoned. “I got several notices asking me to come back and finish my sign up,” she says. “But if you never complete the transaction, you don’t really have any relationship with them.”

Unfortunately the main incentive for marketers to avoid abusing e-mail is ethics. Few people get prosecuted under CAN-SPAM laws. Siegel’s organization can show e-mailers what it means to have good manners. But the only real defense against bad actors seems to be reading the fine print and relegating the unwanted stuff to the spam filter.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

When You Can’t Believe the Model

Lee_Teschler — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:45:53 GMT

Amid all the hand-wringing about financial systems in meltdown mode, the subject of modeling hasn’t gotten a lot of notice. Banks and other financial institutions employed legions of Ph.D. mathematicians and statistics specialists to model the risks those firms were assuming under a variety of scenarios. The point was to avoid taking on obligations that could put the company under.

Judging by the calamity we are now living through, one would have to say those models failed miserably. They did so despite the best efforts of numerous professionals, all highly paid and with a lot of intellectual horsepower, employed specifically to head off such catastrophes.

What went wrong with the modeling? That’s a subject of keen interest to engineers who must model the behavior and risks of their own complicated systems. Insights about problems with the mathematics behind financial systems come from Huybert Groenendaal, whose Ph.D. is in modeling the spread of diseases. Groenendaal is a partner and senior risk analyst with Vose Consulting LLC in Boulder, a firm that works with a wide variety of banks and other companies trying to mitigate risks.

“In risk modeling, you use a lot of statistics because you want to learn from the past,” says Groenendaal. “That’s good if the past is like the future, but in that sense you could be getting a false sense of security.”

That sense of security plays directly into what happened with banks and financial instruments based on mortgages. “It gets back to the use of historical data,” says Groenendaal. “One critical assumption people had to make was that the past could predict the future. I believe in the case of mortgage products, there was too much faith in the idea that past trends would hold.”

Therein lies a lesson. “In our experience, people have excessive confidence in their historical data. That problem isn’t unique to the financial area,” says Groenendaal. “You must be cynical and open to the idea that this time, the world could change. When we work with people on models, we warn them that models are just tools. You have to think about the assumptions you make. Models can help you make better decisions, but you must remain skeptical.”

Did the quantitative analysts who came up with ineffective financial models lose their jobs in the aftermath? Groenendaal just laughs at this idea. “I have a feeling they will do fine. If you are a bank and you fire your whole risk-analysis department, I don’t think that would be viewed positively,” he says.

Interestingly enough, Groenendaal suggests skepticism is also in order for an equally controversial area of modeling: climate change.

“Climate change is similar to financial markets in that you can’t run experiments with it as you might when you are formulating theories in physics. That means your skepticism should go up,” he says.

We might add there is one other similarity he didn’t mention: It is doubtful anyone was ever fired for screwing up a climate model.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

The Statistics of Dumb Mistakes

Lee_Teschler — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:44:16 GMT

The Statistics of Dumb Mistakes

Back in the 1940s, economist Milton Friedman was part of the war effort. He performed statistical studies on high-temperature alloys for jet engines. Friedman, who eventually won a Nobel Prize in economics, used regression analysis on data about alloy strength versus temperature. His statistics predicted that a couple of as-yet-untried alloys would last about 200 hours, noteworthy because those tried thus far had failed after only about 20 hours.

Surprise: When metallurgists cooked up the new alloys, they went to pieces in less than 3 hours.

The lesson in Friedman’s experience is that you can’t derive engineering facts from statistics alone. That is a point amplified by Steve Ziliak, an economics professor at Roosevelt University who coauthored a book called The Cult of Statistical Significance. Ziliak is among a number of researchers who warn that statistical significance — given by the student T test and p values — is sometimes misused as a proxy for important scientific results. And as Milton Friedman discovered early in his career, reliance on statistics alone can often lead to astoundingly bad conclusions.

Ziliak says confusion about statistical significance is widespread even among researchers who should know better. He reached this conclusion by combing through papers published in a number of prestigious economics, operations research, and medical journals. He found numerous instances of researchers who used statistical significance as if it was the same as correlation. “They confuse the probability measure with a measure of correlation of effect size. But they are two very different things. It is almost embarrassing because it is such an elementary point,” he says.

Ziliak’s discovery is much more than just pedantic statistical minutia. In medical research, for example, confusion about significance levels can lead to rejecting good drugs in favor of others that have less oomph. “Suppose you have two diet pills which differ only in the size of the effect they have on dieters,” he says. “One pill takes off 20 pounds, plus or minus 10. The other takes off 5 pounds, plus or minus a half pound. Ninety percent of scientists in medicine would choose the second pill because they think its effects are more significant, though the first pill takes off more weight. That’s because the first pill has a signal-to-noise ratio of just two (20/10) while the second pill’s ratio is 10 (5/0.5).”

The irony is that researchers interested in losing weight would likely have no trouble picking the pill that was most effective, low signal-to-noise or not. People can effortlessly solve a problem in a social setting but struggle when it is presented as an abstract dilemma.

Interestingly enough, engineering research tends to be free of such misconceptions. “One reason engineers didn’t go down this path is that they use Monte Carlo and other types of simulations as well as different quantitative methods that don’t require inferential statistics,” says Ziliak. “And even when engineers do use inferential statistics, their practices have been shaped by people like W. Edwards Deming and other engineers who were around at the birth of modern statistics. Deming in particular saw that significance testing was not going to be relevant for most engineering purposes.”

All in all, if you find yourself wondering why the latest economic theories seem to work no better than Milton Friedman’s high-temperature-alloy predictions, consider the possibility they were hatched by someone unable to recognize an effective a diet pill from its statistics.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

Mapping the carbon capture and storage world

raymond723 — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:15:14 GMT

The UK, US, Canada, Australia, China, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Germany and many other countries are all looking carefully at the prospects of capturing carbon dioxide from coal or gas power plants and storing it deep underground. Barely a day goes by without some new pronouncement - whether it’s politicians saying they are advancing the technology; think tanks, scientists and environmental groups saying they’re not moving fast enough; or industry trumpeting joint agreements for carbon capture projects.

In case you’re feeling slightly bewildered about where and when any serious commercial-scale plants will be built (we haven’t seen one yet, by the way), the Scottish Centre for Carbon Storage has developed a brilliant interactive map of projects (large and small) announced so far. Highly recommended. Since each individual large scale plant (say, 400MW or above) will cost at least $1 billion, the first movers in this field are going to require deep pockets, or substantial state support.

are you all unemployed?

cnmaker — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:39:24 GMT

why so few people come to visit?

what do you do now? seeking job or keep silence?

How Not to Innovate

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:47:30 GMT

Andrew Hargadon has innovation figured out. Hargadon, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at UC Davis, has studied the way big-name innovators such as Edison and Ford were able to come up with a steady stream of noteworthy developments that rocked the world.

Hargadon put his insights in a book called How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth about How Companies Innovate. His book caused enough of a stir to land him a gig as a keynoter at the recent NI Week festivities put on by National Instruments.

One of the things Hargadon found was that the popular image of the supremely analytical genius innovator was largely hogwash. Most innovators don’t come up with their breakthroughs looking at the ceiling. A lot of their ideas instead are actually well known — elsewhere. The process of innovation is often one of borrowing existing concepts from one industry and applying them to another.

Ford and his employees, for instance, got their inspiration for assembly lines from Chicago slaughterhouses, even using some of the same equipment to automate their operations. Edison’s electric lighting combined ideas from the telegraph, the arc light, and the gas-lighting industry.

The lesson, says Hargadon, is that ideas spawning revolutions needn’t be revolutionary, but technologists need open minds. In fact, the not-inventedhere syndrome is often the result when organizations focus too narrowly on a problem. They fall into the NIH mode of thinking that no outsider can have useful insights.

You might say that when it comes to knowing how to go about innovating, Hargadon “gets it.” That brings us to Pulitzer-winning journalist Thomas Friedman, a guy who apparently just doesn’t get it when the subject is innovation.

Friedman, author of The World is Flat and The Lexus and the Olive Tree, is now on a green-energy kick with his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. He was quoted recently as advocating we invent our way out of a dependence on fossil fuel by having “100,000 people in 100,000 garages trying 100,000 things.”

So far, so good. But he also calls current efforts at devising green-energy sources “hopelessly haphazard and piecemeal.” He argues green energy will take a coordinated systems approach, from the White House to corporations to consumers. (Left unexplained is how he would “coordinate” 100,000 people in garages.)

The problem with the vision of a coordinated effort is that it smacks of choosing winners. It doesn’t allow for the revolution-spawning ideas that often come from outsiders. And there are already several of these floating around for green energy.

For a case in point, consider Shai Agassi, a software guy and one-time honcho with SAP AG. Agassi has suggested blanketing the country with smart charge spots for electric vehicles. Drivers could plug in anywhere, anytime, and would subscribe to a plan modeled after those in the cellphone industry. Just as you pay for minutes on your cell phone, you would buy miles on your car, for a cost less than the equivalent cost of gas. You’d receive your wheels, and perhaps even lease its battery, from your juice provider. Drivers who didn’t want to wait for a charge would be able to pull into a car-washlike shed and get a fresh battery in a few minutes.

Of course, Agassi probably would never get the time of day from organizers of a “coordinated effort” on green energy. After all, his ideas are NIH.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

A Few Good Things Coming Out of Detroit

Lee_Teschler — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:51:30 GMT

GM kicked off the recent North American International Auto Show in Detroit by, among other things, introducing a new Cadillac. Once the fanfare had died down, observers could hear a distinct creaking as the turntable display supporting the Caddy labored to move its load.

This little anecdote seemed to set the tone for Detroit’s premier automotive showcase event. Automakers put up a confident demeanor on stage as they described their plans and new models. Away from the lights and cameras, they were more candid about problems. One Chrysler employee described morale there, perhaps euphemistically, as “hopeful.” After rounds of layoffs and attrition, the people left standing at the automaker are “a scrappy bunch who aren’t quitters,” she said.

But Detroit’s Tier One suppliers sounded more fatalistic. “We are all waiting for the other shoe to drop,” one engineer told me, shaking his head. Their feeling is that economic conditions are destined to get far worse before they get better.

But enough with the negativity. There were positive trends at this lessglitzy version of the auto-industry’s confab. One was that ethanol and E85 have been removed from automakers’ official vocabulary, at least as far as I could tell. This was in marked contrast to last year, when even Ferrari showed a car able to burn the stuff. Veteran show-goers could easily come away thinking the ethanol love-fest of 2008 must have just been a bad dream.

On this score, automakers seemed to have regained their senses. It is evident their engineers aren’t done boosting gas mileage through improved engine efficiency. This strategy was a major theme in a number of booths. Direct fuel-injection technology will raise mpg figures on several new models. Other tweaks are in the wings that are largely unappreciated outside of technical conferences put on by the Society of Automotive Engineers.

Yet it probably isn’t sub-$2/gallon gas alone that made automakers back away from ethanol. Truth is, they have made progress on electric vehicles that apparently surprises even a few industry cheerleaders. The 2010 debut for a GM plug-in hybrid no longer seems like a pipe dream.

And you can detect a changing attitude about power sources among auto engineers. One indication: Internal-combustion engines in these advanced vehicles are now referred to not as engines but as “range extenders,” there to power the electric motor if the batteries run low on juice.

It’s been suggested, though, that lithium-supply problems could thwart these plans. Some economists claim lithium can’t be mined economically or in sufficient volumes to support a worldwide fleet of cars powered by hightech lithium-ion batteries. But automakers I spoke with pooh-poohed this idea.

Finally, some carmakers promoted diesels at the show as a means of bettering fuel efficiency. I am not sure that’s a good thing. To sufficiently squelch NOx emissions, next-generation clean diesels inject urea solution into the exhaust. The urea sits in its own refillable reservoir equipped with a heater to prevent freezing in cold weather. Forget to refill the urea reservoir and the vehicle won’t work.

At least to my ear, the whole thing sounds too complicated and prone to hiccups.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

Mathematics of Financial Chaos

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:11:02 GMT

Computer graphic mavens are probably quite familiar with Benoit Mandelbrot. The French mathematician is best known as the father of fractal geometry. In computer graphics, fractals are the method of choice for rendering realistic looking mountains, coastlines, and other natural phenomena.

But another part of Mandelbrot’s work has recently made headlines, at least indirectly. He devoted much of his early career to studying how financial markets behave. He eventually concluded that commodities and stock prices are best described by chaos theory — with frequent unpredictable rises and stupendous crashes — rather than by the orderly statistics of bell curves.

Even those who don’t know the stock market from a meat market would probably agree that chaos is an apt way to describe the instability of the economy over the past few weeks. One interesting facet of chaos theory is that a single snowflake in the right place can cause a catastrophic avalanche. In the case of world financial markets, the snowflake turned out to be bad mortgage loans, mainly in California and Florida. The avalanche is worldwide and may just be beginning.

But you don’t need higher mathematics to understand the financial products that caused this mess. Bob Lewis, a pundit and IT consultant, recently suggested that an Excel model would have exposed the circular logic behind the interlocking mortgage instruments that have proved so problematic. Fundamentally, the relationship between these entities was no different, Lewis says, from a spreadsheet that has the formula =B1+1 in cell A1 and =A1+1 in cell B1. Excel would have happily explained there was something wrong with this thinking.

One might hope the highly paid quantitative analysts on Wall Street would have noticed that the risks of all these instruments correlated with each other. So why no red flags until the entire system was on the verge of a meltdown?

Sadly, the debate surrounding legislative attempts at a bailout tends to confirm the worst suspicions about root causes. The point of this legislation, of course, was to help rebuild confidence in American capitalism. But what emerged was the impression that the mathematics of mortgages wasn’t so much the problem as the mathematics of avarice.

It was not exactly the financial industry’s finest hour when the subject turned to salaries for CEOs whose firms might benefit from the new Bill. Michael Lewitt, president of investment advisory firm Harch Capital Management LLC, summed up the situation as being downright discouraging. Lewitt put it this way: “Mssrs. Paulson and Bernanke tried to convince Congress that bank executives would prevent their institutions from participating in the bailout if it meant that their compensation would be capped. One would think, as the financial system teeters on the brink of collapse, that the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve could make a more persuasive argument than one that poses the likelihood that corporate executives would knowingly violate their fiduciary duty and refuse to participate in a plan to rescue the financial system because it might limit their compensation.”

The mentality these public officials portray as typifying bank CEOs led to the crisis in the first place. All the higher math in the world won’t help avoid future disasters if financial institutions are run by people who lose sight of their public trust.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

Manufacturing Woes in the News

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:06:27 GMT

Unemployment is rising, the economy is slowing down, goods makers are hurting, a real-estate bubble is popping, and there’s a big loss of manufacturing jobs. No, I’m not talking about the U.S. This is China.

You wouldn’t have known about these woes if you’d read a recent post in one of the Machine Design blogs that attracted a lot of attention. It was about statements made by an economist at Global Insight, an economic forecasting house. He asserted China would surpass the U.S. as the world’s leading manufacturer in nominal dollar terms next year. He based this prediction on the slowing U.S. economy and a conjecture that China would gain a larger share of global manufacturing than any other country.

A funny thing happened on the way to this prediction, which was made this past August. The Chinese economy is now slowing drastically. News reports say in one Chinese province 80% of the toy factories have closed, as have half the shoe factories. State-run newspapers claim 37% of the businesses there are losing money, and that 20 million Chinese overall lost their jobs in the first half of this year.

These aren’t just isolated incidents. The purchasing managers’ index in China fell in July and August to a level that indicates manufacturing there is contracting. This hasn’t happened since 2005. Some observers claim the Olympics were responsible for the drop. But though the index bounced back some in September, it is still below where it was in June before athletes started arriving in Beijing.

Those who decry the loss of U.S. manufacturing industries to the Chinese would probably say such problems couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. These sentiments have been amplified by revelations about how the Chinese manage to deliver low prices.

Examples come from Alexandra Harney, a former Financial Times correspondent who wrote a book about conditions in Chinese factories. Harney speaks Mandarin and apparently does so well enough to sense when the Chinese are trying to snow her. In The China Price, she uncovered the fact that 15 years ago, “beating employees was a standard management strategy” at some factories. Times have changed, partly because of new Chinese labor laws and companies like Wal-Mart that began forcing their suppliers to comply with a code of ethics.

But manufacturers widely flout these measures, says Harney. Laws that permit no more than 36 hours of overtime monthly make factories uncompetitive, Chinese claim. So time cards are faked to hide the truth. Employees are coached about how to answer auditors checking on ethics practices. And shadow factories, off-the-books establishments where seven-day weeks and 11 or 12-hour days are the norm, make a lot of China’s exported goods. The existence of these places has been hidden from multinationals like Wal-Mart, at least until Harney’s book came out.

A tightening Chinese labor market and unrest among laborers has mitigated some of these effects. And ironically, in a progression that will sound familiar to Americans, Chinese workers sometimes abandon factory jobs to sell real estate in what has been a hot market.

Can bad mortgages and bank implosions be far behind?

— Leland Teschler, Editor

The Digital World Could Have Been a Different Place

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:04:21 GMT

A lot of headlines these days are devoted to the travails of U.S. companies that once dominated the markets they serve. Detroit automakers are probably the most visible example of firms that let success slip through their fingers, but there are numerous others. Xerox, for one, failed to exploit developments at its PARC think tank which fed the PC revolution. Later its management began a near-fatal fascination with the quality movement.

But the former giant I despair about most these days is Eastman Kodak. It was one of the pioneers in digital photography but still gets most of its revenues from film. A Kodak engineer built the first digitalcamera prototype in 1975. You would never know that, though, from the way digital photography developed in the 1980s. It was clear Japan was pursuing electronic photography and wanted to own it.

Engineers from Sony presented a paper at the 1982 IEEE Conference on Consumer Electronics on the early Mavica, basically an analog electronic camera recording single video frames as still images. And for the most part, 1980s-era papers presented on electronic imaging and cameras at that conference were Japanese.

I sat through some of those early presentations. It was rare for Japanese engineers to speak much English back then. The only English words most seemed to know were the ones written on the sheets of paper they were reading to the audience. You had to give these gentlemen “A” for effort, but it was tough to understand them.

The question-and-answer periods following these speeches were equally challenging. Usually one and sometimes two translators would join the author on the podium. A query from an audience member would bring a lengthy huddle at the front of the room and a brief response.

But the interesting aspect of these questions was who asked them. The most knowledgeable ones came from engineers at Kodak whose affiliation was easily discerned from their name badges. As far as I know, the film giant at the time had not made any noises about an interest in digital photography. Nevertheless, it was clear that buried in the bowels of the organization were engineers who knew a thing or two about how to design electronic cameras.

Kodak came out with its first digital camera, a $13,000 SLR model aimed at professionals, in 1991. The company credited with pioneering mass-market photography only began selling a digital model aimed at ordinary consumers in 2001. This though it has amassed over 1,000 digital imaging patents. Today nearly all digital cameras still use some of them.

In the last four years Kodak has eliminated almost 40,000 jobs and closed a number of its plants. Meanwhile, Canon dominates the market in sales of digital cameras and digital SLRs. Market studies I’ve seen put Kodak in third place behind Canon and Sony.

It didn’t have to turn out this way. Had Kodak pursued its early work in electronic imaging more intensely, today’s consumer camera market might have a quite different look. It is not inconceivable that Kodak could have almost single-handedly changed the face of consumer electronics and kept a bigger chunk of that industry within the U.S. But this would have taken vision and foresight, traits that seem to be lacking in many large U.S. corporations.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

How Legislators Discourage Manufacturing

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:02:42 GMT

With the economy in the toilet, there has been a lot of hand wringing over government attitudes toward manufacturers. It’s often said that legislators favor companies that just push money around over firms that make things. The result has been an erosion in the U.S. manufacturing base and, simultaneously, a loss of middle-class jobs.

Now that the campaign season is behind us, it is easier to discuss these issues without being accused of political hyperbole. So it might be worthwhile to analyze what is generally meant by claims of a legislative bias against manufacturers. Trouble is, much of the debate centers on tax policy. The whole discussion can seem pretty dry unless you are a tax accountant.

But it is a subject worth pursuing because there are important differences in how manufacturers get treated compared to businesses oriented around financial transactions. The biggest disparity stems from the fact that manufacturing is capital intensive. Manufacturers have to buy a lot of equipment to make employees productive. This equipment can’t be treated as an expense in the eyes of tax collectors. The robot arms and other automation equipment sitting on factory floors can only be written off little-by-little against company earnings over an extended period of time.

One impact of such policies is that manufacturers must have expectations of high profit margins for a long time to come before they can justify an outlay on expensive investments like this. Worse, financial companies have no such problem because they don’t have much in the way of capital expenses — banks and mortgage brokers buy comparatively few Caterpillar tractors and the like.

However, the main expense that financial companies have — interest on debt —is completely deductible immediately against what they earn. And that fact, say economists, has served as an incentive to create businesses and investments teetering on insolvency. Put another way, it has made more sense tax-wise to make investments by going into hock to your eyeballs rather than by saving up for them ahead of time.

Finally, despite campaign rhetoric to the contrary, corporations in the U.S. are taxed at a much heavier rate than those in other industrial countries. Figures from the nonprofit Tax Foundation show America has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world at 39.3%, calculated as an average of state and federal taxes. Only Japan is slightly higher. Even so, companies in California, New Jersey, and 22 other states enjoy tax rates exceeding those found in Tokyo. The highest is Iowa with a combined rate of 41.6%.

And according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the lowest corporate tax rates are to be found in Ireland (12.5%). Small wonder, then, that firms set up manufacturing facilities there, and that Ireland’s economy has been growing at twice the rate found in the rest of Europe.

It is not clear whether this data, which is all readily available from public sources, has had an impact on the thinking of legislators. But companies that use a lot of capital equipment are certainly aware of it. Just consider these comments from FedEx CEO Fred Smith, quoted in the Wall Street Journal: “We went out to Boeing… to see the new [Boeing 777] which we have bought. If we had a lower corporate tax rate with the ability to expense capital expenditures, guess what? We’d buy more triple sevens.”

— Leland Teschler, Editor

The Upside of Negative Thinking

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:58:26 GMT

By now most of us are fed up with hearing about chronic bad decisionmaking at automotive and financial firms. But for all the rhetoric about the wheels coming off Detroit and the credit market, critics have missed one point: Both situations can be chalked up to too much optimism.

That conclusion can be drawn from a body of work that suggests managers typically underplay obvious uncertainties, thinking they have more control over their firm’s performance than is really the case. Managers also tend to be too optimistic about their firm’s performance because they are highly committed to it.

It isn’t just managers who tend to be overly optimistic about their abilities. An often-cited survey of students conducted by the College Board in the 1970s found that only 2% of them thought they were below average compared to their peers. Only 6% rated themselves below the median in athletic prowess. The study revealed other statistical impossibilities in leadership ability and getting along with others.

Biases of this sort have caught the attention of management experts. One of the more-interesting works in this area comes from researchers Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, they point out that psychologists say we tend to misperceive the causes of events, particularly bad events. Typically people take credit for positive outcomes and attribute setbacks to whims of the gods and rotten luck. Managers are no different.

On this score, I can cite an example close to home. Several years ago the parent company of MACHINE DESIGN was public, so its financial results engendered a lot of coverage in the local newspaper. After a string of terrible quarters, the CEO was shown the door and agreed to one last interview with a reporter. When asked about the cause of his downfall, he claimed it was due to factors entirely outside of his control. With regard to the dismal financials, he shrugged, “I’m not a numbers guy.”

Lovallo and Kahneman also point out that many corporate cultures pressure employees to communicate positive messages. The result can be catastrophic. There are big incentives to accentuate the upside in laying out business plans, they say. So forecasts tend to be overly optimistic and thus distort the follow-on plans. And by definition, projects with the rosiest scenarios are the ones most likely to go forward and thus have the highest probability of disappointment

Pessimists in such situations are often viewed as disloyal. Their negative opinions tend to get suppressed. When this happens, the organization can lose its ability to think critically about the plan of action.

There is hard evidence that such attitudes played a part in the financial woes of today. One place to find it is in the observations of Elmer W. Johnson, a GM executive who left the company in 1988 after being passed over for the CEO slot. In a memo to the GM executive committee, Johnson warned about a failure to encourage open and honest discussion within the company. He also bemoaned the fact that line managers had a fear of reporting bad news to upper management.

There you have it: GM didn’t need to lower its labor costs, just a few more negative thinkers in top management would have done the trick.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

Not the End of the World

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:55:01 GMT

You know the drum-beat of bad news about the economy is over the top when it starts showing up in the monologue of late-night TV host Jay Leno. Recently he poked fun at members of Congress for voting themselves a $4,700 pay raise with unemployment nearing record highs and the economy in collapse. “But in their defense,” he quipped, “members of Congress… have expenses the rest of us don’t have — defense lawyers, bartenders, mistresses — these things all cost money.”

Of course, a pay raise is the farthest thing from the mind of most workers today. That may be doubly so for engineers. The daily hand-wringing about manufacturing layoffs in the press and on TV has made a lot of people nervous about their prospects for employment. It would be easy to get the idea from the somber tone of business commentators that factories everywhere are on the verge of turning out the lights for the last time.

The truth, though, is quite different. Business is down, but engineers are still being hired.

That’s the impression conveyed by engineering recruiters and hiring managers to whom we’ve talked recently. “The third and fourth quarters were slow for mechanical and electrical engineers, but the first quarter looks promising,” says Allen Vohden of Vohden Associates LLC, an engineering recruiter in Connecticut. “A lot of new jobs came in just in the first week of the year. And engineers haven’t seen any salary compression — salaries aren’t growing but they aren’t shrinking, either,” he says.

Medical-device makers are still hiring, Vohden says, as are pharma and biopharma companies, and some petrochemical suppliers. He calls the food industry “flat” and admits the auto industry is “way down,” as is the demand for engineers in the Midwest. And broadly speaking, openings are down about 20% compared with conditions in the middle of last year, he says. “The south, southwest, and mid-Atlantic states seem to be doing more hiring right now. But companies are being careful. There’s a longer period between when they look at candidates and when they make an offer.”

A slightly different view comes from Oxford Global Resources, a Massachusetts firm that specializes in finding “hired guns” — supercompetent engineers who serve as consultants for relatively short-term assignments. “The demand for validation and software engineers is holding up fairly strongly,” says Oxford Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Scott Beyer. “It really depends on the engineering specialty,” he says. “Telecom is also holding up. California is one of the stronger markets. On the other hand, the outlook for mechanical and hardware engineers is down from previous quarters. If you average everything out, I might call the demand in the next quarter flat to down a bit. But it is not at crisis levels,” he says.

Finally, it is interesting to get the perspectives of firms that are boosting their engineering staffs in these tough economic times. That’s the case at SRI International, a Menlo Park, Calif., research firm. SRI expects to hire about 50 engineers working in software design, system integration, testing, biofuels, and sustainable materials. “We’ve had great success finding entry-level researchers and general engineering new grads,” says an SRI spokesperson. As far as attracting talent, “The diversity of work and the… SRI environment are a big positive.”

We might be tempted to add, the prospect of a steady paycheck doesn’t hurt either.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

Not that hard to learn

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:48:47 GMT

Here’s a frustration that’s particularly common among engineers and engineering students: It sometimes seems impossible to learn fast enough.

So our first annual How-To issue seems like a good time to examine whether there’s a trick to picking up a skill quickly. And as it turns out, there is.

Meet Kent Johnson. He started a school in Seattle called the Morningside Academy. Many of its students have learning disabilities. So it is noteworthy that Morningside students advance in the skills where they have their greatest deficits by about 2.4 grade levels annually.

Morningside’s methods don’t just work with kids. In one case, academically deficient adults improved by two academic grade levels after about 18 hours of Morningside-inspired coaching.

The secret sauce that makes these results possible is a combination of two techniques that are generally absent from conventional schools: direct instruction and precision teaching. Direct instruction centers on brief sessions of learning in small steps. Precision teaching comes into play after a direct-instruction session. Here students practice repeatedly using the material they’ve just learned, accompanied by measurements of their accuracy and speed.

Morningside students don’t just learn material, they “overlearn” it to the point of fluency: being able to respond accurately and fast. Nor can they proceed to the next task until they hit this high level of performance. The point of the exercise: Perform at a fluent rate, and you can retain the information for years even without using it regularly.

So what does a Morningside classroom look like? “It is a noisy, active place,” says Morningside Principal Joanne Robbins. “Instruction is designed so people will be correct, so you hear a lot of accurate responsing. You also see a lot of partnered work and peer tutoring. Timers go off to mark the start and end of segments, and people give each other feedback after every few minutes, so the whole room is very active.”

Don’t get the idea that Morningside’s approach only works with small groups. “When you peer tutor, you multiply the number of teachers you have,” says Robbins. “We carefully teach how to partner and show students how to listen to one another. We can go as high as 50 pupils in a room with tremendous success.”

Morningside has been teaching this way since 1980. Its methods have worked not just with the learning disabled, but also with nursing students, college kids, and youths on academic probation. Clearly its techniques are effective and have stood the test of time. So why don’t other schools mimic its practices?

“That’s a delicate question,” admits Robbins. “Part of it may be that people are not familiar with the procedures….We also have a fundamental difference in philosophy [with other educators] that everyone can learn efficiently. And it requires great dedication.”

So it is unlikely you’ll find Morningside’s techniques in other institutions. But you can apply them yourself, says Robbins. Her advice: “Set a goal and collect data about how you’re doing. Be a good observer, a good cheerleader, and keep a positive attitude. Though it can get complicated, you can make progress quickly if you set small, attainable goals you can reach in a predictable amount of time.”

— Leland Teschler, Editor

MPG Figures That Aren’t What They Seem

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:46:19 GMT

If you’ve read op-ed pages in newspapers lately or spent much time online, you’ve probably seen these complaints: Why can’t U.S. car buyers get the same high-miles-per-gallon vehicles that are sold in Europe?

And why do U.S. automakers seem to make high-mpg cars elsewhere but not here?

As late-night TV host Johnny Carson might have put it, “Not so fast, there, ethanol breath.” Those who advocate shipping European high-mpg models to American shores apparently don’t realize those vehicles would probably be seized at the port of entry: They do not meet U.S. NOx emissions standards. (Movie-going readers may recall a similar fate befalling the Tom Cruise character in the Oscar-winning flick Rain Man.) At least for now, NOx regulations are tougher here than in Europe or Asia.

Moreover, it is quite possible that the alterations needed to hit stringent NOx levels would eliminate some of European vehicles’ mpg advantages. A portion of NOx emissions get taken care of with catalysts in the exhaust system. But part of it has been handled by reducing compression ratios and adjusting ignition and valve timing. This, in turn, reduces engine thermal efficiency. All in all, such measures can degrade mpg performance. (Thanks go to reader Wayne Baldridge for pointing out these relationships.)

I asked the Big Three whether their efforts at meeting NOx regulations work against efficiency in their U.S. models. They reacted as though I had poured oil on the track at a motorcycle meet. The automakers, normally responsive to technical questions, wanted nothing to do with me. All I could get out of Ford was, “We fully understand we must achieve both NOx emissions regulations and improve fuel efficiency within our product lineup. That’s it for us.” GM and Chrysler both clammed up completely. Nor would the EPA respond to queries along these lines.

Since the Big Three won’t talk to me, I don’t know why they won’t address NOx/mpg trade-offs. But I have a hunch. They probably figure an NOx/mpg discussion is a no-win situation. There’s a risk it would alienate EPA decision-makers with whom automakers have cultivated cordial relations. Besides, much of the U.S. populace would be too technically unsophisticated to grasp the concepts involved.

Other factors can inflate European mpg figures. One is never sure, for instance, whether mpg ratings for specific foreign cars are being expressed in Imperial or U.S. gallons. A rating in Imperial gallons, of course, would look about 20% better.

And lest you think there is something inherently better about foreign engine technology, consider this: European automakers have their share of troubles here coaxing out mpg when they try to sell anything but small cars. In 2006, for example, BMW paid over $5 million in fines for not meeting U.S. CAFE regulations. Volkswagen chipped in about $1 million that year. The biggest scofflaw was DaimlerChrysler which anted up over $30 million in penalties, though it is not clear how much of that was from its imported vehicles.

Finally, U.S. automakers have taken heat over the size of the engines they put in their cars. The reality is that 85-hp vehicles haven’t been able to deliver what U.S. customers have wanted: Not specifically muscle cars, but a means of transportation that can accelerate smoothly from on-ramps into 65-mph freeway traffic.

— Leland Teschler, Editor

We Don’t Know How to Recreate Silicon Valley

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:45:11 GMT

Preseason football is on TV, the kids are getting ready for the school year, and theme parks are anticipating their final Labor Day crowds.

It can only mean one thing: That’s right, the election season will soon be here.

The top political issue facing the country these days is the economy. Many regions look with envy at hot-beds of innovation like California’s Silicon Valley and North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and at their propensity to create new industries and jobs. Politicians on the stump often play up to these hopes and dreams. Their message: Vote me into office and I can funnel enough tax dollars your way to make this place the next Cradle of High Tech.

There is only one problem with this scenario — the inconvenient truth that no one knows how to clone Silicon Valley or Research Triangle.

At least that is the conclusion of a recent study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The Foundation, which focuses on entrepreneurship and improving education, concludes there is no such thing as a silver bullet for creating clusters of entrepreneurial companies. In fact, most such clusters of fast-growing businesses have happened by accident. That was the case for the launch of the semiconductor industry around San Jose, say Foundation researchers. Ditto for the auto industry springing up around Detroit in the early 1900s.

More important for the election season, though, is the Foundation’s opinion about tax money meant to boost entrepreneurial activity. Much of it is wasted, they say. That goes particularly for targeted tax credits and for the funding of local agencies aimed at developing high-tech entrepreneurs. The people who staff these offices typically don’t have the intellectual horsepower to make good decisions about start-ups focused on new technology.

Another bad idea, they say, is to fund research out of political expediency rather than through a scientific-review process. Foundation researchers point to Massachusetts as an example of what not to do. The Bay State recently wrote a check for biotechnology clusters without evaluating whether their planned locales had scientific capabilities to support them.

Even ideas that sound logical may not sow the seeds for much new business. A case in point is the presence of strong research universities. They can be helpful but alone are not enough to breed the next Silicon Valley. What you generally get from a research university is a handful of spin-off companies, none of which rock the world.

There’s evidence a few factors do indeed promote entrepreneurial companies. But they are the kinds of things that anyone, entrepreneurs included, would like to have. Good schools are on the list, as are safe streets, low taxes, and an efficient transportation system.

Unfortunately for politicians, legal and social factors often have more to do with entrepreneurial activity than government initiatives. For example, Foundation researchers point out that California’s unwillingness to recognize noncompete clauses beyond a year or so was one force driving new Silicon Valley businesses. And the spin-off companies that fuel industries often arise because key employees can’t get along with their bosses rather than out of any incentives dreamed up by bureaucrats.

Of course, it’s hard to weave that sort of information into a campaign speech. Picture your local candidate for congress making an emotional oration about non-compete clauses. The crowd reaction probably wouldn’t make the evening news. -- Leland Teschler, Editor

What’s Tough About Training

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:32:36 GMT

This issue’s emphasis on motion control prompts some reflection on how people learn about motion technology.

Often theoretical training isn’t enough to grasp what’s really going on when, for example, a beefy industrial motor couples into a gearbox that weighs more than your car. The real insights come from hands-on work. Problem is, opportunities to learn this way have been hard to come by.

But learning opportunities are on the rise thanks to a resurgence in vocational education. One perspective comes from Randy Pearson who heads up training for Siemens Machine Tool. About five years ago an instructor at a Wisconsin vocational school asked Pearson for help putting on a CNC programming course. The relationship mushroomed into involvement with a half-dozen votech programs and inquiries from several more.

“In the past instructors have had trouble finding students to fill these classes,” Pearson says. “Today they have more pupils than they know what to do with. So classes run six days a week. Vo-ed was traditionally populated with troublemakers, and there is still some of that. But now you see guys with tattoos next to kids who look like they could be in business school.”

And what does Siemens get out of this deal? “Probably some brand recognition but not a lot of direct sales,” shrugs Pearson. “We also have the satisfaction of giving kids skills that let them fill in for old guys who are not being replaced. In most shops, the median age is about 45 for CNC operators and programmers. You don’t see 20-year-olds running machines.”

Vo-ed training is great for technicians. B.S.-level engineering students may have a more difficult time honing practical skills simply because apprenticeships for aspiring engineers are rare.

On that score, we could use more people like Willie Goellner. Goellner emigrated from Germany in the 1950s and founded Advanced Machine & Engineering Co. For years, Goellner has hosted an exchange program that brings Austrian engineering students into AM&E’s plant for a few months. “We only get the smartest ones,” he says. “The dean over there uses our program as an incentive for good students.”

Goellner has programs in place for American students as well, but “The Austrians have a practical background that parallels their theoretical training. There is little you have to explain to them,” he says. “The guys from the States have the theoretical stuff but they are lacking on the practical end so they need help in applications.”

Goellner doesn’t just train engineers. He also employs high schoolers to do what he calls “simple stuff — mostly detailing and change notices.” And he thinks companies that don’t do likewise are shortsighted.

“I am from the old country where every company trains people,” he says. “There we didn’t worry about employees leaving to go to competitors. We actually encouraged it for the sake of broader experience. In this country, there are only a few companies that train. The rest just steal employees from everywhere else.”

That’s 180° away from the philosophy at AM&E where Goellner says he budgets some of his own time to work directly with his Austrian and American protégés.

— Leland Teschler, Editor