engineering
jdupuis | November 8, 2011Before heading off to the Charleston Conference last week, I blogged about the big announcement of Pierre Lassonde's big $25 million donation to York to found the Lassonde School of Engineering.
I attended the announcement and livetweeted it quite extensively: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.
I also created a Storify story of a fair bit of the quite extensive twitter traffic of the annoucement and that is here. I've embedded the Story at the end of this post. It's mostly tweeting form the day of the announcement but I have…
jdupuis | November 1, 2011It's a big day here at York University, especially for us science & engineering types both within the Faculty of Science and Engineering and those of us who support their teaching and research missions. There's a big announcement about the coming expansion of our engineering programs to include many of the more traditional streams, such as electrical and others.
The details are being announced today at a news conference at 1pm. I'll be there livetweeting as will others, I imagine.
There was a first announcement a little while back about some government money that was being committed.…
jdupuis | September 27, 2011Computer science and computer science education are a couple of my evergreen topics here on this blog, as you can see by perusing the computer science tag.
And of course, my trip to Harvard for LIAL this past summer perhaps has that institution on my radar a bit more than usual.
So how wonderful is it to find a way to connect those two things?
Along comes Hacking Stereotypes by Steve Kolowich.
It's about a program called HackHarvard which is part of a series of efforts at Harvard to encourage technology entrepreneurship: and increase enrollments in their basic computing course,
HackHarvard,…
kcollins | July 22, 2011Fed by the news media, our fascination and reverence for celebrities has reached shameless heights.
But when you add the element of royalty to the mix, celebrity worship can take off into the stratosphere, triggered even by an item as seemingly mundane as a dress.
This leaves me wondering -- and angered -- over what is happening to us and our priorities.
I'm referring most recently to the whirlwind North American tour this month of newly weds Prince William and Duchess Kate Middleton (a.k.a. Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge), who seem to be a wonderful couple committed to fostering…
jdupuis | May 15, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts, is from February 24, 2008.
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This is one of those books that I picked up at a the train station cheap remaindered books kiosk. I do…
jdupuis | May 13, 2011This past Saturday I spent the afternoon at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival at the Toronto Reference Library. It was a blast, I met a ton of great comics people, spent way too much money and supported a lot of great artists and writers.
The highlight was discovering the new collection We Are the Engineers by former University of British Columbia engineering student Angela Melick. The book is an expanded collection of strips from her webcomic Wasted Talent.
Here's a bit from the Info page:
Welcome to the site! Basically, this is all you need to know: JamJAM, or Angela, is a mechanical…
jdupuis | April 20, 2011I don't usually announce these sorts of things on the blog, but since Randy is a long-time friend, colleague and fellow Habs fan, I just had to make an exception.
The SLA Engineering Division is the group that hands out the award. From their mailing list:
2011 SLA Engineering Librarian of the Year Award
The Engineering Librarian of the Year, sponsored by IHS, highlights the accomplishments and contributions of SLA Engineering Division members to the engineering librarian profession.
The SLA Engineering Division is pleased to announce: Randy Reichardt is the recipient the of the SLA…
mstorksdieck | April 1, 2011Within certain education and policy circles the acronym STEM (i.e., science, technology, engineering, math) has become a common term, used frequently to be inclusive when referring to a broad area of scholarship and enterprise we deem particularly connected, i.e., those listed four subjects. How, or even whether the acronym is understood and fashionable outside these education "insider" groups is not well know. What is known, though, is that the acronym and associated term is not well defined even within groups that make heavy use of it.
When we say STEM, do we simply mean any of the four…
jdupuis | March 21, 2011In his incredibly wonderful new book, On the Grid: A Plot of Land, An Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make Our World Work, Scott Huler gives us three essential take-aways:
Thank God for engineers
Get out your wallet
Let's learn to love our infrastructure. (p. 217-225)
In fact, not much more need really be said about the book. In essence it's a kind of tribute and salute to the women and men who keep our highly technoligized society functioning. The people we often forget about, whose glamour pales in comparison to movie stars, singers, politicians, even police and fire…
jdupuis | March 12, 2011As usual, a bunch of great new articles from the most recent ISTL!
Five Years Later: Predicting Student Use of Journals in a New Water Resources Graduate Program by Andrea A. Wirth and Margaret Mellinger, Oregon State University
Seeing the Forest of Information for the Trees of Papers: An Information Literacy Case Study in a Geography/Geology Class by Linda Blake and Tim Warner, West Virginia University
Local Citation Analysis of Graduate Biology Theses: Collection Development Implications by Laura Newton Miller, Carleton University
Career Motivations of the Scientist-Turned-Librarian: A…
kcollins | February 23, 2011Learn about the theory of Relativity from Einstein himself! Interview by Engineering.com at the 2010 USA Science and Engineering Festival.
jdupuis | February 14, 2011Welcome to the long-awaited latest instalment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the library, publishing and scitech worlds. This time around the subjects of my first group interview are the gang at EngineerBlogs.org.
From my welcome-to-the-blogosphere post, here's a condensed bit about them:
Cherish The Scientist (EB)
I am an electrical engineer with an interest in various areas of electromagnetics, including antennas and numerical simulation techniques, as well as IC packaging. I have completed a master's degree in electrical engineering and am currently pursuing a…
jdupuis | February 5, 2011I got an email the other day announcing the 2011 Canadian Engineering Education Association Annual Conference. It'll be held from June 6 to 8, 2011, at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland & Labrador.
The conference page is here and the call for papers is here.
The call for papers:
The Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) is an organization whose mission is to "enhance the competence and relevance of graduates from Canadian engineering schools through continuous improvement in engineering education and design education." This second annual CEEA conference…
jdupuis | February 3, 2011YASBC. But this time an engineering blog community. This is a fantastic new development if you ask me, especially in a blogging environment domininated by science blogs. Time to let the engineers into the clubhouse, even if that means that we'll have to start serving massive quantities of various beverages to keep them all happy.
Let them explain:
This is a collection of some of the top engineering bloggers on the internet. Surprisingly, scientists seem to outnumber engineers, though we don't think that will happen for long. Some posts link directly back to the author's web page and some…
cagapakis | January 16, 2011Yesterday I mentioned Symbiotic Households, an art project imagining genetically engineered mosquitoes that provide mood stabilizing compounds to a population plagued by worries caused by climate change. Today on twitter I saw a link to a US patent application filed by Microsoft about engineering parasites to monitor and maintain human health. The possible engineered parasites covered in the application include:
mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, bed bugs (Cimicidae Cimex lectularius), midges (such as Ceratopogonidae), other blood sucking arthropods, annelids or leeches, nematodes such as Ascaris…
jdupuis | January 16, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, is from August 9, 2007.
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Every organization relies on software these days. Big custom systems,…
jdupuis | December 31, 2010Ok, this is just plain hysterical. And insightful. And both insightfully hysterical and hysterically insightful.
Enjoy.
Here's a taste, read the whole thing for yourself.
50. "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning."
- Rick Cook
38. "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense."
- E.W. Dijkstra
17. "If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred…
jdupuis | December 18, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Countdown: A History of Space Flight, is from November 14, 2006.
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The decision to read this book was certainly not rocket science, even if it is a book about rocket science. An engaging and fascinating read,…
omnibrain | December 1, 2010Maybe it's because I just had a stiff drink - but I absolutely love this thing. The art is cool, bicycles are great, and engineering for fun interests me. Maybe it's not the bourbon...
-Via Neatorama-
kcollins | October 11, 2010Thanks to one of our sponsors Engineering.com for helping us get the word out about the Festival. They will be at the Expo on Oct 23-24th even! They will be interviewing Bill Nye the Science guy and following them on engineering.com.
Check out this video some of the other things happening on engineering.com. Things like: smallest Violin, Italian Robots, beer for astronauts, and more