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Author Archives: Jon Marcus
Geek Chic: Popular Culture Celebrates Smarts
As a kid, Jaime Paglia hung around his father’s lab at UCLA. Then he’d see how smart people—like the ones he’d met on campus—were portrayed by popular culture. “I grew up with Revenge of the Nerds, which was a huge caricature,” he says. Paglia didn’t become an engineer or scientist, but he did go on to have a big impact …
Olympic Feats: Behind-the-Scenes Engineering at London’s Summer Games
As the world’s greatest athletes prepare for glory on the unrivaled stage of the summer Olympic Games in London, one group of participants is hoping not to be noticed at all. The international team providing technology services for the largest sporting event on earth is in the months-long testing stages of a system it’s taken four years to build, but …
Engineering Titanic: Lessons Learned One-Hundred Years On
When IT leaders gather for his lectures expecting PowerPoint presentations rich with organizational trees and multicolored bar graphs, consultant Mark Kozak-Holland instead projects the image of a black ship’s prow sailing toward them out of dark and distant history. It’s a symbol that seems as unlikely for this era and this audience as it is notoriously well-known. Yet it’s surprisingly …
Engineered to Last – Fenway Park Turns One-Hundred
Outside the red-brick left-field wall of Boston’s Fenway Park is a little-noticed latticework of steel trusses that rises to the peak of the famous 37-foot Green Monster. The ingeniously engineered support, invisible from inside the stadium, allowed 274 highly prized (and pricey) seats to be added at the top of the wall. It’s the most obvious evidence of 10 winters …
Liberal Education Way Forward for Engineers
In my last post Educating Engineers to Meet New Job Demands, I wrote about how required job skills for engineers are changing and how colleges across the United States need to catch up to industry. Well, here’s a little twist to the tale: How many MIT engineers does it take to switch on a lightbulb? Way too many, based on a …
Educating Engineers to Meet New Job Demands
“Outsourced to Detroit.” It’s such a catchy slogan, you can get it on a T-shirt. It’s also a serious strategy for tech firms including Compuware and companies with big technology departments—such as Intuit’s Quicken Loans—that are taking a gamble on moving to the hard-luck city instead of sending IT business overseas. After all, Detroit has plenty of cheap office space. …
Cool Characters: Engineers Take On Global Warming
A narrow hose made of composite fibers rises 18 miles over the Arctic. Supported by V-shaped balloons, it sprays 34 gallons per minute of sulfur dioxide into the earth’s stratosphere. Slowly, the aerosol reflects the sun’s rays back into space. The temperature cools. The Arctic ice stops melting. Sea levels stabilize, no longer threatening to rise and wipe out coastal …
Posted in Innovation
Tagged design, environmental engineering, geoengineering, green technology
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The Best Designs in Sports Technology
There’s a player down, and trainers at the University of New Hampshire are working feverishly in front of banks of cameras to remove his pads and helmets without jarring his neck. One unscrews the face mask to get access to the player’s airway; another pulls a cord that separates his shoulder pads. Cervical spine damage is one of the scariest …
Inside American R&D – Part IV: The Road Ahead
Rising Above the Gathering Storm. That was the ominous title of a report by a commission of respected scientists who urged fast action to confront increased foreign competition and flat federal and corporate spending that imperils United States dominance in research and development. The commission was appointed in 2007 by the presidents of the National Academy of Sciences, the National …
Inside American R&D – Part III: The China (and India) Syndrome
More than 4,000 engineers and scientists work at General Electric’s John F. Welch Technology Center, a gleaming research complex set amid impeccably landscaped grounds and named for the company’s legendary former CEO. In busy, sun-filled labs, they develop new locomotives, airplane engines, and healthcare products, and have received no fewer than 1,000 patents after just 10 years in operation—an average …
