the best of backscatter volume 2

8/10/2019 The Best of Backscatter Volume 2

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1The Best of BACKSCATTER Volume 2

IEEE-USA E-BOOKS

By Donald Christiansen

The Best of

Volume 2from IEEE-USA Todays Engineer


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Published by IEEE-USA.

Copyright 2009 by the IEEE. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

Edited by Georgia C. Stelluto, IEEE-USA Publishing Manager.

Cover design by Gregory O. Hill, IEEE-USA Electronic Communications Manager

Layout by Josie Thompson, Thompson Design.

This IEEE-USA publication is made possible through funding provided by a special dues assessment

of IEEE members residing in the United States.

Copying this material in any form is not permitted without prior written approval from the IEEE.


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Table of Contents

Introduction ................. .................... .................... ................... .................... .................... ................... .................... ................. 4

All in a Days Work .................... ................... .................... .................... ................... .................... .................... ................... .... 8

Black on Black Design ........................................................................................................................................................11

Picking a Winner ..................................................................................................................................................................13

The Hat Trick: Having It Both Ways ................... ................... .................... .................... ................... .................... ...........16

Credit Where Due ................................................................................................................................................................18

Ephemera for Engineers and Scientists .......................................................................................................................21

The Collyers and the Web .................... ................... .................... .................... ................... .................... .................... .......23

About the MBA .....................................................................................................................................................................26

Getting on Prime Time Mission Impossible? ..........................................................................................................28

Irreconcilable Differences? ...............................................................................................................................................30

Engineers Mere Mercenaries? .....................................................................................................................................32

Ghosts ......................................................................................................................................................................................35


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Introduction

This is the second in what may become a series of collections called The Best of Backscatter.

As in volume one, these essays were first published as individual columns inTodays Engineer Online.

Some were later excerpted in Todays Engineer Digest, and others reprinted in one or more of theIEEE Regional Newsletters.

I found that many of those I chose for this new volume fit the category that publishers call ever-

green. That is, even though a few years old, they could have been written today with equal validity.

In other words, they have aged well. That is not always good news; in some cases, it demonstrates

that hoped-for progress has not been made.

There is, thankfully, some fun and humor to be had even in a profession with serious objectives.

I trust a bit of that is evident in some of these selections, and that our engineering idiosyncrasies

and nerdiness occasionally show through.

The opening essay, All in a Days Work, is my response to a high-school seniors question as to what

a day in the life of an engineer is like. After fumbling for an answer, I summoned forth the trials and

challenges of a team of young Data General engineers so ably retold in Tracy Kidders classic, The

Soul of a New Machine. A youngster, I thought, would either be inspired by this saga or sufficiently

deterred so as to pursue some other field.

In Black-on-Black Design, I reveal my suspicions that human factors engineering is too frequently

forgotten as an aspect of product design. In it, I begin by lamenting the frequent use of controls

for consumer electronic products that are invisible to the naked eye because they are black against

a black background. I follow that with a plea for fewer computer operating procedures that arearbitrary and require memorizing. Among the many sympathetic responses to this column was one

from an engineer who said he carries a jewelers loupe and uses a MagLite flashlight to help deal with

the predilection for black-on-black by todays product designers, and another from a programmer

who remembered a rule he followed back in the late 1960s that a user must never be kept in the

dark for more than two seconds.

Picking a Winner deflates any notion that technology forecasting is a science. In it, I offer examples

of far-off-the-mark predictions that may have sounded plausible at the time.

I write about the tyranny of choice in The Hat Trick: Having It Both Ways. On the one hand, the

proliferation of new technical products with new features is a driver of the economy. On the other,they raise issues of rapid obsolescence, compatibility and waste of resources.


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It may be virtually impossible today to be a lone inventor. I discuss the relative prevalence of

individual versus team invention in Credit Where Due, and note that even in earlier times, it was not

always easy to identify the real inventor of an important new device, or the discoverer of a significant

new principle.

The next two essays relate to the reliability of the Internet. In The Collyers and the Web, I compare

the database of the eccentric Collyer brothers whose apartment was jammed with literally tons of

books, magazines, and newspapers to the Internet. I propose, with tongue only partially in cheek,

that the Collyers might have been able to find something more quickly in their archive than we

can today using the Internet. Then, in Ephemera for Engineers and Scientists, I bemoan the quick

disappearance of useful material from the Internet, and give some hints on how some of it may be

recovered.

About that MBA raises the question of whether business schools know much about running

businesses. Enough said. Read the essay and let me know what you think.

A perennial wish (pipe dream, some might say) of engineers is to see a prime-time television series

about engineers. I treat this subject not too seriously, I have to admit in Getting on Prime Time Mission Impossible? A colleague and I postulated just such a series, trying to think like a sitcom

developer. I included our proposal in the original essay. It centered on a cast of engineers attempting

to win an Air Force missile guidance contract. I described each member of the team and then added

We put a woman on the team to enhance the romantic interest, and also to be politically correct.

We may introduce some steamy encounters to incite the interest of Fox Television. Big mistake. At

least in the eyes of two female members of the IEEE who wrote scathing objections, one even threat-

ening to resign from IEEE. I took out the offending sentences. You will find them still absent from the

present essay. Perhaps removing them was a mistake. I did not think so at the time. Yet, I wonder in

retrospect whether leaving them in might have encouraged additional strong but useful responses.

Indeed, one woman Student Member of IEEE did not react negatively, but with an alternative sug-

gestion for a television series one that involved a variety of engineers and researchers. Among herenthusiastic comments, she wrote I couldnt picture a more woman-friendly career.

Over the years, I have observed a tendency of engineers and marketing people to go their separate

ways. In Irreconcilable Differences, I discuss this engineering-marketing interface and probe some

of the reasons why this traditional communication gap is so difficult to overcome.

In response to the column, Engineers: Mere Mercenaries?, one reader wrote Engineers need to start

looking beyond the excitement of creating. Every effect has a cause, and we cannot build a better

bottle with a Genie and not think that the Genie will not one day escape. He will. A good point.

But beyond that, in this essay, I cited several cases in which engineers and engineering schools areundertaking projects that employ technology for the public good, often on a volunteer basis.

The concluding article in this volume resonated with a number of readers. Entitled Ghosts, it was


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my recollection with fondness of certain venues in which engineers once labored, including Bell

Laboratories famous research facility in Holmdel, N.J. At the time I wrote it, it appeared that the

building would be demolished by a developer, to become another ghost, hallowed only in the

memory of those who once labored there in inventive splendor, as I expressed it with a bit of liter-

ary flourish. Fortunately, shortly thereafter, I learned that the original 500,000-square-foot building

would be saved, as the result of a blizzard of objections to its demise from scientists (including Arno

Penzias and Robert Wilson) and architects, and the Internet community, from which came hundreds

of e-mails pleading for its preservation. That good news aside, readers responded with recollections

of places they had worked that no longer exist, along with the plea that somehow we ought to be

able to preserve more of our engineering heritage.

I hope you enjoy these essays. I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Donald Christiansen


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Acknowledgments

My thanks to Pender McCarter for first suggesting I write these columns; to Greg Hill for his aid in

getting them into the online version of Todays Engineer(www.todaysengineer.org) and for creating

the associated artwork; to Georgia Stelluto for selecting and excerpting columns for publication

in Todays Engineering Digestand for making these Best of Backscattere-books a reality; and to NancyT. Hantman for typing, record keeping, and assuring that I meet my deadlines. Special thanks to the

many readers who e-mail me their comments and suggestions concerning both past and future

essays.

Donald Christiansen

About the Author

Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrumand an independent

publishing consultant. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. You can write to him at [email protected].


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All in a Days Work

When a high-school senior recently asked me what a day in the life of an engineer is like, I was

temporarily taken aback. I could not easily respond. It depends, I said, going over the usual range

of possible environments research, design and development, manufacturing, marketing and

sales and telling him a few war stories of my own to give real examples of what an engineermight encounter. I did the best I could in the time I thought a youngster might be willing to spare,

but went away feeling I had somehow missed the mark.

The form of his question had been unusual. Later, I thought, he had probably been wondering

whether engineering, if he chose it as a profession, would be as interesting and exciting as he

believed it to be, or might there be many days of less-than-challenging routine. How many

high-water marks are there in an engineering career, he may have been thinking. To what extent

can you do your own thing, or are you overly restricted by your company or your boss?

Too late, Tracy Kidders The Soul of a New Machinecame to mind. Describing the trials and tribulationsof an engineering group at Data General in the late 1970s, striving to develop a fast, inexpensive

machine to better its competition, the book, I thought, would be an excellent choice to recommend

to the young man should I encounter him again. I withdrew a copy from the local library to refresh

my memory.

The Story in Brief

Operating from the basement of the Data General headquarters building in Westborough, Massa-

chusetts, the team was formed in some secrecy, with a tight budget and a close deadline factors

that guaranteed challenges to all its members. Its head, Tom West, a veteran computer designer, split

the team into two groups: the Hardy Boys (hardware design) and the Microkids (software design).Many top engineering graduates were lured to the team by the prospect of having their name on

an important new machine, something the Data General recruiters told them could happen at IBM

only after years of routine experience. Those who were excited at the prospect and showed other

indications that they would sign on were hired. Signing-on was an informal process that amounted

to agreeing, with unsolicited enthusiasm, that the project would come first, ahead of friends, family

and pastimes.

The perks were these: they could wear jeans, work any hours they wanted, do anything necessary

short of spending money without authorization, with the proviso that theyd complete their part

of the project in time to bring the whole machine to completion within the specified deadline (one

year!). There was an implication, but nothing in writing, that if you signed on and the project was a

winner (i.e., it went out the door), youd then be rewarded. Rumors about stock options circulated.


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Imagine how exciting this prospect was to a new graduate! West gave only broad guidelines (The

32-bit minicomputer was to compete with DECs successful VAX machines, and no mode bit was to

be used). West took a hands-off approach with the team, communicating only through his two group

lieutenants. You tell a guy to do [some part of the design] and fit it all on one board, and I dont want

to hear from him until he knows how to do it, West said.

Many of the team were overachievers in math in school, and had a history of taking things apart to

see how they worked. To his credit, Carl Alsing, supervisor of the hardware group, was able to recruit

a woman, not easy in those days. Eighty-hour work weeks were not unusual, with weekends and

overnights no exception. When a team member hosted an off-hours party, the talk was exclusively

computers. The term midnight programmer came into vogue. One member spent nights alone in

the lab, studying schematics and microcode listings to help him understand the IP, even though it

was not the part of the machine to which he himself was assigned. The members could work alone

or together. If personalities clashed, one could leave notes for the other on the next shift to pick

up where he left off. Technical controversies were encouraged. The axiom that no enmity should

proceed from a dispute among engineers generally prevailed.

Problems did surface. The drama deepened. As it was never clear to what extent the company wasprepared to continue support of the project, some programming was done on the sly, adding to the

intrigue and enjoyment by the secret team. One team member who signed on did not stay. After

spending many 80-hour weeks, he left this note one day: Im going to a commune in Vermont and

will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season. He later joined another computer company

where he worked an eight-hour day, five-day week. Even so, he had liked the fact that he had a lot of

control over the things he did at Data General.

The independence given to team members led one to complain Theres no grand design no ones

in control ... The Harvard Business School would have barfed at the management structure, he said.

There were no organizational tables or PERT charts to be found in the department. West felt the

minimal bureaucracy to be beneficial, even necessary to the on-time completion of the project. Tocontain costs, he had rejected a request by the team for a new logic analyzer, saying, the story went,

An analyzer costs ten thousand dollars. Overtime for engineers is free. The team grew used to Wests

aloofness. He would not respond to their greetings in the halls, but acknowledged their individual

contributions to their team leaders.

Success Achieved

Data General introduced the new computer in April 1980. Alsing expressed the teams feelings, call-

ing it the most exciting project in the company, the most exciting thing in our lives for a year and a

half. He gave lots of credit to West, saying West never bored us.


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As for West, he was compelled by the challenge of working on a project so complex that no single

person could comprehend it. It includes some notion of insecurity and challenge, of where the

edges are, and of finding out what you cant do, all within a perfectly justifiable scenario, West said.

He likened it to mountain climbing.

Writer Tracy Kidder concluded: Maybe in the late 1970s designing and debugging a computer was

inherently more interesting than most other jobs in industry. But to at least some engineers, at the

outset, [this computer] appeared to be a fairly uninteresting computer to build. Yet more than two

dozen people worked on it overtime, without any real hope of material rewards, for a year and a half,

and afterward most of them felt glad. The proper mix of guidance and freedom to invent may have

been the key.

Perhaps if I can get a copy of this tale of extreme engineering to my young high-school acquaintance,

it might convince him that excitement and even drama is possible in an engineering career. But I

should warn him that it doesnt happen every day. Sometimes he may have to leave the office at

5 oclock, whether he wants to or not.

For more, see:Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine, Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1981.


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Black-on-Black Design

Black-on-black is a metaphor I use to cover a variety of befuddling design shortcomings at the in-

terface between otherwise sophisticated equipment and the user.

It derives from the proliferation of entertainment products that feature black knobs and pushbuttonsand black cabinetry or housings. Who thought this up? Minuscule icons or alphanumeric callouts

silk-screened or otherwise imprinted on or near the controls in dishwater gray do little to help. In a

dimly lit room one needs a jewelers loupe to distinguish one button from another.

I sometimes suspect, perhaps unjustly, that the sleek but user-unfriendly consumer products are

designed by artists hoping to win some prestigious design award. Where are the engineers who de-

signed the sophisticated stuff thats inside? Have they no input? And who represents the customer?

The solution does not end with the visibility of controls. Their physical layout enters in: they are

seldom standardized in location or sequence. Do you have a new digital watch with the usualoptions for time, alarm and resetting? If you think the mini-buttons are in the same place as those

on the watch you just discarded, forget it. Misplace the tiny roadmap that accompanied the watch,

and youll have to hack out the programming sequence. It should take no longer than five minutes.

Why do the watch designers do this? Is it not invented here, or do they really think their sequence

and button location is better than everyone elses?

From knobs and buttons we can segue easily to the topic of computers. Everything that software

designers and programmers do may be based on machine logic, but to many computer users, logic

seems to end at the mouse and the keyboard. This is not a good thing, say the critics, who include

the application designers themselves. With computers we find ourselves in the realm of operat-

ing requirements and sequences that are arbitrary and require memorizing. And each applicationis generally a new learning experience. What must be learned by rote is easily forgotten and thus

needs frequent refreshing. When something goes awry, troubleshooting is not a logical process. Get

a troubleshooter on the phone and his most useful phrase seems to be, Now lets try this Average

citizens arent the only ones found in the Barnes & Noble computer manual aisle. I think Ive spotted

a well-known computer professional in dark glasses surreptitiously searching for a guide called

computer something-or-another for dummies.

Is it too late?

Perhaps we are too far into the computer age to stem the proliferation of complex, arbitrary proce-

dures, cryptic nomenclature and rampant acronyms. The younger computer-using generation may

accept it as the norm a fair price for the computers enormous capabilities.


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The human factors engineer is charged with simplifying the interface between machine and user,

but sometimes, perhaps, enters the fray too late to do much to aid a given design project. Concurrent

engineering, too, may leave little time to evaluate and improve the human-machine interface of a

system before it is deployed.

Donald Norman, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University, may have identified

part of the problem. He speculates that in the design process, the design engineers may become

so conversant with the idiosyncrasies of their own designs or their unusual operating requirements

that they do not appear at all troublesome.

Those who believe the user warrants more consideration offer some suggestions:

Involving customers and potential users early in the design process

Engaging human factors specialists at an earlier stage in systems design

Seeking operating sequences in which an action, its eect and conrmation of the expected

consequence are obvious to the operator

Human factors specialists tend to concentrate on health and safety issues, as well they should. Butthis emphasis may downgrade the concern for annoying and inefficient operating requirements,

although the two may in fact be linked. In some cases, you cant have one without the other. Consider

the controls of a modern airliner, the air traffic control system, or a nuclear power plant control room.

At the university level, human factors studies seem generally to be part of the industrial engineering

discipline, so it is questionable whether students specializing in this area find themselves on teams

made up principally of electrical and computer engineering students. It might be a good idea.

Another way to foster an appreciation of user-centered system design would be to assign one

student to play the role of a demanding customer in a design project exercise.

In any event, there is an upside to the downside of human-machine interface foibles. Theres so much

room for improvement that progress ought to be expected, and in many cases, easily accomplished.Perhaps we should begin with those black-on-black buttons.

For more about human factors engineering and user-centered design, see:

Norman, D.A., The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books, 2002.

Chapanis, A., The Chapanis Chronicles: 50 Years of Human Factors Research,Education, and Design,

Aegean, 1999.

Shaw, R.E., and J. Bransford, Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing,Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ,

1986.

Norman, D.A., and S.W. Draper, User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human Computer

Interaction, Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1986.

Mindell, D.A., Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics,

The Johns Hopkins Press, 2002.

Publications of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, www.ieeesmc.org.

Publications of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, www.hfes.org.


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Picking a Winner

Part of the joy of being an engineer is working on cutting-edge projects. We all like to be part of an

organization that brings to market new and useful occasionally even revolutionary products

and services.

Corporations have parallel ambitions. They hope to bet on technologies that will spawn products

that can move smoothly into the marketplace on a schedule that is predictable and with a return

on investment that is satisfactory.

Unfortunately, picking a winner is not that easy. Technology forecasting part art, part science is

called upon to help. But deciding which technologies will be successful, and how and when they will

be incorporated into commercially viable products is a daunting challenge. Those who try have been

notably unsuccessful. Whether based on mathematical models or experts opinions, the accuracy of

such forecasts is often far less than that of science fiction writers.

Here are a few forecasts that were widely publicized in major business publications:

Huge sun-reecting satellites to illuminate night-shrouded areas of the earth (NASA said they

would be able to do it by the mid-1970s)

Human cloning by 1985 (predicted by Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg)

Nuclear-powered undersea recreation areas and undersea motels by 1990 (postulated by TRW

in 1966)

Newspapers delivered by facsimile by 1978 (another TRW prediction)

Superconductors as a billion-dollar industry (In 1967, Fortunereported it could happen by the

mid-1970s)

The demise of the internal combustion engine (Bill Lear, developer of the Learjet, predicted in

1971 that within 10 years, the gasoline engine would be a collectors item.)

(I think I remember reading about some of these same predictions in Popular Sciencemagazine in the

1930s.)

Some projections will never materialize, as they will be bypassed by newer technology. Others may

eventually make it, but forecasts having a faulty timeline can be useless to corporate planners, or

worse, turn into a money pit.


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Forecasting Flaws

Forecasts that misfire are frequently based on our fascination with our own technology and the

enthusiasm it generates among market analysts and business magazine writers. The popular busi-

ness press has often been the first to express unbridled optimism about the expected success of a

new technological development, and, often as frequently, the first to criticize its developers when

expectations were not met.

With the computer field being a notable exception, most forecasts have been much too optimistic.

(We all know that optimism is needed to attract capital!) Steven Schnaars, author of Megamistakes,

warns that in forecasting, a passionate focus on technology for its own sake spells disaster.

Instead, youve got to be aware of other factors, many of which are exogenous, some in themselves

unpredictable. The poor batting average in technology forecasts can be attributed in part to

over-optimism, new forecasts that are retreads of earlier forecasts, unanticipated fads and fashions

(particularly in the consumer marketplace), and, perhaps most dramatic, disruptive technologies

(e.g., solid-state technology) that threaten the status quo. A disruptive technology can drastically

shorten the expected life cycles of numerous products and even industries.

On the contrary, the rise of a new technology may be unexpectedly delayed because companieshaving a large investment in skills and machinery may be reluctant to abandon a product threatened

by the new technology, and may rely on marketing techniques to retard the threat. With the transis-

tor looming on the horizon, the major manufacturers of receiving tubes banded together to form

the Electron Tube Information Council, whose objective was to define and promote the advantages

of vacuum tubes over transistors. Such advantages proved dubious or transitory at best, but perhaps

the councils efforts delayed the incorporation of transistors and semiconductor diodes into certain

products and helped some of the receiving tube makers survive longer than they otherwise might

have.

The Tipping Phenomenon

Then theres the case of two or more manufacturers vying for the same market, exploiting the same

technology but in different formats. It is possible that more than one contender can survive, but the

market may tip to a single winner, especially for services or products that involve networks of hard-

ware, software and users. How and when a market will tip to a particular format is not predictable.

Robert Lucky, author of Silicon Dreams, called it an instance of chaos in group dynamics.

Sometimes the contest for a market niche will go on indefinitely before a clear winner emerges.

Sonys Betamax survived for 27 years, selling 18 million units before it succumbed to VHS, though to

many the handwriting on the wall seemed clear long before Sony withdrew.


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Today, people are paying a lot more attention to technology forecasting methodologies than was

the case in the 1950s and 60s, when technology forecasting first gained interest as a management

tool. Once, when an engineer-colleague of mine was assigned to a market research project, he com-

plained that the major tool for technological forecasting was nothing more than a jury of executive

opinion, which he disparagingly termed circular reasoning. But that was long ago. Today we expect

more.

Even so, I cant help but think of the comment once made by a writer for Forbes: When you get the

urge to predict the future, better lie down until it goes away.

Resources

For more on technology forecasting, see:

Kahn, Herman, and A.J. Wiener, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three

Years, Macmillan, 1967.

Schnaars, Steven, Megamistakes: Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid Technological Change, The Free

Press, 1989.

Moyer, Reed, The futility of forecasting, Long Range Planning,Vol. 17, No. 1, 1984.

Wise, G., The accuracy of technological forecasts: 1890-1940, Futures, Vol. 8, No. 5, 1976.

Godet, M., Reducing the blunders in forecasting, Futures,Vol. 15, No. 3, 1983.

Toer, Alvin,Future Shock, Random House, 1970.

The future that never came, Forbes, July 10, 1978.

Wol, Michael, Carlsons Dry Printer,IEEE Spectrum, December 1989.


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The Hat Trick: Having It Both Ways

We seem to be living in an era where the past is denigrated. Neighbors are embarrassed if their

home, or its dcor, is outdated. We must have the latest version of an ISP program or be considered

technically disadvantaged. My iPod can do more than yours is an acceptable boast.

Engineers, of course, are agents of change, and so we lay the foundations for disenchantment with

the old, while helping popularize the new.

But our laudable successes bring with them a certain disaffection. The tyranny of choice is one

result. Walking through the aisles of cell, answer, and remote-access telephones in Best Buy is like

navigating the breakfast food aisle of a supermarket. What to choose? It is time consuming and ener-

vating to the uninitiated. If Ma Bell and W. K. Kellogg were still in charge, selections could be quickly

made: Ill take the black phone and a box of corn flakes. We could go on to more interesting things.

When the choices for the music enthusiast were but three 78, 45, or 33 1/3 life was downright

idyllic. A three-speed record player silenced all concerns about compatibility. Now our DVD recorderwarns us: Do not play back the following discs: VCD, SVCD, SACD, PD, CDV, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM,

DVD+R/RW, DVD, or audio.

For a while, some products were produced with the idea that they would not quickly become obso-

lete. They would be compatible with later versions and easily updated. During its first decade (and

beyond) of instant cameras, Polaroid designed all functional improvements so that they could be

easily adapted to its first camera.

Do we, as individual engineers, hold any responsibility for assuring the compatibility of operation

between generations of products? Perhaps that rests only with industry associations, in which we

may participate, or with regulatory agencies, to whom we may provide advice. Standards-setting canbe contentious, if ultimately advantageous to all players. In a lengthy process involving both industry

competitors and the FCC, a compatible U.S. color television standard was hammered out, forestalling

competing, incompatible systems coming on the market. In contrast, the PAL system was introduced

in Germany and SECAM in France, neither compatible with the U.S. system, or one another.

Industry standards can help avoid the expenditure of time, effort and capital in developing products

that are incompatible with that of a more successful competitor. Undue delay in defining standards

may result in lots of nonstandard products, all claimed by their makers to do the same thing, only

better. Many will not survive, as customers tilt toward a winner. The losers users may find themselves

saddled with quality and service problems, and, ultimately, more e-waste.


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A Down Side

On the other hand, prematurely adopting standards can stifle innovation and limit the paths avail-

able to designers. It may take the arrival of something truly revolutionary to dislodge an entrenched

standard or make it obsolete. In the computer field, standards and protocols are an absolute require-

ment. Yet, ironically, their very existence may preclude or seriously impede progress toward a simpler,

more user-oriented computer era. Where systems and their cultural uses are entrenched, it requires

disruptive technologies to advance the status quo.

It would surely be counterproductive to limit design options at the research phase of a new technol-

ogy. If standards are set too early, or regulatory restraints imposed prematurely, the world might

lose a fabulous new product we never knew we needed. If set too late, product evaluation may, de

facto, fall to those customers willing to take a chance on one among many contenders. The balance

between the two may be delicate or not. I dont have an answer.

Not everyone is opposed to shopping the aisles of Best Buy or serving as a test customer for a high-

tech product that may prove to be short-lived. I must admit that Im watching the mail for my new

digital watch that also doubles as a TV, DVD, and VCR remote. Ill probably be the first on the block toown one, and its even possible that the neighbors may feel outdated


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Credit Where Due

Assigning credit to one individual for a particular technical development is harder than it used to be.

So much creative engineering is now done in teams that isolating one member would most likely be

unfair, if not impossible. Nearly parallel work done by teams in competing organizations complicates

the matter.

I always supposed that the very early formulators of electrical science, like Volta and Ampere and

their contemporaries, seldom encountered these questions of priority. For one thing, there were so

few of them. Some were given what is perhaps the highest individual accolade having electrical

units named for them. Others, like Kirchhoff and Fourier, were immortalized through their identifica-

tion of physical laws or mathematical relationships. Most of us accept these time-honored credits

as unequivocal. Yet, because these early theorists and experimenters often worked in isolation and

published sparingly, they sometimes pursued similar paths to unknowingly reach similar conclusions.

And because first publication might be in Latin, German, Dutch, French, Italian or English, translationdelays slowed the dissemination of results. Indeed, historians question the absolute accuracy of some

of the firsts. Here are a few examples. They are not meant to denigrate the importance of these early

contributors, but rather to illustrate how difficult it was even then to establish priorities and give

credit where it is deserved.

The Wheatstone Bridge was developed by Hunter Christie, a lesser-known inventor than Charles

Wheatstone. But the configuration was popularized by Wheatstone, who in his lectures gave full

credit to Christie.

American physicist Joseph Henry appears to have experimentally discovered electromagnetic

induction before Faraday. But Faraday was first to publish, and so was credited with the discovery.

Today, it is generally accepted thet Henry discovered self-inductance, while Faraday discoveredmutual inductance.

Henry Cavendish, the meticulous British experimenter for whom the famed Cavendish Laboratory

at the University of Cambridge is named, studied electrical phenomena for many years. He left

stacks of unpublished works, and it was not until Joseph Maxwell, nearly a century later, edited

and published a volume of Cavendishs results that it was found that some of his major findings

had predated similar conclusions by Faraday and Coulomb.


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The importance of publishing

Cavendishs failure to publish during his lifetime and the consequent failure of the electrical commu-

nity to credit him with significant findings may be the outstanding example of publish or perish. But

there were others:

Carl Friedrich Gauss would often react to fellow scientists disclosures by stating that he had

known these things for years, but had not felt it important to publish them. Historians believethat some of these claims may be legitimate, as Gauss, a loner, had such a strong reluctance to

publish.

Hans Orsteds experiments prompted Georg Simon Ohm to conduct his own. He is thought to

have confirmed Ohms Law by 1825 or even earlier, although he first revealed it formally in an

1827 publication. Even so, leading physicists seemed to misunderstand or resist his findings. He

was finally given full recognition when the Royal Society (London) gave him the Copley medal in

1841.

The issue of priority notwithstanding, many of the 19th-century experimenters were able to profit

from their contemporaries work, and most gave credit to them. Orsteds experiments produced a

flurry of experiments by others, including Biot and Savart, Poisson, Faraday, Ohm and Ampere. Am-

pere pursued a combined theory of electricity and magnetism in the early 1820s, encouraged by

Orsteds disclosures.

Maxwell, it seems, was little influenced by ego or the Not Invented Heresyndrome, open to the find-

ings of both predecessors and contemporaries, and always ready to give credit to them. He agreed

that his mathematical theories on electricity and magnetism were made possible by Faradays experi-

ments and his recognition of lines of force. Hertz later confirmed Maxwells concepts experimentally,

and he became a great champion of Maxwell.

Changing times

As the electrical engineering profession moved into the 20th century, a new dimension was added.

Patents became a key to establishing priority and gave the holders access to substantial monetary

rewards. Among the notable cases of contentious patent disputes were these:

Television priorities were the issue between Philo Farnsworth and RCA. Pride of invention and

potential profits were both at stake for Farnsworth, while RCAs David Sarnoff was concerned

principally with the latter.The storied contest entered the public domain through accounts in two

recent bestselling books.

A dispute raged on in the courts for years concerning the origin of the regenerative radio circuit.

The principal contenders were its developer, Edwin Armstrong, and Lee de Forest, who claimed

he had thought of it earlier. A technically illiterate Supreme Court decided in favor of de Forest.Others claiming credit were Irving Langmuir and Alexander Meissner, who sued each other as

well as Armstrong and de Forest.


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A bitter legal dispute between Sperry Rand, on the one hand, and Honeywell and Control Data

on the other, was based on who developed the first digital electronic computer. Although John

Mauchley and J. Presper Eckert were issued the first patent, it was disclosed that John Atanasoff

and Clifford Berry had actually built the first computer. Mauchley had visited Atanasoff and stud-

ied the details of his computer before applying for a patent on the ENIAC, which was ultimately

assigned to Sperry Rand. Iowa State University, where the Atanasoff-Berry computer was built,

had failed to file for patents, and the ENIAC patent was applied for without citing the earlier

computer. The courts ultimately ruled in favor of Honeywell and Control Data, and thus belated

recognition went to Atanasoff and Berry.

In todays complex world, determining whos first has two equally important implications for the

engineer first, peer and, sometimes, public recognition, and second, potential monetary reward.

Timely recording and publication of work, and holding a first-patent position are both important. But

getting your name on an important design or development will probably be as part of a team. And

the chance of having an electrical unit named after you is nil I think.

Resources

For more on the pre-20th-century electrophysicists, see:

Dibner, B.,Ten Founding Fathers of the Electrical Science, Burndy Library, 1954.

The Electric Pantheon, Eta Kappa Nu, 2005.

Bordeau, S.P., Volts to Hertz, Burgess, 1982.

For more on 20th-century inventors who had to contend for credit, see:

Mollenhoff, C.,Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer, Iowa State University Press, 1988.

John Vincent Atanasoff Papers, Iowa State University.

Schwartz, E. I., The Last Lone Inventor (Philo Farnsworth vs. David Sarnoff),Harper Collins, 2002.

Stashower, D., The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television, Broadway, 2002.

Lessing, L., Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong,Lippincott, 1956.


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Ephemera for Engineers and Scientists

I usually think of ephemera as anything at a flea market that would be badly damaged in a sudden

rainstorm like old copies of National Geographicmagazine or a letter signed by Abraham Lincoln.

Mostly paper goods.

But now I find that ephemera appear on and by definition disappear from the World Wide

Web. I often run across an interesting article, make a mental note to revisit it, and then find it is gone,

sometimes within a few days, when I search for it again. I have taken to downloading or printing out

anything that I consider of significance.

The problem manifests itself in other ways. Many technical articles now include references to Inter-

net addresses, as opposed to hard-copy resources. Authors and readers alike complain that many

of these URL-identified references seem to vaporize with time. A study led by Robert Dellavalle of

the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center revealed some startling numbers. Summarized in

Science magazine, it reported that in one dramatic instance, 108 of 184 Internet addresses becameinactive within four years. In tabulating the combined results from articles that appeared in three

major journals Science, JAMA,andNEJM the study team reported that 3.8 percent of Internet

references were inactive three months after journal publication, 10 percent after 15 months and 13

percent after 27 months.

Why does this happen? Since the URL serves as both the name and address of the referenced infor-

mation, all it takes is a change in or discontinuance of the URL to lose the link.

Some of us might not think the loss that great, except for the time wasted in fruitless search. Indeed,

some of the reference material that I have been able to locate easily proved to be of such peripheral

relationship to the parent article that I could have done without it.

Considering that those who ought to know estimate that some five million new pages of information

are added to the Web daily, it is easy to understand why so much of it is suspect not worth read-

ing, much less referencing. In browsing online, I have found technical papers that are undated and for

which the authors name, but no affiliation, is given. Some do have an e-mail address to which one

and all are invited to respond with comment. Perhaps too many comments will prompt the author to

remove the paper from the Web while it undergoes repair. It might never return.

A corollary issue for the author tempted to cite an e-reference occurs when what appears to be an

appropriate paper one seemingly worthy of referencing appears online but without any pedi-

gree. Has the paper been refereed or vetted in any way? What to do? It, too, may disappear.


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Playing Detective

Of course, hard-copy references also have their pitfalls. How often have you tried to retrieve a par-

ticular journal paper, only to find the volume number or some other identifier had been misprinted?

Or have you ever had to track down an out-of-print book? While the search for a hard-copy reference

is time-consuming, it is usually successful.

There are also ways to try to recover missing e-references. Internet search engines may cache Web

pages, and the Internet Archive may be helpful. In the study reported in Science, Internet Archive

provided recoverable information for 31 of 60 inactive Internet references. However, it seems we

need a more fundamental solution. Perhaps it will come through the use of Digital Object Identifiers

(DOIs), the Uniform Resource Name (URN) syntax or the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL).

Meanwhile, there is no sure way of guaranteeing that e-references can be accessed. They may prove

to be chiefly decorative, but nevertheless impressive to those readers who never attempt to retrieve

them.

Resources

For more about e-references, see:

Dellavalle, R. P., et al. Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References, Science, 31 Oct. 2003.

Preserving our digital heritage: Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and

Preservation Program, Library of Congress, www.digitalpreservation.gov.

The Digital Object Identifier System, International DOI Foundation, www.doi.org.

Persistent URL Home Page, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, http://purl.oclc.org.


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The Collyers and the Web

Remember the Collyer brothers? The well-educated but reclusive pair saved everything. In their

New York City apartment they packed tons of books, magazines, newspapers, and a few typewriters.

Tragically, in 1947 they met their demise there. Investigators could scarcely crab their way through

the narrow aisles that separated rows of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. One of the brothers was foundbeneath a pile of books from shelves that had evidently collapsed, and the other nearby.

We shall never know, but I like to imagine that the Collyers were not aicted with discardophobia

(the morbid fear of throwing anything away) a syndrome that many of us are believed to suffer

from today but had actually used and enjoyed their huge archive. Langley, bring me that copy of

The New York Times the one on the dedication of LaGuardia Airport, I can hear his brother, Homer,

asking. And Langley goes right to it, using whatever system he had devised to recall its location. A

bit like researching something on the Internet, dont you think? Yet the Collyers may have been able

to find something even more quickly. Their database was smaller, and they had put everything in its

place themselves custom programmed it, I would say.

Of course, the Internet is much more useful and at the same time more problematic. It is huge, add-

ing, some guess, five to 10 million pages a day. (The actual number is as elusive as the national debt.)

Rod Alferness, a specialist in high-bandwidth optical fiber technology at Lucent, suggests that while

enormous bandwidth can bring us loads of information stored in the Webs data banks, individuals

may become so swamped they cant process it. Do you have half a lifetime to look at everything?

he asks. And what about its quality? Some users suspect that half of what is on the Web is not worth

looking at but they dont know which half. Alan Kaye, co-inventor of the graphical user interface

(GUI), is sympathetic. He sees 99 percent of the content on the Internet as distractive and of no con-

sequence. Yet he believes the small percentage of worthwhile material can be uplifting and culturechanging. The problem will be to make it as easy for people to find out about the good content as it

is to find out about the distracting stuff, he says.

Information Addiction

Perhaps Langley Collyer was diverted on his way to finding the article his brother wanted. I can

picture him, cross-legged on the floor between shelves, reading something in The Timesthat had

caught his eye, then perhaps another item, and another, while Homer waited patiently. This kind

of digression often happens to me when Im online.


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Researching online can become addictive. Caught in the Web may be a good way to express it.

A fellow engineer of my acquaintance admits that he is often up until 2 a.m. following some work-

related trail too intriguing to abandon. A few years ago a TV commercial promoting some computer

product or another featured a young woman at a terminal boasting Its already 10 a.m. and I

havent yet dressed or taken my shower! The commercials creators must have realized its negative

implications, for it soon disappeared. Vincent Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet, recently noted that

its always-on nature poses a pretty tough problem for people who feel they have to keep up with

everything we may all end up suffering from global sleep deprivation.

What to Do?

I am afraid that if we cannot somehow slash the amount of material we must search through to find

meaningful results with a reasonable expenditure of time, the nature of our workstations and home

offices will be transformed. Imagine each day mounting an exercycle to which we have permanently

attached a keyboard. TV dinners will give way to computer dinners, warmed in a microwave oven

and served on a tray, both affixed to the exercycle. As we multiprocess our way through the day,

eyes glued to the computer screen, our hands will dart from mouse and keyboard to knife and

fork. We will have to pedal faster and faster to keep in shape, and figuratively, to satisfy our lustfor information.

Help Needed

Todays search engines and specialized Web sites notwithstanding, the means of precision research-

ing online will continue as an ongoing challenge. Who will meet it? Are library scientists a vanishing

breed? Will Web site and search engine designers (search engineers?) come to the rescue? Are the

former morphing into the latter? A major task will be to design, categorize, classify, and index Web

sites and to certify the degree of quality and legitimacy of what can be found online.

Even Bill Gates agreed recently that search just isnt what it should be. We need better technologyfor navigation, and, he said, answers, not lists of Web sites as we search. Gates hinted that the much

anticipated Longhorn might help.

Lets hope so. We want to make it as easy to find trustworthy information as it was for the Collyers,

but minus the claustrophobic and threatening environment.


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For more on the Internet:

Foulke, J. (Ed.), Engineering Tomorrow,IEEE Press, 2000; p. 110, comments by R. Alferness; p. 4,

comments by V. G. Cerf ; p. 88, comments by A. Kaye.

Navigation aids:

The Librarians Index to the Internet, www.lii.org

Internet Public Library, www.ipl.org

Reference Desk, www.refdesk.com

Hotbot Quick Search Deskbar, www.hotbot.com

Metacrawler, www.metacrawler.com

Altavista, www.altavista.com


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About That MBA

Many of our engineering colleagues have earned MBAs as a follow-on to their baccalaureate or

masters degrees in engineering. Most of them are glad they did. They confirm that pairing an

engineering and a business education makes good sense. Engineers who intend to follow a research

career path may disagree, believing that time spent in further education might better be devotedto specialty studies in a technical area.

Notwithstanding their generally good reputation, business schools are coming under criticism,

and not only from employers of their graduates, but from some of the business school leaders them-

selves. It seems that the curricula have become increasingly focused on business and management

theory and research, and less on real-world considerations like leadership methods, ethical concerns

and multidisciplinary issues. Some business school deans feel that business schools wrongly try to

mimic the curricula of academic disciplines like physics, biology or mathematics. Instead, they say,

business administration is a profession, like medicine, law or engineering, not an academic discipline,

so its curriculum must address not just technical but professional issues.

Until the post-World-War-II years, business schools were notably heavy on practice and light on

research. Then, spurred by critics and aided by foundation grants, they turned their attention to

scientific research. Perhaps the pendulum swung too far in that direction.

Symptoms of the situation today include the difficulty that otherwise qualified professors face in

getting appointments to top-rated business schools unless they have a record of publishing in

scholarly journals. Therefore, they find they must eschew writing articles for unrefereed business

publications or discussing anecdotal experiences in the classroom. Neither gains them career points.

Warren Bennis and James OToole, professors at the University of Southern California, writing in

the Harvard Business Review, commend the practices of law schools, where a well-written, well-documented book or article, published in a serious, practitioner-oriented review is deemed as

valuable as an arcane, quantitative paper published in a journal read only by researchers in the

specialty. In many business schools there seems a widespread discounting, if not disdain, of articles

published in a practitioner-oriented business magazine.

There also is a trend away from the case-study teaching methods, made so popular by the Harvard

Business School. Instead, hypothetical situations are mathematically analyzed. I was once invited

to be an expert commentator when Harvard B-school students tackled a case study in which I had

been a real-world participant. The spirited discussion and analysis by the students was commendable

and thought provoking. (I have often wondered why engineering schools have not experimented

with the case-study method of teaching.)


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Business schools tend to avoid discussions of messy interdisciplinary problems. The result, or

perhaps the cause, is that it is possible, as Bennis and OToole noted, to find tenured management

professors who have never set foot inside a real business, except as customers.

The critics are clearly not calling for a return to the days when business schools were seen as trade

schools, not scientific institutions. They agree that management is both an art and a science, and that

neither should be shortchanged in the educational process.

Running a business

There is also the notion afoot that it might not be a bad idea for business schools themselves to oper

ate businesses. A rare example might be the Cayuga MBA Foundation, established by Cornell Uni-

versitys Johnson Graduate School of Management and run by students. An example from another

calling is at Northwestern Universitys Medill School of Journalism, where students, rather than being

confined to learning writing and reporting skills, are challenged to research, design and produce pro-

totype magazines. They are professionally crafted and equal in quality to that of many commercially

published magazines, and thus might easily catch the attention of a publishing house.

Birds of a feather?

Is there a parallel in the evolution of engineering and business education? I think so. The origins of

both were largely practice-based. Both evolved to a strong science base. But now educators in both

professions see the need for curriculum redesign. The goal is to graduate students able to enter to-

days complex workplace without facing undue surprises and many unfamiliar options, and to make

them more immediately valuable in their first assignments.

In engineering, ABETs Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC2000) concepts are designed to do just that. The

notions advanced by business school educators appear to be similar. If both are successful, the value

of a dual MBA/EE education will be enhanced accordingly.

Resources

For more about MBA programs, see:

Mintzberg, H., Managers Not MBAs, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004.

Overview of U.S. Business Schools, Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, 2004.

Bennis, W. G. and J. OToole, How Business Schools Lost Their Way, Harvard Business Review,May

2005.

Barnes, L. B., C. R. Christensen, and A.J. Hansen, Teaching and the CaseMethod: Text, Cases, and Readings, 3rd Ed., Harvard Business School Press, 1994.


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Getting on Prime Time Mission Impossible?

The other day I met a newly-retired microwave engineer. Soon we were comparing notes about our

respective careers. Prompted by our exchange of war stories, his wife interrupted: Why is there never

a television show about engineers?

We both knew this question has been raised often over the years. Her husband was quick to respond:

A show about engineers would be as interesting as watching paint dry. I must say Ive heard more

optimistic similes, such as watching mold grow on bread, suggestive at least of some nominal action.

Pessimism notwithstanding, my new friend and I picked up on his wifes challenge. We thought a

TV series would be good. Our first idea was a show about nothing but Jerry Seinfeld had already

done that.

How about this, we thought: The Air Force puts out a request for proposal for a new, sophisticatedmissile guidance system (something to do with a neo-SDI project, perhaps). A large aerospace

systems company assembles a crack engineering group to respond to the RFP. During the first few

episodes, we get to meet the team members. We learn which of them graduated from MIT, and that

another nearly flunked out while spending too much time playing video games in his dorm room at

Stanford. (He will become the project leader.)

As the series progresses, the engineers try to confirm who their competitors are, and to imagine

how each might be attacking the proposal. In the sixth episode, a new member joins the team. He

previously worked for the companys arch rival, known to be developing its own proposal. The plot

thickens. Ethical issues arise.

Optimistic that they may win the competition, the company enlarges the project group and invests

in supporting experiments. However, we are approaching the end of the TV season and need a

cliff-hanger for the final episode. Here it is: In the midst of near-elation about the likelihood of

winning the contract, a rumor surfaces that one or two members of the Air Force evaluation team

may attempt to subvert the proposal. Will the team win or lose? Stay tuned; youll find out next

Fall unless the series is cancelled. Then the cast will need to find new jobs, just like the engineers.

If you dont like that idea, heres another. Donald Trump puts a group of young engineers to a series

of tests, firing one after another until only one remains, who gets to keep his job we hope. Or how

about this: A detective series called Sam Sigma, Reliability Engineer. (Weve got more, but you get the

idea.)

Seriously, folks

Facetiousness aside, film and television writers have attempted to deal with the topic of engineering,

with mixed results. The efforts, as reviewed by IEEE Spectrumseveral years ago, ranged from comic to

good try. Among the characters analyzed in theSpectrumarticle were Scotty, chief engineer aboard

the starship Enterprise; Dr. Brown, the mad inventor who built a time machine out of a DeLorean car


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in Back to the Future; MacGyver, not an engineer but who seemed to have engineering skills; and Gyro

Gearloose, Walt Disneys engineer/inventor. Most writers perceive engineers as out of the social main-

stream and, understandably, they have little idea what we do. Viewers are enticed using characters

who have direct contact with the public, like doctors and lawyers.

The National Academy of Engineering, in a 1986 survey, confirmed that the public perceived engi-

neers as self-absorbed, rigid, and possessing poor social skills. One respondent said engineers were

social misfits with whom he would not want to be trapped in an elevator because they were difficult

to communicate with. Little wonder that entertainment writers steer clear of us except, perhaps, for

comic relief.

To be fair, both Jimmy Stewart (No Highway to the Sky, 1951) and Jack Lemmon (The China Syndrome,

1980) portrayed serious, ethical engineers. But that was decades ago. A recent attempt at science

fiction with a realistic portrayal of engineers is the film Primer,winner of an Alfred P. Sloan prize for

helping advance science and technology. But the writer and director had a leg up he was formerly

a software engineer.

On the other hand, do we really care that the doctors, lawyers, and cops get all the prime-timeattention? They capture the attention of the viewers in part because they deal with misdeeds by mis-

creants and other troubled souls. Dr. Sloan of Diagnosis Murderis seldom seen practicing medicine.

Community General Hospital is the scene of weekly mayhem (daily in re-runs), much of it visited on

unfortunate patients. Television characters must be placed in jeopardy to sustain audience interest.

To the entertainment writer, bad news is good news. Accordingly, a TV series on engineers would

have to focus on the foibles of engineers and the engineering failures that result. Do we really want

that?

A more appropriate vehicle for the realistic portrayal of engineers and their work may be the

television documentary. We find the beginnings of such programming on cable channels like The

Discovery Channel and The History Channel. Even so, they are likely to involve subjects with anangle or subject matter that will excite an audience like technological disasters or war technol-

ogy and dismiss or gloss over the engineering options and the personalities involved. Historians

of technology might be encouraged to bring their knowledge to bear in helping write, review, or

otherwise vet such documentaries and thus enhance both factual and emotional accuracy. Further-

more, they could encourage the production of documentaries that expose the technical difficulties

and conflicting personalities involved in bringing to market well-known consumer products, like FM

and color television.

Resources

For more on the public perception of engineers and engineering, see:

Bell, T.E. and P. Janowski, The Image Benders, IEEE Spectrum, October 1988.

Doble, J. and M. Komarnicki, Report on the Public Perception of Engineers, National Academy

of Engineering, 1986.

Davis, Lance A. and Robin D. Gibbin, Raising Public Awareness of Engineering, NAE, 2002.


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Irreconcilable Differences?

Why is it that engineers and marketing people so often discount the advantages of talking to one

another? I have observed this in my own career, and colleagues report similar experiences. Some-

times the relationship between engineering and marketing becomes downright adversarial and, no

surprise, counterproductive. Social scientists have earned Ph.D.s studying the phenomenon.

A clash of cultures often seems to be at the root of the problem. It may seem obvious that new prod-

uct developments are more likely to be successful if R&D and marketing people work together. Yet

engineers may view marketers as middlemen who are not technically qualified to interpret customer

needs. A common belief among engineers is that most marketers are unable to comprehend the

technical niceties of the products engineers develop. Entrepreneur Lawrence Kamm found it to be

typical of a small company that the entrepreneur is the principal salesman. This suggests, perhaps,

that we engineers see the direct engineer-customer interface as the ideal arrangement one that

cannot last, of course, once a company experiences significant growth.

For their part, marketers view us as good analysts, but poor listeners. The Not Invented Here (NIH)

syndrome limits our openness to the thinking of others, they add. A common complaint seems to be

that engineers expect customers to abandon large-scale investments in capital equipment and in-

place systems for an incremental improvement that might accrue from adopting our new product.

But thats just one symptom. Traditional corporate structure may foster disharmony. Engineering

is seen as one function. Marketing and sales, another. Separate charters, goals and budgets. One

engineering manager observed If the powers-that-be [top management] dont worry about good

partnering of engineers and marketers, itll never happen. The result can be that engineers and

marketers go their separate ways. Joint meetings are viewed as unnecessary, or, at best, as a custom

rather than as a need. Infrequent contact between R&D people and marketing can become the norm,and newcomers to an organization see no reason to forge bonds that dont already exist. On the rare

occasion when engineer meets marketer, differences that could be informative may be construed as

disrespectful, and a cycle of disharmony begins.

Another contributing factor may be the matter of credit. When management gives sole credit to

engineers for a successful new product introduction, marketers take umbrage. Likewise, when mar-

keters are lauded to the exclusion of engineers, the latter are offended. The situation is made worse

when neither party makes an attempt to share credit with the other. Such credit theft, as Professor

William Souder of the University of Alabama Business School bluntly labels it, results in further dimin-

ishment in good communication.


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Differing situations

The more sophisticated the product, the more serious can be the communication gap between its

creators and those who sell it. The more high-tech a product is, the more likely the engineers and

marketers will talk past one another.

The gap is widened for products that have multiple applications and many potential customers.

It is less severe for single-customer, single-application products, as might occur in military systems

procurement. But breakthrough products represent the most dangerous threat to good R&D-

marketing communications, because the variety of possible applications is unknown or speculative.

Engineers tend to discount market research intended to aid in defining markets for breakthrough

products as depending too much on asking customers what they would like. Customers dont know,

say engineers, because their foresight is constrained by their familiarity with existing products. John

Workman, a marketing professor at the University of North Carolina, reported that even the CEO

of an established supplier of computer equipment and software told his senior managers that the

biggest danger to us is marketing surveys... Marketers will never come up with a new idea. Further

discounting customer research, one designer noted that design cycles are significantly longer than

the foresight of customers.

Winners and losers

In a study of nearly 300 new product development projects involving more than 50 companies,

Professor Souder noted that nearly two thirds experienced some degree of engineering/marketing

disharmony. Nearly 70 percent of those projects experiencing severe disharmony were failures. But

where R&D/marketing relationships were classified as harmonious, the new product project failure

rate was only 13 percent.

Once formed, disharmonies are extremely difficult to overcome, the study showed. As in the case

of a disease, prevention is much easier to come by than a cure.

For more about the engineering/marketing interface, see:

Workman, J. P., Engineerings Interaction with Marketing Groups in an Engineering-Driven

Organization,IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 129-139, May 1995.

Souder, W. E., Managing Relations Between R&D and Marketing in New Product Development Projects,

Journal of Product Innovation Management, Vol. 5, March 1988.

Gupta, A. K., S. P. Raj, and D. Wilemon, The R&D-Marketing Interface in High Technology Firms,

Journal of Product Innovation Management, Vol. 2, March 1985.


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Engineers: Mere Mercenaries?

The standard line goes like this: Engineers are only interested in furthering technical capabilities

and improving design performance. We dont have much concern for how our resultant systems

will be used in the real world. Or whether our efforts will contribute to the betterment of society, as

compared to merely bringing more dollars to the bottom line. But we have traditionally counteredwith the argument that once a technical development is successful, its applications cannot be limited

for better or worse by its creators.

Scientists, on the other hand, are often seen as more concerned about the applications of their dis-

coveries. Zellman Warhaft, a Cornell University professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering,

explains this marginalization of engineering by noting that engineers tend to be relegated to

the position of technical servants of corporations, governments and society in general. When he

expressed this view to an MIT professor, the response was, Yes, we train mercenaries. Mercenary

might be an acceptable appellation if taken in its obsolete meaning: paid or salaried. But current

usage is in the derogatory vein, namely, serving merelyfor pay.

While the degree to which engineers can influence the uses of technology is debatable, there are

many who nevertheless believe we should try. Aside from electing to work on projects that have

an obvious positive social value, perhaps the best way we can exert leverage on the uses of our

creations is to influence technology policy at the governmental level. But if engineers are to be

induced to contribute to technology-influenced policy decisions, the value of doing so might best

be emphasized while youngsters are contemplating engineering as a profession, or, a bit later, while

they are undergraduate engineering students.

One modest project, friendly to this objective, is under consideration by the International Council

of Academies of Engineering and Technological Societies. It would inform high school studentsabout future engineering challenges, which, if solved, would make a difference and help others

live better the cool thing to do. The council plans to elaborate on engineering challenges in

energy and the environment, robotics, communications, security, transportation, climate, and

water availability, among others.

At the university level, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technologys (ABET) EC2000

criteria stress design courses that involve economic, environmental, sustainability, manufacturability,

ethical, health and safety, and social and political parameters. Cornells Warhaft, cited earlier, has

himself designed a course, Components and Systems: Engineering in a Social Context, that involves

a pair of case studies, one based on ballistic missile defense systems and the other on energy,

transportation and the environment.


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Real-World Projects

A pair of programs are designed to involve engineering students and/or young engineers in projects

that help solve pressing societal problems like energy availability and water management, and where

they can observe first hand the beneficial results of their work.

In the first, UNESCO and DaimlerChrysler have partnered to create the Mondialogo Engineering

Award to generate enthusiasm among young recruits to the engineering profession and to provide

intercultural dialogue and cooperation between educational engineering institutions in both

developing and developed countries. In 2005, an international jury assessed proposals from

419 multinational teams representing 1700 young engineers and students from 79 countries.

Twenty-one proposals were selected for awards on the basis of sustainability, feasibility and

projected costs. Among the approved projects were ones for land mine detection, solar energy

for health centers in Mali, and a photovoltaic telecommunications center in Malaysia.

Engineers Without Borders conducts the second, an international network that links humanitarian

organizations having a similar mission: to partner with disadvantaged communities to improve their

quality of life through education and implementing sustainable engineering projects. Among severalprojects of the U.S. branch of Engineers Without Borders are the following:

The University of Colorado partnered in a project initiated by the U.S. Ambassador to Mauritania

to install a photovoltaic pump for use in the water supply in the village of Bir Moghrein. Traveling

18 hours through the Sahara desert, students, faculty and industry participants contributed to the

successful project.

A team from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is developing an inexpensive

charge controller for a pedal power generator and a low-cost inverter circuit to drive compact

fluorescent lamps for use in Maharashta, India.

A project initiated by Case Western Reserve University will correct inadequacies in a medical

clinic emergency power system in Los Gauricanos, Dominican Republic. A team from Rowan University is currently assigned a project to develop natural gas and

geothermal resources for heating, aquaculture and greenhouses to alleviate economic and

employment hardships of the Native American population in Cheyenne River, South Dakota.

Whether those exposed to commendable programs like these will lapse into a passive mode as their

careers advance, or whether they will sustain ways to employ technology for the public good and

help curtail its ill-considered uses remains to be seen.


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Resources

For more on the societal implications of engineering, see:

Warhaft, Z., Teaching Engineering in a Social Context, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol.

24, (Issue 2), pp. 32-39, (Summer 2005).

Newberry, B., Engineering Globalization: Oxymoron or Opportunity? IEEE Technology and Society

Magazine, vol. 24, (Issue 3), pp. 8-15, (Fall 2005). Layton, E.T., The Revolt of the Engineers, Johns Hopkins Press, 1986.

Fouke, J. (Ed.), Engineering Tomorrow, Wiley-IEEE Press, 1999.

Engineers Without Borders-USA [www.ewb-usa.org]

Mondialogo [www2.mondialogo.org]

International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Societies [www.caets.org]


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Ghosts

I recently attended a reunion of crew members and airmen who served aboard a World War II air-

craft carrier, the U.S.S. San Jacinto. Sailors have a love affair with the first ship on which they served.

This one, an Independence-class light fleet carrier, after the war was transferred to the reserve fleet,

and did not succumb to the shipbreakers torch until 1972. Seven of her eight sisters were alreadygone, but one, theU.S.S. Cabot, was still afloat in 2000. The attention of historians and crew members

then turned to her, in hopes of saving her as a naval museum. She was declared a National Historic

Landmark. Though millions of dollars were allocated and/or donated for the purpose, government

bureaucracy and salvagers greed were too much to overcome. She languished in a Texas ship canal

while vandals and salvagers picked her bones. In 2002, photographed from above, she was a mere

skeleton, and trucks were seen convoying her torched remains to someplace in Mexico. Now all nine

carriers are ghosts living only in the memories of their surviving crew members.

A Ghost in the Making

The image of my own ghost ship, the San Jac, was in my thoughts as I returned from the reunion,

only to find Bob Luckys IEEE Spectrumcolumn on the likely demise of the splendiferous Bell Labora-

tories Research facility in Holmdel, N.J. The Eero Saarinen-designed edifice, now owned by Lucent,

once employed 6,000. By Luckys estimate, 1,200 or so may remain, and Lucent may put the building

on the market, complete with its spacious campus and reflecting pond.

I toured the six-story research palace at the height of its glory, and remember well the glass exterior

and impressive open foyer extending skyward and surrounded by numerous specialized laborato-

ries, many of which I was privileged to visit. So I was sympathetic to Bobs nostalgic fondness for the

facility, which he saw for the first time as a new engineering graduate even before the structure was

complete, and where he worked for the next 30 years.

If the Holmdel lab, including its 470 acres of landscaped grounds, is sold to a developer it may be-

come another ghost, hallowed only in the memories of those who once labored there in inventive

splendor.

A Happy Ghost

My own first job as a new engineering graduate was in a venerable Newburyport, Massachusetts, mill

building erected in 1880. It had been acquired by Hytron Radio and Electronics Corp. (later the CBS

Electronics Division) in 1941 for the manufacture of proximity fuse components and radio receiving

tubes for the military, and later, television receiving tubes and cathode-ray tubes. Though I went onto work in the brand-new headquarters facilities in Danvers and the Minoru Yamasaki-designed semi-

conductor plant in Lowell, my heart remained with the old mill building. When CBS closed it in 1959,

I worried. What would become of it? A number of small enterprises successively occupied it until,

finally, it was abandoned. Upon my visits to Newburyport, I would cautiously approach the block in

which it stood, afraid I would find a town parking lot in its stead. Or worse, what might a developer

have replaced it with?


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But on my most recent visit, lo and behold, it had been turned into a luxury condominium (The

Courtyard) by a sensitive architect who had retained its classic exterior intact and incorporated

its original massive mill beams into a central atrium easily worthy of recognition by McGraw-Hills

Architectural Record. When I introduced myself to one of the residents, we discovered mutual inter-

ests and are collaborating on a history of the building. I am now partitioning a scale drawing of the

buildings three floors to show its various laboratories, offices and manufacturing departments as

they existed in the 1950s. As I walk through the building today, I can envision a colleague at my side,

discussing the problems of decades past. In one of the apartments, I readily transport myself back in

time, peering at a scope waveform in a long-dismantled darkened screen room.

Why is it that we treasure ghosts like these with great fondness? Some of us are fascinated by the

history of technology, industrial archaeology and the preservation of artifacts. But I think it goes

beyond that, having much to do with the colleagues with whom we were privileged to work and

the accomplishments that we were fortunate to take part in within these memorable, nurturing

environments.

Whatever the reason, our ghosts linger in our subconscious, darting forth full blown at unscheduled

moments to evoke times and events we are glad we did not miss.

Resources

For more on ghosts and ghosts-to-be:

Technology and Society, the quarterly published by the Society for the History of Technology.

IA, the biannual published by the Society for Industrial Archeology.

D. Christiansen, The Last Survivor (U.S.S. Cabot), p. 81, The Saga of the San Jac: The Aircraft Carrier

U.S.S. San Jacinto (CVL-30) in World War II, privately published, 2005.

C. K. Hyde, Ruin and Restoration: The Fates of Two Historic Auto Plants in Detroit, Society for Industrial

Archeology Newsletter, Vol. 34, No. 3,

Summer 2005.

R. W. Lucky, Lab for Sale, IEEE Spectrum, p. 92, North American edition, September 2005.


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