The role of language in engineering competence

The behaviour of engineered products is becoming less evident from their outward appearance. Thus many current engineered products have unseen properties that become evident only after protracted investigation, analysis or use. Nevertheless marketing staff, potential users, disposal experts, financiers and so on will wish to make informed decisions about products and commonly their choices will be based on more accessible descriptions, explanations, scenarios and accounts of a products use rather than their direct experience. Engineers usually work with others in enterprises that produce things or provide services. The engineer rarely provides the service or makes the goods but, as a professional, the engineer guides the rest of the enterprise and persuades others to take particular courses of action. It is clear that an engineer's central interest is the artefact. Interestingly the artefact may be in the process of design or the subject of a feasibility study and hence will have no material existence, but it will be circumscribed by a wide variety of texts including specifications, technical reports and standards. Using their specialist language and analytical techniques, the individual engineer will gain assurance about his or her view of the artefact through discussions with fellow engineers, but at some point they will have to convey that view to non-technical specialists. Within the enterprise the engineer will become either an advocate or an adversary of the artefact faced by other individuals or groups who because of their professional or cultural background will value things in different way. The role of the engineer is then as a protagonist or opponent of the artefact within, using Bruno Latour’s evocative phrase, a “Parliament of Things”. And competent engineers, as competent advocates of artifacts, need fluent linguistic and rhetorical skills as well as analytical proficiency and the knowledge that will give them the confidence to project their views. The paper examines the implications for engineering education

I Bloom at Twilight

Driven by a vigorous passion for the ceramic material and its history, I Bloom at Twilight strives to bring attention to craft and construction. To engineer each piece I pull from and distort historical pottery references, lengthening or widening parts of their profile with the form of a flower in mind. By adapting a variety of forming techniques, both ancient to modern, I build vessels adorned with textures that stem from their creation. Inspired by the stunning designs of Soviet Propaganda Porcelain and Nabeshima ware, I apply vibrant glazes in stylized depictions of clouds and flowers. Finally, using wax resist between layers, I inlay Chrome colored glazes to emit a volatile mist of vivid pink onto the surfaces nearby. With this layering of reference, form, and surface my vessels hope to prompt the viewer into a feeling of timelessness and contemplation

1960 Modulus

1960 Yearbook for Rose Polytechnic Institute Terre Haute, IN 47803https://scholar.rose-hulman.edu/modulus/1045/thumbnail.jp

1957 Modulus

1957 Yearbook for Rose Polytechnic Institute Terre Haute, IN 47803https://scholar.rose-hulman.edu/modulus/1042/thumbnail.jp

Neuro-Fuzzy Computing System with the Capacity of Implementation on Memristor-Crossbar and Optimization-Free Hardware Training

In this paper, first we present a new explanation for the relation between logical circuits and artificial neural networks, logical circuits and fuzzy logic, and artificial neural networks and fuzzy inference systems. Then, based on these results, we propose a new neuro-fuzzy computing system which can effectively be implemented on the memristor-crossbar structure. One important feature of the proposed system is that its hardware can directly be trained using the Hebbian learning rule and without the need to any optimization. The system also has a very good capability to deal with huge number of input-out training data without facing problems like overtraining.Comment: 16 pages, 11 images, submitted to IEEE Trans. on Fuzzy system

I Remember: Chicago Veterans of War

I Remember: Chicago Veterans of War weaves together the memories of fifty veterans of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Throughout the book, each veteran speaks in a series of “I remember” statements labeled by a number, not a name. This anonymous structure foregrounds the similarities of all wars. The effect is of one veteran speaking of the shock and scale of every modern war. I Remember is available free in both digital and print format.https://via.library.depaul.edu/big_shoulders_books/1000/thumbnail.jp

Communicating Mobile Processes

This paper presents a new model for mobile processes in occam-pi. A process, embedded anywhere in a dynamically evolving network, may suspend itself mid-execution, be safely disconnected from its local environment, moved (by communication along a channel), reconnected to a new environment and reactivated. Upon reactivation, the process resumes execution from the same state (i.e. data values and code positions) it held when it suspended. Its view of its environment is unchanged, since that is abstracted by its synchronisation (e.g. channels and barriers) interface and that remains constant. The environment behind that interface will (usually) be completely different. The mobile process itself may contain any number of levels of dynamic sub-network. This model is simpler and, in some ways, more powerful than our earlier proposal, which required a process to terminate before it could be moved. Its formal semantics and implementation, however, throw up extra challenges. We present details and performance of an initial implementation