…Scientists and engineers are celebrities in most countries. They’re not seen as geeks or misfits, as they too often are in the U.S., but rather as society’s leaders and innovators. In China, eight of the top nine political posts are held by engineers. In the U.S., almost no engineers or scientists are engaged in high-level politics, and there is a virtual absence of engineers in our public policy debates.
…if American students have a negative impression – or no impression at all – of science and engineering, then they’re hardly likely to choose them as professions. Already, 70% of engineers with PhD’s who graduate from U.S. universities are foreign-born. Increasingly, these talented individuals are not staying in the U.S – instead, they’re returning home, where they find greater opportunities.
Here’s something else you also don’t hear that much – where are many engineers working *instead* of engineering firms like Lockheed Martin? Google, Wall Street, hedge funds, investment banks, the next face-IPO-book. At a conference we heard Dean Kamen say our “best and brightest” are working on things like Adsense and not the hard problems, we’re paraphrasing a bit – but that was the gist of it.
One of the reasons we’re in so much economic misery could be because we made too much “financial engineering” instead of “engineering engineering”. We have very talented friends who are engineers, but are not doing any engineering. They like the salary and the perks, it’s hard not to get addicted to something like that. Kamen also said “we are what we celebrate” so – that fits with Norman’s article as well.
1. What is Moco for LUA, anyway ? This is a native MIDI firmware for atmega8u2 on Arduino Uno.
You can replace original USB-to-serial firmware with Moco. This driver will bridge between USB-MIDI and serial-MIDI.
(1) The host will recognize Arduino Uno as USB-MIDI device without any driver on MacOSX and Windows XP.
(2) You need to write original USB-to-serial firmware back to 8u2 for the reprogramming of main CPU.(atmega328)
Finally, I have succeeding in producing my own variation on the MintyBoost. I found inspiration on this post (http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=18225) on the Adafruit forums. It looks like a stick of gum, and I like it, because it’s single-sided, and because it looked like it would be pretty easy to make at home with my toner transfer setup. I call it the MintStick, because sometimes I don’t like to spend a lot of time trying to come up with good names for things. It’s version 3.0 to indicate compatibility with the MintyBoost 3.0 (since it ought to support the same devices).
Researchers at Northwestern University have created a robotic fish that can move from swimming forward and backward to swimming vertically almost instantaneously by using a sophisticated, ribbon-like fin.
The robot — created after observing and creating computer simulations of the black ghost knifefish — could pave the way for nimble robots that could perform underwater recovery operations or long-term monitoring of coral reefs.
The black ghost knifefish, which works at night in rivers of the Amazon basin, hunts for prey using a weak electric field around its entire body and moves both forward and backward using a ribbon-like fin on the underside of its body.
MacIver, a robotics expert who served as a scientific consultant for “Tron: Legacy” and is science advisor for the television series “Caprica,” has studied the knifefish for years. Working with Neelesh Patankar, associate professor of mechanical engineering and co-author of the paper, he has created mechanical models of the fish in hopes of better understanding how the nervous system sends messages throughout the body to make it move.
What is “Ask an engineer”? From the electronics enthusiast to the professional community – “Ask an Engineer” has a little bit of everything for everyone. If you’re a beginner, or a seasoned engineer – stop in and see what we’re up to! We have demos of projects and products we’re working on, we answer your engineering and electronics questions and we have a trivia question + give away each week. Mosfet the cat stops by too. Previous chats can be viewed at http://www.adafruit.com/ask
30-minute film by Errol Morris, commissioned by IBM. Music by Philip Glass.
What does it mean to be an IBMer? Every employee experiences the company in different ways, but the global impact IBM has made on business and society over the last 100 years gives us all a common framework. “They Were There” is told by first-hand witnesses—current and retired employees and clients—who were there when IBM helped to change the way world works.
The US Departments of Labor and Education have committed $2 billion (with a “B”) towards grants for creating “open” educational resources. A stipulation of the grants requires that all information produced with their funding be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, also known as CC-BY 3.0.
Today Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the solicitation for grant applications under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT). Over the course of 4 years, the program will invest $2 billion “to provide community colleges and other eligible institutions of higher education with funds to expand and improve their ability to deliver education and career training programs.” The program supports President Obama’s goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 by helping to increase the number of workers who attain degrees, certificates and other industry recognized credentials. The first round of funding will be $500 million over the next year. Applications to the solicitation are now open, and will be due April 21, 2011.
The full program announcement (PDF) requires that resources created using grant funds be released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license:
In order to further the goal of career training and education and encourage innovation in the development of new learning materials, as a condition of the receipt of a Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant (“Grant”), the Grantee will be required to license to the public (not including the Federal Government) all work created with the support of the grant (“Work”) under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (“License”). This License allows subsequent users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the copyrighted work and requires such users to attribute the work in the manner specified by the Grantee. Notice of the License shall be affixed to the Work. For more information on this License, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0.
Cathy Casserly, incoming CEO of Creative Commons, said, “This exciting program signifies a massive leap forward in the sharing of education and training materials. Resources licensed under CC BY can be freely used, remixed, translated, and built upon, and will enable collaboration between states, organizations, and businesses to create high quality OER. This announcement also communicates a commitment to international sharing and cooperation, as the materials will be available to audiences worldwide via the CC license.”
More analysis at Cairns Blog (via the twitterverse)
While I would personally prefer that they use the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, which requires users of the data to similarly share their own output, this is still pretty exciting!
If you’ve ever wondered how electronic devices like computers can count, this article gives a simple introduction to binary and logic and shows how they are tied together with electronics to make both simple and complex computers.
NEW PRODUCT – 2.1mm female barrel jack cable [3ft]. A common conundrum: how to connect a classic ‘wall wart’ to a breadboard or PCB without having to solder in a bulky power jack? This cable solves the problem elegantly by extending a sturdy strain-relief’d barrel connector to a dual 3 foot (~0.9m) cable. Works with all 2.1mm DC plugs. One wire has a white stripe on it.
I ported the Arduino driver written by Limor Fried for the SSD1306 monochrome OLED display to the netduino last week. The Arduino driver bit-bangs the data to the display controller, which is relatively slow. I attempted to speed up data transfers by driving the display using hardware SPI on the neduino. Oddly enough, this approach did not work and I have not yet found the root cause. As a result, I resorted to the bit-bang method. Because the SSD1306 OLED display supports a variety of protocols, I’ll continue investigating the issue until I can find a data transfer method yielding better performance.
To coincide with the imminent release of MAKE Volume 25, the Arduino issue, we’re launching an Ardunio site here on MAKE. Over the years, we’ve amassed tons of Arduino content here, offered dozens of Arduino projects in the magazine (and now on Make: Projects), and stocked plenty of Arduino awesomeness in the Maker Shed. But we’ve never had a convenient way for readers to access all of this via a single entry point. Now we do! We’ll be building this site out in the next few weeks and hope it will become an invaluable portal to all things Arduino. We’d love to hear from you about what you’d like to see on this Arduino page…
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Happy New Year! All the best. C – Belgium
Reading out the flash memory is straightforward with an AVR ISP programmer, such as the USBtinyISP, using avrdude from the command line. You’ll need to have a copy of the AVR toolchain– or at least avrdude –installed on your computer. There are easy installers available for Mac (Crosspack) and Windows (MHV AVR Tools) that include this software, along with the other open source tools for AVR development. Linux packages for AVR development are also available.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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