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The article discusses the integration of injection molding technology into secondary level engineering and technology education, focusing on lowering the barrier of entry through 3D printing. It highlights the importance of computer-aided design (CAD) software in engineering classrooms, presenting a lesson/unit for students to design and manufacture plastic components using 3D-printed molds, and emphasizes the use of CAD software and the engineering design process in creating injection molds.

Scientists and engineers often spend days choosing a problem and years solving it. This imbalance limits impact. Here, we offer a framework for problem choice: prompts for ideation, guidelines for evaluating impact and likelihood of success, the importance of fixing one parameter at a time, and opportunities afforded by failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a summary of a special issue of the journal "Materials" focused on the topic of surface engineering for wear, corrosion, and erosion prevention in metallic and ceramic materials. The special issue includes twelve scientific papers covering various aspects of the operational performance and properties of metallic and ceramic materials. The papers discuss topics such as the effects of peening treatments, corrosion resistance, tribological behavior, and wear improvement through microstructural modification and the deposition of wear-resistant coatings. The special issue received significant interest from authors and readers, leading to the announcement of a second volume on the same topic. The summary acknowledges the need for experimental data in surface engineering to understand the wear and performance of engineering materials. [Extracted from the article]

Pragmatists are interested primarily not in representing a purportedly unchanging Reality but in articulating prophetic future possibilities on the basis of the values most venerated by a culture/society in the present. This makes pragmatism sound a little like 'Conceptual Engineering'. Conceptual engineers too are interested in transforming our ways of talking, which implies some notion of how such improvements are to be evaluated. Nevertheless, this paper argues that accounts of conceptual engineering that regard it as key to the project of elucidating an externalist semantics find it difficult to accommodate on their own terms the problem-phenomena taken to be of shared interest: regions of discourse where the demand for change are at their most pressing culturally. This difficulty takes the form of what I call the Conceptual Engineering Dilemma (CED), an inability to accommodate simultaneously the ethical and ameliorative dimensions of contestation. I argue that acknowledging the formalist commitments that undergird CED should make pragmatism more appealing to the practically-orientated analytic philosopher and conclude with a brief survey of some of the tools that it makes available for the pressing work of changing minds for the better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The later Carnap is usually cited as the first conceptual engineer – someone who argues that we can and should revise our concepts in order to make them fit for their purpose. This paper shows that there is an earlier, pragmatist, account of conceptual engineering and that today's conceptual engineers would do well to turn to it, rather than to Carnap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the journal Engineering Studies, which has been publishing interdisciplinary work on gender, race, and power in engineering for the past fifteen years. It highlights special issues on engineering masculinities, exclusion and inclusion in engineering education, and gender dynamics in industrial design. The article also provides a list of articles published by the journal on these topics, emphasizing their high citation and readership rates. It acknowledges the lack of geographic diversity in the research, with most of the work coming from the US and Europe. The article then focuses on three specific articles in the issue that explore the experiences of early-career engineers and the impact of gender and race on their career opportunities. It concludes by encouraging more diverse research in terms of geographic locations and topics. [Extracted from the article]

Positioned as part of leadership development in many organizations, 'stretch assignments' are a type of work assignment that can prove someone's readiness to advance in their career. Informed by status characteristics theory, our research investigates the frequency and expected outcomes of stretch assignments among recent engineering graduates in the workforce. Findings suggest that early-career stretch assignments, especially assignments involving new and unfamiliar areas, potentially intensify gender and racial/ethnic workforce inequality. Other types of assignments that may be more familiar and clearly-scoped to early-career engineers show a different and less inequality-intensifying pattern. We discuss why early-career engineers' assignments may be sites of inequality and the need for more focus on organizational processes around career-advancing work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay examines five Spanish-language books published in Latin America on the emergence of engineering in the region. Focusing on a period from roughly 1850 to 1970, these works share themes of foreigners and foreign education, nation-state construction, and social conceptions of prestige. This research suggests that throughout Latin America foreign educators and models were prominent in early engineering programs and enterprises. However, many historians associate the growth of engineering, especially civil engineering, with increasing state consolidation and economic intervention. As social perceptions of the value of professional engineering changed, domestic engineers increasingly became important planners and mediators. Some engineers became state leaders. By contextualizing these works with other scholarship on the history of engineering, this review essay highlights new insights while suggesting the need for greater attention to gender, race, and labor; comparisons between developments in Latin America, Africa, and Asia; and more research on private-sector engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Argentina's sugarcane province of Tucumán from 1870 to 1910, this article examines the processes of engineering professionalization in Argentina and its application to pressing environmental problems. Engineers were central to the processes through which elites in Latin America sought to attract foreign investment in agriculture, integrate their countries into the global economy, and provide expertise that enabled states to advance a techno-scientific imaginary based on liberal economic progress. Progressive bureaucrats and engineers, such as civil engineer Carlos Wauters, believed that they could use hydraulic infrastructure to transform Tucumán from an agricultural monoculture to a polyculture; others believed that infrastructure should be used to support a sugar monoculture. In exploring this issue, this article bridges the fields of engineering history, agricultural history, and environmental history. It also incorporates Latin America into global scholarship on the emergence and evolution of professional engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measurement was vital to nineteenth-century engineering. Focusing on the work of the Stevenson engineering firm in Scotland, this paper explores the processes by which engineers made their measurements credible and explains how measurement, as both a product and a practice, informed engineering decisions and supported claims to engineering authority. By examining attempts made to quantify, measure and map dynamic river spaces, the paper analyses the relationship between engineering experience and judgement and the generation of data that engineers considered to be 'tolerably correct'. While measurement created an abstract and simplified version of the river that accommodated prediction, this abstraction had to be connected to and made meaningful in real river space despite acknowledged limitations to measuring practice. In response, engineers drew on experience gained through the measuring process to support claims to authoritative knowledge. This combination of quantification and experience was then used to support interventions in debates over the proper use and management of rivers. This paper argues that measurement in nineteenth-century engineering served a dual function, producing both data and expertise, which were both significant in underpinning engineering authority and facilitating engineers' intervention in decision making for river management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological advancements have made rock engineering more data-driven, leading to increased use of machine learning (ML). While the use of ML in rock engineering has the potential to transform the industry, several methodological issues should first be addressed: (i) rock engineering's use of biased (poor quality) data, resulting in biased ML models and (ii) limited rock mass classification and characterization data. If these issues are not addressed, rock engineering risks using unreliable ML models that can have potential real-life adverse impacts. This paper aims to provide an overview of these methodological issues and demonstrate their impact on the reliability of ML models using surrogate models. To take full advantage of the benefits of ML, rock engineers should make sure that their ML models are reliable by ensuring that there are sufficient unbiased data to develop reliable ML models. In the context of this paper, the term sufficient retains a relative meaning since the amount of data that is sufficient to develop reliable a ML models depends on the problem under consideration and the application of the ML model (e.g., pre-feasibility, feasibility, design stage). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation Emergent biological dynamics derive from the evolution of lower-level spatial and temporal processes. A long-standing challenge for scientists and engineers is identifying simple low-level rules that give rise to complex higher-level dynamics. High-resolution biological data acquisition enables this identification and has evolved at a rapid pace for both experimental and computational approaches. Simultaneously harnessing the resolution and managing the expense of emerging technologies—e.g. live cell imaging, scRNAseq, agent-based models—requires a deeper understanding of how spatial and temporal axes impact biological systems. Effective emulation is a promising solution to manage the expense of increasingly complex high-resolution computational models. In this research, we focus on the emulation of a tumor microenvironment agent-based model to examine the relationship between spatial and temporal environment features, and emergent tumor properties. Results Despite significant feature engineering, we find limited predictive capacity of tumor properties from initial system representations. However, incorporating temporal information derived from intermediate simulation states dramatically improves the predictive performance of machine learning models. We train a deep-learning emulator on intermediate simulation states and observe promising enhancements over emulators trained solely on initial conditions. Our results underscore the importance of incorporating temporal information in the evaluation of spatio-temporal emergent behavior. Nevertheless, the emulators exhibit inconsistent performance, suggesting that the underlying model characterizes unique cell populations dynamics that are not easily replaced. Availability and implementation All source codes for the agent-based model, emulation, and analyses are publicly available at the corresponding DOIs: 10.5281/zenodo.10622155, 10.5281/zenodo.10611675, 10.5281/zenodo.10621244, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored young children's perceptions of engineers and engineering through their drawings and narratives. Twenty-six children ranging from four-to eight-years-old participated. Results indicated that although children in this group had limited knowledge of engineers and engineering, most of them, regardless of gender, not only drew engineers reflecting their own gender, but they also identified themselves as engineers already. More than half of them would like to become engineers when they grow up. This study supports the idea that young children are capable engineering learners and calls for age-appropriate, play-based engineering learning experiences in the early years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering identity has been repeatedly linked to the retention and success of engineering students, however, the current methods for understanding identity may not capture the holistic engineering identity journey. This study reviewed the method of utilising journey maps as a new approach to capture student engineering identity experiences. Interviews were conducted with 30 engineering students and early career engineers in which the participants responded to semi-structured, open-ended questions through the creation of their individual journey map. These maps were then thematically analysed to identify the key influences of engineering identity and the stage of their university journey when these influences occur. We determined that participants who strongly identify as engineers more often discussed and valued social identity experiences in the mid-year and final years of their degree, in contrast to participants who did not feel like engineers. We found that utilising journey maps as a tool for understanding identity allowed for a retrospective correlation between experience and impact, provided the participants space for authentic reflection and honoured the individuality of identity development. This method of journey mapping could be used to inform engineering education research in the further exploration and understanding of student identity development, reflective experiences and narrative storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecosystem engineers (EEs) strongly influence ecosystems by affecting the abiotic properties of a system to which many biota respond. EEs can, thus, be pivotal species in restoration by helping to move systems toward desired states much faster and more efficiently than direct human intervention on the abiotic state.For EEs to play a central, purposeful role in restoration, it is important to identify guiding principles about how the EEs may best be selected and incorporated.I discuss three important aspects to determine (a) where the utility for EEs is high; (b) where EEs can most easily establish, are easy to handle and scaling‐up their use is possible; and (c) how to recognize and value multiple, coupled and trait‐dependent engineering functions of EEs.Understanding these aspects of EEs should help guide purposeful and efficient choices in our approach to restoration. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecosystem engineers strongly influence the communities in which they live by modifying habitats and altering resource availability. These biogenic changes can persist beyond the presence of the engineer, and such modifications are known as ecosystem engineering legacy effects.Although many authors recognize ecosystem engineering legacies, and some case studies quantify the effects of legacies, few general frameworks describe their causes and consequences across species or ecosystem types.Here, we synthesize evidence for ecosystem engineering legacies and describe how consideration of key traits of engineers improves understanding of which engineers are likely to leave persistent biogenic modifications.Our review demonstrates that engineering legacies are ubiquitous, with substantial effects on individuals, communities and ecosystem processes. Attributes that may promote the persistence of influential legacies relate to an engineer's traits, including its body size, life span and living strategy (individual, conspecific group or collection of multiple co‐occurring species).Additional lines of inquiry, such as how the recipients respond (e.g. density or richness) or the mechanism of engineering (e.g. burrowing or structure building), should be included in future ecosystem engineering legacy research.Understanding patterns of these persistent effects of ecosystem engineers and evaluating the consequences of losing them is an important area of research needed for understanding long‐term ecological responses to global change and biodiversity loss. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Although open‐ended projects are common in the first and final years of US engineering programs, middle‐year courses tend to utilize simpler highly constrained problems. Such problems can elicit knowledge and social practices typical of school activity ("School World"), with limited applicability in real engineering work ("Engineering World"). They can also result in inequitable participation in groups. Purpose: We investigate whether a single‐session, complex studio task can promote equitable disciplinary engagement in the middle years, where time is limited and students' engineering knowledge needs to be developed. We ask whether and how the task is taken up by teams "thinking and acting like students" versus "thinking and acting like engineers." Design/Method: This microgenetic laboratory study analyzes video data of three student teams completing a realistic complex task. Results: Teams initially used "School World" strategies and social arrangements, but eventually the task demands and facilitator framing shifted activity to "Engineering World." We found within‐team, between‐world differences in reasoning, tool use, and social practices. Examination of shifts from School World to Engineering World pointed to the importance of task framing, material tools, peer interaction, and facilitator support. Conclusions: Activity can shift to the disciplinary social and knowledge practices of engineering in a single task, expanding opportunities to learn those practices and promoting more equitable interactions. Instructors should seek to support disciplinary practices while preserving students' authority to make decisions. Future research should explore the impact of a steady diet of these kinds of studios in the middle years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: To prepare engineers who can address complex sociotechnical problems, a deep understanding of engineers' complex problem‐solving approaches is needed. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study operationalizes comprehensive systems thinking as an analysis framework that attends to aspects of engineering work and relationships among those aspects. Leveraging this framework to analyze engineers' complex problem‐solving approaches enables attention to social and technical dimensions. Design/Method: We interviewed 46 engineers about their specific complex problem‐solving experiences. To explore a range of perspectives, we purposely sampled participants with varying academic, professional, and personal backgrounds and experiences. Data analysis focused on operationalizing comprehensive systems thinking; we first developed a set of aspects that captured the variety of considerations that participants discussed in their descriptions of solving a complex problem. We then inductively developed a scoring guide to differentiate response quality. Results: The scoring approach differentiated the quality of consideration based on a combination of the number of details provided, the degree of specificity, and analytical depth. While most participants discussed the consideration of a wide range of aspects of engineering work, they discussed far fewer possible relationships between these aspects. Contextual aspects of engineering work were consistently the least commonly identified and least likely to be considered in relation to other aspects of a given problem. Conclusions: Our differentiation of various complex problem‐solving approaches can guide the development of educational interventions and tools, ultimately facilitating more comprehensive consideration of aspects—and in particular relationships among aspects—and setting up engineers to be more successful at developing appropriate solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Sada Harbarger is primarily known as the author of the first genre-based technical communication textbook, 1923's English For Engineers, I argue through extensive archival materials that her innovative conferencing with engineering students and interdisciplinary writing efforts, rather, drove her interwar success at Ohio State. Her rural agricultural background and acquaintance with the engineering faculty, combined with her literature training, led to OSU's engineering faculty demanding successfully that English promote her without reference to her textbook. Harbarger is also a notable early example of navigating being a female professor teaching engineering writing in a male-dominated English literature department. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture" by W. Patrick McCray explores the collaborations between technologists and artists during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The book highlights how artists began to move away from traditional modes of expression and embrace new media, often working with engineers to create innovative artworks. McCray's work aims to correct the historical oversight of engineers in accounts of this period and emphasizes the importance of collaborations between art and technology. The book also examines the activities of Frank Malina, a socialist rocket scientist turned kinetic artist, and explores the intersections of art and technology in various projects and initiatives. Overall, "Making Art Work" expands the field of art history and offers a distinct perspective on the creative exchange between technologists and artists. [Extracted from the article]

"¡Alerta! Engineering on Shaky Ground" by Elizabeth Reddy is a well-researched book that explores the socio-technical challenges of using technology to mitigate the impact of earthquakes. The book focuses on the Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano (SASMEX), the world's oldest earthquake early warning system. SASMEX issues warnings within seconds of an earthquake and relies on factors such as political support, public understanding, available resources, and public compliance. The book also examines the history, development, and implementation of SASMEX, highlighting the importance of environmental monitoring and data analysis in earthquake mitigation. While SASMEX can give false alarms, it remains a valuable tool for reducing social inequalities and protecting low-income communities. The book provides valuable insights for social scientists, historians, and those involved in disaster risk reduction. [Extracted from the article]

Metallurgical Engineer Wendi Cooksey is a lab manager for FLSmidth, a Danish company in Salt Lake City, Utah. She works in various sectors such as mining, transportation, aerospace, medical technology, electronics, and heavy equipment. Cooksey's job involves reviewing test work proposals, planning work trips, and having job-development discussions with colleagues from different countries. She enjoys the global aspect of her job but dislikes administrative requirements. Cooksey's career highlights include establishing a gold metallurgical lab in Mali and training local staff. She funded her own college tuition and pursued a degree in metallurgical engineering, which led her to work for various companies across the globe. Cooksey advises students to take engineering and earth science classes in high school, pursue internships, and develop a presence on professional platforms like LinkedIn. [Extracted from the article]

Luminita Gatejel's book, "Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland," explores the history of river infrastructure in the Lower Danube region from 1770 to the end of the nineteenth century. Gatejel examines the geopolitical relations between the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Tsarist Empire, highlighting the concept of "hydroimperialism." The book focuses on two major projects: improving navigation through the Iron Gates and enhancing the navigability of the Danube Delta. Gatejel analyzes the challenges faced by the actors involved in these projects, including natural barriers, political conflicts, and economic factors. While the book provides rich details, there are some errors in the conclusions. [Extracted from the article]

The article offers information on the Ninth European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering, which will take place at the Lisbon Congress Centre in Portigal on June 3-7, 2024.

Lawrence William (Larry) Hallanger, Ph.D., was an ocean engineer and Aquanaut who passed away at the age of 84. He had a distinguished career, including serving as a Senior Project Engineer at the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory and being a qualified U.S. Navy deep sea saturation diver. Hallanger was involved in various underwater construction projects, including the development of DIVERCON I and the Buoyancy Transport Vehicle. He was known for his sense of humor and his contributions to advancing technology for living and working in the sea. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Man-in-the-Sea Museum in Panama City, FL. [Extracted from the article]