29
Apr 12

Preventing Traffic Jams?

This article shows a new technology by Honda aimed to prevent traffic jams. It does so by offering feedback to the driver to stop driving styles that would cause traffic jams.

Traffic jams usually aren’t caused by one single event, it’s a combination of many small decisions by each driver responding to something else. This is why I’m kind of skeptical about this new technology. It’s a terrific idea, who ever wants to be stuck in traffic? I think it’s a far shot to say that a few cars with this technology isn’t going to eliminate traffic jams. Even, suppose, every car has this technology equipped, according to the article, it seems to be only a heads-up display merely suggesting a certain driving style. Nothing prevents people from driving as they wish.

To me, it seems like a waste of time trying to develop this. I’m going to take the bus or subway if I want to avoid traffic. It’s something that comes with driving a car.


29
Apr 12

Google Glasses

When I think of “the future”, this is one of the visions I get in my mind: http://www.pcworld.com/article/253404/google_glasses_all_hype_or_reality.html

Google glasses is a prototype idea by Google allowing you to have all the power of Google in front of your eye, instead of on a computer or on a smartphone.  I do enjoy the power that Google offers to me; I use maps, Mail, and search rather frequently. My take on the glasses is that, I don’t use Google as often as the person in the video does. Additionally, I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like to be distracted when I don’t want to be distracted. Having a phone is bad enough. When I’m out of the house, I need data rather infrequently, except in places where computers are already there. Who knows. Maybe when these hit the market, my demand will have changed.

However, for a cool new gadget to show off to your equally-nerdy friends, I’m all for it.


29
Apr 12

Rapid Prototyping

From what I’ve been shown about rapid prototyping in class, I find it to be remarkably cool. Rapid Prototyping is truly the bridge between the gap of the physical and virtual world. Before taking Engineering design, I didn’t even know that this technology existed. As our computers get more and more powerful, if this rapid prototyping technology develops, there is theoretically no limit to what we can print and produce. Imagine the future where houses, cars, or even artificial hearts are printed.

Another idea that is kind of revolutionary is the idea of self-replicating machines. If you can print anything you can imagine, why not print another printer? RepRap is an open design project that seeks to do just that.


29
Apr 12

What it means to be human

For most living things, “what it means” to be that living thing is simply to survive long enough to reproduce. At one point, finding food, shelter, and protecting from predators was the human’s primary focus as well. Obviously, after thousands of years of settling down, we don’t need to pay much attention to that, as it is already provided for us. We have technology to thank for that. Even an invention as simple as the sickle, the plow, or the yoke changed human life such that settling down in one place was favored over foraging or hunting for food. And today, that process has become even more streamlined, with the addition of tractors, machines, computers, etc. It is streamlined to the point where a small fraction of our population can provide the food for the entire rest. Meanwhile, the rest of our population can now spend our hours doing something other than creating food and shelter. In today’s day and age, much of us spend our days on computers. What a drastic shift from only about 1000 years ago! It’s remarkable how much civilization has changed over the last, even 200 years, since electricity has been in everyone’s houses. I, and I’m sure many others, can’t even imagine being human without electricity in their life. I (and others) have this strange state of not being grounded whenever I don’t know where my cell phone is. Quite obviously, not a single person had that feeling 50 years ago.

Us humans are good at adapting to our environment. Currently, my environment is throwing at me cell phones, computers, and a relatively easy life on campus where I can use my mind instead of my body to survive on Earth.


28
Apr 12

System design

When designing for a system, the fact that is is interconnected makes it much more complex than something in isolation. This is kind of a trivial distinction to make, because just about everything designed is part of a system; in the real world, things are rarely in isolation. However, it’s much easier to look at a system in isolation, because it’s easier to calculate anything with fewer variables. This is where things get tricky. It’s easy to design a system such that it works in isolation. It’s harder to create something that will not fail when it’s used in unanticipated ways.

One example I can think of is through computer programming. In the debugging environment, you know what your program is capable of, and how it handles inputs. What happens, suppose, when a user inputs a string of text when your program is expecting a number? You, as the designer, must be able to account for that, so that it doesn’t crash when it’s in the user’s hands. This same idea applies to other areas of design.

 

One interesting thing to note is that nature herself is one huge interconnected system. Ecosystems are simply the interactions between systems of living things, with systems of, say, erosion, water cycles, etc. This system can catastrophically fail when say, a new species is introduced into an ecosystem not prepared for it (an invasive species). It just goes to show that nothing is immune. An environment evolves to be tailored to a specific niche, and something can disrupt it, because it wasn’t prepared for it.

Our goal as system designers is (obviously) to prevent these things from happening.

 


28
Apr 12

Sustainable buildings

Sustainable buildings are designed such that they are energy and resource efficient throughout the construction, life, and demolition of the building. They either create energy for the building’s own use, or they are designed in such a way that it dramatically reduces the amount of energy input the building needs. (Some buildings even use zero net-energy – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_building)  It seems as if this is the future of buildings, and it makes intuitive sense; you don’t have to pay for energy, or worry about external power outages. This idea makes sense in the long run, drawing us away from unsustainable energy, and also spending much, much less on energy throughout the life of the building. The reason these buildings aren’t springing up all over the place is because they are quite expensive to put up. Photovoltaic cells, and new green technologies cost quite a bit more than non-green technologies. Even though these buildings practically pay for themselves, energy wise, in the long run, the up-front cost is quite unattractive.

As in the case with most problems with energy nowadays, we have solutions, but things aren’t going to correct themselves until the market favors such solutions, i.e. until the cost of these photovoltaic cells, etc., goes down enough to compete with existing technologies.

Maybe aesthetics will be reason enough to build these green buildings, though. We can only hope.

 


26
Apr 12

Intellectual Property

The interesting thing about intellectual property is that it doesn’t fit the normal paradigm of capitalism and trade. The old mechanism of “I give you access to something, and it is no longer mine” doesn’t exactly apply to intellectual property. Instead, we try to apply the mechanism that we are used to into this new realm of intellectual property.

In reality, the only reason why we create such a system for intellectual property is to keep the incentive there for invention. “If I invent a new type of capacitor, I can make money off of the patent” is the train of thought. However, in surprisingly many cases, the draw of creating something new and fine-tuning it itself overshadows the profit motive. There is a surprisingly large sea of open-source software (Linux, Firefox, Minecraft…) in which the entire source code is available online for free. Economics as we know it can’t possibly explain how millions of users log hundreds of hours each  tweaking and refining Linux, for no pay! Is the power of innovation itself more powerful than profit incentive? It looks like: maybe, in some cases.

 


24
Apr 12

Hand Sketching, Relevant?

Although sketching by hand has been used for quite a long time by engineers to describe objects, a new alternative has recently been popping up: Computer Aided Design. These programs, such as SolidWorks, solve the problem that hand sketching also solves, except it does it much more quickly and efficient. After the model is designed in 3D in SolidWorks, it’s only a click or two away from a fully detailed orthographic or isometric drawing.

Hand sketching may be useful if there are no computers where you need a quick design, but we live in the twenty-first century. 3D sketching is quicker, stored more securely, and less prone to human errors.

It’s not to say that hand sketching is a bad thing to learn. Sketching gives you a better understanding of visualizing shapes in three dimensions. I guess it’s analogous to learning arithmetic versus using a calculator. Everyone who uses math should know basic arithmetic, but there comes a point where the use of the calculator is a powerful tool that lets you solve complex problems as easily as before. After a person is fluent in visualizing and recreating shapes in 3D, using a tool like SolidWorks isn’t in any way harmful. It saves time and reduces errors.


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