Sunday, January 29, 2012
Investing in "knowledge workers"
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wages in the service sector have risen in real terms by 1.2% per year on average since 1982; in manufacturing the figure is lower (0.71%) and in education lower still (0.60%). If "knowledge workers" are, as many claim, the key competitiveness in the 21st century, this suggests that we may be under-investing in education.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Dam-busters, myth-busters and tax pounds at work
Nova recently screened a documentary called "Bombing Hitler's Dams" about the engineering of the 'bouncing bomb' used to blow up three dams supplying the Ruhr, Germany's indsutrial heartland, with hydroelectric power during the Second World War. The raid was daring and dangerous requiring enormous courage and flying skill. The planes, Avro Lancasters, had to be flown exactly 60ft above the water behind the dam at 240mph. According to one of the crew, the margin for error was 20ft - so the bomb's release had to be timed to within 1/20th of a second.
Barnes Wallace, the designer of the bomb, devised a way to deliver the bomb to a position 50 feet blow the suface, right up against the back wall of the dam, after 'skipping' over the anti torpedo nets. His solution was simply astonishing in its creativity and the engineering challenges he managed to overcome. That was the 'good news'.
The documentary interleaved an account operation Chastise, the code name for the May 1943 raid, with a present day investigation into the engineering behind the raid. And this is where things went off the rails. Hugh Hunt, a professor of engineering at Cambridge University, founded in the 13th century and arguably Britain's finest institution of higher education, decided to replicate Barnes Wallace's work and build and test a working replica of the bouncing bomb.
What comes across from the documentary (apart from the astonishing waste of time and resources) is the seeming ineptitude of the research team. For example, just before the final test, they painted half the bomb with yellow paint and hadn't considered that by painting only one half, the asymmetric weight of the paint would move the cylinder's centre of gravity away from its axis. Anyone who has lost the balancing weights from their car will know what that means. And this is an engineering team?
The cost of the project must have been horrendous; and what did we (collectively) learn? That making the bouncing bomb had some significant engineering challenges. That's it. Nothing new was created. No new knowledge gained (although some might argue that knowledge we once had, that was lost when Barnes Wallace's notes were lost to a flood, has now been restored - but that's something of a stretch).
Now I should be clear that I do what seems to many to be fairly pointless research - measuring power or simulating knowledge flows in social networks - but I'm fairly sure that as esoteric as it is, it's not recreating something done 60 years ago. And I don't waste a ton of money doing it. If Hunt had built a theoretical model that explained the bomb's behaviour using what we know of the physics involved, that would have been one thing. But building a dam and blowing it up (which, by the way was not done at the time the bomb was dropped but some time later, with the bomb being lowered into position with a crane) according to Hunt "...really makes me appreciate what Barnes Wallace did". I didn't realise that 'appreciating what others had done' - in this case the genius of the person who devised the scheme originally - qualified as an academic contribution.
If this was funded by the university, the regents should be up in arms; if a penny of British tax payers' money was involved, a public enquiry into misappropriation of funds seems called for. This circus is appropriate fare for the MythBusters, not academia.
Barnes Wallace, the designer of the bomb, devised a way to deliver the bomb to a position 50 feet blow the suface, right up against the back wall of the dam, after 'skipping' over the anti torpedo nets. His solution was simply astonishing in its creativity and the engineering challenges he managed to overcome. That was the 'good news'.
The documentary interleaved an account operation Chastise, the code name for the May 1943 raid, with a present day investigation into the engineering behind the raid. And this is where things went off the rails. Hugh Hunt, a professor of engineering at Cambridge University, founded in the 13th century and arguably Britain's finest institution of higher education, decided to replicate Barnes Wallace's work and build and test a working replica of the bouncing bomb.
What comes across from the documentary (apart from the astonishing waste of time and resources) is the seeming ineptitude of the research team. For example, just before the final test, they painted half the bomb with yellow paint and hadn't considered that by painting only one half, the asymmetric weight of the paint would move the cylinder's centre of gravity away from its axis. Anyone who has lost the balancing weights from their car will know what that means. And this is an engineering team?
The cost of the project must have been horrendous; and what did we (collectively) learn? That making the bouncing bomb had some significant engineering challenges. That's it. Nothing new was created. No new knowledge gained (although some might argue that knowledge we once had, that was lost when Barnes Wallace's notes were lost to a flood, has now been restored - but that's something of a stretch).
Now I should be clear that I do what seems to many to be fairly pointless research - measuring power or simulating knowledge flows in social networks - but I'm fairly sure that as esoteric as it is, it's not recreating something done 60 years ago. And I don't waste a ton of money doing it. If Hunt had built a theoretical model that explained the bomb's behaviour using what we know of the physics involved, that would have been one thing. But building a dam and blowing it up (which, by the way was not done at the time the bomb was dropped but some time later, with the bomb being lowered into position with a crane) according to Hunt "...really makes me appreciate what Barnes Wallace did". I didn't realise that 'appreciating what others had done' - in this case the genius of the person who devised the scheme originally - qualified as an academic contribution.
If this was funded by the university, the regents should be up in arms; if a penny of British tax payers' money was involved, a public enquiry into misappropriation of funds seems called for. This circus is appropriate fare for the MythBusters, not academia.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Another good thing
Ubuntu! - I've been using Linux since Fedora Core (it didn't have a number in those days): that was in 2003. In 2009 I switched to Ubuntu for the host OS and later that year made the change both my Linux guests. I have been delighted.VMware now player works fairly seamlessly; the new release upgrade process is only mildly irritating in the Linux guests, and my Logitech webcam still crashes the whole stack (strictly thi is a VMware problem which was fixed in Player R4.0.1 but I prefer R3.1.5 for its window management at start and suspend). But, in return I get a phenomenally stable system, the Logitech issue aside, that hasn't crashed that I can remember in well over two years. Were I not addicted to Excel I'd not use any other OS (and that includes replacing OS X Lion with Ubuntu on my Macbook when I get time).
Today, and this is what prompted the posting, I found another hidden gem. This screen shot shows my desktop spanning two monitors. There is a task bar on both; each has a window list; but, and this is the neat part, the window list is not the same on the two sides, but reflects the windows open on that monitor. And when you drag a window from one monitor to another, the window lists reflect that change. This might not seem a big deal, but try doing that in Windows.
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