Climate Change

So I had signed myself up for Blog Action Day, on October 15th, and then forgot about it. The topic was Climate Change, and I had a vague idea of what I wanted to discuss. But this past week I've been helping my son with a big term paper, running around town running a lot of errands, and it slipped my mind. It didn't help that it had been over a month since my last post on the blog. But better late than never.

I met a fellow grad student back in 1990 that was planning to do his dissertation on climate modeling. Dr. Hansen gave his famous senate testimony about global warming in 1988, and this was now a hot topic in scientific circles. This particular student was fascinated by all the mathematical modeling involved and how so many different aspects of physics and chemistry had to be involved.

I'll never forget a long conversation we had about the changing climate. Even then he thought it was more important to call it climate change instead of global warming, because he believed that the key change was the increased amount of energy in the system. The planet heats up, sure, but heat is just energy, and all that energy can go into other things as well. The oceans heat up, the air heats up. This leads to more storms, deadlier storms, changing weather patterns, etc.

It all sounds sort of prescient nowadays.

Test Engineer of the Year

Test and Measurement World may appear to be yet another trade magazine , and sometimes they are. But they also do great things for the test engineering community, like the salary survey. Their annual Test Engineer of the Year award is another one of those community service sort of things. Pretty cool.

So, go read about the past finalists and winners. Then recommend someone you know who deserves the award. Then vote.

Statistics is cool

During vacation I read this article about statistics being the job of the future (also, refer to this talk by the chief economist at Google). I've posted a lot about statistics before (here, or here, or there for example), and I seem to use it a lot in my job, especially when dealing with large sets of data on a lot of DUTs. So that article naturally jogged my brain to recall a conversation I had last month with some other engineers at work.

The field of computational physics has existed for a long while - at least as long as relatively cheap computer time. The premise of comp. phys. is that many of today's physics problems don't lend themselves to elegant mathematical solutions. You have to apply numerical techniques to simulate, prove, or disprove a theory. When I was in grad school two decades ago I knew a post-doc whose entire job (at least while I knew her) seemed to consist of running Monte Carlo simulations on potential collision results at Fermilab: computational physics.

But let's go one step further. Decades ago one of my favorite books was the award winning Startide Rising by Dr. David Brin. One premise of the novel was that, while other alien races used brute force numerical calculations to figure out engineering, the upstart humans were pursuing solutions using mathematical proofs, theorems approximating effects, etc. Good stuff, but I suspect that the aliens are right. I predict that as science progresses, more and more discoveries will be made using powerful computational tools, not "elegant mathematical formulas."

I'm not sure how much that last, rather speculative paragraph has to do with test engineering. But if scientists can theorize about something, sooner or later it has to be tested. Until then it's just theory. And I think that testing will increasingly involve statistics.

2009 Salary Survey

The 2009 TMW Salary Survey came out this month. I've written about their survey before, but it's always interesting to take a yearly peek into how everyone else is doing.

Interesting tidbit #1: The highest ranking for "New technology learned about in the last 2 years" was clearly RF Measurement (38%). I guess that makes sense when considering the prevalence of WIFI and Bluetooth devices.

Interesting tidbit #2: There is still no breakout of salaries by geographic area. Too bad.

Interesting tidbit #3: The highest paid group of engineers are those with 30+ years of experience, followed closely by the 20-24 years group and then the 25-29 group. To make sure this wasn't a fluke, I checked the 2008 and 2007 surveys as well - they had similar results.

What does that last tidbit mean? I considered that question for a while & ended up with two guesses:

Optimistic view: In some professions the older you are the less you are worth. In test engineering, the more experience you have the more valuable you are. The engineer's programming skills, knowledge of test circuitry, etc., do not go out of style or get stale.

Pessimistic view: Most engineers are forced out of the profession as they age. The ones that are left are the exceptional few with skills not easily replaced, so they can command higher salaries.

For obvious reasons, I prefer the former over the latter.

New test magazine

Well, I said in my last post that I was going on vacation. But this post was already mostly written, so what the heck.

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Keithley is sponsoring a new magazine called Project Test. According to the press release, it is a "unique 32-page electronic magazine edited for test and measurement engineers." In my opinion, the jury is still out. It's obviously meant as a marketing tool - most of the articles in the first issue are written by Keithley employees and spotlight Keithley equipment. I'm not sure if that fits the press release though.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this sort of self-marking document, if it's done right. Hewlett Packard did a good job at this with their Journal this back before the split. The articles were usually written by HP engineers (sometimes in conjunction with marketing), and they often conveyed a great deal of solid technical detail. That is the standard I would hold Keithley to.

Getting LabVIEW certified

Well, I've decided to get my Certified LabVIEW Developer (CLD)... certification? diploma? license? Regardless, I plan on shelling out the money and taking the test probably by the end of the year.

A couple of years ago I was ambivalent about certification. But I've modified my opinion for the following reasons. First, NI now offers a CLD renewal test, which was one of my original gripes. Second, the CLD test used to be one long test - half written and half practical - and it seemed like overkill to me. Now the written part is given as a separate test - Certified LabVIEW Associate Developer (CLAD) - and is often offered as a free test. Third, I took the CLAD a couple months back and passed it easily. I figure I'm halfway there already.

Finally, given the state of the economy I think it makes good sense to get recognition for my skills. Another engineer friend of mine just lost his job, and that sort of thing reminds you to be prepared in case you need to find another employer.

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Over the next few weeks I'll be taking some extended vacation time. I have at least one or two other posts partially written, but I may not get to them until late August or even September.

Test gear history

I found this picture back in April and thought cool. It looked like it could come from a Hollywood period movie yet it was real. I noted the page for future reference and then forgot about it.

My current company is in a huge building that's over a century old. It was one of the first buildings in the world to use reinforced concrete, and it used to be the headquarters for the United Shoe Machinery Company. The halls are decorated with little mementoes of the company's past: poster-sized pictures 50 to 100 years old, historical vignettes of life in the company's heyday, old-style shoes, and equipment used on the manufacturing line. One day I stopped to stare at this display.

It's an old poteniometer used for equipment calibration. So I dug around online and found out that it was manufactured by Leeds & Northrup in Philadelphia - evidently they were quite the test and measurement company back in the day (see this or this).

I connected this piece of equipment with what I'd seen back in April and thought a lot about old test equipment, where it goes, and the history of the equipment and the people who make them. Does the equipment eventually sit on a shelf for decades before it is tossed (or sent to theSmithsonian)? Do the people who devote so much time & effort to create this equipment get any recognition (other than a brief summary on Wikipedia)? Normally I'm not a very reflective or pensive person. But sometimes you just have to think about these sorts of things.