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Why Are Terrorists Often Engineers?
An anonymous reader writes "As a follow up to their September 2008 article, IEEE Spectrum revisits the question of why a disproportionate number of terrorists have engineering degrees. According to their own summary of the interview with political scientist Steffen Hertog, 'nearly half of [individuals involved in political violence] with degrees have been engineers,' a rather ambiguous statement especially for a publication targeted at engineers. The interview makes some interesting points (lack of job opportunities for engineers despite a relatively high social status) and some suspect ones (e.g. framing Islamic culture into the western left vs. right politics). Above all, IEEE Spectrum tries really hard to associate engineers with terrorism for some reason."
http://miscellanea.wellingtongrey.net/2008/02/18/enginneers-vs-sociologists/
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
The revolutionary mindset has something to do with it. Your average goat herder or basket weaver isn't all that interested in toppling whatever ideology he resents. That kind of stuff is generally a product of an angry, middle class; those who aren't as concerned with where their next meal comes from. Those coming from an emergent middle-class often follow fields that are more necessary. You need doctors and engineers before you need psychologists and art majors.
Reminds me of a joke a friend told me.
A professor brings a new and amazing device to school to show to his students:
The Science students ask: How does it work?
The Engineering students ask: How is it made?
The Business students ask: How can we market it?
And the Arts students ask: Do you want fries with that?
The best part is, it's usually the Arts students who laugh the hardest at it. Some of them laugh so hard they start crying. I think.
As Bruce Salem notes those who support creationism and claim scientific credentials tend to be engineers - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis
It would be that Middle Eastern culture seems to value engineering as a "real" degree and many others as not. So the bight students are forced in to engineering degrees, like it or not. My freshmen year I met a guy like that. Hated engineering but his government was sponsoring him to come to the US and learn it so he had no choice. In China you actually see this go further in that more or less everyone in the government is an "engineer" now I put that in quotes because they have lots of degrees that we wouldn't call engineering that they do. Basically the word is what matters. If you are an "engineer" you are good to go. However if you get the same kind of degree but are not an engineer, well then too bad for you.
Our engineering college sees more foreign grad students from a few places than any other place. It isn't like it is the only "hard science" college. Computer science, chemistry, optics, pharmacy, then are in different colleges. However only we award "engineering" degrees. Get a masters in Chemistry and it is just that, it is not Chemical Engineering. That title of "engineer" seems to be the only thing acceptable to many.
One year at my university, the students in the engineering college had a "I Wish I Was a Business Major" week. They had organized trips to bars, a golf outing, and other related activities. They were replications of events business students had actually done that semester.
The organizers had to issue a mea culpa.
Engineering can be an exact science. It can also be an inexact science. for example, you are designing a relatively simple structure, such as a desk. How much load will you design to desk to support? Ideally somebody would tell you that, but there are many cases where that does not happen. You probably have a per item budget, but should you use it all? Possibly not. If you can design a product that comes in under bellow the budgeted cost, but still looks good, and can function in the desired use-cases that is a good thing.
What components do you use? The permissible material types are almost always predetermined by the company, but even those have often have a three-way trade-off between looks, strength, and cost. Ideally the engineer should be outlining the basic possibilities, and have the company choose which trade-off to make, but since in complex projects there are hundreds of such decisions, the engineers usually need to make at least some of these calls.
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