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Oregon Fines Man For Writing a Complaint Email Stating 'I Am An Engineer' (vice.com)
pogopop77 quotes a report from Motherboard: In September 2014, Mats Jarlstrom, an electronics engineer living in Beaverton, Oregon, sent an email to the state's engineering board. The email claimed that yellow traffic lights don't last long enough, which "puts the public at risk." "I would like to present these facts for your review and comments," he wrote. This email resulted not with a meeting, but with a threat from The Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying [stating]: "ORS 672.020(1) prohibits the practice of engineering in Oregon without registration -- at a minimum, your use of the title 'electronics engineer' and the statement 'I'm an engineer' create violations." In January of this year, Jarlstrom was officially fined $500 by the state for the crime of "practicing engineering without being registered." Since the engineering board in Oregon said Jarlstrom should not be free to publish or present his ideas about the fast-turning yellow traffic lights, due to his "practice of engineering in Oregon without registration," he and the Institute for Justice sued them in federal court for violating his First Amendment rights. "I'm not practicing engineering, I'm just using basic mathematics and physics, Newtonian laws of motion, to make calculations and talk about what I found," he said. Sam Gedge, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, told Motherboard: "Mats has a clear First Amendment right to talk about anything from taxes to traffic lights. It's an instance of a licensing board trying to suppress speech."
I worked in a place with a lot of people who worked in the Engineering dept. These folks designed, revised, worked with the people on the shop floor to resolve problems, etc. None of these folks were "Engineers". They were all referred to as "Engineers". It's just a common term for people who do jobs like that.
We also designed and manufactured a couple of life-critical gadgets - things which might result in a death if they failed. Those drawings had to be signed and stamped by one of our two certified Engineers. But we would have been find into oblivion, I guess, 'cause we referred to just about everyone on that floor as an Engineer.
As an industry trained engineer, I've been doing engineering for a few decades. From designing computers and electronics in the 80's to performing and presenting current scientific research, it's just been a part of my life, but previously, I could only refer to myself as an "Amateur Engineer". It's not that I'm not trained, I just wasn't trained in a university. Back in the 80's when I learned to design computers ( as an autodidact ) there simply wasn't a university path open for me as I was in high school at the time, and I was taken in by an R&D lab before I could study further and quickly gained skills and experience beyond what the universities were teaching at the time so never went back to university.
Still, not being able to refer to myself as an engineer caused many problem, especially when registering for government projects or work - where are best I could only call myself a "technician" despite having working in many roles where I was the lead engineer and managed other engineers. It made it pretty difficult finding new work at times also.
Now the Australian government has finally recognized that if you work as an engineer, doing the kind of work that an engineer would normally be expected to do, for a period of five cumulative years, you've proven your point and are recognized not only as an experienced engineer, but as a professional engineer.
Anyone might still be able to claim to be an engineer in Australia, but at least those who have spent years actually doing engineering as a career and were trained on-the-job have finally gained formal recognition as providers of professional services now, whether trained in a university or otherwise. And it's in legislation.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
In Texas, the Occupation Codes state that you cannot do the math if you are not a Licensed Professional Engineer unless you work for Licensed Professional Engineer (who is responsible for your work), work for the Government (primarily Military or NASA), teach and a few other exceptions. In Texas the licensing started because a person representing themselves as an engineer designed a boiler system for a school that blew up and killed over 100 children back in 1937.
Agreed, and being licensed as an engineer by some board in Oregon does not make one an engineer. Would be nice to have someone from MIT or Caltech to go and check their licensing requirements, and subject the board to a simple test to see if they know some engineering to begin with
Twenty years ago in Phoenix, an electrical engineer solved a problem with a freeway interchange that the civil engineers said was impossible and was going to cost the city millions of dollars.
"Why didn't he ever register as an engineer, or at least stop going around telling people he's something he is legally not?"
Jarlstrom is an Engineer. What he is not is a "Licensed Engineer", or a "Registered Professional Licensed Engineer", or any combination thereof. As long as he does not claim to be, he is in the clear. Licensing and terminology varies from State to State, and in some Engineering fields, such a Electronics or Software Engineering, is practically unknown. It is most common in Civil Engineering, where a LPE needs to sign off on Public Projects, often in conjunction with a Licensed Professional Architect. They do not have to actually do any Engineering on such Projects. Their Opinion is what is valuable, not their grunt work. In California at least, they don't even have to have an Engineering degree.
We had one LPE on Staff to deal with such things a Regulatory Compliance, and to represent us and our work Legally. He wasn't even our most Senior Engineer; we had dozens of Engineers. His degree was in Physics. I doubt that even 1% of all practicing Engineers nationwide are Licensed.
This is pure Dick Waving by the Oregon Board. What put them up to it is as yet unknown, but I suspect that there is much more to this than a simple difference of opinion regarding what the single word "Engineer" means. Beaverton historically has had a lot of Engineers, practically none of them "Registered" Engineers. Licensing Boards can be good things, as a means of demonstrating competence. Here however, the competence of Mr. Jarlstrom is not in question, nor his work. Just what he calls himself, by their definitions. If he had titled himself "Grand Exalted Red Light Bandit", then his analysis may have actually been considered.
I hope that the "The Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying" gets castrated. They have a right to Trademark any combination of "Oregon" "Registered", Licensed", and "Professional" attached to the word "Engineer", and tattoo it on their Dicks. Until they do so, they are just a bunch of self-absorbed Wankers, grabbing after the Dicks of others.
Have I been sufficiently rude?
Signed,
A "Staff Scientist/Engineer". That is the Job Classification that appeared on my paychecks, paid by this State. No Licensing or Registration "Board" approval required.
Thought experiment. Let's suppose you're a CIVIL engineer -- the type of engineer the regulations are intended to target. You're on vacation in Oregon, and you notice a serious structural fault in a bridge which means that it is in imminent danger of collapse.
Under this interpretation of the term "practice engineering" you wouldn't be able to tell anyone because you're not licensed to practice engineering in Oregon. In fact anyone who found an obvious fault -- say, a crack in the bridge -- would be forbidden to warn people not to use it until it had been looked at.
Which is ridiculous. Having and expressing an opinion, even a professionally informed opinion, isn't "practicing engineering". Practicing engineering means getting paid -- possibly in some form other than money. At the very least it means performing the kind of services for which engineers are normally paid.
A law which prevented people from expressing opinions wouldn't pass constitutional muster unless it was "narrowly tailored to serve a compelling public interest" -- that's the phrase the constitutional lawyers use when talking about laws regulating constitutionally protected activities. In this case the public interest is safety, which would be served by a law which prevented unqualified people from falsely convincing people that a structure was safe. But there is no compelling interest in preventing an engineer from warning the public about something he thinks is dangerous or even improper.
So if the law means what they claim it to mean, it's very likely unconstitutional.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
History of Engineering Boards is interesting. In Texas, the start of the State board of Professional Engineers traces back to media coverage of a boiler explosion in a school, caused by faulty design by un-licensed engineers. There are still plenty of laws on the books in many states that representing yourself as an "electrical engineer" to the public is technically illegal, unless you've paid dues to the board, and meet other license requirements.
Also, sending this complaint to the Board in charge of enforcing these laws was a bad move. Engineering for public works, such as yellow lights, and bridges, has required more licensing than just a degree for many years.
I think he would have been fine sending such things to Senators/Representatives/etc., it's just "send to board in charge mainly of professional licensing and not much else" was not the smartest plan if you don't want a fine. That's pretty much the only thing that board is interested in, licensing, and the enforcement thereof. It has nothing to do with traffic light setting standards, or much beyond several tests full of engineering questions.
This is like sending the Arizona Bar complaints about how the traffic lights are a problem, claiming to be a lawyer in the letter, and not having any credentials they recognize as "licensed lawyer".
That doesn't seem to hold up in court, though.
https://scholar.google.com/sch...
In that case, a woman completed a four year post-doctorate fellowship in psychology at Yale, had her Ph.D. for education published in a psychology journal, taught psychology at college, studied under psychologists, and was a member of the American Psychological Association for years. She did not, however, have a license to practice psychology in Texas. She would sometimes give psychological advice and, when she ran for a political position, she said she was an attorney and psychologist on her website. The Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists demanded she stop saying she was a psychologist because she wasn't licensed to be one in Texas.
The court basically said it was an infringement of her first amendment rights. She wasn't giving advice to a client. Her background suggests calling herself a psychologist is not misleading. In fact, the court said that commercial speech is speech that "proposes" a commercial transaction, not speech for profit. So even receiving compensation for speech isn't necessarily commercial in nature and can be protected.
So, at the end of it, he probably has a case that his speech is protected. There seems to be precedent.
I am a professional engineer licensed in Oregon. This is very typical for OSBEELS to do. The term "engineer" has very specific legal meaning, and in most states it implies registration and license as a professional engineer. The reason that Oregon and other states vigorously pursue people who claim to be engineers without licensure is to protect the public from those who claim to be engineers but do not have the education or experience to be admitted to the profession. Oregon happens to pursue these types of issues more vigorously than other states I have been licensed in, but this is nothing new. The claim that his first amendment rights are being violated is laughable (but IANAL). He is free to make his case, but he cannot call himself an "engineer" without being licensed.
1) do you think the bare ancient common word "doctor" should be reserved for people who have completed a doctorate degree? Or is it cool with you if some high school dropout starts calling himself a doctor and dispensing medical advice despite not having any education, experience or certification to do so?
Doctors with a doctorate? It's a funny word that way, but at least in my country, medical doctors are technically masters.
2) He was fined for claiming to be an engineer when he was not registered as such. As someone who has an engineering degree (but is not a professional engineer) I find it difficult to believe he's a legitimate engineer and yet had no idea you can't claim to be an engineer without being registered. I don't know where he was trained, but it was made expressly clear to me that I am not allowed to do that.
Of course you can. In non-stupid places. (Another thing is that "engineer" is actually also a degree level in my country, in addition to all the other meanings you know from English, but I digress...)
3) It was decided that applying math and physics to problems requires registration because if you let just any asshole that swears he knows what he's doing sign off on it, bridges and buildings collapse and people die.
So because of falling bridges, you can't solder your own radio? Isn't it much more meaningful to require certifications and such for specific projects rather than for extremely vague words such as "engineer" in a broad sweep?
Ezekiel 23:20
Well there are more reasons for that hope. Contrary to what so many people believe - being president is nothing like heading a company, and being good at one does not suggest you'll be good at the other, indeed the two jobs are almost exact opposites in the skills they require. I'll run through the differences just now - but it's worth noting that the republicans don't seem to recognize the importance of those differences and keep running businessmen for president. 3 of their last 5 candidates were businessmen - and to add injury to insult, they aren't aren't even good at picking businessmen since only one of the three Mitt Romney could be called a successful businessman.
Why being president is nothing like running a company: ... we're not his customers, we are his BOSSES.
- A business owner is risking his own money, the president is managing OUR money
- A business owner has customers, the president does not - those people out there using government services, paying taxes,
- A business owner has near absolute power over business decisions. A president is limited by checks and balances including congress and the courts.
- A business owner can make decisions single-handedly about things like spending and budget priorities, a president gets no real say in that - Congress writes the budget. He can tell them what he would like, but they have no obligation to care. If a CEO and his accountant do not agree on which departments should get budget priority, there is very little risk of the entire company shutting down for weeks - this has happened to government more than once.
- A business owner competes with his rivals in the market, but they take great care not to let each other know their plans and desires. A president has his competition INSIDE THE SAME ORGANISATION and has to negotiate with them on things they don't agree with - giving them some of what they want in return for some of what he wants and cooperate with them on things that they agree on and sometimes just ignore all their beliefs to do the basic jobs of governance together.
- If a business reduces it's expenses, there is almost zero risk of reducing it's income through the exact same action - this is almost ALWAYS the outcome when a government cuts expenses (because a government's income comes from taxing other people's income and government expenses ARE other people's income, and the income of a bunch of people who have never done business with government is reduced too - because the people who do business with government cannot buy as much from them anymore). As a general rule, austerity (especially in a recession) is the economic equivalent of saving money on your heating bill by burning your paycheck for warmth.
I could go on and on but I think I've made my point, frankly what I find myself entirely incapable of doing - is finding a SINGLE thing the two jobs actually have in common - a single overlapping skill between them. A good janitor is MORE qualified to president than the CEO of the company he cleans for - because a good janitor is good at understanding and executing the wishes of his superiors- and the president has a LOT of superiors, 320 million of them in fact.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It came from a very pragmatic, and not terrible, goal - to ensure peer review of massive infrastructure project designs - and peer approval of their designers. It's major outcome has been that very, very few suspension bridges have ever collapsed. These are not things the free market can reasonably function at - how would consumers know whether the materials in the supporting cables are really strong enough to keep it up past 5 years ?
Now it's quite possible the regulations are overbroad if just saying "I'm an engineer" in a context where you are clearly referring to "has the relevant qualifications" and are not trying to sell a design to anybody is covered under it - it could be that there is room for a constitutional challenge which may lead to a narrowing of what such regulations can actually say.
It's unlikely though. "I'm an engineer" is a statement of fact, the supreme court has consistently held that - where a strong government or public interest exists, the state has the right to restrict false statements of fact under narrow conditions. I am pretty sure that "we don't want shopping malls to fall on our heads" count as a strong government and public interest.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
That doesn't make him an engineer in the US. Learning the science and math is only part of being an engineer. The other part is the ethics and law. I know in Canada that these make up a significant part of the testing of the professional engineer. I'm sure that in many other countries it is the same. So an engineer from Ontario can't go and claim to be an engineer in British Columbia or Oregon because the laws are different.