Mm, and in that picture you can see the giant swarm of mosquitoes he was letting out? You have better eyes than me.
See also this. At most it was one. Just opening an empty jar while you have another jar with bugs in it can be an effective stunt.
My boss was at his talk. He did not release the mosquitos. He did have a vial of them there and threatened to, as a joke (boss-man actually said his whole talk was pretty entertaining). So all of you yammering about suing and crap can calm down.
Come on people. Look at the stuff in here. I am an engineer who loves what she does (I build robots!) and I have the good fortune to work in Cambridge, Mass, where women engineers are often no big deal... and yet if I knew I was in a room with all of you, thinking that my brain is different and I'm just not meant for this stuff, and if I *am* good/interested in this it's just because I'm "weird" and going against my gender norms... well, I'd hightail it out of here, too.
And in other countries there are many female engineers. My mother worked with a Ukranian woman who thought it odd that engineering was considered a "male" profession here, rather than a female profession as it was back home. Most of the women I do see in engineering are of Asian descent. You don't think, just maybe, that we're doing a crappy job as a culture of encouraging American kids (not just girls, but even boys too) to get excited about and be interested in this stuff?
I don't deny that women think differently from men. But I do question the suggestion that this means women can't or won't do engineering or science. I question why engineering or science can't handle the way women think. It's not a matter of dumbing it down; it's a matter of figuring out how to leverage diverse ways of thinking about a problem. A group of people looking at a problem in different ways is more beneficial than one geek sitting in a cube doing what he thinks is best. A group of men is good. A group of men and women is better.
Many commercial AUVs are rated to, at most, 6000m. The tradeoffs there are business: basically none of the customers want it any deeper, because, like I said, that depth rating can handle almost the entire ocean. So if this group's main driver is availability of technology and components to work from to build their AUV, they're probably willing to focus on just the 3000m-6000m range to take advantage of that.
This isn't to say it's not worth it at all, and there are vehicles that can go deeper. But the question was asked, "Why are these guys limited to 6000m?" It's not technologically infeasible to go deeper, but practically speaking, they don't need to in order to get the information they need. Tradeoffs.
I work on AUVs for a US company. 6000m pretty much covers 99% of the ocean floor; it's not worth the engineering tradeoffs to go deeper. And yeah, filling pressure vessels with mineral oil is one strategy, but honestly the bigger issues are power and navigation.
Glider technology != ROVs. Gliders are very new, very up-and-coming, and serve a very different market than an ROV. Gliders are useful for their endurance and the distance (including vertical distance) they can cover over long periods of time.
I work for Bluefin Robotics, and I'm getting a kick out of these replies...
Some kids at my college built a K'Nex computer for their CompArch class. The prof recommended this or a water one as a nifty project, and has been doing so for a few years. No one took him up on it till this year.
Olin College of Engineering was built to address this issue. Other schools like WPI have followed suit. The word is out there, especially to the ASEE, and it's being implemented. However, even as a graduate of Olin, I've gotten crap from people at more traditional engineering schools telling me I'll never be worth anything because I haven't been "trained" enough. There's some social change that needs to happen, not just at the university level, before this will really take off.
Hear's another vote for FIRST-related stuff. I was on a high school team and now I mentor and help to run the Boston regional competition. It's a really great program.
LEGO MindStorms and VEX kits are great. I took a BOEBot (parallax.com, I think) to my senior prom -- it ran on a BASIC Stamp (old school!). These all come with great documentation.
If you're in to programming, try a Roomba. The ones iRobot makes. They opened up their SCI protocol and they're inviting hackers to do fun and interesting things with them. You can nab one for $100-$150, have all the hardware and place, and just play around with the code. As an added bonus, it'll even vacuum your floor!
I don't know how old you are, but try to find internships with robotics companies, too. I'm in the Boston area, so I'm most familiar with companies here, but lots of other cities have growing industries where even a couple of months seeing things in action will give you a good perspective on the field.
I'm a little surprised at the "There is no robotics industry" replies. I just graduated with an ECE degree, wanted to go into robotics, and had three awesome job offers from three awesome companies that are all really competitive in the field. I applied about ten different places in Boston alone that all catered to my interests, and I found many many more outside of the state.
One big issue is location -- for robotics, in the US, you should be in Boston, Pittsburgh, or Silicon Valley. I'm in Boston, so I know the most about stuff going on here. Pittsburgh is building up a lot of spinoffs from CMU's Robotics Institute (much as nearly all the Boston robotics companies spun out of MIT). Silicon Valley has a lot of stuff coming out of Stanford.
Then you have to decide what kind. Consumer robotics? Someplace like iRobot. Industrial robotics? Barrett Technologies makes ridiculous robotic arms. Places like Honda do pretty awesome things there, too. Military robots? Boston Dynamics makes the BigDog (it was covered on Slashdot a while ago). Places like Boeing have big contracts with the military's Future Combat Systems program. Draper Laboratory here in Cambridge does flying, swimming, and driving robots for military applications. Space robots? NASA, of course, as well as Ball Aerospace, Boeing, and various university labs. Medical robots? Vecna Technologies in Boston does a human-carrying bot for both battlefield and hospital use. Anthrotronix in Maryland makes robots for kids in physical therapy programs. Some company, I don't know who, makes the DaVinci surgical robot. I personally work on underwater robotics at a just-out-of-startup phase company here in Boston called Bluefin Robotics.
Join the IEEE Robotics and Automation society to start networking. Google robotics conferences and see which companies attend. My delicious page here has a bunch of links to sites I used during my job search.
I do only have my BS, but I plan to get an advanced degree later. As a few of my profs told me, if you want to do the really awesome stuff, or you ever want to start your own company (which I do), you need a PhD for the credibility. I also just feel like there are still other classes I want to take.;) But MIT, CMU, Stanford, and Georgia Tech are all particularly well-known for their robotics and AI programs. Many other universities are starting to jump on that bandwagon as well -- BU is up and coming in surgical robotics.
So do your due diligence on Google, network as much as possible, and ask questions. There's a ton of stuff out there. Don't let anyone tell you the industry isn't there. This is just the beginning of something that will grow with incredible speed over the next couple of decades.
I'm actually in the odd position of having written a 6-page (single-spaced) technical paper yesterday and a 25-page (double-spaced) humanities paper today. The juxtaposition of the two causes a lot of problems for me. Professors tell me to use passive voice in my technical papers ("The dynamics were analyzed using these methods" vs. "The team analyzed the dynamics using these methods") and I'm constantly hounded for not using active voice in my humanities papers ("The dialects have presented interesting challenges" vs "The dialects present interesting challenges").
I'd say the most important thing is to teach appropriateness and to recognize it. When I get into one mindset (engineering or humanities), it's hard for me to get out of it quickly to handle another paper in a different subject. I usually don't notice when I've used the wrong voice until I have someone look it over for me; the more you can encourage your students to have others proofread, the better -- I hate having others read my stuff, but it's worth it.
They could use these to drop packages of cargo, building materials, or supplies. One of the biggest problems NASA has right now is how to create an environment where astronauts can safely travel beyond about 7km from their base (that's around where the current limit is right now, I think, due to life support system capabilities and safety factors). The ability to drop energy stations, refueling stations, oxygen tanks, or whatever remotely would be pretty invaluable.
1) How many Slashdotters are not either CS/Comp engineers, or EEs? From my understanding, that's the majority of jobs that are being offshored. Y'all sound pretty (understandably) bitter. But worth keeping in mind that this guy isn't necessarily "better off" not being in engineering.
2) Engineering shouldn't have to be painful. Why *should* I have to have TAs who barely speak English? The Chinese graduating from Chinese engineering schools, I imagine, have all Chinese-speaking TAs. They seem to be getting on just fine without "toughing it out" through the "typical" engineering curriculum. Also, I go to a school (Olin College; was Slashdotted at one point when we first opened) whose entire mission is to make engineering useful, applicable, and not just a washout program. I got my butt kicked by freshman math and physics, sure, but combining it with *actual* engineering, immediate application, and teachers who gave a damn sure made it worthwhile. I don't think I'm learning that much less. I'm just learning it without needing to go on Prozac in the process.
3) The nature of engineering Last year's president of the ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) is also one of my school's VPs, and I've heard her talk a lot about her beliefs in engineering. One of her key points it that we need to get out of the mindset of cut-and-dry, plug-in-crank-out engineering that is so prevalent and fits much into the stereotypical state school engineering mold. We have to get into innovation, design, and the business side of things, because those are the things that are the next step in engineering. Education machines in India and China are churning out millions of engineers who can do the things computers will be doing in 20 years. We have to stop whining about not being able to keep up with the numbers and look forward to the next big thing in technology and science. Pity parties and "In my day" reminiscing don't do us any good.
"She may have been the best candidate but as most engineers are are men, it does probably mean that the best for the job will probably be male, this just a matter of numbers"
So... if a womens' basketball team is made up mostly of women... only women should be womens' basketball coaches? Then why are so many men coaching college and high school teams?
Well, yeah, we *do* have something to prove, actually. Have you read some of the other comments? The ones about women not being "wired" for heavy computing, or that women simply aren't as good at math as men and thus aren't expected to even be interested? I think that any woman's post "listing accomplishments" is perfectly justified in this case as an arguement against the other posts. Perhaps those who you know in your office or whatever brag excessively, but anything you're seeing on here is just a defense against an ignorant attack.
A lot of this discussion is extremely frustrating. There are so many stereotypes ("Girls aren't as good at math..." "They don't like computers anyway..." "They're just NOT INTERESTED") that are the precise reason that the ratios are so low. How do you know? How many women have you talked to that fit these stereotypes? And have you ever thought *why* some might not be interested? I never owned a set of Legos or an Erector Set as a kid -- plenty of Barbies, though. Computer classes at my high school taught word processing and spreadsheets (at an all-female school... clearly teaching us all we ever needed to know in our future careers as... secretaries?). I'm currently arguing with them right now about updating our technology AND math and science curricula after they drastically cut back on them, thereby screwing over anyone who had any desire of entering such fields in college. It's not encouraged at all. The only reason I'm in ECE (with a CS concentration) right now is because practically by accident my high school ended up with a FIRST robotics team and I fell in love with the programming and wiring. Without it, despite my ability and interest in computers, I probably would have ended up a humanities major just because it never would have occurred to me that engineering or CS was something I was really interested in.
And don't make assumptions on what women do or do not want. I am perfectly willing to stay up all night coding surviving only on caffeine. I buy clothing based on whether or not I can carry my Leatherman in a pocket. I have attended many a Warcraft III LAN party with my boyfriend and his roommates. I build my own computers, run Linux, and for God's sake, I read Slashdot. ('Nuff said..) And I'm not unique -- I got to Olin College of Engineering, which has a 50-50 male to female ratio, and there are plenty of chicks there just like me.
Just keep in mind that it's very much a matter of exposure. For example, one girl in my class had never had any programming experience and only went into engineering on a whim, but loved our first CS class so much she soon after taught herself Perl in order to keep the college Quote Board organized. Another girl who had been considering journalism instead of engineering went crazy with her first introduction to CAD modelling and power tools. It's just that so many of the girls there had never seen any of this before, didn't realize it was out there, and only by some fortunate chance ended up finding it in college.
But please don't assume that women aren't interested. Think of it instead is that a lot of them just don't know what they're missing.
I'm actually leaving tomorrow on my way to Olin.. and just wanted to reply to a couple of things.
1) No, we are not accredited. Olin can't be until they graduate their first class (us). To me, it's worth the potential risk just to be involved in starting the college up.
2) No, you can't "train" someone to be a renaissance engineer. But the type of people they're admitting are already well-rounded.. I'd say I'm actually in the minority since I'm overly computer-geeky and don't play some sort of musical instrument.
3) Yeah, I know HMC is really similar. I actually applied there as well. In fact, in talking to the admissions people at Olin, they talked about trying to emulate what HMC was doing, but with the differences they deemed necessary. So yeah, we're building on something that already works.
4) To any other chicks out there who read/. and are close to applying for college... Olin has a 50:50 male to female ratio. You don't find that many other places. And for God's sake, guys, please don't start with the lewd comments on this...
Slashdot Mirror
Mm, and in that picture you can see the giant swarm of mosquitoes he was letting out? You have better eyes than me. See also this. At most it was one. Just opening an empty jar while you have another jar with bugs in it can be an effective stunt.
My boss was at his talk. He did not release the mosquitos. He did have a vial of them there and threatened to, as a joke (boss-man actually said his whole talk was pretty entertaining). So all of you yammering about suing and crap can calm down.
I'm a girl, asshole, just with crazy parents. Feel free to google me.
Come on people. Look at the stuff in here. I am an engineer who loves what she does (I build robots!) and I have the good fortune to work in Cambridge, Mass, where women engineers are often no big deal... and yet if I knew I was in a room with all of you, thinking that my brain is different and I'm just not meant for this stuff, and if I *am* good/interested in this it's just because I'm "weird" and going against my gender norms... well, I'd hightail it out of here, too.
And in other countries there are many female engineers. My mother worked with a Ukranian woman who thought it odd that engineering was considered a "male" profession here, rather than a female profession as it was back home. Most of the women I do see in engineering are of Asian descent. You don't think, just maybe, that we're doing a crappy job as a culture of encouraging American kids (not just girls, but even boys too) to get excited about and be interested in this stuff?
I don't deny that women think differently from men. But I do question the suggestion that this means women can't or won't do engineering or science. I question why engineering or science can't handle the way women think. It's not a matter of dumbing it down; it's a matter of figuring out how to leverage diverse ways of thinking about a problem. A group of people looking at a problem in different ways is more beneficial than one geek sitting in a cube doing what he thinks is best. A group of men is good. A group of men and women is better.
Many commercial AUVs are rated to, at most, 6000m. The tradeoffs there are business: basically none of the customers want it any deeper, because, like I said, that depth rating can handle almost the entire ocean. So if this group's main driver is availability of technology and components to work from to build their AUV, they're probably willing to focus on just the 3000m-6000m range to take advantage of that. This isn't to say it's not worth it at all, and there are vehicles that can go deeper. But the question was asked, "Why are these guys limited to 6000m?" It's not technologically infeasible to go deeper, but practically speaking, they don't need to in order to get the information they need. Tradeoffs.
I work on AUVs for a US company. 6000m pretty much covers 99% of the ocean floor; it's not worth the engineering tradeoffs to go deeper. And yeah, filling pressure vessels with mineral oil is one strategy, but honestly the bigger issues are power and navigation.
Glider technology != ROVs. Gliders are very new, very up-and-coming, and serve a very different market than an ROV. Gliders are useful for their endurance and the distance (including vertical distance) they can cover over long periods of time. I work for Bluefin Robotics, and I'm getting a kick out of these replies...
Some kids at my college built a K'Nex computer for their CompArch class. The prof recommended this or a water one as a nifty project, and has been doing so for a few years. No one took him up on it till this year.
Olin College of Engineering was built to address this issue. Other schools like WPI have followed suit. The word is out there, especially to the ASEE, and it's being implemented. However, even as a graduate of Olin, I've gotten crap from people at more traditional engineering schools telling me I'll never be worth anything because I haven't been "trained" enough. There's some social change that needs to happen, not just at the university level, before this will really take off.
I love robots.
:D
Hear's another vote for FIRST-related stuff. I was on a high school team and now I mentor and help to run the Boston regional competition. It's a really great program.
LEGO MindStorms and VEX kits are great. I took a BOEBot (parallax.com, I think) to my senior prom -- it ran on a BASIC Stamp (old school!). These all come with great documentation.
If you're in to programming, try a Roomba. The ones iRobot makes. They opened up their SCI protocol and they're inviting hackers to do fun and interesting things with them. You can nab one for $100-$150, have all the hardware and place, and just play around with the code. As an added bonus, it'll even vacuum your floor!
I don't know how old you are, but try to find internships with robotics companies, too. I'm in the Boston area, so I'm most familiar with companies here, but lots of other cities have growing industries where even a couple of months seeing things in action will give you a good perspective on the field.
And above all, hack away
Ummm, sorry. Been a while since I commented on Slashdot. Forgot about doing HTML line breaks. ::looks guilty, slinks away::
I'm a little surprised at the "There is no robotics industry" replies. I just graduated with an ECE degree, wanted to go into robotics, and had three awesome job offers from three awesome companies that are all really competitive in the field. I applied about ten different places in Boston alone that all catered to my interests, and I found many many more outside of the state. One big issue is location -- for robotics, in the US, you should be in Boston, Pittsburgh, or Silicon Valley. I'm in Boston, so I know the most about stuff going on here. Pittsburgh is building up a lot of spinoffs from CMU's Robotics Institute (much as nearly all the Boston robotics companies spun out of MIT). Silicon Valley has a lot of stuff coming out of Stanford. Then you have to decide what kind. Consumer robotics? Someplace like iRobot. Industrial robotics? Barrett Technologies makes ridiculous robotic arms. Places like Honda do pretty awesome things there, too. Military robots? Boston Dynamics makes the BigDog (it was covered on Slashdot a while ago). Places like Boeing have big contracts with the military's Future Combat Systems program. Draper Laboratory here in Cambridge does flying, swimming, and driving robots for military applications. Space robots? NASA, of course, as well as Ball Aerospace, Boeing, and various university labs. Medical robots? Vecna Technologies in Boston does a human-carrying bot for both battlefield and hospital use. Anthrotronix in Maryland makes robots for kids in physical therapy programs. Some company, I don't know who, makes the DaVinci surgical robot. I personally work on underwater robotics at a just-out-of-startup phase company here in Boston called Bluefin Robotics. Join the IEEE Robotics and Automation society to start networking. Google robotics conferences and see which companies attend. My delicious page here has a bunch of links to sites I used during my job search. I do only have my BS, but I plan to get an advanced degree later. As a few of my profs told me, if you want to do the really awesome stuff, or you ever want to start your own company (which I do), you need a PhD for the credibility. I also just feel like there are still other classes I want to take. ;) But MIT, CMU, Stanford, and Georgia Tech are all particularly well-known for their robotics and AI programs. Many other universities are starting to jump on that bandwagon as well -- BU is up and coming in surgical robotics.
So do your due diligence on Google, network as much as possible, and ask questions. There's a ton of stuff out there. Don't let anyone tell you the industry isn't there. This is just the beginning of something that will grow with incredible speed over the next couple of decades.
I'm actually in the odd position of having written a 6-page (single-spaced) technical paper yesterday and a 25-page (double-spaced) humanities paper today. The juxtaposition of the two causes a lot of problems for me. Professors tell me to use passive voice in my technical papers ("The dynamics were analyzed using these methods" vs. "The team analyzed the dynamics using these methods") and I'm constantly hounded for not using active voice in my humanities papers ("The dialects have presented interesting challenges" vs "The dialects present interesting challenges"). I'd say the most important thing is to teach appropriateness and to recognize it. When I get into one mindset (engineering or humanities), it's hard for me to get out of it quickly to handle another paper in a different subject. I usually don't notice when I've used the wrong voice until I have someone look it over for me; the more you can encourage your students to have others proofread, the better -- I hate having others read my stuff, but it's worth it.
They could use these to drop packages of cargo, building materials, or supplies. One of the biggest problems NASA has right now is how to create an environment where astronauts can safely travel beyond about 7km from their base (that's around where the current limit is right now, I think, due to life support system capabilities and safety factors). The ability to drop energy stations, refueling stations, oxygen tanks, or whatever remotely would be pretty invaluable.
Ever been to a FIRST robotics competition? Go to one and tell me you can't get high schoolers excited about robots. :)
1) How many Slashdotters are not either CS/Comp engineers, or EEs?
From my understanding, that's the majority of jobs that are being offshored. Y'all sound pretty (understandably) bitter. But worth keeping in mind that this guy isn't necessarily "better off" not being in engineering.
2) Engineering shouldn't have to be painful.
Why *should* I have to have TAs who barely speak English? The Chinese graduating from Chinese engineering schools, I imagine, have all Chinese-speaking TAs. They seem to be getting on just fine without "toughing it out" through the "typical" engineering curriculum. Also, I go to a school (Olin College; was Slashdotted at one point when we first opened) whose entire mission is to make engineering useful, applicable, and not just a washout program. I got my butt kicked by freshman math and physics, sure, but combining it with *actual* engineering, immediate application, and teachers who gave a damn sure made it worthwhile. I don't think I'm learning that much less. I'm just learning it without needing to go on Prozac in the process.
3) The nature of engineering
Last year's president of the ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) is also one of my school's VPs, and I've heard her talk a lot about her beliefs in engineering. One of her key points it that we need to get out of the mindset of cut-and-dry, plug-in-crank-out engineering that is so prevalent and fits much into the stereotypical state school engineering mold. We have to get into innovation, design, and the business side of things, because those are the things that are the next step in engineering. Education machines in India and China are churning out millions of engineers who can do the things computers will be doing in 20 years. We have to stop whining about not being able to keep up with the numbers and look forward to the next big thing in technology and science. Pity parties and "In my day" reminiscing don't do us any good.
"She may have been the best candidate but as most engineers are are men, it does probably mean that the best for the job will probably be male, this just a matter of numbers"
So... if a womens' basketball team is made up mostly of women... only women should be womens' basketball coaches? Then why are so many men coaching college and high school teams?
Well, yeah, we *do* have something to prove, actually. Have you read some of the other comments? The ones about women not being "wired" for heavy computing, or that women simply aren't as good at math as men and thus aren't expected to even be interested? I think that any woman's post "listing accomplishments" is perfectly justified in this case as an arguement against the other posts. Perhaps those who you know in your office or whatever brag excessively, but anything you're seeing on here is just a defense against an ignorant attack.
A lot of this discussion is extremely frustrating. There are so many stereotypes ("Girls aren't as good at math..." "They don't like computers anyway..." "They're just NOT INTERESTED") that are the precise reason that the ratios are so low. How do you know? How many women have you talked to that fit these stereotypes? And have you ever thought *why* some might not be interested? I never owned a set of Legos or an Erector Set as a kid -- plenty of Barbies, though. Computer classes at my high school taught word processing and spreadsheets (at an all-female school... clearly teaching us all we ever needed to know in our future careers as... secretaries?). I'm currently arguing with them right now about updating our technology AND math and science curricula after they drastically cut back on them, thereby screwing over anyone who had any desire of entering such fields in college. It's not encouraged at all. The only reason I'm in ECE (with a CS concentration) right now is because practically by accident my high school ended up with a FIRST robotics team and I fell in love with the programming and wiring. Without it, despite my ability and interest in computers, I probably would have ended up a humanities major just because it never would have occurred to me that engineering or CS was something I was really interested in.
And don't make assumptions on what women do or do not want. I am perfectly willing to stay up all night coding surviving only on caffeine. I buy clothing based on whether or not I can carry my Leatherman in a pocket. I have attended many a Warcraft III LAN party with my boyfriend and his roommates. I build my own computers, run Linux, and for God's sake, I read Slashdot. ('Nuff said..) And I'm not unique -- I got to Olin College of Engineering, which has a 50-50 male to female ratio, and there are plenty of chicks there just like me.
Just keep in mind that it's very much a matter of exposure. For example, one girl in my class had never had any programming experience and only went into engineering on a whim, but loved our first CS class so much she soon after taught herself Perl in order to keep the college Quote Board organized. Another girl who had been considering journalism instead of engineering went crazy with her first introduction to CAD modelling and power tools. It's just that so many of the girls there had never seen any of this before, didn't realize it was out there, and only by some fortunate chance ended up finding it in college.
But please don't assume that women aren't interested. Think of it instead is that a lot of them just don't know what they're missing.
I'm actually leaving tomorrow on my way to Olin.. and just wanted to reply to a couple of things.
/. and are close to applying for college... Olin has a 50:50 male to female ratio. You don't find that many other places. And for God's sake, guys, please don't start with the lewd comments on this...
1) No, we are not accredited. Olin can't be until they graduate their first class (us). To me, it's worth the potential risk just to be involved in starting the college up.
2) No, you can't "train" someone to be a renaissance engineer. But the type of people they're admitting are already well-rounded.. I'd say I'm actually in the minority since I'm overly computer-geeky and don't play some sort of musical instrument.
3) Yeah, I know HMC is really similar. I actually applied there as well. In fact, in talking to the admissions people at Olin, they talked about trying to emulate what HMC was doing, but with the differences they deemed necessary. So yeah, we're building on something that already works.
4) To any other chicks out there who read