The Entrepreneurial Engineer

The perils and pleasures of interdisciplinarity

2010-03-18T07:36:00.001-05:00

I just gave a talk on "The Perils and Pleasures of Interdisciplinarity" at a Workshop on the Challenges in Top-Down, Bottom-up and Computational Approaches in Synthetic Biology. The talk is available in the viewer below:

Related talks are available here.

2009-10-26T12:24:00.001-05:00

Understanding Engineers starts today

2009-10-26T12:19:00.001-05:00

A new course in Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois called "Understanding Engineers" started today.

Save the Date for Philosophy, Engineering & Technology: 9-10 May 2010

2009-08-11T22:21:00.003-05:00

The 2010 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology (FPET-2010) will be held on 9-10 May 2010 (Sunday evening through Monday) at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO. The event is an outgrowth of the WPE-2007 and WPE-2008 meetings held in Delft and London.

Philosophical reasoning was important to the writing of The Entrepreneurial Engineer and TEE author David E. Goldberg is one of FPET-2010’s organizers. More information is available at www.philengtech.org.

New handbook of Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences is a winner

2009-07-10T04:47:00.003-05:00

See the post here or in the viewer below:

Thoughts of a Reflective Engineer on Volume 9: Handbook of the Philosophy of Science Volume 9, Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences

View more presentations from deg511.

Posted using ShareThis

Little models

2009-06-30T08:21:00.001-05:00

Here is the powerpoint for module 11, Little Models, from the course Creative Modeling for Tech Vision:

MTV 11: Little Models

View more documents from deg511.

The missing basics

2009-06-29T05:06:00.001-05:00

See the talk I just gave at the National University of Singapore in the viewer below:

The Missing Basics: What Engineers Don't Learn and Why They Don't Learn It

View more documents from Ifoundry .

Crossing the qual-quant divide

2009-06-26T09:12:00.001-05:00

Module 10 from my course Creative Modeling for Tech Visionaries is available in the viewer below:

MTV 10: Crossing the Qual-Quant Divide

View more documents from deg511.

Tell the hoards at Heathrow

2009-05-15T04:10:00.004-05:00

that there is a worldwide financial meltdown, please. If this is a depression, I'd hate to see a boom. I'm checked into AA47, LHR to ORD, returning from a talk on genetic algorithms at the Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, and the number of people in Terminal 3 at Heathrow is astounding. There are people sipping Starbucks lattes, people buying Yo Sushi, people stuffing their carts in duty-free shops, people sprawled out on chairs and couches, and people milling in the crowded hallways.

Perhaps they didn't get the memo, or perhaps the "crisis" of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression are completely, utterly, fantastically, and ridiculously overstated.

Dunia blogs TEE

2009-03-23T19:19:00.001-05:00

Dunia Engineering Indonesia blogs The Entrepreneurial Engineering here.

Great video from SMU about engineers and engineering

2009-03-23T10:02:00.003-05:00

Check out this short video here

or in the viewer above! Posted using ShareThis

Declaring war on entrepreneurs?

2009-03-02T06:17:00.003-06:00

Larry Kudlow has a post on the current administration's approach to entrepreneurs and business more generally:

Let me be very clear on the economics of President Obama’s State of the Union speech and his budget. He is declaring war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private-equity and venture-capital funds. That is the meaning of his anti-growth tax-hike proposals, which make absolutely no sense at all -- either for this recession or from the standpoint of expanding our economy’s long-run potential to grow.

Many of the current crop of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are too young to remember the era of confiscatory tax policy prior to President Reagan. The relatively low marginal tax rates of the early 80s were the sine qua non of the hyperentrepreneurial era that ushered in the PC, associated software, and the commercialization of the internet, and those who believe that entrepreneurship and an innovative American economy are inevitable irrespective of governmental policies are likely to be in for a bit of a rude shock.

The pickle rides again

2009-02-27T11:52:00.002-06:00

I hadn't been following closely, but I noticed that Franz Dill has picked up the pace of his blogging at The Eponymous Pickle. Useful reflections on emerging technology (with a particular appetite for consumer marketing) in the 21st century (hat tip New Economy Engineer).

Hayek, a man for our times

2009-02-24T05:07:00.002-06:00

Over the weekend, I reread Friedrich A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Seemed important, given all the unprincipled machinations by government actors of late.

Now twittering

2009-02-12T09:50:00.001-06:00

at www.twitter.com/deg511.

Goldberg: Engineers not understanding markets is criminal

2009-01-07T05:29:00.003-06:00

El Mundo, the 2nd largest paper in Spain, covered my talk in Spain on "The Creativity Imperative and the Technology Professional of the Future" in an article with the title “No comprender los mercados es criminal para un ingeniero.” Links to the online version and the print version (with Goldberg action photo) are available over at the iFoundry web site (here).

The New Economy Engineer

2009-01-02T09:31:00.003-06:00

See Gary Wnek's powerpoint stack The New Economy Engineer here or in the viewer below

New Economy Engineer v.1

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: education innovation)

Gary is faculty director of TiME, the Institute for Management and Engineering, at Case Western Reserve University.

Video: Don Norman on Engineering Design

2008-11-02T18:08:00.001-06:00

Sarah Zehr talks about the importance of non-technical skills

2008-10-30T17:01:00.001-05:00

See the short video below:

All iFoundry videos available here

2008-09-27T16:25:00.004-05:00

The Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education (iFoundry) videos are available in the player below:

All iFoundry presentations available here

2008-09-27T16:06:00.005-05:00

The Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education (iFoundry) makes free presentations available in video (www.youtube.com/illinoisfoundry) or slide form (www.slideshare.net/ifoundry). The presentation s are available in the viewer below:

| Get your Presentation Pack

New iFoundry content is up

2008-09-10T21:56:00.001-05:00

The Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education (iFoundry) has posted new content, including new videos and ppts. For example, Patents in One Easy Lesson is a new video interview of USPTO veteran John Calvert, and Is Science Merely Applied Engineering is a new powerpoint presentation. Go here to see more.

University of Illinois seeks to reinvent engineering education

2008-09-05T19:58:00.003-05:00

Today, the University of Illinois announced bold plans to transform engineering education. See here.

iFoundry: Organizational change for transformation of engineering education

2008-08-17T15:42:00.004-05:00

Here's another YouTube video test. iFoundry: Organizational change for transformation of engineering education.

More information about iFoundry is available here.

Engineers as category enhancers

2008-08-14T17:23:00.002-05:00

I've been working on creating short YouTube videos for iFoundry, the Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education. The first one is about engineers in the 21st century and the need to move toward category creation, not just category enhancement.

How do people share? Email, Facebook & the rest

2008-08-13T10:26:00.002-05:00

ShareThis has released some interesting statistics about how people share information online. E-mail is by far and away the most popular mode of sharing accounting for 35% of the traffic followed by Facebook with 10%, Digg with 7%, and MySpace with 6%. A number of bloggers have written about this including VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb , DigitalInspiration, BusinessBlogAngel.

2nd call: Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering

2008-07-14T09:11:00.003-05:00

The second call for papers for the 2008 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering (WPE-2008) is available here. WPE-2008 will be held 10-12 November 2008 (Mon-Wed) at The Royal Academy of Engineering in London. The workshop, in part, traces its roots to a blogpost on 24 May 2006 on this blog (here) regarding the lack of a philosophy of engineering (see here).

Johnny Bunko: The kids like it

2008-05-29T15:04:00.003-05:00

Dan Pink's new book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need is out, and I've given it the ultimate test. I asked my two sons (Max, 19; Zack, 15) to read it and comment on it. First, the book is successful in the sense that they both read it. It isn't very long, and it is in manga form, so it isn't very taxing intellectually, but neither of these comments is meant to suggest that it isn't quite good. Both boys read it and were able to discuss the points raised in terms of their own experience.

Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering CFP

2008-05-08T06:21:00.000-05:00

Bury the Cold War Curriculum

2008-04-30T19:09:00.006-05:00

My essay, Bury the Cold War Curriculum published as the Last Word in the April 2008 ASEE Prism, got picked up on the web and reprinted here at Redorbit. A related set of powerpoint slides, What Engineers Don't Learn and How They Don't Learn It, is available here or in the viewer below:

| View | Upload your own

Favorite B. C. Forbes quotation

2008-03-02T04:53:00.002-06:00

"The man who is cocksure that he has arrived is ready for the return journey." B.C._Forbes (1880 - 1954). Other Forbes pearls of wisdom may be found here.

Canonical qualitative models

2008-02-17T14:25:00.002-06:00

Certain models in business and engineering become part of the "canon" and are thus part of the background of knowledge one takes for granted. Of course, the act of come up with such models was itself creative at one time, and the study of their structure and content is useful for developing new models of a business or technological situation.

Module 8 of my course, Creative Modeling for Tech Vision discusses some of these models and their construction and use and can be examined on slideshare here or in the viewer below.

| View | Upload your own

The course web site may be surfed here.

Biological anthropology course gets a B+

2008-02-09T16:25:00.000-06:00

I just finished another Teaching Company course on DVD: Biological Anthropology: An Evolutionary Perspective (24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture). The instructor was Barbara J. King, The College of William and Mary. The logical flow of the course was quite good, and the content was up to date. I found her speaking voice a bit grating and her presentation ability below Teaching Company standards. Moreover, Dr. King had the annoying habit of describing in words really interesting graphics and pictures that she didn't show!! This is really odd, because the Teaching Company goes to great lengths to get good visuals. Nonetheless, the course was worth watching, and Dr. King was at her best when talking about primates and primatology, her specialties.

ShareThis on Vator.tv

2008-02-02T04:51:00.000-06:00

Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis, does the elevator pitch for the ShareThis system on vator.tv here. Tim was at AlwaysOn Media in NYC last week (see related posts here and here).

ShareThis reaches 26 million unique users

2008-01-23T13:25:00.000-06:00

A press release today (here) announces the rapid growth of www.sharethis.com. Over 26 million viewers with over a 100 million page views have been reached per month over the last two months, making sharethis one of the fastest growing web applications on the planet. Rafe Needleman discusses the business potential (here) and AppScout discusses how the button can reduce publishing site clutter (here).

Napkintalk

2008-01-20T16:27:00.001-06:00

Here is lecture 7 from Creative Modeling for Tech Visionaries called Napkintalk.

| View | Upload your own

See the course website here.

ShareThis going strong

2008-01-20T15:52:00.000-06:00

The sharethis ubiquitous sharing tool*by Nextumi) now has publisher-side and consumer-side buttons (get the buttons here). Since the availability of the publisher-side button in November, installations have increased dramatically and there is growing interest among content purveyors and consumers alike.

More Teaching Company greats

2008-01-20T15:07:00.000-06:00

Courses from The Teaching Company have become a habit for me during exercising and driving. Just before Christmas I finished watching Nature of Earth: An Introduction to Geology by WVU's John J. Renton. His lecture on plate tectonics was worth the price of admission. More recently I finished Understanding the Brain (DVD) by Vanderbilt's Jeanette Norden. The coverage of the course was a masterful mix of the anatomical, the functional, and the clinical.

In the car, on CD I listened to European Thought and Culture in the 19th Century and 20th Century by UNCC's Lloyd Kramer and I'm in the middle of 5 courses on Great World Religions.

Over many years, I have been impressed with the uniform quality of these courses. I recommend them without reservation

A leadership blast

2007-11-21T10:53:00.000-06:00

A nice short stack of powerpoints on slideshare that captures some important truths about leadership:

| View | Upload your own

It takes a minute or so to scan. Take a look.

Blog covers creativity imperative talk in Singapore

2007-10-15T06:07:00.000-05:00

Lim Kong Weng, an equipment engineer for IBM and Management of Technology grad student at NUS, covers the recent talk in Singapore on "The Creativity Imperative and the Technology Professional of the Future" here.

Creative modelers: 2 techniques from Athens

2007-10-12T10:59:00.001-05:00

Module 6 of my course, Creative Modeling for Tech Vision, is available at my site on slideshare.net. I've also provided it in the viewer below.

Made to stick

2007-10-12T09:55:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I heard Dan Heath present the title message from his book, co-authored with his brother Chip, Made to Stick. The book talks about sticky or viral messages that inherently get passed from person to person. Starting from urban legends, moving through direct mail and other forms of advertising, and continuing to more serious media and messages, the book lays down a sixfold decomposition of what it means to be sticky:

1. Simplicity
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotions
6. Stories

Individually, each of these things sounds reasonable, and I know that I use these ideas in my thinking, but the conscious combination of these elements is remarkably powerful.

I had been struggling with the writing of a sales letter before reading the book. After reading the book, I smacked my forehead, rewrote the letter, and it was incredibly more impactful. I don't yet know whether that particular letter worked, but don't stop for coffee, don't take a break, and go buy and read this book. You'll be glad you did.

Learn don't plan

2007-10-09T20:31:00.000-05:00

Have been studying Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days. In organizations that are urdergoing realignment--where change is necessary but recognition of the need for it is lacking--a collective learning style of change can achieve better alignment and better awareness of the need for change than a plan-then-implement style of change. This seems especially relevant in most university settings, where the change is resisted organizationally with a vengeance.

Are you a creative tech professional?

2007-10-08T08:34:00.000-05:00

My recent lecture at the National University of Singapore, The Creativity Imperative and the Technology Professional of the Future, is on line and can be viewed here. The powerpoints are viewable on slideshare (here) or in the viewer below:

It's been a while

2007-10-08T08:26:00.000-05:00

since I last blogged. I went on vacation, got too relaxed, then the semester hit, and all heck broke loose. Anyway, quite a lot has happened in the intervening time, and I'll try to catch up with some posts over the next week or so.

Engcom.net covers engineering beat

2007-08-06T09:15:00.000-05:00

A website called EngCom was recently brought to my attention. Engcom is a community-driven site that links to articles of engineering interest in 13 categories and asks site readers to rate the articles from boring to interesting. In addition to news articles, the site has features that include humor and inspirational and motivational quotations and stories. Learn at the About description here.

WPE-2007 last call

2007-08-03T12:43:00.000-05:00

he 2007 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering has posted its final call for papers here. The event is shaping up to be a turning point in engineering thought.

Oliver Starr joins Nextumi team

2007-07-19T14:34:00.000-05:00

Well-known blogger of mobilecrunch fame and general bon vivant Oliver Starr has joined Nextumi as VP of Biz Dev. See his self-introductory post here. Nextumi is changing the shape of online sharing with its sharethis product and will play key roles in marketing, strategy, and communications.

Construction of engineering reality

2007-07-11T14:13:00.000-05:00

Here's my take on applying Searle's Social Construction of Reality to postmodern engineering design as part of my Creative Modeling for Tech Visionaries class.

The earlier four modules are available on this blog or at slideshare.

Young engineer alert

2007-07-11T14:02:00.000-05:00

All you young engineers going to the NSPE meeting in Denver at the end of the month, come see your favorite entrepreneurial engineer speak on Three Pillars of the Entrepreneurial Engineer: Pride, Passion, and Creativity. See the program here.

Flat worlds, philosophy & engineering

2007-07-11T12:05:00.000-05:00

See the ppt over at IlliGAL Blogging here.

From GECCO to SPT

2007-07-10T08:55:00.000-05:00

Attended GECCO-2007 for workshops and tutorials Saturday and Sunday and flew to Charleston, SC for the Society for Philosophy & Technology meeting. Blogging over at IlliGAL Blogging about it.

What is viralness?

2007-06-27T15:08:00.000-05:00

Everything on the web is supposed to be viral, but what does it mean for a product, service, video, ppt, or other object to be viral?

IlliGAL website has new look

2007-06-27T15:06:00.000-05:00

See here. The lab also has its own domain name at last, www.illigal.uiuc.edu.

Tech visionaries & models

2007-06-21T09:49:00.001-05:00

Here is the ppt from module 4 of Creative Modeling for Tech Visionaries.

Click on the number for modules 1, 2, and 3.

And the winners were

2007-06-21T09:35:00.000-05:00

Earlier I mentioned my nomination for Most Entrepreneurial Scientist in the USA. The top 3 were as follows:

Paul Schimmel for his work on drug delivery in Alkermes Inc.
Joseph DeSimone for his work on drug delivery and fule cells in Liquidia
Leroy Hood for his work in Homestead Clinical.

I knew I was in trouble when Leroy Hood came in 3rd. Actually, it was grand to make the short list in such august company.

Who, what & where questions?

2007-06-07T11:29:00.000-05:00

Florida is talking about fathers teaching their children to ask the what question (what will you study/do?), mothers teaching their children to ask the who question (who should you marry), but who teaches us to ask the where question? And the where question matters, because of the concentration of human effort is critical.

External human capital as building block of innovation

2007-06-07T11:25:00.000-05:00

Richard Florida is talking about Jane Jacob's theory external human capital as the basis of innovation.

Is the world flat?

2007-06-07T11:17:00.000-05:00

Florida is now talking about place and UN population data. The world now has over 50% of its population in urban areas. After some cool data analysis involving electrification and patents that say there are 12 region/cities in the world that matter.

What a great message!

2007-06-07T11:13:00.000-05:00

I love Florida's message, and he's a very persuasive messenger. Creativity doesn't care about gender or race. Creativity is about people following their passions.

Toyota as creative company

2007-06-07T11:07:00.000-05:00

He's talking about Toyota as a creative company because of the high-level realization that Toyota is a great company because of the capability of each one of its associates.

The dissociation of theories from their intellectuals

2007-06-07T11:02:00.000-05:00

Richard Florida just did a great riff on how theories take on a life of their own when people become public intellectuals.

The Lycos move

2007-06-07T10:58:00.000-05:00

Florida is talking about move of Lycos from Pittsburgh to Boston and the birth of The Rise of the Creative Class. He asked the company why it moved and the answer came back that it needed to get creative people fully assembled. This suggested that the firm is not the invariant; rather, creative clusters are the invariant.

Next up Richard Florida

2007-06-07T10:53:00.001-05:00

Author of Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida, is up next (see here). He is working on a new book tentatively titled Who's Your City.

Live from Technopolicy

2007-06-07T10:48:00.000-05:00

Am sitting in an interesting talk by Carl Johan Sundberg, entrepreneur and physician, discussing efforts at integrating tech xfer at the Karolinska Institute. The conference is Internationalising Regional Innovation of the Technopolicy Network in Fairfax, VA (program here).

microCreativity: Module 3 of Creative Modeling for Tech Visionaries available

2007-06-05T14:06:00.000-05:00

Module 3 of my course, Creative Modeling for Tech Visionaries, is available on slideshare. I've posted it in a viewer below

You can see all my public slideshows over at slideshare here.

Nominated for Most Entrepreneurial Scientist

2007-06-02T10:55:00.000-05:00

The author of this blog was recently nominated by the Technopolicy network as The Most Entrepreneurial Scientist in the USA (see here). Stay tuned next week to see which of the top five nominees takes home the trophy.

Making WPE with philosophy

2007-05-28T15:11:00.001-05:00

The 2007 Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering (WPE-2007) has issued its call for papers here. The workshop will be held at TUDelft, October 29-31, 2007 (Monday-Wednesday). Extended abstracts (1-2 pages) are due 17 August 2007.

Module 2 for Creative Modeling for Tech Visionaries Online

2007-05-27T16:22:00.000-05:00

Module 2, What is Creativity?, is available for viewing in powerpoint form below. This module discusses different definitions and theories of creativity.

See the course web site here. Other ppts are available at my slideshare account here.

A Billion Bits or Bust

2007-05-22T14:37:00.000-05:00

Kumara Sastry and I will be giving the presentation A Billion Bits or Bust at the NCSA industrial partners meeting in about half and hour.

Here is the ppt slideshow in for your viewing enjoyment.

ShareThis 3rd AbbeGirl video is up

2007-05-21T17:41:00.000-05:00

Watch it here.

Sign up for the ShareThis ubiquitous sharing tool here.

Engineering losing global battle

2007-05-16T06:43:00.000-05:00

According to Orthstar CEO, James Orsillo, in the Elmira, NY Star-Gazette here.

Pride, passion & joy of engineering

2007-05-15T16:47:00.000-05:00

The long version of this talk (The Joy of Engineering) is one of my favorites to give and it is usually well received. It starts with two historical inversions (with science & business) that place engineers in secondary roles when, in fact, engineering has been key innovation force throughout human history.

Scroll through these slides and let me know what you think.

Ycombinator bootcamp for young ventures

2007-05-15T09:29:00.000-05:00

Here's a bootcamp for venture companies called Ycombinator. Sounds like the right way to go for very early stage ventures.

Genetic algorithm course intro lecture available

2007-05-14T19:05:00.000-05:00

The introductory lecture from my course Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning is presented in ppt viewer below. The course web site is available here.

See the full syllabus here.

Design of Innovation intro in ppt viewer

2007-05-11T10:56:00.000-05:00

The introductory module of a short course The Design of Innovation is available below in a slideshare viewer:

Look at course web site (here) or the google book web site (here) for further information.

Engineering for the 21st century

2007-05-10T10:34:00.000-05:00

The powerpoint slides for the opening lecture to my course on The Entrepreneurial Engineer has been uploaded to www.slideshare.net/deg511 and is available below for viewing. The course site is here, and the book site is here.

University tech xfer is hard

2007-05-10T04:12:00.000-05:00

Rob Schultz explains some of the reasons why here.

Latest sharethis abbegirl "punk" video is rad

2007-05-09T11:56:00.000-05:00

Rad? Check it.

ShareThis group on Facebook

2007-05-09T11:52:00.000-05:00

The Ohio State University interns working for Nextumi have started a ShareThis group (here). It has 222 members as of today.

Creative modeling course intro

2007-05-09T09:57:00.000-05:00

A powerpoint viewer from the introductory lecture to my course, Creative Modeling for Tech Visionaries is presented below. See the course web site (here) for more information.

Sharethis makes top-11 list

2007-05-09T04:37:00.000-05:00

of IE Explorer add-ons over at www.makeuseof.com. In fact, Sharethis is no. 3 (see here).

IP-CC talk on 3 lessons of philosophy for creative design

2007-05-08T09:11:00.000-05:00

Ian Parmee held a meeting of his Institute on People-Centred Computation in Bristol last week. I gave a talk on 3 lessons of ancient and modern philosophy for creative people-centered design. The talk is embedded below using slideshare.

UWE talk on creativity in the engineering curriculum

2007-05-08T08:57:00.000-05:00

I gave a talk at the University of the West of England (UWE) last week on injecting creativity into the engineering curriculum. See the presentation below (posted on www.slideshare.net). The talk argues that we are still trying to make do with an engineering curriculum crafted by the demands of post World-War II era and the cold war, and that our fast-paced, human-centered times demand a greater emphasis on human concerns, creativity, and entrepreneurship.

ShareThis blog debut

2007-04-27T14:14:00.000-05:00

see here.

Sharethis CEO interviewed on the Scoble Show

2007-04-19T19:32:00.000-05:00

Learn more about sharethis here.

Video: Easy to share with sharethis

2007-04-19T19:27:00.000-05:00

Click here to see for yourself.

Teambildung

2007-04-18T15:18:00.000-05:00

10 lessons hier.

Sharethis on Mashable

2007-04-18T11:47:00.000-05:00

here.

Sharethis listed on KillerStartups

2007-04-18T11:45:00.000-05:00

here.

Teaching Company courses

2007-04-18T05:57:00.000-05:00

Regular readers of TEE know that I am a fan of the Teaching Company. Earlier I finished Jeffrey Kasser's lovely Philosophy of Science on video. At present, I am in the middle of a video course called Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations taught by UCSB's Brian Fagan. It is a super course with global sweep (good coverage of Asia, Africa, and the Americas in addition to the usual European & ancient civilization coverage). For my driving pleasure, I just finished Michael Sugrue's (Princeton) Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues on audio. The cast of characters in the dialogs is large, and a good guide to the inside ball is essential. Sugrue's course does the trick. I usually peruse the courses on sale (here). Next up on audio, Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine Revealed through Biography. Specifically, I'm interested in analogies to the engineering profession in the history of the medical profession.

Fashionista video is pretty tight

2007-04-16T14:38:00.000-05:00

See the abbegirl fashionista video here. Go to www.howyoushare.com for more info.

MIT's Pentland giving killer talk

2007-04-16T13:22:00.000-05:00

I'm blogging live in a talk by Sandy Pentland of MIT's Media Center on Automatic Measurement and Modeling of Human Networks as part of Nosh Contractor's Age of Networks series at the UIUC. Both the modeling and measurement parts are really worth a look.

Nextumi's share2me renamed sharethis

2007-04-16T07:11:00.000-05:00

I've been working as chief scientist since 2004 for a company called Nextumi on a ubiquitous sharing tool called share2me. The product has been renamed sharethis and the company is launching a major marketing campaign using YouTube videos and a media campaign. See here, here (myspace id reqd) and here for more details.

Visit to UNCC

2007-04-05T19:07:00.000-05:00

I've spent an enjoyable few days with Frank Skinner, founder of the Mechanical Innovations course at UNC Charlotte learning about the exciting innovation-based activities in mechanical engineering. They have a progressive senior design course, a spanking new building, and 5 new hires on the way. Sounds like things are moving in a nice direction at UNCC ME.

IlliGAL GA proves P=NP

2007-04-01T17:54:00.000-05:00

See full post here.

Goldberg renounces capitalism, advocates Plato's approach

2007-04-01T17:18:00.000-05:00

David E. Goldberg, author of The Entrepreneurial Engineer, and director of the lab that today showed that P=NP (see post here), today renounced capitalism by disavowing the approach of TEE and by resigning as chief scientist of Nextumi, a web2.0 company that is officially releasing sharethis, a ubiquitous sharing tool, this week. "Marx and Foucault were right. Capitalism is an oppressive system and all discourse is mere posturing for power. I can no longer toil in the vineyards of a self-serving elite whose very existence is anathema to the interests of a yearning global proletariat." Asked if he wasn't also abandoning the competitive and innovation principles embedded in his evolutionary computation work and The Design of Innovation, Goldberg said that "Mathematics is one thing. People are another. I can no longer live knowing that my work might be used by unscrupulous operators and even venture capitalists to justify their evil."

When asked what system might be better, Goldberg had this to say. "I think Plato had it about right in The Republic. Abolish private property, family relationships, and install a philosopher-king. Just because Socrates was an ugly pest doesn't mean that he and his star pupil didn't have something interesting to say. Moreover, this system seems to be working well at the University of Illinois, so I think it might just scale well to the US economy."

See the whole press release here.

Hot enough or not so hot

2007-03-27T07:09:00.000-05:00

An AP story in the local paper (see story here) alerted me to a dating web site for good-looking or "hot" people called www.hotenough.org. The entrepreneurial engineer in me suggests an opportunity. Can www.notsohot.com be far behind.

Don't miss Tech Visionaries talk

2007-03-25T12:52:00.000-05:00

Ray Price will talk about his research into Tech Visionaries on Wednesday at noon in 2405 Siebel Center. See here for the ETC lecture series generally and here for the Tech Visionaries talk specifically.

Frank Skinner & innovation at UNCC

2007-03-25T12:44:00.000-05:00

I've been carrying on a correspondence with Frank Skinner at UNC Charlotte. Frank heads up mechanical engineering's senior design activity at UNCC and he is keenly interested in both linking universities and industry and teaching innovation in a serious way. I plan to visit with Frank next week in Charlotte to see if we can make some sparks fly. See Frank's Mechanical Innovation website here. Also take a look at the nice blog post on his activities in Swamp Fox here.