Why engineers do what they do

Hot soup has a heartfelt blogpost about why engineers do what they do here.

Pride and passion for the joyful engineer

PE Magazine picked my short article The Joy of Engineering: Pride and Passion for the Professional. Download a pdf file here.

Square of Epictetus

I've blogged about Epictetus before (here), and I really like the opening words of the Enchiridion:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

If we think of the things in our control and not in our control and consider them juxtaposed with our internal state of mind (concerned or not concerned), we can get a nice visualization of what I've chosen to call the Square of Epictetus.

The two positive quadrants are when we are concerned with those things we can control and unconcerned with the things we do not. I've called these, the quadrants of accomplishment and peace of mind, respectively. On the other hand, when we spend concern on things we do not control or when we do not mind things we can and should, I've labeled these quadrants, the quadrants of needless worry and foregone opportunity.

In which quadrant do you spend most of your time? There can be honest difference of opinion between one of the two positive quadrants, and there can be genuine difficulty in not knowing whether something is controllable, even partially, or not, but looking at it this way, I wonder why I've spent as much of my life as I have in the quadrant of needless worry.

How do your rate in the Square of Epictetus? Where do you spend your time, and do you think you are spending your time wisely?

Boom vs. Boom

The MySpace and YouTube sales together with the rumors of a FaceBook sale got me thinking about the dot.com bust and the current round of big acquisitions. Is there a difference? Or is this yet another tulip craze? I actually think it is real, and I think there are a number of factors to take into account:

Technoecomomic forces. The technoeconomic forces of the first boom and the current one, if it is one, are the same. The internet (a) reduces transaction costs (see Ronald Coase), and (b) increases network returns (see Brian Arthur), but the difference is that the first boom was anticipatory: the infrastructure was not there to realize the benefits fully.

Infrastructure now in place. In the current boom(let), the infrastructure of search and advertising are now in place. Google is a central actor, and in some ways the Google IPO was central milestone in proving that the internet can generate real businesses with real returns. The first boom was about eyeballs (on web sites), but the current boom is about taking eyeballs and turning them into profits.

From widgets to self-expression. The first boom was about infrastructure and web widgets of various flavors. The current boom(let) is about lifestyle, self-expression, and identity; it is more human centered, less technology centered. The remaking of Apple as a music company in ITunes is a landmark in this shift, and the Friendster to MySpace and Facebook evolution is all about going from mere communication to community and projection of persona. This shift causes three other shifts: bigger bangs, younger actors, more communal enterprises

Bigger bangs. With infrastructure in place and the playing field shifted to self-_expression and lifestyle, the successes are faster and bigger. This gives us Big Bang capitalism with a vengeance. There is a positive reinforcement loop at work here. More entrepreneurs have always bred more entrepreneurs, but if this occurs bigger and faster, the new entrepreneurs become angels and VCs more quickly, and the cycle accelerates.

Younger actors and customers. The shift to lifestyle, changes the demographics of the boom(let) as well. Cultural change takes place among those who are not already set in their ways, the young. High schoolers and undergraduates now use AIM + Facebook/MySpace + Mobile phones in place of email. For them email is dead. This occurred quickly. Brin and Page (Google) were grad students. Karim (YouTube) got his BS from Illinois in 2004 and Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard in 2004 as undergrad. Future changes will occur at the HS and undergrad demographic. Current undergrads have noticed (at Illinois for sure), and they want to be like their successful peers.

Creative communal activities. David Brooks coined the term "BoBos" to refer to Bourgeoise-bohemians, those who accepted capitalist processes together with a creative ethic, and Richard Florida has chronicled the rise of the creative class. The new boom(let) reflects these changes well, I think. The new businesses are a pastiche of creative, marketing, financial, and technical effort. Stock and stock options create a kind of creative commune in which everyone benefits if the enterprise is successful. This is a change from capitalism of times gone by, and perhaps Marx's historical materialism was right in the sense that paternal and hierarchical capitalism of the 20th century would be overthrown by something more communal. It wasn't communism that arose, however. It was a more integrated and creative kind of business organization in which success was more evenly shared than in earlier industrial forms of organization.

Where does this lead? It seems to me that these features will become hypertrophied as time goes on. Young becomes younger. Creative becomes more creative. Communal becomes even more communal. Lifestyle/identity becomes more like Hollywood and fashion than technology driven. My own work in Nextumi is at the edge of these trends, and my research in genetic algorithms has been redirected at helping enterprises and groups become more innovative and creative through the use of collaborative technology and machine learning together in a new synthesis (http://www-discus.ge.uiuc.edu/).

WMU features TEE

Ed Eckel, librarian of the Parkview Campus of Western Michigan University, has recommended TEE to his engineering students here.

TEE hits ME mag

Bill Rule, an old colleague at the University of Alabama (now at SUNY Oswego), points out that TEE, the book, has a bit of writeup in Mechanical Engineering, the magazine of ASME on page 49.

TEE book of the week at TSU

Texas Southern University (TSU) librarian has declared The Entrepreneurial Engineer the book of the week here:

This handy guide includes exercises at the end of each chapter to as the author puts it: “engage the material and put it into practice”. For current and future engineers who want to remain at the forefront of the field, this text has the information you need to succeed.

Take a look at the full blog entry.

YouTube UIUC connection

By now most of you have heard about the Google-YouTube deal (here), but lost in the shuffle is the strong University of Illinois connection. Three principles to YouTube, Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, and Max Levchin are UIUC CS alumni. See some coverage of the UIUC angle here.

Fable of the bees

While exercising this morning listened to a lovely lecture by Darren Staloff on Mandeville's Fable of the Bees on my Teaching Company course on The Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition. This has to rank as one of the great turning-conventional-wisdom-on-its-head stories of all time in which Mandeville argues against conventional wisdom and over two thousand years of philosophical thought that public virtue (the common good) emerges through the interaction of private vice (self interest).

I've blogged frequently about the Teaching Company. Currently I'm doing The Great Minds on video DVD in the mornings when I exercise, and I'm doing Introduction to Greek Philosophy (Roochnik) in my car on audio while I drive around town. I've got to do the Greek Philosophy course, because my older son Max is taking a Greek philosophy class at Northwestern and he was asking me questions about Platonic dialogs I hadn't read.

The art of worldly wisdom

I've been dipping into Art of Worldly Wisdom, a collection of aphorisms published in 1647 by Jesuit scholar and philosopher Baltasar Gracian. Here's number 83 (Fischer translation):

Allow yourself some pardonable defect, for a certain weakness at times may be the greatest evidence of strength. Envy carries its ostracisms, just as civil, as they are criminal: it accuse the most holy of sin, because without sin, and because totally perfect condemns totally. Envy makes of itself an Argus to discover the flaws of the flawless, for its own comfort. Detraction like lightning, only strikes the greatest heights. At such times, therefore, let Homer sleep, and let him affect some lack of spirit, or of virtue, but not of prudence, in order to appease envy, that it burst not of its own poison: wave a cloak before the bull of jealousy, to rescue immortality.

Get the Barnes and Noble version here or there are online versions available as well (see here)