This episode discusses similarities between engineers and accountants, and provides a brief overview of accounting terminology.
Like most engineers, Brian has gone through the process of assigning his engineering costs to a seemingly endless list of expense accounts.
Accounting is an important function in virtually every business. Today’s episode considers some of the similarities between accounting and engineering.
Accounting is the collection, organization, analysis, and presentation of financial records relating to an organization’s activities.
Jeff references the text-to-speech cartoons generated online at xtranormal.com. Apparently, there’s a brief series of these videos dedicated to public accounting (foul language, NSFW).
The definitions of debit and credit have specific meanings for accountants that are different from the meanings commonly assigned in everyday usage.
Financial transactions are recorded in ledgers, which may be one of five types: assets, liabilities, income, expenses, or equity. All the individual ledgers are combined to create the general ledger.
Billing and payment terms are often much different in industry than what household consumers are used to.
Accounting activities are typically divided into financial and managerial accountancy.
Financial reports for publicly traded companies in the United States can be found on the EDGAR website that is run by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
We consider engineering education from a European perspective in this episode of The Engineering Commons.
Our guest for this episode is Sebastian Ahlström, a civil engineer who is pursuing a masters degree at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
An interest in buildings and construction led our guest to pursue a degree in civil engineering.
In Sweden, high-school students have to decide whether they are going to pursue a 3-year bachelors degree or a 5-year masters degree. Unlike academic programs in the US, the bachelors degree does not necessarily prepare one for acquiring a masters degree.
Sebastian reports having to write a thesis as part of his bachelors degree, as opposed to completing a senior project.
Having spent a year working on road construction, our guest has decided he’d rather work on erecting buildings. A valuable insight resulting from hands-on experience!
It is common in Sweden for students to wait one to three years after graduating from high school before beginning their college education.
Grades in Swedish universities are almost entirely based on the results of final exams, with little weight or emphasis given to homework, quizzes, and mid-terms.
Brian mentions the Swedish disporia in Minnesota, which refers to a region where Swedish emigrants have gathered.
Sebastian struggled with the units of measure used here in the US, much preferring the metric system used elsewhere in the world.
The group briefly discusses the difference between a foot-pound (energy) and a pound-foot (torque). Per Wikipedia: “Both energy and torque can be expressed as a product of a force vector with a displacement vector (hence pounds and feet); energy is the scalar product of the two, and torque is the vector product.”
We talk a bit about job opportunities in Sweden and the European Union.
Sebastian can be reached at sebastian.p.ahlstrom –at– gmail.com.
Thanks to Michael Coghlan for the photo titled “Chalmers Campus (Gothenburg University).” Podcast theme music provided by Paul Stevenson
In this episode, we discuss working with those from other technical disciplines, and also touch upon the software skills that engineers should possess.
Our guest for this episode is Paul Davis, a software engineer who currently writes jet engine control code.
Although there is some dispute about the quotation’s origin, EdsgerDijkstra is frequently credited with proclaiming that “Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes. There is an essential unity of mathematics and computer science.”
Computer science relies on a number of developments found in discrete mathematics.
Paul’s first job after college involved getting Windows 3.1 users connected to the internet via a program called Winsock.
His next job found him managing a VAX cluster that ran on the VMS operating system.
To gain software development experience, Paul earned a masters degree in Software Engineering from Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Paul found the study of formal methods, using Z notation, to be both useful and intellectually challenging.
In an old blog post, Jeff reasoned that software engineers are really “engineers.”
Since code can be easily changed, tweaking software is often the lowest cost “fix,” but can cause unimagined and unintended consequences.
Paul has encountered a number of engineers that use an interface package, such as Simulink, to isolate them from having to generate low level code.
Engineers can benefit from learning more about software development, according to Paul, since so much of modern engineering involves programming.
Writing code is the best way to learn about coding issues. Paul suggests Python, since it is a widely supported language with a lot of goodtutorials.
Does anyone actually read these show notes? Perhaps I could simply string together random words like baseball, snowshoe and bubble gum.
Jeff struggles to describe a linear variable differential transformer (LVDT), even though he taught a Mechatronics course this past spring. He promises to do better in the future!
Paul suggests that software developers specialize in a particular domain, and that physical engineers strengthen their awareness of software concerns.
This episode discusses similarities between engineers and accountants, and provides a brief overview of accounting terminology.
