We consider engineering as a knowledge network in this episode of The Engineering Commons podcast.
Adam relies on his colleagues to help him coordinate his work, as well as to provide him with technical guidance–such as in conducting a Proctor soil compaction test.
Jeff needed fellow engineers to explain how to check the swashplate in an axial piston pump for excessive wear (“scuffing”), and to examine the piston shoes for embedded foreign materials.
The theory of Distributed Cognition contends that knowledge and cognition is distributed across objects, individuals, artifacts, and tools found in the environment. This allows a group of people to perform cognitive tasks that no single person can accomplish alone.
Chris Gammel had mentioned “context” as being his word of the year, even before he started Contextual Electronics:
@talldarknweirdo yay, contextuality! Context is by far my favorite word of the year, even pre-CE. My second favorite is, "invest"
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
We consider engineering as a knowledge network in this episode of The Engineering Commons podcast.
