The mysterious sixth-generation plane came to life in just one year. This breakthrough tech helps explain how. //

• The Air Force has created an “e-Series” designation for digitally designed aircraft.
• The Air Force's secret new fighter jet, which it designed, built, and flew in just one year, is the second e-Plane, following the eT-7A Red Hawk.
• The sixth-generation e-Plane is adopting Formula 1-style practices.

Dr. Will Roper is the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.

Our clunky, Cold War-era process of defense procurement is in need of a major refresh. While it still produces world-leading military systems, its escalating timelines and cost are unsustainable byproducts. The stark contrast with commercial industry warns the U.S. military may have peaked, unless we find a better way—soon.

Right on cue, then, here comes digital engineering, a new commercial technology that’s lending a legitimate art form to military weapons-buying with revolutionary, even stylish results. (Yes, we just used “art form” and “weapons-buying” in the same sentence.)

Technical Tips from Mark W. Persons
Ideas that might help you at a Radio Station

Radio Broadcast Industry
Articles written by
or about Mark Persons

Coming from a family ownership situation, I treated each station as if it were my own. The attachment was personal because the work was mostly for clients who believed in engineering. A message on our telephone recorder said, “I am out working on one of America’s great radio stations.”

My wife Paula came into the business full-time after working as a legal secretary. She has a keen sense of character and it paid off. Her job was to run the office, freeing me to go out in the field 60 hours a week at 40 or more clients. //

I never wanted to own a station. The challenge of installing, troubleshooting and repairing equipment was more than enough. It is a great feeling to get all electrons flowing in the same direction, so to speak. //

Regarding the SBE Lifetime Achievement Award: I had no intention of seeking that or any other accolade. Life just worked out that way while keeping the “families” of stations the best they can be. Paula says she will bury me next to a transmitter when the time comes.

Pick up almost any book about nuclear energy and you will find that the prevailing wisdom is that nuclear plants must be very large in order to be competitive. This notion is widely accepted, but, if its roots are understood, it can be effectively challenged. //

There have now been 110 nuclear power plants completed in the United States over a period of almost forty years. Though accurate cost data is difficult to obtain, it is safe to say that there has been no predictable relationship between the size of a nuclear power plant and its cost. Despite the graphs drawn in early nuclear engineering texts-which were based on scanty data from less than ten completed plants-there is not a steadily decreasing cost per kilowatt for larger plants.

It is possible for engineers to make incredibly complex calculations without a single math error that still come up with a wrong answer if they use a model based on incorrect assumptions. That appears to be the case with the bigger is better model used by nuclear plant planners.

For example, one assumption explicitly stated in the economy of scale model is that the cost of auxiliary systems does not increase as rapidly as plant capacity. In at least one key area, that assumption is not true for nuclear plants.

Since the reactor core continues to produce heat after the plant is shutdown, and since a larger, more powerful core releases less of its heat to its immediate surroundings because of a smaller surface to volume ratio, it is more difficult to provide decay heat removal for higher capacity cores. It is also manifestly more difficult, time consuming and expensive to prove that the requirements for heat removal will be met under all postulated conditions without damaging the core. For emergency core cooling systems, overall costs, including regulatory burdens, seem to have increased more rapidly than plant capacity. //

nuclear power is no different conceptually than hundreds of other new technologies.

The principle that Ford discovered is now known as the experience curve. . . It ordains that in any business, in any era, in any capitalist competition, unit costs tend to decline in predictable proportion to accumulated experience: the total number of units sold. Whatever the product (cars or computers, pounds of limestone, thousands of transistors, millions of pounds of nylon, or billions of phone calls) and whatever the performance of companies jumping on and off the curve, unit costs in the industry as a whole, adjusted for inflation, will tend to drop between 20 and 30 percent with every doubling in accumulated output.

George Guilder Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise Updated for the 1990s, ICS Press, San Francisco, CA. p. 195 //

The Adams Engine philosophy of small unit sizes is based on aggressively climbing onto the experience curve. If a market demand exists for 300 MW of electricity, distributed over a wide geographic area, traditional nuclear plant designers would say that the market is not yet ready for nuclear power, thus they would decide to learn nothing while waiting for the market to expand.

In contrast, atomic engine makers may see an opportunity to manufacture and sell 15 units, each with 20 MW of capacity.

Pressure, air temperature, air flow rate (actual/normal) CFM/SCFM, LPM/NLPM, pressure loss, pipe length

How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you're spending more time than you save? [across five years]

How often you do the job
vs
how much time you shave off

A shortened version of this paper appeared in IEEE Computer, October 1994.

This paper was presented as a keynote talk at the International Conference on Software Engineering, Melbourne, Australia, May 1992 and is included in the proceedings.

Nancy G. Leveson
Computer Science and Eng. Dept., FR-35
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195

Even though a scientific explanation may appear to be a model of rational order, we should not infer from that order that the genesis of the explanation was itself orderly. Science is only orderly after the fact; in process, and especially at the advancing edge of some field, it is chaotic and fiercely controversial.

    -- William Ruckelshaus [33, p.108]

Civil Engineering online calculation: Gravity-fed pipe flow - Hazen-Williams formula for a full pipe.

Civil Engineering online calculation: Flow in pressurized pipe - Pressure drop by Hazen-Williams equation.

I told the telephone repairman, “It seems like we never had trouble when we had copper pairs; but now since you guys went to fiber, we are having lightning damage to anything connected to the fiber.”

Well, the guy was on the ball. He said, “You know, the fiber is in a copper shield to protect it from crushing; maybe it’s coming in on the copper shield.”

The shield was bonded to the modem, which had the usual four-foot ground rod driven. Next day, they sent a crew that terminated the copper shielded cable outside and ran just a piece of fiber, one strand into the house and moved their modem to the basement.

Now there is a length of 15 feet of pure glass between the incoming cable and the modem. Since that was done two years ago, we have had no trouble, though the storms are as potent as ever.

Tom's Guide writes about home brew TEMPEST receivers:

Today, dirt-cheap technology and free software make it possible for ordinary citizens to run their own Tempest programs and listen to what their own -- and their neighbors' -- electronic devices are doing.

Elliott, a researcher at Boston-based security company Veracode, showed that an inexpensive USB dongle TV tuner costing about $10 can pick up a broad range of signals, which can be "tuned" and interpreted by software-defined radio (SDR) applications running on a laptop computer.

All engineering knowledge has an expiration date. The trick is to know when. -- Robert Luckey, IEEE Spectrum

Technology moves faster than our imagination can keep up with. We invent one breakthrough technology today and then tomorrow's inventors transform it into another we never imagined possible." -- Atlantic Magazine

Broadcast professionals cannot afford to be complaisant... we must continue to challenge ourselves... we must continue to learn and expand our horizons. -- Gary Cavell

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works. It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “fairly bright engineer with low self-confidence and zero practical knowledge of business.” I wouldn’t trust this as the definitive guide, but hopefully it will provide value over what your college Career Center isn’t telling you.

90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software: Economics 101: the price for anything (including you) is a function of the supply of it and demand for it. Let’s talk about the demand side first. Most software is not sold in boxes, available on the Internet, or downloaded from the App Store. Most software is boring one-off applications in corporations, under-girding every imaginable facet of the global economy. It tracks expenses, it optimizes shipping costs, it assists the accounting department in preparing projections, it helps design new widgets, it prices insurance policies, it flags orders for manual review by the fraud department, etc etc. Software solves business problems. Software often solves business problems despite being soul-crushingly boring and of minimal technical complexity.

Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program thing
s: Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs. Status in well-run businesses generally is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things. (That can, but does not necessarily, entail actually doing them.) Don’t call yourself a programmer: Instead, describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs. If you have not had the opportunity to do this yet, describe things which suggest you have the ability to increase revenue or reduce costs, or ideas to do so.

How much money do engineers make?

Wrong question. The right question is “What kind of offers do engineers routinely work for?”, because salary is one of many levers that people can use to motivate you. The answer to this is, less than helpfully, “Offers are all over the map.”

Your most important professional skill is communication: Remember engineers are not hired to create programs and how they are hired to create business value? The dominant quality which gets you jobs is the ability to give people the perception that you will create value. This is not necessarily coextensive with ability to create value.
All business decisions are ultimately made by one or a handful of multi-cellular organisms closely related to chimpanzees, not by rules or by algorithms: People are people. Social grooming is a really important skill. People will often back suggestions by friends because they are friends, even when other suggestions might actually be better. People will often be favoritably disposed to people they have broken bread with.

At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career. Either talk to older people or trust the social scientists who have: family, faith, hobbies, etc etc generally swamp career achievements and money in terms of things which actually produce happiness. Optimize appropriately. Your career is important, and right now it might seem like the most important thing in your life, but odds are that is not what you’ll believe forever. Work to live, don’t live to work.

About Author

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) ran four small software businesses. He writes about software, marketing, sales, and general business topics. Opinions here are his own.

Engineers learn early that redundancy is the road to the reliability demanded of broadcast facilities. But is this always true or sometimes even possible? Each layer of the broadcast facility infrastructure (power, IT, environment, interconnect, control, processing, communications, monitoring, command and control, etc.) can be assembled in various configurations, with calculable and predictable impacts on the overall availability of the facility. For every engineer who has ever been asked to plan his/her next outage, or knew intuitively that a spare needed to be budgeted, this tutorial covers how to apply the statistical analysis of system availability to the design, operation, and budgeting of a broadcast facility.

The other two pylons were reinforced in the early 1990s, when Autostrade was still owned by the Italian state. Back then Prof Carmelo Gentile was one of those working on the project and he witnessed some disturbing evidence of decay.

"At a certain point they did an inspection of the bridge and a piece of concrete came away and revealed a hole. Inside you could see the steel falling to pieces. In fact, we found an area where there was no concrete at all. If there is an air pocket inside water gets in and corrodes the metal, making it rusty.

"Riccardo Morandi [the bridge's designer] loved the poetry of concrete so he wanted to make a bridge where concrete was all you saw - the metal was encased in concrete. This design contains a huge number of problems. If everything is done perfectly, you protect the steel inside. But if the manufacturing process is not perfect, you can no longer inspect the steel stay, so you cannot see if there is corrosion or if it has become unsafe. And it was very hard with the technology of the time not to have any air pockets or bubbles in the concrete."

Deputy Prosecutor Paolo d'Ovidio says expert analysis of the debris has shown that, in the section of the bridge that collapsed, much of the metal inside the concrete was also badly corroded. His team are investigating possible manufacturing defects as well as the maintenance and safety checks carried out on the bridge.

"The condition of the bridge was very poor. It was a miracle that it hadn't happened the year before. It could have happened three, five, even 10 years before," he says.

You may not know the name Abraham Wald, but he has a very valuable lesson you can apply to problem solving, engineering, and many other parts of life. Wald worked for the Statistical Research Group…

One of Wald’s ways to approach problem was to look beyond the data in front of him. He was looking for things that weren’t there, using their absence as an additional data point. It is easy to critique things that are present but incorrect. It is harder to see things that are missing. But the end results of this technique were profound and present an object lesson we can still draw from today. //

The Army Air Corps noticed that after a mission, bullet holes were not distributed uniformly across the aircraft. The fuselage took nearly 2 bullet holes per square foot on average, and the fuel system took almost as much. But the engines took just a bit more than one bullet per square foot. The Army wanted to know how much more armor to put on the parts of the plane that were taking the most bullets.

Wald had a different point of view. Instead of putting armor on the fuselage, Wald wanted to add armor to the engines, even though they appeared to be taking fewer hits. Why? Because the samples the Army measured were from planes that returned. Wald surmised that the planes with many bullet holes to the engines were not coming home. The extra armor belonged not on the part of the plane that could survive a lot of bullets, but to the part of the plane that couldn’t.

As a result, extra engine armor appeared on warplanes from that point forward. Once you understand the logic, Wald’s insight seems obvious. But it defies many people’s idea of common sense to protect the part of the plane taking the least damage. //

For software, hardware, and most other fields, it is much easier to look at what’s present and critique it than it is to decide what’s totally missing. In Wald’s case, everyone was looking at the hole densities without thinking why the density wasn’t uniform to start with

Plasteel provides two Excel spreadsheets, one English and one Metric, that compute the volume of liquid in a tank given the rod depth measurement. These spreadsheets produce print-ready
lookup tables that are specific to your tank’s inside length and diameter.

The calculation tool below makes it easy to determine the maximum volume of a cylinder-shaped tank. The "Create Dipstick Chart"-button can be used to derive a simple chart, for a quick reference to the volume of a partially filled round tank, when the fluid depth, and the tank dimensions are known.