Teschler on Topic Leland Teschler • Executive Editor [email protected] On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler Back in the dark days around the end of the year 2002, the NASDAQ-100 had dropped 78% from its peak, and the country was in the middle of a recession. Many early dot-com companies had run out of capital and gone bankrupt.…
Don’t worry about EV fires
Teschler on Topic Leland Teschler • Executive Editor [email protected] On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler I recently passed an unfortunate soul on the highway whose vehicle was engulfed in smoke. This incident brought back memories of my own car fire back in the 1970s. I was driving along when suddenly the guy behind me began laying on…
STEM classes don’t teach engineers how to think
Teschler on Topic Leland Teschler • Executive Editor [email protected] It’s no secret that the media eagerly report potential technical breakthroughs with hyperventilating headlines. The most recent example is the buzz surrounding battery technology for electric vehicles. We might wonder why EVs don’t all have a 1,000-mile range given the number of news reports about spectacular…
No worries: The internet would have arrived without Arpanet
Teschler on Topic Leland Teschler • Executive Editor [email protected] On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler Back in the early 1990s, before the Internet had spread much beyond hard-core forum dwellers on Compuserve, I penned a piece about electronic data interchange. The first EDI messages were sent in 1965 when the Holland-American steamship line transmitted trans-Atlantic shipping manifests…
Time to kill the Malcolm Baldrige Award
Teschler on Topic Leland Teschler • Executive Editor [email protected] On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler Many of us who were around in the late 1980s remember the debut of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The Baldrige Award, administered by NIST, is supposed to enhance the competitiveness of U.S. businesses. Recipients are selected based on factors such…
Don’t believe everything you read in conference proceedings
Teschler on Topic Leland Teschler • Executive Editor [email protected] On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers got some notoriety from its research activities when it retracted more than 7,300 abstracts, most from authors in China. It turned out that most of the retractions stemmed from numerous technical conferences in Asia that…
Einstein and the relativity deniers
Teschler on Topic Leland Teschler • Executive Editor [email protected] On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler You can say one thing for groups that believe in theories such as global warming denial or 9-11-01 conspiracies: Scientific experiments and other evidence that disprove their ideas generally don’t slow them down much. They often beseech non-believers to “keep an open…
Does the world need engineers on Wall Street?
Teschler on Topic Leland Teschler • Executive Editor [email protected] On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler There once was a lot of hand-wringing in the U.S. technical community about the number of engineering students who never practice engineering once they graduate. Much of this angst was directed at engineers who went into Wall Street finance jobs where the…
What 9/11 truthers do during a pandemic
Teschler on Topic Leland Teschler • Executive Editor [email protected] On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler Looking for something to do while sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic? Try dissecting the latest results from an outfit called Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth which looks at the collapse of WTC building 7 on 9-11-01. AE911Truth promotes the…
DIY ventilators? Not unless there’s a zombie apocalypse.
Leland Teschler, Executive Editor [email protected] On Twitter @DW_LeeTeschler Teschler on Topic News reports of the Covid-19 virus have given a lot of space to the shortage of respiratory ventilators. The Society of Critical Care Medicine claims at least 950,000 U.S. patients could need ventilators but hospitals only have 160,000. One response to statistics like these…
When smart people make dumb decisions
Teschler on Topic Leland Teschler • Executive Editor [email protected] On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler Here’s an interesting task for you. Decide whether the following conclusion is true based only on the opening two premises: • All living things need water. • Roses need water. Therefore, roses are living things. You made a mistake if you decided…
Learning about learning: Just about everything you thought you knew about education is wrong
Leland Teschler • Executive Editor [email protected] On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler You might think educators would know a lot about what works when it comes to teaching. But recent events seem to show that educators’ confident pronouncements about teaching methods are largely baseless. That’s a distressing development for engineers who have children in school and for…