What have we lost/gained 8

[gaufridus]

Looking at thread 769-137240 reminded me of something that we used to do some years ago (late 1960s/early 1970s): I spent some time as an industrial engineer, in our office we had a calculating machine - huge desktop thing, mains electricity powered, nixie tube display etc. In lighter moments we used to have races - someone would write down a list of numbers and two people would race to add them up. One on the calculator thingy and the other person add them up in his (her) head. The mental arithmetic person would win more often than not. Today, when confronted with similar sums the first thing we do is reach for our calculators.

What have we lost or is it really a real gain allowing us to free our brains for other things?

What do other (older) folks think and what do the younger generations feel?

What other time saving devices have changed our working lives?

 

[Ashereng]

Digital camera (5 megapixels and up) + memory card (1 GB + computer with memory card/USB slot + server

When I as-build, I take pictures. A lot of pictures. For a control system panel (Rittal doublewide), about 25 - 50 pictures per side. When I get back to the office, it goes on the project drive.

Sure, the description, notes, documentation and drawings, etc, is great. But, usually, we miss something.

The pictures make it that much less likely to miss something. From anecdotal evidence, and some of my own expeiences, it cuts down on return trips by 50%-75% of the time, because of missed information.

 

[SlideRuleEra]

Overall, I believe that the changes in technology are a tremendous overall gain.

As for what has been lost, these few sentences summarize it for me

http://www.slideruleera.net/MaintainSharpInstincts.pdf

http://www.SlideRuleEra.net

 

[RDK]

When I was in high school (early 70’s) I could sum or average groups of 5 3 digit numbers in my head faster than I can now add them up on a calculator.

I have lost that ability either through aging or through disuse.

The trouble of doing these sorts of comparisons is that the people who raced the calculators (and often won) are now old enough that they most likely have lost the skill anyway and so cannot make the true comparisons. Those young enough to perhaps have this skill never developed it in the first place.

Mental abilities change over time from analytical skills to more pattern matching/memory skills. Thus as a junior engineer just starting out you have to calculate a beam size where us old farts have seen enough to have a good rough idea of the size of beam for most applications.

If my experience tells me that a W310 (W12 to my American friends) beam is about right and the program tells me that a W150 (W6) is needed then I know enough to check the data entry. A junior engineer will simply send it to the drafting department.

What has changed is that with computers designing the beams the junior engineers do not see all steps of the calculation. When I was a junior engineer I could see if I had made an error in my calculations or initial condition assumptions quickly because I saw every stage of the calculation. I also had to return to the starting conditions several times in the course of the design so if in one set of calculations a finger error in entering the number would become apparent.

Now people enter the numbers once and have no checks on then until a beam size pops out of the other end of the program.

I’d say that computers make the process of designing and the grunt work much easier but the cost is that the engineer no longer has the same feel and degree of judgment that one gets by doing the work by hand.

Eliminates the small mistakes but allows you to make bigger mistakes faster.




Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng

Construction Project Management
From conception to completion

http://www.kitsonengineering.com

 

[IRstuff]

The analogy is interesting, but totally irrelevant to modern engineering. Averaging 5 3-digit numbers was never part of engineering. The tools that we use today, allows us to run dozens of FFT's a day, something that would have taken weeks to do by hand or by calculator. In fact, the FFT would have never been developed without the a sufficient fast computer to even make it worthwhile.

The bottomline is whether you prefer to be doing it by hand over the course of weeks or running in Mathcad or Matlab in less than a few minutes.

Does anyone seriously lament not using rocks to grind our wheat for our bread and cookies? Could we have sent men to the moon with only pencil and paper calculations? Even Apollo had an 1802 micro onboard for doing inertial nav.

This very discussion is made possible by that same technology. Technology is totally neutral. WE make with it what we will. As wise Pogo once observed, "We have met the enemy and they are us." If we've sped up and bypassed the roses, that's our fault, not the transistor's.

When I compare my 12-yr old needing to use a laptop in school because the lessons are taught over a WLAN, compared to using log tables when I went to junior high, there's really no comparison. While it's academically interesting to understand and use log tables, I doubt that anyone would seriously propose going backwards to that as a good thing.

This is all about comfort zones. There's a whole generation growing up that will have never used nor seen a 5-in floppy and possibly never even use a 3.5-in floppy, or even a vinyl LP.

Embrace the change and use it to your advantage, but it's up to you to remember to smell the roses, although, you can certainly programm your PDA to remind you. To do otherwise is to be a Luddite and lament the inability to go potty in a hole in the ground.

TTFN

 

[Ashereng]

I think one of the gifts of technology is that it allows us to chose.

If you want to program your PDA to remind you to smell the roses, or to program Aibo to smell it for you, that is the gift of technology.

If you want to be a Luddite, you can. If you want to go to the moon, you can.

I think that is what we gain - choices.

 

[Jabberwocky]

"Eliminates the small mistakes but allows you to make bigger mistakes faster."

Bigger! Faster!! MORE!!!!

Yippee!! Hooray for Choice!

Really though, good point.

 

[IRstuff]

I think so.

100 yrs ago, half of us would have already died from TB and the like. Most of us would have been slaving away in factories or doing some sort of manual labor.

Certainly wouldn't have had time to post messages on the internet ;-)

TTFN

 

[zeitghost]

I'd have been dead from appendicitis at the age of 9...

 

[zdas04]

I'm often reminded of the Amish rejecting "modern technology" in favor of horse and buggy technology--what makes the 1880's state-of-the-art techlology "good" and later technology "evil"?

We're doing the same thing here if we say that log tables or being able to add a column of numbers in your head is somehow "better" than Mathcad (not counting v12) or Hysis.

I love Rick's quote that technology "Eliminates the small mistakes but allows you to make bigger mistakes faster."

If I choose to use a program to facilitate an engineering task, I don't in any way abrogate my obligation to ensure that the decision does not result in harm to people. I address this duality by carefully verifying the results of some sample calculations before I blindly accept that a new program can do the job I've assigned it.

David

 

[gaufridus]

Is it not true that modern technology (or even old technology as well) is a tool helping us bring our visions to fruitition in the best possible way. It may be true that computers take away the feel of the calculation but surely one gets a feel for the result as experience grows.
What really counts are the brains within the person bringing out the ideas and hence technology is a real gain.

Incidentally IRstuff, I was born in the same UK village as Ned Ludd was reputed to have been born. Not in the same era of course and nor do I share his ideals.

 

[DaveVikingPE]

"When I compare my 12-yr old needing to use a laptop in school because the lessons are taught over a WLAN"

What kind of school is that? Appliance-user Middle School? What happens if the batteries die and there's no outlet nearby?

Dude, it's the K-12 set that needs pedagogues and blackboards.

 

[RobWard]

A colleague of mine mentioned that it would've been interesting if a group took the same decision as the Amish, but in the mid 70's.

No offense intended to any Amish here...



"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go past." Douglas Adams

 

[UcfSE]

There are some things we lose with technology. Already mentioned is the ability or a certain level of skill to do arithmetic in your head. I wasn't hired to do arithmetic though.

 

[rb1957]

i'd bet that you, UcfSE, aren't paid to make mistakes, and i'd bet you've made a few ...

that's not a dig, just an observation that some things we do aren't exactly what we're paid for. a quick mental sanity check (that would be a check that is performed quickly and done mentally rather than some of the other literal interpretations of that phrase) could find a problem rather than believing in the infailability of the computer (and the data entry human).

i think it is a fairly general trend to accept computer output as "gospel" rather than questioning it.

off soap box !

 

[zdas04]

I was just doing a calculation that seems germane to this discussion.

For a compressor you can figure the temperature rise across a compression cylinder pretty easily. Converting that to a rate of heat transfer required in the interstage cooler is pretty easy too. Then I (incorrectly) converted that number to horsepower--I got an answer higher than the total engine output. Because I've been messing with compressors since a "horsepower" was defined as "the work that can be done by a $2 horse in an hour" I realized that something was wrong and fixed it (I needed to calculate the required air flow on the cooler side to match the heat removed and then calculate the fan hp needed to push that much air).

A program that tells you that the cooler load is bigger than the compression heat load would be caught by any competent engineer, but not necessarily by a competent programmer. When it is an intermediate step, a 30-40% error will often never be displayed or caught, you just get wrong answers. That is why I always manually verify the results of a program before I trust it.

David

 

[UcfSE]

To err is human. Everyone makes mistakes, that should go without saying.

My point was I need to have experience engineering, not doing long division or poking numbers in a calculator all day. I accept doing error checking, code checking, checking the software output, checking connections by hand and so on and on and on is all part of my job. If I am hired to dig 100 10-yard holes, why use a shovel if I have a back-hoe? I'm not saying don't check your numbers, I'm saying work smarter, not harder. You only have so much time to learn and do, spend it doing the things that you don't have a machine to do for you. That does not mean don't check the machine.

 

[IRstuff]

And, I think that part of working smart is to not repeat the same mistakes and/or reduce the possibility of making the those mistakes, particularly, if we are tired from the night before. ;-)

Technology provides that possibility. While there is almost an undercurrent of anti-computer sentiment, we should note that many programs and tools such as Mathcad and TKSolver provide transparent unit conversions. Once a unit conversion is defined, it's essentially impossible to make a conversion error when using that conversion. I don't have to check it; I can spend that time doing the next analysis. While that makes me dependent on that tool, I'm more effective and productive overall.

The same analogy can be applied to CNC. You could certainly drill holes and rout by hand, but why would you? You're bound to make mistakes and you have to check each and every hole and feature for correctness to spec.


TTFN

 

[MrMojito]

I don't think that we've lost anything due to computers or any other form of automation technology. The bad engineers will always be bad and the good engineers will always be good. Its not hard to tell one from the other and computers have nothing to do with this.

 

[rb1957]

along the line of the thread topic ... we've clearly lost many techniques for doing analysis (just about nobody uses graphical methods for solving beam bending moments, tho' they can be very usefull to quickly describe the moment s in a beam) 'cause we've got better tools (and maybe better education).

personally i laugh where on TV shows like Star Trek (TNG) the captain can sit down at any console an thinks every detail intiminately, or can discuss the esoteric details of some technical minutae with the resident expert. i doubt that anyone can have that bredth and depth of knowledge. woudl the captain of an aircraft carrier be able to fix one of his (non-gender specific) planes ?