Electrical and Computer Engineering Newsblog

This is the first week of the Michigan Tech summer – a bit of a euphemism, since the leaves aren’t even out on the trees yet. I can remember a meeting of engineering chairs around this time a few years ago, after a particularly hard winter, when then-Provost Max Seel walked in and said “I have bad news for you. In six weeks the days start getting shorter.”

I am taking advantage of this somewhat quiet time in the calendar to visit family in my home town of Tulsa, Oklahoma. When I make trips like this, I like to carve out time to visit high schools and talk to math and physics classes about electrical and computer engineering and about Michigan Tech. Yesterday I visited Union and Memorial high schools and enjoyed my time with the students there. My cousin Donna Hardway is a math teacher at Union High School and made the arrangements for me (thank you Donna). Memorial High School has a highly successful FIRST Robotics team, and I was very impressed with the facility they have created for that activity.

I thought this would be a good time to pay tribute to all the high school teachers out there, especially the math teachers, that do so much to prepare the students that eventually come to places like Michigan Tech. We could not do our job without them. By and large they are overworked and underpaid, but are dedicated to their students. They work every day to prepare students to make the first transition from being children to being independent adults, and in a lot of cases preparing them for the next step which is college. One or two good teachers can make a huge difference in a kid’s life. Often this means guiding students to find out that they really are good at something, giving them the confidence to go on and follow their dreams, which might include, say, engineering. I just can’t say enough good things about them.

I graduated from Tulsa Edison High School in 1975. I took trigonometry and calculus in my junior and senior years, respectively, from a local teaching legend named Jack Dobelbower, who taught at Edison for 31 years. “Dobe”, as all the students called him, was an imposing figure of a man who had an uncompromising commitment to academic excellence. He assigned homework every night, and every class period began with 10-minute quiz on the previous day’s work. I don’t recall their being any other major exams, just those daily quizzes that forced us all to stay up-to-date. He made it clear that in his position between the students and the school administration, he was totally on the side of the students, even to the point of allowing students who were not feeling well to come to class, take the quiz, then declare themselves absent and go back home. He raised the bar for everyone, and did it with such passion and conviction that most students rose to the challenge. Because of that experience, I have always carried the thought that “a good high school calculus class will beat a college calculus class any day.” (That thought may be flawed – I know we have excellent calculus instructors at Michigan Tech too.) Dobe also had a mysterious personal life, and there were lot of wild rumors that he and his wife lived in a converted school bus in the country out west of town, and adopted lots of foster children. I can’t confirm or deny any of that, although these stories did lend a certain mystique that made him seem larger than life for us students. As I said above, one good teacher can make a huge difference, and that was absolutely the case for Jack Dobelbower and me. In my own teaching I try to live up to the example that he set, and if I can do that I will be happy and proud.

Many of the readers of this column who have gone on to a professional life in electrical and computer engineering will have similar stories. If any of this resonates with you, I encourage you to reach out and thank your high school teachers. Show your appreciation while you still have a chance.

I have to end this week’s column on a bit of a down note. I have learned over the past couple of years that there are a lot short-sighted politicians and demagogues who are slowly and systemically dismantling the whole public school education system in the state of Oklahoma. It hurts the economy, it makes the state look bad, and it’s just plain wrong. I stand firmly behind the teachers in this ongoing battle. I suppose that now that I live in Michigan I shouldn’t care so much, but these are my roots and I came out of an excellent public school that did a lot to shape me into the man I am today. I just hate to see that come undone. If you are reading this and feel that high-quality public education is important for our society, our culture, and our economy, please do what you can to support your local schools and the teachers that mean so much to all of us. Thank you.

– Dan

Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University

Today, April 22, is Earth Day, so it seems appropriate to say a few things about the environmental impact of the work of electrical engineers.

Actually, there is a whole lot to say, much of it surrounding the topic of generation, transmission, and distribution of electrical power. This is not my own area of technical expertise – I am more of a communications and signal processing engineer – so I have to exercise caution in pontificating too much on the topic. I will hasten to point out this is an area of strength for the ECE Department at Michigan Tech, as it has been ever since the department was founded in 1928. We have a lot of good people contributing to the next generation of power and energy technology, and to the education of the next generation of power and energy engineers who are going to make that technology work.

It is safe to say that the development of electrical power has had a huge impact on human civilization over the last 100 years. As a species, we learned how to burn fossil fuel in enormous rotating machines, and through the magic of electromagnetic induction we convert that mechanical energy to electrical energy which can be transmitted over long distances and distributed to homes and businesses everywhere. The development of “universal electrification,” as this is called, was named the #1 technical achievement of the 20th century by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. It has had an immeasurable positive effect on the standard of living and quality of life for us all. Think about that the next time you turn on a light switch in the middle of the night.

We now understand that this technological advancement comes with a certain environmental cost. One cannot burn fossil fuel without putting some residue back into the atmosphere, and the consensus of the vast majority of professionals who know what they’re talking about is that this is having a detrimental effect on our world (I don’t claim to be one of those people.) As electrical engineers we have to take some responsibility for that problem. Fortunately, if we are part of the problem, we are also part of the solution. A great many smart, dedicated electrical engineers are looking at alternative means for generating and distributing electrical power that do not have the same environmental cost, or so we hope. I can’t begin to go into all the technology and the tradeoffs in alternative and renewable energy generation, and the smart distribution systems that go with them – we have entire courses on that topic – but I encourage all young engineers with a passion for making a big contribution to the planet to consider this as a career possibility.

From my own casual observations, I see a lot of potential in solar power. Everything that we are and everything we consume ultimately comes from the sun anyway. I am particularly fascinated by passive solar technology, whereby arrangements of mirrors are used to concentrate solar energy, creating localized areas of intense heat for turning steam turbines or melting salt. I can’t help but think that there is a lot of real estate in the desert Southwest of the United States where such technology could easily be deployed. [I’ll probably catch a lot of flak from some people for that position – the desert is much more than a lot of sun-baked nothingness, and I get it – but it’s easy to see how one might get that impression when you fly from here to California.] The dropping costs and widespread adoption of solar photovoltaics is a positive sign too – although from an environmental perspective one needs to factor in the cost of acquiring natural resources and manufacturing the panels.

I’m not a big fan of wind power (no pun intended), mostly because I think that the big wind farms popping up all over American farmland are kind of ugly. Other people find them stately and beautiful, so I am willing to be wrong about that. As an alternative means of providing much-needed power that we are most certainly not going to give up, I can see the value. I did read a fascinating article recently in IEEE Spectrum about how wind power is a testament to our dependence on fossil fuel, when one considers everything that goes into the manufacturing, transportation, and deployment of wind turbines: see http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil.

Steering away from power and energy for a bit, let me add that there are other ways that electrical engineers can practice their trade and have a positive impact on the environment. Watch out for water as a big growth area in the coming decades. Water is something we all take for granted, until something goes horribly wrong as it did with the recent slow-motion trainwreck in Flint. People are now talking about the “water-energy nexus” in which our dependence on water and energy makes one big interconnected system: we need water to produce electrical energy, and we need electrical energy to produce clean water. I foresee a lot of important work to be done, and also a lot of career opportunities.

I’ll use that last assertion to put in a plug for our new Concentration in Environmental Applications, offered as part of our undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at Michigan Tech. We created this concentration to give students with an interest in air quality, water quality, and/or remote sensing an opportunity to pursue those interests and at the same time apply their engineering talents. There are going to be a lot electrical engineers needed for the electrical machinery, automation, industrial control, communication, and signal processing that go into the systems that monitor and improve our air and water quality. Please take a look if that sounds interesting – the ECE Department will be happy to provide all the information you need.

Happy Earth Day!

(Also – happy last day of classes to all our graduating seniors! Take it easy on Senior Walk, OK?)

– Dan

Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University

A couple of weeks ago I attended the annual meeting of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association, or ECEDHA, in San Diego. I enjoyed seeing old friends, making new ones, and having good discussions about a number of issues that we have in common and may not realize.

One of those issues is that of the ECE “image”, that is, how the general public, and specifically prospective students and their parents, views the field of electrical and computer engineering. There is a lot of angst and hand-wringing over the fact that we as a profession are not widely known or appreciated for what we have accomplished, and that in fact we are “losing ground” to other disciplines who are moving in on our turf.

This brings up a couple of thoughts for me. The first is, should we be worried about this at all? I think I will put that one off, and today I will offer a couple of observations on how I think we got to this point.

First of course is the “nerd” stereotype associated with electrical engineers, and engineers in general. This is promulgated in popular culture – think e.g. of the comic strip Dilbert, or Wollowitz in “The Big Bang Theory”, or many of the characters in “Revenge of the Nerds.” We all cringe at these stereotypes, although most of us in our heart of hearts will admit there is a kernel of truth in them; some even embrace them fully. Still, it is a constant battle to convince young people that one can be an engineer and still live a happy, healthy, productive, and well-adjusted life. I do what I can when given the opportunity.

A second issue is the “invisibility” part, that is, no one knows who we are and what we do. In this regard I think that as electrical engineers we have become a victim of our own success. We happen to work on systems that depend wholly or in part on the manipulation of electricity – voltage, current, electric fields, and the like – and it just turns out that of all the forces of nature in the universe, electricity is probably the most malleable. We can do things at unbelievable scales of both space and time. We can make electrical devices change their state a billion times a second, and can put a billion different such devices on a chip no bigger than a square centimeter. As a consequence, we can build systems that do unbelievable things, like a smart phone that connects to the Internet and downloads and displays videos from half a world away. The problem is, this technology is so successful that it is adopted quickly and commoditized. It is so useful and popular that people will just assume that it exists (or even claim that they have right to it) and they are unaware where it came from and the effort that it took to bring it to market. One can say this about electrical power to the home, telephone service, radio, TV, audio systems, medical instrumentation, computers – the list goes on and on. All this stuff just showed up in our lives in the space of two to three generations. But if you ask kids who invented the iPhone, guess what they will tell you, almost certainly: scientists.

It may be that part of the reason we as a profession are invisible is that the stuff we work with – electricity – is also invisible. The work of a mechanical engineer is obvious in the motion of an automobile, and the work of a civil engineer is obvious in the structure of a bridge. It’s there for all the world to see. However, people just have to take our word for it when we say we are pushing electrons around for the benefit of humanity. You can see the results of our work – that video downloaded to your phone, say – but everything that made that happen remains a mystery to most.

What to do about this situation? I suppose we have to address the first question I asked, namely, should we worry about it at all? Stay tuned; I’ll pick that up another day.

– Dan

Daniel Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University