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Is it zeitgeist? Hadn’t seen this when I ranted a bit on MBA’s

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Read more at : MeganMcardle.com: Is the MBA Going Away? 9July 2013

… it is the graduate schools that the collapse has begun. That doesn’t mean that graduate education will go away (after all, neither tulip bulbs nor stock exchanges went away when those bubbles collapsed); rather, the market will get dramatically smaller, with the shakiest programs going bust, others retrenching, and the top ones continuing to draw more students than they can enroll. If it spreads to college, we should expect to see the same pattern: top tier schools surviving and even thriving, while lesser ranked schools pitched into financial crises by declining enrollment.

Also: Don’t Go to Business School! by Megan McArdle at The Daily Beast Jan 9, 2013 10:36 AM

Unless you can get into a top program, professional school may cause more problems than it solves

ViaMeadia // The Miracles Wrought by Price Transparency

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

A surgery center in Oklahoma has started a bidding war by offering drastically lower prices than other providers and posting them online. The center describes itself as “free-market loving”—an unorthodox but welcome branding for a health care provider. The evidence of its success, however, is eye-popping. Where some hospitals charge more than $16,000 for a breast biopsy, Oklahoma Surgery Center charges $3, 500, according to a local Oklahoma news station. And that’s just one of many impressive examples.

Read more at: IndyStar: Abdul: Why our health-care system needs a single-payer – you

The recent move by the Obama administration to delay implementation of the employer mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act means this is the perfect time to have a grown-up discussion about how we deliver health care in this country. As a free market-conservative, social-libertarian political pundit, I am convinced more than ever that it is time in this country for a single-payer health care system.

Get rid of employer ‘health insurance’ go with health savings plans and catastrophic medical insurance AND PUBLISHED PRICING then we at least know what the real price is and stop paying for so many empty suites…

On a very related note, at least in my mind: There is a great debate about the collapse of the demand for lawyers and the issues with ‘Higher Ed’ payoff vs price in general outside of core STEM. But as a practicing engineer, business development type I have to tell you that one of the most pernicious problems in today’s world is an over supply of pure play MBA’s, business school PhD’s, Operations consultants, etc, etc, et-bloody-cettera. I’m not saying that the tech types know all, do all, but when they are ignored the company ( practice, clinic,….. ) in which they work becomes a zombie…and as we all know zombies can win in the short run, even proliferate, but in the end they either rot out or pull down the society (economy) around them.

WIRED, way, way weird, and oh so cool!

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Wired: ‘Holographic Duality’ Hints at Hidden Subatomic World

The holographic duality, discovered in 1997 by Juan Maldacena, says that events inside a region of space that involve gravity and are described by string theory are mathematically equivalent to events on the surface of that region that involve particles and are gravity-free. Illustration: Annenberg Lerner 2013

In the mathematical parlance of the holographic duality, certain strongly correlated matter in 2-D [such as in cuprate hi temp superconductors shown above; editors note] corresponds, in 3-D, to a black hole — an infinitely dense object with an inescapable gravitational pull, which is mathematically simple. “These very complicated quantum mechanical collective effects are beautifully captured by black hole physics,” said Hong Liu, an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “For strongly correlated systems, if you put an electron into the system, it will immediately ‘disappear’ — you can no longer track it.” It’s like an object falling into a black hole.

An Electric Air about them

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Flying hybrid: This two-seater electric-gas airplane may be the first of many to take to the skies

UVa’s Sustinere design for a 50-seat jet eschews batteries in favor of a turboelectric distributed propulsion (TeDP) concept – two 2,500shp turboshaft engines under the wing generating electrical power to drive six 3,300lb-thrust fans arrayed in a duct that wraps around the upper fuselage.

The EADS IW concept uses a single large turbine engine to generate electricity to power six ducted fans that provide thrust. This allows propulsive and thermal efficiency to be optimized separately. The turbine engine can be optimized for thermal efficiency (turning fuel into shaft power) while the ducted fans increase effective bypass ratio and therefore propulsion efficient (turning shaft power into thrust).

Read more at AWST : eConcept – EADS’s Hybrid-Electric Airliner

Two years after Honeywell and Safran announced plans to develop an electric-drive system, the team is preparing to demonstrate a proof-of-concept system on an Airbus A320 at this year’s Paris air show.

The result of close collaborations with Finmeccanica companies – Selex ES, Ansaldo Breda, and Ansaldo Energia – and partner companies from Italy, UK, U.S. and Japan, the aircraft embeds some unuque features: aesthetically pleasing styling and aerodynamically unique tiltrotor configuration; carbon graphite exterior surfaces; High-Integrity Flight Control Computer and Actuator Control Unit; custom produced electric motor inverter and motor control algorithm; axial flux permanent magnet electric motors.

SpaceYES!!

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

SpaceX continues to drive down the barriers like the aggressive but rationale organization they are and the world needs to move us to the next level of Earth to orbit operations. And having a dream and stretch goals are required elements.

From NASA Spaceflight: Dragon Roadmap: From domestic crew independence to humans on Mars
July 5, 2013 by Chris Bergin
Grasshopper reaches a thousand feet in new nav test. Read more at: SpaceX shows off new nav gear with latest Grasshopper rocket launch-and-landing (video)
By Timothy J. Seppala posted Jul 6th, 2013 at 3:47 PM

Rudimentary Liver from Stem Cell, 3D Printed Ear and 3D Printed micro Battery ? What does the future hold

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Theres a huge amount of research going on in fields that don’t at first appear to have much to do with each other that could in the next few years to few decades lead to a world where the possibility of building new organs either as replacements or upgrades is possible, even common.

Those worried about the future of employment in America—for themselves or for the country as a whole—should look to this data. As of now, many of the jobs of the future are going to be health care jobs, and that will only become more true if Obamacare stands and the pool of insured patients expands dramatically. To understand what the jobs of the future will be (or to land one), go where the money is: services, and especially, according to this data, health services.
For those unlikely to take up health jobs, this graph might seem discouraging. After all, more doctors and health workers points to more health care costs, in a system that’s already vastly too expensive. As the Atlantic points out on its piece on the graph, “There are a couple stories that branch off from this graph. One is the unchecked growth in health care prices over the last few decades, which has made the medical industry the one truly recession-proof job engine of the economy.”
But there’s also a case of optimism here. The Atlantic notes that the two kinds of health care jobs most likely to grow in coming decades are personal health aides and home health workers. This is good news even on its own; achieving a better balance between hospital care and home care is an important task for health care reformers. Moreover, it means there’s a lot of room for entrepreneurial individualse to come up with new and creative ways to cater to a growing demand for personalized health care.

The American Interest // Egypt, we have no idea…

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

The American Interest /July 1, 2013 / Adam Garfinkle / Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—Memorize That Name
Read more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/2013/07/01/note-to-clueless-msm-types-abdel-fattah-al-sisi-memorize-that-name/#sthash.aMzX3wZw.dpuf
Lots of deep insight for those who want it, along with a bit of ‘I told yo so.’

This was an interesting passage and a key to why this whole region is so utterly foreign to many of us who wish for better things:

Years ago a clever and truth-telling fellow named David Lamb devised what he called the IBM syndrome to describe political culture in Egypt and the Arab world. The “I” stands for “inshallah“, may God will it: in other words, fatalism. The “B” stands for “bokr“—tomorrow morning, or just tomorrow: suggestive of an extremely elastic, pre-modern perception of time, vaguely akin to some uses of the Spanish word mañana. The “M” stands for “malesh“, which is untranslatable, but which kind of means “whatever”, “never mind” or “fagetaboutit”: not my job, someone else will take care of it, or not, who cares? What difference does it make?

It is also a bit frightening to realize that there are examples of this sort of mindset in ‘the west’ and that it’s a plague…

Wisdom, eloquence and virtue

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Wisdom, eloquence and virtue – these are the aims of a classical education. The patriarchs of western civilization understood that education was more than the acquisition of basic skills and mere competency. The purpose of education was to transform, to elevate, and to refine the mind and the soul. This was the standard, not the exception. At the center of classical education is an emphasis on the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Because these universal values serve as the building blocks of classical learning, the classical arts are timeless and proven, and have been known to produce many eloquent confessors and wise leaders. Our communities today are in dire need of just these sorts of men and women. In an endless pursuit of the latest educational dogma, many schools no longer have the capacity to judge what is Good, True and Beautiful, much less teach it. In forsaking the soul for the mind, they have forgotten how to educate both. Classical Education is a holistic approach to education, and a return to excellence in teaching, curriculum and expectations.

Via: http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/22434-The-Rise-of-Classical-Education.html
From: http://ricochet.com/main-feed/The-Rise-of-Classical-Education
More at: http://www.immanuelalexandria.org/school/curriculum/what-is-classical-education
This triggered a flash of fierce agreement from me, we have debased education and muddled it with training. I think that many intellectuals from the middle twentieth century would say that the communists and their Nazi fellow travelers won. The left (which both Nazi and Communists are at core) managed to stain classical education as elitist and useless, whereas in reality it was at its core vastly more leveling and practical than what we have today. A classical education creates a society of citizens with a deep repository of common referents that are rooted outside our ephemeral now, it also trained the mind to think, to organize to pattern recognize across a range of topics in ways that are broadly useful and common without being straight jacketed.

We also straight jacket everyone into a lockstep industrialized system where homogeneity of outcome is vastly more important than quality and to a degree individuality. Why can’t many kids start near full time work at sixteen and spend some years figuring out what they want to do before continuing at part time or your time schooling. Why is it that high schools are not open to anyone wanting to work on their english or get a high school degree? Why is it so hard to get credit for class work and job experience, hobbies etc, the totality of which would make many overlooked folks true masters of their art?

From The ENGINEER: Bumble Bee Drones at War

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

The rise of the micro air vehicle
13 June 2013 | By Jon Excell
Read more: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/in-depth/the-rise-of-the-micro-air-vehicle/1016519.article#ixzz2XeLGHbVs

A soldier of The Queen’s Royal Lancers launches a Black Hornet, Nano UAV from a compound in Afghanistan during Operation QALB.

…one of the compelling advantages over larger surveillance UAVs such as the Reaper is that the system can ‘be tasked in a matter of seconds’, whereas a reaper might take half an hour to arrive at the scene.

…Prox Dynamics’ CEO and founder Petter Muren told The Engineer that the technology that appears on the PD100 is considerably more advanced than anything that would be found on a remote-controlled aircraft. The motors, servos and sensors are, he said, smaller and more efficient. The radio-link is more advanced, the system has fully integrated GPS, as well an autopilot system, and is far more robust.

And the beat, wing beat, goes on…

From The ENGINEER // What a Beauty! A Bugatti designed aircraft could soon fly

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

The ENGINEER :In the wings: recreating the Bugatti 100P
Almost eighty years ago aircraft design was still more art than science and what science there was revolved around slide rules and mechanical, even human, calculators, but they took chances and pushed boundaries.

This aircraft used the period’s (late ’30’s early ’40’s) advanced composite, plywood, made of hardwood and balsa wood as well as sophisticated aerodynamics to achieve a remarkable projected performance, 500 MPH, at a time when 300 was fighter fast. This aircraft had a cooling system similar to the breakthrough one in the P51 mustang, a half decade earlier, and the composites were used in the famous British strike bomber the Mosquito, also a half decade later. But the original of this remarkable aircraft never flew, being shipped out of the path of the oncoming Nazi army and ending up as decayed parts in the Experimental Aircraft Associations museum in Oshkosh WI. Now a team of enthusiasts are building a replica they expect to fly soon.