The Mighty Skule Cannon: 80 Years Old and Still Mighty
Cannon circa 1999
[Cross-posted from The Cannon Newspaper's January feature to reach a wider audience]
The year is 1929. It is a calm and quiet evening on the picturesque University of Toronto campus. Students could be seen relaxing at the then 10-year-old Hart House, the central community hub built for students of all faculties and colleges alike.
Suddenly, a loud thundering boom rocked the foundations of the building. Was it a bomb? Are we under attack? Is the war returning? These thoughts raced through the minds of surrounding students, caught unaware by the apparent explosion, as they searched simultaneously for cover and the source of the outburst.
Engineering: Passion Lost and Found
[Cross-posted from Richmond Hill High School Alumni Association blog found here.]
What follows is a story I have told only to a few of my closest friends (and probably not in its entirety), because of its complexity, personal nature, and my own confusion. It’s taken me a long time to formulate this into a coherent message to share. I think it is worth reading for anyone who is considering a career in (or at least an academic foray into) the field of Engineering. I apologize in advance for the length, as this may read more like a journal than an essay. I hope, though, that you will appreciate the sentiment behind the words.
—–
High School Blues
It was the final year of high school. Some say it’s the best year of their life – not yet an adult, but old enough to do all the cool things you never could when you were ‘just a kid’. I, however, spent most of this year in confusion and stress. Up to this point, I had been fairly academically accomplished. I’d been regularly getting those revered 90’s in all of my classes. I’d written all the toughest math contests and placed well. I’d just placed in the top 60 in the Canadian Computing Competition. Actually, I was really bored by school. It provided no challenge, and it gave me no direction.
Plato and Socrates
I heard this on the radio today, thought I'd share it.
---
One day, Plato asked Socrates, his teacher and mentor, "What is love?"
Socrates replied, "Plato, take a walk through the wheat field nearby. Without turning back, walk forward, and pick the most magnificent stalk of wheat you can find. However, you are allowed to pick only one."
Plato followed Socrates' instructions, confident that he would find the best stalk of wheat in the field. Before long though, he returned empty-handed. Socrates asked, "Why have you picked nothing?" Plato replied, "I had found the most magnificent stalk of wheat as soon as I walked into the field, but since I was only allowed one pick, and I could not turn back, I thought I could find a better one further ahead. However, I could not find a better one as I kept searching, so I returned with none."
"And that is love," said Socrates.
Some days later, Plato asked Socrates another question. "What is marriage," he asked. Socrates answered: "Go to the woods, and as before, without turning back, bring me back the best and strongest tree in the forest. Again, you're only allowed to choose one, so choose wisely."
Plato walked through the woods, and returned soon after with a tree. However, the tree was not strong nor tall. Socrates asked him, "Is this the best tree in the forest?" Plato answered, "No, but I didn't want to return empty handed like last time, and while I'm sure there are better trees in the forest, I felt I could not afford to miss the opportunity at this tree."
"And that is marriage," said Socrates.
On yet another day, Plato asked, "What is an affair?" Socrates answered, in his usual way, "Head to the woods, and look for the most beautiful flower. This time, you're allowed to look wherever you want, and you can retrace your steps if you must." Plato, given these instructions, went into the woods full of confidence. In a short time, he had found the most beautiful, most colorful blooming flower in the forest, and picked it out of the soil for his return. As he returned, however, the flower began to wilt. When he arrived, Socrates asked, "Is this the most beautiful flower in the forest?" Plato answered, "Yes, I discovered this most beautiful of flowers, but as I returned, the flower began to lose its color and beauty."
"And that, is an affair," said Socrates.
Now older and wiser, Plato asked Socrates once more, "What is life?" Socrates pondered for a moment, and told Plato, "As before, go to the woods, and find the most beautiful flower there is. You can go anywhere, and pick as many as you want." Remembering all his previous experiences, Plato walked into the woods again. But after three days and three nights, he had still not returned. Socrates, with a bit of concern, went out in search of Plato. Before long, Socrates had found him, in a makeshift camp that Plato had set up. He asked Plato, "Have you found the most beautiful of flowers?" Plato pointed to a flower right next to his camp site, and said, "That is the most beautiful flower in the forest." Socrates inquired, "Why have you not picked it yet?" Plato answered thoughtfully, "If I pick it, it would wither like the last one. But even if I don't pick it, it will wither and die sooner or later. So while it is in full bloom, I will live beside it, admiring it from here. When it finally wilts, I will look for the next most beautiful flower."
Socrates took this in, and said, "Now you understand the essence of life."
What Separates Engineers from Politicians?
This piece was written as a reflection for the ESC202 Praxis IV course.
Much has been said about the difference between politicians and engineers. This is a debate that has gone on for ages. Why do Engineers not engage in public debates? Is it because engineers do not know about public policy?
When I sit around my engineering peers, and discuss politics, I often get noncommittal responses and shrugs of indifference. There are never any heated debates about politics, and never any emotionally charged tirades about one’s favourite political party. Engineers do not seem to be interested in public policy.
Mostly, this is because engineers don’t connect to politicians. They feel like politicians don’t make a difference. Like talking to a less intelligent friend, engineers find discussions with politicians useless – they spend much of their time explaining technical concepts without getting much progress. By the time an engineer figures out a way to get the politician to understand the technical details, the politician has long since lost interest.
Their goals, of course, are also different. Despite the public claim that politicians are supposed to serve “the people”, there are countless instances where special interest groups and lobbyists manage to sway politicians to a direction away from the majority view. These political battles create endless red tape – the kind of bureaucracy that engineers despise. Such an efficient workplace would instantly turn off an engineer.
Engineers find public policy important, but do not have time to deal with the implementation of the policies. The fundamental difference between engineers and politicians working on public policy is the time scale. Politicians, by nature of their job, think only in terms of years. Promises on public policy often happen in 5?year election cycles, and then get pushed aside when they are actually in office. Meanwhile, engineers and scientists have to deal with technology that changes on a constant basis – for example the tech sector progresses in maybe 6?month cycles, much faster than the politicians. By the time public policy is able to get past all the red tape, the science world has already leaped eons ahead.
So why bother with public policy? Politicians will always be playing catch?up anyway. There isn’t much reason to explain technical concepts to politicians and have to wait for them to accept technological progress. Perhaps the whole concept should just be scrapped: instead, let scientists and engineers do whatever they want to advance the field of science and technology, and let the public reap the benefits directly, without going through the government.
Why Don’t Engineers Rule the World?
This piece was written as a reflection for the ESC202 Praxis IV course.
It is perhaps somewhat arrogant to say Engineers would make the world better if only we could run the government. There is a reason that engineers do not run for positions in government, and do not get into bureaucratic positions of power.
Many engineers approach social situations as nuisances. This attitude is not shared by politicians, who use social events to their advantage in gaining political support. This alone makes engineers seem lofty and unapproachable by the average person, who may not have the same intellectual ability as an engineer. For this reason alone, it may be hard for engineers to understand the needs of society – because they think in a way that is so vastly different from other people.
While engineers certainly have a good grasp of scientific problems and can easily problem solve, engineers are not particularly well suited as leaders. The type of people that the engineering profession attracts is not representative of the majority of the population. Engineers are usually the types of people who prefer objective reasoning with numbers and equations rather than with subjective realities like most societal issues are.
Engineers have no trouble coming up with solutions to most problems, with their trained analytical skills. Unfortunately, much of the time engineers solve the wrong problem altogether. While some solutions may make some scientific sense to the engineer, they do not necessarily have the same charm to the average Joe. Engineers, having solutions to problems, are generally progressive in nature. They want to see their solutions implemented as soon as possible, and are often frustrated when their proposals to politicians get stuck in red tape for years.
What engineers often do not see is that some people do not wish for a change. Despite glaring social problems, people get comfortable in their social niche, and do not necessarily want change. Like the engineers who work with the disadvantaged developing world with EWB know well, the engineering solution is not always aligned with the cultural values of the majority, and do not serve the needs of people.
If the world were run by engineers in government, things would surely get done. Engineers hate bureaucracy. But there is no guarantee that the things that get done would be the best things for society. While technological advances would be easily accepted, their social impacts may not be so easily realized.
Human Factors Design
This piece was written as a reflection for the ESC202 Praxis IV course.
Human factors are rarely considered in any engineering design. Often, it is the last step considered. Take for example, the personal computer. Hailed by some as the greatest invention of the 20th century, it is one of the least accessible and understandable pieces of technology ever created. Everyone knows this, but hardly anybody but engineers can change this. Computers are near impossible for anyone to use. Even the most experienced user with the best programs can sometimes fail to get a computer to do what they want.
Countless man-hours of productivity are lost in corporations by the inability of staff to use these supposedly great 'tools'. IT departments are becoming disproportionately large, and huge sums of money are poured into maintaining and fixing computers on a daily basis. Most people simply do not know how to work a computer, despite its ubiquity in society.
Why is this the case? The first personal computers were designed by and designed for engineers. Even in the 70s, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded the company Apple and designed the first personal desktop computer, it was the result of circuit design, hacking, and input from other computer hobbyists. When it was invented, it was lauded as the technology that would bring computers to the masses. All of this, without much thought into how non-technical users would feel.
These engineers never considered that some users would not be familiar with keyboards, command lines, and installation routines. Despite the advances in computer design and graphical user interfaces, many of computing's most archaic practices are still in place. Let's take, for example, installing a new hard drive. Let us draw analogies between this installation and a similar installation in the physical world – let's say, putting up a new bookshelf to put more books.
First, let's look at the bookshelf installation. To install a new bookshelf, one could simply move one in from the store and place it in a room. In the worst case, the bookshelf would need to be assembled – but bookshelves are intuitive things. You build a frame with the given instructions and tools, and then you place the dividers into the shelf.
Now let's look at the computer. To install a hard drive, you need to first unplug your computer, unscrew its cover, and take it apart. This is akin to removing your door to move in a bookshelf. Next, you would have to locate a slot in your computer to place it, then put the new hard drive in place and plug it in to the motherboard. That is the most straightforward part. If the hard drive were anything like a bookshelf, one would expect the computer to work by now. Unfortunately, this is not the case – there are still many more steps before this task can be fully accomplished. (On older hard drives, you even had to change the settings on the old hard drive to tell it to become the 'slave' drive, and the new one to be the 'slave' drive.)
After putting the hard drive in place, we must turn on the computer (and hope that nothing was damaged in the installation process). Then, after the computer has taken its time to load, you have to wait an even longer time for it to 'detect' the new hardware. This is like waiting for your room to figure out it's got a new book shelf in it. In many instances, the computer will not do this automatically. You actually have to go to the 'Control Panel' and tell the computer to look for a new drive. Then, you would likely have to install new software to get the hardware working. If this were really a bookshelf, you would be extraordinarily exasperated by now, after having to tell your room to look for the bookshelf, and then asking it to learn about the bookshelf before it can use it. Putting it in this light, it is clear that computers are not well designed for human usage.
This brings us to the cause of the problems. Computer and software engineers seem to have no idea what level of knowledge the general public has. Their expertise in computers has blinded them to the fact that most users have no idea what goes on when you install some hardware or some software. In fact, most users shouldn't need to have any sort of idea in order to use it. Does a pedestrian need to know how a bridge holds forces to walk across the bridge? Does a driver need to know how the internal combustion engine produces kinetic energy to drive a car?
Programmers often begin to write code based on solving a technical problem. They figure out what needs to be improved with the algorithms and all the 'internal' stuff that goes on in a computer. They spend so much time on their own program that they become intimately familiar with all its parts. They forget that outsiders have never seen anything like it before. Many software engineers have a natural fear of visual and industrial designers. They figure that a person not trained in programming shouldn't have a say of what goes on in their program.
The cure to the computer complexity problem, is of course Human Factors Design. It has already been proven to work. Observe the latest phenomenon in technology – the Apple iPod and iPhone. When these products were designed, they were not designed to solve a technical problem. Rather, the focus was on the human. The iPod and iPhone were designed to have the least number of buttons on it as possible. Whereas most electronic gadgets have a plethora of switches, buttons, and status displays, the iPod has only one scrollwheel and a handful of buttons. The iPhone has even less buttons – in fact, it only has one. These products are a runaway success simply because they are easy to use. Users who see these products in a store realize how easy it is, and are instantly hooked.
There is no reason that people should be fighting their technology – they should be embracing it, and be aided by it. There is still a long way to go for computer design for humans, and engineers need to be up to this task.
Engineers in the Public Eye
This piece was written as a reflection for the ESC202 Praxis IV course.
It is true that engineers have an understated and sometimes negative public image. Much of the public does not understand what it is that engineers do, or what engineers stand for. The public perception of engineering is that of a profession occupied by nerdy folks who spend their days tinkering with gadgets. In the media, engineers are never mentioned. In schools, where science and math are taught, there is little to no mention of engineering. "Engineering" is never taught as a subject at the elementary and secondary levels of education. There are famous scientists and mathematicians that every schoolkid can name, but not one famous engineer is ever remembered.
The question is, should engineers remain behind the scenes? On the one hand, engineers do indeed have to deal with many technical details which the public knows little of (and likely does not need to know). On the other hand, engineers have a moral obligation to serve the public interest. Building a bridge over a deep valley, while a feat of modern technology to be sure, is no feat of engineering unless it truly satisfies a societal need.
Often, though, engineers feel estranged from their surroundings by a blissfully ignorant public. At the recent Engineering Society meeting regarding the proposal to separate from the University of Toronto Students' Union, many engineering students voiced their opinions on university culture. Many students felt that it was necessary to separate from UTSU simply because they do not understand "us". We are misunderstood and portrayed as rebels, often isolated by the rest of the university. It was said that UTSU rarely acknowledged our needs, and treated us with little respect.
While it was not my intention at first to join this particular debate, I have since developed an opinion opposing that of the Engineering Society's. In my view, it is a waste of financial and human resources to isolate ourselves further from the rest of the university. It is exactly this kind of view that demonstrates a lack of holistic thinking that engineers ought to possess. While this students' quarrel is not in itself a symptom of the engineering profession at large, it should still be noted that engineers should be embracing, not rejecting, the public. Our attitudes towards the rest of the world need to be fostered at an early stage in our professional development, beginning at the university level.
Engineers, of course, have good reason to be intimidated by public consultation. Faced with equations and schematics, we have no problems getting our hands "dirty". But when confronted by politicians with agendas to push and lobbyists with special interests (just the kinds of people most likely to show their faces at a public consultation), we feel uncomfortable and out of place. Like a partial differential equation, many of society's complex problems cannot be solved using tried-and-true formulas. Engineers often have no background in the sociological or economic issues that underscore most of the situations they deal with. This lack of understanding leads to public distrust, making engineers seem to society as aloof.
Regardless of opinion, we live in a democratic society - and public consultations are one of the many checks and balances needed to make everything fair. For the public, these consultations are one of very few opportunities to talk to engineers. For the engineers, these may be a necessary "evil" of the occupation.
Sustainable Engineering
This piece was written as a reflection for the ESC202 Praxis IV course.
In modern society, prices are going down, and sizes are going up. This is in part due to economic pressure; in part due to consumer culture; but it is largely also due to the technological advancements from engineers and scientists.
Engineers are largely the ones responsible for driving prices down. Without their technological innovations, it would not be economically feasible to mass produce ans slash prices. The engineering profession, in fact, prides itself on making better and better things at the lowest possible cost. Engineers today work tirelessly to satisfy these consumer demands for better and cheaper goods.
Mass production, automation, artificial materials, and many more technologies of the post-industrial age are all engineering achievements. Engineers, who are the first to create new technologies, are also the first to find out the side effects. To promote a new technology without considering its side-effects would be morally irresponsible for anyone, especially engineers who are taught to hold public safety above all else.
While it is the moral obligation for everybody to look out for the well-being of our home - the Earth - it is the engineers who have the know-how and the ability to really do it. Bureaucrats and politicians, who do not have the technical background that engineers do, can only see the immediate effects of new developments and not the theoretical long-term consequences.
Ideally, engineers should be able to refuse morally irresponsible jobs. It is everyone's duty to protect the Earth - because we all share the same fate in the end. Engineers who have the power to change the world with technology should be able to do so with pride.
David Suzuki
Some tidbits from Friday's David Suzuki talk at the University of Toronto, which was spectacularly done.
"We are turning our backs on the very survival mechanism that got our species here in the first place."
"We are air - everything we do to the air, we do directly to ourselves."
"There is no crisis of the environment - the crisis is us."
"Economy and ecology are from the same root word meaning home ... it is time to put 'eco' back into economics."
"Economists seem to think that the economy can grow forever ... nothing can grow forever."
Mathematics in Ontario High Schools: A Step Backwards
Some time in 2005, the Ministry of Education of Ontario decided they would evaluate the mathematics portion of Ontario's secondary school curriculum. Their first study led them to announce that they would remove the calculus course from the curriculum, replacing "Advanced Functions and Introductory Calculus" to "Advanced Functions", along with some slight adjustments to both the infamously difficult "Geometry and Discreet Math" course and the grade 11 "Functions and Relations" course.
All of these changes were designed to simplify the curriculum, or perhaps, in their mind, to make the curriculum more 'relevant' to students. The ministry cited increasing failure rates in mathematics, and the low enrollment numbers into the Calculus and Geometry courses. There was some noise made by students and parents, as well as the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers. To this end, I wrote the ministry a letter, which I subsequently posted on my blog (click to read). [For the record, after they replied with their initial acknowledgment of my letter, I never heard back from them.] After hearing the complaints, the ministry decided to postpone the proposed changes for a year, while creating a special task force to investigate the changes to the curriculum.
I, for one, was hoping the ministry would scrap the changes completely, and realize the mistake they had made. Unfortunately for me, that didn't happen. While I occupied myself with the various activities at university, I forgot about this issue during the past school year. So when I visited my high school again, I was shocked to hear that new changes were to be implemented next year which would have a dramatic effect on current secondary school math students.
The changes made were:
- Grade 11 Functions and Relations became Grade 11 Functions
- Grade 12 Advanced Functions and Introductory Calculus became Grade 12 Advanced Functions
- Grade 12 Geometry and Discrete Math was basically removed, making room for a new course, called Grade 12 Calculus and Vectors
- The third senior math course (and generally recognized as the easiest), Grade 12 Data Management, was essentially untouched
Now, it would appear that Calculus remained in the curriculum, and that the only real casualty was the Geometry and Discrete portion of mathematics. Upon closer inspection, in fact, both calculus and geometry+discrete were dumbed down and/or removed. Vectors, which made up about one-third of the old (and difficult) Geometry course, was added onto the already packed Calculus course, while some of the Grade 11 Functions and Relations content was moved to the new Grade 12 Advanced Functions course.
What did all this accomplish?
- Grade 11 students who don't intend to take calculus now have a much easier course;
- Grade 12 students who wished to take calculus, but not the more difficult geometry course must now take an extra course to get their credit;
- Stronger grade 12 math students who wished for a challenging course to stimulate them are now simply out of luck.
Not to mention, of course, the problems that they caused for all the students going into this 'transition' year. (Namely, all the students who took Grade 11 Functions and Relations last year will have to take Grade 12 Advanced Functions, which repeats some amount of material, before they can take Calculus)
Now, I am sure the Ontario Ministry of Education had the students' best interest at heart when they implemented these changes, but they have gone about it in a completely backwards way. To put it bluntly, in order to curb failure rates of senior mathematics students, the ministry has decided to dumb down the curriculum. Simple, right?
Well, as I wrote previously in my letter to the ministry, the failure rates, in fact, are representative of a larger problem, and that is the growing incompetence of our educators and the use of particularly bad learning material (anyone who remembers the Quest 2000 series of textbooks introduced by Harris will understand what I mean). Kids are no longer learning the fundamentals properly - of course they're having trouble in upper years.
I'd love to get into how the education system is flawed, but that's a topic for another day. Most of it, of course, has to do with most educators teaching all the wrong things, and the mostly forceful rote memorization and inherent boring-ness of the assigned work. If we start teaching people to ask why and motivate instead of lecture, we might actually see some positive results.
In any case, the fundamental flaw behind this new series of courses is that instead of fixing the fundamentals from the ground up, they have decided to build another obstacle and hoping for the best. Seriously, will requiring an extra math course before calculus really improve students' understanding of the concepts? Surely, those who were having trouble with calculus aren't going to suddenly get better at it just because they've been given more math.
A second fatal flaw in the new courses lies in the lack of a true mathematics course. Anyone who has taken high school calculus knows that for the most part, this is a course about memorizing techniques and, well, methods of differentiation. For the most part, students taking calculus don't realize its significance, nor do they expect to use it in any facet of their life after the course. Most merely enroll in the course to get the prerequisite for their university program. The only real mathematics course for senior students, Geometry and Discrete Mathematics, has been all but destroyed.
Sure, the ministry did note that the "Discrete" course was getting low enrollment numbers - but for good reason. It was a course designed, and in that respect, designed very well, for students who were genuinely interested in mathematics or were at least skilled in the subject. I say without hesitation that content-wise, it was definitely the most challenging course I took in high school, but it was also very enlightening, from a mathematics standpoint.
Geometry and Discrete brought everything we learned in mathematics together, from basic number theory to algebra to geometry. It required connection between concepts, and a deep level of understanding of what mathematics is. If nothing else, it was an unbelievable learning experience. The sheer elegance of mathematics was brought out in the course, and for those so inclined, it was even enjoyable.
Beyond just the learning experience, Discrete provided a solid basis upon which science, math, and engineering students could build during their postsecondary education. Without taking the Discrete course (which was not a requirement for my engineering program), I would surely have done far worse in both my Vector Algebra and Linear Algebra courses. Ironically, the only reason I had a vector algebra course at all in my first year was because it was removed as a prerequisite for entry into the program last year. The class average in that course was very high this year - and not because the material is easy, but because most of the students there had already learned the material.
Now, engineering at the University of Toronto is a rather diverse group. I would venture to say (although I do not have solid statistics here at the moment) that somewhere between a third and a half of the students in my program was from out-of-province, and yet, most still had the background knowledge for that course. This proves only one thing - the rest of the world is at least on par with the Ontario education system. Now, with the removal of the more challenging course, Ontario has surely fallen behind.
As an aside, but perhaps not so off-topic, AP Calculus in Ontario has all but hit an end. The flagship course of the American Advanced Placement program is a course which teaches university-level calculus to high school students who wish to get a head start, or wish for a truly challenging learning environment. With the addition of a second prerequisite to calculus, it essentially forces all secondary schools to semester their grade 12 math programs, and run calculus in the second semester. Thus, if AP Calculus classes were to be run, it would have to be in the second semester as well. Typically, schools in Ontario have their second semester from February to June. Unfortunately, the Advanced Placement exams run by the college board in the States is held in early May. That leaves only three months for AP Calculus to teach students all they need to know for the AP Exams in May, on top of all the other curriculum-required material. This little logistical problem has rendered AP Calculus virtually useless in Ontario. Now, it will only be a matter of time before that is ultimately canceled, leaving Ontario students further behind their counterparts from the rest of Canada as well as the United States. Oh, and not to mention the more impressive European education systems, and the ever-competitive Chinese students. So much for having a good and competitive education system.
Canada was recently ranked one of the worst in terms of innovation among modern industrialized countries around the world. Now, with Canada's largest province deciding to dumb down the education system, Canada will fall even further behind in innovation. Without solid mathematical foundations in secondary school, the postsecondary institutions will now have to shoulder the burden of teaching students these subjects, in an environment that is generally harsh for learning (for one, if you fail in university, you'll now have to pay for it - is that any incentive to take a challenging course?). With our mathematics lagging behind, it is no wonder that we're not innovating - how long will it be until our economy begins to suffer because our students have been denied the opportunity to excel in a global context?
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