Electrical And Electronics Engineering Quotes

It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

We, and the universe we live in, produce and operate in a sea of natural and unnatural electrical and magnetic fields. The earth, for example, pulses at about 10 Hz, like a small engine. Our bodies, as you may remember from chapter 1, are really electromagnetic machines. We simply can't move a muscle or produce a thought without an electrical impulse - and wherever there is electricity, a magnetic field is also produced, which is why we link the two together into one word: electromagnetic." Ann Louise Gittleman

Mister Geoffrey, my experiment shows that the dynamo and the bulb are both working properly," I said. "So why won't the radio play?" "I don't know," he said. "Try connecting them here." He was pointing toward a socket on the radio labeled "AC," and when I shoved the wires inside, the radio came to life. We shouted with excitement. As I pedaled the bicycle, I could hear the great Billy Kaunda playing his happy music on Radio Two, and that made Geoffrey start to dance. "Keep pedaling," he said. "That's it, just keep pedaling." "Hey, I want to dance, too." "You'll have to wait your turn." Without realizing it, I'd just discovered the difference between alternating and direct current. Of course, I wouldn't know what this meant until much later. After a few minutes of pedaling this upside-down bike by hand, my arm grew tired and the radio slowly died. So I began thinking, "What can do the pedaling for us so Geoffrey and I can dance?

The deep space transport uses a new type of propulsion system to send astronauts through space, called solar electric propulsion. The huge solar panels capture sunlight and convert it to electricity. This is used to strip away the electrons from a gas (like xenon), creating ions. An electric field then shoots these charged ions out one end of the engine, creating thrust. Unlike chemical engines, which can only fire for a few minutes, ion engines can slowly accelerate for months or even years.

Three Moonie 65-megaton hydrogen bombs exploded nearly simultaneously at very high altitude. With no air around the bombs to absorb the initial blast of the explosions, and convert the energy into mechanical shock waves——all the nuclear energy blasted out in its electromagnetic form. It was a brutally intense pulse of Compton recoil electrons and photoelectrons that created huge electric and magnetic fields that were MURDER on sensitive electronic equipment at tremendous distances. The electro-magnetic fields, coupled with electric and computer systems, producing huge voltage spikes in the circuits and damaging current surges along all signal paths, fusing precision engineered memory and micro-boards and virtual drives and CPUs into fried silicon laced junk! Nanobots to Nanoscrap in Nanoseconds!

At two hundred fifty feet in length with a surfaced displacement of 2,200 tons, the Samisho was not a small boat. Built to the 0+2+ (1) Yuushio-class standards at Kawasaki’s shipyards in Kobe, she’d begun service in 1992, and last year she’d been brought back to the yards for a retrofit. Now she was state of the art, an engineering and electronics marvel even by U.S. naval standards. She was a diesel boat, but she was fast, capable of a top speed submerged of more than twenty-five knots and a published diving depth in excess of one thousand feet. Her electronic detection systems and countermeasures by Hitachi were better than anything currently in use by any navy in the world, and her new Fuji electric motors and tunnel drive were as quiet as any nuclear submarine’s propulsion system, and much simpler to operate. The Samisho could be safely operated, even on war footing, with fifty men and ten officers—less than half the crew needed to run the Los Angeles-class boats, and one-fourth the crew needed for a sub-hunting surface vessel

I will give technology three definitions that we will use throughout the book. The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose. For some technologies-oil refining-the purpose is explicit. For others- the computer-the purpose may be hazy, multiple, and changing. As a means, a technology may be a method or process or device: a particular speech recognition algorithm, or a filtration process in chemical engineering, or a diesel engine. it may be simple: a roller bearing. Or it may be complicated: a wavelength division multiplexer. It may be material: an electrical generator. Or it may be nonmaterial: a digital compression algorithm. Whichever it is, it is always a means to carry out a human purpose. The second definition I will allow is a plural one: technology as an assemblage of practices and components. This covers technologies such as electronics or biotechnology that are collections or toolboxes of individual technologies and practices. Strictly speaking, we should call these bodies of technology. But this plural usage is widespread, so I will allow it here. I will also allow a third meaning. This is technology as the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture. Here we are back to the Oxford's collection of mechanical arts, or as Webster's puts it, "The totality of the means employed by a people to provide itself with the objects of material culture." We use this collective meaning when we blame "technology" for speeding up our lives, or talk of "technology" as a hope for mankind. Sometimes this meaning shades off into technology as a collective activity, as in "technology is what Silicon Valley is all about." I will allow this too as a variant of technology's collective meaning. The technology thinker Kevin Kelly calls this totality the "technium," and I like this word. But in this book I prefer to simply use "technology" for this because that reflects common use. The reason we need three meanings is that each points to technology in a different sense, a different category, from the others. Each category comes into being differently and evolves differently. A technology-singular-the steam engine-originates as a new concept and develops by modifying its internal parts. A technology-plural-electronics-comes into being by building around certain phenomena and components and develops by changing its parts and practices. And technology-general, the whole collection of all technologies that have ever existed past and present, originates from the use of natural phenomena and builds up organically with new elements forming by combination from old ones.

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

Stanford University’s John Koza, who pioneered genetic programming in 1986, has used genetic algorithms to invent an antenna for NASA, create computer programs for identifying proteins, and invent general purpose electrical controllers. Twenty-three times Koza’s genetic algorithms have independently invented electronic components already patented by humans, simply by targeting the engineering specifications of the finished devices—the “fitness” criteria. For example, Koza’s algorithms invented a voltage-current conversion circuit (a device used for testing electronic equipment) that worked more accurately than the human-invented circuit designed to meet the same specs. Mysteriously, however, no one can describe how it works better—it appears to have redundant and even superfluous parts. But that’s the curious thing about genetic programming (and “evolutionary programming,” the programming family it belongs to). The code is inscrutable. The program “evolves” solutions that computer scientists cannot readily reproduce. What’s more, they can’t understand the process genetic programming followed to achieve a finished solution. A computational tool in which you understand the input and the output but not the underlying procedure is called a “black box” system. And their unknowability is a big downside for any system that uses evolutionary components. Every step toward inscrutability is a step away from accountability, or fond hopes like programming in friendliness toward humans. That doesn’t mean scientists routinely lose control of black box systems. But if cognitive architectures use them in achieving AGI, as they almost certainly will, then layers of unknowability will be at the heart of the system. Unknowability might be an unavoidable consequence of self-aware, self-improving software.

Steiger presented another analysis by a professional engineer, who saw the wall carvings at Dendera as an accurate illustration of an electrical device—one which would not be out of place in a modern electrical blueprint file. "In regards to the ancient Egyptian electron tubes, electromagnetic engineer Professor S.R. Harris identified a box-and braided cable in the picture as 'virtually an exact copy of engineering illustration used today for representing a bundle of conducting wires.' The cable runs from the box the full length of the floor and terminates at both the ends and at the bases of two peculiar objects resting on two pillars. Professor Harris is said to have identified these representations as high voltage insulators.

I have a great deal of respect for Gordon Moore of Intel. We are fellow electrical and electronic engineers and I use many of his Intel products. However, I do see a man that is probably aware he is funding a known biologically toxic astronomy facility atop the most sacred mountain in Hawaii. How ethical is that? Have you ever heard Gordon Moore talk about Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS)? Some of his products are known to aggravate the debilitating condition that many people have started to develop around the world. It is the disease of electricity, electronics and wireless radiation.

If I had been shown how far electromagnetic fields extend out of electrical and electronic products, I probably would never have worked as an electrical and electronics engineer.

The challenge now is to decode the underlying meaning of small-world and scale-free architecture, if there is any. In one recent attempt, Solé has observed that electronic circuits tend to be wired in a small-world fashion, and he thinks he knows why. Whether he was analyzing the latest digital microchips or the clunky circuits found in old televisions, he found that all the components were just a few electrical steps from one another, yet they were much more clustered than they would have been in an equivalent random circuit, thanks to the modular design favored by engineering practice.

ON FEBRUARY 14, 1946, a breathless bustle filled the halls of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering in Philadelphia. On this day, the school’s secret jewel was going to be revealed to the world: the ENIAC. Inside a locked room at Moore hummed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first machine of its kind capable of performing calculations at lightning speed. Weighing thirty tons, the massive ENIAC used around eighteen thousand vacuum tubes, employed about six thousand switches, and encompassed upwards of half a million soldered joints; it had taken more than 200,000 man-hours to build.

To this end, they rely on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), that assigns each of them a different range of MAC addresses.

As far back as April, 1969, Spectrum, a publication of the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, featured

Voltage is measured in volts. Current is measured in amperes. Resistance is measured in ohms. One volt is the electrical pressure required to cause 1 ampere of current to flow through a resistance of 1 ohm. Scientists have made experiments which show that 6280 trillion electrons pass a given point each second when there is 1 ampere of current in a circuit.

ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and calculator) developed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, soon followed.

the research? “So many people, I did not know them all. They studied my work. They asked me questions. I told the ISI about it when I got home. A major like you, he was. You can check.” The major did not want to make more work for himself. And it was true, the story as it had been narrated and understood was all in the files. “Why did you go back to America?” he demanded, looking at a sheet of paper. “I was invited to present a paper at a conference that was cosponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It was a great honor for me, and for my university. You can ask them.” He held out his cell phone again, so that Major Nadeem could make a call to verify, but the major shook his head. They spent several more hours like this, going through the major episodes of Dr. Omar’s career. When they came to his most recent work on computer-security algorithms, Dr. Omar apologized that he could not talk about this work in any detail because it had been classified as “top secret” by the Pakistani military. The major found nothing of interest. Dr. Omar was very careful, then and always. The major asked him to sign a paper, and to report any suspicious contacts, and Dr. Omar assured him that he would. The Pakistani authorities never came after him again. That was three years before his world went white.   Omar al-Wazir had multiple binary identities, it could be said. He was a Pakistani but also, in some sense, a man tied to the West. He was a Pashtun from the raw tribal area of South Waziristan, but he was also a modern man. He was a secular scientist and also a Muslim, if not quite a believer. His loyalties might indeed have been confused before the events of nearly two years ago, but not now. Sometimes Dr. Omar grounded himself by recalling the spirit of his father, Haji Mohammed. He remembered the old man shaking his head when Omar took wobbly practice shots with an Enfield rifle, missing the target nearly every time. The look on the father’s face asked: How can this be my oldest son, this boy who cannot shoot? But Haji Mohammed had taught him the code of manhood, just the same. Omar had learned the

Most managers I have worked for have told me I have some of the best technical skills they have seen in an electrical and electronics engineer.

Our understanding of the world and our well-being rest, to an insufficiently appreciated degree, on the scientific and engineering advances made between 1867 and 1914. Those decades saw the invention and commercialization of internal combustion engines, electricity generation and electric lights and motors, the inexpensive production of steel, the smelting of aluminum, the introduction of telephones, the first plastics, the first electronic devices, and a rapid expansion of wireless communication. We also came to understand the spread of infectious diseases and the nutritional requirements for healthy growth (above all, the need for adequate protein intake), as well as the need for indispensable plant nutrients in securing abundant and affordable food supply. The

Our understanding of the world and our well-being rest, to an insufficiently appreciated degree, on the scientific and engineering advances made between 1867 and 1914. Those decades saw the invention and commercialization of internal combustion engines, electricity generation and electric lights and motors, the inexpensive production of steel, the smelting of aluminum, the introduction of telephones, the first plastics, the first electronic devices, and a rapid expansion of wireless communication. We also came to understand the spread of infectious diseases and the nutritional requirements for healthy growth (above all, the need for adequate protein intake), as well as the need for indispensable plant nutrients in securing abundant and affordable food supply

What do you call an electrical and electronics engineer with Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity? Unemployed!

The day we harnessed electron, was the beginning of artificial intelligence.

After purchasing a CLS, Tesla’s engineers tore it apart. One team had reshaped the boxy, rectangular battery pack from the Roadster and made it flat. The engineers cut the floor out of the CLS and plopped in the pack. Next they put the electronics that tied the whole system together in the trunk. After that, they replaced the interior of the car to restore its fit and finish. Following three months of work, Tesla had in effect built an all-electric Mercedes CLS.

As I reflect upon some of the exceptional leaders I’ve studied in my research, I’m struck by how Covey’s principles are manifested in many of their stories. Let me focus on one of my favorite cases, Bill Gates. It’s become fashionable in recent years to attribute the outsize success of someone like Bill Gates to luck, to being in the right place at the right time. But if you think about it, this argument falls apart. When Popular Electronics put the Altair computer on its cover, announcing the advent of the first-ever personal computer, Bill Gates teamed up with Paul Allen to launch a software company and write the BASIC programming language for the Altair. Yes, Gates was at just the right moment with programming skills, but so were other people—students in computer science and electrical engineering at schools like Cal Tech, MIT, and Stanford; seasoned engineers at technology companies like IBM, Xerox, and HP; and scientists in government research laboratories. Thousands of people could’ve done what Bill Gates did at that moment, but they didn’t. Gates acted upon the moment. He dropped out of Harvard, moved to Albuquerque (where the Altair was based), and wrote computer code day and night. It was not the luck of being at the right moment in history that separated Bill Gates, but his proactive response to being at the right moment (Habit 1: Be Proactive).