30 fun facts about engineering, science and technology

1.      220 million tons of old computers and other technological hardware are trashed in the United States each year.

2.      A diamond will not dissolve in acid. The only thing that can destroy it is intense heat.

3.      According to Moore's Law, microchips double in power every 18 to 24 months.

4.      Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921.

5.      Although the famous first flight at Kitty Hawk took place on December 17, 1903, the secretive Wright Brothers did not demonstrate the technology to the broader public until August 8, 1908.

6.      As of early 2009, there have been 113 space shuttle flights since the program began in 1981.

7.      Bill Clinton's inauguration in January 1997 was the first to be webcast.

8.      Chuck Yeager blasted through the sound barrier at Edwards Air Force Base in 1947.

9.      Einstein received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, the phenomenon by which electrons are knocked out of matter by electromagnetic radiation such as light.

10.   In 1901, the Spanish engineer Leonar do Torres-Quevedo was responsible for the earliest developments in the remote control with his Telekine that was able to do "mechanical movements at a distance."

11.   In their Miyagi, Japan laboratories, beginning in 1924, Professor Hidetsugu Yagi and his assistant, Shintaro Uda, designed and constructed a sensitive and highly-directional antenna using closely-coupled parasitic elements. The antenna, which is effective in the higher-frequency ranges, has been important for radar, television, and amateur radio.

12.   Marie Curie was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes for Science

13.   No one has received more U.S. patents than Thomas Edison – 1,093 to be exact.

14.   On 11 July 1962, France received the first transatlantic transmission of a TV signal from a twin station in Andover, Maine, USA via the TELSTAR satellite.

15.   On 9 June 1906 the Winnipeg Electric Railway Co. transmitted electric power from the Pinawa generating station on the Winnipeg River to the city of Winnipeg at 60,000 volts. It was the first year-round hydroelectric plant in Manitoba and one of the first to be developed in such a cold climate anywhere in the world.

16.   On December 12, 1901, a radio transmission of the Morse code letter 'S' was broadcast from Poldhu, Cornwall, England, using equipment built by John Ambrose Fleming.

17.   One third of the world population has never made a telephone call.

18.   Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse code, was a painter as well. One of his portraits is of the first governor of Arkansas and hangs in the governor’s mansion of that state.

19.   Telecommunications satellites, and other satellites that need to maintain their position above a specific place on the earth, must orbit at 35,786 kilometers and travel in the same direction as the earth's rotation.

20.   The circumference of the earth is about 25,000 miles. Its surface area is about 200,000,000 square miles and it weighs 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.

21.   The Ericsson Company first produced cellular phones in 1979.

22.   The first computer mouse was introduced in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart at the Fall Joint Computer Expo in San Francisco.

23.   The first Japanese-language word processor was developed in Tokyo between 1971 and 1978.

24.   The first laser was made in California in 1960.

25.   The first two video games copyrighted in the U.S. were Asteroids and Lunar Lander in 1980.

26.   The Internet is the fastest-growing communications tool ever. It took radio broadcasters 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million, television 13 years, and the Internet just 4 years.

27.   There have been 113 space shuttle flights since the program began in 1981.

28.   Tim Berners-Lee coined the phrase “World Wide Web” in 1990.

29.   U.S. President Bill Clinton's inauguration in January 1997 was the first to be webcast.

30.   Valdemar Poulsen, a Danish engineer, invented an arc converter as a generator of continuous-wave radio signals in 1902.

5 things that Computer Science Engineering students should focus on

What should students be really focusing on? Somebody asked me this question recently – Imagine students who are in 2nd or 3rd year of their degree course right now. They’ll spend a few years finishing college, and a few years just learning the ropes at their first job. So it will really be about 5 years before their career really starts. What will the software technology world be like at that time, and what are the skills that students can work on acquiring right now to ensure that they are well positioned to thrive?

Of course, 5 years is a long time, and to quote Neils Bohr, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. Still I think some general trends are clear, and there are some other timeless skills that are worth looking at. Based on that I’m giving my list below.

But wait!

Let me not bias your thoughts. Before you read my list, skip to thecomments section below, and put down your list. Then read my list and critique it again in the comments. Hopefully we can have a good discussion that will benefit students.

So, here’s my list of areas students need to be thinking about:

• The next billion customers: The IT revolution has probably reached a billion people of the world so far. In the next 5 years, it will reach the next billion. These will be a very different set of people. Many of them will be illiterate – so you need to focus on non-text, non-English interfaces – video, animations, voice recognition. Search for “English Seekho” to get an idea of what I mean. Most won’t have money or electricity for computers, so mobile devices will rule – so you need to start playing with mobile platforms like Android. In general, search for the “the next billion” and you’ll find some interesting material put together by the likes of Nokia, and MIT giving you ideas on what to focus on.
• Usability: As IT touches the lives of more and more people, less and less of them will be “computer savvy”, and less and less of them will view computing devices as something that needs to be learnt. Consequently, the products that will succeed, will be the ones that are easy to use. And making something easy to use is rather difficult. It is a sub-discipline of computer science, and there is a lot of theory, and a bunch of well-defined algorithms and practices you can use to make things easy to use. The whole area is called HCI (Human Computer Interaction), and UCD (User Centered Design) is a part of it. It’s an area that you must be familiar with
• Computer Science Fundamentals: This will never go out of fashion, and yes, when I look at students coming out of our colleges, this appears to be a rather neglected area. Far too much emphasis on specificprogramming languages, and specific “technologies” is a mistake. Whatever the future holds, you will be well served by knowing the basic theory of computer sciences. Learn data-structures and algorithms. If you don’t have a favourite data-structure, and an algorithm that you find beautiful, then your computer science education is incomplete. If, after seeing an algorithm, your first thought is not about the complexity of the algorithm (O(n), O(log n), etc.), then you need to hit your books again. If you’ve only learned Java and C#, and you don’t really understand pointers, heaps, stacks, you will sooner or later be at a disadvantage. Understand the basics. And while you’re at it, also learn mathematics and statistics.
• Presentation skills: This is not a computer science skill, but this is one of the most important skills that computer science students are missing. You must treat presentation as equally important, or more important than your program, design, and algorithms. And you must spend as much time learning presentation (from books, in classes, and in practice) as you spent on programming languages, and computer science subjects. I’m sure you haven’t done that, hence this item in my list. You should know how to write well. Not just papers and documents, but much more importantly, emails, and blog posts, and facebook wall postings, and tweets. You must think about what the user/reader/client wants to know (instead of what you know and want to tell). And of course, you must know how to speak well. How to tell a story instead of listing some arcane facts about your work. How to leave out stuff that you find extremely interesting, but the listener doesn’t.
• Economics: Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert says: “When you have a working knowledge of economics, it’s like having a mild super power.” Basically, if you understand the fundamentals of economics, you can see and understand what drives people and technologies and success and failure a lot better than people who do not understand it. I hated the fact that I was made to study economics in IIT for my computer science course. It seemed like a complete waste of my time. Now, looking back, I think it was probably the most important course.

What you learn in COMPUTER SCIENCE engineering??: started with enthusiasm

What you learn in COMPUTER SCIENCE engineering??: started with enthusiasm: started engineering in a enthusiastic way....wanted to invent something new...wanted to change the world, got scared on first day after see...

started with enthusiasm

started engineering in a enthusiastic way....wanted to invent something new...wanted to change the world, got scared on first day after seeing knowledge of others. later that proved to be useless when they were copying my answer sheet during exam-

so the lesson is NEVER DOUBT ON YOURSELF