All in chemical engineering
Christina Pikas has some thoughts and questions about the kinds of people for whom blogging works as personal information management. Can scientists jump onto the blogging bandwagon? Does it make sense?
I had an interesting conversation the other day. An organization that does both research and manufacturing wants a system that will help them see knowledge across all their products. Does anyone know of such a monster?
On November 17, 2003 Michael Shafer's computer found the 40th known Mersenne prime, 220,996,011-1! Michael is a chemical engineering graduate student.
During the AIChE conference last month, and during many such conferences, the question of what is it to "do" chemical engineering arises. I've always liked to think of it as using chemistry, math, physics to develop salable goods and services. Even this doesn't fit all people who do chemical engineering.
At the AIChE meeting, Cawas Cooper from Air Products talked about a project that evolved from their Innovation Week, where people were encouraged to come up with new ideas and collaborate with their colleagues to sell the idea to their respective management. Those projects that get management blessing are pursued.
More from the AIChE meeting. Jonathan Worstell of Shell Chemical in Houston talked in a a number of sessions about the importance of Concurrent Engineering. In Worstell's view, the basic problem that Concurrent Engineering solves is that projects are too complex and too long for traditional serial engineering, where each phase...
Some more thoughts about designing experiements based on talks at the AIChE annual meeting.
I have a lot of thoughts running about my head after the AIChE conference. One of the topics that happens to have a lot of blogosphere crossover recently is working with limited resources, whether in the lab or in business.
As a chemical engineer by training and someone who likes to cook, it is good to know that scientists like to ply their skills in the kitchen.