At EDN, we are analyzing data from a salary and job-satisfaction survey of electrical engineers worldwide. We’ll publish the results next month. But by coincidence, I just got a call from a reporter at Monster.com who wanted to talk about salary trends among electrical engineers.

I couldn’t divulge specific information from the forthcoming report on our global survey, but there are some interesting results worth commenting on in the August issue of IEEE Spectrum ("Engineers Are Doing Well by Doing Good," p. 64), which survey various engineering disciplines. Practitioners in computer science scored the highest salaries—at $90,000 for systems engineers and $80,000 for applications engineers. Electrical engineers came in at ...Read More

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Conventional wisdom holds that the foundry owns the responsibility to fund and manage the tools and processes associated with semiconductor product quality, says Phil Burlison at Verigy. However, he says, in the newer technology nodes, yield accountability involves more than the optical inline inspection and other related monitoring functions that are an integral part of the wafer-fabrication process. As process geometries shrink, he says, “There is a growing view that the quantitative data generated on ATE can be used well beyond a ‘go/no go’ filter for defects. Integral to this new process are the tools that can analyze and convert test-failure data into meaningful indicators of design/process problems.”

The emergence of such tools poses questions: who pays for them, how is the data that the tools generate promulgated, and to whom? To investigate ...Read More

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In a post last week I suggested that engineers and physicists might be better stewards of the economy than are politicians and economists. In an article in Slate, Jordan Ellenberg, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, suggests the economy is actually in the hands of not-too-smart gamblers.

In his post, titled “We're Down $700 Billion. Let's Go Double or Nothing!” Ellenberg likens the “complex derivatives behind the current financial havoc” to the martingale game—a “sure fire” way to make, for example, a hundred dollars on a coin-toss game. You bet $10...Read More

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Alice, Brother Jerome, Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Jabberwacky, and Ultra Hal are undoubtedly spending every waking moment cramming for the Turing test slated for Sunday October 12 at the University of Reading, under the auspices of The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. One or more of them hope (if I may ascribe human emotions to them in advance of passing the test) to answer the question—as an article in the Guardian puts it, “Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse with human interrogators in an experiment that will attempt to prove that the answer is yes.”

The go...Read More

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MIT will celebrate the 50th Smoot-aversary tomorrow, Saturday, October 4. The event honors Oliver Smoot, who served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) from 2001 to 2002 and as president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) from 2003 to 2004. He also famously served as his own “calibration standard”—with which the Harvard Bridge was found to measure 364.4 smoots (plus or minus one ear) in length. By the way you can use Google's online unit-conversion calculator to determine that semiconductor process geometries are approaching the 15-nanosmoot node.

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Should we leave the economy to politicians, financiers, and economists, or might physical scientists have something to contribute to the topic?

In a New York Times column titled “This Economy Does Not Compute,” Mark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, questions the wisdom of the former group, writing, “A few weeks ago, it seemed the financial crisis wouldn’t spin completely out of control. The government knew what it was doing—at least the economic experts were saying so—and the Treasury had taken a stand against saving failing firms, letting Lehman Brothers file for bankruptcy.” Unfortunately, he adds, the Lehman collapse was quickly followed by “the rescue of the insurance giant A.I.G., the arranged sale of ...Read More

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As I reviewed John McCain’s responses to Science Debate 2008 yesterday, I came across this statement: “Under my guiding hand, Congress developed a wireless spectrum policy that spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology that enables Americans to surf the web while sitting at a coffee shop, airport lounge, or public park.” That formulation seemed awfully close to Al Gore's March 1999 statement: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet," which was widely misinterpreted as a claim that he had invented the Internet.

Would pundits misattribute to McCain the claim that he invented cell-...Read More

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John McCain has responded to questions from Science Debate 2008, saying he would appoint a White House science and technology adviser. He also called for building 45 new reactors by 2030.

Here is a summary of how McCain responded to seven questions (of Science Debate 2008’s 14 total) that I highlighted (and paraphrased) in an earlier post ("For candidates, computer literacy optional, answers mandatory"):

• What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?

“My policies will provide broad pools of capital, low taxes and incentives for research in America, a commitment to a skilled and educated workforce, and a dedication to opening markets around the globe,” McCain says, adding that he would wor...Read More

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Salt Lake City, UT. What’s the role of test equipment in today’s military? Test equipment should have become obsolete by now, quipped Dan Christenson as he addressed the plenary session of Autotestcon 2008 (www.autotestcon.com), which convened here today. Costly ATE systems, he said, should have been driven out of existence by built-in test. Christenson, who is affiliated with the Air Force Global Logistics Support Center and serves as the Autotestcon general chairman, delivered his remarks while introducing keynote speaker Mark D. Johnson, the executive director of the Ogden Air Logistics Center at Hill Air Force Base (www.hill.af.mil).

Johnson addressed the fact that ATE continues to play a big role in the Air Force and other service branches. He began his speech citing “&hel...Read More

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Should technology replace human referees in sports events? Farhad Manjoo tackles that question in Slate this week in an article titled “Hey, Robot Ref! Are You Blind?” Manjoo’s article is partly inspired by Major League Baseball’s recent introduction of instant replay for certain “boundary calls.” But he focuses extensively on the Hawk-Eye system used in tennis, which “stitches together video footage from several high-speed cameras to produce a 3-D simulation” of a tennis ball’s trajectory. “Tennis,” he writes, “adopted Hawk-Eye after several high-profile matches were marred by bad c...Read More

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Barack Obama has responded to questions from Science Debate 2008, saying he would establish a national chief technology officer. He also said he supports the development of a new generation of nuclear electric technologies that address cost, safety, waste disposal, and proliferation risks.

Here is a summary of how he responded to seven questions (of Science Debate 2008’s 14 total) that I highlighted (and paraphrased) in an earlier post ("For candidates, computer literacy optional, answers mandatory"):

• What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?

“Our talent for innovation is still the envy of the world, but we face unprecedented challenges that demand new approaches,” he says. &ldq...Read More

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It’s easy to take a digital, binary view of the 17th century Church vs. Galileo conflict: Galileo right, Pope Urban VIII wrong. But the issue is more nuanced, and Galileo’s interaction with church officials demonstrated the problems that can result when scientists and prelates trespass in each other’s realms. Such problems persist to this day and take on great emphasis in an election year, when candidates should be asked (as the organization Science Debate 2008 wants them to be) how they might reconcile their own personal beliefs with conflicting scientific evidence.

The Galileo story even involves a supposed “gap” in the heliocentric theory that seemingly let critics prove Galileo wrong on his own scientific turf. I was prompted to review the story by an August 28 articl...Read More

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