It is Tomorrow’s Engineers Week 2019 here in the UK, which according to its organizers “provides a unique opportunity for engineers, employers, universities and schools to showcase how engineers working in all sectors are on a mission to make the world a better place”.
An important challenge for engineering community is how to communicate exactly who is an engineer and what it is that they do. This was illustrated perfectly this week by an exercise undertaken by folks at the Royal Academy of Engineering, who used an artificial intelligence machine learning model called a generative adversarial network (GAN) to analyse more than 1100 images of engineers that are available online. GAN then outputted images that it concluded were representative of engineers: and the majority of these were of white men wearing hard hats.
This stereotype was backed up by an online search of images of engineers, where 63% of the images on the first page of results were people wearing hardhats. To address this stereotype, the Royal Academy has a website called This is Engineering, which includes biographies of a diverse bunch of engineers as well as the above video.
Who could resist a preprint called “The physics of fun: quantifying human engagement into playful activities”? The paper is by David Reguera and colleagues at the University of Barcelona, who have analysed the behaviour of millions of video-game players.
They have discovered a scaling law (what else) that describes the dynamics of how people engage with the games. Furthermore, they have identified a phase transition that occurs when a person decides to stop playing a game. Rather than only applying to video games, the team believes that they have characterized, “general and profound behaviour of how humans become engaged in challenging activities with intrinsic rewards.
For those looking to get a head start on Christmas gifts, how about some space-related ovine apparel for that special person in your life? The European Space Agency (ESA) has teamed up with UK-based Aardman Animations and film distributor StudioCanal to produce a range of merchandise to tie in with the Shaun the Sheep movie, Farmageddon.
The film, which was released in October, features an alien called Lu-La who crash-lands near Shaun’s home at Mossy Bottom Farm. Shaun and the gang then help the alien to safely get back home. Earlier this year, to prepare for his space adventure, Shaun even flew onboard an Airbus A310 aircraft that simulates the weightlessness that astronauts experience in space by undergoing a series of “parabolas”. The collection – branded with ESA and Farmageddon logos and icons – includes T-shirts, hoodies, mugs and bags. With a mug costing €15.90 and a tote bag setting you back €19.90, the design seems not the only thing that is astronomical.
