(note that the words in parenthesis are my own opinions)
Why are women underrepresented in engineering? (public perception? Biological differences? Do women study things that interest them more because they are not expected to be the major breadwinner in the family? Are the students who study engineering really aware of what it entails and whether they really love it? Is it more of a status thing that men are more attracted to? )

What are engineers? (People who know how to make things but do not really have any influence policy-wise. Those who do have power tell them what to do/make and they do it.)

MIT students created E. coli that smelled fresh for graduation project. When asked if they felt like god creating a new life-form, student said “No, we’re engineers, we just design things.” has no awareness of the effects of their work.

Very little about engineering courses are on humanitarian subjects <85% science and math v.s. 15 % humanities>.

When we were children we worked with ‘connecting the dot’ workbooks. These kind of activities have persisted throughout our education and churned out people unable to go outside the box for better solutions to real life problems. Real life is not like a work problem. It is complex and multi-faceted. (wow, no wonder those connect the dots books were so boring!)

Engineering has changed time: “Anthropogenic Impact on Global Geodynamics due to Reservoir water improvements” NASA changed length of day

Quote: “Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions” (an example of how short term thinking in technological design has failed our future generations)

“Our underachieving colleges”book

Complex Systems: What is it?
- Systems of systems : nonlinear dynamic systems
- Emergent behavior
- Sometimes adaptive
- Cannot predict from constitutional parts
(Like the difference between James Bond way of solving crime and CSI, Numbers way of solving crime) Yes, in fact one of the advisors to the series Numbers is a Complex Systems development director.

Way to look at things go from: Simple Complicated Complex
Simple and complicated are deterministic approaches.

In Stockholm, they have traffic problems. They could choose to build more bridges to ‘relieve congestion’, but they chose to hire IBM, which put together a task force of different professions, and devised a tariff solution that lowered traffic immensely and got a lot of people going for public transport (of course he mentioned statistics, but as I tend not to remember specific numbers they’re not quoted here)

Pure technological solutions are not going to solve the big problems our world is facing. They must be combined with policy, with economy, with sociology. cap and trade.

(Here he mentioned ‘reverse engineer the brain’ which I did not catch /understand completely.)

If you like math and science, you go into math and science, you don’t go into engineering. If you’re concerned about solving human problems, you go into engineering.

4 reasons people choose a major:
<1> Pressure: Dad wants you to
<2> Currency: You want to make money
<3> Legacy: You want to make a difference
<4> Luxury: Study something you really enjoy
Many schools operate under the concept of letting as many people in as possible, and then weeding them out and making them lose interest. This is not a good idea. It’s better to screen the people coming in first, and when they’re in do the best to help them and ensure that they graduate. The best schools in the US have this luxury.
State Universities: Anyone can get in but it’s very difficult to get out.

Question after: (Why are women underrepresented in engineering?) Because they view it as a job where they’re unlikely to interact with their environment and they’re more social creatures who want to interact with their environment. That is why more than half the med students in the US are now females, but in engineering it’s still vastly underrepresented.
(Note: phrasing may be different due to slower pen)
http://www.uvm.edu/~cems/explore/holistic.pdf



After thought:
I think in one way our education here has failed us is that it expects us to make a choice in high school – sciences or humanities? At the outset it weeds out girls who have as yet no idea what they can get out of the sciences and thus are selected to the humanities which are easier to learn because they’re more interesting to our minds. However, when they start getting notion of what they want to do with their life later on in high school or in the beginning of college they are already stuck without an option to go into the sciences. This also selects for people who spend much of their vital formative years dragging their minds through formulas when in fact the humanities are much more vital towards forming their characters and sense of social responsibility. By the time they are in university they are individuals who are perfectly capable of solving difficult questions on paper but unable to apply it well to the complex problems of life. The people in humanities, with their more developed social skills, are more likely to go into politics, whilst the people in sciences are relegated to white collar labor jobs in biotech companies, and reclused from public life in academia. However, both awareness of the sciences and a fair understanding of the humanities is vital towards healthy policies.
We need balance and practice in thinking rather than grafting knowledge.