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Letters to the editor
By Design News Staff -- Design News, July 5, 1999
The education myth
I have to disagree with the statement, "the half-life of a good technical education is perhaps five or 10 years" (Ask the Manager, 6/7/99). This is a myth I have seen in several publications over the years without any supporting evidence. Does the statement mean that engineers lose half of the knowledge learned in college after five or 10 years? After reading the letters in the last few issues of Design News on how unprepared new engineering graduates are, I would say it is quite the opposite.
After working with many customers and vendors, I feel I have an excellent working knowledge of several CAD systems as used by these different companies to design their products. How many new graduates can bring this type of experience to their first job? This is just one example of how unprepared new engineers are.
The "half-life myth" is advocated by misguided managers who want an excuse to fire experienced but higher-paid engineers to replace them with inexperienced, lesser-paid new graduates. In my experience, losing the knowledge of the seasoned engineer combined with the cost of the learning curve of the new graduate never equals the financial gain from having a lesser-paid employee.
A technical education is the foundation for a lifetime of learning. To the many engineers I have had the privilege of working with, college graduation is the door to a world of knowledge. It is not the slow decay of their knowledge and skills.
Design News should refrain from perpetuating this absurd myth without backing it up with some hard evidence.
Peter Massaras
H.L. Yoh Co.
Philadelphia, PA
Your toast, baby
In the 4/19/99 issue of Design News, we posed the following No-problem problem: "What is the smallest possible toaster--a nano-toaster--that would make good quality toast?" Several readers described why this problem can't be solved:
The answer is simple. The size of the toaster would be determined by the size of bread that is consumed in a household. For example, a toaster in a Pop-Tart factory would be relatively small compared to one in Texas!
Chris Wiehle
Melrose T-Top International
Cortland, IL
The flaw in developing a nano-toaster begins with the semiconductor interlayer lazing (emission in the infrared region) effect and its ability to direct the energy toward the target food. This lazing interferes with the nano-mechanism that advances the target food, so that a non-knife has to be used to dislodge the food. The second issue relates to metering of the energy after first use so that the second target food is toasted to the same golden brown. If the budget can afford another $2 million hit, the development team can solve these minor concerns.
Glenn Roenigk,
Engineer
AAI Corp.
The problem does not lie in how small a toaster can be made, because with the AutoCAD command "scale," one can make the toaster as small as one wants. The problem lies in creating a nano yeast to make the nano loaf of bread with nano holes.
Thomas R. Wiatak
Centerline Drafting Service
Brunswick, OH
I estimate costs for the parts we make, so I am always looking for cost-effective designs. Therefore, the best solution is the same toaster that you always had. Instead of waiting for the toast to pop up, all you have to do is turn the toaster over and harvest the crumbs. They may be more like milli- or micro-toast, but you know the quality is good because someone had the larger size earlier. An added bonus is that your toaster will be cleaned, which should be done once in a while anyway.
Julia Nelson
Application Engineer
Stock Drive Products
And the winning entry...
This problem can't be solved, at least not as a commercial success due to some harsh realities about the toaster industry. Ever since the invention of the electric toaster we have been aware that buttered toast lands butter-side down. This is not an accident. The bread consortium put up the funding for the first toaster design, and still holds the lion's share of the toaster market.
Rob Phelps, a savvy designer, saw a huge opportunity for the bread industry when inventing the toaster. He carefully measured and cataloged a host of parameters, including average kitchen counter height, bread densities, rotational dynamics, etc. and built the first toaster to only accept bread that would have the proper rotational dynamics to fall butter-side down. The toast slot width and length limited the maximum for those dimensions, while the depth of the slot limited the minimum slice length. Any bread that would fit in his toaster would complete a half turn on the way down, plus or minus less than a quarter turn.
The result is the butter hits the floor and gets dirty, forcing the customer to get another slice. Over the years this has resulted in at least a 6% increase in total bread sales since the dawn of the toaster. That totals to untold billions of dollars.
So you see, any toaster that messes with the rotational dynamics of bread will be up against a bread conglomerate that will use whatever tactics necessary to force it out of the market. If you want a better idea about those tactics, watch the movie Tucker.
S. Scheuermann
Senior R&D Engineer
ConMed Corp.
Note: Opinions expressed are those of our readers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Design News.
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