Engineering Quotations | Page 3

The aim of human rights, if I may borrow a term from engineering, is to move beyond the design and drawing-board phase, to move beyond thinking and talking about the foundations stones - to laying those foundation stones, inch by inch, together.

Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.

I'm against ObamaCare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change.... I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering... I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.

The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.

Our yearning for democracy is accompanied by a no less profound yearning for peace. And the media also faced the task of historical engineering to establish this required truth. We therefore have phenomena called 'peace missions' and the 'peace process'. These are terms that apply to whatever the United States happens to be doing or advocating at some moment... in short, 'War is Peace'.

Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.

My worry is that other advances in science may result in other means of mass destruction, maybe more readily available even than nuclear weapons. Genetic engineering is quite a possible area, because of these dreadful developments that are taking place there.

I am trying to get at the moral arguments and the ethical status of various attempts at enhancement, or genetic engineering, or the bid for designer children. But there are implications for society at large.

Land surveyors can spend as much time reading legislation, bylaws, and engineering documents as we spend in front of an instrument in the field or calculating coordinates for a subdivision. We are mathematicians, historians, project managers, advocates, engineers, and even chainsaw operators!

Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.

I will be sufficiently rewarded if when telling it to others you will not claim the discovery as your own, but will say it was mine.

Tragically, some people are genetically more susceptible than others to agripoisons and industrial pollutants. Genetic engineering to correct these medical problems is a narrow (reductionistic) and instrumental (mechanistic) response to a problem that is fundamentally conceptual: namely, our attitude toward life and our mistreatment of the Earth, plants, and animals-and ourselves in the process.

Lorenzo de' Medici seeks highly skilled, aesthetically oriented individual to conceive and implement several major public projects. You are a generalist with sound training in structural engineering, synthesis of pigments and Christian iconography. Some climbing involved

The other dynamic keeping the stock market up - both for technology stocks and others - is that companies are using a lot of their income for stock buybacks and to pay out higher dividends, not make new investment,. So to the extent that companies use financial engineering rather than industrial engineering to increase the price of their stock you're going to have a bubble. But it's not considered a bubble, because the government is behind it, and it hasn't burst yet.

The underlying strategy of the Fed is to tell people, "Do you want your money to lose value in the bank, or do you want to put it in the stock market?" They're trying to push money into the stock market, into hedge funds, to temporarily bid up prices. Then, all of a sudden, the Fed can raise interest rates, let the stock market prices collapse and the people will lose even more in the stock market than they would have by the negative interest rates in the bank. So it's a pro-Wall Street financial engineering gimmick.

Engineering isn't about perfect solutions; it's about doing the best you can with limited resources.

Energy Engineering started first in IIT Kharagpur in 1983 and mine was the third batch. It was definitely not a popular course. It was basically an amalgamation of nuclear, mechanical, chemical engineering, etc. But I don't think it was a big factor because if we look, most of them joined the IT sectors and not the energy sector.

It is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering — only expensive — blind, faint-hearted, doubting world.

There are fields of scientific work...which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology...in which every single notion receives a separate and different name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.

Companies want to innovate. Companies that don't innovate wither on the vine. The connection between STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and the financial stability of a nation is what needs to established.

I was taking chemical engineering. But I went into the army after that. When I came out of the army, I was a different person. I met a lot of good jazz players in the army.

PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job.

A classic engineering mistake and one I've made is confusing what is hard and what is valuable.

Happiness is German engineering, Italian cooking, and Belgian chocolate.

During the war years I worked on the development of radar and other radio systems for the R.A.F. and, though gaining much in engineering experience and in understanding people, rapidly forgot most of the physics I had learned.

The benefits of medical research are real - but so are the potential horrors of genetic engineering and embryo manipulation. We devise heart transplants, but do little for the 15 million who die annually of malnutrition and related diseases. Our cleverness has grown prodigiously - but not our wisdom.

What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.

Progress is cumulative in science and engineering, but cyclical in finance.

There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy.

The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.

Very few people can communicate with one another. The only language that's not subject to interpretation is mathematics, chemistry, basic science, engineering principles, and applied agriculture. But other than that, many systems today are subject to interpretation.

He only wishes there were something that would heal the scars in his mind, which he can still feel. He sees his mind now as an archipelago of islands that he labors to build bridges between - and while he's had great success engineering the most spectacular of bridges, he suspects there are some islands that he'll never reach.

For every scientific (or engineering) action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction.

Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms of the income x; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in another interval or bracket of income. An archeologist who, five thousand years from now, shall unearth some of our income tax returns together with relics of engineering works and mathematical books, will probably date them a couple of centuries earlier, certainly before Galileo and Vieta.

What is commonly overlooked in using the computer is the fact that the central goal of design is still to obviate failure, and thus it is critical to identify exactly how a structure may fail. The computer cannot do this by itself . . .

A failed structure provides a counterexample to a hypothesis and shows us incontrovertibly what cannot be done, while a structure that stands without incident often conceals whatever lessons or caveats it might hold for the next generation of engineers.

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.

Engineering, like poetry, is an attempt to approach perfection. And engineers, like poets, are seldom completely satisfied with their creations. They notice, even if no one else does, the world that is not quite le mot juste, or the hairline crack that blemishes the structure.

Engineers are not superhuman. They make mistakes in their assumptions, in their calculations, in their conclusions. That they make mistakes is forgivable; that they catch them is imperative. Thus it is the essence of modern engineering not only to be able to check one's own work but also to have one's work checked and to be able to check the work of others.

It seems to be saying perpetually; 'I am the end of the nineteenth century; I am glad they built me of iron; let me rust.' ... It is like a passing fool in a crowd of the University, a buffoon in the hall; for all the things in Paris has made, it alone has neither wits nor soul.

My latter schooldays and my university days were during the war, when science - physics, in particular - was a very important and glamorous subject. A lot of us felt that if we couldn't get into science, we might try engineering or medicine.

I would staple a green card to the diploma of anyone that graduates with a degree in the physical sciences or engineering in the U.S.

You had to make a camera look like it's traveling at 300 mph, but you couldn't make it actually travel at 300 mph so you had to slow everything down and build devices to do that. So you were constantly engineering.

I like engineering, but I love the creative input.

Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko… all believed in the social role of art… Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering; music with painting; poetry with design; fine art with propaganda; photographs with typography; diagrams with action; the studio with the street…

The 19th century was the great period of engineering, thanks to the railways, thanks to lots of discoveries in metallurgy.

It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.

I am looking at opening a school of social engineering. The McAfee School of Social Engineering has a nice ring to it. Beyond that, it is hard to say what life will bring my way.

I think of modern marriage as a car strangely fashioned out of an old abandoned horse carriage, built upon the framework of a mule cart. All the original engineering is still there, underneath it all.

Whether you're studying electrical engineering or poetry, college is not about maximizing income, it's about becoming a better and more informed observer of the universe. And for me, at least, that what's leads to a more fulfilling life.

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.

Spread the truth-the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.

A country's competitiveness starts not on the factory floor or in the engineering lab. It starts in the classroom.

We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us.

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

Engineering is easy - it's the people problems that are hard.

I have run engineering since day one at Oracle, and I still run engineering. I hold meetings every week with the database team, the middle ware team, the applications team. I run engineering and I will do that until the board throws me out of there.

If I were 21 years old, I would go into biotechnology or genetic engineering.

I wanted to further my education, so I went on to get a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and came back and served about ten years in the Canadian Navy as what we call a combat systems engineer.

Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as 'all of Estonia.'

All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint.

In Lagos there's a really strong case to resurrect strong parts. Embedded in all of it are some amazing pieces of planning, amazing pieces of engineering and interaction. For instance, the campus of Lagos University is stunningly beautiful, efficient and generous, and that needs to be recognised and preserved.

I think the ethics and morals of genetic engineering are very complicated. It intrigues me.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

Engineering is the application of scientific principles toward practical ends. If the engineering isn't practical, it's bad engineering.

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!

Put glibly: In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state.

Science is concerned with what is possible while engineering is concerned with choosing, from among the many possible ways, one that meets a number of often poorly stated economic and practical objectives.

Those with engineering skills will build tomorrow's genius computers. But those with the ability to create knowledge of any kind will be the ones who are best able to extract great value from them. The way to create value in the age of genius machines will be to compile and disseminate knowledge that other people will find useful.

Building on our successful partnership, we can now bring together the best of Microsoft's software engineering with the best of Nokia's product engineering, award-winning design, and global sales, marketing and manufacturing,

The biggest engineering companies, like Schlumberger, Halliburton and others, have technology they spent billions of dollars developing.

Productivity is most important by engineering management rules, but enjoyment is most important for engineers. One stems from the other.

All we know about the new economic world is that nations which train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness.

If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!

I hire people who can do their jobs and who will advise me of things they don't agree with. The worst thing you can do is get in a room with 14 people who say, "OK!" Then you really are making decisions about engineering and finance and other areas.

We are more dependent on science and engineering than at any other time in history. However, there is plenty of evidence that far too many people are scientifically illiterate, often having been put off science at school.

In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. These two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related.

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.

The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded.... I fear that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.

The reason our country looks the way it does is through social engineering that distinctly benefits suburban communities, exurban communities, and often white residents. And we are socially engineered in such a way as to, often unconsciously and unintentionally, but sometimes intentionally, perpetuate this divisive inequality.

I didn't write because in the corps I took mining engineering of all things and, you know, they, they graduate a mining engineer as a sort of an illiterate.

The glory of science is, that it is freeing the soul, breaking the mental manacles, getting the brain out of bondage, giving courage to thought, filling the world with mercy, justice, and joy.

By the time we, consumers, are aware of processes like genetic engineering, they're already being done. It's sort of like the war in Iraq: By the time we know about it, it's almost a fait accompli. And that's certainly true with science.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

Engineering is not quite as important as imagination

Today's water institutions-the policies and laws, government agencies and planning and engineering practices that shape patterns of water use-are steeped in a supply-side management philosophy no longer appropriate to solving today's water problems.

I believe that the time has arrived for medical investigation of the problems of manned rocket flight, for it will not be the engineering problems but rather the limits of the human frame that will make the final decision as to whether manned space flight will eventually become a reality.

Science has discovered much. The engineering is wonderful, epicycles and all. And yet, as we look at this vast, elaborate structure built on layer and layer of complex constituents, can we help but be reminded of the Land of Oz. Have we found the Emerald City? Is this what we were searching for? Is this the ultimate fabric of reality? Is this all there is?

That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think. But our primary problem as universities is not engineering that future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key issue for us is our ability to organize this information once it has been amassed - to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and assure its survival for use by generations to come.

The trauma of 9/11 stimulated infinite possibilities for worry - some quite plausible, but most inspired by remote what-if fantasies. A society bingeing on fear makes itself vulnerable to far more profound forms of destruction than terror attacks. The "terrorism war", like a nostalgic echo of the cold war, is using these popular fears to advance a different agenda - the re-engineering of American life through permanent mobilization.

Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

Companies like I.B.M. have offered women scholarships to study engineering for years, and women engineers routinely get higher starting salaries than men.

Perhaps the best reason to consider the hard sciences is that, well, one study suggests science, engineering, medicine, and dentistry graduates live longer than arts graduates (or law grads). So whatever money you make you can keep a bit longer.

Software will get to be somewhat more mature, ah, but it will never be as predictable as most areas of engineering.

Most of our competitors were one-product wonders... They would do their one product, but never get their engineering sorted out.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering. When you finally get done and get to appreciate what you have done it is like a part of yourself that you've put together. I think a lot of the people here feel that way.