Having children makes you look to the future – you have hopes and dreams for them and want to prepare them well for what is to come. But it has occurred to me on numerous occasions that we base our decisions on what we know now, not what is likely to be the reality in
There has been a lot of column inches dedicated to the subject of driverless cars in recent months as trials on UK roads have got under way. Less, however, has been written about autonomous transport of another kind – namely driverless boats. It would seem a no-brainer that if the technology is almost here to
We have written a couple of well-received posts in the past about combating engineering’s image problem, engineering; a profession or a trade and also addressed why there are so few women in engineering – all subjects that are close to my heart. I recently read a wonderfully simple explanation that to ‘engineer’ literally means to “make things
Quality is a word that does not seem to be banded around as much as it used to be. In my experience the industry seems to go through cycles, or fads where certain initiatives come and go. I suspect that this is linked to economic climate more than anything else – in the ’80s quality initiatives were rolled-out across
There are thousands of examples of how nature has guided technological development throughout human history. No-one did more to pioneer this approach than the great Leonardo himself who used detailed studies of nature, anatomy and biology to invent incredible machines such as his “Mechanical Dragonfly”, “Great Kite”, “Flying Machine” or “Glider”. Although some 500 years have