Tag Archives: February

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Colloquy (February)

Illustration from 1913 showing Pythagoras teaching a class of women. Pythagoras believed that women should be taught philosophy as well as men and many prominent members of his school were women.Our practice is fairly structured as our Syllabus reveals.  Once a month we like to break form and throw our agenda “open”.  Unstructured.  Completely determined by the interest of our clients, colleagues and followers.  Use the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.

Abiit sed non oblitus | Michigan

Why Intellectuals Drift Towards Socialism

“Reflections on the motive power of fire: | Sadi Carnot

Standards February: Discovery & Invention

Standards January: Language

* Lyndon B. Johnson played a significant role in the passage of the Education Acts of 1965, which consisted of two key pieces of legislation: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the Higher Education Act (HEA).

As President of the United States, Johnson made education reform a priority of his administration and saw it as a means of addressing poverty and inequality in America. He signed the ESEA into law in April 1965, which was designed to provide funding to schools serving low-income students and aimed to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their more affluent peers. The ESEA also provided funds for teacher training and other educational programs.

In November of the same year, Johnson signed the HEA into law, which provided funding for college and university education and sought to make higher education more accessible to all Americans.

Together, these Education Acts of 1965 were a significant achievement for Johnson’s administration and played a crucial role in expanding educational opportunities for millions of Americans. They marked a major shift in federal education policy and helped to establish the federal government’s role in shaping education policy in the United States.

 

National Institutes of Health (Library of Medicine)

Moral grandstanding in public discourse: Status-seeking motives as a potential explanatory mechanism in predicting conflict

 


Dr. Jill Jacobs-Biden: Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Student’s Needs

Michelle Obama: Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community

Dr. Claudine Gay: Taking charge: Black electoral success and the redefinition of American politics

Ibram X. Kendi (Henry Rogers):  The Black Campus Movement: An Afrocentric Narrative History of the Struggle to Diversify Higher Education, 1965-1972

Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman

Hilary Clinton: There is Only the Fight…

John Kennedy: Appeasement at Munich

Janet Yellen: Employment, Output and Capital Accumulation in an Open Economy: A Disequilibrium Approach.

John Nash: Non-Cooperative Games

Reflections / John Nash

 

Professional Engineering Licensure

Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been. - Albert Einstein

Intuitive Machines

Electrical Engineering License: Example Questions

Short Circuit Calculations

Electric Machines Motors & Generators

Digital Electronics

Power Systems

Stability Analysis

Communication

Illumination

Cost Analysis and Project Economics

Python

Mechanical Engineering License: Example Questions

Civil Engineering License: Example Questions

Certifying the Certifiers

What Is A Standard Drink?

 

“It’s a fine line between Saturday night

and Sunday morning” – Jimmy Buffett

 

“Rather a bottle in front of me

than a frontal lobotomy” — Some guy

 

Many people are surprised to learn what counts as a “drink”. The amount of liquid in your glass, can, or bottle does not necessarily match up to how much alcohol is actually in your drink.  Even before the United States federal government withdrew from regulating alcohol, the conversation, and degree of agreement and  attitude, remains remarkably regionally specific:

Missouri University of Science & Technology: What is a Standard Drink?

University of South Alabama: What is a Standard Drink?

Stanford University Office of Alcohol Policy and Education

Other nations serve alcohol to students on campus in university owned facilities.

Maynooth University Student Union County Kildare


College students create the ultimate hangover cure


Boiler & Pressure Vessel Code

“Mechanic and Steam Pump” | Lewis W. Hine (1921)

 

The heating and cooling requirements of K-12 schools, college and university educational, medical research and healthcare delivery campuses are a large market for boiler pressure vessel manufacturers, installers, maintenance personnel and inspectors.  The demand for building new, and upgrading existing boilers — either single building boilers, regional boilers or central district energy boilers — presents a large market for professional engineering firms also.  A large research university, for example, will have dozens, if not well over 100 boilers that heat and cool square footage in all climates throughout the year.  The same boilers provide heating and cooling for data centers, laundry operations, kitchen steam tables in hospitals and dormitories.

The safety rules for these large, complex and frankly, fearsome systems, have been developed by many generations of mechanical engineering professionals in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code (BPVC).   From the BPVC scope statement:

“…The International Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code establishes rules of safety — relating only to pressure integrity — governing the design, fabrication, and inspection of boilers and pressure vessels, and nuclear power plant components during construction. The objective of the rules is to provide a margin for deterioration in service. Advancements in design and material and the evidence of experience are constantly being added…”

Many state and local governments incorporate the BPVC by reference into public safety regulations and have established boiler safety agencies.  Boiler explosions are fairly common, as a simple internet search on the term “school boiler explosion” will reveal.  We linked one such incident at the bottom of this page.

University of Michigan Central Heating Plant

The 2023 Edition of the BPVC is the current edition; though the document is divided into many sections that change quickly.

ASME Codes & Standards Electronic Tools

ASME Proposals Available For Public Review

ASME Section IV: Rules for the Construction of Heating Boilers (2019)

Public consultation on changes to the BPVC standard for power boilers closes February 7th.   

This is a fairly stable domain at the moment.  We direct you elsewhere to emergent topics:

Ghost kitchens gaining steam on college campuses

College: the Next Big Frontier for Ghost Kitchens

Illinois Admin. Code tit. 77, § 890.1220 – Hot Water Supply and Distribution

Design Considerations for Hot Water Plumbing

FREE ACCESS: 2019 ASME Boiler and Pressure Code (Section VI) 

Plumbing

 

 

Two characteristics of the ASME standards development process are noteworthy:

  • Only the proposed changes to the BPVC are published.   The context surrounding a given change may be lost or not seen unless access to previous version is available.  Knowledgeable experts who contribute to the development of the BPVC usually have a previous version, however.  Newcomers to the process may not.
  • The BPVC has several breakout committees; owing to its longer history in the US standards system and the gathering pace of complexity in this technology.

We unpack the ASME bibliography primarily during our Mechanical, Plumbing and Energy colloquia; and also during our coverage of large central laundry and food preparation (Kitchens 100) colloquia.  See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting, open to everyone.

Issue: [12-33] [15-4] [15-161] [16-77] [18-4] [19-157]

Category: District Energy, Energy, Mechanical, Kitchens, Hot Water

Contact: Eric Albert, Richard Robben, Larry Spielvogel

More:

Standards Michigan BPVC Archive

ASME BPVC Resources

Big Ten & Friends Energy Conference 2023

Standards Michigan Workspace (Requires access credentials from [email protected]).

School Boiler Maintenance Programs: How Safe Are The Children? 

Boiler Explodes at Indiana High School


The “Groundhog Day” Effect

United States National Weather Service

 

Research Without Old Data and Old References

 

Background: The use of older data and references is becoming increasingly disfavored for publication. A myopic focus on newer research risks losing sight of important research questions already addressed by now-invisible older studies. This creates a ‘Groundhog Day’ effect as illustrated by the 1993 movie of this name in which the protagonist has to relive the same day (Groundhog Day) over and over and over within a world with no memory of it. This article examines the consequences of the recent preference for newer data and references in current publication practices and is intended to stimulate new consideration of the utility of selected older data and references for the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Methods: Examples from the literature are used to exemplify the value of older data and older references. To illustrate the recency of references published in original medical research articles in a selected sample of recent academic medical journals, original research articles were examined in recent issues in selected psychiatry, medicine, and surgery journals.

Results: The literature examined reflected this article’s initial assertion that journals are emphasizing the publication of research with newer data and more recent references.

Conclusions: The current valuation of newer data above older data fails to appreciate the fact that new data eventually become old, and that old data were once new. The bias demonstrated in arbitrary policies pertaining to older data and older references can be addressed by instituting comparable treatment of older and newer data and references.


Related:

ASTM International: Standard Practice for Calculating and Using Basic Statistics

Groundhog Day: Ancient Origins of a Modern Celebration (Library of Congress) 

IMSDb: “GroundHog Day” The Complete Script

Harvard Business Review: When the Groundhog Predicts an Early Spring, Investors Get Optimistic

Indiana University: Groundhog Day Probability in Perspective


Standards Pennsylvania

 

 

 

 

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