EngVibe will be moving from online news and information to print media this year through the form of an exciting new engineering magazine: Kinetic.

Kinetic is targeted at young Australian engineers – from university students through to grads and young professionals. The magazine will include news and coverage of events from throughout the year and will celebrate the human side of this great profession.

This annual publication has been made possible through a grant provided by the Foundation for Young Australians and with the support of other companies. Kinetic will be free, with distribution through universities and other engineering youth organisations throughout Australia. Additionally, an electronic version of the magazine will be available for download here at EngVibe.

More details will be provided over the next few months, but if you want further information or to be involved in this magazine, please get in contact: engvibe@gmail.com

Business Week has an article on the state of the Technology sector job market.  Good news for Engineers in that area- “Unable to find enough U.S. citizens for tech jobs, U.S. companies scoop up as many foreign nationals as they can using the limited pool of H-1B work visas issued by the federal government each year.”

Have a read here.

A tourist walked into a pet shop and was looking at the animals on display. While he was there, another customer walked in and said to the shopkeeper, “I’ll have a CAD monkey please.” 

The shopkeeper nodded, went over to a cage at the side of the shop and took out a monkey. He fitted a collar and leash, handed it to the customer, saying, “That’ll be $5000.”   

The customer paid and walked out with his monkey. 

Startled, the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and said, “That was a very expensive monkey. Most of them are only few hundred dollars. Why did that one cost so much?”   

The Shopkeeper answered, “Ah, that monkey can draw in AutoCAD - very fast, clear layouts, no mistakes, well worth the money.” 

The tourist looked at a monkey in another cage. “That one’s even more expensive! $10,000! What does it do?”

“Oh, that one’s a Design monkey; it can design systems, layout projects, mark-up drawings, write specifications, some even calculate. All the really useful stuff,” said the shopkeeper. 

The tourist looked around for a little longer and saw a third monkey in a cage of its own. The price tag around its neck read $50,000. He gasped to the shopkeeper, “That one costs more than all the others put together! What on earth does it do?” 

The shopkeeper replied, “Well, I haven’t actually seen it do anything, but it says it’s an Engineer.”

Advertisement via our facebook group.

Quality People Recruitment has an excellent opportunity for a Graduate Civil/Structural Engineer to join a small dedicated team in sunny Perth. The successful candidate will have good communication skills and demonstrate a keen desire to deliver high quality design of steel, concrete and timber structures.

If you feel you are suited for this role, or you know of anyone who is, please send your CV to menachem@qualitypeople.com.au

Were you jumping around the lounge playing Nintendo Wii games the other day? Did you turn around to your fellow Wii Sportsman and say, “What’s the next step after these motion-controlled games? I reckon we should try and make a console that uses your brain to control the game.  We’ll be millionaires!”

Well, you are too slow. This article covers an Australian company, Emotiv Systems, who have done exactly that.  CEO and co-founder Nam Do says, “Our vision for the future communications between man and machine is that it’s not going to be limited to conscious control, but non-conscious interaction will play a big part.”

Can’t beat them to market, why not join them: Senior C / C++ Software Engineer / Architect - Sydney,  Research Scientist - Sydney

At EngVibe we like bridges. Previously we showed the World’s Longest Bridges, today we are showing the most picturesque.

Neatorama has a post about the 10 Most Beautiful Bridges in the World, I strongly suggest you check it out by clicking here. (Pictured is the Khaju Bridge, Iran)

EngVibe is all about the positive – cool engineering jobs, fun projects and Pong. Today though I thought I’d present a humorous, but somewhat accurate, piece about the less fun side of studying engineering – this article is from Aaron Rowe (Wired Blog Network):

For many students, earning a degree in engineering is less than enjoyable and far from what they expected. Here are our biggest complaints about the educational rite of passage. Of course, they are sweeping generalizations. Feel free to disagree. 

5. Awful Textbooks
Thick, dry, black and white manuscripts are rarely a source of inspiration and sometimes can cause loads of confusion. Often, the text is poorly written and interrupted by lengthy equations with symbols that are different from those used by the professor during lectures.

4. Professors are Rarely Encouraging
During each class, a professor that would rather be tending to his research will waltz up to a blackboard or overhead projector and scribble out equations for an hour without uttering a single sentence to create some excitement.  

3. Dearth of Quality Counseling
College students may not have a sense for how to build their resume and they might be clueless about the variety of career opportunities that await them. Unfortunately, some academic advisers do little more than post fliers about internships and hand out a checklist of classes to take. They should make some projections about the future job market, learn about the interests of each young scholar, and offer them tailored advice for how to best prepare themselves.

2. Other Disciplines Have Inflated Grades
Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films.

Some professors view undergraduate education as a type of natural selection, but their analogy is flawed. Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores because they have a larger group of supportive friends to or more time to dedicate to studying.  

1. Every Assignment Feels the Same
Nearly every homework assignment and test question is a math problem. Only a few courses require creativity or offer hands-on experience.

Engineers create a huge range of products and systems it isn’t worth trying to list them. For Allan Alcorn his creation and legacy: Pong, the world’s first popular video game. 

Allan was a young electrical engineer when he was hired by Atari. He created a game designed to be so simple that ‘any drunk in any bar could play’.

Allan made the trip to Melbourne to visit Game On, a cool exhibition about of the history of video games at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) – featuring 125+ playable arcade and console games. He thinks himself ‘extremely lucky to have been in the right place at the right time at the start of an industry.’ 

Engineering, who knows what you’ll create. I’m sure Allan didn’t plan on changing home entertainment history with a simple 2D tennis game.

Read a news piece from the Sydney Morning Herald or learn more about Game On.

Two fourth-year University of Queensland students have made PNG their place of work as part of the university’s Professional Engineering Placement Scholarship program. 

David Shaw and Adam Brown will work at New Britain Palm Oil Limited where they will apply work conducted as part of their research projects related to the company.

The projects involves optimising the operation of a screw press that extracts oil from the palm fruit and improving the efficiency of steam emissions, reducing costs. 

‘Things are so different to Australia, so we had to adapt to a totally different way of working,’ David said. 

The UQ press page is here.