Engineering stereotypes

One of the things I love about being a grad student at Northwestern McCormick’s MSIT program is that I receive a regular newsletter from the engineering school (although it is apparently available as an RSS feed). In the most recent newsletter was a an article titled Study: Engineering Stereotypes Drive Counterproductive Practices, by Emily Ayshford.

The study was done by Paul Leonardi, the Breed Junior Chair in Design at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and colleagues at the University of Colorado. What they found was that engineering students would fall into stereotypical behavior they have observed in media or in older students, such as procrastination, working individually on a group project, or bragging about having done a problem without following directions. These behaviors are what students feel they need to do to prove their engineering prowess, but hiring managers are finding that they are counterproductive for the real world workplace.

"There’s a stereotype that engineers do things by themselves," Leonardi says. "So when students are asked to work in teams, they think, am I going to be disadvantaged? When I go to the workplace am I not going to be as valuable?"

In other words, students believed that if they weren’t able to do a project alone, they couldn’t consider themselves an expert engineer. Leonardi and his colleagues often saw groups splitting up group work, even if they were specifically asked to work on it together at the same time.

These findings fascinate me. At least since high school, I have been guilty of such behavior. In grad school, however, I have taken a slightly different approach. I’m still a bit of a procrastinator, but that has little to do with bragging and more to do with some occasionally poor time management. I like to do some of the coursework alone, but the huge amount of group work has been extremely beneficial to me. The chance to interact with others about the topics we’re learning in class has been invaluable, both from a personal learning experience perspective and from a professional networking perspective.

I have definitely found it is important to learn how to work well on a team, and even better to learn how to work well on a team where everyone has different strengths, weaknesses, and personalities. The guy who prefers to work alone or do everything himself only serves to bring the entire team down.

Are there any other stereotypical behaviors you’ve seen in school or in the workplace? Were they in engineering or in another field?

Microsoft discounts Windows 7 upgrades

If you’re a geek (and since you’re reading this blog, you must be), then you’re probably at least somewhat interested in the upcoming Windows 7 release from Microsoft. I have been testing Windows 7 Beta and RC for the past few months, and I have to say that it is a lot better than Vista was when it was released a couple of years ago. My main computers still have Windows XP on them because of how bad I thought Vista was. When I return from DC, I have plans to upgrade my desktop at home with Windows 7 RC, now that I finally have everything backed up to a Western Digital Elements 1 TB external HDD.

That being said, if you will be in the market to upgrade your Windows operating system, but not your hardware, Microsoft has a great deal on Windows 7 upgrade licenses. For a limited time, you can pre-order and get 50% or more off of Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade and Windows 7 Professional Upgrade. The offer is good until July 11. Unfortunately, the discount does not apply to Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade. To get more information and to see which version is right for you, you can check out Amazon.com’s Windows 7 Resources page. Of course, you can always ask me, too.

And as an added bonus, if you purchase Windows 7 through any of the links here, you will be supporting ask-mark.com. Doesn’t that thought make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? I thought so.

Friday photography fun


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With grad school done for the year (one year down, one more to go), I decided to take the afternoon off on Friday. After working in the morning, I headed down to Evanston to have lunch with Abby. We had been talking earlier in the week and had decided on Blind Faith Café, a vegetarian restaurant, for lunch. Those of you who know me might be surprised, but I thought I would give it a try. The short of it: I liked the ratatouille, and the macrobiotic plate didn’t look bad, either. I think I’ll head back down there again and try some more things from the menu, but don’t count on my giving up meat any time soon.

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Site restoration

Once again I was notified that ask-mark.com was triggering virus/malware alerts for visitors. My preliminary investigation at work showed that I had some sort of script injected into my files again. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get cygwin and ssh to connect to my host through the proxy server.

When I got home, I connected to my host and poked around, investigating how my site got hacked again. Not finding any obvious evidence other than file modify dates from yesterday, I decided to restore from one of my snapshots. I found that a snapshot from last week was not affected by whatever hacked my site. I wanted to restore the snapshot without first deleting the entire contents of my site. So, I tried using cp -rf ..., but I found that I was still being prompted to overwrite files. A little searching, and I found that my .bashrc file had an alias for cp = 'cp -i' so that it always ran in interactive mode. Commenting out that alias prevented the overwrite prompts, and now my site is back. I went back and restored the alias to ensure I don’t accidentally overwrite a critical folder in the future.

I just found out that the website for another organization with which I work is facing a similar hack. Does anyone know how all of these websites are getting hacked? Are the CMS packages (WordPress, .NET Nuke) insecure? Or are hackers gaining access some other way?

Also, never underestimate the usefulness of backups.

Welcome to the neighborhood, Sushi Ya

In the northwest suburbs, I frequent several sushi restaurants: Nobu’s Japanese Restaurant in Schaumburg, Sushi Station in Rolling Meadows, and Wild Fish in Arlington Heights. I like something different about each of them, so it’s hard to pick a favorite, but Sushi Ya in Schaumburg is quickly becoming my new favorite.

After opening about a month late due to construction delays, Sushi Ya is a welcome addition to the neighborhood. Michelle and I stopped by the restaurant for dinner Wednesday night, their second night of operation. Two days later I stopped by for dinner with Josh and Marsha before poker night. The staff is very friendly, and I thought the speed of service was pretty good for the first week in business.

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Mother’s Day

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. We invited my family over, mostly because my sisters and I are horrible at planning nice stuff, partly because we’re all poor, too. I cooked up the beef pot roast because that’s just about the only nice thing I can make. It was an exhausting 5 hours, but a delicious meal came out of it. Plus, we have leftovers! That’s something that we almost never have when I make this, and that also means that I have dinner for tonight already.

A few funny things happened yesterday. The first: Mel showed up early. The second: Mel asks me, "Since when did you watch NASCAR?" The third and final one I will share: Mel goes, "So what’s this?" and motions around her mouth, referring to my facial hair. For another ten or fifteen minutes, I am the butt of jokes, including Chris repeatedly pointing out that several of her students like what I’ve done to my face. Yup, that’s right, I am the envy of a few high school students. Joy!

We’ll see if I can keep up the blog posts. I’ve got summer break from grad school in about a month, which theoretically means I will have more free time. I might actually have the free time, but I might not choose to blog with it. We’ll see what happens.

Teabag Obama!

You can’t make this stuff up. After seeing @ejacqui and @chartier tweet about TEABAG OBAMA, I had to check this out for myself. I have been hearing pundits call on conservatives to "teabag the White House" or "teabag Obama" for a few weeks now. So, I did not understand why anyone would make a big deal about it now. And then I saw the video:

I’m glad someone other than The Daily Show (possibly broken link to the video) is starting to address this ludicrous slogan. Nobody is coming right out and saying it, but for those of you incapable of using Google, checkout the Urban Dictionary definition of teabag.

I know there are Young Republicans out there. I would think that at least one of them has used the internet, at least one of them has a marketing background, at least one of them would pull one of the older conservatives aside and say, "Hey, you might want to rethink that slogan."

Beyond that, I don’t have a clear understanding of why they are choosing teabagging as their method of protest. They want to draw a parallel to the Boston Tea Party, but that was about taxation without representation. Today, both sides of the aisle are being represented. It just so happens that one side of the aisle isn’t getting what it wants (frankly, I think both sides of the aisle might be losing on this one).