This volume celebrates the can-do, risk-taking, creative pioneers of Texas Instruments from its inception in the 1930s as a tiny geophysical exploration company working out of the back of a truck in the oilfields of the Southwest, to its status in the world today as one of the world's leading electronics companies. From the determination of its founders--Eugene McDermott, Erik Jonsson, Cecil Green, and Pat Haggerty--to the genius of its inventors such as Nobel prizewinner Jack Kilby, TI has transformed the world in seven and a half decades. In photographs and anecdotes, the book tells TI's history of innovation in products and technologies, including the development of the first commercial silicon transistors, the first integrated circuits, and the first electronic hand-held calculators. Today, this Fortune 500 company is at the forefront of digital signal processing and analog technologies--the semiconductor engines of the Internet age. TIers are currently working on solutions for large global markets such as wireless and broadband access, and for a variety of emerging markets such as digital projection systems and digital audio. The seventy-five vignettes making up this history paint a picture of TI and its people, providing a window into a corporate culture that fosters the creativity and mental toughness to compete in the world semiconductor market. The stories, in addition, show TI's staunch sense of fiscal responsibility, civic mindedness, and high ethical standards in its business practices.

A new approach to safety, based on systems thinking, that is more effective, less costly, and easier to use than current techniques. Engineering has experienced a technological revolution, but the basic engineering techniques applied in safety and reliability engineering, created in a simpler, analog world, have changed very little over the years. In this groundbreaking book, Nancy Leveson proposes a new approach to safety—more suited to today's complex, sociotechnical, software-intensive world—based on modern systems thinking and systems theory. Revisiting and updating ideas pioneered by 1950s aerospace engineers in their System Safety concept, and testing her new model extensively on real-world examples, Leveson has created a new approach to safety that is more effective, less expensive, and easier to use than current techniques. Arguing that traditional models of causality are inadequate, Leveson presents a new, extended model of causation (Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes, or STAMP), then shows how the new model can be used to create techniques for system safety engineering, including accident analysis, hazard analysis, system design, safety in operations, and management of safety-critical systems. She applies the new techniques to real-world events including the friendly-fire loss of a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter in the first Gulf War; the Vioxx recall; the U.S. Navy SUBSAFE program; and the bacterial contamination of a public water supply in a Canadian town. Leveson's approach is relevant even beyond safety engineering, offering techniques for “reengineering” any large sociotechnical system to improve safety and manage risk.

Science/Engineering "Petroski has an inquisitive mind, and he is a fine writer. . . . [He] takes us on a lively tour of engineers, their creations and their necessary turns of mind." --Los Angeles Times From the Ferris wheel to the integrated circuit, feats of engineering have changed our environment in countless ways, big and small. In Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering, Duke University's Henry Petroski focuses on the big: Malaysia's 1,482-foot Petronas Towers as well as the Panama Canal, a cut through the continental divide that required the excavation of 311 million cubic yards of earth. Remaking the World tells the stories behind the man-made wonders of the world, from squabbles over the naming of the Hoover Dam to the effects the Titanic disaster had on the engineering community of 1912. Here, too, are the stories of the personalities behind the wonders, from the jaunty Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer of nineteenth-century transatlantic steamships, to Charles Steinmetz, oddball genius of the General Electric Company, whose office of preference was a battered twelve-foot canoe. Spirited and absorbing, Remaking the World is a celebration of the creative instinct and of the men and women whose inspirations have immeasurably improved our world. "Petroski [is] America's poet laureate of technology. . . . Remaking the World is another fine book." --Houston Chronicle "Remaking the World really is an adventure in engineering." --San Diego Union-Tribune

Imagine a world without cars and computers, or toys and televisions, or movies and microwaves. Then imagine a world without engineers. Engineering the ABCs answers questions about how everyday things work and how engineering relates to so many parts of a child's daily life. In an entertaining and engaging way, this book shows how engineers shape our world.

In over 200 delightful short essays Bill captures the creativity and impact of engineers. He talks of their spectacular achievements - jets, satellites, skyscrapers, and fiber optics - but draws his deepest insights from the everyday, the quotidian. He finds beauty, elegance and meaning in Ferris wheels, Tupperware, Slinkys, mood rings, waterless urinals and Velcro. Delivered originally on public radio between 1999 and 2006, each essay is a small slice of the world created by engineers. The essays also illuminate and inform about the important topics of our day by showing how intertwined engineering and technology are with terrorism, security, intellectual property and our cultural legacy.

The Greeks and Romans were considerable engineers. They made many remarkable machines, which where not betttered until the Industrial Revolution. Landels shows how these machines were developed and made. He draws together evidence from archaeological discoveries and from literary sources.

Nearly every aspect of daily life in the Mediterranean world and Europe during the florescence of the Greek and Roman cultures is relevant to engineering and technology. This text highlights the accomplishments of the ancient societies, the research problems, and stimulates further progress in the history of ancient technology.

The Global Engineers: Building a Safe and Equitable World Together, is inspired by the opportunities for engineers to contribute to global prosperity. This book presents a vision for Global Engineering, and identifies that engineers should be concerned with the unequal and unjust distribution of access to basic services, such as water, sanitation, energy, food, transportation, and shelter. As engineers, we should place an emphasis on identifying the drivers, determinants, and solutions to increasing equitable access to reliable services. Global Engineering envisions a world where everyone has safe water, sanitation, energy, food, shelter, and infrastructure, and can live in health, dignity, and prosperity. This book seeks to examine the role and ultimately the impact of engineers in global development. Engineers are solutions-oriented people. We enjoy the opportunity to identify a product or need, and design appropriate technical solutions. However, the structural and historical barriers to global prosperity requires that Engineers focus more broadly on improving the tools and practice of poverty reduction and that we include health, economics, policy, and governance as relevant expertise with which we are conversant. Engineers must become activists and advocates, rejecting ahistorical technocratic approaches that suggest poverty can be solved without justice or equity. Engineers must leverage our professional skills and capacity to generate evidence and positive impact toward rectifying inequalities and improving lives. Half of this book is dedicated to profiles of engineers and other technical professionals who have dedicated their careers to searching for solutions to global development challenges. These stories introduce the reader to the diverse opportunities and challenges in Global Engineering.

A look at engineering education today— with an eye to tomorrow Engineering education is in flux. While it is increasingly important that engineers be innovative, entrepreneurial, collaborative, and able to work globally, there are virtually no programs that prepare students to meet these new challenges. Shaping Our World: Engineering Education for the 21st Century seeks to fill this void, exploring revolutionary approaches to the current engineering curriculum that will bring it fully up to date and prepare the next generation of would-be engineers for real and lasting professional success. Comprised of fourteen chapters written by respected experts on engineering education, the book is divided into three parts that address the need for change in the way engineering is taught; specific innovations that have been tested, why they matter, and how they can be more broadly instituted; and the implications for further changes. Designed to aid engineering departments in their transition towards new modes of learning and leadership in engineering education, the book describes how to put into practice educational programs that are aligned with upcoming changes, such as those proposed in the NAE's Engineer of 2020 reports. Addressing the need to change engineering education to meet the demands of the 21st century head on, Shaping Our World condenses current discussions, research, and trials regarding new methods into specific, actionable calls for change.