Category: The Mad Engineer Blog
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What I’m reading: “Soul of a Professor”
Published in 2022, “Soul of a Professor” documents Lisa Pruitt’s journey from childhood trauma through her time as an engineering professor at the University of California-Berkeley, one of the top engineering schools in the country. Her deep-seated feelings of inadequacy led her to develop an eating disorder and alcoholism at a very young age, and…
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What the Wildfire Community Can Learn from Civil Engineers on Hazard Mitigation
The field of civil engineering has long been involved in mitigating hazards affecting communities. Fires, however, have generally fallen outside of the purview of civil engineering, possibly due to the fact that civil engineering education does not provide the necessary background in fire science. Nonetheless, “resilience” is a term that spans the civil engineering and…
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On Verification
Those who are new to scientific computing often underestimate the importance of verification and validation (V&V). Verification is the process of ensuring that your code solves the governing equations correctly, whereas validation involves demonstrating that your model accurately simulates reality by comparing to empirical data. V&V is the cornerstone of computational modeling and should be…
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Why I Drink
For many, dealing with mental illness also involves overcoming a substance use disorder. In my case, I have self-medicated for a long time with alcohol, and the situation reached an unsustainable level during the pandemic. Today, I am working on living a healthier lifestyle. My doctor asked me to think about the reasons why I…
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What I’m Reading: “The Center Cannot Hold”
Elyn Saks is a hero of mine. Ever since I watched her TED talk, I had to know more about her. She is an esteemed professor of law at University of Southern California. She holds an impressive slate of degrees from Vanderbilt, Oxford, and Yale. She also happens to have schizophrenia. In her memoir, The Center Cannot Hold (2007),…
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The Literature Review Demystified
The single most important thing to starting a research project is knowing what has already been done by others. Yet students tend to shy away from doing a literature review. Granted, reviewing the literature can be a daunting task. There are hundreds if not thousands of papers written on a topic. Where do you begin? …
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That Time I Coded a Video Game
In my last blog entry, I showed how we can use object-oriented programming (OOP) to set up an analysis of a truss. My journey into OOP all started a few weeks ago when my eleven-year-old had to do a project for school and wanted to learn how to code video games. Simple enough, I thought. A…
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A Crash Course in Object-Oriented Programming
I’m a big fan of coding, but I get the sense my college education may have failed me. Don’t get me wrong–I’m proud of my degrees from Pitt and Virginia Tech, and my education was more than enough to propel me into an academic career at the University of Michigan. But the state of the…
A. E. Jeffers 