Opportunities in Engineering

It is becoming more and more an accepted fact that engineers, or physicians, or lawyers—like our poets—are born and not made. I believe this to be true. Educators generally are thinking seriously along these lines, with the result that vocational advisers are springing up, especially in industrial circles, to establish eventually yet another profession. (1) Instinct is defined as a natural and innate inclination towards a certain behavior. Instinct leads young men to enter upon certain callings, unless turned off by misguided parents or guardians, and as a general thing the hunch works out successfully. Philosophers from timem immemorial, including Plato and Emerson, have written of this still, small voice within, and have urged that it be (2) heeded. The thing is instinct—cumulative yearnings within man of thousands of his ancestors— and to disobey it is to fling defiance at Nature herself. Personally, I believe that when this law becomes more generally understood there will be fewer failures decorating park benches in our cities and cracker-boxes in our country stores. Every city (3) need an engineer who loves what he does.

  The profession of engineering, therefore, has its type. You may be of this type or you may not. The type is quite pronounced, however, and you need not go wrong in (4) ones decision. All professions and all trades have their types. Steel-workers—those fearless young men who balance skillfully on a girder, frequently hundreds of feet in the air—are not to be mistaken. (5) Rough, rugged, gray-eyed; with frames close-knit and usually squat; generous with money, and unconcerned as to the future; living each day regardless of the next, and living it—steel[1] workers are as distinct from the clerical type—slender, tall, a bit self-conscious, fearful of themselves and of the future—I say, the steel-worker is as different from the clerical worker as the circus-driver is from the (6) cleric. Their work marks them for its own, if a man lack it upon entering the work, just as the school-room marks the teacher in time for its own. The thing is not to be mistaken. 

[1] The successful engineer must be possessed of a certain fondness for figures. The subject of mathematics must interest him. [2] He must like to figure, to use a colloquialism, and his fondness for it must be genuine, almost an absorption. 

(7) Having this fondness for mathematics, which may be termed otherwise as a curiosity to make concrete ends meet—the working out of puzzles is one evidence of the gift— the young man is well armed for a successful career in the profession. [3] It must reveal itself to him at an early age, too, as early as his grammar-school days, for then it will be known as genuinely a part of him, and the outcropping of seeds correctly sown by his ancestors. [4] He will like mathematics for its own sake, and when, later, in college, and later still, in the active pursuit of his chosen work, he is confronted with a difficult problem covering strains or stress in a beam or lever or connecting-rod, he will attack it (8) neutrally, instead of—as I have seen such problems attacked more than once—irritably and with marked mental effort.

The successful engineer must be a man who likes to shape things with his hands. (9) He need not always do it, and probably will not after he has attained recognition, save only as he supervises or makes the mechanical drawings—the picture—of the thing. But the itch must be present in the man.

And, like the desire within him to figure, it must make itself manifest within him early in life. If a young man be of those who early like to (10) crawl in under the family buzz wagon; tinkering there for half a day at a time; emerging in a thick coating of grease and dust and with joy in his eye—such a young man has the necessary qualifications for a successful engineer. He may never do this—as I say—in all his engineering career. But the yearning must be as much a part of him as his love for mathematics—so much so that all his engineering days he will feel something akin to envy for the machinist who works over a machine of the engineer's own devising—and it must be vitally a part of him. (11)

Who Was Charles Curtis, the First Vice President of Color? 

Next week, when she takes the oath of office,Senator Kamala Harris will make history asthe first woman, first African American, and first person of South Asian heritage to become vice president of the United States.But she won’t be the first person of color in the office. That honor belongs to Charles Curtis, an enrolled member of the Kaw Nation (12) which served as President Herbert Hoover’s vice president for his entire first term from 1929 to 1933. Prejudice against Native Americans was widespread and intense at the (13) time therefore Curtis's ascent to the office speaks of his skillful navigation of the political system. His rise also tells a broader story of how prominent Native Americans viewed how their communities should (14) assimilate within a predominately white society and government. The policies Curtis pursued in Congress and then as vice president,specifically those on Native issues, cloud his legacy today despite (15) its groundbreaking achievements.

Curtis was born in (16) 1860 to a white father from a wealthy Topeka family and a mother who was one quarter Kaw (a tribe also known as Kanza or Kansa). When he was young,Curtis’ mother died, and his father fought in the Civil War for the United States. (17)Growing up and with the years that passed by, he spent time living with both his sets of grandparents, and for eight years, he lived on the Kaw reservation. Curtis grew up speaking Kanza and French before he learned English.Mark Brooks, site administrator for the Kansas Historical Society’s Kaw Missionsite, says Curtis was known for his personal charisma.

“He had a knack for conversation,” Brooks says. “He was just a very likeable person even early on when he was just a young boy in Topeka.”

 In 1873, the federal government forced the Kaw south to Indian Territory, which would later become Oklahoma. The adolescent Curtis wanted to move with his community.(18) According to his Senate biography, his Kaw grandmother talked him into staying with his paternal grandparents and continuing his education. 

 “I took her splendid advice and the next morning as the wagons pulled out for the south, bound for Indian Territory, I mounted my pony and with my belongings in a flour sack, returned to Topeka and school,” Curtis later recalled, in a flourish of self[1]mythologizing. “No man or boy ever received better advice, it was the turning point in my life.”

 Curtis gained some fame as a talented horse rider, known on the circuit as “Indian Charlie.” But his grandparents on both sides encouraged him to pursue a professional career, and he became a lawyer and then a politician. Contemporary accounts cite his personal charm and willingness to work hard served him well in politics. Kansas politician and newspaper editor William Allen White described him carrying books with the names of Republicans in each Kansas township,mumbling the names “like a pious worshiper out of a prayer book” so that he could greet each of them by name and ask about their family.(19) Although the racist treatment of the Kaw by white Kansans—which included land theft and murder—many whites were obviously willing to vote for Curtis.“The one thing that might have lightened the persecution of Curtis was that he was halfwhite,” Brooks says. “He’s light-complected,he’s not dark-skinned like a lot of Kanza. His personality wins people over. He was a popular kid.”

 (20) Throughout his time in Congress, Curtis also consistently pushed for policies that many Native Americans today say were a disaster for their nations. He favored the Dawes Act of 1887, passed a few years before he entered Congress, which allowed the federal government to divide tribal lands into individual plots, which eventually led to the selling of their land to the public. And in 1898, as a member of the Committee on Indian Affairs, he (21) sketched what became known as the Curtis Act, extending the Dawes Act’s provisions to the so-called“Five Civilized Tribes” of Oklahoma. Curtis also supported Native American boarding schools, in which children were taken from their families and denied access to their own languages and (22) cultures, abuse was rampant.

 Which Came First: The Brain or Sleep?

Stay awake too long, and thinking straight can become extremely difficult. Thankfully, a few winks of sleep is often enough to get our brains (23) to assent functioning up to speed again. But just when and why did animals start to require sleep? And is having a brain even a prerequisite? In a study that could help to understand the evolutional origin of sleep in animals, an international team of researchers has shown that tiny, water-dwelling hydras not only show signs of a sleep-like state despite lacking central nervous systems but also respond to molecules associated with sleep in more evolved animals.

"We now have strong evidence that animals must have acquired the need to sleep before acquiring a brain," says Taichi Q. Itoh, assistant professor at Kyushu University's Faculty of Arts and Science and leader of the research reported in Science Advances. While sleeping behavior was also recently found in jellyfish, relative of hydras and fellow member of the phylum Cnidaria, the new study from researchers at Kyushu University in Japan and Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Korea found that several chemicals eliciting drowsiness and sleep even in humans had similar effects on the species Hydra vulgaris. "Based on (24) their findings and previous reports regarding jellyfish, we can say that sleep evolution is independent of brain evolution," states Itoh.

 "Many questions still remain regarding how sleep emerged in animals, but hydras provide an easy-to-handle creature to further investigate the detailed mechanisms (25) produced sleep in brainless animals to help possibly answer these questions one day." Only a couple of centimeters long, hydras have a diffuse network of nerves but lack the centralization associated with a brain.

(26) Tiny, brainless animals with no true meaning to their existence give no opportunity to truly test their sleep pattern. As an alternative, the researchers used a video system to (27) slowly dissect  movement to determine when hydras were in a sleep-like state characterized by reduced movement – (28) which could be disrupted by a flash of light. Instead of repeating every 24 hours like a circadian rhythm, the researchers found that the hydras exhibit a four-hour cycle of active and sleep-like states. More importantly, the researchers uncovered many similarities related to sleep regulation on a molecular and genetic level regardless of the possession of a brain. Exposing the hydras to melatonin, a commonly used sleep aid, moderately increased the sleep amount and frequency, while the (29) dull neurotransmitter GABA, another chemical linked to sleep activity in many animals, greatly increased sleep activity 

[1] On the other hand, dopamine, which causes arousal in many animals, actually promoted sleep in the hydras. (30) Furthermore, the researchers could use vibrations and temperature changes to disturb the hydras' sleep and induce signs of sleep deprivation, causing the hydras to sleep longer during the following day and even suppressing cell proliferation.[2] "While some sleep mechanisms appear to have been conserved, others may have switched function during evolution of the brain," suggests Itoh.[3] Investigating more closely, the researchers found that sleep deprivation led to changes in the expression of 212 genes, including one related to PRKG, a protein involved in sleep regulation in (31) a wide range of animals, including mouses, fruits flies, and nematodes.

 Disrupting other fruit fly genes (32) appearing to share a common evolutional origin with the sleep-related ones in hydras —altered sleep duration in fruit flies, and further investigation of such genes may help to identify currently unknown sleep-related genes in animals with brains. "Taken all together, these experiments provide strong evidence that animals acquired sleep-related mechanisms before the evolutional development of the central nervous system and that many of these mechanisms were conserved as brains evolved," says Itoh. (33) That being said, there is still much more to explore in brainless creatures in relation to sleep patterns, but a scientific base has been built for future scientists to build upon.

 Effects of Poverty on Childhood Development Seen in Children as Young as Five

In a nationwide study, UCLA researchers have found that health inequities can be measured in children as young as 5 years old. (34) The research, published in Health Affairs, contributes to a growing body of literature finding that children of color who are also (35) poor face greater health inequities than their white counterparts.

Researchers trained kindergarten teachers in 98 school districts across the United States to administer the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a measure of children's physical, social, emotional and language development.

The assessment was administered to more than 185,000 kindergarteners from 2010 to 2017. (36) If analyzing and correlating the results according to where the children lived, the investigators found that 30 percent of children in the lowest-income neighborhoods were vulnerable in one or more domains of health development, compared to 17 percent of children in higher-income settings.

 The researchers also found that income[1] related differences in developmental vulnerability varied substantially among children from different ethnic and racial groups. Black children, for example, were at highest risk, followed by Latina/o children. Asian children were at lowest risk. The differences in developmental vulnerability between Black children and white children were most pronounced at the higher socioeconomic levels and tended to narrow for Black and white children from lower[1] income neighborhoods. Such early disparities can have a profound influence on (37) their long-term development, leading to higher rates of chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, drug use, mental health disorders, and dementia as adults.

 "Our findings underscore the pronounced racialized disparities for young children," says lead study author Neal Halfon, MD, director of the Center for Healthier Children, Families, and Communities at UCLA. "Many other studies have highlighted patterns of income and racial inequality in health and educational outcomes. What this study (38) showing is that these patterns of inequality are clearly evident and measurable before kids start school." (39) Halfon also is a professor of pediatrics, public health, and public policy in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the Fielding School of Public Health, and the Luskin School of Public Affairs.

The report also (40) underscores the value of understanding child-developmental inequities at the most micro levels. (41) "Because the EDI is not only reported at but also linked to Census-tract-level indices of neighborhood risk, this measurement tool helps cities and local grassroots efforts develop targeted supports and services to address racialized disparities," adds coauthor Lisa Stanley, project director for Transforming Early Childhood Community Systems at the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families, and Communities.

The EDI tool was developed by Dr. Dan Offord and Dr. Magdalena Janus at the Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and has been internationally validated, and used widely in Canada, Australia, and other nations. The EDI was first piloted in 2009 by UCLA in Santa Ana, in partnership with First Five Orange County. 

(42) UCLA researchers make this data accessible to local communities to help them develop their own initiatives to address the root causes of inequalities. "These findings not only highlight the equity challenges we face but also reveal the truly inequitable design of all the systems responsible for ensuring that children thrive," says co-author Efren Aguilar, geographic information systems lead at the Center for Healthier Children, Families, and Communities at UCLA. (43) "However, only by addressing the historical exploitation and exclusion of (44) marginalized communities, can we begin to repair the pains and exploitative practices of the past and redesign our community systems so that all children thrive."