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FROM THE EDItOR
Perceptions of Science and Engineering
T
his column discusses the increased effectiveness of scientists in promoting their value to society, compared with the effectiveness of engineers, at least in many countries. While many control engineers have been working to increase the understanding and appreciation of control engineering among the populace, this column cites evidence that these efforts are often hampered by the public having a poor perception of engineering more generally. Like other control engineers in recent years, I publish in a variety of science and engineering venues, with the selection mostly based on where the contribution is likely to accrue the largest number of readers. Not surprisingly, a fairly large proportion of my papers appear in control engineering journals and conferences, while other papers, mostly on control applications, appear in journals most closely associated to the application. For example, most of our contributions to microelectronics manufacturing and lithium-ion batteries have appeared in the Journal of Applied Physics or the Journal of the Electrochemical Society, which mostly contain papers authored by scientists with some papers by engineers solving technology problems. Doing the research in many control applications requires reading publications written by scientists, and I also regularly interact with scientists through collaborations and in service on various campus and professional committees. These communications with scientists, as well as occasionally reading newspapers and other publications directed toward the Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCS.2014.2333193 Date of publication: 16 September 2014
These communications with scientists...provide some perspective on the huge differences with how scientists and engineers communicate with and are perceived by society. public at large, provide some perspective on the huge differences with how scientists and engineers communicate with and are perceived by society. The magnitude of the differences in overall public perception of scientists versus engineers can be quantified with survey data. Table 1 is a list of occupations judged to be of “very great prestige” by a poll of U.S. adults carried out by Harris Interactive in 2009, which is the last year in which the poll was taken (Harris Interactive is a 40+ year-old market research firm that is a member of several survey research organizations and is owned by Nielsen Holdings, which tallies the Nielsen ratings of television programs). Fifty-seven percent of the respondents ranked the profession of scientist as being of “very great prestige.” The profession of scientist was ranked number two overall, just behind firefighter, and tied with medical doctor. Being an engineer was rated much lower in the poll, ranked closely with police officer, priest/minister/clergy, and farmer in the middle of the 23 professions in the survey. In this ranking, the profession of engineer was ranked much closer in prestige to a member of Congress than to a scientist, although Congress has had a lower than 40% approval rating in the United States for the last decade [2].
6 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » october 2014
Some analysis of poll data collected over a 32-year period indicates that engineers have been systematically rated as less prestigious than scientists, sometimes as much as by a factor of two, and some years have been rated lower than members of Congress [1, Table 2]. Such a poor perception of engineers directly impacts on the perception of control engineering and the support
Table 1 The top 12 of 23 professions rated as being “very high prestige.” The second column is the percentage of 1100 U.S. respondents giving that rating in July 2009 [1, Table 1]. Profession
%
Firefighter
62
Scientist
57
Doctor
57
Nurse
54
Military officer
51
Teacher
51
Police officer
44
Priest/minister/clergy
41
Engineer
39
Farmer
36
Architect
29
Member of U.S. Congress
28
for and understanding of control engineering among the populace. One reason for the higher perception of science relative to engineering is that numerous scientists and their professional societies continuously and aggressively transmit messages to the public and to government officials to support basic sciences. For some societies, strong and forceful positive outreach to the public pervades nearly everything they do. For example, the themes of the 2013 and 2014 Annual Meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which is the world’s largest general scientific society, were “The Beauty and Benefits of Science” and “Meeting Global Challenges: Discovery and Innovation.” Contrast such slogans with the highly technical themes of most control engineering meetings, such as “energy systems” or “transportation systems.” Most engineers naturally define themes around technical content, rather than around outreach to the public. In another contrast between science and engineering outreach, it is common in the meetings organized by scientific societies such as AAAS to invite
“
high-level career politicians—such as U.S. presidents and science ministers of the European Commission and various federal governments—to serve as plenary speakers [3]. When attending an organizational meeting to propose plenary speakers for one of the major science meetings, I observed the committee chair start the discussion by asking people to brainstorm which high-profile politicians could be proposed and then self-suggested the highest profile politician in the country, even though the person had no scientific expertise or training of any kind. All of the scientists nodded their heads in favor of the proposed plenary speaker, with not a single person mentioning what aspect of science would be the topic of the plenary talk. When I meekly raised the speaker’s lack of any knowledge of science as being a potential issue with the person being a plenary speaker for a science conference, the rest of the people in the room looked at me like I was from another planet. By being the only engineer in the room, I guess I was from another planet, from their perspective. Another reason for the much higher value placed on scientists than
engineers in many countries is that very few members of the public or academicians have any real understanding of what is really involved in translating a basic science discovery into a technology of value to society or how the efficiency in performing this translation usually depends critically on the level of engagement and skill of systems and control engineers. Feel free to e-mail me your comments on this topic to
[email protected].
References [1] R. A. Corso. (2014, June 17). Firefighters, scientists and doctors seen as most prestigious occupations. Harris Interactive. Rochester, New York. [Online]. Available: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/Harris-Interactive-Poll-Research-Pres-Occupations-2009-08.pdf [2] Gallup. (2014, June 17). Congress and the public: Congressional job approval ratings trend. [Online]. Available: http://www.gallup.com/ poll/1600/Congress-Public.aspx [3] G. Pinholster. (2014, Jan. 17). AAAS Annual Meeting will draw thousands of scientists and science fans to Chicago. [Online]. Available: http://www.aaas.org/news/aaas-annual-meeting-will-draw-thousands-scientists-and-science-fans-chicago
Richard D. Braatz
Nyquist, Extended
T
he presence of a delay element introduces new qualitative characteristics into a system, which may cause undesired instability. For this reason, the analysis of such systems has considerable significance. There exists a large number of papers dealing with this problem. Most of them have been applying an approximation method based on the Hurwitz criterion for stability analysis. However the method has not been derived precisely, and as we shall see later, it often leads to qualitatively wrong results. … Therefore no previous work that we are aware of has established a sufficiently general and exact method for analysis of systems with delayed feedback. The paper presented here is dedicated to this goal. Stability criteria proposed below are based on considerations of frequency characteristics of the part of the system without time-delay. The criteria obtained simplify greatly the stability analysis of systems with delayed feedback.” —Ya. Z. Tsypkin (translated by L. Jocic and S. Kahne) “Stability of Systems with Delayed Feedback,” Avtomat. Telemekh., vol. 7, pp. 107–129, 1946 This paper by Tsypkin develops a major extension of the Nyquist criterion for systems with feedback delay. In recognition of this extension, the paper was given the place of honor immediately after the paper by Nyquist in a compendium of results on frequency-response methods in control systems edited by A.G.J. MacFarlane (Frequency-Response Methods in Control Systems, IEEE Press, New York, 1979).
october 2014 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 7
