TAKATA RECALL UPDATE

Maybe your car is on the actual list http://www.safercar.gov/rs/takata/takatalist.html

On the other hand, you can sign up for an alert as the phasing in of rhe recalled items is going to take some time. 

>> May 4: Expansion of recalls will phase in another 35-40 million inflators through 2019. Sign up for our Recall Alerts to be notified when you can search for all vehicles affected by this recall.

The World’s Best Engineering Schools

From the Business Insider:

Some of the best engineering schools in the world serve as feeder programs for the best technology companies out there, like Facebook, Google, and Apple.

So, which school is most likely to land you the job you want?

Over the past few weeks, we’ve conducted a survey to find out the true ranking of the top 50 schools. The top school in the world, from our survey, is the California Institute of Technology.

Jump right to the list >

All these schools have comparable high-quality academics, smart professors, and great campuses. But when it comes to figuring out the value of an engineering school, there’s only one thing that really matters: The amount the school will help your future career.

Of our 723 respondents to the survey, nearly all (91%) said they had a computer science, engineering or equivalent degree.

The two most important things that went into choosing an engineering school were the skills and knowledge they acquired in school (73.9%) and the brand value of the school (18.8%).

The majority of the respondents (66.8%) studied and applied the C, C++ or C# programming languages, with Java following as a close second (40.8%).

Most engineers who responded were either research scientists (10.8%), mobile developers (8.9%) or mechanical engineers (13.3%).

Here’s the methodology:

  • Our initial list was compiled by canvassing engineers, industry professionals and entrepreneurs who work at some of the most popular technology companies.
  • We asked respondents to grade schools on a 1 (not valuable) to 5 (most valuable) scale. The score is the average of all responses across those scales.
  • Each survey included grades for at least 10 schools. Respondents could also write in responses to the survey for schools that were not included. Some write-ins with overwhelming response were included in the rankings.
  • We parsed LinkedIn to find the top employers for each school, and they are in order of greatest number of graduates employed per school.

Click here to check out the top 50 engineering schools >

Surf the Wave in Oregon for Power

This just crossed my desk tonight, while Walker Engineering doesn’t work directly with power projects we have a passing interest in what goes on in Oregon in emerging technology.  The idea of harvesting power from wave action has got to be, on the surface (pun intended), one of the most interesting developments recently.

Read the complete story on KATU.com.

 

The size of a PowerBuoy, seen here sitting on a dock in Scotland, is evident by comparing the size of the employee, right, to the buoy. The company says Oregon’s will look exactly the same. (Photo courtesy: Ocean Power Technologies Inc. Used with permission)