Author: Jose Oscar del Rio

How fake can you be?

When I was surfing through the empathy exercises Daniel Pink suggest to do I thought that the Spot the Fake Smile was the most useful one. Every day I interact with many people. Usually I like to be with people that bring smile and laughter. In other words, I always like to be in positive conversations that bring joy to the group. The reflection of joy on people is through their smiles.

As I read the description of the test I wondered how good I was spotting fake smiles. I really thought I was going to be good. In the beginning of the test, all smiles seemed genuine but I knew something it was not right the way I was identifying the smiles. So I started to focus on the eyes and the ending of each smile.

Whenever the eyes of the person smiling did not slightly closed at the end of the smile I labeled the smile as genuine and the ones that completely changed their facial expression at the end, I labeled them as fake smiles. At the end of the test I realize that I need to get better at spotting fake and genuine smiles. I got 8 out of 20 smiles correctly identified.

For me the picture of the woman above reflects a genuine smile. I really thought that the man definitely reflects a fake smile. According to the test both of these people have genuine smiles. So in other word, I really do have to work on my smile detection.

According to BBC lines between eyes appear on fake smiles and cheeks may bunch up making the eyes look as if they were contracting. In the other hand, BBC says that in a genuine smile the eye cover folds, the fleshy part of the eye between the eyebrow and eyelid move downwards and the end of eyebrows dip slightly.

One fault that I think the test has is that it uses people from different heritages. Maybe it is easier for people to detect fake or genuine smiles from people of their same or similar heritages. So I think the test does not accurately say that one good or bad at spotting fake or genuine smiles.

 

Sources:

The information and images were provided by BBC-Science & Nature of Human Body- Spot a Fake Smile Test Results


Two Extreme Situations!!

After reading the meaning section of Daniel Pink’s book I decided to perform the 20-10 exercise.

If I inherited $20 million, no strings attached, would I spend my days the same way I spend them now?

The answer to this question is yes. My father told me once that money can go away from one’s possession from one day to another. In the other hand, nobody or anything can take away a good education or the things you learn. So yes, even though I inherit this amount of money I will remain studying at Georgia Tech to become a professional Mechanical Engineer. In other words, the way I will benefit from this amount of money is that I am not going to be worried about college economically.

Also one thing I will do immediately with this amount of money is that I will give a fraction of it to my dad so that he could better his private business. I will do this because my dad’s business is suffering changes from the economic crisis today and by doing this I will be thanking my dad for all the years of extremely hard work to maintain our family to the fullest of his capabilities.

Finally, when I have had finished my education career and when I am settled with a job I will certainly give a part of the $20 million dollars to a charity in my hometown in great need.

If I knew I had at most ten years to live, would you stick with your current job?

Well right now I am starting my college career. What I want to do in my educational career is to become a mechanical engineer and then obtain master’s degree. Time wise, this will take me at least six years. So yes, I will continue studying till I have finished my educational goal. I think it is worth the time because the experience will make me become a better person and I am going to study what I have always enjoyed in my life.

I know that I will have extra time during my educational career. I will spend the extra time with my family because for me family is extremely precious and time spent with my family is of great value. Also, after the six years of education I will do as many community services around my hometown and probably in other parts of the world that are in great need because I think that in this way is how I can be as more productive to the world in only a four year period.

After performing the 20-10 exercise I have noticed that my life would not change that much in either hypothetical situation. I think that this means that the life that I am having till today has a big meaning behind it.

Sources:

Image was created by me using the Microsoft Paint editor program.


My iPhone 4 Changed Completely in only 60 Minutes!!!!

I have had an iPhone 4 for the past year. I remember I bought it because I can use it as an iPod, the has awesome app games, it has the best internet browsing on phones and it looks cool! After having my 20% personal time I concluded that I have wasted the usage of my iPhone 4 for a whole year.

The iPhone 4 is more than a phone. I noticed this fact when I decided to research more on how to take as much as I can from my iPhone product. The first thing I did was to research on the latest thing in the iPhone. I saw that the iPhone had this amazing update called iOS5. I updated my iPhone and a lot of things were looked and acted different in my iPhone.

Since I am a person who is extremely disorganized with dates and deadlines I decided to concentrate in the organization gadgets of the iPhone. I found out that the iPhone has a calendar app which helps the user/me get organized. With the calendar app I can add events, assignments or things to do in specific dates and at the specific time of the day. The awesome thing about this app is that it sends you notifications at the time you schedule an event/assignment. Even more, I can set alerts that send me notifications reminding me minutes, hours and days before the event/assignment.

For example, I put my micro-economics test as an event in the calendar app. Also I set an alert two days before the exam to remind me that if I have not started studying by then, then I should step up my work.

Also something that happens to me is that I always forget to call my mom when she tells me. The Reminder app helps me get over this problem. For example, my mom called me today and I told her that I could not talk in that moment because I was studying. So my mom told me to call her when I get to the dorm. Because of my iPhone I am not worried about this issue. I set a reminder which will send me a notification as soon as I arrive to my dorm.  The Reminder app have a feature which you can set a specific address to detect with the GPS of the iPhone and send you a notification remind you about what you have to do arriving or leaving a specific location.

     

Last but not least, I noticed how amazing the iPhone is and went to the app store and searched a WordPress app. There is a WordPress app which can help me keep my class blog up to date everywhere I go.

The iPhone used to be a distraction and procrastination device for me, but thanks to that 20% personal time I was able to transform my iPhone towards a tool of great advantage towards me for school and personal things.

Sources:

The whole blog is based on the Apple Product iPhone 4 running the newest software called iOS5.

The pictures are taken from screen shots of my own iPhone 4.


The Best in Atlanta, Is from Georgia Tech!

The mechanical engineering program at Georgia Tech is ranked number two in the nation. Therefore, its mechanical engineering professors should be the best of the best in the United States. This is why interviewing professors and faculty from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering are one of the best people to interview to get a sense of the process to obtain a successful mechanical engineering career?

Bert Bras

Bert Bras is a mechanical engineer with a masters from University of Twente, The Netherlands and a Ph. D. from University of Houston (1992). Bras have made research with Maritime Research Institute Netherlands’ (MARIN) Design Research Department. His objective in research is to look up ways to reduce the environmental pollution of companies while making them competitive in their field. Today he is the Director of the Institute of Sustainable Technology Development at Georgia Tech.

Peter J. Hesketh

Peter J. Hesketh is a mechanical engineer with a B.S. from University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, and a M.S. and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Hesketh area of research is Sensors and Micro/Nano-electro-mechanical Systems. Today he is a professor at Georgia Tech since the spring of 2000. Peter has had many patents which most of them concentrate in the area of several gas sensors.

Richard F. Salant

Richard Salant became a mechanical engineer in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He obtained his B.S., M.S. and a Sc. D. in MIT. Salant’s areas of research are fluid mechanics, fluid sealing, lubrication and tribology. Richard F. Salant became a professor at Georgia Tech 1987.

Several questions I would like to ask in an interview towards one of these professional mechanical engineers.

1. Where do you see Mechanical Engineering heading to?

2. How did you become the engineer you are today?

3. Why did you choose mechanical engineering?

4. Did you become interested in mechanical engineering during your college career, before or after?

5. Did you have a mentor who gave you good advice in your career?

6. Why did you decided to become a professor at Tech? Was it because there are limited jobs for mechanical engineers?

7. Did technology affected your interest in mechanical engineering? How?

8. What do you recommend to do after obtaining a Bachelors degree at Tech? Go straight into the work field or obtain any other post graduate degree?

9. What is the most important aspect a mechanical engineer should have?

10. How can research help me as a future mechanical engineer?

11. How good do you think GaTech is for students studying mechanical engineer?

12. How is a typical day at work being a mechanical engineer at work?

13. How difficult is it to continue in his or her field after graduating and becoming a mechanical engineer?

14. What kind of problems do you encounter in your work field?

15. Did you ever have changed in direction in your career? Any doubts?

16. What has been your input towards mechanical engineering? Have you change the mechanical engineering field? How?

 

Sources:

Information from each professor taken from (http://www.me.gatech.edu/faculty/index.shtml) The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering website.

The Picture was taken from Google Images


The Best of the Best!!!!

Mechanical engineering is one of the broadest engineering existing today. Almost everything we do and anything we use is based on mechanical engineering. Three persons that have had a big influence in the field of mechanical engineering are the following: Maxim Faget, Kare Lujean Nyberg, Bill Nye and Elijah McCoy.

Maxime Faget

Maxime Faget was an American mechanical engineer who worked for NASA. He was born August 26, 1921 in British Honduras and died October 9, 2004 in Texas. He obtained his mechanical bachelors degree from Louisiana State University. He was a member of the Space Task Group which was the group whose task was to set man on moon. He created the Mercury spacecraft and developed the escape tower system used on Mercury. Maxime Faget designed a space shuttle which he called DC-3.

Karen Lujean Nyberg

Karen Lujean Nyberg is the 50th women who have gone to space. She is a mechanical engineer and a NASA astronaut. Karen was born October 7, 1969 in Minnesota. She obtained her mechanical engineering degree from the University of North Dakota in 1994. She focused her studies and research towards thermal neutrality in space suits.  Also she worked with firefighter suits to make them more efficient in the cooling process. Moreover she designs thermal control systems for Mars and Lunar mission studies. Lastly, she has won several awards because of all her influence in the mechanical engineering field such as NASA Tech Briefs Award and the Joyce Medalen Society of Women Engineers Award.

Bill Nye

Bill Nye is best known as “Bill Nye the Science Guy”. Besides being a mechanical engineer, Bill is a science educator, comedian and actor. Nye was born November 27, 1955 in Washington DC, he is still living today. He obtained a mechanical engineering bachelor degree from Cornell University in 1977. After finishing his studies he began his career at Boeing. After working for Boeing Bill Nye created a series that he wrote, acted and produced called “Bill Nye the Science Guy.”  It was a huge success. Even though it was produced for a pre-teen audience, the program attracted people from all ages. The show is used in many academic institutions today.

Bill Nye created a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor which is still used today in 747 airplanes. He was involved in many projects to explore mars. He developed a device to track time, based on the position of the sun. The device was also used to calibrate colors in the environment. Bill Nye has some patent including that for ballet shoes and educational magnifying glass.

Bill Nye was a mechanical engineer who really cared for society and the environment. I think that having a program whose objective is to make society’s population science literate is more important than having an invention. He had a program that was mainly focused on pollution. He focused on education young kids on how to use available resources that do not pollute earth to make clean and usable energy.  Children are the future in earth, so educating this population will have a huge impact on our future, specifically in the science area. This is the reason I consider Bill Nye extremely influential.

Elijah J. McCoy

In 1844 Elijah J. McCoy was born in Canada as from an escaped slave family from Kentucky. He died in 1929 in Michigan. McCoy was certified as a mechanical engineer in Scotland. He was a huge inventor; he invented automatic oil lubricators for steam engines, trains and ships. After this invention he had 57 patents mainly on lubricators. McCoy even invented an iron folding board and a lawn sprinkler. The big thing about McCoy is that he was an African American who struggled and became an extremely influential man in the mechanical engineering field especially towards the black population because he lived when black people were completely segregated and were considered inferior.

Sources:

The information taken of each Mechanical Engineer was provided by Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia

The images were also provided by Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia


Dreams are Useless in Life!

Throughout all my life I have never had a concrete dream to look up to and accomplish it. I do not believe on having dreams. Instead, I believe everyone should pursue his or her “ideal person”. The ideal person cannot be seen as the person you want to become when you grow up. Nevertheless, the ideal person should be looked as a model. This model is more than a dream.

At this moment I am sure you are completely confused and thinking what the hell is happening to me. I do not believe in dreams because dreams can be accomplished. What I mean is, when you accomplish your dream, what happens after? Do you do whatever you want in your life because you have accomplished your dream and you have nothing else to live for in your life? In other words, what accomplishing a dream means to me is that you surpassed the one goal you had in your life, therefore you can die since there is no point to continue living in our Earth. Therefore, when dreams are accomplished you become a nuisance.

Now you know why I do not believe in having dreams, I think you will understand better what my concept of the ideal person or model is. From now on, I will refer to the ideal person or model as “my ideal.”  My ideal in life is to become the perfect one. In other words, if you want to translate this into the dream concept it will be like this “my dream in life is to become the perfect person.” As you can see, having a dream like this does not make any sense because it is impossible.

So now I bet you are thinking how do I pursue my ideal? To pursue my ideal, I try to work hard every day, I try to learn something new every day and make a difference in my day day that makes me a better human being. In addition, my ideal includes helping others on their needs without expecting anything in return because this way I make a difference. Also, I set goals in my life, which serve as steps of stairs that every time will make me come closer to my ideal. In other words, after accomplishing goals I have to have a new goal to continue my journey towards my ideal.
Moreover, I, a human being, will never become perfect because an essential aspect that makes me and you human beings is that we make mistakes. By following my ideal, I will have a reason to live and something to accomplish every day I am able to wake up. By these means, I try to become a better human being every day, getting as close as I can get to my ideal.

For example, today I woke up with three things to accomplish, learn as much as I can from my professors, do my homework carefully and finally help one friend with a quiz he has to take tomorrow and he really needs to do well on it. A broader example will be, when I was in high school my goal was to graduate with excellent grades to get in a prestigious institution that would help me as a tool to become an intellectual and better person. Now my goal is to succeed in my college career intellectually, socially and make a difference in our society. This will be another step to take in the stairs to reach my ideal.

Finally, I am taking the pass of mechanical engineering because I think is the most efficient way I can make a difference in the world. After, I become a mechanical engineer at Tech I want to work with a renewable energy company to design and make highly efficient apparatuses that can transform pollutants into useful energy. I have this goal, because I think that Earth really needs a rest of all the damage we have been doing with our pollution and deterioration. In other words, it is one of the biggest changes our world needs today.

As you can see, it is difficult to describe the concept of the ideal in words because it is extremely complex idea and to fully understand by means of intellect. To fully understand the concept of the ideal, an intellect is needed but you have to have a more spiritual and emotional state of mind.

For all those of you who love numbers I have come up with a quantitative “meaning” of the concept of my ideal. I see myself as the number 1 and my ideal is to reach the number 0. The division of me (number 1) by a larger and larger number reflects every step or goal I accomplish in my life. In other words it does not matter how the magnitude of the number I dived to the number 1 it will never reach the number 0 but it will be closer and closer to it.

No matter how many times you divide the number one you will never get to the number 0, but it will be extremely close to 0.

I hope you have at least understand the reason I wake up every morning to live my life. I did my best explaining this concept, but I am sure an explanation of my ideal is not enough through a blog.

 

Sources:

Image was composed by me in the program Microsoft Paint


Humor in Life

Reading Daniel Pink’s Play section of his book has really shown me that my right brain have a good part of a right brain! I am a person who does not play video games every day, but really enjoys investing some of his time at video games. Also something I related to extremely well is that I usually try to see things in a humorous way, and I  laugh a lot especially around my friends. I think humor is an essential part of everyday because usually the things you remember are your accomplishments and the things you enjoyed with laughter. In other words, for me laughter gives meaning too my day because it really sticks to me  and laughing releases my stress.

Also I have an anecdote from my high school that is very similar to the joyfulness section of the book. One day, my homeroom teacher told us that we were going to do some laugh therapy. Everybody looked at each other thinking “what the hell is that?!?!” The teacher just started laughing for no reason , and some of the students tried to imitate her with fake laughter. At the beginning, it was all fake laughter until everybody felt it and just started laughing for absolutely no reason. At the end, everybody felt relieved, but still no one knew why they were laughing.

I thought that every Play activity of Pink’s book was amazing, but as soon as I finished reading about “Step on the humor scale” I wanted to do this test to see where I stood. As I took the test, I could relate each question with my everyday life., At that  point I felt that I was cheating because all my answers where 3s or 4s. At the end I got 54 out of 64 which explains a lot of my humor since I am close to the highest score. Finally I feel blessed that I have one well-developed right brain ability. I am not just a left brainer!!!


Amazed by Symphony & Negative Spaces

Reading Daniel Pink’s symphony exercises really amazed me. I have realized that I am an L-Directed person. As I started to work in the simple activities suggested by Pink I could not do any of them. I gave up; I tried each and every one of the activities.

I started to browse the internet. As I was browsing the internet I started to reflect upon the negative spaces that make up some drawings, thinking where I have seen such thing.

All of a sudden I encountered a Panda that was not even drawn. The picture of the panda is the logo of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The logo is composed several black spots that in conjunction with the white background it makes up the picture of the panda.

I got excited and continued searching for other common logos that uses negative spaces. I encountered one that I see almost every day, the NBA logo.

I could not believe it how could I missed that the player with the ball in the logo is not even a drawing it is just negative space!

It was a fun looking for negative spaces as Daniel Pink suggested.

I feel that I really need to use my Right-Brain more often and engage in more symphony exercises, to see the world through the right-brain perspective. In other words, I want to see everything as a big picture. This way I can become a holistic person.

Being a holistic person is a great advantage. A holistic person is as stated by Pink is more likely to be more successful because a holistic person is the one who can connect ideas processed by left brain to the right brain and now a day computers have taken over L-directed tasks.

Lastly, this morning walking down the stairs beside the Clough Commons I starred at the Starbucks and detected that the girl in the logo is made by negative spaces.

At least I have a part of my right brain developing!

Sources:

Images taken from Google Images


A Ga Tech English Class

The class of Friday September 2 was an unusual class. Our homework was to bring an object handcrafted by me. I brought a little wood case I did with my dad. Before going to the class I did not know what it was for.

Entering the classroom, Dr. Hunter told us that we were going to get out of the classroom environment to go and start our invention mob. Finally, I recognized that the handcrafted object’s purpose was to come up with an idea of the invention mob. My object did not serve to bring new ideas for the invention mob project.

My group spent quite a lot of time thinking about what our project could be about. It was extremely awkward because no one was giving ideas and everybody was looking at each other thinking “kill me right now.”

I spoke and asked my group members “what are you good at?”

One member of the group was good at Photoshop editing, one liked comic books and another one liked short stories. Combining these ideas and talents the group came up with the idea to create a photographic comic. The theme that was proposed by one of the group members was a detective/spy theme.

The project is planned to be made as collaborative as possible between the four of us in the group. Weiting will specialize on photo editing and the rest of us will focus on obtaining photos from friends and photos that match up the storyline for the comic. The distribution will definitely change as the project solidifies.

To make a good invention mob, our group will try to integrate as much people outside of the group. We are going to ask people outside of the project to give us ideas and even participate as characters in the comic.

Meanwhile, the first task to complete the invention mob is that each of us has to chat with friends. During the chat we are going to give our friends the four possible characters in the comic.

  1. Detective
  2. Detective’s partner
  3. Criminal
  4. Lab Scientist

Afterwards he or she would have to come up with a mini-skit. The purpose of the mini-skits is to pile up different ideas from everyone and make an amalgam of all the ideas that will build up the plot of the comic book.

So far the invention mob project seems to be extremely interesting and exciting. I cannot wait to see its final outcome!