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What can I say?

This year's NSF EEC PI meeting was so energizing to me it made me resurrect the informal blog on my webpage just to be able to talk about it!

For me, the highlight was the interactive keynote by President Lesia Crumpton-Young of Texas Southern University. Her talk was titled, "Reflecting to Re-Envision", and she really challenged us to think about how we can make engineering *better* in every facet. Look, you're not going to understand her energy if you've never heard her speak, and I'm not going to do justice, so let me just share a few of the ideas that stood out to me...

It's time to rethink higher education... "What if our goal was to create social impact and not preserving the status quo?"

President Young 9/23/2022 quoting Brian Rosenberg in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/23/2021

Reflecting to re-envision requires that we: i) abandon ego-centric decisions; ii) prevent proliferation of improper ideas; iii) sharpen critical thinking; and, iv) cultivate enlightened decision makers.

My paraphrase of President Young's "Reflecting to Re-Envision" theme

At Texas Southern, our mission statement is now two words: "Transform Lives"... That's it.

President Lesia Crumpton-Young, 9/23/2022

Because, as engineers, we are problem-driven, we so often focus on the problems or deficits in our current experience. This is fair enough--the places where we are most dissatisfied are often where the most important opportunities are found. However, this makes us vulnerable to operating with a deficit mindset, and we can unwittingly promulgate a deficit mindset to other areas. When this deficit mindset meets with other cultural, institutional, or social factors and intersects with pre-conceived judgments about faculty, students, staff, or administrators in a range of people groups, the deficit mindset can result in suppressing and not supporting the excellent ideas of others.

Sometimes it is just good to be reminded to share or explore even a small idea.

It is also good to remember that you hold some unspoken assumptions that, if unexplored, could end up placing a wet blanket on the fires of innovation and collaboration.

President Young shared with us a number of questions, but I'd like to repeat one of them to you: How will you innovate, transform, or disrupt your thinking, your department, your institution, or your community? Where will you infuse innovation or challenge the traditional thinking, populations, stereotypes, and performance myths that dominate your context?

How will you intend to transform lives?

This week in infrastructure systems:

• New Jersey Transit is a commuter mass transit system with surging ridership, increased fares, and record numbers of passenger trips to NYC. Despite this, NJT is not enjoying a period of success. NJT is suffering reductions in state support, and the consequences of long-term maintenance neglect and overlooked infrastructure investment needs. The NYT has published an extended article on this issue in light of the recent accident at Hoboken Terminal.
• As the US Presidential Election of 2016 winds down to a close, the candidates are frantically fighting off sordid ghosts of time past. However one might feel about these accusations, one of the main party presidential candidates will become US President, and we must know where they stand on infrastructure development. Both campaigns have been tight-lipped on their plans for infrastructure spending, but ConstructionDIVE reports what we know about the candidates' current commitments. The few details the campaigns report: Clinton will establish an infrastructure bank and send a budget request to Congress of $275 Billion USD in the first 100 days of her administration. They report that Trump, on the other hand, indicates he will spend "at least double" what Clinton spends.

This past weekend, Panama celebrated the new Canal, accommodating larger Neo-Panamax vessels that greatly reduce shipping costs while increasing its efficiency. This project, and others facilitating the transit of such large vessels will have wide-ranging impacts on infrastructure systems. Please take the opportunity to listen to Tom Ashbrook's "On Point" Podcast titled "Global Trade and the New Panama Canal", as a creative primer on the topic. I, personally, am fascinated to see what preparations we are making here in Baltimore to try and steal back some of the West Coast traffic that may be available if we can get our railway infrastructure, especially the tunnels, ready for Panamax container traffic.

I thought it might be a good idea to start sharing some of the things I read or hear across several great news sources on infrastructure systems. We all are affected by our infrastructure systems daily. With this in mind, we are starting a series called #TWIST-This Week in Infrastructure Systems. Today, I'm sharing four items from my week's reading for our first issue.

1. The Guardian asks "Is City Living Bad for Your Health?" This is a crucial question that deserves our attention, as our society is becoming increasingly urban and resource intensive. As we come together in greater geographic densities, we have the opportunity to improve our economic and environmental efficiency--but we have to make sure we don't do so at the expense of our health.
2. Govtech.com shows us how we can use robots to perform sewer structural monitoring. Arlington, TX, USA recently has developed a 42-inch robot using technology created by Red Zone Robotics to revolutionize the way they conduct sewer system to scan large-diameter concrete sewer pipes--the pipes that would lead to most catastrophic failures--and evaluate data on their system.
3. ASME is encouraging engineers to engage with the literature of their profession. They have a list of 3 books all engineers should read, including Petroski's "To Engineer is Human", Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", and Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things." These could provide some great ideas for engineers not only to engage one another across disciplines, but also to engage the general public in issues engineers face when designing systems or technologies.
4. While we in DC are suffering through the long-overdue WMATA SafeTracks initiative, NYC has recently released their Mobility Report. In their own words, the NYC Mobility Report "...presents data on the primary drivers of transportation demand in New York City— population, tourism, employment—side-by-side with transportation indicators related to vehicle use and transit ridership dating back to 1910..." Their goal is to examine how they have relied on their transportation systems to achieve such vibrancy, and to determine what is necessary to keep moving forward.