John Gyorki ::
Editorial Director :: John has extensive experience in both design engineering and professional writing. He has contributed technical articles to magazines since 1962. Gyorki received a BSEE degree from Lawrence Technological University in Southfield Detroit, Michigan. During his 30-year career in engineering, he was employed as a design engineer, engineering manager, and VP of engineering within several companies.
John Gyorki
November 14th, 2008.
If you are faced with a shortage of qualified, college-graduate design engineers, you might want to explore the possibility of hiring and training certain technicians for design jobs who now work for you — or even consider new hires. Many capable techs have passed any number of industry-specific certification tests or may hold an associate degree from a two-year college.
Since many of them have had to install, repair, and maintain a variety of complex electrical and mechanical devices and systems, they have an extremely practical working knowledge (in addition to the theory of operation) and may know both good and bad things that are not necessarily obvious to the engineer who originally designed them.
John Gyorki
October 20th, 2008.
I come from a highly creative family, which includes 22 aunts and uncles. For several generations, we had produced artists, photographers, writers, doctors, engineers, inventors, technicians, mechanics, pilots, musicians, analysts, researchers, pharmacists, CEOs, religious, and a junk man (who became a millionaire!), but curiously, no lawyers, politicians, or sales and marketing-oriented people. So, long ago my curiosity drove me to read all the literature I could find concerning the effects of culture, environment, and genetic predisposition on creativeness. Only in the past two decades, however, have researchers made significant advances in cognitive science that let us learn more definitively how the brain functions (or disfunctions). Since before the time of Freud, clinical psychologists had been limited to studying brain activity through noninvasive electrodes connected to the outside of the skull. But now, cognitive scientists have a variety of 2D and 3D brain scanners using x-rays and electromagnets, particularly SPECT scanners (single photon emission computed tomography), that let them conduct some pretty awesome studies with much more accuracy (“Change Your Brain, Change Your Life,” Daniel G. Amen, MD). Analysts can see detailed functional activity in specific locations of the brain with positional accuracy to within millimeters.
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John Gyorki
September 25th, 2008.
I recently did some research on alternative energy sources in order to find out how much progress we have made to date to ease the strain on our limited petroleum resources and reduce the gasses that cause global warming. Unfortunately, the results from these various sources did not appear to me to form a consensus. By the way, we all agree that we have limited petroleum resources and global warming, right?
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John Gyorki
July 29th, 2008.
Because I received such an overwhelming number of e-mail responses on this subject in the May issue, I decided to write a second article. I invite you to read the first set of replies on the Design World website Insights blog.
Obviously, most people agreed with my opinion regarding the devastating loss of American jobs and the negative effect that “off-shoring” has on our economy. This included smart, prominent manufacturers who make US products, profitably! Only those who choose to off-shore our knowledgebase object to my opinion. In the hope of finding a government publication that supported my opinion, I consulted the Internet and read our president’s report on the status of the US economy for 2007 (called a 2008 report). I was surprised (and a little puzzled) to read that the president painted a very rosy picture of our economic status! He and his advisors did not own up to the fact that we were and still are on a steep path to recession, but rather, that our economy was “unsettled.” What a weasel word! The report went on to say that although unemployment was approaching 5%, it was not likely to reach it. At this writing, the number is 5.5% and climbing. It also claimed that the US was the largest exporter of goods and services of any country, but he did not immediately describe what these goods and services comprised. After a little more searching, I got the impression that he was equating those exported services with the jobs that we offshored — primarily software development to India and China. How can that be an export? Exports are supposed to bring in dollars, not pay them out in salaries to foreign companies. (more…)
John Gyorki
June 18th, 2008.
I have been a design engineer for many more years than my wife would like to admit. And during those years, I had fun designing new control systems, instruments, consumer products, and even a chemical process. At no time did I consider my job as being a problem that needed a solution, nor did I have a problem that needed a solution. When I created things, I used ordinary engineering tools, which consisted of pliers, screwdrivers, wrenches, soldering guns, oscilloscopes, digital signal analyzers, voltmeters, algebra, trigonometry, physics, and chemistry. You get the idea. I went to school and college to learn how to use these tools to design and make things. So where did the idea come from that I always had a problem that needed a solution? I think it started when my mother said, “Do your homework. Do your math problems.” There it is. Until then, I didn’t know math was a problem. I liked manipulating numbers, fitting them to equations, charts and graphs, and later, schematic diagrams. I liked designing circuits that eventually became radios, power controllers, vehicle computers, and more instruments. Where is the problem here that needs a solution? (more…)
