Electrical Engineers

"You have given the great honour … to hundreds of millions of children in the world who are deprived of their childhood and health and education, and fundamental right to freedom. It is a great moment for all those children. … I am quite hopeful and rather sure that this will help in giving bigger visibility and attention to the cause of children who are most neglected and most deprived. This will also inspire individuals, activists, governments, business houses, corporate to work hand in hand to fight this out. And I am quite hopeful about it, that the recognition of this issue will help in mobilising bigger support for the cause."

"I was personally concerned and involved in child rights-related activities right from my childhood. Then over a period of time I realized that it is not possible that one person can make substantial change; so it is necessary to build an organization of like minded people and sensitize other people to join. I knew right from the beginning that child labor is not just a technical or legal issue and also not merely an economic issue. It’s a combination of several things. It’s a deep-rooted social evil and to wipe it out we have to build a strong movement. Bachpan Bachao Andolan has never been a typical NGO but it has emerged as a movement over a period of time."

"First of all, everyone must acknowledge and feel that child slavery still exists in the world, in its ugliest face and form. And this is an evil, which is crime against humanity, which is intolerable, which is unacceptable and which must go. That sense of recognition must be developed first of all. And secondly there is a need of higher amounts of political will. There is a need of higher amount of corporate engagement, and the engagement of the public towards it. So, everybody has a responsibility to save and protect the children on this planet."

"It was a passion from my childhood to work for children, I carried it forward. I have been very strongly advocating that poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labour. It perpetuates poverty. If children are deprived of education, they remain poor."

"My mother saw me being attacked. She cried when I left engineering for this cause. She understood my fight, encouraged me. I remember all those who were with me in this struggle, including two colleagues who were killed. Whenever I free children from slavery and take them back to their mothers, the tears of happiness in their eyes are like blessings of God. When I see the faces of liberated children, I find their smile of freedom divine and it gives me divine strength. I never feel I'm liberating them, rather it feels like they're giving me freedom."

"Before he became the second Indian to win the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, not many had heard Kailash Satyarthi’s name. But within 90 minutes of the announcement, the child's rights activist had gained more than 4,500 followers on Twitter — and the list was growing at blazing speed. The 60-year-old activist has been a relentless crusader of child rights and his organisation, the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), has been at the forefront of the drive against child labour in India for years. … He was trained as an electrical engineer, but he began his work by staging raids on Indian manufacturing, rug-making and other plants where children and their parents often work as bonded labour. Building on his initial activism, he organised the Global March Against Child Labor in the 1990s — dedicated to freeing the millions of children abused worldwide in a form of modern slavery. The activist is also founder of RugMark, a widely known international scheme that tags all carpets made in factories that are child-labour free. In 1998, he organised the Global March Against Child Labour across 103 countries, which helped pave the way for an International Labor Organization convention on the worst forms of child labour."

"We are going to organise End Child Slavery Week from 19th November to 25th November, and that would be an annual event which we would be organising every year on different aspects of child slavery, and this year we are demanding to the international community that the abolition of child slavery must be incorporated into the post-millennium development goal or the sustainable development goal. So that would be the emphasis of this year's End Child Slavery Week."

"If I was not fighting against child labor, I don't know what else I could do. It was always in my heart, I could not live without that … It's really a kind of spiritual feeling which is difficult to explain … And the smiles come on the face of the children when they realize that they are free. … When you are living in a globalized economy and a globalized world, you cannot live in isolation, all the problems and solutions are interconnected, and so the problem of child labor in any part of the world is your problem. … The world should have one thing in mind — if the children are exploited in any part of the world, if the children are deprived of their childhood in any part of the world, the world cannot live in peace … The world cannot be human."

"The brain has this wonderful property — you can go through and shoot out every tenth neuron and never miss them."

"Listen to the technology; find out what it's telling you."

"The quantum world is a world of waves, not particles. So we have to think of electron waves and proton waves and so on. Matter is 'incoherent' when all its waves have a different wavelength, implying a different momentum. On the other hand, if you take a pure quantum system – the electrons in a superconducting magnet, or the atoms in a laser – they are all in phase with one another, and they demonstrate the wave nature of matter on a large scale. Then you can see quite visibly what matter is down at its heart."

"An economic system is not a linear system, and... this fact stands in the way of the determination of the parameters of the system by methods that presume linearity, and... it introduces great difficulties in the extrapolation from past behaviour for purposes of prediction."

"During the early phase of World War II, Britain was challenged to refine the understanding of human control of tanks and aircraft. The first engineering-oriented manual control models were probably those of Prof. Arnold Tustin in the United Kingdom applied to tank-control, followed closely by models by J.P. North of Boulton- Paul Aircraft Co."

"Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) introduced the that bears his name to the control community to relate discrete-time and continuous-time systems."

"Arnold Tustin is best known for his contributions to control theory and its application to electrical machines. However, his interests were much wider than electrical engineering, for he was a polymath who brought a systems approach to each of the many areas that he investigated. In the modern jargon he thought ‘outside the box’ and in doing so championed the use of control systems theory beyond its traditional limits. His impact was such that, in addition to his engineering contributions, he is well known for his systems treatment of economics and to a lesser extent... biology."

"Two kinds of self-controlling machines exist: the regulators whose effect has a fixed value and the Servo-mechanisms whose effect has a value depending on the value of a variable which is the “control.” The idea is simple and reveals itself to be accurate. We have found it confirmed by the technical authority, Prof. Arnold Tustin, of the University of Birmingham, who during the war elaborated a system for the movement of gun turrets and naval guns. According to him, if a machine were entrusted with driving a car, it would be a regulator on a straight road and a servo on a winding one."

"Once a full-employment policy has been adopted... the economic ’system’ just on that account is significantly different. Its equilibrium position has been shifted to a rising curve of trend close to and following the employment ceiling. The conditions of stability about this new level are radically different because the region of operation is now within the less flexible and sharply non-linear range of employment saturation"

"There are certain formal similarities between the problems of devising policies for economic stabilisation and those of designing automatic control systems. Methods have recently been developed by engineers for analysing the dynamic properties of quite complex models... [which] can also be used for the analysis of dynamic process models in economics... Professor Tustin’s book contains material of fundamental importance for all who are engaged in either theoretical or empirical studies of dynamic processes in economics. It throws new light on the possibilities and the difficulties of quantitative research in this field."

"Interest in the human-operator problem was stimulated by Prof. Arnold Tustin of the University of Birmingham, England, who suggested the application of the delay-line synthesizer to the study of some tracking records which he had brought with him from England. His experimental setup from which data were obtained consisted of a movable handle unit whose output was integrated once and then made to position a mechanical pointer. A second pointer, located next to the handle-driven pointer, was given an input motion consisting of a number of sinusoidal components of a nature sufficiently involved to prevent anticipation by an operator. The operator, upon noticing an error or difference between the two pointers, was required to move the handle in such a way as to reduce this error to a minimum value..."

"The separate excitation of the dynamo corresponds with the independently determined investment in the economic model, and the total excitation with income. Perhaps in this electrical age, the conventional metaphor of ‘priming the pump’ might be dropped in favour of ‘exciting the dynamo’."

"Actual economic systems are constantly subjected to change and disturbances, which would result in irregularity."

"The writer, who as an engineer has spent most of his life in factories, is inclined to look at the basis for investment from a technological point of view... Consider … the class of industrial investments only... The situation is one of entrepreneurs and boards of directors considering, from time to time, various ’possibilities of investment’, such as extra lathes or looms, an extension to a factory, a venture in some completely new product, and so on. It is helpful to think of these ’opportunities for investment’ as existing, in a given situation, in great number and variety, whether they are at that moment under active consideration or not. When any such possibility is considered it is assessed in respect of ’expected profitability’. One may conveniently think of all possibilities of investment as ’quanta’ that can be placed in a schedule of small ranges of expected profitability according to these assessments. The placement of a given ’opportunity for investment’ on this schedule has some ’margin of uncertainty’ (a curious analogy with the case of the quanta of physics)."

"It is possible that the major collaboration between economists and engineers is still to come, in the greater use of physical analogues and computers of the analogue type to avoid the difficulties of calculation. Apart from their major use as possible tools for economic regulation, physical analogues have a subsidiary use, for there are students of economics, as there are many students of engineering, who can better understand the significance of the somewhat formidable mathematics that tends to be used in this field, if they can first acquaint themselves with the types of behaviour in question as exhibited by physical objects that can be seen, felt, handled and experimented with. It may also be suggested that economists may find that what they have to say about economic policy will be very readily assimilated by one group of attentive pupils, namely the scientists, engineers and technicians of industry, if explanatory notions can be drawn from the theory of automatic control, which is now part of a normal engineering education. The aim of this essay has been to give explanations of system behaviour, and some approaches to its analysis, using geometrical construction and physical analogy where possible to clarify the implications of the more usual formal algebraic approach."

"The nature of the instability of an unregulated free-enterprise system is only now beginning to be clearly understood. Perhaps the degree of understanding already attained ensures that the grosser shortcomings have gone for ever, and to that extent the conflict between Capitalism and Communism is about issues that belong to the past. It may now be too late. The gods must smile to note how different the state of the world might have been if the progress of economic thought of the last twenty years had been advanced by even ten years. The possibility of a stable economic life with full utilization of our resources is still not sufficiently assured, and it is extremely important that it should be so assured, and that the whole world should accept this as a fact. The work that is being done in econometrics is massive, and undaunted by mathematical difficulties, but it appears, at any rate as viewed from outside, to be unclear as to its aim."

"The striking parallel between the economic models that are currently under discussion and some engineering systems suggests the hope that in some way the rapid progress in the development of the theory and practice of automatic control in the world of engineering may contribute to the solution of the economic problems."

"Simulators set up the required system of interdependences, usually between electrical potentials or voltages as variables, by means of valve-amplifiers and electrical networks. Since the voltage across a capacitance is proportional to the integral of a current, that across an inductance to the first derivative of a current, and that across a resistor to the current itself, it is possible to arrange a network of electrical elements, with amplifiers and feeds-back where necessary, so that a given linear differential equation is caused to relate an ’output’ voltage to an ’input’ voltage. Thus a given linear system of interdependences can be simulated, either directly or in any convenient transformation. If non-linear relationships are required there is no universally applicable simple device, but there do exist a great variety of non-linear elements with non-linear characteristics that are known and to some extent; adjustable. These include non-linear resistors... and the characteristic curves of thermionic valves, of rectifiers and discharge vessels and of magnetic materials. Limits may be set by the use of neon tubes that become conducting when a certain voltage is exceeded, or by relays, and so on"

"When beliefs need some modification, We make it with much trepidation, For our world is then new, And things seem all askew, 'til we're used to the new formulation."

"The topic that I have attempted to explore is the usefulness of these notions of the engineer, about feeds-back, harmonic components and the like, in application to the analogous problems of economic fluctuation and economic regulation."

"The analysis of engineering systems and the understanding of economic structure have advanced since then, and the time is now more ripe to bring these topics into a potentially fruitful marriage."

"Methods by which engineers stabilise their mechanisms suggest analogous possibilities for stabilising economic systems."

"Feedback: It is the fundamental principle that underlies all self-regulating systems, not only machines but also the processes of life and the tides of human affairs."

"Already well known to engineers all over the world as a pioneer in the development of automatic control, it may well turn out that Gordon Brown will make a still deeper mark on the engineering development of this century."

"The ‘theory of control systems’ in engineering is now a well-developed subject, making use of some remarkably powerful concepts and methods of analysis, especially in relation to problems of stabilization and the prevention of unwanted oscillations."

"He is transported to that curious world of decibels and negative frequencies where filter experts live."

"Within the past ten years there have appeared with increasing frequency books, articles, conferences, and monograms dealing with system engineering, system analysis, system design, the systems approach, the design of systems, system theory, and problems of systems engineering. The number of publications and the stature of their authors does not allow the dismissal of the subject as a passing fad. The breadth of engineering activity involved in even a cursory examination of recent publications is of interest... It is therefore obvious that whatever Systems Engineering may or may not be, it is non-sectarian and encompasses activities that are of concern in all phases of engineering. On the other hand undergraduate college offerings akin to Systems Engineering are rather limited and even graduate programs are not extensive."

"The pressure to generate the ideas and methods attributed to Systems Engineering stems directly from the needs of 20th century society. As our frontiers have disappeared, man has turned to technology to furnish the "good life" in a rapidly shrinking, crowded world. Our interdependence upon one another has increased in direct proportion to the population increase. The race to maintain or improve the operating efficiency of society has required that the systems and mechanisms that serve the society also become increasingly complex and interdependent. Goode and Machal have provided statistics to illustrate the above. They note that the world population increased from 800 million in 1750, to 1200 million in 1850, and 2400 million in 1950. Maximum transportation speeds went from 40 mph in 1850, and 100 mph in 1900, to commercial transport speed of 350 mph in 1950 and supersonic transport planes of over 1200 mph in the 1960's. Our communication systems are a good indication of increasing complexity. U.S. telephones jumped from 350,000 in 1900, to 55 million in 1955."

"[Allen Rosenstein was a principal investigator with a Reports Group from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.] A first step in the UCLA project was to determine how designs are actually carried out. The group under Allen Rosenstein, was charged with investigating design. They interviewed some forty designers; people from all kinds of industries, petroleum, aeronautical, construction, electronics, etc. It was found that individuals who did design tended to follow a certain pattern, but they did not do it consciously."

"For generation accustomed to thinking of the United States as the world's leading industrial power, something was lost when the U.S, became the world's largest debtor."

"While Peggy and I lived in Los Angeles, we made some interesting friends [after 1944]... There was also Allen Rosenstein, a young professor of electrical engineering from UCLA who belonged to a group associated with the American Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.... My association with Allen Rosenstein, professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and president of Pioneer Magnetics, led me in 1985 to a USAID project in the Caribbean and to a two-and-a-half-year consulting role with Coopers & Lybrand as a part of President Reagan's Caribbean initiative."

"In a city where buzzwords and catch phrases have a half-life of perhaps six months to a year, the term and the concept of "competitiveness" have lasted much longer; there is every sign we'll hear it for many years to come."

"Consideration of a further possibility, namely that of constructing physical systems that are analogues of the economic system, and of observing and recording their behaviour."

"Like concepts such as national energy policy or war on drugs, competitiveness covers a lot of territory"

"::(iii) Characterization of the general results in terms of some simple quantities, such as signal-to-noise ratio, information rate, bandwidth, etc"

":(2) The computational aspect. The classical (more accurately, old-fashioned) view is that a mathematical problem is solved if the solution is expressed by a formula. It is not a trivial matter, however, to substitute numbers in a formula. The current literature on the Wiener problem is full of semi-rigorously derived formulas which turn out to be unusable for practical computation when the order of the system becomes even moderately large..."

"The creator of modern control and system theory, Kalman theory, which was established in the early 1960s, brought a fundamental reformation to control engineering and since then laid the foundation for the rapid progress of modern control theory."

"::(ii) Conditions which guarantee a priori the existence, physical realizability, and stability of the optimal filter."

"One should clearly distinguish between two aspects of the estimation problem:"

":(1) The theoretical aspect. Here interest centers on:"

"[H]is fundamental contributions to modern system theory... provided rigorous mathematical tools for engineering, econometrics, and statistics, and in particular for his invention of the "Kalman filter,"… was critical to achieving the Moon landings and creating the Global Positioning System and which has facilitated the use of computers in control and communications technology."

"::(1) The general form of the solution (see Fig. 1)."