‘Tis  the Season! Here is my attempt at compiling a list of best  gifts for Engineers (and other research types) on your Holiday gift list, under $30! (No, I am not in anyway compensated by the after-mentioned companies, nor do they send me free stuff. Although they should.)

No matter what you choose to give your Engineer this holiday season, remember the most important thing about us:

An engineer is always right.

And no, there are no exceptions to that rule. Ever.

1) A perfect t-shirt to demonstrate the above

“It’s not that I can’t explain it…it’s just that you wouldn’t understand”  T-shirt $28

http://www.cafepress.com/+dark_tshirt,97056632

2) Ah…non-engineers… such a nuisance

Mug $18

http://www.cafepress.com/+you_broke_something_large_mug_white,492085411

3) No engineering gift guide would be complete without the PhD comics! They are as funny as they were 7 years ago in grad school

2112 Calendar $17

http://www.phdcomics.com/store/mojostore.php?_=view&ProductID=20220

4) Steve Jobs. ‘Nuf said.

Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson $17

http://product.half.ebay.com/Steve-Jobs-by-Walter-Isaacson-2011-Hardcover/109073110&tg=info

5) OK, technically, these do not fit in the “under $30″ category. BUT these crayon pens are just too cool, so we’ll just say that the extra is a part of the written-in safety factor.

Crayon Pens $33

http://www.penboutique.com/showproduct.aspx?ProductID=7875&SEName=acme-crayon-retractable-rollerball-pen

Have a wonderful Holiday Season and best of luck shopping for all of the Engineers on your list!

Cheers,

Masha

P.S. My 201o Super-Ultimate gift guide:

http://mvpmodelingsolutions.com/mvpblog/2010/12/

Check it out if you’re in the area! Here’s the poster that the UD grad students put together for my talk. I believe the students thought that I did not look cool enough to talk about the Social Media…so they spruced up my photo to make me look a bit “edgier”.

Sorry for the late upload of the Part 2 of the Successful Unemployment Toolkit!  (Please read the post here and upload Part 1).

Upload Part 2 of the audio (zip file that includes Tracks 6-15 in mp3 format):

mvpmodelingsolutions.com/Tracks_6_through_15_mp3.zip (This Download is virus-free, and NO, you DONT’t have to provide your contact info, or sign your life away in general. Just download and enjoy!)

If you’ve listened to both Parts 1 and 2 of the toolkit, I’d love to hear what you think! Please comment below.

Cheers,

Masha

Two years ago I read the first edition of Tim Ferriss’s 4-hour Work Week (see related post: How Much is Your Time Worth? – Unexpected engineering lessons from “The 4-Hour Workweek.”) - and was instantly inspired to create my very own internet product.

My first marvelous informational product (you be the judge after downloading it below), the Successful Unemployed Toolkit - failed miserably. I spend a lot more money on trying to market the product than I brought in by selling it. Turns out that engineering-related information does not lend itself to internet marketing as easily as “Become a Gazillioner while sitting on your couch” or “Loose 300lb NOW” type of information. It’s a lot more challenging to market and sell stuff to the scientific community (I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it’s because we’re more skeptical or simply smarter than the rest of the world ).

But as they say, it’s only a failure if you don’t learn from it. After selling a whopping 12 Successful Unemployment Toolkits, spending about $2000 on marketing, and shutting down the product website, I learned that:

- Nothing beats the thrill of selling a product that you dreamed-up and created from start to finish (even if you only sell 12 of them). Thus…

- …I cannot fathom going back to creating products for someone else (MVP has greatly benefited from this realization and is enjoying successful growth as I continue to create and develop my own products)

- Social media is an absolutely indispensable and free tool for any business or a individual

- Public speaking can be a lot of fun and I got a lot of practice as part of my first failed product marketing experience

- It’s a great big world of information out there - just because you got your degree, learning does not have to stop!

Now, what’s in it for you? Although I failed to make the Successful Unemployed Toolkit into a revenue-generating product, I still think that the information that I provide in it is very relevant and extremely useful to any engineer or scientist who is looking to grow professionally, or needs to find a job.

So I am giving away the Successful Unemployed Toolkit completely FREE. You don’t have to sign-up for anything. Just click on the link below, download and enjoy (if you find the information useful, I always appreciate your comments and e-mails!)

I will be giving away the toolkit in THREE PARTS during the month of October. Part one consists of first third of the MP3 audio portion and the Reference Guide. Parts 2 and 3 will include second and third parts of the audio, respectively.

(This Download is virus-free, and NO, you DONT’t have to provide your phone, e-mail, or sign your life away in general. Just download and enjoy!)

What is the Successful Unemployment Toolkit™? ( This text is directly from my, now shut-down, website…download is below the description…)

When I started my company, I became very involved in the company marketing and public relations efforts. In the process, I realized that a lot of techniques that go into promoting and building a small business can be very effective for individuals who are looking for a job and want to increase their professional value whether or not they are currently employed.

Working out of my home office forced me to look for opportunities that would allow me to grow as a professional while increasing my value as an expert in the field. I developed these techniques and implemented them very successfully for myself and my business. Now, I want to share with you how to use this information and techniques for your professional development.

The Successful Unemployment Toolkit™ that I have created for scientists and engineers is a set of very specific steps that you can start implementing immediately.

I will show you step-by-step how to:

· Add more valuable credentials and skills to your resume, even if you are not officially employed (and I am not talking about taking more classes or going back to school)

· Stay on top of the latest research developments in your field, whether or not you are currently working

· Stand out from the crowd of thousands of other job applicants, even if they have more experience in the field or a higher degree than you

· Develop the skills that will get you hired

· Find opportunities for professional growth

· Uncover jobs that are not advertised

· And most importantly - How to feel professionally fulfilled and HAPPY

DOWNLOAD Part 1 (zip file that includes Tracks 1-5 in mp3 format): mvpmodelingsolutions.com/Tracks_1_through_5_mp3.zip

DOWNLOAD Reference Guide in pdf format: mvpmodelingsolutions.com/ReferenceGuide_2011.pdf

Cheers!

Masha

Dear MVP Readers,

I am so excited to announce my first set of On-demand short courses for ACS!!  Seeing a huuuuge need for practical knowledge of statistical data analysis for science/engineering professionals (see previous post), I’ve created 2-4 hour course modules that can be viewed on your own time, and will leave you with a much better understanding of how to best analyze your experimental or computer modeling data.

The courses that are now available on the American Chemical Society website are:

Introduction to Statistical Analysis of Laboratory Data -

Understand the fundamentals of statistical treatment of laboratory data and learn how to solve basic data analysis problems with the help of Excel.

• Introduction to Statistics and MS Excel
• Measurement
• Calibration and traceability
• Why do we need data analysis?
• Three types of error
• Accuracy and precision
• Significant figures
• Population and Sample
• Mean, Variance and Standard Deviation

Advanced Statistical Analysis - Hypothesis Testing and ANOVA

• Determining significant Systematic Error
• Testing Variances
• Hypothesis Testing
• One way ANOVA
• ANOVA in Excel
• Least Significant Difference
• Sampling
• Multi-way ANOVA

Introduction to Statistical Calibration of Laboratory Methods

• Understand the linear calibration model
• Learn to estimate the uncertainties in the calibration parameters
• Learn to perform calibration calculations in Excel
• Calculate parameters and uncertainties in the standard addition method
• Calculate the detection limits from measurements of blanks and uncertainties of the calibration method

Excel Basics for Statistical Analysis of Laboratory Data

• Introduction to MS Excel
• 12 Hands-on Excel Examples Covering:
  • Mean, Variance and Standard Deviation
  • Calculating confidence Intervals
  • Normal distribution testing
  • Test for an outlier
  • Determining significant systematic error
  • Hypothesis Testing
  • Systematic Error
  • Testing Variances
  • One way ANOVA
  • Least Significant Difference
  • Sampling
  • Two-way ANOVA
  • Linear calibration model
  • Standard addition model
  • Limits of detection

Through a combination of lectures and problem-solving sessions, these On-Demand module will teach statistical techniques you can put to immediate use in your workplace. Example Excel files demonstrated in these modules will be available for you to download.

My live on-line courses in Statistics and Chemical Kinetics are starting on Sept. 15th 2011. To register visit:

Essentials of Chemical Kinetics

Introduction to Statistical Analysis of Laboratory Data

Hope to have you as a student this fall!

Cheers,

Masha

Statistics was my least favorite course as an engineering undergrad. I was totally convinced that the entire class was a complete waste of time. Who really uses this stuff anyway?

Ironically, I recently found myself teaching a Statistical Analysis of Laboratory Data course for the American Chemical Society (ACS) and was shocked to discover that I thoroughly enjoyed the topic.

When the opportunity to teach statistics first presented itself about a year ago, I was very skeptical. The main reason for my skepticism was that I always considered “statistics” to be sort of nebulous and non-practical thing - like turbulence models in CFD simulations, or the weather channel (I am convinced that I can predict weather better then the weather people).

My apologies, if most of you are offended by this statement, but being an engineer, I can only believe in things that are practical. Things that work - make sense to me. Statistics, the weather channel, and turbulence have never provided me with any pragmatic value…well until recently.

Funny thing is that I have studied and enjoyed many things that might be considered much more “theoretically fluffy” than the weather prediction. Two of my favorite courses in grad school were General Relativity and High-energy Astrophysics. Talk about “out-there” concepts. But what I learned in these courses helped me understand the world around me; I could visualize the concepts and relate them to practical experience in everyday life. This was largely due a wonderful UCSD physics professor (thank you Dr. Fuller!) who made these courses pragmatic and relevant to me.

On the other hand, when statistics was taught to me as an undergrad engineering student with no on-the-job experience, it was nothing more then a jumble of confusing probability equations that seemed like a complete waste of time. When I started doing research in grad school,  I became more and more acutely aware of how much “bad” data is out there in the scientific community. So many times I was advised by experienced researchers not to use a set of data from a certain university or research group, because that university or research group was known to produce data that was unreliable and/or inaccurate. Their data was published in peer reviewed journals, yet there was no standard for quantitatively measuring its uncertainty?

Eventually, I realized that there are standards that ALL researcher should adhere too when reporting research data in any scientific field. Those standards, which describe the reliability of any data set, are identified by well-established statistical analysis guidelines. After teaching this course, I was shocked to realize how untrained most researchers (including myself) are in reporting their scientific data.

I think back to all of the technical papers I read through in grad school and during my work in R&D, all published in peer-reviewed journals…In so many cases the authors barely even mentioned their sources of error, yet alone described how they eliminated systematic errors, identified statistical outliers, or optimized their number of measurements!

If you are not appalled by the above paragraph, you need to re-visit statistics. Great place to start is: Data Analysis for Chemistry by Hibbert and Gooding. This short and to-the-point book approaches statistics in a very practical way and is great for researchers in any field. Now, I admit that in the past I was very guilty of ignoring statistics when publishing my own data. But after my recent revelation, you can be sure that any data I report in the future will be thoroughly combed in every direction with a statistical comb.

…And, who knows, eventually I might actually start to believe in turbulence modeling…

Cheers,

Masha

My downloadable courses on Statistics will be up by the end of August 2011 on the ACS website: http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/search_results.cfm

For a bit of completely shameless self-promotion - here is what a student wrote to ACS about my most recent Statistics course:

“The course was GREAT!!!!!!!! Probably one of the best I’ve attended in the last 4 years. Very valuable, USEFUL information and laid out in such a way that’s completely understandable to all. The online format was very good and allowed great flexibility in terms of attendance. Questions were always answered quickly. The handouts and example sheets will be invaluable going forward. This course was definitely worth the money spent and I highly recommend it!

Masha is really well versed in the course content and provided a great series. Please thank her!”

-Eden

Associate Director, QA

One of my favorite things about following an entrepreneurial path is the spontaneity and unlimited creativity that one can subject his or herself to while on this road.

For those of us who like unbeaten paths, who enjoy working 20-hour days one week and laying around on the couch “decompressing” the following week,  for those who love adventure, are not too keen on routines, for those who are annoyed by fear – this can be a great path to take.

So it is fun for me to announce that MVP is changing its entrepreneurial direction, in order to become more focused on the educational aspects of science and engineering. Since computer modeling will only become more and more integrated into future R&D processes, MVP will still provide training on the Best Practices for computer modeling, but will now focus on providing learning opportunities and platforms for, not only current engineers and scientists, but for the upcoming R&D workforce as well.

Future researchers need to know how to create virtual laboratories and experiments that can provide high-quality scientific data. Raised in the world of video games and social media – they deserve to know how to utilize their natural ability to “be one” with the virtual world in their work as scientists and engineers. Our high schools and universities leave much to be desired, when it comes to this area of STEM education.

And so, the new goal of MVP Modeling Solutions is - to provide learning opportunities that would allow all researchers, whether they are the Baby Boomers or the Millennials, to utilize the virtual space of computers and the web, to conduct real scientific experiments that will allow us to keep discovering the world around us and to keep on creating it.

Thoughts? Please comment below!

Cheers,

Masha

Take a look at the new MVP website and courses offered!

Don’t know about you, but I noticed a trend at technical conferences.

A poor grad student standing in front of an audience, is hanging on for his dear life to the podium while giving a presentation on “Molecular Capabilities of the T3H15C200Rn100 in the Capacity of Potential Implementation in  Electrical Conductivity” or something along those lines… You can barely make out what he is saying, buckets of sweat are dripping from his shaking fingers - you can actually reach out and touch the tension emanating from that poor soul! Finally he is finished - you can actually see the relief, like a giant mountain, sliding of his chest.  That is until the session chair announces: “Does anyone have questions for the presenter?”

Unavoidably, in every large technical conference I’ve ever attended, there is a group of professors who consider themselves to be VERY BIG DEALS. These professors have a FAVORITE saying during Q&A sessions. They especially love to use it on the nervous grad students. In fact the more uncomfortable and nervous the poor student looks, the more likely he is to elicit the favorite BIG DEAL response:

“I would just like to make a statement.”

(This is supposed to be Q&A, but the BIG DEAL professors don’t need to ask questions, just make statements, because they’re brilliant)

“I would NOT make such conclusions, based on this type of data, as this [miserable, obtuse, excuse for a] presenter just showed. In fact,  as I said in Chapter 7 of my VERY IMPORTANT book, I know about how I think, I know how I do things and you are wrong, but I am very smart. I know because I just know!”

OK, granted, I paraphrased but the general meaning is the same. So, just to get it off my chest - the above example is NOT a question. Thus, it would be nice not to hear it during Q&A sections of technical talks.

Cheers!

Masha

Have you ever thought of seeing your name on the cover of a book? Whether you are a published or an aspiring author, the post below will help you to avoid some common mistakes made by scientists and engineers trying to get their book published by a reputable publishing company.

In order to obtain a book contract with a publishing house you typically need to pitch your idea to an editor. So I figured that who best to give you advise on how to get your book published than an editor himself! This is a guest post from Peter Gordon, Senior Editor at Cambridge University Press, who has been signing and publishing authors in science and engineering fields for over 30 years.

Read on, and be sure to let me know when I’ll be able to buy your book!

Read more »