engineering

This rotating skyscraper is coming to Dubai

The city is planning to build it by 2020. The dynamic tower hotel was designed by David Fisher in 2008. Now it’s finally coming to life. Each floor of the 80-story building will rotate independently giving guests and residents a 360 degree view. An apartment could cost you up top $40 million.

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10 most powerful female engineers of today

To celebrate International Women’s Day, we’d like to highlight ten of the most powerful female engineers of the modern world.

Microsoft’s Peggy Johnson

Peggy Johnson currently serves as Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Business Development. Before joining Microsoft, she held the position of Executive Vice President and President of Global Market Development at Qualcomm. Johnson holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from San Diego State University

 

Google’s Diane Greene

Diane Greene is leading a new team in Google that combines all of the company’s cloud businesses. Google’s goal is make its cloud business bigger than its ad business by 2020. Greene holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Vermont.

 

Apple’s Tara Bunch

Tara Bunch is vice president of AppleCare, Apple’s technical-service and support organization. Bunch joined Apple in 2012 after a 20-year career at Hewlett-Packard, where she was a senior vice president of global customer service and support operations. Bunch graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.

 

Bechtel’s Barbara Rusinko

Barbara Rusinko is president of Bechtel Nuclear, Security & Environmental, Inc. (NS&E).  Barbara is a registered professional engineer with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of South Carolina, and a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Alabama – Huntsville. She serves on the corporate partnership council of the Society of Women Engineers.

Pilot’s Jessica McKellar

Jessica McKellar is founder and CTO at Pilot, a bookkeeping service. Prior to founding Pilot, Jessica was director of engineering at Dropbox and a major figure in the world of Python, a popular web-development programming language. McKellar attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied computer science and chemistry.

Ford’s Reates Curry

fords-reates-curry

Reates Curry has been at Ford Motor Company since 1995 working with the Driving Simulator Team. Her expertise is in the area of human-machine/computer interaction with an emphasis on developing metrics for safe and efficient in-vehicle technology design and testing of human-machine interfaces (HMIs). Curry has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Columbia, a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Rutgers University where she did her research in the area of Machine Vision.

 

Amazon’s Sharon Chiarella

Sharon Chiarella is the Vice President of Community Shopping at Amazon where she leads the team responsible for iconic Amazon experiences including Customer Reviews and Wish Lists. Prior to joining Amazon in 2007, Ms. Chiarella held leadership positions at Microsoft, Yahoo!, Kodak, and Presto Services.  She earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science from Manhattan College and her MBA from Harvard Business School.

Google’s Anna Patterson

Anna_Patterson

Anna Patterson, PhD has been described as one of the most important women in technology. She is currently Founder and Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures and Vice President of Engineering at Google. Patterson received her B.S. in Computer Science and another in Electrical Engineering from Washington University and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and was a Research Scientist at Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence working with John McCarthy on Phenomenal Data Mining and Carolyn Talcott on theorem provers.

VMware’s Yanbing Li

Yanbing Li is senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s Storage and Availability business unit. The group’s products are used by over 7,000 companies, VMware says, and the team has 1000 people in 5 countries. Li has a PhD in electrical engineering and computer engineering.

Make in LA’s Noramay Cadena

noramay-cadena

Noramay Cadena is a cofounder of Make in LA, a startup accelerator focused on hardware projects. Prior to that, spent over 12 years working across multiple business units at The Boeing Company. She led process improvement strategies across large development programs to help the company break the cost curve associated with bringing large programs to market. Noramay holds an MBA, a Master’s in Engineering Systems and a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering – all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

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Australia’s six engineering wonders

Australia.

We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil;
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in nature’s gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;

We are a beautiful and diverse country, no doubt about that.  And we have some of the world’s most magnificent engineering wonders to match that. Here are six of them.

 

Sydney Opera HouseSydney Opera House

When people think of Australia, chances are they are envisioning the Sydney Opera House. With its unique shell-like roof structure, it is one of the 20th century’s most famous and distinctive buildings.  The facility features a modern expressionist design, with a series of large precast concrete “shells”, each composed of sections of a sphere of 75.2 metres (246 ft 8.6 in) radius, forming the roofs of the structure, set on a monumental podium. The building covers 1.8 hectares of land and is 183 m  long and 120 m wide at its widest point. It is supported on 588 concrete piers sunk as much as 25 m below sea level.

 

Sydney Harbour Bridge

Sydney Harbour Bridge

The Sydney Harbour Bridge is one of Australia’s most well known and photographed landmarks. It is the world’s largest (but not the longest) steel arch bridge with the top of the bridge standing 134 metres above the harbour. It is fondly known by the locals as the ‘Coathanger’ because of its arch-based design.

 

Snowy Mountains Scheme

Snowy Mountains Scheme

The Snowy Mountains Scheme is the largest public works engineering scheme ever undertaken in Australia. The scheme is nationally significant for its engineering success and as a symbol of Australian achievement. The Snowy Mountains Scheme was placed on the National Heritage List on 14 October 2016.

 

Kalgoorlie Super Pit

Kalgoorlie Superpit

The Super Pit, was Australia’s largest open cut gold mine until 2016 when it was surpassed by the Newmont Boddington gold mine also in Western Australia. The Super Pit is located off the Goldfields Highway on the south-east edge of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. The pit is oblong in shape and is approximately 3.5 kilometres long, 1.5 kilometres wide and 570 metres deep. At these dimensions, it is large enough to be seen from space.

Adelaide to Darwin Railway

Adelaide to Darwin Railway

The Adelaide–Darwin railway is a south-north transcontinental railway between the cities of Adelaide, South Australia and Darwin, Northern Territory. Between 2000-2004 the line was extended from Alice Springs to Darwin as a Build, Own, Operate and Transfer back (BOOT) project by the AustralAsia Rail Corporation. This replaced the former narrow gauge line from Darwin to Larrimah and the narrow gauge/standard gauge Central Australia Railway from Port Augusta to Alice Springs which used a different route up to 200 km to the east. The railway has withstood many uniquely territorian disasters – floods and cyclones washing trains off the tracks, fast-growing tropical vegetation blocking the line and numerous accidents with road trains.
But despite all those setbacks the line has endured through the decade.

Collins-class Submarine

Collins class submarine

The Collins class takes its name from Australian Vice Admiral John Augustine Collins; all six submarines are named after significant Royal Australian Navy (RAN) personnel who distinguished themselves in action during World War II.  The Collins Class project was established in 1982 to provide six new Australian built submarines for the RAN. The Collins Class submarines are the second largest non-nuclear powered submarines in the world. Regarded as the best large conventional diesel-powered submarine in the world, the Collins Class are packed with high level technological and performance capability.

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