ASME Takes ISHOW to India

ASME Takes ISHOW to India ASME Takes ISHOW to India Teams of students, engineers and entrepreneurs from Cambodia, Indonesia, and across India competed at the first of three 2015 ASME global showcases for products designed to meet social needs in developing regions.The ISHOW Global Innovations Showcase welches held in the southwestern Indian city of Pune, with similar competitions planned for Washington, DC, and Nairobi, Kenya. The teams are competing for $500,000 in funding, plus coaching and consulting by design engineers, product designers and media specialists.ISHOW Program Manager Paul Scott addresses Finalists.The ASME ISHOW focuses on hardware innovations, and teams in Pune presented products in all stages of development initial design, products undergoing user testing, and products already on the market that are being redesigned to broaden their reach and social value. ASME designed ISHOW to leverage its expertise in mechanical systems and ASME staff leaders say this focus on hardware distinguishes ISHOW from other social innovation showcases, especially those featuring software and information technologies.There are unique challenges facing social entrepreneurs with hardware based ventures, said Noha El-Ghobashy, ASME Managing Director for global development. Investors tend to shy away from hardware because of the complexities associated with supply chains, with manufacturing, and with getting physical products to end users, especially in the developing world. This takes an ecosystems, and thats what were trying to do with ISHOW. Were trying to raise awareness and build that ecosystem.Imaduddin Majid and Ridwan Wicaksono, chemical engineering students, and partner Syauqy Aziz, all from Jakarta, Indonesia, won the competition in Pune for their work developing water quality monitors for shrimp ponds. Their product, called BlumbangReksa, will transmit data about water chemistry through the cloud, and will provide decision-support to farmers.Pune winners Ri dwan Wicaksono (center) and Imaduddin Majid (right) with Catapult plans Noel Wilson.The pair said the feedback they received in Pune from ISHOW engineering, design and communications experts helped them deliver a winning presentation. The coaching before our presentation was very important, said Majid. The coaches told us to tell the story behind our project. His partner, Wicaksono, added Overnight we took that suggestion and we rearranged our slides. We also used Google to find additional pictures, we put in more data, and we made the presentation clearer and more accessible.Each winning team in Pune won $15,000, but Aziz said that the money was not the main benefit. Instead, he said there was tremendous value in relationships and networking opportunities they are building through ISHOW, and that friendships with the other teams is especially valuable.Other winners are experienced engineers. Rajeev Kumar and team partners from Bengaluru (Bangalore) are already selling diagnostic sy stems for healthcare. They want to extend the reach of this equipment to poor, rural areas, to improve healthcare there.Apart from the prize money, I think the connection with ASME is quite useful, Kumar said after the winners were announced. And of course, the design review that we are going to participate in tomorrow will be important. What we are hoping to get from the design review is feedback on the product itself. We have a good team of hardware and software engineers, but not really anyone who can advise us on product design. So we are looking to make a world class product, and that is where I think the contribution tomorrow will be very useful.Pune winner Rajeev Kumar addresses judges during ISHOW competition.Kumar was anticipating the interaction with expert coaches assembled by ISHOW. ISHOW program manger Paul Scott explained this feature of the competitionThe winners will go through a process that we call of winner support, a days worth of free consultancy and a design an d engineering review, to really drill down into their innovations and look at them from a technical perspective. Weve put together an excellent team of six technical reviewers, from industry and academia. Theyre going to sit down with the innovators that win, giving advice and assistance. We think thats going to be really valuable for the winners.The third winner in Pune was Anurag Agarwal. With partners in New Delhi, Agarwal founded New Leaf Dynamic Technologies, to develop an off-grid refrigeration system powered by farm waste and cow dung. The system is called GreenCHILL.It really opens up a new set of opportunities for us, Agarwal said. It is a great achievement for our organization and the work that we have been doing. It will give us access to experts. It will give us access to a network through ASME, it will improve our access to funding and give us more credibility. Winner Anurag Agarwal (center) receiving design coaching from Catapults Marius Rossouw.Agarwal also spoke of h ow ISHOW coaching helped make a better presentation. During one of the talks, P.R. Ganapathy President of Villgro, an ISHOW partner organization in India talked about impact as it relates to prosperity, and that really hit me. Agarwal said he incorporated into his pitch an explanation of how his refrigeration system would help farmers grow more profitable crops he cited strawberries instead of potatoes. The farmers will make better livings. And consumers will have strawberries. And everybody will have smiles on their faces.Ganapathy was one of five judges at the ISHOW event. The others were El-Ghobashy, Dr. Mishra Priyaranjan, principal scientists at Philips Shyram Rajan, chief technology officer India, GE Healthcare Jackie Stenson, CEO, Essmart and Arun Venkatesan, a consultant who specialized in product development.Design consulting for winners was provided by Noel Wilson, Marius Rossouw and Karin Carter of Catapult Design. Design engineering consultation was provided by Iana A randa, of ASMEs Engineering for Global Development program, Priyarajan, Stenson and Venkatesan.Media consultation was provided by Paul Scott, ISHOW program manager and Petr Spurney, of the ASME Foundation.Click here for a video about the competition in Pune.View the USA finalists.

Airborne RED HORSE (Combat Engineers)

Airborne RED HORSE (Combat Engineers)Airborne RED HORSE (Combat Engineers)Joint operations are not a new concept here. Its a way of life for many units on base. But for a new breed of ?Air Forcejoint operators, this weeks Joint Forced Entry Exercise welches a chance to get off the ground literally. The Airmenare part of Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineer units, better known as Red Horse. They are from Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., Hurlburt Field, Fla., and Langley AFB, Va. Their task is to quickly assess and repair runways. But unlike other Red Horse teams, these Airmen parachute into the fight with the Army. The airborne Red Horse teams objectives during the joint exercise are to participate in an airfield seizure with Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., and then clear and repair the airfield alongside Army engineers. Their work will prepare the way for C-17 Globemaster IIIs to land, bringing in support and supplies to oper ate the air base. The exercise is a model of what the airborne Red Horse teams will be doing in the near future. These guys would be at the point of the spear, said Maj. Kevin Brown, chief of engineering for the Armys 82nd Airborne Division. When they parachute in, they dont have the luxury of having the security police or having other assets that are normally associated with a developed airfield. They are going out into the woods, into an undeveloped or remote airfield, and basically relying on their own survivability and field craft skills along with their technical engineering skills to get the runway going. Red Horse units activated in 1966 during the Vietnam War when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asked the Air Force to develop its own combat construction team. They are trainedto be a self-sustaining force in remote, bare-bones and possibly high-threat environments at any time, in any place and with any branch of the military. Their specialty is runway and ramp constructi on, maintenance and repair. Thanks to the teams flexible nature, they can fill virtually all bae civil engineer roles. Previous tasks have included renovating living quarters at former Taliban bases in Afghanistan, building fire stations and hangars, rewiring air traffic control towers, building laundry facilities and even paving basketball courts. Red Horses flexibility and diversity have made them a natural choice for the new concept of airborne civil engineers. The airborne RED HORSE was stimulated by the vision of the Chief of Staff, Gen. John Jumper, based on his experiences in U.S. Air Forces in Europe, and three teams were established in 2002. Airborne RED HORSE teams are significantly different than the rest of traditional RED HORSE combat engineer squadrons in that members are airborne qualified and use much lighter specialized equipment. ARH team members also attend a 13-day Army Air Assault course to learn how to sling-load their equipment and rappel from helicopters. ARH teams take 21 traditional RED HORSE members and augment them with six firefighters, six explosive ordnance disposal technicians, two chemical and biological readiness experts, and security forces personnel, as needed. The men and women who make up an ARH team volunteer from within the traditional units and have to be physically qualified. While the program has been developing over the past few years, the Airmen have been training. They have attended the airborne school at Fort Benning, Ga., and have been learning the tactical skills needed for them to be ready to work alongside their Army counterparts. How many guys in the Air Force get to do this? asked Staff Sgt. Mark Gostomski, 99th Civil Engineer Squadron, one of the 33 Airmen participating in the exercise. The Air Force brings a wealth of experience and knowledge in airfield repair and airfield construction. We also have a wealth of tactical knowledge, so were basically melding the two into a joint collaboration of effort, Maj or Brown said. The idea is not to take over any of the jobs the Army already has within their units, but to augment those units with Air Force specialties. They are configured to do a rapid assessment and repair of a runway, said Capt. Brent Legreid, airborne Red Horse project manager. In addition to that, because theyve got plumbers, electricians, andothers, they can also do a good assessment of the facilities on the base or in the local area to determine if the infrastructure is there to support bigger follow-on forces. That is something that the Army doesnt have integrated into their airborne corps. Although the Airmensaid the differences between the Air Force and Army cultures can make working together a challenge, they also said the outcome is well worth it. Its a groundbreaking opportunity to see where the Air Force is going, said Staff Sgt. Thomas Cooper, 823rd Security Forces Squadron. Theyve been really receptive to us. Were stepping up to show what were capable of and to s how that we can make their load lighter.

Calling It Quits on Your Internship

Calling It Quits on Your InternshipCalling It Quits on Your InternshipShould you leave aninternship? Although my opinion is usually that unless it includes the following 4 criteria, I recommend that if at all possible, a current intern should try to stay with the internship for the experience it provides, the ability to make professional connections, and a chance to include relevant experience on their resume. Since I believe there are some good lessons in the scenario, I thought Id write about it so that people in similar circumstances (including jobs they cant stand) can evaluate when its time to call it quits on their internship or job. Intern Question Now, my question is, three months of not really experiencing what I expected and talking about it with the CEO more than once and things not improving, is it time for me to call it quits or stick around HOPING things will get better? And if I should stick it out, how long should I stick around knowing that the other offer may di sappear after January? In this case, I think the writer makes some excellent points on why leaving this internship would not be a badthing. First off, this person is a graduate student who had a job and was making decent money with great benefits only to leave and pursue what they thought would be their dream job once they completed their training which took form by doing an internship. For someone seeking a future job and looking to get exposure to the entertainment field in LA, taking this job sounded like an excellent idea. But over the course of the past 2 months, this internship has proven to be a nightmare. First off, many of the promises that were made at the time of the bewerberinterview were not followed through by the employer. The applicant was seeking excitement in the next job along with a decent salary, benefits, a good working environment, and a chance to grow within the company. To make the situation more complicated, the applicant was also interviewing for another c ompany that seemed amazing, but it didnt offer the glitz and glamour of working with celebrities on a daily basis, so they ended up putting that job on hold. They decided to take the internship because it was paid, it promised some glitz and glamour, and had the potential to work into a full-time job once the internship was over. To the interns despair, the pay was quite low and did not increase significantly only after some discussions and then again after taking on the role of personal assistant when the full-time employee was fired. Come to find out 2 previous employees doing this saatkorn job were also fired. They have had 10 interns over the course of the past 2 years and only 3 employees on the payroll. As the personal assistant, the employee is now bored with the job running the office, and the actress that they work directly with is a lot of work. There have been promises of future commissions once events take place, but theres been nothing mentioned about training on how to be successful once a commission structure has been put into place. The student is currently struggling with low pay and having trouble making ends meet while living in LA. Staying in a bad internship while struggling financially is probably not a good idea in this case, especially since the learning seems to be minimal with a non-existent growth path. Dilemma The writers Dad thinks the student should do what they think is best, but Mom wants the student to stay because she feels that the student has a prestigious title and theres a possibility that things will get better. While the reader is feeling quite used and upset because the company has not lived up to its promises and there appears to be no growth potential with the company. If youd like to let us know what you think, please join us on the Forum to see my response and let us know if you think this student should stay or leave their internship.