§1. Course identity and instructors [00:03]
My name is Tom Eagar. I've been teaching this course in one form or another for about twenty-five or thirty years. It goes by, in Course 3, two numbers: the graduate version is 3.71 and the undergraduate is 3.171. If you're taking it in mechanical engineering it has a mechanical engineering number as a joint subject. I actually came to MIT fifty years ago this month as a freshman. So it's a big anniversary — you don't have to get a cake or anything.
The course is ostensibly about structural materials, but in fact that's not really what it's about. It's more of a course on whatever I want to talk about. When you get to be my age you can do whatever you want — just ignore the administration. But it does have some modules that have to do with structural materials, so if you're interested in structural materials you can get what you want out of the course.
There were, in the spring, two co-lecturers. Simone Belmar is a graduate of this department; he has his own consulting company now. And Steve Lyons is a graduate of the Sloan School; he's a practicing attorney in downtown Boston. In the spring semester he's lectured three times on intellectual property law. He thinks that anybody who goes to MIT, there's a good chance some of them are going to be involved in some sort of startup or some business, and they should know something about intellectual property law. Good point. In fact, we're going to try to get that course switched over from being a module in this course to actually a full-fledged course over at the Sloan School, because the Sloan students have appreciated what Steve had to talk about.
§2. How this became an online class [02:07]
Some administrative details. There's a sign-up sheet going around, or you can contact my assistant down the hall. The students have really turned this into an online class. I teach at nine o'clock in the morning because I tend to get in at 7 a.m. and go home at 2 p.m. to avoid traffic, mostly. But there are students, as you can see, from four or five different departments. I actually did an analysis one year of what time would fit for everybody. The only hour in the week that would fit for all the students from all the different classes, undergraduate and graduate, was 4 o'clock on a Friday afternoon. No thank you, I was not going to lecture them.
About thirty years ago — maybe a little over twenty-five — I actually taught the first distance education course at MIT. It was an experiment where MIT gave credit, and it was distance education to students at General Motors. We videotaped the class and I had thirteen or fifteen students at General Motors, and General Motors was paying tuition for them and they were getting credit as special students at MIT. GM had programs — they could either get a master's degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic or Purdue University because they have programs with those universities. But they wanted a welding course, and my specialty for getting my tenure was welding, and they said would Tom Eagar teach a welding course. Well, I was teaching a welding course, so we videotaped it.
And I learned that the students never ask questions. I wanted the students who were watching this by video to ask questions because they were taking it delayed, and I thought, how am I gonna get feedback from the class? I got like two or three questions in the first half of the semester. And then General Motors flew me out to Detroit to meet with a lot of the students. I said, how come you don't ask questions? They said, well, if we don't understand something we just play the tape back over that portion again, and it usually makes more sense the second time.
It turns out Stanford University in the 1980s learned the same thing before MIT. They called it tutored video instruction, and they had students in different parts of the country that had a tutor that would play the video at the company site. We didn't have real-time internet access back in the 80s. And they actually found the students who took it by tutored video instruction did better than the students who took it live. It was partly because you can play it back. And it's not that the professors are always incoherent, it's that when you're watching something live, sometimes your mind wanders off to something else, like a Snickers bar, and you miss part of it.
So I thought, well that's interesting. And then I found that students would come to me and say, well professor I can't be at class on such and such a day. I said, well fine, you can watch the movie, because we were videotaping. We did that for one or two years with General Motors, and after that I decided I'd pay for the videotaping myself for the last twenty-five years, because if you can't make it to class you can watch the movie. Over time, with the internet, we now upload these things to YouTube, and there are a hundred and fifty hours of me on YouTube. You get to take whatever 150 hours you want, as long as you take 36 of them. So that's how it evolved, and the students have really turned it into an online class because of the scheduling problems.
We've decided over the last couple of years — not every semester — to flip the lectures. Anybody know what flipping the lectures means? You don't have to come to lecture because you can watch the movie. Just log into YouTube, watch it at your leisure. My favorite response from a student was that they used to watch my lectures while they fixed dinner. So you can multitask. We'll have recitations only this semester, because you're gonna find we have lots and lots of lectures you can watch. The recitations are going to be — not Monday at 9 o'clock in this classroom. Next Monday I'll do one, Dr. Belmar will do one the next week, and we'll alternate for the first four weeks, and we'll let you know what our schedules are after that.
I try to compress this course into the first half of the semester mostly. You actually have till the end of the semester, but if you're smart you will get rid of this class early on and have the rest of your time for the other classes that get busy later. So it says schedule Monday Wednesday — that should be changed to just Monday. And your student papers will be in November, which is one of the five requirements, and I'll get to that in a second. Any questions?
§3. Flexibility, stress, and the module structure [07:50]
I coined the term "flexibility and stress-free environment." The administration is worried about all the stress on the students. In fact Paul Gray, who was president of MIT all through the 1980s, when he retired as president he said one of his big disappointments was that he had not reduced the pace and pressure of MIT. Someone would say, well, the pace and pressure of MIT is part of MIT — drinking from a fire hose — and there's nothing wrong with learning to work hard. But there is something wrong with toiling and not learning anything while you're working hard. There's lots of times when people give you assignments that are for the sake of giving an assignment.
There's a number of modules. They're originally 12-unit modules. In order to pass for a 12-unit class you're supposed to have about 36 lectures. If you go look at the other course that meets three times a week, you should take 36 lectures. Fusion welding used to be a double module — that's now twelve lectures. These are my old welding courses, and there are 12 lectures each. There are 36 welding lectures. The Navy students during the summer and the 2N program are actually required to take this. The Naval Sea Systems Command says, if you're going to build ships you need to learn how to weld. They weren't learning that from my class anyway — they learned the science of welding.
There's material selection, which has a lot to do with structural materials. Last semester I taught "what is total quality management." Why? Like I said, I teach whatever I want. But a lot of these things are turning into a textbook that will be on what engineering is all about. In fact there is one called "what is engineering." Brian Haslam is here videotaping today. I don't know if we're going to videotape the recitations. If someone wants to learn how to videotape, it's not that hard. You'd have to get here ten minutes earlier, Brian, to set up. If anyone wants to videotape the recitations, if you can be here on Monday, we'd pay you fifty bucks an hour in class; out of class it's basically seventy-five or a hundred bucks a day. So let Brian or myself know. There's only gonna be about half a dozen or so, but you can make four or five hundred dollars by doing the videotaping. And Brian can show you how that's done. But his wife is due any time now, so you have to talk to him soon.
If you go to eagar.mit.edu you'll just find all of them, with a little more discussion about the modules. There are some modules by Dr. Belmar over the last five or six years, mostly on environmental and mechanical behavior. Last spring he taught one on how to start a business, because he started his own business and he got an NSF grant. NSF has a program that is not typical NSF, but they teach you what you need to do and what the pitfalls are in starting your own business.
Dr. Neil Jenkins was an undergraduate here, finished his PhD here, then he went to medical school. The year I was on sabbatical he taught a module on non-destructive evaluation of the human body. So he's a medical doctor; he basically talks about, if you're interested in medicine or biology, what a doctor looks at when you go in for a check-up. I sat through all those — it was on my sabbatical — but basically it's the five senses: taste, touch, sight, sound — didn't smell. Some diseases have a unique smell. It's actually fairly interesting. Neil did that one.
And then Steve Lyons, this practicing attorney. He's not just a practicing attorney, he's the Lyons of Kleinman and Lyons, and he typically argues cases before the US Supreme Court about once every year or two. So he's a fairly prominent intellectual property lawyer. He's a graduate of Sloan School, and as an alum he just would like to give back some of the things that he learned to the students. It's a very practical type of course.
§4. The one-page outline requirement, and Vera Kistiakowsky [13:40]
What are the requirements for the students? You've got to watch 36 lectures. We're not having them live this semester; we're having recitations which do not count as part of the 36 lectures. That's usually in six modules. I was doing 12-lecture modules, and then it turns out the students in online courses like briefer modules. So Brian and Anil and some other people got together, and they basically took a deck of cards — all my lectures — and shuffled them. So what's online now, you might have a lecture from 2013 with a lecture from 2015. It just shows that whatever I talked about, doesn't really matter what order you take. You can go to the website and pick out what you're interested in.
You need to prepare a one-page outline of each lecture module. So that's going to be six pages, and it only has to be one or two lines describing the two or three themes of that lecture. Now how did I survive MIT? I came here fifty years ago. I found out about this week fifty years ago I was in the bottom third of my entering class. They got all the freshmen together in Kresge and they said — we used to say, look to your right, look to your left, one of the three of you won't be here next year. They said we don't say that anymore. But then they flashed up the College Board scores and all the other statistics of my class, and I was smart enough to realize I was in the bottom third. I thought I was hot stuff, because in my high school, if I couldn't solve the math problem, nobody could, including the teachers. I got here, thought I was going to be a math major, that lasted for two weeks.
One of the things at MIT, you're kind of forced to learn a little humility because there's always someone better. You don't compare yourself with yourself. In fact there's a handout on Stellar, something I wrote about twelve or fifteen years ago after thirty-some years at MIT, which is my description of what makes MIT unique as a university. It's called "Leadership, Management and Education at MIT." It's only a couple of pages long, and I would encourage you to read it. A lot of my classmates and some faculty have told me it's the best article I've ever written — in the faculty newsletter. Well that's not saying much, if you read the faculty newsletter. But many of them said it really brought back what they remembered of their MIT education, after all I haven't gotten out of here for fifty years.
In my junior year I took an elective course in physics called Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, taught by Vera Kistiakowsky. She was the first tenured woman faculty member in physics at MIT. Her father had won the Nobel Prize at Harvard in chemistry. Brilliant, always brought her big German Shepherd to class. I had no clue what was going on in that class. I always got 15s out of a hundred when class average was 85. The night before the final, I figured I was gonna flunk this course. I didn't know what was going on. So I took the book and I decided, well I'm just gonna go through and try to pick up what the high points are. Went into that final, three-hour final, finished it in an hour and twenty minutes, checked it over another twenty minutes, walked out of the class and got an A in the class.
When I got that grade in January, all of a sudden I said, oh, you mean all this other stuff they teach you is just fluff? All you have to do is understand the high points? The professors cover ten times what you need to know, and if you can just figure out — I used to call it "guess my lecture." They have something they want to teach you, but there's only two or three concepts in an hour that they can really get across. So for the rest of my junior year, my senior year, my graduate career at MIT, I never took notes anymore. You don't have to take notes in this class. Well, you can take notes, but you're not gonna have quizzes. Just sit there and try to learn, try to figure out what the professor's talking about. You could take some notes, because at the end I want you to write down one or two lines of what you got out of that lecture.
You're gonna find that I teach basically in stories. You can call them parables. Brian went through and found that in the last four years, I've told 551 stories in my lectures. Five or six years, whatever — he had to watch all of it. I tell stories because I thought back, what do I remember from my freshman year? I remember the stories. I don't remember what they taught me. I learned about the Bohr atom and I learned about Miller indices, but I remember the stories. So I prefer to teach in stories. I think the students in general think they're interesting stories. Even my own children think some of them are interesting, although my daughter and son now say, well dad you already told me that one. And I don't have an infinite number of stories.
I would like you to learn how to analyze, at the end of a fifty-minute lecture, what were the one or two points. The interesting thing to me, since we've been doing this for a few years — I can read what one student wrote from a module, then I read what another student wrote from the same lecture, and you wouldn't believe they had anything to do with the same module. Because each person takes the stories and the lessons from the story based on their own experience. It doesn't really matter what you write down. It's the process of learning to stop at the end and do sort of an evaluation: what was this person trying to get across? I quit studying for quizzes for the last three years of my career. I just go in there and wing it.
§5. The paper, peer review, and topic selection [20:41]
You've got to prepare a ten-page paper on a materials topic of your choice. We'll go through that in a little bit more detail. You've got to review or edit three or four other student papers. We're going to ask you to tell us what your topic is in a few weeks, so that we can group them in a way that they have sort of common interest. Ten pages maximum of text, plus additional figures or tables, whatever you want, but I don't want to read anything longer than that. It's actually harder to write the short ten-page thing than it is to write the thirty-page thing. You just do rambling. I read these undergraduate lab reports, just how I spent my minutes in the lab, minute by minute. First we opened the door, then we let the door close but we made sure no one was in the way.
You should have some reference sources. This is an MIT course, we should know that. It's just not you talking about something. And it's nice if you give me a little biography of where you grew up and how you got to MIT. Potential topics — when I originally put this together a few years ago I said, well you could take an element and just study the element. Well, no one's done that. You could look at commodities like steel, aluminum or concrete, and there's all kinds of information from a federal agency that basically does studies on these commodity markets.
You could take a technology — one student did Japanese sword-smithing. They used to have a little display in the hallway of these students who had made a Japanese sword on their own. Some students have done the HMS Titanic. Some students from nuclear engineering have done nuclear power plants. A couple of students one year both did pole vaulting. They were both pole vaulters at MIT. Turns out a pole for a pole vaulter — you ever seen them, they bend more than 180 degrees and they don't break. It's because it's a composite material that's layered and has variable stiffness. It's actually very interesting technology.
Or make a proposal for anything you want. The primary requirement is you pick a topic you're interested in, because you'll do a better job if you're interested. I'm not gonna assign you to do something that you don't care about. I don't want to see your thesis, unless you can make it down to ten pages completely. But I don't care if you tell me about your thesis. It's something you've already worked on; hopefully you're interested in your thesis.
I don't want something off the internet. A couple of students — there are pretty good search engines. Not this Brian, but there's another Brian Hellman who's out this week — Brian is pretty good about tracking down and saying, well, they got everything from two sources and one of those was Wikipedia. We don't particularly like that; we actually want your thoughts. So any materials topic you wish, talk about something you're interested in. Ten pages double-spaced. At least ten point if not twelve point font. None of this six-point font.
Don't be too general. I don't want to know how to build an automobile, it's a bit general. Or too broad. One of the jokes used to be when I was a student, the MIT final exam: define the universe and give three examples. That's your three-hour final. It's a little broad. So don't try to cover too much. The pole vault pole and how it's made was fine. I don't need to know the history of pole vaulting and who won the last sixteen Olympics. Unless your topic is who won the last sixteen Olympics and how pole vaulting technique has changed over the last sixteen years — or sixty-four years, whatever — if it's sixteen Olympics.
I would like you to tell me something about what you think. I teach these Navy students during the summer, and I don't know how many times I've had the Thresher disaster or the British carrier the Sheffield in the Falkland Islands war, and the variations on those themes. The Thresher disaster — the submarine sank off Cape Cod, which was a major catharsis for the US Navy. They basically shut down submarine production for three years, and the Navy instituted a new program which they called SUBSAFE, which actually is the beginning of total quality management. The Navy did it in the 60s, American industry picked it up in the 90s, the Japanese picked it up in the 60s, 70s and 80s. But it was actually developed because of the Thresher disaster. The Sheffield got hit by an Exocet missile in the Argentine-British war over the Falkland Islands, and this one little missile destroyed the whole ship because the aluminum superstructure caught fire and just became a great big flare.
And so the question is, did that really happen or not? There's still debate about it. So you can have a theory after studying something.
§6. The five requirements and grading [27:30]
So what is the grading, what are the five requirements? First requirement: no quizzes, no finals, no tests. I told you it's flexibility and stress-free environment. What I've learned over the years is, when I was lecturing courses like thermodynamics and there was a quiz the next day, I had to make sure I covered certain things. So if a student asked a question, it wasn't going to give me time, I would sort of ignore their question and just cover the things that everyone needed for the quiz the next day. That's not the way to teach.
I hated three-hour finals as a student. I used to not take courses that had three-hour finals. Even if it was something I was interested in, I wouldn't take the course because I hated three-hour finals. There's no quizzes and no tests, don't worry about it. That's why you don't have to take notes. You don't have to remember anything in this course. That was something I learned my first year as a faculty member. I had a little notebook and I would put things down in that notebook, and then about nine months later I realized I never had time to go back and read the notebook. So I decided, quit taking notes. If I can't remember, it's not important. People are shocked now, I still don't take notes. I wouldn't say I've never taken a note, but I don't take a lot of notes.
The submission of your proposed topic is due in a couple of weeks. The 21st is a Friday — we'll just have something on Stellar, you can tell us in one third of a page or half a page what your topic is. We will read it, and if we think it's too broad or too general — it's not usually too difficult, although I picked one of those once as a freshman. There's no problem with collusion with other students. So I'm supposed to talk to you about, you know, can you cheat. You can cheat all you want in this class because there's no quizzes, no finals. Cheating is not — but collusion, you can talk to other people all you want.
Your paper is gonna be due on October 26 — that's six weeks from now, folks. Told you I'm going to try to compress this. You don't have to finish watching your 36 modules by October 26, but I want your paper. Because what we're going to do — that should be 11/26, sorry about that, I'll have to change that — a month later, we're going to give your paper to other students to have them peer review it, and make suggestions. They don't rewrite it; it just means they read it and they make comments on what they didn't understand. I'm sorry for that error, that's a month later, 11/26. I make typos.
Your final paper is due after you've gotten their comments. You've got about two weeks to make the edits, make the changes, and submit it. So if you really look at it, from when you finish your paper on 10/26, if you've already done your 36 modules, what do you have to do? Read three or four other papers and make some comments, and then you have to take their comments on your paper. That's all you have to do for the second half of the semester. If you are diligent, you can do the 36 units before Halloween. If you just did one a day. Well, while you're fixing dinner.
I was getting in my car yesterday, and one of the Navy students who was walking up had a baseball cap on. I didn't recognize him, but he was walking with a little three- or four-year-old girl. He came up and said, I'm one of your Navy students. He took his cap off so I could recognize him. He has his daughter. He says, she watched some of your lectures with me. He has a picture of her on his lap while he was watching the movies. She's probably the youngest student in my class. In fact I've had some people who didn't even go to college. I've had philosophy majors take this class.
Completion of one-page outlines, the modules. You could do that back in October if you want, but in fact it'd be best when you do a module just turning it in. We'll have a place on Stellar and you can turn in your little one-page. When I say one-page, it can be a half page. I just want your bullet-point summary of the one or two points, or three points, that were in the lecture. So you can submit it six times. Many students will say they learned a lot from other students' papers. Any questions? Yeah.
Student: [question, inaudible — about outlines per lecture or per module]
Per module. Six lectures in a module. If you do one or two lines on each lecture, you've got twelve lines, half a page. If you do a double module you can put twelve on one page. But it's supposed to be for you to learn how to summarize after a lecture what it was you learned, what are the high points. Other questions? That question comes up every year.
§7. Teaching philosophy: stories over testing [33:02]
So let's talk a little bit about my teaching philosophy. Dr. Belmar and Mr. Lyons have sort of picked up on my teaching philosophy. Dr. Belmar has been teaching part of this course with me for five or six years, and he's gotten to the point where, instead of coming in and giving lectures — which is what he had learned, you copy what you see other people do, that's how he started lecturing — he now tries to come in with his stories. And Steve Lyons came in — boy, he had all these PowerPoints that kind of went through all the points about intellectual property law, he wanted to make it very organized. He would come in and watch Simone and myself lecture, and in the student evaluations he says, well, how can I do better? I said, well Steve, when you've told stories, don't you see how they really like them, they pay more attention. He's gotten to the point where he teaches my stories. So all of us are sort of teaching by stories.
My philosophy is that too much of our educational approach is geared towards preparing students to take tests. Let's face it, you're MIT students, you don't need to learn how to take a test. Now how did I figure this out? About twenty or twenty-five years ago, I'd kind of get up in the dark, eat breakfast on my own, and leave the house before most people were awake. And one time one of my kids left their math book on the dining table, and I, eating my cereal, opened it. This is a high school math book. And it was interesting, it had two pages on differentials, two pages on exponentials, two pages on integration. I had no idea that mathematics came in two-page modules. Every subject could be treated in two pages. It didn't make any sense to me. And then I realized, all they're doing is prepping the students to take the SATs. I thought that's dumb, they should be teaching math, rather than prepping them — because I know what they'd learn on those things, they would learn how to pass an SAT quiz. But would they know what an exponential was? No. So I think that's sort of dumb.
This subject is not required for anyone — anyone have this as a requirement? It's an elective. The Navy students have it as a requirement; the Naval Sea Systems Command does that. So if you're taking it, hopefully you're taking it for fun. Let's try to have fun.
Another thing is, some professors like to build up their ego by telling you how complex the subject is and how brilliant they are. I told you, I was in the bottom third of my entering class. I've known since I came here that most of MIT are smarter than me, and therefore I'm not gonna try to show you up. I'm going to try to show you how you can simplify things, which is what I had to do to get through things.
I'm gonna try to tell you what you already know and how to integrate it. I did a study once when I was department head for the School of Engineering, and we found that the faculty in the school — the department heads and center directors — thought that we only spent about 10% of our time teaching integration skills to the students, and we should be spending 30% of our time teaching integration skills. So a lot of the stories actually are trying to integrate economics and other things.
§8. Total Quality Management at IBM [37:24]
I'll give you a brief outline of the three modules we did live last spring. When we do live, we don't always get very many students. In the spring we tend to have 40 or 50 students in the class. This is about the same size class — one, two, three, four — 19. Fall semester is about half the size of the enrollment in the spring semester. That doesn't really matter, but I decided to teach total quality management.
The reason I did is, when I was department head in the 1990s, TQM was a big hot topic. Most of the faculty in the School of Engineering didn't know much about it. A lot of the faculty at Sloan knew something about it because industry was big on it. So I had a bunch of undergraduates in the Chipman Room and I said, does anyone know what TQM is? And some student in the back says it's B.S. There's a lot of truth to that. But the CEOs of some of the top companies had issued a challenge to MIT and another six or seven elite universities, and we were paired with IBM. About seventy-five MIT faculty, seven and a half percent of the MIT faculty, went and spent a whole week at the IBM executives training center on the Hudson River. Beautiful facility, the cafeteria food was fantastic, it was a fancy motel without the swimming facilities, and they didn't have the exercise facilities. But it turns out IBM was going to teach us total quality management because they felt it was so important.
They called it Customer Driven Quality, they had their own name for it. The senior executive vice president of IBM, which is probably one of the top three or four people in the company, gave the introduction. And Chuck Vest, the president of MIT, came out to say how important he thought this little exercise was. We had probably twenty-five or thirty Sloan faculty, and the rest of them were mostly from the School of Engineering. The people from IBM got up and they talked about these principles — some of which, guess what, the professors from Sloan or the School of Engineering invented those principles. They didn't know they were teaching the teachers.
The senior executive vice president said, we used to have four hundred and ten thousand employees at IBM, and through CDQ we've reduced it to three hundred and twenty thousand without getting rid of any direct labor reports. So they'd gotten rid of 90,000 out of two hundred thousand managers. Someone asked, why'd you have so many managers? He said, well, we used to have a lot of people in place to try to keep big problems from rising up to the top. So a little bit later I raised my hand to ask, well, you said you got rid of half your people that were keeping the big problems from rising to the top — have you found more problems rising to the top? And he stopped, he thought, he says, well, no. So they had 90,000 people doing negative value-added, and they found that saved money when they got rid of them.
My theme in TQM was to present to the students what the TQM movement was, going back to the US Navy and the Thresher disaster and Admiral Rickover and how it came out of necessity — he didn't want to lose another submarine. And how it spread first to Japan and the Toyota system, and then finally to the United States. And then at the end, let the students try to decide. I told them what some of the tools were — did you know they taught you how to draw up pie charts in TQM? But they taught some other things that are very valuable. Statistical process control and other things. There are good parts of TQM, but the first response of the student, that some of it is B.S., is absolutely correct. But in fact it's not all. Hopefully the students were able to sort out the fact from the fiction.
Simone Belmar has started a company called MMT — on-site evaluation of pipelines for mechanical properties. This is a little scratch tester, and they can measure the tensile strength of the steel, hope to be able to measure the fracture toughness. He's gotten about 1.2 million dollars out of the NSF SBIR program. NSF requires, if you get money you have to go attend some workshops taught by people from industry who'd started their own businesses. So Simone basically went through, and he covers that, and a lot of students really liked that. Has nothing to do with structural materials per se, has to do with starting up a business.
Steve Lyons, intellectual property — the law, how to become conversant on how law and technology interface. What does it mean to get an IP, what's copyright, trademark and patent law. He had some guest speakers come in, some of the top patent attorneys from Boston came and gave some guest lectures.
§9. Occam's razor, PowerPoint, and the World Trade Center paper [43:23]
So philosophy is, keep it simple. You've all heard Occam's razor, which is keep it simple, or some people call it keep it simple stupid, the KISS principle. In fact Occam — d'Ockham — said it in Latin: "It is futile to do with more things that can be done with fewer." I'm not sure he was following his principle there. But anyway — teaching success. I've already told you you can only cover one or two concepts in an hour, all the rest of the stuff is fluff. Numerical results are easier to grade than conceptual expositions — that's why in the School of Engineering you get nice simple little problems. The professor all has to do is check off, did you get the same number that he got, rather than something that's some exposition that he has to read.
You've all been in classes, engineering classes, where the professor spends a whole hour doing a derivation, right? And they screw it up invariably, right? Did you ever stop to think about why a professor would do that? It's a very simple answer: they didn't have time to prepare a lecture. I learned this in my first year, second semester on the faculty. I had been on travel. I was teaching a course in deformation processing. I really hadn't prepared for the lecture that morning. And I looked in the book, and there was a derivation — ah, I could do the derivation in class. And then all of a sudden a light went off, I thought, oh, that's why they do it. I went to class, I did the derivation, screwed it up, I'm sure. And I promised myself I would never do a derivation in class again, and I haven't. If a derivation needs to be written out, I'll write it out, Xerox it, give it to the students. You're smart enough to follow the math on your own. We would just discuss what the derivation means, what the result means. So doing a derivation in class — if they pull that one on you, now you know what it's all about.
Communications, which I'm not going to have a lot of time to go over. There's a guy, Edward Tufte, who is a professor at Yale, and he wrote four books on communications. He said fuzzy writing is usually the result of fuzzy thinking. On Stellar you'll find an article on the cognitive style of PowerPoint by Tufte. He hates PowerPoint, he despises PowerPoint. However, there are some advantages to PowerPoint. You're gonna find that he did the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint. You want to see a great piece of English literature turned into pure drivel, you use AutoContent Wizard to do PowerPoint.
He tells the story of Lou Gerstner, who became the CEO of IBM when IBM was having some serious problems. The first day — first of all he couldn't get in the building, he didn't have an ID. Sort of a catch-22 — couldn't get an ID until he got in the building, but he didn't have an ID so they wouldn't let him in the building. So here's the CEO, for an outsider, of a four-hundred-thousand-employee company who couldn't get in the building. When they finally had someone come down and overrule the security guard, he got in the building, he had some meetings with some of the top executives to find out what's going on in IBM. And they all got up to do their PowerPoints. After about fifteen or twenty minutes, he went up, he turned off the overhead projector, he says, let's just talk about your business. Emails went around IBM within five minutes about how Lou Gerstner had turned off the PowerPoints, and they didn't have PowerPoint anymore. Too many people use PowerPoints as a crutch.
There is an article on why the World Trade Center collapsed. I give you this because it's an article I wrote. I was asked, three weeks after the World Trade Center collapsed, by the editor of a metallurgical journal if I would write something. I was so sick of hearing all the falsehoods — fake news, I guess is the term today — that were being put out in the press. I said okay, I'll write an article. I spent three hours, with the help of a student, writing this article. I really didn't know much of anything about the World Trade Center, but I knew some chemistry and I knew some physics and I had done some fire investigations, so I just talked about what I knew and what the scientific principles were. And I also knew — remember, fuzzy writing is the result of fuzzy thinking — I was going to pitch it to a high school science student, that was the level.
This came out in December after September 11th, and within a month or two there were websites out against me. I was just a shill for the government, but the government had actually brought down the World Trade Centers. It was actually a way to get the Arabs upset with the Jews. They said that I should — letters writing to the president of MIT saying I should lose my tenure. It was just wonderful. For the next nine years, if you typed "WTC collapse" on Google, I was the number one hit. I'd go to Washington, people said, well here's the expert on the World Trade Center collapse. I thought, hmm, I spent three hours writing that paper, less time than any paper I've ever written, and I've gotten more comments. I still get comments from wackos about the World Trade Center.
There's a couple of others. One is the future of metals — something I wrote twenty-five years ago to try to bring material scientists back to reality. There were people saying oh metals are dead — well, not exactly. So that has to do with structural materials, strangely enough. And this other one — I was on a National Research Council committee for materials research for defense needs, and we all have to write something. So I took my structural materials course, the one that you could take if you're interested, and I kind of summarized it in four or five pages, and this was my contribution. It didn't fit any of theirs — they were into nano-this and bio-that. My paper didn't make any sense to them, so they put it in an appendix. They don't refer to it. But if you're interested in structural materials, you could just read that and save yourself the trouble of watching all the lectures. Any questions?
So tomorrow Dr. Belmar will be here, and he will do his little intro for his modules. You should start looking at the website and figuring out what modules you want to watch. I'll see you again on Monday, if you want to come — but you don't have to, because there's no quizzes. Thanks.