tallbridgeguy

Not much going on tonight.

Not a lot going on right now.

• Graves Road Bridge Project (date?)
• Cool bridge picture

Love this abutment.

Happy St. Paddy’s day! Just a couple of small bridge projects going on…

• bull city rising
• 18th street pedestrian bridge

I was looking around the web for women (wow does that sound wrong!, keep reading..) bridge engineers. I know about Linda Figg and the contributions of Emily Roebling in getting the Brooklyn bridge built but I have not heard of many high profile women bridge engineers.

According to an article in the Washington post about “17 percent of undergraduate engineering degrees were awarded to women in the 2006-07 school year, the latest for which information is available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.” They went on to say “the low numbers of women are holding the field back.”

I would say that the 17 percent reflects the number of women in my engineering class. So the first barrier to women in engineering is based purely on numbers. (In structural engineering I would wager the numbers do not reach 10 percent.)

I am not smart enough to understand why this imbalance in engineering is occurring, but with two daughters I am concerned with the trend. What do you think? Are things improving for women in engineering?

from sliderulemuseum.com

Some links:

• Girls experiencing engineering
• engineer girl
• national engineers week

I have to teach the Direct stiffness method in a couple of weeks. Could someone point me to a nice basic introduction textbook or paper that I can use for my class?

The hardest part of teaching is breaking down information into easy step by step pieces…..and I am struggling a little bit with how to approach this subject. (It is not easy to teach to a large class something as troublesome as this type of analysis…)

I would also like to develop a spreadsheet or mathcad sheet to help out with problems. If you have something like that I would appreciate some help!.

Thanks!

A pedestrian bridge design by Bernard Tschumi and the french firm Hugh Dutton opens in La Roche-sur-Yon.

I fear that soon every pedestrian bridge will be a tube! Just like shoulder pads in the 80’s I’m sure that tubes will be remembered for coming to prominence in the 2010’s.

Hey want a bridge! Think tube! oh and make it red please!

Courtesy de zeen magazine

If your bored check out this cool Popsicle bridge.

Its Friday and next week is spring break, which means, no classes! (YA!) Hopefully I will have more time to post something meaningful. (I doubt it.)

In between designing I have been rendering a ramp bridge a friend of mine drew up in sketchup. Notice the little person…

I have been super busy working two jobs and not posting anything..(waaa I know, right! See I can talk that young hipster lingo)

I have been working on providing clear video tutorials on analyzing problems with STAAD for my class. The hard part is finding decent software to provide the videos! I want to provide high resolution, almost full screen, clear, beautiful small sized videos. You would think that would be easy with today’s software choices. Wrong if you don’t want to spend any money…

I have started using Camstudio. A great open source screen capture device. Couple this program with codecs from here, ffdshow tryouts, and you get some really good resolution, fairly small videos. I will post some as I get better!

Here is a quick STAAD example tutorial I made…you can expand it to full screen and it plays fairly well.

I recently handed back the first exam and I have some questions about grading an exam. The big problem, a student would miss an early step and it propagates throughout the rest of the question. Obviously that results in the wrong answer.

For example, if you are asked to draw the shear and moment diagrams for a frame and you get the initial reactions wrong, your diagrams are wrong. I can give points for the right “shape” but it becomes a guessing game for points.

Last year the exams were multiple choice, where the answer has to be correct, and the students hated them. This year the other instructor is trying a system of 0%, 50%, 100%. Meaning you get 0% if it is all wrong or you didn’t write anything. 50% if you get it “mostly” right but calculated the wrong answer. And a 100% for the correct answer.

In my case the average would be 60% for the exam, if I used that system (I think his was 64%). Only one student got them all correct.

So I am looking for advice on how to write a test that is easier to grade (15 hours last time) and gives a CLEAR cut point system.   AND throw in the fact that students have demands and expectations about what scores they should get….

Finally spring is coming, so I threw in a watercolor I did for me mum. A propeller flower!

The Brady Street bridge was built a few years back but it is a cool little pedestrian bridge. $385,000 for a 205 foot bridge, cheap!

Brady Street Bridge