Job Shadow Time Lapse

Background

On my hour commute to work I have lots of time to think about stuff. My frequent topics revolve around work and career since I still don't feel like I've found my vocational calling in life. One recurring theme in my career search is the mismatch between our dreams and reality.

For example, my first post-college job was essentially my dream job. I got hired at a prestigious company, working on cutting-edge technology with excellent compensation. But the reality of any job is that things are messy, at best. People can be the most challenging aspect of a job, and the work that you do is far from the academic rigor of the daily homework presented in engineering classes.

Company brochures, recruiting videos and people typically present only their best front about their jobs (which is exactly what I experienced when I tried to interview people on the inside). Work with robots that automatically build computer chips? Sounds awesome! But sometimes that daily work lacks luster. Long shifts, starting at a screen under artificial lighting. These are things that somehow get omitted from the company propaganda.

Even career services presents a biased picture of various jobs. But who can blame them? Their bottom-line mission is to get people into the work place to support themselves. Most people I know would rather do something other than their work, but we all recognize work as a necessary part of life. So everyone puts on a bit of a front.

But I think that makes it more challenging to find a fitting job. It's like you only look at half the job. And I love so many things, they all sound appealing. For me it's the negative aspects of a job that have made a bigger difference in my personal satisfaction.

I wish that you could get a fuller, unbiased idea of a job. I think job shadows are a great way to accomplish this. The difficulty of a job shadow is finding them. Linked-In can help, but in my personal experience people have been hesitant even when getting introduced by a mutual connection. There's got to be a better way?

The Idea

Create time-lapse, job-shadow videos. The videos would give a representative look at the daily activities for various jobs. This way you can see the statistician sitting for hours in front of his computer, or the manager sitting through hours upon hours of meetings. Important aspects of a job could be emphasized by slowing down the video. But not too much editing. If a job contains lots of walking then you want to capture that aspect.

Progress

I have no idea how to market something like this, but it would be a great addition to someone who is already in this space. Or maybe you could start the website and pay freelancers to take the video. With that approach, I wonder if this could fall under my "Teen Business" ideas.

This is another one of those services I wish existed. I would pay for this, but I don't want to start this business.

A Study of Adhesion Strength in 3D Printing

Background

I'm having terrible adhesion problems on my new 3D Printer. It's keeping me from making progress on other projects that rely on 3D printed parts. While researching a fix I discovered that this is a universal problem among hobbyists, and everyone has their own solution including glue mixtures, taping schemes, heated beds of varied temperatures, cleaning solutions, various print bed materials, calibration routines, etc. I understand that everyone has a slightly different build, and those builds will add variation. But I think that excuse is over-used because of the lack of usable data. The common theme seems to be people trying one thing after another until they find something that works. Very unscientific.

I really don't want to take a "shotgun" approach to this problem, but I don't really want to use my free time systematically designing and running experiments to collect the necessary scientific data. It would require a force gauge which costs around $100 for a decent unit, and I would rather burn that extra money on something more fun.

As an engineer I get this type of data from companies who are dedicated to performing experiments to collect data on heat capacities, enthalpies, transfer coefficients, etc. etc. etc. We just pay someone else to collect the data. I haven't found an entity in the 3D Printing world that has undertaken the science of all these little problems that hobbyists face.

The Idea

Since I'm losing my job in June 2015 I'll have some free time. I could probably dedicate myself to a systematic study of 3D Printing problems. I'd design and perform experiments on print adhesion using different substrates, temperatures, filaments, surface treatments, etc. Then I could publish and hopefully sell the information to pay for my time and the capitol required to perform the studies.

My big concern is how to distribute the content in a manner that will help pay for the time and capitol invested into the project. I'm a big believer in publishing this stuff for free, but there's so much work to be done I don't think I could afford to go unpaid for that long. Maybe I could get funding up front via KickStarter so I can reduce the risk of recovering a personal investment. That would also help reduce the risk of people just copying and redistributing the content. If it was paid for up front then I could just post the results for free. Otherwise I'd have to look into a distribution method to protect the copyright, like a website or cell phone app.

Progress

 11/10/14 - Just an idea so far. How do I gauge the potential interest from the community?

Non-Insulating Weight Blanket

The Idea

When I sleep I like to have a medium to heavy weight blanket on me. I'm also a little quirky because I also need to cover as much skin as possible, so I typically sleep with socks, long pants and long sleeves. On warm nights I obviously get too hot with all that insulation, so I have to toss the blanket and/or the clothes. This makes it more difficult for me to get a good night's sleep. I'm sure I could learn to live without all my securities, but I like to increase my quality of life when it's convenient. Some people grew up in more difficult circumstances where such securities are practically a necessity. These types of dependencies are commonly tied to autism and Down's syndrome. I identify with people on the spectrum and often suspect and joke that I, myself, am on the spectrum. I've remember one parent's story about how their high needs child would come home at the end of the school day and burrow into a pile of blankets to recover from the unpredictable social jungle that is called Junior High. So I've thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice to have the security without the added discomfort?" That's how I came up with my idea of the non-insulating weight blanket. It's a blanket of equivalent weight without the insulating properties. I want one of these blankets, but I can't find one sold anywhere, so I'm going to have to develop it myself.

 Progress

 My favorite blanket right now is a denim blanket made by my wife. It's about the perfect density and provides a secure level of pressure, but it probably falls on the lighter side of a good security blanket. It's 56 inches wide, 70 inches tall, and weighs 4.8 pounds. That's a pressure of 0.0012 psi (or 2.5 feet of air, 0.9 kg/m^3, 84 microbar, 8 pascal, etc.). I found some blankets made for people with sensory processing disorder. A blanket of similar size can be up to 25 pounds, but I think those are designed for temporary therapeutic relief and not meant to be used for an entire night. In any case it seems the acceptable range of pressure is fairly large.

Critical Ratio

My first inclination in such a design is to modify the thickness to possibly exploit the critical insulation ratio. When you insulate a round object the added insulation slows down conduction but speeds up convection. There is a critical insulation thickness such that when your insulation is below the thickness you speed up heat transfer by adding insulation. And when your insulation thickness is above critical adding insulation slows down heat transfer. So my first thought is to estimate the critical ratio for a blanket around a person.

Without going through a bunch of explanation (here's a good link for that) the critical ratio basically comes down to the rate of conduction vs the rate of convection, or k/h. I estimate the thermal conductivity (k) of a denim blanket to be around 0.04 W/m*K. Estimating the convection coefficient (h) is a little harder, but to just get in the very rough ball park let's think about a human body. The internal temp is 37 degrees C, and the room temp is 20C giving a delta of 17C (or Kelvins if you wanna be technical). Using a guess of 2 square meters of surface area, 80 Watts heat generation that gives around 2 W/m^2*K.

So that gives a critical radius of (0.04 W/m*K)/(2 W/m^2*K) = 2cm. So, um, you might be able to cool down a finger...but your whole body ain't gonna fit inside 2 centimeters.

Mesh and Material

If I can't win by changing the thickness of the blanket then I will have to remove some of the insulating material and turn the blanket into more of a mesh. That will cause a hit in density, so I'll have to modify the material composition to increase density. The ideal material would be thermally conductive, easy to wash, easy to sew or press, flexible and cheap.

Material	rho (gm/cm^3)	k (W/m*K)	Washable	Sew/Press	Flexible	Cost ($/lb)
Dirt / Earth
Polypropylene