It is a tremendous honor for me to serve as the 26th President of the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations (NCSEA). Unlike most (perhaps all) of my predecessors in this office, I am not the owner of my own firm, or a partner, or a principal, or a project manager, or a department head, or a supervisor of any kind. How did an ordinary practicing structural engineer like me wind up in such a lofty position? …
Author Archives : Jon A. Schmidt, P.E., SECB
Jon A. Schmidt (jschmid@burnsmcd.com) is a Senior Associate Structural Engineer in the Aviation & Federal Group at Burns & McDonnell in Kansas City, Missouri. He serves as President on the NCSEA Board of Directors, was the founding chair of the SEI Engineering Philosophy Committee, and shares occasional thoughts at twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt.
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an original text by Charles Sanders Peirce.
Transcriber’s Comments
This text comes from Peirce’s manuscript 1357 as maintained by the Houghton Library at Harvard University, cataloged in 1967 by Richard S. Robin, and made available online by the Scalable Peirce Interpretation Network (SPIN) at http://fromthepage.com/collection/show?collection_id=16. It constitutes a partial draft of the “Report on Live Loads” that he prepared in the mid-1890s for George S. Morison’s proposed span across the Hudson River, and immediately follows the excerpt that appeared in the Editorial (The Esthetics of Structures) in the February 2017 issue of STRUCTURE. …
The Logic of Ingenuity
The process of (abductively) creating a diagrammatic representation of a problem and its proposed solution, and then (deductively) working out the necessary consequences, such that this serves as an adequate substitute for (inductively) evaluating the actual situation. …
Modern culture tends to associate esthetics primarily with visual appearance, but philosophy has traditionally sought to unify the virtues of beauty, goodness, and truth. How might someone evaluate whether a particular structure achieves these ideal ends? …
Part 3: Engineering Reasoning
The thesis of this series is that engineering reasoning is a practical implementation of what Charles Sanders Peirce described as diagrammatic reasoning. Most people associate the word “diagram” with a picture of some sort, but he viewed it primarily as “a concrete, but possibly changing, mental image of such a thing as it represents.
Part 2: Engineering Analysis
The Logic of Ingenuity
The process of (abductively) creating a diagrammatic representation of a problem and its proposed solution, and then (deductively) working out the necessary consequences, such that this serves as an adequate substitute for (inductively) evaluating the actual situation. …
Part 1: Engineering Design
The Logic of Ingenuity
The process of (abductively) creating a diagrammatic representation of a problem and its proposed solution, and then (deductively) working out the necessary consequences, such that this serves as an adequate substitute for (inductively) evaluating the actual situation. …
Insulated metal panels can provide a cost-effective exterior cladding solution for a multitude of projects. However, the same mechanical characteristics that enhance the panels’ flexural rigidity and provide weight savings also result in nonlinear response to loading. This is of particular interest in blast-resistant design, where components are often required to deform well beyond conventional serviceability limits. …
In October 2005, I received a call from Ron Hamburger, who was nearing the end of his term as President of NCSEA. He informed me that Jim DeStefano had resigned as chair of the Editorial Board for STRUCTURE magazine, and he asked me if I would be interested in succeeding him. He described the job as primarily coordinating the work of the other members, which consisted of soliciting, shepherding, and editing articles for publication. …
Representation is intrinsic to human life and engineering practice. We communicate with other people throughout the design and construction process by means of words, diagrams, and sketches. We create mental and computational models of materials, loads, and the arrangement of members. We develop building information models (BIM), drawings, and specifications to indicate how the various pieces and parts are to be assembled into the finished structure. …