The Portland International Conferences on Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET) occur in Oregon in odd-numbered years, and in diverse locales in the even. I write from lovely Phuket island in southern Thailand, as I listen to bird- and cricket song and the crashing surf of the Andaman Sea, and gather my thoughts following the close of PICMET-2010.

Arctic Heroes #3 - Robert McClure


Robert McClure and his crew were the first people to transit the North West Passage - by ship and sled.  They were also the first to circumnavigate the Americas - by ships and sled.


McClure's ship - HMS Investigator - has just been found.  She was abandoned in June 1853 due to a combination of factors: the general poor health of the crew; the uncertainty of escape from the ice; the availability of other vessels to take the crew home.

I believe that music sounds like people, moving. Yes, the idea may sound a bit crazy, but it’s an old idea, much discussed in the 20^th century, and going all the way back to the Greeks. There are lots of things going for the theory, including that it helps us explain (1) why our brains are so good at absorbing music (…because we evolved to possess human-movement-detecting auditory mechanisms), (2) why music emotionally moves us (…because human movement is often expressive of the mover’s mood or state), and (3) why music gets us moving (…because we’re a social species prone to social contagion).