Twitter and What I Found There

 #KeepingitCurrentwithElectricalEngineering 

This was an interesting experience for me because I never thought I would be using Twitter for academic research. Normally, I associate it with just a place where people, including myself, go to to rant or say what ever they please or comes to mind. To my surprise, I found quite a bit of useful information on there that changed the way I look at Twitter.

Samoilov, Yuri. "Circuit" 5/16/2014 via flickr. Attribution 2.0 Generic

1. What is all the talk about?

     Simply stated, everything. To be a bit more specific; anything with an electrical current flowing through it. Electrical Engineers on twitter are talking about everything from historical events in the field, to the future of electronics in the work place, and even about artificial intelligence. Besides this, there is also quite a bit of humorous memes circulating around. There are also various job offers, recent discoveries, as well as links to tutorials.

2. Interesting stories from the world of Twitter.

    One hash tag that came up a lot was #drivelesscars. By the looks of it, driveless cars will be hitting the street way sooner than one might think. For example, one story I found states that London will have driveless cars on its streets by this summer. 

Jurvetson, Steve. "Google Robocar RaceTrack Ride" 3/3/2011 via flickr. Attribution 2.0 Generic 

    Another interesting stories that I found was related to a robotic-run farm that will be able to harvest over 30,000 heads of lettuce a day. I believe that this is a great idea that can help out greatly with food production issues. It is fast, quick, and effective. It seems that it is exactly what we need to feed the worlds growing population.

    Seeing these innovations has made me even more excited to enter this field. I really cannot wait to start working on projects that may one day better the world. On a side note. It also sort of scared me in a way. One particular hash tag , #RiseoftheRobots, reminded me of the other side of electrical engineering and robots. For now, the technology we create has been helpful, but I just cannot help to think that with every advancement, we are one step closer to creating something that will destroy us. I need to stop watching so many science fiction movies. 

Rupert, Nathan. "Terminator Robot" 7/24/2010 via flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

3. What impressions did Twitter leave on you about your discipline?

     There is a lot of interesting things going on in my field. There is a lot of pictures on cool gadgets, as well as explanations on next-gen tech that will make anything processor-bases exponentially more powerful. For the most part it was what I expected to find on Twitter. I expected to see talk about driveless cars, drones, and robots. However, I did not expect to see how these things were being used in today's world.