My Top Six iPad Apps

A friend in our Houston office has just bought an iPad, and asked for some app recommendations. I said I'd email her, but then thought it might be as easy to write a blog entry about it instead, and maybe get some recommendations from the network. So here goes.

1. Notability

The best app I have for taking notes, and what I use for doing my favourite engineering task, checking reports.  The screenshot above is from Ailsa Munro's first draft of her M.Eng thesis.  You can type, highlight, and write onto an imported pdf, and email the result back.  Linked in with Dropbox, I've saved a few saplings so far with this one.

2. Dropbox

This app is simplicity itself, and allows seamless picking up and saving of data between my desktops and the iPad.

3. Paper by 53

A simple but incredibly well executed drawing program.  When you see this one on the App Store a lot of people are asking for more control, more choices. But they're missing the point, and the designers are resisting well.  It turns a simple sketch into something that looks professional. I've used it for all my illustrations for talks this year, and the feedback has been very flattering.  It's not that my drawing is superb, but this makes it as good as it can be.

4. Myscript Calculator

This turns your finger writing into a full scientific calculator.  Great fun, and handles long sums really well.  And this one is free.

5. Meteogram

This uses the Norwegian weather service forecast to fit an entire week's weather info into two charts. And so much information too, from cloud depth, weather icons for each period, temperature, wind and direction, and rainfall, for the next seven days.  Infographics at it's best.

6. Mindjet Mindmanager

This is a great free application on its own.  But add in the fact that the PC version is superb and compatible, and that you can use Dropbox to keep the files synchronised on the desktop and iPad, it's a great tool.

And honourable mention to....

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  The apps are now as good as the websites.

And a recommendation for any fan of the Irish Times, a subscription to this.  Great newspaper anywhere.

Explain Yourself....

The phrase "Explain yourself" is one that in the wrong context can send shivers down my spine.  It brings back memories of the Dean of Discipline in my secondary school, probing the extent of a fellow pupil's misdemeanour to help define the punishment. 

In our professional context, though, it's something we probably do every day.  And I'm thinking about it tonight as I just finished the draft of an article, and I'm hoping I got it right.  From simply coaching a member of staff in a new concept, through to detailed justification of the results of our work, explaining is one of those skills that sets apart a consulting engineer from a good design engineer. 

But like any skill, it can be improved.  I'm not sure exactly why I first stumbled on Lee Lefever's book "The Art of Explanation", but once I bought it, it's been a significant contribution to how I approach explaining, and even to how I explain explaining. 

One of the best bits of the book is an A-Z scale of explanation.  As illustrated here, we do often live in a bubble where we expect that everyone else knows what we know.  On an A-Z, we're maybe at W or X, and a lot of our peers are in a similar place.  But not everyone is.

I remember after 3 years in chemical engineering being a bit amazed that some of the arts students we met didn't know what Reynold's number was, as it was in at least one lecture we had per week, or even at times one a day.  For us, it was like someone not knowing that "A" was a letter, or even what an alphabet was.  But normal people did live outside our bubble, and Re was not a big part of their life.  What I now do is ask people on the scale where they are, and try to tailor my explanation accordingly. 

Do check out the book, and see if it helps.  My copy is on loan to another good explainer I know, but I've got the Kindle version on the iPad for emergencies.

[And by the way, Reynolds number is an expression of the ratio of inertial forces (how easily things flow) and viscous forces (how difficult other things make it to flow), and is a fundamental concept across chemical engineering.  Actually, maybe I'm a little outside that bubble now, and could use someone else's explanation.  Still remember the formula, though.]

Learning and Exploring without wikis.

My daughter's homework the other weekend was to create an A-Z of Europe, but without countries or capital cities.  The instructions suggested composers, landmarks, rivers, etc.  She asked me to go onto the computer to do it, but to be honest, I couldn't see how you even start such a task on the computer, apart from of course copying someone else's A-Z.

So, at 5pm on a Saturday, we were off to WH Smith down the village for a book on Europe.  No such luck, so we came back with a school atlas, and a Dorling Kindersley Child's Encyclopedia.  We wiped clean the whiteboard, and by six o'clock we only had 3 letters to go, K, Q, and Y.

What I had was a very strong memory of my own childhood, and flicking through Childcraft, Children's Britannica, and various children's encyclopedias of science and nature.  My daughter was quickly skimming through the book, dismissing anything that wasn't about Europe, but with a few "cool"'s, a few "look at this Dad", and longer than she strictly needed to at the horses section.  She had a good look through all of it, and has brought it into school for further reading.

It reminded me that the first instinct of the current generation to go to the internet for everything may not always be the best.  That a large colourful book can hold it's own fascination, and add a few facts in along the way.  And that you can complete a homework research task without a computer.

(And by the way, we used "Lakes of Killarney", "Quimper" in Britanny and "Yves Saint Laurent" to finish the list.  Sibelius was our random composer, although she's more familiar with Swedish House Mafia.)

Tomatoes and Fruit Salad

We're about to kick off an exercise internally with the goal of creating a paper for a major safety conference effectively by internally crowdsourcing.  We have a team of about 25 volunteers from across the various parts of Atkins Energy group, including power, nuclear and oil and gas, of every age group from graduate to 40 years of experience, and we're going to try use the talents and experience of this diverse group to examine what we have and haven't learned from Piper.

The Piper Alpha disaster happened 25 years ago in July, and was a real game-changer in the offshore industry, and in high hazard industries worldwide.  What we are trying to do is to examine whether the lessons of Piper have been learned, what we could do to increase that understanding, and how to make the lessons really be learned.  It all turns into a presentation and probably technical article to be delivered by Martin Grant, CEO of our energy division, in June here in Aberdeen.

It's interesting to me in a number of ways.  I guess in the first place, my entire career was affected by Piper, in that my first job in Aberdeen came as a direct result of the requirement to develop a safety case for offshore operations, and my subsequent career progression while not always directly in process safety, has always had a flavour of that in it somewhere.

The second is the assertion that the oil industry can be very insular in practice, and that we don't often look outside of our industry for greater understanding, or checking that we are in line with modern processes or approaches.  From a management of major accident hazard point of view, it could be argued that as we had the worst few disasters within our industry, Piper Alpha, Texas City, Macondo, we have little to learn from others.  I can't imagine that assertion holding up to much real scrutiny, however.

The final place I'm looking forward to learning here is how to actually produce such knowledge and understanding in a networked, globally distributed team.  We did some very interesting training in Poyry on global networks, and I've read a bit since then on them, but it'll be fun to see how the interactions, the project management, and the knowledge development work in a team spread all the way around the world. 

I'll come back to this over the next few months and see how it's going.  As a lack of spoiler alert, the output won't be shared until after the conference.

And as for the title of the post, the first person I heard of say this line was Brian O'Driscoll, Irish Captain before they won the Rugby Six Nations Grand-Slam, in reply to some detailed question.  "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.  Wisdom is leaving it out of a fruit salad".  (And for wisdom, I also use "understanding")