Sean Moran's Blog, page 8

Expert Witness: Water Treatment

I've been very busy working on a couple of expert reports to do with potable water treatment. With a bit of working over the weekend, these will go out midweek next week.

I'll then be available for my backlog of writing tasks. The proofs are back for my dictionary, then I have a couple of articles to write for Kirk Othmer.

There are a couple of other live expert witness jobs on the back burner, and another maybe about to come in. 

Expert Witness Work and The 7 "P"s

 

LinkedIn is showing the most common job title for people viewing my profile as "solicitor", and I'm getting quite a few enquiries in for expert witness work, almost (but not quite) all water related. 

For once, none of the new enquiries are from people who have left it until the last minute to find an expert, who then ask for an unrealistic delivery programme for a report. I can accommodate a certain amount of this, but there have been times in the past where I have been surprised by bait and switch tactics by several such clients simultaneously. 

A bit of free advice: getting expert reports produced under unnecessary time pressure is not optimal. Talking to an expert early on might be wiser.

Don't know what the 7 Ps are? See my dictionary. It's available for preorder....

Expert Witness Work Picking Up Again

I picked up a new expert witness job today, on top of the steady proper engineering project I started a little while back.

The dictionary is up on Elsevier's website. There's even a companion website, about which more another time. I am however presently unsure about the planned next Elsevier project.

Real Engineering: Resource Recovery

My dictionary is on Amazon, but for some reason, only Amazon.in as of now. I'll have to do something about that blurb. All a bit vague. I'm always amazed by how long it takes to go from submitted manuscript to published book in 2022. April submission, November publication. If it were an e-book it would be on Amazon already!

I've mostly been getting started on a bit of real engineering, in resource recovery. Unusually, it's less than an hour from home, which makes a pleasant change. Air travel isn't as much fun as it used to be.

The expert witness jobs are quiet for now. I'm sure they will come back to life at the least convenient moment, but for now, things are steady. 

Back To Real Engineering

The dictionary went in Friday before last. Conveniently, a few enquiries came in around the time of submission, and I have my hands more or less full with some proper engineering for the foreseeable. 

There's a couple of expert witness jobs as well, and possibly a new one. It'll be a while before I drop onto the writing jobs I have lined up.

It's good to keep my hand in with proper engineering. I wouldn't want to become an expert in being an expert, (rather than an expert engineer), like some I come across in expert witness work.

Moran's Dictionary Of Chemical Engineering

It's all coming together, though time is a little tighter than I'd planned for.

Some of the definitions of terms take you down deep rabbitholes, as defining them gives you many other terms to define, and a bunch of AKAs and near AKAs.

I started this checking stage with 8,000 terms and I have more than 10, 000 now! It took 3 years to get to 8000. I'll be adding 25% to the content in two months, whilst carrying out final QA checks before submission. Its been more or less full time work for two of us.

The Home Straight

I've had some training enquiries and expert witness work, but most of the week has been spent checking my dictionary of chemical engineering, due for submission at month end. 

It's all on track, though the sheer size of the publication means that I know it must contain errors, or at the very least, fall short of perfection. However, the deadline is the deadline, and I find that eventually, one loses one's appetite and ability to check and rewrite a book. "Books are never finished—they are merely abandoned.”, as Oscar Wilde said (though he was sort of quoting someone else). 

I'll have to get what I missed in the second edition, though with so many stages of checking there cannot be much. I do however feel a bit more generous towards the authors of  those other dictionaries of chemical engineering which surprised me with their large number of errors.

Expert Witnessing and Training

Just as I am finishing off the dictionary, work starts to come in again. A new training enquiry, and renewed activity on some expert witness work which had been dormant for a while. Funny how that worked out....

Expert Witness: Chemical Engineering Terminology

The more I discuss words and terms with my fellow engineers. the clearer I become about how little they understand them. Not just particular words and terms, but the nature of the terms engineers use every day. These are often not much to do with the everyday words they appear to be made of. They may even mean the opposite of their apparent everyday meaning. 

Yet only yesterday someone on LinkedIn was arguing that engineers were defining words wrongly because they used them to mean something different from the definitions given in a general purpose dictionary. I'm not sure if it is better or worse that the person in question isn't an engineer. At least engineers have the excuse that they were selected to be good at maths.

Real Engineering and Expert Witness Work

I've had a few enquires recently about some real engineering work. I'm working on the dictionary over the weekend to clear the decks for a bit of it on Monday. 

I'm always happy to get some proper design work in. Too many expert witnesses haven't practiced their profession in decades (and too many never did, really, they just managed those who did). 

I like to keep in touch with modern practice. The interactions with my fellow professionals which make sure that my books reflect current practice are useful, but you can't beat first hand experience.