Engineering communications from St. Columba to the Internet

Engineers are good at controlling data and deriving information from it. In the everyday action of withdrawing cash from a hole-in-the-wall machine, massive amounts of data stored in a data warehouse can be used for security, to check that you are the genuine cardholder by measurement made on the iris of your eye. That data can be mined, in the time taken to prepare your cash or statement, so that you can be selectively offered a product which may appeal to you. The value of an engineering company is now heavily weighted towards information, knowledge and skills, rather than to plant and buildings. Tangible assets have been replaced by intangibles, such as patents and copyrights, which are legal methods of protecting technical information. In this paper, the author asks, do engineers communicate their own professionalism?, are they good at communicating the relevance, importance and excitement of engineering to children, especially to girls?, and can engineers manage the message as well as the medium?.