User:Jbizarro/sandbox

=First draft on improving a civil engineering article=

Samuel Wright Mifflin
A prominent American civil engineer, abolitionist, Quaker, and Author. Samuel Wright Mifflin Was born into a Quaker family in 1805 and died in 1885. He first worked with the Columbia Railroad and would continue for most of his career to operate as a a surveyor and locator. In his lifetime he was responsible for the layout of lines of the Newark and Erie, Boston and Portland, Philadelphia, Reading, and Lebanon Valley. After the war he had a career change and worked on harbor repairs for Lake Erie and Michigan. Beyond his practice as a civil engineer he also well educated and did research. He authored a book, Methods of Location; or Modes of Describing and Adjusting Railway Curves and Tangents, as practiced by the Engineers of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Smith, 1837; repr. 1854). Outside of this he contributed to his community around him and was a well known abolitionists, even housing escapees following the Underground Railroad. Mifflin had a two wives across his lifetime, the first Elizabeth Martin, who passed in 1858, and Hanah Wright, who he was with till he passed on July 26th 1885 in Wayne, Delaware, Pennsylvania, USA.

John Benjamin Henck
The Wikipedia entry about John Benjamin Henck was very to the point and covered only his academic and engineering success. This section would be better if labeled "Professional life of John Benjamin Henck", because I am sure he had more events and more of a build up in his life than what is offered. The entry Was insightful about his early success as a Harvard graduate and work as a professor for a couple of universities. Interesting enough all of this early work focused on classical literature with focus on Greek and Latin. He than made a rapid switch into civil engineering in the pursuit of money. From there Mr Henck headed and worked on numerous big projects with all of them closing with success.

Engineering education of North America
Reading this entry would lead to believe a single person wrote the entries for United States, Canada, and Mexico, because USA has much more written for it giving some brief history, telling how engineering education change, and a detailed descriptions on its current status. The Canadian description is simplified and only addresses the current state. The Mexican description only focuses on the past and the failures of the implementation of engineering education in mexico. The united states description was very accurate for how the education system currently works and the brief history gave a good background.

Capital budgeting
This entry came across biased at some parts with using words like "more reasonable" when comparing two different methods of analyzing capitol budget. There were also points where the article was giving statements that sounded more like opinions since they were not supporting it with credibility. Such statements used phases like "surveys indicate" or "some managers find" without having any citations. Over all this entry summarizes a big topic and breaks it down into small sections to make it easier to understand to the layman. The article was still a little hard to comprehend without an economics background because of some of the terminologies used.