Beware of ZoomBombing

With SAWE’s increased use of Zoom for online meetings, please beware of something called “ZoomBombing”. I’ve added some info on properly configuring your Zoom account to the SAWE Zoom Meetings page.

Please DO NOT publicly share any Zoom meeting details.  This article outlines some vulnerable settings that allow internet trolls to sabotage Zoom meetings with something called ZoomBombing.

After you have created a personal Zoom account, here are some settings to help prevent this:
IF you have the need to publicly sharing Zoom links where they could be discovered by trolls, be sure to change screen sharing to “Host Only” before a call starts. Some tips for other ways to protect your Zoom calls include:

  • Disable “Join Before Host” so people can’t cause trouble before you arrive.
  • Enabling “Co-Host” so you can assign others to help moderate.
  • Disable “File Transfer” so there’s no digital virus sharing.
  • Disable “Allow Removed Participants to Rejoin” so booted attendees can’t slip back in.

SAWE Houston Offshore Workshop report

The SAWE Houston Offshore Workshop 2020 was held on March 6th at Fluor Corporation’s offices in Sugar Land, Texas with gracious sponsorship of Fluor, Aker Solutions, SAWE Inc and BAS/ShipWeight. The workshop focused on the review of the SAWE Offshore Recommended Practices, a revision of the ISO 19901 for Offshore Weight Control and the proposed Offshore Handbook chapter to the SAWE Mass Properties Engineering Textbook. The Class Society (ABS) and SAWE presented the: Rule; Guideline; Guidance Note; Recommended Practice and ANSI Standard development process that each organization uses. The reviews started with the Project Proposal for the document, followed by discussions of the class, ISO or regulatory basis of the requirements, a development history of the current draft. The discussions that followed got right to the main points or one could say road blocks to completing the SAWE Recommended Practices. The documents and RPs included RP 0-3 Weighing, O-4 Reporting, O-7 In-Service Weight Control, the Handbook and Mass Properties Engineer Certification. The meeting minutes in the Offshore Industry folder under standards and practices Group Office on the SAWE website has more detail.

Excellent free eBook on “Working from Home”

Submitted by Robert Zimmerman
SAWE Vice President – Technical Director

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis is resulting in many people quarantined or otherwise working from home.  For many of those, this is a new experience.  Fortunately, Take Control Books, a publishing firm specializing in Tech-related books, has released a free book by Glen Fleishman.  The book is available in multiple formats, including PDF and EPUB.  The latter is compatible with multiple electronic eReaders.

Here is information about the eBook and how to obtain it from Take Control Books publisher Joe Kissel:

As a result of the pandemic, a huge number of people who normally work in an office are now working from home. If you find yourself in that position and feel unprepared for remote work, we’d like to offer a bit of help. Glenn Fleishman generously volunteered his time to write Take Control of Working from Home Temporarily, which also features advice from numerous other Take Control authors and other people with extensive experience with remote work. As a small gesture to help out in this uncertain time, we’re offering the book for free.

The book’s contributors, who collectively have centuries of experience working from home, offer advice in areas such as setting up a workspace (obtaining, moving, or repurposing furniture and hardware, for example); communicating with coworkers via text, audio, video and other collaboration tools; maintaining healthy physical and psychological boundaries between work and non-work activities; adapting to the presence of family members and roommates in or near your work area; and adjusting your schedule and habits to best balance productivity and sanity. There’s also a chapter for parents of school-age kids on how to juggle family obligations when working from home.

This new book is free. To obtain it, follow these steps:

Click this link, which automatically adds the new book to your shopping cart and takes you to the cart page: https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/cart/?add-to-cart=571553

If you aren’t already logged in, fill in your email address and password at the top and click Log In. (Alternatively, fill in your first and last name and email address under “Billing details” and select your desired contact preference.)

Click the “Place order” button at the bottom of the screen. No payment is required. After a few moments, your order will be processed. Depending on your browser, you may or may not see download links on screen, but in any case, you’ll get an email message from us with the links, and the book will also be available immediately in your library.

We know it’s difficult to cope with the ever-changing restrictions we all face, and we hope this book helps in some small way.

Joe Kissell

Publisher, Take Control Books

A Message From Our President

SAWE is an International Society and currently there is an international health crises worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic. First and foremost our concern is for health and safety of our families and loved ones. Although we’re a technical society, nothing is more important to our society than your fundamental health and wellness.

The health crisis worldwide has the attention of all of us. SAWE’s mission to provide you with training, resources, technical references, standards guidance, and other technical support remains our primary focus. However, this mission will definitely be impacted in these difficult times. We are a society that relies on the dedicated service of volunteers and a few paid positions. That doesn’t change, but we certainly expect the health and safety of our membership to come first. And we respect and understand policies of our membership’s employers regarding travel restrictions to be in the best interest of all involved. We acknowledge and honor these preventive restrictions and accept them wholeheartedly.

I have created a COVID-19 task force to gather information, provide guidance, and modify this year’s activities to best provide SAWE’s mission to our membership and the mass properties community. This is a fluid situation that relies on your understanding. The task force will create some contingencies that address these trying times.

Our society’s strength has a long history of precious personal relationships and close interaction. I expect that to become stronger in these trying circumstances, but it will rely more heavily on our online connections due to health concerns. SAWE remains dedicated to serving you for your technical needs. And we’ll be exploiting flexibility with digital and online capabilities to maintain the best quality support we can within current health constraints.


Good health to all.
John Hargrave
President SAWE

The SAWE 79th Conference on Mass Properties Engineering is now on Social Media!

The 2020 conference now has it’s own social media channels on Facebook and Instagram: sawe_conference_2020

Many thanks to Laura Bethge-Meyer from the Central European Chapter for taking the initiative to create these new social media feeds specifically for the upcoming conference in Hamburg!

Go follow on Instagram and “like” on Facebook: sawe_conference_2020

Texas Chapter needs volunteers for SAE Aero Design West, April 4-5, 2020

The Texas Chapter will be supporting the SAE Aero Design West competition again this year by weighing each competitor’s airplane and payload during the event.  See the Texas Chapter website for more details.

https://www.sae.org/attend/student-events/sae-aero-design-west/