Tax Cuts - A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts - Warren Buffet

Go watch This Week With Christane Amanpour when she speaks with Warren Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates as well as Ted Turner.  That show is what sparked this blog post.

When I hear this nonsense about "trickle down economics" I go back to George H.W. Bush's statement to Ronald Reagan when he said that "trickle down economics" are "voodoo economics" and they are.  There is no Trickle Down Theory of Economics.  Period.   When I hear the Republicans talk about the need to pay for unemployment benefits but there is NO need to pay for the tax cuts for the ultra-rich it is crystal clear that they are either lying and/or stupid.  There are no other options - lying and/or stupid.  Do the math.  When you extend unemployment benefits to it goes right back into the economy.  When you give huge tax breaks to the rich, they keep it.  The myth of the rich pouring it back into the economy is exactly that - a myth.  CBO has also stated this in no uncertain terms as well.

If President Obama caves in to the Republicans on extending the upper two percent George Bush Tax Cuts then he will be the George McFly of politicians (great article explaining why Obama already is George McFly).  Politifact does a great job showing how completely out to lunch some of the key Republicans are on this issue.  It is no surprise, because any party (not all, but most) that is anti-science (think evolution, global warming, gays in the military, ...), would surely be anti-economics as well.  However, I do think the Republicans are brilliant in their ability to get Obama to cave on important issues.  Obama has zero courage and the Republicans have little knowledge of sciences and even less desire to help the country as witnessed by the Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell's "one term Obama" mandate.  Congress's inability or desire to make hard decisions is why we stay in the crapper right now as a nation.  I better stop now and stick to the point of my post - which is economic theory.  Hopefully my long term friend, Steve Fritzinger, will post his comments on this as he is a real expert on economics among other topics.  Steve has a podcast on economics for the BBC which is fantastic.

Obama will end up being a one term President.  As the old saying goes, "dance with who brung ya".  Obama's total cowardice when dealing with the republicans is just unbelievable.  He caves before any fight.  If he was a poker player, he would fold BEFORE the other players bluff.   When I read the following in Mother Jones Magazine, that came out in this latest Wikileaks fiasco (BTW, the founder of Wikileaks should go to jail for this) it became crystal clear to me that any hope of Obama having the courage to lead this country is completely gone:

"In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A "confidential" April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.

The previous month, a Spanish human rights group called the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had requested that Spain's National Court indict six former Bush officials for, as the cable describes it, "creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture." The six were former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon's former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel. The human rights group contended that Spain had a duty to open an investigation under the nation's "universal jurisdiction" law, which permits its legal system to prosecute overseas human rights crimes involving Spanish citizens and residents. Five Guantanamo detainees, the group maintained, fit that criteria."

It is a shame that Obama looked like such a tough leader in the campaign and has turned out to be such a wimp when dealing with the republicans.

We have gone from the worst president of all time in George W. Bush to someone who looks like the cowardly lion in the movie The Wizard of Oz.

BTW, I am not a Democrat or a Republican, I am a pro-science, pro-logic, pro-knowledge, Independent and I recommend everyone watch The Daily Show or The Colbert Report to get their news and stay away from Fixed Noise (Fox News - it is clear why Fox hosts want Bush tax cuts extended) and MSNBC.  You will be better informed and a happier carbon based unit as well :-)

I should go back to writing about technology, it does not raise my blood pressure :-)

Great Control Design Article

Below are the first couple of paragraphs on a great article written by Jim Montague, Executive Editor for Control Design.

"Hey, Mr. Machine, how're you feeling today? Mr. COO wants to know. Seriously?

Well, it's about time.

Operators, engineers and managers always want to know how well their machines are running. When machines were simple and shops were small, this was pretty easy to do. However, as machines and their corporations and staffs grew larger and more complex, it became harder to stay aware of how an individual machine's operational health could affect its company's economic health. You know, the old right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. 

Still, many sophisticated devices have been developed and implemented to check on the health of machine and production lines, and as these increasingly software-based tools pushed for more and better operations, they also opened up new levels of proactive and predictive maintenance. Likewise, enterprise resource management (ERP) software and other business-level tools also have grown more sophisticated. However, the persistent problem is that both the production and business sides and their monitoring tools apparently still don't know how to talk to each other. "

The bold text above is where the real win with MTConnect will come into play.  It is not just the monitoring, it is the integration of machine tools with rest of the enterprise where we will see the phenomenal changes in manufacturing.


Mr. Montague brings out that point here:

"Despite the historical drawbacks and other new hurdles, some machine builders are finding ways to get machine performance data up to their business-level managers and clients. One of the newest ways to secure and distribute machine information is with the MTConnect (www.mtconnect.org) standard that puts data from different types of equipment and applications into a standard format. Based on XML and HTTP, MTConnect fosters interoperability between machines, controls, equipment and software by employing a standard vocabulary to gather, publish and distribute machine tool data via Internet Protocol (IP) and Ethernet TCP/IP networking."

The rest of this great article is here....

MTConnect in the Market by Mark Albert

Mark Albert is the editor of Modern Machine Shop Magazine and wrote the most important article on MTConnect a year ago titled:  MTConnect Is For Real.   He wrote another great article titled, MTConnect in the Market.  Below is just a snippet from Mark's article:

"The developers of the standard, now operating as the MTConnect Institute, a not-for-profit, independent organization (mtconnect.org), were careful to avoid restrictions that might hinder its adoption on a voluntary basis. For that matter, there is no restriction on how products “powered by MTConnect” can be made available to the marketplace. In fact, a number of suppliers and end users have chosen to share developments based on MTConnect for free. That’s because they think promoting the standard this way is in their best interest."

Mark Albert is one of the best writers in the business and it is always great when he writes about MTConnect.

Tim Edstrom's National Honor Society Ceremony

Congratulations to our youngest son, Tim Edstrom, for being selected to the National Honor Society (NHS).  He joins his two brothers, John and Michael, in being NHS members.   His parents are very proud.  Below is the NHS ceremony at Broad Run High School tonight.  Congratulations Tim!

Tim with his grandma and grandpa on the right with his mom on the left in this photo.

Tim and his good friend Caleb Adams.  Tim and Caleb played lots of basketball together including for the AAU Shox.  Caleb and Tim are the only Shox who made it to NHS.

Dr. David Dornfeld's "Drinking From A Fire Hose"

Dr. David Dornfeld, Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Director, Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability at University of California, has written two excellent articles:


                Drinking From A Fire Hose
                Drinking From A Fire Hose: Data Collection  Part II


Below is a great example of Dr. Dornfeld quantifying energy values in a medium facility:

"Recall that we had estimated that sampling energy data values for a “medium sized facility” for a day (here meaning 25 CNC machines, 10 programmable logic controlled machines and assorted other handling and line equipment with 8 data sources per machine at a sample rate of 5 hertz) would yield a data stream of 86,400,000 data points each day. And that if we added the other sources, we’d likely end up with 100 million data values a day to deal with.

Below Dr. Dornfeld discusses the importance of correlation:

So, let’s continue our discussion from last time. Data can be related to events and information associated with those events. Thus, data can be understood as something that occurred either at a specific time or over a range of time. In manufacturing systems, events can be a numerical value (for example, the instantaneous power consumption at a specific time) or can be a type of annotation (for example, the alarm state of the machine tool over an interval). Complex events are abstractions of events that are created by combining simple events. For example, based on simple events pertaining to the tool position, the instantaneous power consumption, and the machine tool’s program in machining a part, we can create maps linking power and stages of part production"

Dr. Dornfeld is an internationally known expert and one of the creators of the MTConnect protocol as well.  Dr. Dornfeld is also known for Dornfeld's Law.

Cloud Computing - HMI as a SaaS

There was an interesting post on LinkedIn regarding HMI as a SaaS called GoToMyHMI is Your 'HMI-Gateway' in the Cloud for HMI Access from Any Device, Any Where

I do not have any specific experience or knowledge with this product by Software Horizons.  The reason I think this is interesting is that it appears to be a very nice example of manufacturing using the cloud to provide a valuable service.

Scaling TSA Does Not Equal Follow Israel's Example

When I hear that TSA should follow Israel's security practices, I think of Mike O'Dell's timeless advice:

Scaling is ALWAYS the problem.

Israel has 20 flights per day.  The US has 20,000 flights per day.  Do the math.  Dana Milbank did today in the Washington Post:

"In a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, Israel uses profiling, background checks and extensive interviews to filter out the highest-risk fliers, who are then subjected to searches of luggage and person more invasive than anything the Transportation Security Administration has conjured. The air security argument has been about whether Americans would prefer Israeli-style profiling to the current system of body scans and pat-downs. But this overlooks a more fundamental problem: The Israeli system, even if it could be scaled up, is out of our price range. 

El Al, Israel's national carrier, reported spending $107,828,000 on security in 2009 for the 1.9 million passengers it carried. That works out to about $56.75 per passenger. The United States, by contrast, spent $5.33 billion on aviation security in fiscal 2010, and the air travel system handled 769.6 million passengers in 2009 (a low year), according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. That amounts to $6.93 per passenger."

We are not even having the right conversations on airport security and we never will as long as Congress has anything to do with it - and they always will....

Nice MAG Freedom eWare Article at Automation World

A sign of maturing standard is when it is simply referenced in an article, such as this one on eWare at Automation World, where it states:

"The software, which is MTConnect compliant, can interact with smart phones, tablet PCs and similar mobile devices, displaying machinery status, productivity data and machinery analytics for various systems on a plant network"

Virtualization.net

It is interesting to see what trade rags pick up either an article or a video.  Virtualization.net picked up a video that I created with Diyana Hrzic's brilliant editing on cloud computing that was only sent to those individuals who attended the Emerging Technology Center (ETC) at IMTS 2010.

Virtualization.net looks like a very interesting site that has a wealth of cloud and virtualizaton information.

Empty Clouds

I have written a number of articles and white papers on cloud computing.   I always emphasize security as job #1.  While there are many, many advantages to cloud computing, there is one area that some SaaS providers are taking the easy way out - Service Level Agreements (SLAs).    I have stated in every one of my articles and presentations that SLAs in a written agreement are critical before you place a cloud bet.  I can not over emphasize how important it is to have a viable and written SLA.    Look at the big dog in the IaaS room, Amazon's EC2, and you will see a company that has seriously thought about this and provides a reasonable degree of assurance and protection when you are placing a business bet on the cloud.  A number of software companies still do not get it that you simply can not expect a business to place a huge bet on your SaaS when there is no recourse if that service is down.  We hear stories all the time from software sales reps that state, "you can get an SLA if you really push it and are a big customer."  You should not have to be a big company to get an SLA.

Prior to SaaS, I did a great deal of work with High Availability (HA) servers at Sun Microsystems with Sun's partners (in the early 1990s) and Sun's software.  The challenge with HA servers was multiple from asymmetric to symmetric HA servers, to round robin load balancing, to eliminating Single Points Of Failures (SPOFs), to HA aware software, to upgrades, to patches, to version control, to sysadmin, to a thousand other issues.   Running your own HA servers was a non-trivial task to take on.  SaaS, in theory, should eliminate most of these concerns as the SaaS provider takes on the hard computer science challenges.  This does not mean that you don't question your SaaS provider regarding how they take care of these issues behind the scenes.  If you do, you will be treating your SaaS provider just like the Wizard behind the curtain in the movie - The Wizard Of Oz.  Remember the old phrase, "if you assume, you make an a$$ out of you and me."

It is simply a matter of time before we start hearing of customers openly demanding that SaaS companies step up to the plate as Amazon and others have to provide meaningful SLAs. The SLAs are now becoming more of a standard for IaaS and will be for PaaS.

What is an empty cloud?  A SaaS with no SLA or a completely vague SLA that provides ZERO recourse.  The industry is going through a learning phase right now.  Companies are going to realize that you simply must have an SLA.   There is another option if the SaaS company refused to have an SLA and that is a disaster recovery (DR) option that can be either hot or cold started in the event the service is down.   If you can get a copy of your data and get a perpetual license that you can run either locally or in another cloud instantiation, then get a DR as an option.  Clearly, this option may not be possible for many, put it is available for some.  

Lenny Rachitsky at Transparent Uptime has a GREAT post on the importance of SaaS Dashboards that is a must read.  Below are five areas he brings out in his post:
 "Lets first define what makes an online health dashboard "successful", and in the process explain why you (as a SaaS provider) should have one:

1. Your support costs go down as your users are able to self-identify system wide problems without calling or emailing your support department. Users will no longer have to guess whether their issues are local or global, and can more quickly get to the root of the problem before complaining to you.
2. You are better able to communicate with your users during downtime events, taking advantage of the broadcast nature of the Internet versus the one-to-one nature of email and the phone. You spend less time communicating the same thing over and over and more time resolving the issue.
3. You create a single and obvious place for your users to come to when they are experiencing downtime. You save your users' time currently spent searching forums, Twitter, or your blog.
4. Trust is the cornerstone of successful SaaS adoption. Your customers are betting their business and their livelihoods on your service or platform. Both current and prospective customers require confidence in your service. Both need to know they won't be left in the dark, alone and uninformed, when you run into trouble. Real time insight into unexpected events is the best way to build this trust. Keeping them in the dark and alone is no longer an option.
5. It's only a matter of time before every serious SaaS provider will be offering a public health dashboard. Your users will demand it."

Bottom line: Do NOT go for a a SaaS with zero SLA or at least a Disaster Recovery Cold/Hot Start Server or you will be sorry.

Happy Thanksgiving To Our Troops

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our troops who are serving in harms way this Thanksgiving.  It is nice to see the various sporting events honor the troops today.

MTConnect Sub-Module

As President and Chairman of the Board for the MTConnect Institute, I am very pleased to announced the first addition to the MTConnect family of logos - MTConnect Sub-Module. A sure sign of success for any protocol is when companies or organizations come with new and creative ways to implement a protocol.  This is the case with MTConnect Sub-Module.  MTConnect Sub-Module is to be used to recognize or label the hardware or software segment that provides a part of the MTConnect protocol that sits in a TOTAL MTConnect solution.   In other words, the solution MUST provide a TOTAL MTConnect solution, but a member MUST label those parts of those solutions that are simply sub-modules that depend on other modules for a complete solution.

An example is in order here.    GE/Fanuc created a COMPLETE MTConnect black box solution in 2008 (note this is no longer available after the two companies went their separate ways) that was the size of a brick that had everything you needed in one box to connect an existing machine tool to the outside world.  On one side of the brick were your legacy ports for machine tools.  On the other side of the box were four ethernet ports that all supported the FULL MTConnect protocol ie adapter/agent.  The box ran Linux with all of the necessary MTConnect software.  All you needed was a client someplace on the net.  Now imagine if GE/Fanuc had decided to make that solution into two separate boxes to accomplish the same thing as the single box.  Imagine that those boxes required each other in order to provide a complete MTConnect adapter/agent.  In that scenario, each of those boxes would be an MTConnect Sub-Module and together they would be MTConnect compliant.

Cloud Computing For Manufacturing Intro Video Part 1

Below is a cloud computing video  that helps those in manufacturing understand the basics.  This is one of three videos that we created here at AMT - The Association For Manufacturing Technology.  This is a very professional video for one reason and one reason only - THE GREAT VIDEO EDITING WORK OF DIYANA HRZIC!






Cloud Computing For Manufacturing Intro Video Part 1

[In]Decision Points

I would be remiss if I did not talk about President George W. Bush's memoir Decision Points.  So, what prompted me to write this?  Bush's book that was released?   Not directly.  What prompted this was my father telling me of the young soldier that was in the chemo room with him this week at Walter Reed Army Hospital on the Oncology Ward that was missing both legs, both arms and was receiving chemotherapy with his young wife watching.  My first words out my mouth were, "Jesus Christ!"  My next words can not be uttered here, but this posting will provide the facts that lead to that comment.

If you believe George W. Bush should be the fifth entry on Mount Rushmore, then you might want to stop reading now.

Let's see, where to begin....

• First, I always have said that George W. Bush  would be a great neighbor.  Easy going, does not seem to be an in your face type of guy.  When he was drinking, he was probably a very funny guy to hang out with as well :-)
• Second, I always thought his dad had both brains and guts.
• As a president, however, George W.  Bush will absolutely go down as the worst ever.
• Three unfunded tax cuts that were mostly for the rich.
• Two unfunded wars.
• Bush later admitted that Iraq had NOT A DAMN THING TO DO WITH 9/11.
• Thomas Friedman's "Too Good To Check" column on the "Obama's Asian visit costs $200M/day" nasty rumor, as trumpeted by FN.  The list price for the Afghan war is $190M/day and Iraq is $2BILLION/week, not counting the tragic fallout facing soldiers at Walter Reed.  (Put another way, we could just pay 30M Iraqis $67 a week to like us.)
• When talking about the cost of Bush’s wars, we usually count the dollars and American troops killed/maimed.  That leaves out two huge groups: 
• Iraqis/Afghans whose lives have been destroyed and contractors.  In Iraq several hundred thousand Iraqis have been killed out-right by violence and 1 to 1 ½ million have died from other war related causes like disease.  Another 3 million have been turned into refugees.  We should NOT leave them out when counting costs, but I am sure some will view this as just "collateral damage".
• There are also at least as many contractors, many from poor nations just looking for any job, as there are American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  They get killed and maimed just as frequently as our troops, but we never even bother to count them either.
• An unfunded Medicare prescription drug program
• Making regulation a four letter word.  The Great Financial Recession happened on Bush's eight year watch.  
• We are talking trillions of $$$$$$$$$$$  here folks....
• Let's see, how did that work out?
• Let's remember Bush inherited a surplus.
• Bush watched the national debt grow from $5.6 trillion to nearly $10 trillion
• "You see, the growing surplus exists because taxes are too high, and government is charging more than it needs," Bush said in February 2001.     Uhhhh, that would be a big no.  Not when you are in the hole as a country.  Driving down the debt was a smart thing.
• We are in such a huge financial hole right now because of Bush's idiotic decisions.  Congress will not have the courage to do what other countries are starting to do - make the hard decisions no matter how unpopular they may be.
• For those longing for Reagan, go back and look at the numbers here at PresidentialDebt.org
• Looking at those numbers, you realize that Reagan was much worse on the debt, but that is not the point of this blog entry :-)
• When I hear Bush state, "I kept America safe."  WHAT!  Bush likes to forget that 9/11 occurred on his watch.  We need only go back to the famous seven minutes of Bush sitting there wide eyed listening to the teacher in Florida reading "My Pet Goat" to realize that this guy had not a clue on what it takes to be a great president.
• It was interesting to watch Bush state that water boarding saved lives and is the right thing for America to do to other countries, but when Matt Lauer asked him, "what if other countries were to do the same to us?"  Bush stated, "Matt, I am not going to debate this."  Of course, what he was saying was, "Matt, I do not think about things I do not think about, I might have to reflect and that might be painful for me to do."  This reminds me of the famous scene in the classic movie, "Inherit The Wind" when the topic of evolution comes up and the attorney Matthew Harrison Brady says, "I do not think about things I do not think about."
• The Oval Office with Matt Lauer was amazing to watch when Lauer confronted him.
• When Bush was asked his worst moment?  When Kanye West implied Bush was a racist.  Really, that was Bush's WORST moment as President?   Are you freaking kidding me?  Watching kids come back in body bags for a war he and Cheney made up with no WMD was not up there in the top ten at least?  Watching Americans suffer in New Orleans during Katrina really paled to Kanye West hurting his feelings?  Now, I must state that I do not think George Bush has a racist bone in his body.  
• When Bush states that, even without WMD, he would STILL go into Iraq again then he is lying to himself and to the American people.  Let's think this through here "W".  You get in front of the American people and say, "We have to go after Saddam Hussein because we think he has WMD.  However, even if he does not have any WMD and THERE ARE NO LINKS to 9/11, me and Dick Cheney still think it will be worth sacrificing thousands of young American lives and trillions of dollars anyway."   How do you think the Americans would have reacted to that there "W"?
  
• Obama was given one hell of a mess.  Obama needs to spend more time doing what is right and less time answering questions that appear on Fixed Noise and the other wacko "news" outlets.  Yes, MSNBC can be just as wacko, but it does not have the money and power that Fixed Noise does.  If Obama continues to kick the can down the road and show no courage in standing up to The Party of No, then he will be a one term president as well.  Democrats have zero guts.  
• What I can say that I admire about Bush is that he has kept his mouth shut since he got out (except for this book). That takes restraint and class.  He should tell his buddy Cheney to exercise some class as well.

Rodney Dangerfield and American Manufacturing

Below is an article I wrote for the IMTS Insider.

Rodney Dangerfield and American Manufacturing

Twenty-one percent of everything made in the world is made in the United States of America.  China makes 12%. Surprised? Probably not, if you are reading the IMTS Insider, because likely that means you are in manufacturing.  However, I bet if you asked individuals outside the industry which country leads the world in manufacturing, their answer would likely be China.  You then might get into a long discussion about the price of labor and politics. But that is not the point of this article. This article was sparked by a recent NPR Planet Money podcast called The Friday Podcast: Buttons And Other Connectors.

I would encourage everyone to listen to this short podcast because it drives home a very simple point that is sometimes forgotten in manufacturing; it is NOT lean manufacturing, it is innovative technology. Don't get me wrong, the principles of lean are important, but if you are not innovating, being lean is simply a race to the bottom. How much do you spend on R&D? It always blows my mind when I hear someone in manufacturing say that there is not a lot to be gained by investing in R&D. 

The podcast compares and contrasts two companies.  As NPR states on their Planet Money home page:

“Back in the day, the Buttonwood Corporation ran double shifts at its New York City factory, with 150 machines cranking out tens of thousands of buttons.  These days, Chinese factories not only have cheaper labor, but also newer, fancier machines. Buttonwood — a family business, owned by two brothers — has just one employee left. They sell small orders of wood buttons, and take orders online at woodbuttons.com.

The Zierick Manufacturing Corporation makes products that are all around us, but we never notice: little pieces of metal that connect electronics components to control panels.  This sounds like the kind of cheap commodity item that would be made in China. But it isn't; Zierick's factory is in upstate New York. Zierick's trick is to keep coming up with new, patentable ideas to make connectors better and better. So if you want a really good, reliable connector, it's worth it to pay more and get one from them. The company's doing well.They have lots of employees, lots of customers. They just have to keep coming up with new ideas to stay ahead of everybody else.”

Why do I have Rodney Dangerfield in my title?  The companies that are innovating and growing do not get the respect they deserve because most people believe “American manufacturing is dead.”  In today's sound bite news world, this is not surprising. Tell your non-manufacturing friends who is winning and why in manufacturing.  Finally, when you listen to this podcast, you can see the difference between someone who is looking forward and innovating and someone who is looking at years gone by.  Sometimes you are the windshield and sometimes you're the bug.  Innovate and be the windshield: It’s much better that way.

Dave Edstrom

Director, The Office of Strategic Innovation 

AMT - The Association For Manufacturing Technology

Congratulations To Tim Edstrom - National Honor Society

Congratulations to our youngest son, Tim Edstrom, for being selected to the National Honor Society (NHS).  He joins his two brothers, John and Michael, in being NHS members.   His parents are very proud.

My wife was in NHS in High School.  As close as I got to NHS in High School was when Glen Gawarkiewicz and I rode in together to and from Lake Braddock :-)

MTConnect Technical Advisory Working Group Meeting at DMG Mori Seiki

I am really looking forward to the MTConnect Technical Advisory Working Group Meeting at DMG Mori Seiki.  We have a number of very important initiatives that I am very excited about and will blog about later this week.  The meeting start today and ends on Wednesday.

Michelle Rhee Breaking The Union and Firing The Bottom Ten Percent

This is from The Atlantic where Michelle Rhee made a very interesting statement on fixing the school system.

This Spring, Rhee negotiated among the most revolutionary teacher's contracts in the country, which essentially broke the union, loosening tenure protections in exchange for the potential for teachers to make more money and earn performance bonuses. D.C. is being hailed as a model in urban education reform, and there are plans to replicate this model; The Obama Administration is putting more than a billion dollars behind a "performance-based" rewards system similar to the one being tested in D.C.

That statement that starts off below is from Michelle Rhee:

"She said if the U.S. fired 6-10 percent of the worst teachers in the country and replaced them "not even with the best, but with average teachers," U.S. schools would move from 21, 25 and 26th in math to the top 5.

"Now let me just say, to all of you business people..." Rhee continued.

"Wait wait wait," the moderator, Harvard University's David Gergen, interrupted. "...Do you believe this?"

Rhee replied: "Yes, I actually do. If someone told you as a business, that if you removed the bottom 6 percent of your performers, that you would move from 25th in the market to top-5, you would do it in a heartbeat. You would not even think twice about it. But we have an incredibly hard time in this in this country. We like teachers. It is an incredibly noble position in this country.  But we have to look at the reality..."

Adrian Fenty takes some of the blame here for how he handled DC, but DC is the one to blame here.  DC citizens want better schools, but are not willing to support those who actually make the hard decisions.

This is a very interesting article.  I am going to really miss Michelle Rhee but look forward to seeing where she lands...

Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear

Tim, Julie and I attended the Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear that was estimated at 10 million by Jon Stewart so it must be true :-)  It was a picture perfect fall day that was tons of fun with 215,000 of our closets Comedy Central friends.  Note Glenn Beck had 87,000, but from a weight standpoint, the crowds were equal :-)  Because of the fighting over numbers, the National Parks do not give estimates. An indicator of the size was Metro stated that there were 330,000 riders by 11am on that Saturday and that is the normal total number they see for an entire Saturday during that time of the year.  It was bigger than Glenn Beck's rally is all this crowd cared about - that and having a good time.  The creativity of these individuals I will place against any other rally event on planet earth.

This was my favorite sign.  I have no idea who this guy is, but his sign is brilliant!

This was Tim's favorite sign.

Me and Julie at the rally.

Jon Stewart was selected as the most trusted news person in America - seriously, he was.  That shows just how screwed up our normal "news" channels have become when a comedian is the most trusted person.  He is for good reasons....

7th Street after the rally.

We had to go to Tim's favorite DC restaurant - Ben's Chili Bowl.

Separation of Church and State

The most important amendment, and one of the best things about the United States of America, is the first amendment to the United States Constitution  and is part of the Bill of Rights, which is the separation of church and state:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Lately, we have all heard a number of complete knuckleheads, that either do not believe there is separation of church and state or misquote Thomas Jefferson, so I thought I would post this and encourage everyone to attend the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Rally For Sanity and Keep Fear Alive Rallies this Saturday.   Below is a letter Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 to answer a letter from them written in October 1801.

I highlighted the most important part of this letter below.

Mr. President

To messers Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, & Stephen S. Nelson, a committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut.

Gentlemen

The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist association, give me the highest satisfaction. my duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, & in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. [Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from prescribing even those occasional performances of devotion, practiced indeed by the Executive of another nation as the legal head of its church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.] Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association assurances of my high respect & esteem.

(signed) Thomas Jefferson
Jan.1.1802.

3D Technology on NPR on Tech Tuesday

Yesterday, Kojo Nnamde had a great one hour show on 3D Printing.    The title was:

How 3D Technology Is Changing Product Development

There were a number of very interesting speakers:

Stephen Rouse is the Director of operations and research for 3-D medical applications at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.   John Lee is a 3-D printing specialist with ABC Imaging, a printing business in Washington, D.C.   Scott Summit is an industrial engineer and co-founder of Bespoke Innovations, a firm that designs cutting-edge prosthesis.   Ashlee Vance comes on as well to discuss what he has learned about 3D printing and an article he wrote for the New York Times. Check out the links above (underlined text) to see some very cool examples of additive technology.

 One of the questions that comes up quite a bit with manufacturing is, "how do you make manufacturing cool?"     Without question, there is nothing cooler than 3D printers or additive technology.   Below is from a blog entry on the Emerging Technology Center at IMTS 2010 showing a product that was printed one layer at a time with a 3D printer or additive technology.

Don't just look at the photo below and think this is the ultimate example of 3D printing - far from it - go to the links in the first paragraph for cool examples at the individual sites listed.

Meeting Local Motors Jay Rogers in Miami

Last week in Miami there was a very successful Global Forecasting and Marketing Conference, AMT's Annual Meeting and the Board of Directors Meeting.

The highlight for me was listening to and having a chance to spend some time with the founder and CEO/President of Local Motors - John "Jay' Rogers.   This is fascinating to me because it is a car company based on the principles of open source software.

As Popular Science stated:  

"The company was co-founded in 2007 by former Marine and Harvard Business School graduate Jay Rogers on the notion of combining the crowd-sourcing and DIY movements with staid auto manufacturing. Amateurs and professionals submit designs to Local Motors’s Web site, and users vote on the winners in a monthly contest. If, among other factors, a vehicle generates enough buzz that the company thinks it could sell at least 500 of them, the engineers fine-tune the design to make it feasible. Then Local Motors sets up a micro-factory—think automotive plant meets semi-pro DIY garage—where buyers build the car themselves under guidance from the company’s instructors for an estimated $50,000. “We’re not trying to make cars for soccer moms,” Rogers says. “We’re trying to make cars for people who are really deeply interested in automotives. Local Motors can bring these low-volume, highly desirable vehicles to market.”

As Wired Magazine stated:

"In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers."

This is definitely a company to watch and Jay Rogers is a real thought leader.

Homeless Veterans on 60 Minutes Tonight

Watching this 60 Minutes episode on homeless Veterans was heart wrenching.  Some of our politicians give a lot hollow rhetoric when it comes to taking care our Veterans.  There are of course exceptions.  For example, I know for a fact that Senator Webb is a leader who deeply cares about our veterans.  He recently reached out to my father to thank him for his service to our country and encourage him in his current fight with cancer.

60 minutes reported that there are 9,000 Iraq and Afghanistan vets that are homeless.  That is incredible.  

It was stated that the primary reason for homelessness for our Vets is that we are asking our young soldiers are being redeployed 2, 3, 4, 5 and more times and the combat stress is incredible.  There are 250,000 troops who have asked for mental help.  Imagine that numbers who do not ask for help.  IEDs are causing untold problems as well.

The episode is in San Diego at Camp Stand Down which is where these homeless Veterans meet to find out if they can get help.  Only 20% were able to receive help.

I would strongly encourage everyone to watch this.

If we can not take care of these vets, then why in the hell are we nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Benoit Mandelbrot Died Yesterday

Steve Fritzinger passed this on to me that Benoit Mandelbrot died yesterday.

At Sun Microsystems, we used to have a fractal program that allowed you to turn on the number of processors in the system or to farm the calculations out to systems on the network that had a fractal daemon waiting to receive data and then return the answer.   It was the classic parallel program.

Seagull Century 2010 and Long Weekend in Ocean City, MD

The photo on top is me and just above is Jeff Stone.  Last Saturday was absolutely perfect weather for the Seagull Century 76 degrees and not a cloud in the sky as you can see.  These photos are on Assateague Island looking back at Ocean City, MD in the distance.  The water temperature was 69 degrees as well.

After finishing 100 miles

Above is me, Tim and his friend Thomas.  Tim is holding his MONSTER flounder that he caught in Ocean City, Maryland a year earlier in July of 2009.  It was SO BIG, that the Captain called Coastal Fisherman and they sent out a reporter to take Tim's picture.
Tim is on page 49 of the Coastal Fisherman.  See below:

 

Above is Tim by himself.

Above is Thomas Jones and my son Tim in a brand new Corvette Grand Sport 436hp convertible at the GM performance tent at OC, MD.  It was cruisers weekend, so we always go check out the cool cars.

You can not come to Ocean City without standing in line to buy Thrasher's fries...

The 638hp Corvette ZR1 super charged engine.

Cyber Metallic Gray - my next Corvette.

LS Controller Kit for Corvettes and other Chevrolets

10.10.10 Binary Day and The Answer to Life Day

My wife's cousin, George Smith, put a number of interesting facts on his facebook page today  regarding 10.10.10   As George points out, when you look at 101010 as the binary representation of decimal 42, then it gets to be a really interesting day:

• The obvious one of month, day and year all being the same number.
• 101010 is 42
• Wikipedia states: The number 42 is in the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is calculated by an enormous supercomputer over a period of 7.5 million years to be 42. According to the novel Mostly Harmless, 42 is the street address of Stavromula Beta. In 1994, Adams created the 42 Puzzle, a game based on the number 42.

As Wikipedia also points out about 42 decimal:

• Given 27 same-size cubes whose nominal values progress from 1 to 27, a 3×3×3 magic cube can be constructed such that every row, column, and corridor, and every diagonal passing through the center, comprises 3 cubes whose sum of values is 42.

• Forty-two is a pronic number and an abundant number; its prime factorization 2 · 3 · 7 makes it the second sphenic number and also the second of the form { 2 · 3 · r }. As with all sphenic numbers of this form, the aliquot sum is abundant by 12. 42 is also the second sphenic number to be bracketed by twin primes; 30 is also a pronic number and also rests between two primes. 42 has a 14 member aliquot sequence 42, 54, 66, 78, 90, 144, 259, 45, 33, 15, 9, 4, 3, 1, 0 and is itself part of the aliquot sequence commencing with the first sphenic number 30. Further, 42 is the 10th member of the 3-aliquot tree.

• 42 is the product of the first three terms of Sylvester's sequence; like the first five such numbers it is also a primary pseudoperfect number.

• It is the sum of the totient function for the first eleven integers.

• It is a Catalan number. Consequently; 42 is the number of noncrossing partitions of a set of five elements, the number of triangulations of a heptagon, the number of rooted ordered binary trees with six leaves, the number of ways in which five pairs of nested parentheses can be arranged, etc.

• It is the reciprocal of a Bernoulli number.

• It is conjectured to be the scaling factor in the leading order term of the "sixth moment of the Riemann zeta function". In particular, Conrey & Ghosh have conjectured
  

  

  where the infinite product is over all prime numbers, p.^[1][2]

• It is the third pentadecagonal number. It is a meandric number and an open meandric number.

• Since the greatest prime factor of 42² + 1 = 1765 is 353 and thus more than 42 twice, 42 is a Størmer number.

• 42 is a perfect score on the USA Math Olympiad (USAMO)^[3] and International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).^[4]

• In base 10, this number is a Harshad number and a self number, while it is a repdigit in base 4 (as 222).

• The eight digits of pi beginning from 242,422 places after the decimal point are 42424242.

• 42 is the expected number of throws of a (single) fair die until two sixes show up successively (for the first time).

In technology

• Magic numbers used by programmers:
  • The glyph, or character, corresponding to the number 42 in the ASCII character set, is *, the asterisk, commonly known as the wildcard character. For example, when used in a Unix command such as "rm -fr /*", * means "everything".
  • In the TIFF image file format, the second 16-bit word of every file is 42, which is used together with the first word to indicate byte order.
  • In the reiser4 file system, 42 is the inode number of the root directory.

• The GNU C Library, a set of standard routines available for use in computer programming, contains a function—memfrob()—which performs an XOR combination of a given variable and the binary pattern 00101010 (42) as an XOR cipher.

• 42 is the result given by the web search engines Wolfram Alpha, Google and Microsoft's Bing when the query "the answer to life the universe and everything" is entered as a search.

Ten Years Ago Today Purchased My Corvette

Ten years ago today, my wife Julie and I came back on a red-eye from Hawaii.  After lunch that day, Julie asked me to run up to Walmart to pick up some school supplies for the boys.  On the way to Walmart I decided to stop by Carmax.  I walked into Carmax and saw a black C5 (5th generation Corvette) Corvette coupe, looked inside and it was an automatic.  As I was walking away the salesman said, "we have three more just like it in the lot."   I then said, "oh, you have three more Corvettes in the lot?"   He then said, "no, we have three more black C5 coupes."   That really got my attention because that was the exact type of Corvette that I was looking for during the past year.  I also thought, "this is a sign from Jesus/Allah/Buddah that I should go check these out." 

We walk out to the lot and the second and third C5s did not have the options I wanted.  The fourth black C5 coupe had every option I wanted and more.  I took it out for a drive and then asked the salesman how it works when you buy a car from Carmax?  The salesman said that when you buy it, you have three days to return it.   I then said, "let's do it."   From when I uttered those words it was less than a 1/2 an hour when I was driving off with my new Corvette.  It was the exact type of experience that you want to have when you buy a car. 

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I drive home in my 1998 black Corvette coupe.  When I pull up in the driveway, Julie is outside with the boys.   Julie asked, "did you just buy a Corvette."   I then say, "no, I am just test driving it."  Julie then says, "don't give me that crap, you have metal tags on the car and their is no salesman with you."   I then say, "wait, a second, now that I think about it,  yes I guess I did buy it."  We both laughed and my sons that it was pretty cool.

I called Steve Ferry who is a Corvette expert and he came out to the house with his son Matt.  Steve checked it out and gave me his approval.  He then suggested that I take it up to Tony's Corvette Shop.  I called Tony first thing Monday and brought it up there on Tuesday.  Tony gave it his approval as well after spending a couple of hours going through it carefully.  It has been a great car.  

About five years ago I had Tony take it from 345 hp to 430 hp by adding a Honker Callaway airbox, ceramic coated long tube headers, x-pipe, RandomTech replacement catalytic converter replacement, Corsa Pace Car exhaust, a thicker replacement under panel to keep heat out of the cabin and miscellaneous other upgrades.

It puts a smile on my face every time I start the engine.  This is a daily driver unless the weather is crap.  As I tell people, if I come out and get in a Nissan Quest versus a Corvette, I had better have my head examined.  Driving a Corvette is fun. Waxing and polishing a Corvette is not....

The Social Network - Facebook movie

I almost hate to admit this, but I really liked the movie The Social Network, from both the geek and the movie standpoints.  My wife saw it this weekend and really liked it as well.  I should state (no offense here) that my wife is not a geek :-)

This is one of these rare movies that a geek can take their non_geek_significant_other (NGSO :-) to and both can have a good time.   It also further validates the theory that you should go to Harvard and then drop out to start your own company if you want to be filthy rich in life.  My favorite line in the whole movie was when Mark Zuckerberg was standing outside with some other Harvard students after a guest lecturer had just given a talk:


     Student outside of just finished lecture:   "Hey, I arrived late to this but when that guy was speaking about the next Bill Gates, it seemed like he was looking at you Mark.  By the way, who was that guy?"

Mark Zuckerberg replied as he was walking away from that group, "That guy was Bill Gates"  :-)

There is an interesting article on that exchange here.

MaaS Manufacturing as a Service

Since every thing these days in the computer industry, it seems, is [A-Z]aaS (Something as a Service) today, the most logical question is where does manufacturing fit in? MTConnect is driving these conversations. First, let's be clear and not furthe confuse folks about MTConnect and cloud computing. MTConnect is a protocol that is an open and royalty free mechanism for manufacturing technology equipment to easily speak to the rest of the world. MTConnect runs in the manufacturing plants and shops. Cloud computing involves farms of thousand and thousands of servers that reside in places like Amazon, Google, Rackspace and countless other locations that allow companies to pay for what computing and storage they need when they need it.

MTConnect is typically a stepping stone or logical gateway to cloud computing. For example, the first question that plant/shop owners typically ask themselves after they start seeing the benefits of MTConnect is “how do I start to tie all of my other enterprise systems together in a secure and scalable manner?” My answer is to first find a top notch integrator and to make sure you investigate the benefits of cloud computing. In my opinion, Manufacturing as a Service (Maas) MaaS is really what these owners are looking for. MaaS should have the three major elements of cloud computing as part of it which are typically represented by:

• SaaS - Software as a Service
  
• PaaS - Platform as a Service
  
• IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service
  

Please note that MaaS is not a term I thought up or coined. As far as I can tell MaaS was first discussed here in October of 2007. I do however believe that a more descriptive definition is in order for MaaS.

Like any topic, it is important to understand how MaaS came to life. When I first suggested MTConnect at the 2006 AMT Annual Members Meeting in Lake Las Vegas with Dave Patterson of UCB, the most common question I received from Sun Microsystems management was:

“Dave, why are you spending time helping machine tool vendors create a new open and royalty free standard - where is the payoff for Sun?"

Sun was a fantastic company to work for and management was extremely open in their thinking (which is why I hung around for 23 years :-) My response was:

"When all of these machine tools start spitting out data, there is no way in the world that manufacturing shops/plants are going to want to take on the burden/cost of building up their data centers to take the next logical set of steps. Initially, every single company and machine tool vendor will be obsessed with monitoring. They will quickly realize that the REAL win with MTConnect is not the new ease of use in monitoring, but it is taking the data for further integration and analytics. The only answer at that point will be to do it in the cloud. The real money will be in total integration in manufacturing with all the existing software plans/shops current have. There is no one better at network computing and integration than Sun Microsystems."

At that point, every single Sun Executive I explained this to would be knowingly nodding their heads.

This was my vision from day one with MTConnect in 2006 - MaaS - Manufacturing as a Service.

MaaS is the implementation of SaaS, PaaS or IaaS specifically in the manufacturing domain. I further spell out specifics on MaaS in future IMTS Insider articles and blog posts.