Why I RideYou can go here to donate to sponsor Dave and his two sons for this VERY IMPORTANT cause. Please do!
My wife was diagnosed with MS in 2006, which brought home the impact of this disease. Fortunately, she did not really have it, but I was inspired to try harder to raise funds to help find a cure so that other families wouldn't face this daunting lifestyle. In the process, and I learned that MS has struck children, brothers, sisters, nieces, cousins, and close friends of my friends, making the disease much more widespread than I'd realized.
"Last year's 24 Hours of Le Mans marked the 50th anniversary of Corvette's first participation in the world's most celebrated sports car race. Fifty years after Briggs Cunningham's No. 3 Corvette finished first in the large displacement GT category, the restored race car was reunited with one of its legendary drivers, John Fitch, at the fabled French circuit. Now the remarkable story of this milestone Corvette's return to Le Mans is told in a new documentary film, "The Quest."
The film recounts how the No. 3 Corvette disappeared into obscurity after winning its class at Le Mans. It follows the quest of renowned Corvette enthusiast Chip Miller to find, restore, and ultimately return this milestone automobile to France to celebrate the golden anniversary of its historic victory. Following Miller's untimely death in 2004, his dream of returning the No. 3 Cunningham Corvette to Le Mans lived on through his son Lance and the Miller family."
"The Virginia earthquake of 2011 August 23 occurred as reverse faulting on a north or northeast-striking plane within a previously recognized seismic zone, the "Central Virginia Seismic Zone." The Central Virginia Seismic Zone has produced small and moderate earthquakes since at least the 18th century. The previous largest historical shock from the Central Virginia Seismic Zone occurred in 1875. The 1875 shock occurred before the invention of effective seismographs, but the felt area of the shock suggests that it had a magnitude of about 4.8. The 1875 earthquake shook bricks from chimneys, broke plaster and windows, and overturned furniture at several locations. A magnitude 4.5 earthquake on 2003, December 9, also produced minor damage.
Previous seismicity in the Central Virginia Seismic Zone has not been causally associated with mapped geologic faults. Previous, smaller, instrumentally recorded earthquakes from the Central Virginia Seismic Zone have had shallow focal depths (average depth about 8 km). They have had diverse focal mechanisms and have occurred over an area with length and width of about 120 km, rather than being aligned in a pattern that might suggest that they occurred on a single causative fault. Individual earthquakes within the Central Virginia Seismic Zone occur as the result of slip on faults that are much smaller than the overall dimensions of the zone. The dimensions of the individual fault that produced the 2011 August 23 earthquake will not be known until longer-term studies are done, but other earthquakes of similar magnitude typically involve slippage along fault segments that are 5 - 15 km long.
Earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S., although less frequent than in the western U.S., are typically felt over a much broader region. East of the Rockies, an earthquake can be felt over an area as much as ten times larger than a similar magnitude earthquake on the west coast. A magnitude 4.0 eastern U.S. earthquake typically can be felt at many places as far as 100 km (60 mi) from where it occurred, and it infrequently causes damage near its source. A magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually can be felt as far as 500 km (300 mi) from where it occurred, and sometimes causes damage as far away as 40 km (25 mi)."
What do The Beatles, the city of Florence, Italy, and the MTConnect: Connecting Manufacturing Conference [MC]2 all have in common? Are we moving [MC]2 from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Florence, Italy, and having Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as the entertainment for the opening reception? That would be nice, but highly unlikely. So, what is the common thread? Let me explain. |
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This is a new feature story that Paul Warndorf, VP of Technology for AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology, has asked me to write each month. I thought it was a great suggestion and I hope to get feedback from you on what is interesting and topics you would like me to address. This will not be strictly about MTConnect, even though I hope to have a thread to our open and royalty-free protocol. I chose the name “The President’s Window” because it is concise, and I hope it conveys the open theme of these monthly articles. Since this is thefirst article, I thought I would start off with one of my favorite themes. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was my account for 6 years starting in the mid 1980s when I was a Systems Engineer at Sun Microsystems. I loved having NIST as an account because the institute was always doing something very interesting and pushing the limits on what Sun could provide in terms of computing power. On one of my first visits to NIST, I was brought into a conference room and saw the following engraved in the floor: “I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.” Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thomson) That phrase is built into the DNA of computer science and science in general. To provide a simple example of this, when you walk into a data center that houses thousands of computers in countless racks, you will find that every single one of those computers is monitored extremely closely. But according to industry and academic experts,only 4 to 5 percent of machine tools are monitored today. This percentage is mind-boggling to me. How can any plant possibly make intelligent decisions if they cannot quantify what a machine tool is doing? Let’s look at some of the laws in the computer industry and see if there are similarities in manufacturing. Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, made a statement that has now become known as “Metcalfe’s Law.” Metcalfe’s Law basically states that the value of any network is the number of users or devices connected to the network squared. If we apply Metcalfe’s Law to manufacturing, we would modify it slightly to state: The value of any manufacturing shop floor’s network is the number of pieces of manufacturing equipment that can speak MTConnect squared. Why MTConnect squared and not just the number of pieces of manufacturing equipment squared? Because it is MTConnect that makes these pieces of equipment able to all speak the language of the Internet, which is XML. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld liked to say, “there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.” Stated another way, “you don’t know what you don’t know.” The real purpose of MTConnect is to quantify the known unknowns and provide the framework to discover the unknown unknowns. You can’t manage what you don’t know. And unless you are quantifying what you don’t know, then you are shooting from the hip, which is never a good idea. In order to quantify how well a manufacturing plant or job shop is doing, you first must easily get the data and put it in a standard quantified form. That is exactly what MTConnect does. Getting the data in an open and royalty-free way is what will allow you to first monitor what you are doing and then to share the information with all your applications and all your partners. While the most obvious use of getting common information out of a piece of equipment is monitoring, that is just the tip of the iceberg. The real win with MTConnect is when quantified information is available anytime, anywhere to any application, to any partner and on any device, it drives up productivity. I imagine Lord Kelvin would change MTConnect’s mantra to: “MTConnect – to measure is to know.” MTConnect: Different Devices, Common Connection MTConnect: To Measure Is To Know |
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"This is not to be confused with supply-side economics, the dubious Reagan-era doctrine that tax cuts would generate enough economic growth and revenue to reduce the deficit. Republicans still believe in lower taxes but generally don’t claim they pay for themselves. The new GOP views actually have a much longer pedigree: They are rooted in an intellectual contest that raged during the 1930s and 1940s, and had long been settled by the opposing side."
"A shift toward fiscal and monetary austerity in the United States in 1937 helped prolong the depression. Fiscal tightening helped push Japan back into recession in 1997. "
By Dave Edstrom| David Edstrom phone: 703-827-5211 |
"In the past week, with the entry of Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the race, Huntsman’s candidacy has become something of an afterthought, yet he gained some buzz this week over Twitter by taking Perry to task for doubting the science of evolution and global warming.Huntsman also made the statement below:
On Twitter, Huntsman declared: “To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”
"When we take a position that isn't willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science has said about what is causing climate change and man's contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position," Huntsman told ABC's "This Week."Huntsman said he couldn't remember a time when "we actually were willing to shun science and become a party that was antithetical to science. I'm not sure that's good for our future and it's not a winning formula," according to interview excerpts released Saturday ABC. The full interview is set to air Sunday.
"MANCHESTER, N.H. — In the first town hall of his freshly announced presidential campaign, Mitt Romney yesterday reaffirmed his view that global warming is occurring and that humans are contributing to it, a position that has been rejected in recent years by many Republicans as the issue has taken on a greater partisan tinge."
Please go read the entire article, it's well worth the time!
An early proponent and supporter of MTConnect, Mr. Neidig has been active as a member of the MTConnect Technical Advisory Group. He’s also taken the standard a step forward by creating several applications for networkable handheld devices, such as the iPhone and Android. “These apps can be used to dial up the network address of a machine tool’s CNC and access data available through the MTConnect adapter,” he explains. For example, one app enables him to scroll to various screens—such as the one from his iPhone shown here—to view machine status and performance data.
2.0 Background. Information and electronic technologies are being increasingly used to enhance transportation safety and efficiency - resulting in increasingly complex, cyber-physical systems, and new failure modes and mechanisms that are not well understood with respect to safety hazards and security vulnerabilities.
The USDOT is collecting relevant information to characterize needs and establish a strategic research roadmap to meet the rising challenges of ensuring the safety of automotive safety-critical systems due to increasing complexity of motor vehicle systems using advanced electronic controls to improve drivability, safety, efficiency, and operational reliability; escalating use of information technology in motor vehicles to enhance basic and secondary vehicle functions and to enable infotainment applications; and wireless connectivity to in-vehicle systems, between vehicles and external information networks, and among vehicles.
This looks like a very interesting and extremely important RFI. Here is an interesting article by ABC News on:Essential information and insights are sought as input to strategic decisions about next research steps and justifying initiatives relative to research possibilities as well as revised approaches to regulation, enforcement, incident/forensics, vehicle testing, communications/outreach/professional capacity building, or recommended electronic hardware/software systems architecture and engineering design safeguard principles and/or practices, including human factors and training considerations.
"Vehicle manufacturers and third-party systems are increasingly using wireless networks as a cheaper means for connecting to Electronic Control Units (ECUs) – the computer brains behind braking, engine, and locking mechanisms along with other systems. A typical luxury sedan today may use more than 100 megabytes of computer code spread across 50 to 70 ECUs, researchers say."
CANNON FALLS, Minn. – President Barack Obama will visit a Cannon Falls park Monday for what the White House calls a town hall meeting.
The White House Thursday night confirmed the event, which will begin at 11:45 a.m. Free tickets are available to the public beginning at 1 p.m. Sunday at Cannon Falls City Hall, 918 River Road.
Tickets will be limited to two per person and will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.
The exact format of the Obama event was not announced, but it is part of a three-state bus tour during which he plans to discuss the economy.
It will be at Lower Hannah's Bend Park.
"On Monday afternoon, after his first town hall of the day and lunch with veterans in Cannon Falls, MN, President Obama stopped his huge, black armored tour bus in the storybook town of Zumbrota, which has just a little more than 3,000 residents. Pie was required for the 114-mile drive to the day's second town hall, across state lines in Decorah, Iowa. The President, accompanied by bodyman Reggie Love, disembarked at the Coffee Mill Restaurant, a cafe in the tiny downtown, and ordered five different kinds of pie. The Eater in Chief is a pie fanatic: Pies are served at every White House holiday, and three kinds were on offer at his 50th birthday shindig, too."
