Saturday, August 16, 2008

Recommended Book of the month I'm spending two extra days in Las Vegas. My aunt and a cousin (whom I haven't seen in years) live out here. My cousin has a brother who lives 15 miles from me in Ohio, but I haven't seen him in a couple of years. So, I fly all the way out here to see him and his wife, too. That's why my wife is on this trip. She discovered that when I'm on a business trip I work. Not that much fun (shhh, don't tell her about NI Week). Sat by the wave pool at the Mandalay this morning reading "New Directions in Bioprocess Modeling and Control" by Michael Boudreau and Greg McMillan (ISA press). OK, so most people read trashy magazines and novels--but once a geek... I'll never be a process engineer, but I have a curiosity to dive deeper into the subjects. This book reminded me of many of the basics I've learned over the past 20 years in process control and even some of the concepts I learned designing electronic tuning circuits when I was a kid. Then the authors led me into a view of a bioprocess plant. It is well written and informative. If you are looking into advanced modeling and control for batch processes, this book is a must. 4:40:00 PM    comment []

Technical Education I've often thought that wherever 10 people are gathered and the topic turns to education there will be 20 opinions--not much in the way of facts, but lots of opinions. Although Green Engineering was a topic at NI Week, education was even bigger. From the public introduction of WeDo (the Lego/NI robot development kit for grade schoolers) to several special press events discussing education--especially the science/engineering part, we were immersed in the topic for the last two days of the conference. The public demonstration of WeDo was most impressive because of the person demonstrating how to program a robot using LabView--11 year old Sarah Almgren. If you are not helping the profession--and our society--by introducing science and engineering to kids of all ages, then consider this a challenge to get off your duff and do it. The impressive thing about National Instruments isn't that it donates equipment to colleges. This is a time-honored tradition probably begun by Apple--who gave Apple IIs years ago partly in the hope that kids would be used to Apples and go buy them when they graduated. NI seems to genuinely work with schools or find ways to promote people to work--not just provide stuff, but encourage leadership and partnership with schools and kids. So, take a WeDo to your local elementary school and voluteer to help them learn to build and program. Or take a Mindstorms to older kids. Or voluteer to help out at FIRST robotics. A question came to mind after a couple of Twitter "Tweets" with @perspective21 of Emerson Process Management. Much of this is robotics even though it teaches many engineering and programming concepts. But is there something similar, or could we do something similar, for process control? Let me know. 4:31:40 PM    comment []