Clipped to the Drawing Board by jackson Browne
Northrop and Johnson Sales Division is pleased to announce three new listings for sale; the 131ft Oceanfast Opal C, the 115ft Crescent Kapalua and the 98ft MCP Yacht Obrigado.
|
|
Thursday 8 January, 2009 01:51 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
|
The National Aeronautics and Space Agency is posting a variety of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educational videos freely available for use in the classroom or home environment. Called “NASA eClips,” the program provides short videos for different age groups on both YouTube and the NASA educational website. Some of these videos are directly created by NASA and others are provided by partners or organizations that donate their video for posting.
|
|
Wednesday 7 January, 2009 03:47 PM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Bob Smith
“Our country desperately needs innovative entrepreneurs and efficient managers in order to survive in this increasingly competitive global environment.” —Baumann
Recalling NASA designed the Atlas rocket, the workhorse of the early space program, in only three years using slide rules, Dr. Hans Baumann wonders if computers are overused today, especially during the education of engineers. It might be the case, he believes, that too much reliance on the narrow, deterministic environment of pre-packaged software solutions inhibits the free-ranging perspective that sustains creativity. “You do not invent using software.”
His appraisal of American standing as an engine of technological development is similarly no-nonsense: “The United States is sliding backwards, losing market share and technical leadership.”
“We will be challenged pretty soon,” he said, “because of the public debt and the demise of our industrial base. It will produce a crisis in this country.”
That contemporary thinking and a professional career where he personally designed or directed the development of over 30 valve lines are some of the reasons Baumann earned ISA’s Honorary Member award, the society’s highest honor. The award recognizes “contributions in the advancement of the arts and sciences of automation throughout a five-decade career of invention, design, writing, consulting and business leadership.”
|
|
Wednesday 7 January, 2009 11:46 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Dwellings in colonies on the moon one day may be built with new, highly durable bricks developed by students from the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech.
Initially designed to construct a dome, the building material is composed of a lunar rock-like material mixed with powdered aluminum that can be molded into any shape. The invention recently won the In-Situ Lunar Resource Utilization materials and construction category award from the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES). The award was one of two prizes given out this year by the research center, which is dedicated to supporting life on the moon and beyond.
Design work on the early-development lunar bricks was based on previous work by the College of Engineering student team’s adviser Kathryn Logan, a professor of materials science and engineering and the Virginia Tech Langley Professor at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) in Hampton, Va. The seven-member student team works with Logan at the NIA.
|
|
Tuesday 6 January, 2009 02:47 PM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Dillon Smatcher
FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) launched its
eighteenth FIRST Robotics Competition season today with a Kickoff of a new
robotics game called "Lunacy" at Southern New Hampshire University in
Manchester, NH, hometown and headquarters of FIRST.
"Forty years ago, NASA fueled a generation`s imagination with the success of
Apollo 11. As we celebrate that remarkable feat of technology and engineering
with our 2009 game, "Lunacy," we are sparking more of that kind of inspiration
through the FIRST Robotics Competition," said FIRST founder, Dean Kamen. "Just
as NASA scientists landed a man on the moon and returned him safely to earth in
1969, so too will these young people go on to explore new frontiers and develop
breakthrough technologies that will change the world."
|
|
Sunday 4 January, 2009 11:18 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Speed is like an aphrodisiac to some people, and I imagine those who experience this will lust after this production powercraft creation from UK-based XSMG Marine, the fabulous XSR 48 .
Believe it or not, this incredible craft is theoretically capable of the ‘magic ton’, 100mph (160km/hr) depending on engines chosen and set up.
Even in its standard form, if any aspect of such a craft can be termed standard, the XSR 48 can achieve 75 knots (about 85.5mph or 137.5km/hr).
So what makes this amazing boat quicker than you average speed boat, quicker even than a Ferrari Daytona ‘supercar’?
|
|
Thursday 18 December, 2008 10:16 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
What happened to the Personal Robot - a domestic servant who would never tire of being told what to do? When writer Danny Wallace set off to find out the fate of this long overdue dream, the BBC's Peter Leonard joined him.
Human beings are just brilliant. We can dive to the sea bed in submarines, fly to the moon in rocket ships, design uber-powerful computers and so on and so forth.
But so far we've failed to deliver one of the most tantalising promises of the modern age. Personal domestic robots have remained irritatingly elusive.
|
|
Thursday 18 December, 2008 12:37 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Susan Decker
The University of Arizona has spent nearly $13 million designing a new science center for Rio Nuevo — including notable expenses for travel, meals and architectural designs that have been discarded, according to an investigation by the Arizona Daily Star.
Pitched to voters in 1999 as a $30 million item, science-center costs ballooned to $350 million with the proposed addition of a Rainbow Bridge across Interstate 10 before settling back down to about $130 million in a joint development with the Arizona State Museum.
|
|
Monday 8 December, 2008 10:15 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Susan Decker
I have just returned from a trip to Denmark with a stopover in Norway.
But on reflection on my return, I realise that you don’t have to be an ‘airport economist’ to see the influence that Denmark has on Australia. In fact, I can see it all a few metres from my office in Sydney.
Firstly, when I look out my office window in Sydney, I can see the Sydney Opera House, designed by the famous Danish architect Jorn Utzon.
We all know what an important icon it is for Australia and how much it has done for Sydney and Australia. The Sydney Opera House is truly a global architectural icon.
Secondly, when I walk just a few metres north of my office I can head up to Observatory Hill, and see a bust of the famous Danish children’s storyteller Hans Christian Anderson.
Observatory Hill was originally a fort and was set up to watch for a possible Russian invasion in the early part of the twentieth century, but the Russians never came and we now have Hans planted on this prime piece of real estate instead.
|
|
Tuesday 2 December, 2008 07:47 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Aworld-record attempt is being used to encourage more young people in Wales to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) subjects.
Swansea University is involved in a bid to build a British supercar which can travel at 1,000mph. The current land-speed record is 763mph.
The Bloodhound supersonic car will travel at five times the speed of a Formula One car.
It will be powered by a Eurojet fighter plane engine and will weigh 6.4 tonnes. It will be driven by Wing Commander Andy Green, who set the current record in 1997.
|
|
Thursday 13 November, 2008 02:01 PM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Blue Peter was / is a UK kids TV programme, where they could make anything out of double sides sticky tape and old coathangers and empty kitchen roll tubes.
"Blue Peter engineering" is the belief system that 100% of the population who are not engineers have about engineering, and it pisses engineers off just as much as telling your Bank Manager your overdraft is no problem, you will simply give him a cheque.
In my life as a freelance development engineer I encounter basically two types of "customer", the first type has actually paid me to do some actual work at some point in the past, and the second type has not paid me, just enquired about something.
The first type, that has paid me once, would, you'd think, have a clue. You'd think that having been through the process once, when they come back to you a second or third or fourth time, that they would come back with an idea that might actually work.
|
|
Saturday 8 November, 2008 08:40 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
A combination of innovation, economic and environmental benefits as well as commercial success led to the Shell Global Solutions OMEGA (Only MEG Advantage) Technology team winning the prestigious SELLAFIELD LTD AWARD FOR ENGINEERING EXCELLENCE at the IChemE awards ceremony in Birmingham, UK, last night.
The annual IChemE Awards recognise and promote organisations that have made an outstanding contribution to innovation and excellence in the fields of safety, the environment or sustainable development in process industries.
|
|
Saturday 1 November, 2008 08:32 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
|
On a recent Monday morning, the eighth graders in Chris Malanga's technology class at Riverhead (N.Y.) Middle School were hard at work constructing Web pages . Scattered across computer screens in this classroom about 75 miles east of Manhattan were Web pages reflecting students' distinct personalities and interests. One blared rap music. Others boasted purple text over garish background images. These were no mere MySpace (NWS) profile pages, constructed with a few clicks of the mouse from a menu. These students built their pages from scratch, writing pure HTML in a text file. "They like that it's something they learned in school that they can take home and use to jazz up their MySpace [pages]," Malanga says.
|
|
Wednesday 29 October, 2008 06:30 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
The secrets in the title of Brad Matsen's new book are those of greed and deceit — "Titanic's Last Secrets" concludes that owners and builders of the ocean liner Titanic made decisions that saved them huge amounts of money and sacrificed more than 1,500 lives.
"Titanic's Last Secrets: the Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler" (Twelve, 322 pp., $27.99) is a tribute to the passion and obsession of those Matsen calls "Titaniacs," who devote their lives to increasing the world's sum of knowledge about the sinking of the world's greatest luxury ship.
|
|
Saturday 11 October, 2008 06:07 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by jackson Browne
Sir James Dyson strides into the room with his trademark vacuum cleaner under his arm, but it’s the gadgets in his pockets that he really wants to talk about.
“I thought I would get stopped at reception, but I got through,” smiles the 61-year-old inventor, extracting two white cylindrical objects with wires sticking out at one end.
He plops the devices on the table enthusiastically. To my untrained eye, they don’t look very interesting; the sort of thing you might see in a drawer at an electrical shop, but seems terribly excited. “We’ve been doing a lot of work on electric motor development,” he announces. “We’re going for higher speeds.”
|
|
Sunday 5 October, 2008 08:22 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Faced with an aging workforce and a growing demand for skilled workers in emerging markets like China and India, companies in the West are grappling with a talent crunch of unprecedented scope. According to experts at Wharton and The Boston Consulting Group, firms are increasingly questioning their workforce requirements and quality, training and development, and wage levels. Responses include over-hiring to meet future needs, upgrading training in concert with universities and in-house corporate schools, and extracting greater productivity through innovation.
Jim Hemerling, senior partner and managing director at BCG in San Francisco, says two factors are combining to exacerbate the so-called "war" for talent: the "significant aging of the workforce in North America, Europe and Japan [which is] shrinking the supply of experienced people in developed markets," and the rise of "rapidly developing economies, or RDEs, driving up demand."
Western companies are trying to retain people with 20 or 30 years of experience and who are heading into retirement age, even though they are expensive and have limited growth prospects, Hemerling says. At the same time, they want to hire people by the "tens of thousands" in the RDEs to both exploit the market opportunities and to leverage lower-cost talent by shifting some of their workforce requirements to those countries, he adds.
|
|
Tuesday 30 September, 2008 09:03 PM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Ask any five business professionals what their requirements are for a good laptop and you could get five different answers. While some business professionals would choose storage and memory and connectivity as the most important features of a good business notebook, others would say that battery life, weight and even durability are equally important.
A Dell survey of nearly 4,000 IT professionals and end users showed that productivity is the number one concern of IT people using notebooks followed by design. Third on the list is "peace of mind", which means total protection for the users and IT managers. Lastly is total control of ownership, which means control of the notebook even from a remote location.
In a press conference Thursday at the Makati Shangri-La, Dell Philippine country manager Barry Bunyi said it is launching a new line of Dell Latitude laptops in the Philippines, which provides breakthroughs on extended battery life, portability and design.
|
|
Friday 26 September, 2008 12:07 PM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
London had its elephant, and now Liverpool has its very own spider. At 7.36pm, a giant yellow leg appeared from behind a building at the end of Salthouse Dock and a crowd who had been growing increasingly restive after standing for 90 minutes in the pouring rain screamed and shouted.
Several children tried to hide, but one enquired if he might be able to take the spider home. "I wouldn't want that in my house," declared his mum.
"You wouldn't get it in our house," said her husband.
"It's like something out of Doctor Who," said another, as first more legs and then, slowly, a vast body emerged and a 50ft high spider started walking down the road, waving its great legs over the heads of the crowd.
There were more squeals: some of apprehension, others of sheer joy. The spider, named La Princesse, is the brainchild of François Delarozière and his company La Machine, who over the past 15 years have engineered a host of mechanical animals including the glorious Sultan's Elephant that made London smile in 2006.
|
|
Thursday 25 September, 2008 01:11 PM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by jackson Browne
Walking the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earlier this week, I had one of those rare experiences that rewards your faith in human potential. I had the good fortune to attend the first International Development Design Summit (IDDS), a brainchild of MIT professor and MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" winner Amy Smith. It was a moving experience.
I initially met Smith at the 2006 TED Conference. She blew the audience away with an extraordinary presentation on an appropriate technology. She spoke of the repurposing of discarded, carbonized bio-materials like used corn cobs
into simple yet effective briquettes. It might sounds trivial, but a room packed with extremely seasoned entrepreneurs and experienced investors gave Smith a standing ovation after her presentation. The scorched cobs were undeniably primitive, yet their elegant simplicity and revolutionary potential was obvious to all.
|
|
Thursday 25 September, 2008 04:30 AM |
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Nick Leon has found that design can do much more for your business than a bit of window dressing – the right design approach can go straight to the bottom line.
Nick Leon heads up Design London , which has a very innovative program set up to help businesses incorporate design throughout their processes, and not at the end as an afterthought.
He explains the many business benefits from this approach, and says that a new job description – a design associate – has emerged because of this innovation.
Nick explains why in an increasingly competitive and commoditised world, design is so important and how business owners need to shift their thinking to take a creative perspective.
|
|
Wednesday 24 September, 2008 11:59 PM |
|
Save This Page
