I read an interview this morning with Carlos Ghosn, head of Renault and Nissan, with his perspectives on the car industry and the economy in general. The words seem pretty wise, almost encouraging. Here’s something that resonated with me:

What must a carmaker do to survive and prosper? First, you need to [weather] the next two years. That’s a basic condition. To get through them, you need to make sure that you have a positive free cash flow. Or to put it another way, avoid burning cash. That’s very fundamental. [You must be able to] still generate cash, even with a market as treacherous as the one we’ll be facing. There is an end to any crisis, and this one is no exception. There will be an end. And you want to be ready. You want to have innovative products, strong fundamentals, a team that believes in the brand and believes the company will be ready to fight again.

Interesting article written about B&R Industrial Automation hardware being used at the mechanical engineering department at CSU Chico. Friend of the company Nick Repanich heads up the efforts there, teaching students the real skills they can use right out of college in automation applications.

Each semester students build different machines with automated solutions. In each project they use the B&R Power Panel (PP35), designed as a controller and operator panel, as the main controller. Peripheral devices can be connected via standard integrated B&R CAN interface. Students control pneumatic actuators, read sensors, control stepper motors, and in one project read analog voltage of a battery to determine its condition. “We are now able to teach critical technologies that all engineers should know,” said Repanich.

I was interested in understanding a bit about why Paul Krugman won the Nobel prize for his work in trade, and although some of the stuff, as he says, seems obvious now, it was not so obvious in the past. Consider, for example, why companies in certain industries tend to cluster around each other, and why those places are where they are:

“The same sort of logic explains why particular industries concentrate in certain locations, except that in such cases the logic involves things like a deep labor market for specialized skills and a good market for suppliers of specialized inputs. What determines which industry locates where? Often, accident: Silicon Valley owes its existence in large part to a couple of guys named Hewlett and Packard, who started some stuff in their garage, New York is New York because of a canal that only pleasure boaters use today.”

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I hate to link right back to the same site twice in a row, but in this case it’s too good to pass up.

We’ve all heard about (or personally experienced) those times when some maintenance issue or software bug causes someone to hop on a flight across the country at a moments notice to take care of a problem.

Now imagine that the problem machine is in outer space. What are you gonna do about it?

The Big Picture tells the story through some amazing images of the process.

As a group of automation engineers we have a unique appreciation for beautiful wiring on large machinery. So this photo essay on the building of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland was pretty inspiring.

We’ll be at the B&R booth all three days at Semicon.

Directions to B&R’s Booth:

Get to the North Hall of Moscone Center on Howard St, between Third and Fourth St.. Here’s what it will look like:

Google Street View of Moscone, North Hall

Then go down the long escalators, take a left, and wrap around the corner in the main open room:

We’ll see you there!

-David

I just came across a very interesting essay on priorities at Lifehacker:

Prioritization is always more emotional than intellectual, despite what people say. Just like dieting to lose weight or budgeting to save money, eliminating things you want, but don’t need, requires being disciplined, committed, and focused. Saying “exercise is important” is one thing, but ranking it against other important things is entirely different. Many people chicken out of this process. They hedge, delay and deny the tough choices, and the result is that they set up projects to fail. No tough choices means no progress. In the abstract, the word important means nothing.

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