Free Republic

A large explosion occurred at the BP Refinery in Texas City. Only a few miles from Jarbo Bayou. (Kemah, Clear Lake Shores and League City). BP Refinery produces 3% of all the nations Gasoline. The price of fuel soared over night due to the blast in the plant that was in turn around mode. All 14 deaths were those contract workers from J. E. Marrett Engineering Co. of Los Angeles, CA who were working the turnaround. UTMB in Galveston is requesting blood donors. Those who are eligible to donate blood, can do so between 8:30am - 4:30pm Monday - Friday...

Years ago when I had a full head of hair, I worked for the New Jersey Institute of Technology and gained a great respect for engineers and architects. Without them, nothing gets built, nothing works, and we would all be back rubbing two sticks together to make a fire. In early March, my local daily newspaper ran a story that was four paragraphs long and buried at the bottom of the page. Engineers see U.S. Infrastructure Sinking. It was one of those stories deemed newsworthy enough to include since it cited a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers,...

BANGALORE, India — Memory interface licensing company Rambus Inc. opened a design center here Thurdsday (Mar. 17), aimed at expanding its design operations and better serving its customers in Asia, who account for half the company's sales. With 10 engineers now, the center is to be scaled up to 50 by the year-end, the company said. This center would start with a focus on developing cells and cores based on the company's technologies in the areas of PCI Express and DDR2 memory controller designs before taking on work in Fiber Channel and Serial accoridng to Samir Patel, vice president of...

At a news conference in Washington, D.C., today, U.S. semiconductor industry CEOs and an economist stressed the importance of continued progress and leadership in semiconductor technology since the coming transition to nano-scale semiconductor devices means leadership in IT is up for grabs. Advertisement Organized by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), the conference included Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel Corp.; Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron Technology and current chairman of the SIA; Dale Jorgenson, a Samuel W. Morris University professor at Harvard University; and George Scalise, president of the SIA. Following the vision of Moore's Law, the U.S. semiconductor industry has...

The Future of Biology: Reverse Engineering    03/14/2005 Just as an engineer can model the feedback controls required in an autopilot system for an aircraft, the biologist can construct models of cellular networks to try to understand how they work.  “The hallmark of a good feedback control design is a resulting closed loop system that is stable and robust to modeling errors and parameter variation in the plant”, [i.e., the system], “and achieves a desired output value quickly without unduly large actuation signals at the plant input,” explain Claire J. Tomlin and Jeffrey D. Axelrod of Stanford in a...

India's software and chip design expertise and Taiwan's manufacturing prowess are a natural fit that should allow the combination to lead the world in digital ICs for consumer electronics according to a NetIndia123 report, quoting executives speaking in Bangalore, India. A Taiwan-based consortium which includes three leading silicon foundries and a number of academic research departments wants to form links with Indian embedded software and chip design firms to develop system chips (SoC) for next-generation digital products, the report said. Formed in January 2000 the Taiwan SoC consortium, originally known as the Silicon IP Consortium, was formed by the Industrial...

Zou Shichang, chairman of Grace Semiconductor Mfg Corp., boldly predicted in an interview here that China will become the epicenter of global IC manufacturing by 2010. With a greater emphasis on manufacturing, IC demand in China surged in 2002 to more than $24 billion. Zou said that could be only the tip of the iceberg since China currently supplies only 17.5 percent of its total domestic market demand. That underscores the huge potential growth in China's chip demand. China currently accounts for nearly 10 percent of the world's semiconductor said Zou. "In terms of market, opportunities as well as applications,...

First Technology Safety Systems These long-suffering human surrogates are lineal descendants of crash-test dummies Samuel W. Alderson began manufacturing in the early 1950's. Samuel W. Alderson, a physicist and engineer who was a pioneer in developing the long-suffering, curiously beautiful human surrogates known as automotive crash-test dummies, died Feb. 11 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 90. The cause was complications of myelofibrosis and pneumonia, his grandson Matthew Alderson said. The dummy that is the current industry standard for frontal crash testing in the United States is a lineal descendant of one Mr. Alderson began manufacturing for...

NAVAL STATION EVERETT, Wash. (NNS) -- The Navy unveiled its future as it officially christened its revolutionary new Littoral Surface Craft - Experimental, commonly referred to as "X-Craft," Feb. 5. Developed by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), this high-speed, aluminum catamaran is designed to test a variety of technologies that could allow the Navy to operate more effectively in littoral, or shallow, waters. Officially, the ship's been named Sea Fighter and has been assigned hull number FSF 1, which stands for fast sea frame. X-Craft marks the first time a catamaran was designed and built specifically for the Navy....

Harvard President Lawrence Summers said Wednesday in a statement on the school's Web site that he regretted not considering more carefully his remarks last week suggesting innate differences between the sexes could account for why fewer women succeed in science and math careers. "Despite reports to the contrary, I did not say, nor do I believe, that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science," Summers said on the Web site. However, he wrote, "I was wrong to have spoken in a way that was an unintended...

The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, who offended some women at an academic conference last week by suggesting that innate differences in sex may explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers, stood by his comments yesterday but said he regretted if they were misunderstood. "I'm sorry for any misunderstanding but believe that raising questions, discussing multiple factors that may explain a difficult problem, and seeking to understand how they interrelate is vitally important," Dr. Summers said in an interview. Several women who participated in the conference said yesterday that they had been surprised or outraged...

The publisher of CIO Magazine, Gary Beach, writes an ominously titled article, "The Education Crisis", in the December 15, 2004 issue. I suppose it's the fad nowadays to bemoan America's fall from its position as world technology leader. This collective sense of doom oftentimes produces incoherent arguments from otherwise smart people. This is one of those times. Beach is particularly concerned about the decline in US engineering graduates. To support his concern, he engages in some fuzzy math. He claims that: So in the 16 years from 1985 to 2001, there was a 40 percent drop in the number of...

It's fair to say none of us would be here if it wasn't for an engineer. John Logie Baird. A bit of a crackpot. But if it weren't for him - and several other inventive engineers - there would be no television.Without TV, the BBC might not exist. In which case, I wouldn't have joined millions of viewers watching the Queen's Coronation in June 1953. Stuck in remote north Norfolk, it was the first time I'd seen a television. The experience was made all the richer by Richard Dimbleby's commentary. Over the next few years, he became a regular fixture...

Warning: The Hydrogen Economy May Be More Distant Than It Appears Michael Behar In presidential campaign of 2004, Bush and Kerry managed to find one piece of common ground: Both spoke glowingly of a future powered by fuel cells. Hydrogen would free us from our dependence on fossil fuels and would dramatically curb emissions of air pollutants, including carbon dioxide, the gas chiefly blamed for global warming. The entire worldwide energy market would evolve into a “hydrogen economy” based on clean, abundant power. Auto manufacturers and environmentalists alike happily rode the bandwagon, pointing to hydrogen as the next big thing...

Investors seem to be betting that Congress will fix the asbestos mess this coming year.... We suspect they're too optimistic, and for now we take more heart from last week's landmark decision by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to reject the $1.2 billion Combustion Engineering settlement. ...[O}ur view is that the judiciary is finally exercising some adult supervision over a mess of its own making. Combustion Engineering, a unit of European construction giant ABB, had become a model of how trial lawyers abuse "prepackaged" bankruptcies to rake in millions for their unimpaired clients, while leaving real cancer victims with...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Presidential elections for dummies -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Another presidential election will soon be upon us. Unfortunately, both parties are making nothing but silly appeals to emotion in their campaigns. The best political brains in our nation evidently feel that talking to people on an idiot level is what it takes to get a candidate elected. One of the issues is offshoring and the deterioration of our manufacturing sector. I haven't heard a Republican who has anything incisive to say about the matter. The Democrats, on the other hand, criticize offshoring, but they cast the problem largely in irrelevant terms. An example is...

Structural steel of the twin 110-story towers of the World Trade Center was stripped of its fireproofing by debris from the aircraft impact and weakened by the resulting fires, eventually causing the towers to collapse, according to an interim report by the National Institute of Standards & Technology. The report says the region of dislodged fireproofing was determined from the predicted path of the debris. “Had the fireproofing not been dislodged, the temperature rise of the structural components would likely have been insufficient to cause the global collapse of the towers,” says NIST in the Oct. 19 release of another...

What is the issue the Palm Beach Post calls "almost the only topic" and the one that is "playing a pivotal" role in Florida's battle for the American Senate? It's not health care, taxes, education, the economy, or even Iraq. Rather, the two principal candidates are engaged in a ferocious argument over Sami Al-Arian, an accused Islamist terrorist. Their battle teaches lessons for the future.Mr. Al-Arian, a Palestinian immigrant, was a professor of engineering at the University of South Florida when in 1994, investigative journalist Steven Emerson aired a documentary establishing that, as president of the Islamic Committee for Palestine,...