A new world power, and power in the new world
October 22, 2007

1. The real Asian powerhouse?: This article from Fortune Magazine verifies what I’ve been suggesting for a long time: The biggest threat in a global economy is not China. It’s India. They have all the labor advantages and economies of scale, a strengthening educational system and none of the political and social stigma.

2. The BCS of auto sales: If you’ve been watching college football this year, you know rankings haven’t mattered much. So while it was big news when Toyota passed General Motors for the lead in global sales for the first time last quarter, it’s also only one criteria by which to rank the automakers. And even when GM moved back ahead this quarter, it was by a margin of 7.06 million vehicles sold in 2007 to 7.05 million for Toyota. The other thing college football rankings have shown us is that no one gets declared a winner until the season’s over. And at 7 million vehicles apiece, let’s call them both formidable and leave it at that.

3. Safety as a starting point: I would have been mildly amused by the cover of an MRO publication in our field last month with a red lipstick cover had the subject they were treating so casually had been anything but safety. When you put a kiss on your cover to illustrate giving safety ‘lip service,’ you trivialize the subject. Safety in manufacturing deserves better than that. In the real coverage of safety in October’s Plant Engineering, you find out how a manufacturer used safety to drive gains in productivity and preserve a plant that has been in operation for decades. Safety is not about trivia, and it’s not about compromise.

4. No more tilting at windmills: A joint project between ABB and the Jiangsu Longyuang Wind Power Co. in China has provided generators and other power equipment to help connect a wind farm in Rudong with the electrical transmission network. The clean electrical energy is in contrast to China’s waste emissions from its coal-fired power stations. Strong winds in the region help keep the windmills turning, and the wind farm now creates 230,000 MWh to the region. That cuts CO2 emissions by about 200,000 tons. The question becomes that as we look at persistent issues of global pollution, doesn’t generating wind power make more sense – not as a single solution, but as a part of a larger solution?

5. Middle schoolers get the right idea: A Maine publisher has teamed up with Boston’s Museum of Science to develop an engineering-based curriculum to give middle school students the skills they need to solve real-life challenges. The Building Math series from Walch Publishing was created with support from the GE Foundation’s Math Excellence Program. The students solved math and engineering problems to help them scale Mt. Everest, survive on a South Pacific island and help residents of the Amazon overcome an outbreak of malaria. “The key to educating students for today’s competitive global economy is to engage them in applying both math and science knowledge to solve real problems. Introducing them to engineering design skills and concepts at a young age can help fuel the innovation of new technologies,” said Museum of Science president and director Ioannis Miaoulis. “That’s why we are developing standards-based engineering curricula reflecting the human-made world.”

Posted by Wolseley on October 22, 2007 | Comments (0)