By The Numbers – 2009-04-01

4 points from U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics about machinery manufacturing: 1) High productivity growth is expected to cause employment to decline, but many openings will result from the need to replace workers who retire. 2) Production workers, who account for over half of all jobs in the industry, increasingly need training beyond high school.

By Staff April 1, 2009

4 points from U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics about machinery manufacturing: 1) High productivity growth is expected to cause employment to decline, but many openings will result from the need to replace workers who retire. 2) Production workers, who account for over half of all jobs in the industry, increasingly need training beyond high school. 3) Machinery manufacturing has some of the most highly skilled—and highly paid—production jobs in manufacturing. 4) Job prospects should be good for high school graduates with strong communication, basic math, and problem solving skills who can be trained for highly skilled production jobs. www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs052.htm

500 million unit mark in shipments of Cypress Semiconductor Corp. PSoC programmable system-on-chip. Commercial-scale PSoC shipments began in 2002. PSoC devices combine programmable analog and digital blocks with memory and a micro-controller, adding flexibility and saving time. www.cypress.com/psoc

21st Century Coalition is a group of nearly 50 diverse corporations including 3M, Caterpillar Inc., Eli Lilly, General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and Johnson & Johnson. The coalition seeks to ensure that the “patent system fairly rewards those who contribute to our society through the invention and development of new and useful products and processes.” www.patentsmatter.com

40th anniversary of the moon walk in 1969 was the namesake of the 2009 FIRST Robotics theme, “Lunacy.” See coverage at www.controleng.com by searching on first lunacy. www.usfirst.org

3 broad areas of involvement for the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) are pattern recognition, computer vision, and image processing. www.iapr.org

6 safety standards heavily influence safety for machines builders and for electronic control system and drives manufacturers. www.controleng.com/article/ca6643769.html

7 emerging technologies could result in automated guided vehicles that never stop to recharge, more nimble robotics, smarter trending for better pattern recognition to detect cancer as it forms (and could advance predictive controls), says IEEE. Read more at www.controleng.com/article/ca6644013.html

>$300,000 of donated embedded hardware and design/simulation software goes into the 3-year EcoCAR challenge competition, giving engineering students the opportunity to design and build advanced vehicles with next-generation automotive technologies while gaining hands-on experience with the latest automotive engineering tools. www.controleng.com/article/CA6643149.htmlwww.ecocarchallenge.org

2 millionth article in IEEE Xplore, an electrical engineering, communications and computer science database, is “Intelligent Packet Dropping for Optimal Energy-Delay Tradeoffs in Wireless Downlinks.” It appears in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. IEEE is 125 years old; oldest articles are from 1913. www.ieee.org