Has it been that long since bloggers exploded onto the scene? Now there's an estimated 70 million blogs, more than one for every man, woman and child in California, New York, Michigan and Illinois combined. Former colleague Dan Farber at ZDNet wrote a worthy retrospective on blogs. Given that many blogs, there must be some engineers out there that do it. True to the anti-social stereotype, engineers just don't seem drawn to blogging. That's too bad given the actual knowledge they have, say, compared to someone simply with political or religious views to express.
Actually, there's a glimmer of hope. I have found some pretty decent engineering blogs. They include an admissions blog to Cornell School of Engineering; a radio frequency blog that's more like a web site; a Dell blog to tech talk and Curious Cat, a science and engineering blog. With the staggering number of new blogs created every day, how could there not be more engineering blogs than a couple of years when a similar search turned up virtually none? Perhaps, there's only a snowball's chance that engineers will blog en masse. I've tried to coax some into it who I thought would be good, but have enjoyed limited success. We do have Matt Traum, an MIT doctoral candidate blogging on alternative fuels in I Have the Power! Also, another engineer is about to go online at Designnews.com. But we need more…perhaps you? We want to liven up the conversation.
Almost every automaker has had to 'pick a side' when it comes to alternative fuel options and ways to divest from a reliance on gasoline. Fiat is looking to back compressed natural gas or liquid propane as an interim solution.
Plastic may not be the most beloved of materials to the more environmentally minded, but Plasti 2012 aimed to mold a different opinion of the material in people's minds.
The rare earth element market has become steadily more rational, and new sources coming online will continue to reduce costs. Still, it is unlikely that prices will drop to their former lows.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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