A New Engineering Profession Is Emerging: Decision Coach

 
A New Profession Is Emerging: Decision Coach Presentation Slides,

$0 (PDF) These slides are from a presentation Baker Street publisher, Dr. Stephen Barrager, made at a recent INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research in Huntington Beach, California. The emperor of all business processes is the process we use to make strategic decisions. Decisions like product design, portfolio selection, geographic expansion, and the updating our CIT infrastructure. The most popular way of making these decisions is to form a team. The teams are made up of executives and people from engineering and operations. The cultures and interests of these groups are different. Their experience working in teams can vary greatly. The teams muddle through. Decisions do get made. Too often the decisions get endlessly reworked and opportunities for innovation are lost. A team needs a coach. The coach can help the team design a process, select the right tools, bring skilled facilitation, and take responsibility for project management. A well coached team is more efficient and more innovative. The ideal coach comes from the engineering culture. Engineers have the analytical and design skills that are so important in complex situations. They are comfortable working with big data and models. They also bring a profound understanding of technology and markets. Many engineers are skilled at working with both the executive and the operating cultures. Many engineers have a natural entrepreneurial spirit. Organizations are notoriously bad at learning from past mistakes. A coach can provide the organizational memory that is so important for learning from one project to the next. Many engineers are in fact playing the coaching role. The role is gradually getting recognized in many leading organizations. Visitor Agreement ¦ Privacy Policy © 2013 Baker Street Publishing, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

For full articles with all slides, click here: http://bakerstreetpublishing.com/publications/a-new-profession-is-emerging-decision-coach/?goback=%2Egde_43593_member_229343744

What is a Career Integration Grant?

CIG, Career Integration Grant, is the successor to the former Reintegration Grants (ERG & IRG). CIG provides financial assistance to experienced researchers who are offered with a stable research position in an EU-27 Membre State (MS) or in an Associated Country (AC) where they have not worked or resided for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to the call deadline. Researchers who have benefited from an ERG or IRG are ineligible for CIG. You will find more information on the call at the Research Participant Portal.
For complete article click the link: http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/page/call_FP7?callIdentifier=FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG&specificProgram=PEOPLE#wlp_call_FP7

good news from CERN- First three-year LHC running period reaches a conclusion

Having supported many projects whithin CERN for over 20 years, haveing blanket PO from them over the years along with another friendly supplier from States, the writer was privileged to work on some of the most exciting projects in the world, including the Atlas machine. Managed by personal friend of mine, we have seen its highs and its hurdles in progress till its final completion several years ago. Any news from CERN is usually a good news for the writer, thus the following PR is here for your reading pleasure:

Geneva 14 February 2013. At 7.24am, the shift crew in the CERN1 Control Centre extracted the beams from the Large Hadron Collider, bringing the machine’s first three-year running period to a successful conclusion. The LHC’s first run has seen major advances in physics, including the discovery of a new particle that looks increasingly like the long–sought Higgs boson, announced on 4 July 2012. And during the last weeks of the run, the remarkable figure of 100 petabytes of data stored in the CERN mass-storage systems was surpassed. This data volume is roughly equivalent to 700 years of full HD-quality movies.
“We have every reason to be very satisfied with the LHC’s first three years,” said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer. “The machine, the experiments, the computing facilities and all infrastructures behaved brilliantly, and we have a major scientific discovery in our pocket.”
The LHC now begins its first long shutdown, LS1. Over the coming months major consolidation and maintenance work will be carried out across the whole of CERN’s accelerator chain. The LHC will be readied for higher energy running, and the experiments will undergo essential maintenance. LHC running is scheduled to resume in 2015, with the rest of the CERN complex starting up again in the second half of 2014.
“There is a great deal of consolidation work to do on CERN’s whole accelerator complex, as well as the LHC itself,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. “We’ll essentially be rebuilding the interconnections between LHC magnets, so when we resume running in 2015, we will be able to operate the machine at its design energy of 7TeV per beam”.
The LHC exceeded all expectations in its first three-year run, delivering significantly more data to the experiments than initially foreseen. Physicists measure data quantity in units known as inverse femtobarns, and by the time the last high energy proton-proton data were recorded in December, the ATLAS and CMS experiments had each recorded around 30 inverse femtobarns, of which over 23 were recorded in 2012.
To put this into context, the particle whose discovery was announced on 4 July 2012 was found by analysing around 12 inverse femtobarns. That means CERN’s experimental physics community still has plenty of data to analyse during LS1.
“There will be plenty of physics to do during LS1, and not only at the LHC,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “The LHC is the flagship of CERN’s experimental programme, but is nevertheless just one component of a very varied research infrastructure. All of the other experiments here have on-going analyses, so I’m looking forward to many interesting results emerging as LS1 progresses.”
For the first weeks of 2013, the LHC has been colliding protons with lead ions as part of the programme to understand matter as it would have been just after the Big Bang. The last four days of the run saw a return to proton-proton collisions, this time at reduced energy. These collisions will provide useful data for interpreting the data recorded with lead ions. Single beam studies will continue until the weekend, when the process of bringing the LHC up to room temperature will begin, allowing LS1 work to get under way.
Video: http://cds.cern.ch/record/1516001
Picture: http://cds.cern.ch/record/1516031?ln=en
Press Contact:
CERN press office, press.office@cern.ch
+41 (0)22 767 34 32
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new year 2013

No-one I know of says 2011 was a pleasant year to be an investor – 90% of fund manager’s loathed it and lost money due to a mixture of wild and unpredictable currency movements and of course crazy volatility and massive irrational selloffs. Then came 2012, which was much better but not without it's moments, but all in all a better year despite all the dramas of the Europe debt crisis and fiscal cliff. However, 2013 will see most of this behind us.
I think 2013 will have a lower political involvement and that alone will make it a better year and investors can go back to concentrating on what’s important – buying shares in businesses that are doing well, based on common sense and good solid business fundamentals – won’t that be nice?

Happy and prosperous new year

As usual I wish you and yours a happy, healthy and prosperous new year, to all readers and co-editors of this blog.

best regards
Stefan (Baginski)
twitter  @sbaginski22

Waka Waka strikes successfully again!

- PRESS RELEASE -
for immediate release

Power to the World with WakaWaka Personal Solar Power Station
Most efficient solar lamp in the world now provides ability to charge any cell phone and tablet with USB connector .
Haarlem (The Netherlands) —December 10, 2012 – The WakaWaka Power is the much anticipated follow-up to the very successful WakaWaka Light, winner of 4 Accenture Innovation Awards last month. Building on the original design, the WakaWaka Power is thinner and  lighter and features a Sunpower solar cell, Intivation power management and much more battery capacity than the previous version.  It deliveres up to 60 lumens of bright, safe, bright reading light for more than 40 hours on an 8 hour solar charge as well as the ability to charge cell phones and tablets.
Always Power at Your Fingertips
The WakaWaka Power is the culmination of many months of design to create a product that is both a fashionable and a functional tool for everyday use. With the growth in mobile devices, there is a increased need to have a reliable, efficient, portable device that ensures power at your fingertips at all times. The WakaWaka power was dramatically upgraded with the best solar technology on the market today, which makes it up to 200% more efficient than comparable products, in particular in low light conditions. The sun does not always shine.
Personal Solar Power Station
Consumer feedback has guided the development to meet the needs of not only consumers but also of disaster prep, emergency services and even military. Four different light modes generate a bright torch light down to a low intensity night safety light. As an extra a SOS emergency beacon is programmed. Being so compact and reliable as well as very easy to use with just a single large button, the WakaWaka Power is well suited to be the premier Personal Solar Power Station worldwide.
Crowdfunding
On 12-12-12 the pre-sale of the WakaWaka Power will start on Kickstarter.com . The suggested retail price for the WakaWaka Power is $79.00. During this pre-sale Kickstarter event, visitors can purchase the WakaWaka Power for as little as $49.00/unit.  The funds raised will be used to take the prototype into production ready for delivery to retail stores around May.
Light Up Haiti
For each WakaWaka Power sold during the crowdfunding campaign, one WakaWaka Light (lights only) will be delivered to UNHCR to be distributed to a Haitian family living in darkness. Still today, 3 years after the devastating earthquake in 2010, more than 370,000 Haitians live in shelters, without any electricity, heavily dependent on toxic, expensive and extremely dangerous kerosene lamps. This short video indicates the situation there.
_________________________________________________________
Not for publication:
For more general information, please consult our FAQ’s at our website: wakawakalight.com
For pictures:
http://www.wakawakalight.com/images/ww-proto1.jpg
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For statements and interviews, please contact:
Cas van Kleef
cas@wakawakalight.com
tel +31 (0) 23 51 76 611
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CERN 1990-2012

CERN-In 1990 European Centre for Nuclear Research landed an order to deliver a complex set of computer modules for experiments from my company. It followed with further requests. Finally in 1991 December I got a blank order for 1992. And this is how we got along so well, that I was in Meyrin every other month from then on. Now I am on the other side of the Atlantic, but still keep contact with this great bunch of scientists trying to crack the atom. Many friends have retired, Dr Parkman, Dr. Eck and others, But even today more than 22 to years later, the news which arrived this morning is worth to publish for others to know.

Professor Agnieszka Zalewska Elected President of CERN Council

Geneva, 20 September 2012. CERN[1] Council today elected Professor Agnieszka Zalewska as its 21st President for a period of one year renewable twice, with a mandate starting on 1 January 2013. Professor Zalewska takes over from Michel Spiro who comes to the conclusion of his three-year term at the end of December.

“I feel particularly honoured to have presided over the CERN Council through a period that has seen the first major results from the LHC,” said Professor Spiro. “But we are just at the start, so while warmly thanking CERN management and personnel for the last three years, I’d like to wish Professor Zalewska all the very best as the LHC adventure continues to unfold.”

Agnieszka Zalewska is a Professor at the H. Niewodniczański Institute of High Energy Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She has a distinguished career in particle physics and a long association with CERN. She received her doctorate in 1975 from the Jagellonian University, Krakow, for work carried out on bubble chamber data from an experiment at CERN. Later, she worked on the DELPHI experiment at CERN’s Large Electron Positron collider, LEP, where she played an important role in the development of silicon tracking detectors. Since 2000, she has been involved with neutrino physics through the ICARUS experiment at Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory, which studies a neutrino beam sent through the Earth from CERN, and has also been involved with feasibility studies for an underground laboratory in Poland. She has been a member of several CERN committees, and has been the Polish scientific delegate to the CERN Council since January 2010.

“The coming years will be fascinating, but demanding, as we prepare the LHC for running at higher energies and implement the updated European Strategy for Particle Physics,” said Zalewska. “CERN and its Council will become my only priority, and I would like to thank the Council members and outgoing President for the confidence they have placed in me.”