Murray Slovick
A 21st Century Blackboard
I have a fondness for blackboards. Despite the imposing power of the PC, there is something about a blackboard that to me still shouts "Engineering!" I rejoice in the notion of thinking on your feet, working out complex problems chalk in hand (or a marker, in the case of a whiteboard), erasing false approaches and diagrams, and finally underlining in triumph and with an exclamation point the correct answer at the bottom of the board. So I admit to being positively predisposed to 3M's Digital Wall Display when it was demonstrated to me recently by 3M personnel. Sort of a 21st century electronic version of my chalk-on-slate favorite, the Wall Display is a standalone presentation solution that combines the best features of an LCD projector, a digital whiteboard, an easel pad, and a multimedia system.
Murray's Archive

Linda Lyon and Roberta Silverstein
Perseverance: The Watchword for Getting It and Keeping It
Guerrilla PR and Reputation Management
Leapfrogging the competition using guerilla PR tactics and managing an organization's reputation may seem like two divergent topics. They are really two sides of the same idea—proactive communications.

Keeping Your Client (Organization) in the News Cost-Effectively
To keep an organization in the news successfully, PR must evaluate the state of the current market to define the types of stories and trends that will resonate with the media.
Columns Archive

Frank Greenhalgh
No Way Out
When the shuttle Columbia dissolved on re-entry Saturday morning, Feb. 1, it brought home to us all that space travel is risky business. There have been 128 missions and 17 years since the Challenger went down. We have all somehow taken the reliability and successes with a grain of salt. Saturday showed us that it really has been a fabulous feat for the shuttle launches to be so reliable.
Frank's Archive

Alex Mendelsohn
GPS Jammers and Spy-vs.-Spy
Speaking of concealable devices, there are those who contend that a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) jamming system, built in a home workshop, can disable the reception of GPS signals. Designs for such jammers are now kicking around the Web. Whether homemade or off-the-shelf, are GPS jammers a bona fide threat?
Alex's Archive

Brian Elfman
Missile Defense Agency—More Than a New Face
Since Operation Desert Storm in 1990–1991, the U.S. military posture has been, especially through the Clinton Administration, one of putting out global fires. Essentially that's a tactical policy. Then, military spending bore primarily on replenishment. Now, the U.S. military posture has shifted dramatically. For example, in support of terrorist and weapons-of-mass-destruction countermeasures, there's homeland security, missile defense, and space countermeasures. It would be fair to call this kind of shift an affirmative-countermeasures policy. Each of these types of countermeasures presents formidable challenges. And each requires pushing the technology envelope to the extreme. This means opportunities for design engineers emerging from an endless stream of perplexing technological issues. For these reasons, military spending on technology will easily exceed what was spent during the Cold War era.
Brian's Archive

DeAnne DeWitt
Machines in the Myths: The State of Artificial Intelligence
Use the term "Artificial Intelligence" around most people, and it conjures images of thinking, emotive machines, often in anthropomorphic form. Film and fiction have portrayed AI so often and in such depth, that the meme of "machine consciousness" has become embedded in people's minds.  From 2001's HAL to Star Wars robots to Terminator and the sad little boy in A.I., we've been provided with images and mythic tales of machines making informed conscious decisions and exhibiting emotion.
DeAnne's Archive

Brian McGinty
Project Asuka: Japan's $700 million Fabrication Initiative
Japan has recently funded a consortium intended to reverse the decade-long decline of their semiconductor industry. The Advanced Semiconductors through Collaborative Achievement project, dubbed "Asuka," is intended to leap-frog chip design ahead a generation. The consortium intends to lower the smallest integrated circuit feature size from the now-current 130 nm to 70 nm by 2005. The ambitious project portends an across-the-board retooling of an entire industry.
Brian's Archive

 

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