I really liked this one folks.

If you want to keep up with what the pragmatic, structured, organized, thoughtful people who design build and maintain the behind the scenes critical infrastructure that you, me and all of us count on for EVERY FACET of our daily lives, I highly suggest you add Control Global to your "favorites" list.

A few favorite quotes from the article as a tease to encourage you to read the whole thing :

Engineering solves problems. Innovation creates problems. Most innovation comes from people outside the domain of expertise. Innovators can be anybody.

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We think that this is the innovation age. Not so. We forget fish hooks, fire and the wheel. Twice as many patents were issued in the early 1900s as today. Distance, time and familiarity diminish importance.
My dad would talk to some of my visiting young MBAs. They would complain about the D.C. politics, the latest recession and tax laws. After they left, Dad would say, “Don’t they know this has happened five times before?”

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What does this mean to the working process engineer? We should not dwell on the latest standards and play in our sandbox. Putting change into a process because we want to try out the latest computer is not progress. We, as well as our management, should think about what we do and why we are doing it. Innovation is not just components, systems and toys. Innovation also is a part of how we think.

Please take a minute to review the whole article here:

http://www.controlglobal.com/articles/2006/232.html

From within the article and for more on the event the author was covering: Go to http://technologyreview.com/events for a multimedia presentation of the event.

Happy New Year folks. Maybe a good goal for 2007 is to move education and informed decision making to the front of the line so we aren't so vulnerable to being taken to the cleaners by snake oil salesman selling myth and hidden agenda (politicians).

Just for fun. Has anyone seen anything in the media lately, or heard our President (or any politicians) speaking about the current state of the Social Security Trust Fund, the projected cash flow, the proposed repayment of the moneys borrowed from the trust fund in recent decades?

Are we too busy for such things because of arguments about saving us from Global Warming by "causing positive changes to the climate direction" or the War on Terror?

Anyone thinking bait and switch?