Industry Crib Sheet: ISM Manufacturing Index Slows Down in May
President Announces Support for 12 Manufacturing Regions Indonesia's Industrial Growth Powers Machine Tool Demand Poor Housing Starts Stump Construction Spending The manufacturing sector slowed down in May but still grew for the 12th straight month, according to the Institute for Supply Management's (ISM) purchasing managers index of 53.2 released this morning. The May index was a 1.7-point drop...
Read More »The Light Side: Comfort Food Is Merely a Placebo, Study Quips
Micro-size Life-forms May Have Swam in Mars Lakes Breaking News Is Delivered On Your Bathroom Hand Towel Robots Are Taught to Do Chores at UC Berkeley Before you plow into a bag of potato chips thinking it will make your mood better, you'd likely still feel better without the binge-eating. What's more, you'd probably be in a worse mood if you ate those chips. Recent, separate studies have...
Read More »Can New Dassault Platform Reinvent Product Life-cycle Management?
Dassault Systemes' 3DEXPERIENCE is a multibillion-dollar, paradigm-shifting product life-cycle management platform. But a product like this is not an easy one to get through to engineering organizations grounded in traditional ways of product development. This leads to wonder what market penetration can be expected. Is Dassault Systemes' 3DEXPERIENCE platform "the next step beyond PLM"? CEO...
Read More »Minding Your Business: What to Expect from a Metal Stamping Provider
"Value added" is an oft-used term, but for today's suppliers of stamped parts, the actual stamping work is just one part of the supplier sourcing criteria. Offering core capabilities such as design and engineering, a stamping provider should be a manufacturing partner. The number-one expectation of a metal stamping supplier is that they add value to a project. With continued global pressure on...
Read More »AT&T Gets On Next-Generation IT Infrastructure
Telecommunications giant AT&T recently surprised industry observers with its shift toward a cloud-based architecture called network functions virtualization (NFV). NFV means the company will stop running its massive network on expensive communications hardware and will migrate to cheaper commodity servers controlled by standard software instead of proprietary protocols. In connection with its NFV...
Read More »AMT Viewpoint: Throw Caution to the Wind? No, but Don't Give In to Doom
Pat McGibbon, Association For Manufacturing Technology's vice president of intelligence, says U.S. manufacturing and the economy are susceptible to market sentiment more than anything right now. Nearly all the metrics are positive and suggesting a few more quarters of growth at minimum. This month there seemed to be an edge in the conversations I had with some industry executives at...
Read More »Industry Crib Sheet: U.S. Robotics Market Sees 2nd-Best Quarter Ever
Chinese Manufacturing Shows Inkling of Improvement Jobless Claims Hover at Pre-Recession Level The robotics market in North America posted its second-highest quarter ever in terms of robots ordered in first quarter 2014, according to new statistics from the Robotic Industries Association (RIA). A total of 5,938 robots valued at $338 million were ordered by companies in North America in first...
Read More »The Light Side: Washington's Secret Zombie Defense Plan
Just Do It: Research Says We 'Pre-Crastinate' 'Pinocchio rex' Was No Joke of a Dinosaur Lab-on-a-Chip Detects Cancer Early and On the Cheap The next season of The Walking Dead is another five months away, but if, by some chance, life imitates art beforehand, it's good to know that the government and military are ready to rock, in the form of the comprehensive "CONPLAN 8888: Counter-Zombie...
Read More »Smelter Reform Seen as Answer to Conflict-Free Minerals Sourcing
Intel and HP recently presented an update of their work in the Conflict-Free Smelter Program, designed to get the world's smelters to source minerals only from mines that have proven not to be funding armed rebel groups in the Congo. Two of the world's most influential information technology companies continue to work on removing conflict minerals from global supply chains as a long-anticipated...
Read More »OLEDs Illuminate the Future of Lighting and Displays
Organic light-emitting diodes hold promise for powering our future generations of electronic displays, lighting, and signage. They blend high brightness and contrast with low energy consumption, while parallel research in new materials could bode well for thinner and flexible OLED installations in unique and once-thought impossible ways. Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are the future of...
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