Article

From December 09 issue of Control Magazine

ISA's executive board needs to hire a turnaround specialist, not another association manager - or divvy up the money and go home.

There are many things that ISA does just because they have always done it.

Less than 0,3% of all potential ISA members worldwide actually belong to ISA.

ISA isn't really international, has great difficulty getting traction in many parts of the world. 

Η Ιαπωνικ? Κυβ?ρνηση υιοθετε? την μ?θοδο διαχε?ρισης ?ργων της Κρ?σιμης Αλυσ?δας (Critical Chain Project Management)

The notion that a self-aware computing system would emerge spontaneously from the interconnections of billions of computers and computer networks goes back in science fiction at least as far as Arthur C. Clarke’s “Dial F for Frankenstein.” A prescient short story that appeared in 1961, it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems.
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READING, England — Computers argued, cracked jokes and parried trick questions, all part of an annual test of artificial intelligence carried out at the University of Reading.
Typing away at split-screen terminals Sunday, a dozen volunteers carried out two conversations at once: one with a chat program, the other with a human. After five minutes, they were asked to say which was which. Some were not sure who — or what — they were talking to.
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A survey released yesterday by ISACA reveals that one in four companies are increasing their IT investments this year despite the volatile economy..

Le capitalisme financier et le libéralisme débridé s'effondrent et avec eux les règles de gestion, de comptabilité et les jeux d'indicateurs en place dans nos entreprises et ayant largement contribué à cet emballement. Vouloir sortir de la crise sans remettre en cause fondamentalement les mécanismes qui nous y ont conduits est juste une aberration. De nouvelles valeurs et règles du jeu sont à inventer.

Using the digital mind that guides their self-repairing robot, there is now a computer program that uses raw observational data to figure out fundamental physical laws.

A new algorithm can distill fundamental natural laws from mere observations of a swinging double pendulum and other simple systems.

When I suggest the idea of mapping the enterprise IT assets, I usually got the answer that it's a waste of time because “IT is simple“

This diagram represents an average customer that I'm dealing with. This is an example of an American company with 300 applications, 150 products (COTS), 100 databases, around 50 technologies and more the 1,000 servers. The diagram shows the instances of the mentioned above building blocks and the relations between them:

By some estimates, the information and communications technology (ICT) sector produces about 2 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, roughly the same amount as the aviation industry, whose emission levels have been high enough to get government and regulatory bodies to take action on that sector’s climate impacts.
By 2020, the increasing demand for ICT products and services is likely to push the sector’s emissions up by almost 40 percent, to 1.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide.
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Trained teams are often used in process improvement only to find what is obvious to anyone working with the process. Each of the popular process improvement systems like Theory of Constraints, Lean Manufacturing, and Six Sigma has high implementation costs. While these methods are valuable in evaluating ideas, often they cannot be supported in a zero capital world.
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Version V0401 integrates support for ISA88 and ISA95 into a single standard providing support for general recipes
Research Triangle Park, NC (26 November 2008) — WBF, the Forum for Automation and Manufacturing Professionals today announced the release of Version V0401 of B2MML and BatchML, which combines the two markup languages into a single related set of standards useful to the general process industries.