Jonathan Love's tour-de-force single volume Process Automation Handbook is a necessary reference, right beside Liptak's Instrument Engineer's Handbook, and if I can be pardoned, my own Instrumentation Reference Book, that should be on every process automation professional's desk or bookshelf.

I got an email a few weeks back asking if I would review a book that had the title, "Core Engineering Concepts." I said sure, send it along.

ISA is offering the CAP study guide free to people who register to take the CAP exam:

Dear Automation Professional,

Please take notice of another good deed by an automation vendor. We need everybody to jump in and do things like this if we want to continue to have people who want to work in automation:

From the press release:

Phoenix Contact engineers celebrate National Engineers Week by teaching science in Pennsylvania, Michigan

Honeywell's "boilermaker in chief" Norm Gilsdorf is one of nine alumni receiving an award from Purdue University during Engineers' Week. One of the other alumni is another distinguished woman in engineering, Joan Miller, a senior vice president at CH2M-Hill Engineers.

Here's some of the press release from Purdue:

From the press release:

According to Katie Drummond in her column posted January 15th on Wired.com DARPA is becoming concerned that so few wired-up, connected, with-it kids are moving into science and engineering tracks in school. And the numbers are continuing to fall.

So DARPA is asking for help.

Seth Godin's blog today talks squarely to the point of why it takes so beastly long to get corporate change....and that's not just in the automation industry either, although we're one of the worst and longest to hold on to legacy systems.

Frightened, clueless or uninformed?

MANUFACTURING PROFESSIONALS TO INTRODUCE

A while back (in 2006) I wrote an editorial titled "Would you want your kid to do this job?" If you want to re-read it, or read it now for the first time, here's the URL:

http://www.controlglobal.com/articles/2006/041.html

Recently, a reader named Bob Kluck sent me a comment on it: