Okay. You're a serious automation professional. You have much too much on your plate and you would never think of wasting time on the job or using a company-supplied computer for anything other than work. So the following information is for you to use only to interest the young people in your life to get more interested in STEM pursuits. Really. Check out Lego Build. You need to use the Chrome browser for this, but that shouldn't present too much of an issue.

ISA has formed a new standards committee, this time to tackle issues around intelligent device management. 

The announcement is below. Here's Fieldbus Foundation's Larry O'Brien's blog on the subject.  

ISA Charters New Standards Committee on Intelligent Device Management

I don't usually post marketing oriented things, but I know that a lot of automation marketing professionals read this blog and read Control and ControlGlobal.com, and I ran across something interesting.

Back in the mid-1990s, when I was putting together a website for a company that I was director of sales and marketing for, I believe I originated the practice (in the automation industry at least) of posting service manuals and specifications on the web for both reading and downloading. It was time consuming, and it was costly.

This has not been a good week for refineries in the United States. On August 2, the diesel hydrotreater of the Holly-Frontier Tulsa East refinery blew up, causing the unit to be shut down, possibly for months. You can read about it here: http://www.tulsaworld.com/business/article.aspx?subjectid=49&articleid=20120808_49_0_Lastwe902577 . No one appears to have been injured, and no cause for the accident has been announced.

These days, much technical training for process automation specialists and other engineers--especially post-college--is pretty much a DIY affair. The glory days of deep company-sponsored training programs are long gone. But that doesn't mean resources aren't out there. 

Sometimes we get so focused on what's going on at Control and ControlGlobal.com that we forget there's other stuff happening in the Big World.

For example, the first color pix from Mars.  I find it disconcerting that robots can take better pictures than I can. Just sayin'.

The Space Research Centre at the University of Leicester works with NASA and the European Space Agency, supplying instrumentation and other hardware for space missions. The centre uses NX and Teamcenter from Siemens PLM Software to develop its products, uniting all phases of projects, from design through analysis and manufacturing.

Maverick Technologies is the largest independent control system integrator in the world.

This allows them to do things that other system integrators can't easily do, and even most EPC companies cannot do. Even some vendor OEMs have difficulty doing the things that Maverick's new offerings can do.

Don't miss the content-rich July issue of Control.  Our cover story "Process Automation Jobs: Help Wanted" tells you how to take advantage of the job boom in the process automation industries.

Outsourcing has changed. People have finally realized that the appropriate response to demand is to build product where the customers are. Here's a very interesting report from John Kendall at IMS Research (which was recently aquired by IHS Inc.):

BRIC Countries Benefit from Production Localization for Industrial Motor Controls