I found this interesting YouTube video which talks to one of the reasons I started LearningMeasure.com. I agree that the US educational system is not creating enough engineers and scientists, and am trying to do some small part to help produce more competent scientists, engineers, and technicians through continuing education.

There is one area that I don’t agree with Dr. Kaku, in that I think we should reduce the number of H-1B visas allowed per year. What having so many H-1B visas does is removes the urgency to fix our own house, and since there are still unemployed US engineers, these immigrants are taking away jobs from US citizens who would be qualified because they will work for a much lower wage.

Some changes have been made in the process of registering as a student on LearningMeasure.com. To assure that a valid email address is provided when registering, when one registers as a student, an email is sent that contains a link that completes the process.

It is important that a valid email address is entered when registering to be able to take advantage of some of the new features we will be adding, and it is the only way we will be able to contact you if something goes wrong with your account.

I went to the Measurement Science Conference as I have stated previously. It was a good to see people who I haven’t seen in awhile, and to participate in some of the meetings. I also like that the MSC has returned to the Disneyland Hotel. Not to say that it was bad at Pasadena, but as my wife came with me, it was better for her to have something to do during the day. In the evenings, I did go to Disneyland. The rooms at the hotel have much improved over the previous time the MSC was held there.

I did spend a lot of time in the exhibitors area, clearly since ITS9 was held in conjunction with the MSC, there was significantly more exhibitors whose products were temperature related.

I had considered getting a booth for LearningMeasure.com at the conference, but the cost clearly was too high for the business it would likely bring in. I really don’t see the utility for spending something like $2500 for a booth, $100 for each electrical outlet, and then you have to rent tables, chairs, internet connections, not to mention the travel and hotel costs. I doubt that any of the exhibitors have a hope of getting back what they spend in increased business from the conference between conferences. Perhaps its main utility as a reward for the employees of each company, with some small possibility of a slight return.

The conference had a lot of talks from high school students which I think was a good thing for them. It is good to try to inspire the next generation. I think those involved with the Metrology Ambassador program are doing a great job there.

I enjoyed most of the talks that I attended, but the one I enjoyed the most was the talk on the upcoming changes to the SI units. As usual it was difficult to decide which talks to attend, as more often than not there were two talks I was interested in attending at the same time.

I was surprised to see a talk on systems engineering and some of the presenters saying they came from a systems engineering background. I have been considering adding basic systems engineering courses to the LearningMeasure.com course catalog. In particular I think both measurement and uncertainty analysis are important topics in systems engineering, and the design of new measurement capability could benefit from the discipline of systems engineering. One of the reasons I went to the conference is to get some feedback that I could use to plan what courses to develop.

Overall it was a good experience. I will probably attend the next one, although I don’t think it is particularly good for business, other than possibly a source of inspiration.

I will be going to the Measurement Science Conference (MSC) next week and would like to offer a special for those in attendance.

At the Measurement Science Conference only, for those who contact me directly at the MSC, I will be offering a $50/student/year subscription rate ($10 off the normal rate). You will have to fill out a form and return it to me during the conference listing all the accounts you wish to purchase, if you are a company I will send an invoice for the accounts, individuals will have to pay at the conference. I do not have a booth, so you will have to track me down.

It was a rough day, but the upgrade of the last server is complete. There were some problems in transferring over that caused some things on the site to break. It took a few hours to figure out what was wrong. With this I think I can move away from the hardware problems we have had and get back to working on course content.

There are a number of courses that have been asked for, including more algebra courses, a course on trigonometry, and a course on Fourier transforms. It is interesting to me that the most requested courses recently have been math courses. My on plan is to try to alternate between the math courses and engineering and measurement courses.

The server that holds this blog and the podcast was replaced today. Only have one more server to replace next weekend, which holds the main LearningMeasure.com content. When the hardware updates are complete, I will return to course and feature development.

If there is anything you would like to see developed on the LearningMeasure.com site, let me know by sending an email to webmaster@learningmeasure.com.