Just last week I attended the Measurement Science Conference (MSC). It was fairly interesting, although many of the engineers and technicians that I know were not in attendance. It may have been the economic times, but I had the impression that the conference had more management than usual.

There was an estimate that I heard that the number of people in the metrology community in the United States was approximately 30,000 people. The number of people involved with measurement, test, instrumentation, verification, and validation is significantly larger than this, yet these 30,000 individuals are absolutely vital for everyone in those fields and for the economy as a whole. A measurement of any kind can not have any value if it is not traceable back to agreed upon standards, and that is what metrology is about.

The main thing I took away from this conference is that the average age of the metrology community is near that of retirement age, and that there is insufficient educational resources and succession planning in place to replace those who will retire soon. Of course LearningMeasure.com is trying to do something about that by creating training material that can be used within existing training programs or as stand alone training.

The same issue exists in the measurement community at large, but not as severe. LearningMeasure.com’s courses clearly are aimed at this community as well.

There were a fair number of technical presentations at the conference, and some of them pointed out needs in the community that will lead to future course development here. In particular one example of the things I took away was the need for a course in grounding of measurement systems. I am looking forward to reading the papers for the presentations from sessions I didn’t attend.

I asked if I could take videos of the conference for the podcast, and do interviews on the exhibit floor, but the organizers said not this year, but next year they may allow it, so I will hopefully be back next year and be able to do podcasts from the conference. I did however get a number of people to agree to being interviewed on the podcast this next year, so I am looking forward to that. I met a lot of new people, and generally had a good time at the conference.

The following courses have been added to the course catalog

• MEAS201 - Basic AC Measurement
• INST150 - Introduction to the Thermal Voltage Converter (Low Frequency)

The first of these describes some of the basic AC measurements such as voltage, current, and impedance. It requires as a prerequisite MATH110 and EE102. This course makes the connection between complex numbers and AC measurement, which is why MATH110 - Introduction to Complex Aritmetic is a prerequisite for this course.
The second of these is a short introduction to the TVC, and has MEAS201 as a prerequisite. This is the first in a short two course introduction to the TVC. The second is under development. The TVC is a device that is used to measure precise AC voltages.

The new LearningMeasure.com blog is now fully operational. This blog replaces the LearningMeasure.com news page, which is archived here. If there are any issues please let us know. Now you can comment or ask questions on our news posts or announcements.

The migration of our news and announcements to a WordPress blog has been planned for a long time. The primary difficulty was integrating the WordPress blog into the site in such a way that it was consistent with the site’s look and feel, and frankly having the available time with the other projects that are in-work. We are pleased with the results, hopefully it will result in a better experience for our curtomers.

We are always looking for comments on any aspects of this site, and now there is an additional mechanism to give us feedback.

This is the first post on our new LearningMeasure.com blog. It is meant to replace the old LearningMeasure.com news page which will be archived here for posterity.

As with the news page, we want to use this blog to make announcements on new developments at LearningMeasure.com, whether it is a new course announcement, or a new feature added to our service.

In addition, we intend to also put short commentary and articles pertaining to measurement and metrology.

Technorati Profile