Although we primarily focus on the chip-making operations shops perform, this welding “parlor trick” on Miller Electric’s Web site is worth a look-see.
The trick—welding together two pieces of aluminum foil—is performed by Ron Covell, owner of Covell Creative Metalworking. Mr. Covell’s customized cars and motorcycles have been featured in a number of magazines. His Web site has examples of his handiwork and numerous welding instructional DVDs that he offers. Give this trick a shot!
There are signs that the United States will soon start making the move to wind power in earnest. However, I suspect that the country lacks the big machining capacity needed to meet the potential demand for large turbine components such as rotor hubs. Do you have the capacity to machine such sizeable parts, and are you poising your shop to support the wind energy market? Or, has the potential for winning new business in this alternative energy segment spurred you to consider adding large machines?
Please share your thoughts. with us send us an email or comment
Thomasnet.com has launched a new section called “Need to Know Guides.” They are basically information on anything you would need to know regarding manufacturing technology; there is a huge section on green manufacturing as well as more standard processes and categories. This will likely be a destination for many who need to know more about their specific niche industry. The guides should prove to be a great source for this very hard to find information. There are currently over 205 guides on the page and the section is growing, if you have any questions on a subject or an idea for a topic drop them a line and there is a strong possibility they will write a guide to your very question. Chances there are others similar to you who have asked or will ask that same question. Check out a DIY CNC article here from their Need to Know Guide Section and see what you think.
Purple Crayon is a new entry into the home fabricating arena. Shown above, with it’s makers [Konrad] and [Aaron], it’s set to compete with RepRap and Cupcake. It looks to be bigger than Cupcake, but smaller than the reprap. There aren’t many details available on their site, but we’re sure there will be soon. They do state that it should retail for less than $1,000.
worked with wolfram alpha demo, it answered some multi chained questions like”how many employees at google in 1999″
Got all Sports questions wrong.
my friend at Thomasnet, took these screen shots as the Wolfram|Alpha site was up very briefly and he was able to download the toolbar. The site was up for a bout 10 minutes and not even basic questions like 2+2 worked so the server was probably not even configured yet and must have been unintentional
for full sized non blog photos view them here
.
Toolbar Screenshot
Yesterday I attended a demonstration of Stephen Wolfram’s , “Wolfram|Alpha,” the new “answer search engine.” The software has a lot of potential, and builds on the already millions of lines of code from Wolfram’s popular Mathematica software. Like any major undertaking there are many hurdles to overcome. It seemed that there was much more money needed to keep paying their team of approximately 100 PhDs. There was apparently a large amount of work ahead to reach the end game of being able to provide “all the worlds’ computable knowledge.” The means to accomplish are their fulltime staff of PhDs as well as consulting outside experts. Wolfram said they were also open to having a structured and strictly reviewed, process for outside submission of information. Just this initial stage of gathering information seems very time consuming and labor intensive, but from what I saw of the technology, it seems that it has the potential to pay off big. The sources of the data can be viewed at the bottom of the page; this human gathered information combined with their algorithm determines what is presented.
The three steps for getting the data to the end users screen are as follows.
Gather and curate sources/data find red flags or anomalies in the data; these could either be problematic or telling information put this information in the data flow or algorithm convert this to natural language and decide how to present this on the users screen, this is done using heuristics (best guess) and other methods.
The biggest problems he talked about overcoming, was understanding human syntax, meaning converting natural language to something the software can understand. The information is how a human can access it using natural language that is the challenge. This seems to be the major problem with search getting a computer to think like a human and borders into AI. This gets more difficult as the questions get more complex with longer chains of information/parameters/concatenation like, “What is title of Marlen Brando’s first movie.” This is question is three levels deep and would be difficult yet according to Wolfram, possible to answer. Wolfram|Alpha was not presented as a Google killer as it serves a different purpose. Search engines are looking for other peoples answers that are out there somewhere on the internet, in a blog or html page. Wolfram|Alpha, computes its own answers from information in its database. This information is proprietary and its use comes with its own ToS which was described as being fair we did not get to view it. The screen shots were kept purposely hard to read, the text was very small and hard to read and one could just get a general understanding of what the layout looked like.
Here is a rundown of questions that were asked before our eyes. Most were able to be answered but there were some errors we saw unfold before our eyes, or as Wolfram said “good we found a bug, that’s why this isn’t released yet.” Answers consisted of a broad range subjects mostly with statistical answers. These statistics may or may not have been exactly what one would be searching for. Because the text was small we only knew what was being displayed by what Wolfram told us what was there, it was possible to make out basic charts and layouts.
Questions
“Serum htl”- returned general medical information
“Medical tests serum html”- returned a breakdown of how much serum isneeded for different body types, ages and other factors.
“Male serum html”- the system could not answer this one.
“Springfield”- figured out the closest Springfield to your geo ip and gave stats for that town.
“Weather in Springfield in 1996”- this worked, or returned something at least, like everything else it was illegible.
“Microsoft Vs. Sun” – compared the two businesses, understood that sun was talking about a company.
“Blue and yellow” – the answer was green.
“C#”- gave information on the musical scales and details surrounding C# in music theory.
“Caffeine”- shows chemical properties such as the molecular weight as well as other statistics and properties.
“Hurricane Andrew Hurricane Katrina” – this question did not work at first he had to adjust his natural language which brings up the question again, how users are going to understand to use the search engine.
“Orange juice”- gave Nutritional breakdown and some other facts
“Weather in Princeton NJ when Curt Garble died” – maybe a loaded question, maybe the most impressive example, probably a bit of both. This gave an answer weather it was right or not the ability we could not see. The ability for the system to understand the multiple chains in impressive.
Other questions which were answered with a page of statistics
“Distance to Moscow”
“Units for measurement”
mathematical questions and physics
“Mortgages”
Job info- similar to dept of labor statistics
“Universities”
my friend at Thomasnet, took these screen shots as the Wolfram|Alpha site was up very briefly and he was able to download the toolbar. The site was up for a bout 10 minutes and not even basic questions like 2+2 worked so the server was probably not even configured yet and must have been unintentional.
Toolbar Screenshot
Yesterday I attended a demonstration of Stephen Wolfram’s , “Wolfram|Alpha,” the new “answer search engine.” The software has a lot of potential, and builds on the already millions of lines of code from Wolfram’s popular Mathematica software. Like any major undertaking there are many hurdles to overcome. It seemed that there was much more money needed to keep paying their team of approximately 100 PhDs. There was apparently a large amount of work ahead to reach the end game of being able to provide “all the worlds’ computable knowledge.” The means to accomplish are their fulltime staff of PhDs as well as consulting outside experts. Wolfram said they were also open to having a structured and strictly reviewed, process for outside submission of information. Just this initial stage of gathering information seems very time consuming and labor intensive, but from what I saw of the technology, it seems that it has the potential to pay off big. The sources of the data can be viewed at the bottom of the page; this human gathered information combined with their algorithm determines what is presented.
The three steps for getting the data to the end users screen are as follows.
Gather and curate sources/data find red flags or anomalies in the data; these could either be problematic or telling information put this information in the data flow or algorithm convert this to natural language and decide how to present this on the users screen, this is done using heuristics (best guess) and other methods.
The biggest problems he talked about overcoming, was understanding human syntax, meaning converting natural language to something the software can understand. The information is how a human can access it using natural language that is the challenge. This seems to be the major problem with search getting a computer to think like a human and borders into AI. This gets more difficult as the questions get more complex with longer chains of information/parameters/concatenation like, “What is title of Marlen Brando’s first movie.” This is question is three levels deep and would be difficult yet according to Wolfram, possible to answer. Wolfram|Alpha was not presented as a Google killer as it serves a different purpose. Search engines are looking for other peoples answers that are out there somewhere on the internet, in a blog or html page. Wolfram|Alpha, computes its own answers from information in its database. This information is proprietary and its use comes with its own ToS which was described as being fair we did not get to view it. The screen shots were kept purposely hard to read, the text was very small and hard to read and one could just get a general understanding of what the layout looked like.
Here is a rundown of questions that were asked before our eyes. Most were able to be answered but there were some errors we saw unfold before our eyes, or as Wolfram said “good we found a bug, that’s why this isn’t released yet.” Answers consisted of a broad range subjects mostly with statistical answers. These statistics may or may not have been exactly what one would be searching for. Because the text was small we only knew what was being displayed by what Wolfram told us what was there, it was possible to make out basic charts and layouts.
Questions
“Serum htl”- returned general medical information
“Medical tests serum html”- returned a breakdown of how much serum isneeded for different body types, ages and other factors.
“Male serum html”- the system could not answer this one.
“Springfield”- figured out the closest Springfield to your geo ip and gave stats for that town.
“Weather in Springfield in 1996”- this worked, or returned something at least, like everything else it was illegible.
“Microsoft Vs. Sun” – compared the two businesses, understood that sun was talking about a company.
“Blue and yellow” – the answer was green.
“C#”- gave information on the musical scales and details surrounding C# in music theory.
“Caffeine”- shows chemical properties such as the molecular weight as well as other statistics and properties.
“Hurricane Andrew Hurricane Katrina” – this question did not work at first he had to adjust his natural language which brings up the question again, how users are going to understand to use the search engine.
“Orange juice”- gave Nutritional breakdown and some other facts
“Weather in Princeton NJ when Curt Garble died” – maybe a loaded question, maybe the most impressive example, probably a bit of both. This gave an answer weather it was right or not the ability we could not see. The ability for the system to understand the multiple chains in impressive.
Other questions which were answered with a page of statistics
“Distance to Moscow”
“Units for measurement”
mathematical questions and physics
“Mortgages”
Job info- similar to dept of labor statistics
“Universities”
cnc machining Jobs in Michigan | Indeed.com
