7 “Tips for Strategizing Holiday Office Schedules” include some fair-minded pointers for short-staffed workplaces, including rotating from year to year who gets blocks of time off during the holidays and sharing must-do responsibilities. www.allbusiness.com

>40 videos, more than 40 hours total, show various manufacturing processes, courtesy of the Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford University. The “How Everyday Things Are Made” site is great for getting people excited about careers in manufacturing. (High-speed connection is recommended.) manufacturing.stanford.edu

3,785 x gallons per minute (GPM) = cubic centimeters (cc) per minute. Other liquid flowmeter calculations are available on the correction formulae and sizing page at www.kinginstrumentco.com.

445 trillion calculations per second (445 teraflops) is the speed of IBM’s Blue Gene/P computer recently delivered to Argonne National Laboratory. www.anl.gov

12 Founding Partner organizations, IBM, and the National Engineers Week Foundation formed the Engineers Week Diversity Council, “seeking to broaden the ranks of women and underrepresented minorities at all levels of engineering.” Engineers Week 2008 is Feb. 17-23. www.eweek.org

>90% wire cost savings (about $100,000) was realized in wire cost, time, and labor to route and terminate an Engle Printing & Publishing Co. automation installation using CC-Link. www.cc-link.com

6 tools for manufacturers are listed at Manufacturing.gov. The site “shows the ideas and innovation that the U.S. Government is working to develop for the future of the American worker.” As of Nov. 19, the top item in the news section was dated May 4, 2007. www.manufacturing.gov

2,349,636 square foot McCormick Place Center West Expansion in Chicago hopes to attract new business for its $850 million price tag. Among first customers was Rockwell Automation’s Automation Fair 2007. www.mccormickplace.com, www.epstein-isi.com, www.automationfair.com

4 million U.S. businesses will, by law, be required to respond to an every five-year census by Feb. 12, 2008. Watch for your forms from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Economic and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau. business.census.gov.

20% average energy loss can be attributed to running pumps off their ideal operating point (without variable speed control), said William Adams of Flowserve Corp. (www.flowserve.com), at the IEEE Industrial Energy Efficiency Workshop in Baltimore, MD. For more on the conference from Frank Bartos, search “energy” at www.controleng.com.