By the Numbers – 2008-11-01

$1,738 billion is U.S. manufacturing output, followed, in billions, by Japan at $952, China at $760, Germany at $643, and United Kingdom at $330, rounding out the top five in the “Pocket World in Figures 2008 Edition” from The Economist. www.economist.com .

15 November is the deadline to nominate an automation product newly available in North America between January and November 2008. Learn more about the 2008 Control Engineering Engineers’ Choice Awards at www.controleng.com/awards .

20 programmable logic controller and programmable automation controller products are listed in the September issue posting of the Product Research article on that topic. Of respondents, 92% expect to buy as many or more PLCs/PACs in the next 12 months as they did in the previous 12 months. www.controleng.com

3 companies, as of Oct. 14, tested the Tofino Modbus TCP Enforcer Loadable Security Module, introduced at ISA Expo last month. The cyber security product performs detailed analysis and filtering to improve SCADA security. www.byressecurity.com ; www.mtl-inst.com ; www.modbus.org ; www.controleng.com

88% of Control Engineering survey respondents expect to buy as many or more fuses, circuit breakers, relays, disconnect switches and surge protectors to safeguard their automation controls and instrumentation investments in the next 12 months as they did last year, according to Product Research on power protection devices in this issue. www.controleng.com

20% of U.S. public transit agencies are cutting services due to budget constraints; 46% of population has no access to public transit; and $6,251 is the amount the average two-worker household saves annually by taking public transportation instead of driving a car, says the Environmental Defense Fund. www.edf.org

9 Wikipedia sister projects include Wikiquote (quotations), Wikispecies, Wikibooks (32,552 pages as of Oct. 20) and Wikiversity. www.wikipedia.org

10 hydrogen atoms fit in one nanometer almost exactly. The wavelength of green light is approximately 350 nm. Viruses (or, more correctly, virii) vary in size from a few tens to a few hundreds of nanometers. A DNA molecule is 2.2-2.6 nm wide. Entire DNA molecules, however, are almost big enough to see: up to 73 million nm, or about .075 mm, long. Widths of the smallest structures on the latest Intel microprocessors are about 45 nm. If one micron were blown up to the width of a two-page spread in this magazine, 1 nm would be 1/64 in. wide. For more on nanometer positioning, see cover story in this issue ( www.controleng.com ) and www.wikipedia.org .

14 organizations share how they innovate in the “Innovators” supplement to EDN , which provides insights into the process even as it admits, “Innovation is hard to teach and hard to predict….” www.edn.com/innovate08

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