The Canadian Standards Association (CSA) announced today the launch of Quality at work: an introduction to Quality Management ISO 9001, an on-line training tool available free to organizations around the world who want to learn more about the characteristics and advantages of quality management system.
The announcement was made at the World Congress of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) focuses on the theme of quality improvement.

             

E-learning tool  (free9000)

              

       

The revision process for ISO 9001 is designed such that whenever there are significant changes to be made (major revision), the next revision will be less significant (minor). Since the revisions issued in 2000 were major, it follows that the next one will be minor. Indeed, the proposed changes are more based on the clarification of points already in the standard rather than the inclusion of new requirements.

     

ISO 9001: 2000 review  (ClarkQuality-Lrqa)

              

     

More than anything, Ghosn wants to be prepared rather than try to predict: "We can't know what consumers will want 10 years out." But generally he is betting on smaller engines, smaller vehicles, and higher fuel economy due to the probable rise in gas prices.

In green technology, he is stressing all-electric vehicles (EVs) more than gas-electric hybrids: "People used to think electric cars were ugly, hard to drive, and unsafe, but it's completely different now." The goal is to build a lineup of EVs starting in 2012.

              

Renault Ceo forcast  (BusinessWeek)

                             

                    

The technology has faced criticism over the past year as an over-hyped technology that isn't as reliable as High-Speed Packet Access 3G technology, and even as a "disaster" by Garth Freeman, the CEO of Australian WiMAX operator Buzz Broadband, who described problems such as latency, jitter and poor indoor service.

               

Wimax today   (Networkworld)

               

                 

The pharmaceutical industry maintains its strength in innovation by the growing number of valuable new products during the last quarter of 2007. US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has allowed no fewer than seven new drugs between October and December on a total of eighteen approvals.

Among the products which should have a significant effect on the market, Fitch raised the antithrombotic Effient (Eli Lilly and Sankyo), a rival of Plavix (4 billion dollars turnover in USA in 2007) of Sanofi Aventis.

Fitch survey   (Lemonde) (Fr.)

                    

             

EDF Energies Nouvelles announces the signing of a photovoltaic panel supply master agreement with Nanosolar and a $50 million investment (€31 million) in the company via EDF Energies Nouvelles Réparties.

Nanosolar is a global leader in solar power innovation. Nanosolar's solar electricity panels deliver unparalleled cost efficiency, enabling customers to use green power without paying more. The main founders of Google "Larry Page and Sergey Brin" are shareholders of Nanosolar.

Silicon Valley based Nanosolar uses innovative technology to manufacture thin-film photovoltaic cells of Copper-Indium-Gallium-Selenide (CIGS) using a printing deposition process. Under the master supply agreement, EDF Energies Nouvelles will gain access from 2009 onwards to part of Nanosolar's production of solar panels.

                

Edf-Nanosolar agreement   (Berlinews.de)

       

Technology  (Nanosolar)

                 

                 
"Cyber-Sight" is a means for connecting people via the internet in their efforts to provide quality eye care leading ultimately to the elimination of avoidable blindness. For 25 years ORBIS has been assisting ophthalmologists and other eye health care providers around the world, initially with the world’s only flying eye hospital (FEH) and now with the addition of hospital based programs, and 5 permanent “in country programs”.

The stimulus for "Cyber-Sight" was the perceived need to add continuity to a long series of successful but time limited projects. With Cyber-Sight, ORBIS can now achieve extended presence meaning that contact with those served is not limited by how long the FEH is in place or how long a hospital program lasts. The program is available to all qualified ophthalmologists in the developing countries and needs the support of any qualified ophthalmologist who wishes to donate his/her time and expertise.

           

Orbis "Cyber-Sight" (Orbis)

                 

       

Hidden in the mountains, a new megalopolis is built at breakneck speed. When Chongqing awakes, nothing can stop China.

11 years ago, with 32 million inhabitants, Chongqing has become "the largest city in the world". But we must keep quotes, for the moment.

Tokyo remains the most populous city, with 12.4 million inhabitants. Chongqing is in fact the latest town production from the chinese Communist Party, which has expanded an area of eight million city-dwellers to include the surrounding countryside, where 24 million peasants have been crammed.

      

City of Chongging (Yu)  (lactualite.com) (Fr.)

                

                

To maximise computing horsepower, software makers as "Micrososft" will need to change how software programmers work. Only a handful of programmers in the world know how to write software code in such a way as to divide computing tasks into chunks that can be processed at the same time, instead of a traditional, linear, one-job-at-a-time approach.

  

A new programming language would be required, and it could affect how almost every piece of software is written.
The shift to parallel computing was born out of necessity, after processor speeds ran into heat and power limitations, forcing the semiconductor industry to assemble multiple cores on a single chip.

      

CRSO's Microsoft view   (news.zdnet.co.uk)

    

Intel's blogger view (blogs.intel)

      

Learn more (computing.llnl.gov)

      

           

The German Agency for renewable raw materials and European partners to back up transnational projects.

   

The ongoing call of projects focuses on the areas of enzymes, bacteria, Biopolymers, biomonomères and improving technological processes.
A detailed list of topics is available in the official Projects tender text, can be reached on the website of the FNR (Fachagentur Nachwachsende Rohstoffe).

To be financially supported, the projects should contain several themes, and involve agencies from countries , at least three, as a tender participant.

              

Project tender   (bulletins-electroniques)

          

     

To cope with their duty for collecting and recycling electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) produced and marketed, the producers have brought together into french eco-certified agency such Eco-logic, ERP, Eco-system and Récylum who is more specific, dealing with recycling lamps. These french agency ensure treatment, valorization, and products disposal through out distributors or the involvement of local community.

           

Recycling EEE   (Actu-environnement)

      

          

To holistically measure overall vendor performance and value (overall value = tangible metrics + intangible metrics), a "balanced scorecard" is an ideally structured methodology. It looks at a number of weighted metrics both collectively and individually, and gauges how a vendor's performance-to-metrics is helping achieve the business goals of an organization, such as IT.

         
From overall vendor performance measurement and value-for-money attributes, the balanced scorecard methodology examines four elements of performance: relationship, cost management, quality and delivery. Depending on the organization's needs and concerns, each of these elements will likely have multiple different measurements.

        

The Balanced Scorecard  (cio.com)

               

        

Researchers say that the field of ecotoxicology and environmental risk assessment of nanomaterials is still in its infancy after less than a decade of concerted effort.

And while snapshots from short-term exposure studies are yielding tantalizing glimpses now, the whole picture provided by long-term data on more subtle effects of nanomaterials is completely missing.

New methods and collaborations could bring more definitive information soon. Until then, efforts to understand the hazards of nanomaterials continue in a piecemeal fashion.

        

The hazards of nanomaterials  (enn.com)

                

                   

Microsoft will allow free and unrestricted access to all documentation protocols or APIs. Tomorrow, the group will put online on MSDN site nearly 30000 pages of technical documentation previously available only in the form of agreement from secret sharing.

               

Microsoft new strategy  (cubic)

                 

             

This is the seventh edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). The EIS is the instrument developed at the initiative of the European Commission, under the Lisbon Strategy, to provide a comparative assessment of the innovation performance of EU Member States.

The EIS 2007 includes innovation indicators and trend analyses for the EU27 Member States as well as for Croatia, Turkey, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Japan......

Tables with definitions as well as comprehensive data sheets for every country are included in the Annexes.

            

Innovation Survey indicators  (proinno-europe.eu)

             

          

The cost of sending a text message and using the mobile internet abroad is likely to fall after the European telecoms commissioner, Viviane Reding, said yesterday she will impose price cuts if Europe's mobile phone companies do not drop their charges significantly by the summer.

    

SMS at low cost  (guardian)

                  

    

A new chip uses so little power, it could enable sensors, communication devices and other gadgets that run on body heat and movement alone.
Better circuit design and batteries have already led to smaller, more-mobile electronics. But changing a battery is not an option for many medical and military devices. Military researchers at Darpa, which helped fund the MIT work, are keen to increase the lifespan of these technologies or even eliminate the need to charge them.

  

Military strategists imagine these types of low-power chips could be used in the battlefield, particularly in body and environmental sensors. Among more mundane uses, Nokia is looking at low-voltage chips for use in cellphones and computers. Intel also has a low-power-chip research unit.

     
Body-heat & Technologies  (wired)

                

               

One company that is doing that kind of demonstration right now is Vattenfall, Sweden’s national energy company, in Stockholm. It’s building a novel clean-coal plant in southeastern Germany, in a town called Schwarze Pumpe. The approach Vattenfall will test and evaluate at the 30-megawatt facility—a technology called oxyfuel, or sometimes oxyfiring—is not the one most favored by students of carbon capture. But it appealed to Vattenfall partly because of its disarming simplicity.

           

The approach Vattenfal  (spectrum.ieee.org)

                   

               

W3C announced the publication of SPARQL, the key standard for opening up data on the Semantic Web. With SPARQL query technology, pronounced "sparkle," people can focus on what they want to know rather than on the database technology or data format used behind the scenes to store the data. Because SPARQL queries express high-level goals, it is easier to extend them to unanticipated data sources, or even to port them to new applications.

           

Sparql  (w3.org)

               

        

The acquisition accelerates Sun's position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today's announcement reaffirms Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

              

Sun & MySQL  (sun.com)

            

     

Reader feedback and good shaped global answer:

To the reader, virtualization is a way of connecting two objects (not even necessarily computational objects) that are not designed to be connected to each other.

Imagine object A and object C.Object A is designed to be connected to D and Object C, to E. You would like them to work together in some fashion but right now they don't. So what you do is invent object B and slip it between A and C. Object B makes C look like D to A and makes A look like E to C. That is Virtualization. It is a very very general idea that will be a big deal for a long time.

     

What is virtualization?  (cio.com)

   

Virtualization in 2008   (LeMondeInformatique) (Fr. lang.)

    

          

STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the signing of a cooperation agreement covering the development of technological processes CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) sized 32 nanometres (nm) and 22 nm in geometry.

It also includes design techniques and advanced research required for the manufacture of silicon wafers to 300 mm. The agreement covers both the basic CMOS technology and the technologies derived value-added for system-on-chip (SoC).

    

IBM & STMicro partnership (STM) (Fr. lang.)

      

                    

Enormous vendor consolidation has changed the enterprise application landscape forever. But there's more change and uncertainty on the horizon for CIOs. Here's what you can expect and what you should do:

    

* More Application Vendor Consolidation Ahead in 2008,
* The Rise of the Vendor Ecosystem,
* Fierce Competition Continues,
* We Know About the Goliaths. Don't Forget About the Davids,
* What's to Come of Enterprise License Maintenance Fees?
* The Supply Chain Gets Even More Wireless—and Dangerous.

    

Enterprise Application Trends  (cio.com)

         

      

Metrics for judging the success of application-development projects are too complex for many organisations to understand, according to a survey commissioned by software firm Borland and carried out by Forrester Consulting.

    
According to the research, two factors "conspire to deter application-development organisations from attempting to improve their metrics programmes". The first factor is the cost and complexity involved in collecting data for the metrics; and the second factor is over-reliance on what Forrester calls "superficial metrics".

   

Application-Development Tolls (zdnet.uk.co)

    

Forrester Survey (Registration required) (Borland.com)