Sometimes, walking away from a risky technology project is the better part of valor. Here are five handy rules for avoiding "ratholes."
Business history can be highly misleading. Why? It's written by the winners. Historians spend careers studying the making of the atomic bomb, but not the making of the atomic-powered plane (a spectacular Air Force failure). Research managers analyze DuPont's development of nylon, not Coca-Cola's creation of New Coke (a dud).
We need to pay more attention to the losers, because they can help us understand why innovators fail and when engineers should fold a project. I was reminded of this recently when Boeing, the world's leading aircraft maker, announced the cancellation of a planned supersonic aircraft that promised to carry 300 passengers from Los Angeles to Tokyo in four hours and 20 minutes.
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Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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