This section was written by Associate Editor Jean Thilmany
 

Track Down a Table

Scientists looking to track down a particular table within a mass of journals and documents will soon have a specialized search engine to aid in the hunt.

The search engine, developed by researchers at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., identifies and extracts tables from documents created in the portable document format. It indexes and ranks the table-search results by title, text reference, and date of publication.

Why is such a search engine useful?

Tables are an important data resource for researchers. In a search of 10,000 documents from journals and conferences, the Penn State researchers found that more than 70 percent of papers in chemistry, biology, and computer science included tables. Many included multiple tables, said Prasenjit Mitra, an assistant professor at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.

Existing software can't search for tables across documents, Mitra said. That means scientists and scholars must browse documents manually to find tables.

The engine, TableSeer, can be tested online at http://chemxseer.ist.psu.edu. The source code will be available when the project nears completion, Mitra said.

Digitized virtual worlds have blossomed in recent years, what with the wide variety of games, shared digital media, and social networks available now. And with that growth comes a spate of academic interest and studies.

"The fusion of virtual and physical worlds for advanced communications represents a new field of interdisciplinary inquiry," said Byron Reeves. He's a Stanford University communications professor and co-founder of Media X and the Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute.

Online computer games like the World of Warcraft let players speak and interact via the Web while they play. The growing popularity of interactive, virtual communities has piqued academic interest, with many professors looking at how to best use these communities within their own area of academic interest.

Media X brings together academic researchers and industry partners to study interactive communications and technology. Academics come from diverse fields that include communication, engineering, humanities, law, medicine, business, and design, said Keith Devlin, Media X's other co-founder.

The institute offers yearlong grants to support research into how people use and share information and collaborate in virtual worlds.

This year, for example, three Stanford computer science and electrical engineering professors will be looking to develop virtual sensor nets. Those instruments, once developed, will continually measure the goings-on in virtual worlds while still allowing users their privacy.

Two professors of civil and environmental engineering will also be using their Media X grant this year to begin developing an interactive textbook. Such a book could capture the questions and thoughts of textbook users and communicate among the learner, instructor, expert, or author, according to Kincho Law, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and a grant recipient.

After applying design for manufacture and assembly techniques to their supply chains, 68 percent of a survey group measured an increase in production throughput and 47 percent measured an increase in profit per specific unit of factory floor space, according to a recent survey conducted by Boothroyd Dewhurst Inc. of Wakefield, R.I.

The software maker has developed the concept of DFMA software, which it produces. As engineers design, DFMA software allows them to see the cost and the effects of their design decisions and to adjust them accordingly.

According to Boothroyd Dewhurst, respondents to the survey included Dell, Motorola, TRW Automotive, Raytheon, MDS Analytical Technologies, Magna International (automotive seating), and other American manufacturers.

"We achieved a 300 percent increase in profit per square foot of factory floor space by taking a lot of cost and labor out of the product using DFMA tools," said Mike Shipulski, director of engineering at Hypertherm Inc. in Hanover, N.H. The company makes plasma-cutting technology.

"Everyone in industry recognizes the limitations of using traditional cost accounting methods to identify overhead savings outside the areas of directly applied labor and materials," Shipulski said.

The full report can be downloaded at http://www.dfma.com/downstream/.

Everyone talks about nanoscale devices, says a researcher at Georgia Tech, and so his team is at work on a method to power them.

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have prototyped a nanometer-scale generator, which produces continuous direct-current electricity by using mechanical energy produced from sources like ultrasonic waves, mechanical vibration, or blood flow.

After much computer simulation, they've produced tiny generators based on arrays of vertically aligned zinc-oxide nanowires that move inside a zigzag plate electrode, according to Zhong Lin Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering at Georgia Tech.

"There has been a lot of interest in making nanodevices, but we have tended not to think about how to power them," Wang said.

"Our nanogenerator allows us to harvest or recycle energy from many sources to power these devices."

Wang and his group expect that their nanogenerator could one day produce as much as four watts per cubic centimeter. That's enough energy to power a range of nanometer-scale defense, environmental, and biomedical applications, such as biosensors implanted in the body or environmental monitors.

And they could have other uses.

"If you had a device like this in your shoes, when you walked you would be able to generate your own small current to power small electronics," Wang said.

The motion of your feet would make the nanowires move within the generator to produce power.

Purchasing the parts that will eventually join to make a complex product can be just that—complex. But now a number of new applications are helping to streamline the ordering process.

To find and price parts and assemblies fast, New York Air Brake turns to online configurators from suppliers like Assured Automation. These configurators allow engineers to price and configure necessary parts via the Web.

Just ask David Griffiths, an engineer at New York Air Brake. The Watertown, N.Y., company makes railroad brake systems. Because Griffiths relies on his supply chain partners to configure and price parts quickly, he no longer uses the manual processes of yore. Those processes involved consulting large catalogs and all too often resulted in unacceptable order errors and long lead times to complete quotes, he said.

Instead, New York Air Brake uses online configurators that automate the disparate manual processes typically associated with supply-chain configuration, pricing, and quoting.

Here's how the configurators work for New York Air Brake:

To create a valve assembly for purchase, Griffiths selects a valve, actuator, and related accessories from a visual list on the configurator's Web site. He assembles the parts on the computer, generates the part numbers, and gets the price. Once he has selected the valve assembly, he downloads the 3-D CAD models, installation and maintenance manuals, and full sets of data sheets. He can also use the configurator's Web site as a virtual file cabinet or bookshelf to save selected parts for later.

New York Air Brake uses configurators from Assured Automation of Clark, N.J., and A.R. Wilfley & Sons of Denver for many of its supplied parts.

"In my experience, online configurators give me back the one thing that I have less of: time. I save as much as eight hours a week," Griffiths said.

Before Griffiths had access to online configurators, he referenced several volumes of catalogs from multiple suppliers to find the correct parts. He also made phone calls to get the exact product number, price, and purchase order numbers.

"The configurators are much better than lugging around all of those big books," he said. "And I find the animated views of the assemblies very helpful when explaining my designs to my colleagues."

Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif., has released its frame generator customization tool for use with the Autodesk Inventor 2008 family of software products. The tool lets users add custom structural profiles to Inventor's frame generator tool.

A maker of jetting photopolymer, Objet Geometries Ltd. of Rehovot, Israel, has released PolyJet Matrix Technology, which allows the simultaneous jetting of different types of model materials. The material is used to create 3-D prototypes from CAD files, according to the developer.

Synergis Software of Quakertown, Pa., is shipping its Adept 7 document management software, which is integrated with SolidWorks and Autodesk applications and supports Windows Vista.

The Open Design Alliance of Phoenix has made its DWGdirect 2.5 Beta available to all members. This application gives members an early look at DWGdirect libraries. New features include annotation scaling, drawing-file underlay, and partial screen updates.

Wolfram Research of Champaign, Ill., has a series of add-ons for Mathematica 6. The add-ons, from third-party developers, extend Mathematica's usefulness, according to the developer.