Pardon if I'm wrong, but, methinks, We should cross post to the sci edu
group.
*+- Another thought: what's the chem lab found in every home? The
KITCHEN. In
*+-plant visits course, we went to the old General Foods lab in Tarrytown,
which
*+-used to hire a few of our grads. This is no small thought. My dad's
older
*+-brother is considered to have played a major role in the rise of modern
Greek
*+-science by introducing a rather simple teaching technique for
*+-then-highly-rural students: the school garden.
*+- The other thing is MICROFLUIDICS is changing a lot. You can have
safer
*+-school labs using smaller quanities. When we went to big pharma in my
plant
*+-visits course, there was this huge lab that dropped many antiobiotic
*+-candidates on a matrix of many bacteria. Well, today the entire thing
(high
*+-throughput screening) is the size of my late mom's original Cuisinart.
*+-There's a blood test device (the size of a 1970s home computer) you
find in
*+-every chemotherapy clinic which costs about a hundred grand.
*+- There is a big popular PHOBIA of chem and bio. We need to overcome
it in
*+-order to keep our competitive edge. But also, there is an OLIGOPSONY of
a lot
*+-of the gadetry which keeps it expensive. I was working with some
"energy"
*+-consultants and we got a thirty buck (kill-o-watt, methinks it's
called)
*+-meter you can measure how much every gadget spends in electricity.
Then we
*+-tried to get a similar Doppler meter for HVAC and plumbing and found it
cost
*+-two grand refurb. The blood test device above is cost effective enough
to put
*+-in a lot of group practices, yet they still send out to labs, at much
higher
*+-per-patient cost. We need to encourgae more of a garage mentality in
*+-chem/bio, but the bloody media is our biggest enemy. Folks have no idea
how
*+-much they would save in med costs if we had more such "garages".
*+- Sciplus.com is a cool source for lab supplies.
*+-(I use "guerrilla" management techniques for startups.)
*+-You hit on a serious problem. My NSPE chapter is trying to set up a
program
*+-for HS students. Even the software (CAD, CFD, Sim) is overpriced.
There is a
*+-bit of Freeware (octave.org, sourceforge.net, bloodshed.net,
*+-http://www-rocq.inria.fr/OpenFEM)
out there, though. I would try to
stick
*+-with stuff that works inside a MatLab clone. (Despite Codd&Date's
attempts
*+-on referential integrity two decades ago, the major cost of using
computers
*+-is still transfering data between programs) I've heard it claimed no
one does
*+-pilot plants any more, thanks to simulation, but someone answered, no
one
*+-builds new refineries in the states anyways. 5dollarsoftware.com has
an EE
*+-CD with an early free trial version of IntelliCAD, compat w AutoCAD
2000.
*+-COADE CADWorx it's not, though.
- = -
Vasos Panagiotopoulos, Columbia'81+, Reagan, Mozart, Pindus,
BioStrategist
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/vjp2/vasos.htm
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
[Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards]
[Urb sprawl confounds terror] [Remorse begets zeal] [Windows is for
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