Gary's Labor Day discussion of automation's impact on jobs plus a quick update of some news in the automation industry.

Gary reports on NI Week, National Instruments' annual user conference. He discusses the large turnout, 25 years of LabView, multicore and FPGA parallel programming with LabView and dataflow programming, and NI's growth into a big company.

Gary reports from the Honeywell User Group in Phoenix June 14. He discusses HPS president Norm Gilsdorf's "business transformation" strategy, recaps some of CTO Jason Urso's presentation and discusses, what else, Honeywell's wireless strategy along with thoughts on ISA100.

Wrap up of the ABB User conference with analysis of ABB and Baldor, report on Packaging Automation Forum thoughts on machine safety and programming standards, and report on the MARTS conference and a dinner to benefit autism awareness.

Gary discusses Invensys and his interview with Operations Management CEO Sudipta Bhattacharya, vision and robotics at Automate 2011, Wes Iversen's retirement and the upcoming Packaging Automation Forum and Maintenance and Reliability Forum.

In this video essay, Gary discusses the disaster in Japan and the resulting hype about nuclear power safety. He salutes the process engineers and operators who are working in a terrible situation to get the plant back on track.

Gary discusses database technology, data connectivity, what today's engineers need to know, OPC UA's future and more software topics with engineers at Inductive Automation.

Gary reports on his trip to the ODVA (www.odva.org) annual meeting including technical updates, security and energy white papers, introduction of Bosch Rexroth as the latest principal member, implementer application and technical visionary information.

Leadership in automation. How the leaders who developed ISA88, ISA95, MIMOSA have left a legacy that is readily apparent in products and applications. Now the ISA100 committee leadership needs to take the steps necessary to bring reconciliation and convergence and finish the standard.

Gary discusses Inder Sidhu's book "Doing Both". He's a Cisco Sr. VP and shows examples of how to do two seemingly contradictory strategies. Also Jon DiPietro's blog Domesticating IT about business strategy death spirals.