Trained to identify the varying types of asbestos used in old buildings, Matt Mountain of Mountain Duct Cleaning knows what he’s looking for.

Consumer awareness and opinion of heat pumps are both improving, along with the technology. Manufacturers see a strong market ahead, although some challenges remain.

As HVAC providers, we have the ability to advise homeowners, builders, and property managers on ways to improve their indoor air quality.

The growing electricity demands being placed on the country’s century-old grid are resulting in an increased number of unexpected power outages across the U.S.

It is 2018, and this is not your father’s rooftop equipment. The old, reliable system taking up space on the roof has become so much more.

Every year, The NEWS introduces the latest cooling equipment available for the upcoming summer season in order to help contractors prepare for this busy period by doing the research that will help them to distinguish between brands. The coverage features specific information about each individual product as submitted by the manufacturers.

Last year was a notable one for Testo Inc. as the test and measurement manufacturing company celebrated its 60th anniversary. However, 2018 promises to be just as momentous as Testo US will reach its 35th anniversary milestone.

Learn how HVAC companies can increase retention by giving their employees a stake in the company’s success through phantom stock plans.

AI technology can help HVAC contractors monitor each sales and repair call.

In the seventh installment of this series, we ask if there are any special storage requirements for A2L refrigerants.

Old homes and old HVAC systems bring the potential for asbestos — here’s what HVAC contractors and duct cleaning professionals need to know if they run into it on a jobsite.

Posted by Dave Aitel via Dailydave on Oct 31

In this episode we talk to Christof Ebert about requirements engineering. As the name "engineering" suggests, we need to be systematic when working and managing requirements. Christof will structure RE into several activities, namely elicitation (identifying the relevant requirements), specification (clearly describing requirements), analysis (synthesizing a solution), verification and validation (achieving good requirements quality), comittment (allocating requirements to a project, product release or iteration), and management (keeping track of the implementation status of requirements). In this episode we discuss these activities and highlight lots of practical guidance.

In this episode we talk with Kent Beck about automated unit testing and JUnit.

Recording Venue: Skype Guest: Michael Stonebraker Dr. Michael Stonebraker, one of the leading researchers and technology entrepreneurs in the database space, joins Robert for a discussion of database architecture and the emerging NewSQL family of databases. Dr. Stonebraker opens with his take on how the database market is segmented around a small number of use […]

Nathan Marz is the creator of Apache Storm, a real-time streaming application. Storm does for stream processing what Hadoop does for batch processing. The project began when Nathan was working on aggregating Twitter data using a queue-and-worker system he had designed. Many companies use Storm, including Spotify, Yelp, WebMD, and many others. Jeff and Nathan […]

Robert Blumen talks to Christopher Meiklejohn about conflict-free replicated data types. The discussion covers consistency in distributed systems, CRDTs, and their use in NoSQL databases.

James Cowling of Dropbox tells Robert Blumen about their massive migration from Amazon’s S3 to their own distributed storage system.

Alex Petrov, author of Database Internals explains the ins and outs of database storage engines. What are they? How do they differ? What problems do they solve? Host Adam Gordon Bell spoke with Alex about these questions as well as how information...

Liram Haimovitch talks about how a business handles customer issues with a software product. How issues start out with a dedicated customer-facing team and when they may be escalated to engineering.

Mike Del Balso, co-founder of Tecton discusses Feature Stores which are data platforms to operationalize Machine Learning applications. He talks about challenges faced by teams in creating custom data pipelines to serve models in production...

J.R. Storment and Mike Fuller discuss cloud financial operations (FinOps) with host Akshay Manchale. They consider the importance of a financial operations strategy for cloud-based infrastructure. J.R. and Mike discuss the differences between operating your own data center and running in the cloud, as well as the problems that doing so creates in understanding and forecasting cloud spend. Mike details the Cloud FinOps lifecycle by first attributing organizational cloud spend through showbacks and chargebacks to individual teams and products. JR describes the two levers available for optimization once an organization understands where they're spending their cloud budget. They discuss complexities that arise from virtualized infrastructure and techniques to attribute cloud usage to the correct owners, and close with some recommendations for engineering leaders who are getting started on cloud FinOps strategy.

"The current state of PC case design seems to be comprised of a few design and function features that can be found on just about any modern case. This includes tempered glass side panels, support for vertical video card orientation, and multiple fan and radiator installation options. These features are often mixed and matched, and depending on thei... [PCSTATS]

"Gamerstorm's Macube 310P mid-tower computer case offers great value for money with just a few issues here and there."... [PCSTATS]

The distributed social network Mastodon has grown to 12.8 million user accounts, supporting itself through user donations and a lot of effort by the volunteers running servers. There's no CEO changing the network at whim, no ads and no algorithms that manipulate what you see to increase engagement. Just a scroll of posts by the people you follow pulled from all over the world.

Every Mastodon account has an RSS feed that can be found by going to the user's Mastodon page and adding ".rss" to the URL of that page. For example, the RSS feed for Bonaventure Software is at this address:

https://mastodon.online/@bonaventuresoft.rss

The feeds are valid RSS and use the Media-RSS and Webfeeds namespaces.

The Media-RSS content element contains the photo, audio or video included in the Mastodon post, if one is present:

The Webfeeds icon element holds the URL of the user's avatar:

One potential improvement to the feed would be to add a link element from the Atom namespace to identify the URL of the RSS feed, as in this example:

That might not happen anytime soon. Mastodon is a frenetic open source project with 61 open issues and suggestions involving RSS.

A coalition of progressive groups, including labor organizers, are connecting the dots on climate and the economy in North Carolina GOTV efforts.

From the U.S. to Palestine, Indigenous people have been pushed off their land in the name of conservation. It’s time we decolonize our relationships—with the Earth and each other.

Rio de Janeiro’s Port Zone was once the largest slave port in the Americas. As developers work to “revitalize” the area, Black activists are fighting to retain the remnants of the district’s historical significance.

The United Auto Workers’ union victory in Tennessee was the result of strategic decisions, and could herald a bright future for organized labor in the South.

Women of color want demographic and political representation, just as wealthy white men have had for generations.

looks pretty interesting... I've used flot a little bit but think there's some real promise here

Fake news is everywhere, but what is it and how can you spot it? Watch our video and read useful tips on how you can spot fake news quickly!

It has been more than a year since Russia invaded Ukraine. Ricky went to Ukraine to speak to children there about how the war has affected them. This is his special report, Ukraine: The Children's Story.

Author Nazneen Ahmed Pathak tells Press Packers, Khadija and Jackson, how real history inspires her stories.

A crimewave has shaken one school to the core...and the culprit? Not exactly who, or WHAT you’d expect.

Find out which viral news stories from the US election are real or fake with this quiz.

De-Graft has this week's Happy News to put a smile on your face. We have an enormous Spider-Man, some happy rodents and a feathered duo brightening up a school.

Nina has our weekly dose of Strange news. We've got some cake, some giant masks and some apples in a bath!

Nope you're not seeing double! Take a look at the new wax figure of Mary Earps at Madame Tussauds.

Do you remember Pesto the king penguin chick who reached stardom in September? Zookeepers say he is now entering his "awkward teenage phase".

Help students master important reading skills with a passage about the Pony Express and reading comprehension questions, in this printable warm-up.

The first technique to control harmonic-related problems in the industry involved substantial use of single-tuned filters to offer a low-impedance path to harmonic currents. Interestingly, it is not difficult to find harmonic-producing loads in the megavolt-ampere range in the industry... Read more

The post Six methods to control the flow of harmonic currents and decrease harmonic distortion limits appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Nowadays, if you do not consider harmonics distortion when designing a new network, you missed the whole point of the network design. Yes, really. The sooner you realize that harmonics problems are on the rise, the better. Modern power networks... Read more

The post Practical design knowledge in harmonics distortion and power factor correction (PFC) appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

New Lesson Plans Entry: 'Reporting verbs storytelling and bluff card games' has just been added to the Lesson Plans area of UsingEnglish.com.

Severe weather is the single leading cause of power outages in the United States. Outages caused by severe weather such as thunderstorms, hurricanes and blizzards account for 58 percent of outages observed since 2002 and 87 percent of outages affecting... Read more

The post Billion Dollar Storms vs U.S. Electric Grid appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

The printable daily warm-up helps students master important reading skills with a passage on American history and reading comprehension questions about Betsy Ross.

Nowadays, when we all see and feel the colossal crisis looming on the horizon, the question of energy security is among the first things on the table in each country’s management. It’s now essential more than ever for each country... Read more

The post Electrical engineering for hydropower, from run-of-river to pumped storage plants appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.