Nancy Bartels is Control's managing editor. You can her at
[email protected] or check out her
Google+ profile.This summer, I'm spending a good deal of time with Abigail Adams, one of our amazing Founding Mothers. While her husband, John, was busy practicing sedition and serving as one of our fledgling country's overseas representatives, Abigail, the parson's daughter from Weymouth, Mass., who had no formal education whatever, was raising five children and successfully managing the family finances, investments and her own small business. She also carried on a voluminous correspondence, not only with family members, but also with the likes of Thomas Jefferson on topics ranging from colonial politics to family gossip to the superiority of the French to the English theater in the 1780s. She would go on to become First Lady. She was one tough, savvy, spirited sister—and she had absolutely nothing to do with process automation.
She gets a mention here simply because I'm listening to her biography in the car. (Abigail Adams, by Woody Holton, Simon & Schuster, 2009). Like most Americans, I spend too much time driving from one place to another, but once I discovered the virtues of the CD and, later, the MP3 player, all that time sitting in traffic is more productive. Instead of repetitive traffic reports and annoying "Top 40" or "Golden Oldie" stations, I can listen to biographies, novels, commentary, even college courses. The podcast is a beautiful thing.
If your tastes run more toward process automation than biographies or novels, ControlGlobal can help. We have more than 200 podcasts on subjects ranging from the RS-485 standard to "Upgrading Your DCS with No BS." We also cover everything from process security to best practices in industrial networking. Flow measurement, asset management, calibration, process analyzers and just about every other process automation topic get a nod in one of our podcasts.
Some of these many podcasts are produced here at the Process Automation Media Network. Others are produced by vendors. Every month a podcast associated with the cover story for that month becomes available. All are free.
Just go to the ControlGlobal home page at http://www.controlglobal.com/ and click on the "Multimedia" tab at the top of the page. That will take you to a complete list of all our available podcasts.
Good parson's daughter that she was, Mrs. Adams disapproved strongly of wasting time. I think she would have liked the idea of the podcast—a way of turning "downtime" to productive use.
