In my August column, “How to Turn Capability Indexes Into Dollars,” and my September column, “The

(Trimble: Sun City, South Africa) -- At the XIV International Congress of the International Society for Mine Surveying in South Africa, Trimble Navigation Ltd. introduced two new advanced features for its Trimble 4D Control software solution for monitoring systems.

(Automation Technology: Bad Oldesloe, Germany ) -- With the new CX-Compact Sensors, Automation Technology presents a new generation of detector-heads for high-speed 3-D scanning.

(Sparta Systems: Holmdel, NJ) -- In the past 12 months, the food and beverage industry has seen major recalls due to contaminants and bacteria present in a multitude of products.

(Optech: Toronto) -- Optech Inc., a  manufacturer of advanced light detection and ranging (LIDAR) survey instruments, has released the new Intelligent Laser Ranging and Imaging System-Long Range (ILRIS-LR).

(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Every day is a metric day at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). But that won’t stop the agency from celebrating Metric Week, held annually the week of Oct. 10—the tenth day of the tenth month.

(CAP: Northfield, IL) -- Medical laboratories and health care organizations increasingly face the challenge of needing to do more with less. Yet, the expectation of continuous high quality patient care—which includes competitively priced fees—remains high.

(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Scientists have long known that time passes faster at higher elevations—a curious aspect of Einstein’s theories of relativity that previously has been measured by comparing clocks on the Earth’s surface and a high-flying rocket.

Jack Welch, the famous and former CEO of General Electric (GE), once said that the markets in which GE competed were “brutally Darwinian.” The expression is apt because competitive markets always enforce a natural selection where only the fittest firms survive.