Model Airplanes

The victor in that race was Joseph Thibodeau, a tax and aviation attorney from Denver and general aviation pilot who, some years earlier, had shown up in Reno as a spectator, joking that when he returned, it would be to race.

Race he would. By the time he passed Vance in the 2007 competition, Thibodeau already was a winner of a 2002 Unlimited race in the Sea Fury, which he had begun to race because the aircraft with its big radial engine was “much more tolerant of harsh conditions” than his first warbird, a P-51D Mustang called Crusader that he had flown in several Unlimited races in the 1990s.

If a telephone interview with Thibodeau were scored like a piece of music, it would proceed mostly mezzo-piano as the discussion covers subject matter such as his career conducting high-profile court cases in criminal tax matters and FAA enforcement action, his background as a counselor to governors and state aviation authorities, his role as a panel attorney for the AOPA Legal Services Plan, and his life as a GA pilot. Ask him about the future of GA and he is upbeat; cover the emerging subject of drones in the airspace and he’s on it, asking whether the interviewer has heard about the recent case of the unmanned aircraft operator who crashed his drone into a giant Ferris wheel in Seattle.

All the while, however, there’s that fortissimo movement waiting to be played—his story of big-iron fighters and roaring engines, of blinding

Article source: http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/All-News/2016/February/17/Unlimited-passion-for-aviation

It should be simple.

Your body is yours. My body is mine.

But parents and society inadvertently send really confusing messages, said Yvonne Cournoyer, prevention program manager at the Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

Every time you ask them to kiss their great aunt and they don’t want to, you unintentionally tell them they have to do things to make other people happy — even if they don’t want to.

Consent is woven into a range of important goals: protecting children from sexual abuse, encouraging them to report abuse if it happens, teaching them how to have healthy relationships, and instilling empathy and respect for others.

People who have these lessons at younger ages are more likely to be assertive, and not be coerced or pressured into sexual activity before it’s something they want, said Peggy LaDue, executive director of the Central Minnesota Sexual Assault Center.

The skills you’re imparting are the skills needed to have healthy relationships, Cournoyer said. In any relationship with another, it’s your responsibility to get permission, negotiate and communicate feelings and resolve conflict.

“We all have to communicate personal boundaries and respect for other people,” she said. That means seeking consent from others, as well.

Teach empathy and the fact that people have their own wants and needs. Everybody doesn’t have to want the same thing you want at the same time. Just as your feelings can be hurt, so can those of others.

Ask them to think about how they would

Article source: http://www.sctimes.com/story/life/wellness/2016/02/20/teach-consent-s-gift-your-kids/80232582/

Come early March, grants worth $300,000 are up for grabs for manufacturers giving year-long access to national lab supercomputing cycles and half the staff hours of computer scientists with domain expertise under a U.S. Department of Energy program called High Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg).

In Phase 1 of the program, manufacturers as large as General Electric and Procter Gamble, and as small as ZoomEssence, won grants to research the reduction of energy consumed in paper-making, cutting coke usage in steel-making, making lighter-weight aircraft and automobiles parts and developing a cloud-based welding simulation tool for industry use.

To apply for an award, companies should monitor the HPC4Mfg site for the Phase 2 grant announcement. Ten grants will be awarded.

The program, which is led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and includes Lawrence Berkeley (LBNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL), gives manufacturers access to some of the most powerful HPC systems in the world.

HPC4Mfg is part of President Obama’s National Strategic Computing Initiative, which calls for public-private partnerships to increase industrial adoption of HPC. Selected projects will apply modeling, simulation and data analysis to industrial products and processes to lower production costs and accelerate development of new clean energy technologies.

Peg Folta

“On the industry side it can be hard to know what capabilities exist and how to work with them,” Peg Folta, director of the HPC4Mfg program at LLNL, told EnterpriseTech.

Article source: http://www.hpcwire.com/2016/02/19/300k-supercomputing-grants-up-for-grabs-for-manufacturers-from-doe/

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, the Pentagon’s long-troubled and costliest weapons program, is now on course to become a success and even a relative bargain, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter says.

“My memory goes back seven years ago to a development program way over cost and way behind” and to “early buys which were too expensive,” Carter, who was the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer at the time, said in an interview. “So we’ve put a lot of effort” into making the fighter jet “what it’s supposed to be: not only the best tactical aircraft in the world but the most affordable.”

While the F-35 program is still projected to cost a record $391.1 billion, getting down the cost per plane is crucial to selling it to buyers abroad. Eleven foreign partners and customers for the fighter include the U.K., Italy, Australia, Norway, Japan and Israel.

The aircraft’s “reputation internationally is now very solid,” Carter said in the interview last week. “There are a lot of buyers and more queuing up to buy.”

Canadian officials, who originally said they wanted to buy as many as 65 aircraft, now want to evaluate it in a competition. Canada’s exit from the program could increase the per-jet cost of the most common model by 1 percent.

Still costly

Production of the fighter jet is being ramped up at Lockheed’s mile-long assembly plant in west Fort Worth, which is undergoing a $1.2 billion reconfiguration. The company expects to produce 53 F-35s this year, up from 45 last year, then

Article source: http://www.star-telegram.com/news/business/article61302387.html