This year’s American National Standards Institute Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., “Breaking Down Borders: Business, Standards and Trade,” will be of interest to professionals from business, academia, government and standards developing organizations. Kicking off two days of presentations, panel discussions and breakout sessions will be a keynote address from William H. Lash III, U.S. assistant secretary of Commerce for Market Access and Compliance.

During two panel discussions, international experts from business and government will explore key issues affecting global commerce and trade within the context of standards and conformity assessment activities, and examine facilitation of global trade and harmonization of international regulations and standards. Concurrent breakout sessions will focus on diverse issues such as conformity assessment, government/industry partnerships, standards integration into business strategies, cross-border personnel certification, and integration of standards into university curricula. The conference will close with a luncheon address from James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, a division of the Executive Office of the President. Information on the conference is available on ANSI’s Web site. For information about all World Standards Week events click here.

Ceramics Database

Designers and manufacturing engineers aiming to exploit the high-temperature strength, superior wear resistance, and other potential advantages of ceramic materials now have a valuable free resource to consult: the National Institute of Standards and Technology Structural Ceramics Database. Available on the NIST Web site (click on “evaluated data”), the vastly expanded SCD contains evaluated data on the physical, mechanical, and thermal properties of a wide range of advanced ceramics. The database now holds more than 30,000 numeric values for compounds derived from the ceramic oxide, boride, carbide, nitride, and oxynitride chemical families. References for all data sources are supplied, and the measurement methods used to establish numeric values are described. In addition, the SCD lists materials specifications, including chemical composition and processing details.

Baldrige Award

Benchmarking is one important way to assess your company’s own quality program. Toward that end, the applications of the 2001 Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award winners are now available on the Web. View these to learn more about the winning ways of the five organizations that received the award last year. The applications include each organization’s responses to questions in the seven business categories of the Baldrige performance excellence criteria. Tailored for business, education and health care, the seven categories are: leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, information and analysis, human resource focus, process management, and results.

In addition, a new set of audiovisual materials showcasing the successful strategies of the same five winning organizations has been released. Available on VHS or CD, the programs are available from the American Society for Quality, PO Box 3066, Milwaukee, WI 53201-3066 (800/248-1946).

NEW:Update 2002

The National Educators’ Workshop 2002 (NEW:Update) will be held Oct. 13-16 at San Jose State University. There will be experiments, demonstrations, and special interest sessions, lab tours, and social events. Contact: Jim Jacobs, Norfolk State University, Norfolk, Va. (phone: 757/823-8109). //

Copyright 2002, ASTM