MSU’s Extension’s Beef Production program supports Michigan’s beef industry through research, education, and outreach to enhance producer profitability, sustainability, and quality of life. It focuses on key areas like nutrition, genetics, grazing management, health, reproduction, and economics. Notable efforts include advancing grass-fed beef systems, feedlot management, and beef x dairy crossbreeding.
Conducted at facilities such as the Lake City and Upper Peninsula Research Farms, the program offers workshops, resources (e.g., pricing tools, disease prevention guides), and youth education via 4-H market beef projects and family recipes.
Our Master Gardeners are wrapping up a great educational tour of Alberta and British Columbia, Canada. They participated in learning opportunities at Canadian National Parks, agricultural sites, and gardens, and gained a better understanding of Indigenous and Asian cultures. pic.twitter.com/47jcrlYJfv
Introduction. [Abstract]. The rapid growth of data centers, with their enormous energy and water demands, necessitates targeted policy interventions to mitigate environmental impacts and protect local communities. To address these issues, states with existing data center tax breaks should adopt sustainable growth policies for data centers, mandating energy audits, strict performance standards, and renewable energy integration, while also requiring transparency in energy usage reporting. “Renewable energy additionality” clauses should ensure data centers contribute to new renewable capacity rather than relying on existing resources. If these measures prove insufficient, states should consider repealing tax breaks to slow unsustainable data center growth. States without tax breaks should avoid such incentives altogether while simultaneously implementing mandatory reporting requirements to hold data centers accountable for their environmental impact. Broader measures should include protecting local tax revenues for schools, regulating utility rate hikes to prevent cost-shifting to consumers, and aligning data center energy demands with state climate goals to avoid prolonging reliance on fossil fuels.
The rapid growth of data centers presents genuine challenges to electric power systems: very large concentrated loads, accelerated interconnection schedules, new transmission requirements and concern over who ultimately pays for the necessary infrastructure. These problems deserve careful attention, but they are fundamentally engineering problems — and therefore problems capable of engineering solutions.
Electrical power systems have repeatedly adapted to new classes of load. Electrification of industry, air conditioning, electric heating and large computing facilities each altered planning assumptions in their time. Data centers will do the same.
Power engineers are already developing better methods for load forecasting, staged interconnection, demand response, energy storage, on-site generation and microgrids. Data centers themselves can become more flexible loads, reducing consumption during stressed grid conditions rather than operating continuously at maximum demand. Improved transmission planning, advanced protection and controls and better coordination between utilities, system operators and large customers will further reduce adverse effects.
The present difficulties should therefore not be mistaken for permanent conditions. Engineering practice evolves when operating experience reveals new constraints. The extraordinary concentration of electrical demand created by artificial intelligence will test the grid, but it will also accelerate improvements in how large loads are designed, connected, controlled and supplied.
1. Build vertically — Stack rack “white space” across three to five floors, including one or two below grade, to reduce building footprint and land consumption.
2. Make architecture an asset — Treat the exterior as an architectural statement appropriate to its community rather than as an anonymous industrial enclosure.
3. Support municipal infrastructure — Design electrical and standby-generation capacity to support critical municipal loads, including water and wastewater systems during major regional contingencies.
4. Co-locate emergency management functions — Provide space and resilient infrastructure for local or regional emergency management operations.
5. Provide community swing space — Incorporate adaptable space that can support sports, recreation and other community uses when not required for primary facility operations.
A data center need not be only a data center.A very large, extraordinarily well-powered and resilient building can return some of that resilience to the community hosting it.
Overdoor, France, ca. 1825; | Smithsonian Design Museum
Education communities have significant food safety responsibilities. Risk gets pushed around global food service counterparties; a drama in itself and one that requires coverage in a separate blog post.*
Since 2013 we have been following the development of food safety standards; among them ANSI/NSF 2: Food Equipment one of a constellation of NSF food safety titles whose provisions cover bakery, cafeteria, kitchen, and pantry units and other food handling and processing equipment such as tables and components, counters, hoods, shelves, and sinks. The purpose of this Standard is to establish minimum food protection and sanitation requirements for the materials, design, fabrication, construction, and performance of food handling and processing equipment.
It is a relatively stable standard; developed to support conformance revenue for products. A new landing page seems to have emerged in recent months:
Manufacturers are required to meet the NEC and CEC electrical codes to have their food equipment sold and used in the United States and Canada. Watch our video for more details. pic.twitter.com/d0vUf4zUl2
Not trivial agendas with concepts that cut across several disciplines involving product manufacture, installation, operation and maintenance. We find a very strong influence of organizations such as Aramark and Sodexo. More on that in a separate post.
This committee – along with several other joint committees –meets frequently online. If you wish to participate, and receive access to documents that explain the scope and scale of NSF food safety standards, please contact Allan Rose, (734) 827-3817, arose@nsf.org. NSF International welcomes guests/observers to nearly all of its standards-setting technical committees. We expect another online meeting hosted by this committee any day now.
Keep in mind that all NSF International titles are on the standing agenda of our Nourriture (Food) colloquia; open to everyone. See our CALENDAR for the next meeting.
40 years ago today, “The Big Chill,” a movie about a group of U-M grads written and directed by alum Lawrence Kasdan, debuted in theaters. 🎥 pic.twitter.com/fUVDNGXSNW
— Alumni Association of the University of Michigan (@michiganalumni) September 28, 2023
“Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses. The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.”
Abstract: One of the most common questions in the early stages of designing a new facility is whether the normal utility supply to a fire pump is reliable enough to “tap ahead of the main” or whether the fire pump supply is so unreliable that it must have an emergency power source, typically an on-site generator. Apart from the obligation to meet life safety objectives, it is not uncommon that capital on the order of 100000to1 million is at stake for a fire pump backup source. Until now, that decision has only been answered with intuition – using a combination of utility outage history and anecdotes about what has worked before. There are processes for making the decision about whether a facility needs a second source of power using quantitative analysis. Fault tree analysis and reliability block diagram are two quantitative methods used in reliability engineering for assessing risk. This paper will use a simple one line for the power to a fire pump to show how each of these techniques can be used to calculate the reliability of electric power to a fire pump. This paper will also discuss the strengths and weakness of the two methods. The hope is that these methods will begin tracking in the National Fire Protection Association documents that deal with fire pump power sources and can be used as another tool to inform design engineers and authorities having jurisdiction about public safety and property protection. These methods will enlighten decisions about the relative cost of risk control with quantitative information about the incremental cost of additional 9’s of operational availability.
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New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwBpic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
