The following article has been donated by Marcie E. Stoker of Everdrive.com, a leading used auto parts, Ford parts, and Honda parts provider.
An Ignition System's Insides and Outs
The purpose of your car's monstrous ignition system is to time a spark that ignites gas at the precise moment needed to power your engine. Several different parts work together to make this happen. Your car's engine is basically a huge pump. Air and gas are pumped in, producing energy that turns the tires and moves the vehicle. That's an oversimplification, but sufficient for learning how the components of the system work. Below, I'll briefly describe the parts involved and take you through the process of igniting the gas and powering your engine.
Parts And Their Jobs
Your ignition system is comprised of spark plugs, a distributor (and cap), rotor, and coil. The coil is what transforms an electrical current from your car battery into a spark. When the coil successfully creates a spark (and it needs to be potent enough to actually ignite the fuel), the spark is transferred to your car's distributor. The reason it's called a distributor is because it spins and allocates the sparks from the coil to multiple spark plugs. It does that through the rotor.
The rotor spins with the distributor and contacts the cylinders of the engine. When it does this, it transfers the sparks to the spark plug wires. At this point, the spark has nearly traveled to where it needs to be. Each of the spark plug wires is attached to the distributor cap through its own contact point. Those wires send the spark directly to the spark plugs which are mounted in your car's cylinder head. When the gases from the fuel flow into the cylinder, the spark ignites them, causing combustion.
The process I've just described happens over and over, tens of thousands of times while your car is in operation.
A Seamless System
Your ignition system is most effective when the sparks are precisely timed. In the past, this was done by employing a points-and-condenser module to tell the distributor when to allocate the sparks to the spark plugs. Today, most cars are equipped with computers (called ignition modules) that control the timing. They do so by notifying your car's engine control unit about the placement of the pistons. If an ignition module fails, it's usually necessary to replace it.
Over the past few years, manufacturers have begun experimenting with "distributorless" ignition systems. Rather than a single coil creating the sparks needed to ignite the fuel, each spark plug has its own coil. That effectively eliminates the need for the distributor. It's still considered a young technology, but holds significant promise.
The Lasting Value of Gold
No substance of value has held its worth, allure, and esteem longer than gold. No substance or animal creature on Earth. You know what that means: move over cockroach, gold's got your number. Gold is found in prehistoric burial sites, in jewelry designs all through the holy land, and in modern-day electronic circuitry like circuit breakers and buttered-up computer chips. Gold can also be found in recent investment reports noting that it topped out at more than $1,050 an ounce in mid-March, up from $680 a year ago. Although it dipped to $888 late in April, it has had a wondrous run, up from $349 nearly five years ago.
Gold's history is long and storied. There was a time, believe it or not, that Americans didn't have the right to sell coins of the golden variety. Except as jewelry, Americans were not allowed to own gold or sell gold from 1933 to 1975. When the ban was lifted, the controversial government-set price of $35 an ounce was abandoned and gold skyrocketed to its 1980 peak. During this ban, American citizens were still able to sell silverware, but for obvious reason, this didn't satisfy them as much as dealing with gold. For many years after 1975, it was difficult for ordinary investors like you and me to trade gold. Only the power brokers could do it. An old piece of jewelry could be sold to a pawnshop or some other dealer, but for far less than its true value. Some firms sold gold coins, but they often were marketed as collectibles for prices exceeding the value of the gold inside them. Once a gold stake was acquired, they had to deal with the hassle and expense of storing it. This era is now a forgotten dream, and it's unlikely that we'll ever see it again.
The Lasting Value of Gold
No substance of value has held its worth, allure, and esteem longer than gold. No substance or animal creature on Earth. You know what that means: move over cockroach, gold's got your number. Gold is found in prehistoric burial sites, in jewelry designs all through the holy land, and in modern-day electronic circuitry like circuit breakers and buttered-up computer chips. Gold can also be found in recent investment reports noting that it topped out at more than $1,050 an ounce in mid-March, up from $680 a year ago. Although it dipped to $888 late in April, it has had a wondrous run, up from $349 nearly five years ago.
Gold's history is long and storied. There was a time, believe it or not, that Americans didn't have the right to sell coins of the golden variety. Except as jewelry, Americans were not allowed to own gold or sell gold from 1933 to 1975. When the ban was lifted, the controversial government-set price of $35 an ounce was abandoned and gold skyrocketed to its 1980 peak. During this ban, American citizens were still able to sell silverware, but for obvious reason, this didn't satisfy them as much as dealing with gold. For many years after 1975, it was difficult for ordinary investors like you and me to trade gold. Only the power brokers could do it. An old piece of jewelry could be sold to a pawnshop or some other dealer, but for far less than its true value. Some firms sold gold coins, but they often were marketed as collectibles for prices exceeding the value of the gold inside them. Once a gold stake was acquired, they had to deal with the hassle and expense of storing it. This era is now a forgotten dream, and it's unlikely that we'll ever see it again.
Title: Software Estimation and Controlled Risk
I’ve written before on the predictive nature of estimation software. Using cost estimating software products as project management software can help show you aspects of your project which you haven’t accounted for, particularly things like risk.
You can't take that leap back
However, software estimation products can do more than highlight areas which you haven’t seen, they can also peer around the corner and show that which you haven’t done yet. Through the software’s rather developed, and mathematically sound, understanding of your project, that understanding can be leveraged towards making theoretical changes.
Think about it this way, software estimation project management software allows you, the project manager to play the “What if…” game. What if I doubled my workforce? What if I reduced everyone’s workload by 10%? What if deadlines were all extended by 10%? What if I assigned every part of the project to just one person?
The questions can seem trivial, even comical, however they point to a very interesting application for such software – they ability to control, limit, and even potentially mitigate risk. The questions I just posed all center around one significant area – the sharing of a workload to make a project easier on employees.
How does making project members work easier help to control risk? Well, for one thing, for projects which are heavily dependent on multiple deadlines all being satisfied in a particular order, specifically where one group is waiting on the work of another, each deadline represents a potential point of failure. By making deadlines easier to achieve, the risk of failure is thus avoided.
Of course, deadlines represent just one area of risk. I like to use them as an example because hard deadlines seem to exist in every area from newspapers to software companies to automobile manufactures. The flexibility of project management software which employees these estimation techniques means that project managers can juggle all sorts of variables in a project finding the optimal mix. In the end, such juggling helps to control the risk of uncertainty.
