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• 21st Century teamwork

  Team leadership is a crucial aspect of engineering management. But how do teams work well together? In this edited extract from their book 'Effective Team Leadership for Engineers' Pat Wellington and Niall Foster examine teamwork.

  
  

• A future through adventure

  Tired of the recession and juggling figures and business plans? All managers eventually need to find ways of motivating themselves. Entrepreneur and psychologist Steve Carter suggests going on a desert escapade.

  
  

• A sound move

  E&T reflects on how the arrival of the MP3 player also signalled the rise of contract manufacturing in the consumer electronics industry.

  
  

• Affordable astronomy

  Affordable equipment makes telescope control easier.

  
  

• An audiophile's utopia

  While it's possible to pipe music around your home, getting everything to work in sync is difficult with today's networks. The answer may lie in better software, says E&T.

  
  

• An orchestra in 60 boxes

  E&T travels to the Kent countryside to hear a unique automatic organ.

  
  

• Brazil focus

  When world leaders meet in Copenhagen in December to thrash out the replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, the actions of emerging nations are seen as key to its success. In the first part of our extensive coverage before the summit, we focus on Brazil.

  
  

• France's communications landscapes

  France's communications industry is bringing high-speed wired, wireless and fibre-optic networking to its consumers.

  
  

• My Way - WR Grace and Co

  Effective communications are essential to Grace, a global chemicals and engineering company with operations in many territories and many different industries; when the company opted for an IP video conferencing solution, its plans certainly did not lack ambition, as its manager of global media networks Guy Welty tells E&T.

  
  

• Music and computers

  Sampling is the latest technology to remake music. It's one more contribution from engineering to a 35,000-year-old art form.

  
  

• New Europe-wide air traffic control system

  The Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre in the Netherlands switched over to a new flight data processing system (FDPS) in December. It is the first in a pan-European network of ATC systems designed to cut flying times and boost air traffic capacity, and cut airliners' fuel emissions and costs and heralds a fundamental and long-overdue change in the way European air traffic is managed.

  
  

• Not just a desk job

  One of the biggest names in professional audio equipment design and manufacture, Solid State Logic is world famous for its large-scale recording and mixing consoles. E&T spoke to SSL's director of new products, Niall Feldman.

  
  

• Past and present of sound engineering

  E&T talks to Richard Ranft, head of the British Library Sound Archive.

  
  

• Power to the people

  As standalone products, smart meters cannot give consumers the information that they crave to monitor their electricity use. But, as E&T discovers, when it is combined with a home display unit the consumers have the power to control their consumption.

  
  

• Powerful sounds

  Sound waves are the latest potential source for renewable energy as E&T discovers.

  
  

• Sines of reality

  The new thing in software is copying the old. E&T filters out the bad from the good in synths and finds out how to remake the Fender sound.

  
  

• Speech processing research increases intelligibility

  Signal-processing and speech sciences are being jointly developed to improve the intelligibility of speech.

  
  

• When hand-built is cooler

  In a production-line world, what room is left for hand-wired audio amplifiers? Plenty, given guitarists' fondness for 'authenticity', reports E&T.

  
  

• 'Scanner' Robin Rimbaud

  E&T meets Robin Rimbaud, an internationally acclaimed technologist of music.

  
  

• Security and C language: fix it, don't nix it

  Critics who claim that the decades-old C programming language is inherently insecure; no so, argues E&T - as with any other software environment, programmers just have to ensure that they use security tools to fix vulnerabilities.