Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

Device ‘Ownership’ Is a Civil Liberties Issue We’re taking part in Copyright Week , a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation. The technology you rely on to interact with the world and express yourself should ultimately obey you, not the company that made it. If the devices in our pockets, on our bodies, and all around us are going to help us advance our own values, it has to be possible to control and customize them so they don’t just do whatever their manufacturer envisioned. A sad fact of modern technology is that many “smart” devices use their smarts to act as their manufacturer’s spy and digital enforcer. They monetize your private data and are designed not to empower you, but to maximize the profits you b...

Even the Rightsholders Think Europe’s Article 13 is a Mess, Call for an Immediate Halt in Negotiations With only days to go before the planned conclusion of the new EU Directive on Copyright in the Single Digital Market, Europe’s largest and most powerful rightsholder groups — from the Premier League to the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Association of Commercial Television in Europe — have published an open letter calling for a halt to negotiations , repeating their message from late last year : namely, that the Directive will give the whip hand to Big Tech. Article 13 — which still mandates copyright filters for big platforms, despite months of obfuscation — is the brainchild of the music recording industry, who invented the idea of the “value gap” as a synonym for “when we negotiate with YouTube for music licenses, we don’t get as much as we’d like.” Seen in this light, the unworkability of Article 13 is a feature, not a bug. Putting Google on the hook to give in on...

Access Control is the phenomenon introduced in several industries to ensure selective access to data and areas. The primary focus is on information security and restricted physical access. The process involves two processes – authorisation and authentication. The first step is authentication which is used to verify that the person is the same who he or she claims to be. The next layer of protection and validation is authorisation. It means that the person who is looking for access shall be granted access or not. Moreover, there can be different levels of access that can be set in the system. It can range from – view only access, limited or selective access or power to make amends, transfer data or make transactions.   An automated building having advanced building management control system can be used to control any theft. Breaching the data will mean a faulty access system in the plant. Such systems make the data prone to public accessible systems making the essential elements ...

Generally, in the case of a power connection, the electricity goes through a circuit breaker box where it is divided into numerous circuits. These circuits are supported by a breaker or fuse, which function as switching devices that can be function manually or automatically to control and support the electrical power system. Without a circuit breaker, there is a risk of electrical fires, shocks, and electrocution. There is a broad range of circuit breakers available, which depend upon the voltage, installation, external design, placement, and breaking mechanism. Here are the different types of circuit breakers: Air Circuit Breaker : This circuit breaker operates with their arcing contacts exposed to the air. These contacts operate at a given level of atmospheric pressure. In many of the places, air circuit breakers generally serve as replacements of oil circuit breakers. Types of air circuit breakers: Plain Air Circuit Breaker: This circuit breaker is also known as Cross-B...

Regulatory agencies are releasing new standards that bolster industrial energy efficiency and boost global sustainability efforts. In the US, for example, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) premium-efficiency motor program will save 5.8 terawatts of electricity and prevent the release of nearly 80 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere over the next ten years. This is equivalent to keeping 16 million cars off the road. In Europe, the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) has released the EN50598 standard which assesses power drive systems and makes recommendations for designing more environmentally friendly power applications. In addition to that, the standard was also adopted by International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) under international standard IEC 61800-9-2:2017 . This focuses on system-wide efficiency on top of traditional individual component efficiency.The subsy...

The digitization of everyday processes means that data that was not accessible before can now be both gathered and analyzed in an affordable manner. In many cases, the computation of that data is happening in or around local devices (a concept referred to as edge computing). The emergence of new industrial edge applications across private industries such as oil and gas, mining, telecommunications and public entities such as municipalities, has opened the door to many new opportunities for solution deployments in outdoor environments. For resellers, integrators, distributors, and consulting engineers, this represents potential growth in new business areas. However, the deployment of such solutions requires a different mix of product, delivery and service specifications from what is commonly found in a traditional data center and network offerings. Many edge computing and industrial edge solutions focus on the capture, processing and analysis of local information often with a limited ...

Written by Guest Blogger,  Debashish Chakraborty Building Energy Management Systems is a bold idea to better serve  Schneider Electric ‘s meaningful purpose. Digitization and visualization as two key pillars help us achieve our energy efficiency goals, especially in the buildings market. The one challenge which visualization brings with it is about qualified staff to decipher the data, study trends and act accordingly. Adding to that talent pool is therefore important. In my current role at Schneider Electric, I have had the unique opportunity to sit across the table with customers, some with a cumulative building footprint of anything between 10 to 30 million square feet in India, aggregating an electricity bill of around INR 150 million to 250 million a month. That’s a big number to grasp, and even a lower single digit percentage savings on this will be significant. What keeps me awake, is the quest of finding the reasons for overlooking energy efficiency in such large bu...

The Public Domain Starts Growing Again Next Year, and It’s About Time We’re taking part in Copyright Week , a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation. Have you ever wondered how it’s possible for there to be two Jungle Book movies to be in development at the same time? Why everything seems to be based on a work by Shakespeare? Or why it always seems like someone is telling a version of The Wizard of Oz ? The answer is that these works are in the public domain, meaning that copyright law no longer prevents other artists from adapting them to create new works. One major rationale for copyright is supposedly that, by giving an exclusive set of rights to artists for their work, we incentivize creativity by making i...

Copyright Week 2018: Join Us in Fighting for Better Copyright Law and Policy We’re taking part in Copyright Week , a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation. Copyright law shapes the world we live in. It is supposed to encourage progress and creativity, enriching our culture and contributing to the growth of knowledge. However, the law is often used as a blunt instrument by a few prominent actors to preserve their cultural dominance. Less obviously, governments and other large industries have taken to using the law to hide information they don’t want us to see and use or to limit functionality and ownership of software and devices we buy and use. The law shouldn’t work this way. It should serve us all. It doesn’...

At Schneider Electric Software’s Innovation Summit in October, representatives from industry-leading chemical manufacturer BASF delivered a keynote presentation addressing their digital transformation goals. It really gave me an opportunity to see just how large an impact digital transformation is making in modern industrial applications and how it’s helping companies large and small cut costs, improve productivity and decrease operational risks to the enterprise. In today’s chemical industry margins are increasingly thin and competition grows fiercer by the day. Chemical companies need to control costs while acquiring and maintaining customers in an industry where regulations are constantly changing. This means these companies need to discover and exploit any competitive advantage they can while reducing risk to the enterprise. Like other companies, chemical manufactures drive revenue growth through new customer acquisition.  One of the ways leading chemical companies are attra...