Tag: United States

EXAIR Wishes You a Happy Independence Day

Published on by johnball2014Leave a comment
Independence Day

Every year on the 4th of July, Americans celebrate Independence Day with family, cook outs, parades and of course fireworks.  It is time to rejoice and reflect on how our nation began in 1776 by declaring our independence from British rule.  Did you know the United States of America started with 13 states? Here are some other interesting facts about Independence Day:

  • John Hancock was the only person that signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. The 55 other people signed afterwards.
  • The average age of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was 45. The oldest was Benjamin Franklin at the age of 70.
  • Only two of the signers later became President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. They both died on July 4th, 1826.
  • Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President, was born on July 4th, 1872.
  • Benjamin Franklin suggested the turkey as the national bird, but was overruled to make it the bald eagle.
  • Every 4th of July, the Liberty Bell is tapped, not rung, thirteen times in honor of the original 13 states. I can’t blame them, it has a crack in it.
  • July 4th was declared a holiday in 1870, 94 years after the declaration.
  • Americans consume about 155 million hot dogs on Independence Day, the biggest hot dog holiday of the year. (And it is one of my favorite foods)
  • Fireworks were first used to celebrate the 4th of July in 1777 in Philadelphia.

I hope you enjoyed this read, and from the EXAIR family to your family, we want to wish you a wonderful 4th of July. EXAIR Will be closed on July 4, 2017.

John Ball
Application Engineer

Email: johnball@exair.com
Twitter: @EXAIR_jb

 

Photo: Happy 4th of July by Karson Designs.  Creative Commons 2.0

Learning Styles – We Have You Covered

Published on by Dave WoernerLeave a comment

In the engineering department at EXAIR, we feature a couple of different generations of engineers.  This generational difference leads to some great discussions about the times, politics, and pop culture.  I’m often defending people who do things a little differently than they did in the 70’s or the 90’s.  I hate defending this because I think we have lost some know-how and wisdom over the last couple generations, but I do think that there are more opportunities for folks, who learns things outside of reading a book.

In my experience people learn by three different ways.  People learn by seeing things, hearing things, or doing things. I learn best by seeing things and doing things.  If you try and teach me something over the phone without any visual representation I have a hard time understanding the subject.  If I can see a picture or a video on the topic, I will pick it up much better and will take away more than listening to a lecture or reading a book.  One of my favorite things is talking to a person who has been growing a garden, grilling a steak or fixing a leaky sink about what they know and their secrets to a successful project (often a plan and organization but that is another blog).

types

Having said all that, today we have access to an enormous amount of information over the internet that we could never have accessed before.  This has the great benefit of opening new opportunities up to everyone. We don’t need to know everything that engineers had to know in the past, because we can look it up so much quicker.  It doesn’t pay much to have the dimensions of every thread memorized, because we can find it at our fingertips in seconds on a smart phone or laptop.

At EXAIR we are constantly mindful of a new generation of consumers that are using our products for the first time, and we want to provide as much material as possible to all of the different learning styles.  Because EXAIR is based in Cincinnati, Ohio, we cannot physically visit every customer that we have around the world, but we do try and expand our presence as far as possible.  Our best resource for dispersing our information is our website, EXAIR.com.

On the website we try to include as much new media as we can to explain how our products work and at which applications they excel.  In our Knowledge Base, we feature Case Studies, CAD Libraries, and Frequently Asked Questions to provide our customers as much information as possible about our products.  We do ask that you register to the website to receive this material.  To teach our visual learners, we create informal videos created by our application engineering department and post those on this blog, and we have Video Library.  For the audio learners, our application engineers are available to speak over the phone to answer any questions you may have.  For the tactile learners, we do offer all of our products inside the United  States and Canada on 30 day unconditional guarantee.  This allows customers to try our products and learn by doing.  These three methods allow any style of learner to understand our products, and use them to the best of their ability.

Dave Woerner
Application Engineer
davewoerner@exair.com