All Features
Bill Kalmar
Most of us, I’m confident, have some rather significant events in our lives that bring joy and excitement. It could be marriage, the birth of a child, perhaps a first grandchild, a new home, or retirement. Somewhere in all those events many of us will celebrate our 50th high-school reunion. That…
Duke University
Duke University electrical engineers have developed a man-made material that they say literally allows them to manipulate light at will.
They say that the results of their latest proof-of-concept experiments could lead to the replacement of electrical components with those based on optical…
Mark R. Hamel
First, the introduction. This post was earnestly written by my friend, Jeff Fuchs. He’s the director of the Maryland World Class Consortia, a lean nonprofit assistance organization in the mid-Atlantic. He’s also president of Neovista Consulting, which works with large and small organizations on…
Mike Richman
From the minute I arrived on site, I knew that this would be a Coordinate Metrology Systems Conference unlike any other. First of all, it was in Phoenix… in July. So, the 100-plus-degree temperature wasn’t unexpected; the humidity, on the other hand, was a bit of a surprise. The evening preceding…
Stewart Anderson
There has been a lot of press in recent years about the importance of the “learning organization.” While many authors have explored the idea of a learning organization from the perspective of how learning can be enabled and shared, the economic impact of learning, and its resulting effect on…
Davis Balestracci
Finally, the medical industry is putting aside its “We’re medicine; we’re different” mindset and taking a more practical look at quality improvement. Bravo! Although an element of physician culture remains convinced that improvement is all about outcomes and double-blind clinical trials, the…
More than ever, businesses need ways to improve their operations to better gain, serve, and retain customers while reducing costs and improving margins. Implementing management systems and attaining third-party accredited certification can help businesses achieve success on all of these fronts…
Donald J. Wheeler
In part one we found that the skewness and kurtosis parameters characterize the tails of a probability model rather than the central portion, and that because of this, probability models with the same shape parameters will only be similar in overall shape, not identical. However, since software…
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues have discovered a new relation among electric and magnetic fields and differences in temperature, which may lead to more efficient thermoelectric devices that convert heat into electricity or electricity into heat.
“In the search for new sources of…
Gallup
Empire building is the pinnacle and most extreme level of the pyramid of bureaucracy. It occurs when one group attempts to regain or enhance its self-sufficiency by encroachment or by expanding its span of control even when that is not in the best interest of the organization. There are several…
Paul Naysmith
While playing her role as Maria Kutschera in The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews once sang about her favorite things, among which were geese flying with the moon on their wings, doorbells, and brown paper packages. Remembering these things was how Maria would distract herself when times were bad…
Donald J. Wheeler
With the use of statistical software, many individuals are being exposed to more than just measures of location and dispersion. In addition to the average and standard deviation, they often find some funny numbers labeled as skewness and kurtosis. Since these numbers appear automatically, it is…
MIT News
The migration of manufacturing from the United States to Asia could be having a significant impact on which advanced technologies are commercialized. Specifically, there is evidence that the shift in manufacturing is curtailing the development of emerging technologies in areas such as…
Quality Digest
Ever feel like your brain has been put in a jar, “all shook up,” then poured out? That’s what we did with a list of 18 quality words and terms that you would hear at a Six Sigma training class. Unscramble them and e-mail your answers to us by Aug. 31, 2011, and you just might win a $50 gift…
Edward D. Hess
These days small-business owners are faced with the difficult task of doing much more with a lot less. But even though they might be making cuts to their prices and budgets, now is not the time to start cutting great customer service out of their business plans.
The U.S. economy is still in a…
Mike Micklewright
In a 2009 book review for Bukisa.com, a blogger named Khead quoted from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point (Little, Brown and Co., 2000): “‘In order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements.’ This is one detail that explains his Rule of 150. The…
Bruce Hamilton
It’s now been about four years since the Dow began its precipitous decline, and about three since the invention of the expression “too big to fail” entered our lexicon. Two years ago, the U.S. Treasury became a majority stockholder in another entity deemed too big to fail. Today, the expression…
Harry Hertz
Every few years the American Society for Quality (ASQ) conducts a Future of Quality study. The first phase of the 2011 study, which involves the use of a Delphi process to identify the key forces of change, has been completed recently. Using input from 150 panelists in 40 countries, the study…
UC Davis Graduate School of Management
Frugal companies succeed commercially in part because they consistently control spending and are resourceful with people and products rather than cutting costs reactively, according to a new University of California, Davis, study. The paper, “Corporate Frugality: Theory, Measurement and…
Microscan
Optical character recognition (OCR) is a vision system tool that is widely used in the packaging industry. Like bar code technology, OCR is a data-capture methodology. Its primary advantage is that it encodes information in a format that is both machine- and human-readable, while bar codes and…
ISO
(ISO: Geneva) -- A new international standard detailing the level of competency required by those responsible for verifying greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has been published. It is the latest addition to the toolbox of standards from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for…
Michelle LaBrosse
You are in the kitchen, surrounded by ingredients, and are asked to prepare a meal. As you look around, you notice that you have the usual: flour, sugar, eggs, milk, butter, meat, veggies, and fruit. You think, “No problem. I can whip something up in no time.” Then you take a second look around…
MIT News
Power turbines may be a mature business, but they are also a booming one. This year General Electric received record orders for jet engines, and because natural gas is currently cheap, worldwide demand is increasing for gas turbines used in power plants, says Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s chairman and…
NIST
The electromagnetic force has gotten a little stronger, gravity a little weaker, and the size of the smallest “quantum” of energy is now known a little better. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has posted the latest internationally recommended values of the fundamental…
The QA Pharm
Responses to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Warning Letters and the FD483—a written notice of deficiencies found during inspections—are usually full of commitments. They involve what will be done to correct compliance problems, and when it will be done. The FDA has even started to ask…
