All Features
Gleb Tsipursky
Have you or your employees been feeling work-from-home burnout (WFH) and Zoom fatigue these past months despite the supposed convenience of working from home and using video conferences to meet?
Due to the computer-based nature of their work, many quality professionals have been in the privileged…
Bob Holmes, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Most of us won’t soon forget that disconcerting moment last spring when grocery store shelves were suddenly bare where the flour, pasta, and other staples should have been. The news told of farmers dumping milk—nearly four million gallons a…
Rita Men
Ending the pandemic depends on achieving herd immunity, estimated at 70 percent or even 80 percent to 90 percent of a population. With some 30 percent of Americans telling pollsters they have no interest in getting vaccinated, that’s cutting it a bit close. The numbers are even worse in many other…
Jo Napolitano
Artificial intelligence, or AI, requires a huge amount of computing power and versatile hardware to support that power. But most AI-supportive hardware is built around the same decades-old technology, and still a long way from emulating the neural activity in the human brain.
In an effort to solve…
Optical Gaging Products OGP
The RGM Watch Co. was founded by American watchmaker Roland G. Murphy. His career and interest in horology (the art or science of timekeeping devices) began as a teenager while working part-time for a clock company. Later, he enrolled in the Bowman Technical School of Watchmaking, and in 1986,…
Knowledge at Wharton
The future of work is hybrid. In the post-pandemic world, many companies will embrace the lessons learned from more than a year of telecommuting and not fully return to the office. Instead, Wharton management professor Martine Haas says, they will adopt a hybrid model with some combination of…
Del Williams
On conveyor systems in the food processing industry, some powdered and bulk solid materials such as grains, sugar, and creamer are ignition-sensitive in specific concentrations, particularly when exposed to static electricity discharge. Key concerns are conveyor-system connection points such as…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Quality professionals no longer focus solely on product or service quality. Today, the quality function is involved in almost every aspect of a company, from customer interactions and compliance management to environmental health and safety, supply chain management, risk management, and more.
A…
Kate Zabriskie
From time to time, everyone misses a deadline, forgets an obligation, or fails to meet a commitment. We’re human, and it happens. For most of us, failure is followed by an immediate effort to right the situation.
Problem solved, right? Not so fast. “Most of us” excludes a special cohort: those who…
Joseph Near, David Darais
It’s not so simple to deploy a practical system that satisfies differential privacy. Our example in the last post was a simple Python program that adds Laplace noise to a function computed over the sensitive data. For this to work in practice, we’d need to collect all the sensitive data on one…
Mike Figliuolo
A consistent and regularly scheduled prioritization process helps eliminate distractions and can focus your efforts on the most meaningful projects. Some processes are formal, while others are simply frequent conversations about priorities. Choose a process that’s appropriate for the size of your…
Eryn Brown, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Last spring, things looked grim for Dora Herrera. Revenues at her family’s 45-year-old restaurant business, Yuca’s, had plummeted within a few short weeks as Covid-19 kept customers away from its two popular taco shacks in Los Angeles and…
John Toon
Using X-ray tomography, a research team has observed the internal evolution of the materials inside solid-state lithium batteries as they were charged and discharged. Detailed 3D information from the research could help improve the reliability and performance of the batteries, which use solid…
Michael Mallen
The concept of cost of quality (COQ) has been around for decades, but applying it to business is difficult. The adage “quality is free” (coined by Philip B. Cosby in his book by the same title) does not simply mean that you don’t have to pay for it. It means that you are likely already paying to…
Sharona Hoffman
Artificial intelligence holds great promise for improving human health by helping doctors make accurate diagnoses and treatment decisions. It can also lead to discrimination that can harm minorities, women, and economically disadvantaged people.
The question is, when healthcare algorithms…
Matt Fieldman
What is America Works, and why is it important to the future of American manufacturing?
The American manufacturing industry is at a crossroads, facing growing competition from foreign countries while struggling to develop a skilled, dedicated workforce here at home. American manufacturers are…
Ryan E. Day
One of the technologies driving Industry 4.0 is artificial intelligence (AI), and AI is enabling massive change in manufacturing. It is also revolutionizing the smart manufacturing supply chain as well.
It seems that for every benefit technology provides, it also spawns an associated challenge.…
Michael P. Powell
The promise of advanced manufacturing technologies—also known as smart factories or Industry 4.0—is that by networking our machines, computers, sensors, and systems, we will (among other things) enable automation, improve safety, and ultimately become more productive and efficient. And there is no…
Scott Heide
During the last several decades, the ability to manufacture customized products for customers has become increasingly attractive to a growing number of companies. However, customization has led to manufacturers drowning in a sea of increasingly complex bills of material (BOM).
Standard products…
Dave Klumpe
Recent surveys point to increasing frustration and, frankly, exhaustion among nurses across the country. Although attending to patients during the pandemic has exacerbated the challenges of the profession, nursing shortages have been reported on for well over a decade. It is incumbent on hospitals…
Manfred Kets de Vries
Serge faced a conundrum. One of his business partners was in a legal dispute with Serge’s father, Charlie, and asked for his help. Serge knew that his father was prone to suing everyone who crossed his path—including family members. The business partner had repeatedly tried to end this legal fight…
Marcus Woo, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
You may have heard the outlandish claim: Bill Gates is using the Covid-19 vaccine to implant microchips in everyone so he can track where they go. It’s false, of course, debunked repeatedly by journalists and fact-checking organizations. Yet…
Liz Uram
When Mary started with the company, she was enthusiastic, energetic, and consistently the top salesperson on the team. She got along well with her co-workers and was known for her superior customer service skills. But over time, something changed.
Mary began to arrive to work late, leave early,…
Corey Brown
Understanding the distinction between document management and knowledge management is vital to operational excellence. While the terms can sometimes be used interchangeably, understanding their differences couldn’t be more relevant to the shifting industrial workforce.
What is document management…
Mark Esser
Alot has changed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) during the past 120 years. For one thing, we were known as the National Bureau of Standards for the first 87 years of our existence. Then, in 1988, we became the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to…
