All Features
The Conference Board
(The Conference Board: New York) -- The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index, which had improved slightly in July 2011, plummeted in August. The index now stands at 44.5 (1,985 = 100), down from 59.2 in July. The Present Situation Index decreased to 33.3 from 35.7. The Expectations Index…
NIST
It’s not often that someone can claim that going from a positive to a negative is a step forward, but that’s the case for a team of scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and private industry.
In a recent paper titled, “Expanding the Capabilities of Microfluidic…
Mark R. Hamel
To avoid confusion, the term “headhunter” in this article does not refer to those who take the severed head of others as some sort of trophy (that practice, as far as I know, is defunct); nor does it refer to finding, at a price, qualified candidates for employment. Rather, we’re talking about…
Quality Digest
This month we’re challenging readers to create quality poems in the three-line haiku format. The first line should be five syllables, the second line seven syllables, and the third line five syllables for a total of 17:
Standards are key here:
Format is five-seven-five
Or QC…
SICK
(SICK: Minneapolis) -- SICK, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of sensors, safety systems, machine vision, and automatic identification products for factory and logistics automation, has launched its DDS36 and DDS50 incremental encoders. They are low-cost, light-duty optical incremental…
Paul Naysmith
The human mind is currently the most intelligent device you will ever own. However, have you ever noticed how it has a filtering system? For example, do you remember the uneventful drive to the office this morning? I have no idea why the brain “forgets” these things, but in an instant you will…
Alliance Scale Inc.
(Alliance Scale: Canton, MA) -- Alliance Scale Inc. is introducing a high-quality line of precision stainless-steel weight sets for calibrating balances and scales used in education, food, forensic, pharmaceutical, and other laboratory and quality-control applications requiring better-than-…
Elizabeth Clor
Industry-leading manufacturers will be presenting best practices for using statistical process control (SPC) software at InfinityQS’ fifth annual user conference at the JW Marriott San Francisco Union Square, Oct. 16–19, 2011. The conference, Infusion 2011, will offer nine comprehensive, hands-…
ISO
(ISO: Geneva) -- Any of us can find some packages or packaged products tricky to open. Such difficulties can be worse for the elderly, or people with disabilities. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is contributing to a solution in the form of a standard for designing…
AIA
(AIA: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Machine vision sales grew 16 percent in North America during the second quarter of 2011 compared to the same quarter one year earlier, according to the Quarterly Machine Vision Sales Tracking Report of the Automated Imaging Association (AIA), the world's largest global…
Teledyne DALSA
(Teledyne DALSA: Waterloo, ON) --Teledyne DALSA, a Teledyne Technologies company and global leader in machine vision technology, has introduced the Genie TS series cameras. The Genie TS combines advancements in Teledyne DALSA’s CMOS imaging sensor technology with a newly optimized camera series…
Les Schnoll
According to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, every year about 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from food-borne diseases. Hardly a day goes by where there isn’t another recall of food contaminated with a variety of microorganisms…
The Marconi Society
(Marconi Society: Mountain View, CA) -- Robert W. Galvin, former chairman of Motorola, will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Marconi Society for his historic and lifelong impact on worldwide telecommunications. The award will be presented at the Society’s annual awards gala…
AIAG
(AIAG: Southfield, MI) -- The Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG), a nonprofit, member-supported organization that works with a wide range of manufacturing companies and service providers to help them operate at peak performance, is holding two events, Sept. 27–28, 2011, that are crucial for…
Oriel STAT A MATRIX
(STAT A MATRIX: Edison, NJ) -- Can your organization survive a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspection? Are you aware of the different aspects of your business that the FDA will be inspecting? This course, “FDA’s Quality System Inspection Technique (QSIT),” is intended to facilitate…
Renishaw
(Renishaw: Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, UK) -- InVia Raman microscopes from Renishaw are high-sensitivity systems with integrated research-grade microscopes, enabling high-resolution confocal measurements. inVia Raman microscopes support multiple lasers, with automatic software switching…
RIDGID
(RIDGID: Cambridge, OH) -- RIDGID announces the newest addition to the RIDGID SeeSnake inspection product line: the SeeSnake nanoReel industrial inspection camera system.
The RIDGID SeeSnake nanoReel N85S system is used for ultra-small diameter lines ranging from 0.75 in. to 2 in., and has the…
Nikon Metrology Inc.
The EU’s co-funded COMET project, which seeks to improve the efficiency of European industrial manufacturing, is creating a revolutionary solution that enables robots to perform high-end machining. Robots of any brand fitted with the COMET plug-and-produce controller unit successfully respond to…
NIST
Management and nonmanagement personnel across a broad cross-section of U.S. organizations see eye to eye on mission, customer focus, and commitment to success but differ significantly in their views on how to best measure quality of work and customer satisfaction. These are a few of the…
(IRCA: London) -- The International Register of Certificated Auditors (IRCA) has launched a new Pharmaceutical Quality Management Systems (PQMS) Auditor certification scheme (ICH Q10), to support the assurance of global supply-chain integrity.
In a sector that has seen an increase in the…
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The expression “beauty’s only skin-deep” has often been applied to the chemistry of materials because so much action takes place at the surface. However, for many of the materials in today’s high technologies, such as semiconductors and superconductors, once a device is fabricated, it is the…
Craig W. Alexander
I was recently in a local big-box retail store. My family had run another errand, and I was waiting for them inside the entrance of the store. It was a busy Saturday afternoon, and it was raining very hard outside. People were hurrying into the entry area to get out of the rain, and there was a lot…
Torrey Pines Scientific
(Torrey Pines Scientific: Carlsbad, CA) -- Torrey Pines Scientific Inc., manufacturer of chilling and heating laboratory equipment, announces its new EchoTherm Model SC25XT Fully Programmable Variable Speed Shaking Dry Bath for use with biological and other samples.
The SC25XT is fully…
Delcam
(Delcam: Birmingham, UK) -- Delcam has introduced an online guide to the developments in the 2011 version of its PowerINSPECT inspection software. The website includes a series of videos on the functionality in the 2011 release, such as the “Quick Report” option that makes the initial analysis…
Renishaw
(Renishaw: Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, UK) -- Renishaw’s AxiSet Check-Up is a cost-effective solution for checking the alignment and positioning performance of rotary axes. In just a few minutes, users of five-axis machining centers and multitasking mill-turn machines can identify and…
