All Features
Harish Jose
Today I’m looking at the ideas inspired by mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are a class of neurons that activate when someone engages in an activity, or when they observe the same activity being performed by someone else.
The phenomenon was first identified by a group of Italian neurophysiologists…
Edmund Andrews
Seems everybody has a horror story about health insurance: Kafkaesque debates with robotic agents about what is and isn’t covered. Huge bills from a doctor you didn’t know was “out of network.” Reimbursements that take months to process.
It’s no secret that healthcare in the United States is…
Daniel Ackerman
This story was originally published by MIT News.
Despite years of hype, virtual reality (VR) headsets have yet to topple TV or computer screens as the go-to devices for video viewing. One reason: VR can make users feel sick. Nausea and eye strain can result because VR creates an illusion of 3D…
David Darais, Joseph Near
How many people drink pumpkin spice lattes in October, and how would you calculate this without learning specifically who is drinking them, and who is not?
Although they seem simple or trivial, counting queries are used extremely often. Counting queries such as histograms can express many useful…
Nate Burke
Unfortunately, a website is no longer enough for a significant or successful digital presence. Essentially, a presence is nonexistent without some consideration of search engine optimization (SEO).
But this, too, has become one of the basics of “going digital”—a must, rather than a “nice to have…
Quality Digest
Located in Butler, Wisconsin, Accurate Pattern has specialized in wood, metal, and plastic patterns, tools, fixtures, gauges, prototypes, and models since 1985. Technologies and services include CAD design, manual and CNC machining, wood and metalworking, painting and welding, plastic fabrication,…
(Hitachi High-Tech: Oxford, UK) -- Hitachi High-Tech Analytical Science has further expanded its metals analysis range with the launch of the OE720 optical emission spectrometer (OES) metals analyzer. A year ago, the reveal of the ground-breaking Hitachi OE750 caused waves in the industry by making…
Graham Freeman
Here’s an unfortunate truth: The story of the Covid-19 pandemic is one of epic quality failures in almost every area imaginable. Although there have been some admirable successes, such as the food and beverage organizations that have ensured the continued safe delivery of food supplies to most…
Judah Levine
As a physicist in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Time and Frequency Division, I have worked in the general area of operating atomic clocks and using output signals from them to distribute time and frequency information for more than 40 years. I am also a Fellow at JILA,…
(ABB: Zürich, Switzerland) -- ABB has launched its new ABB Ability Performance Optimization Service for cold rolling mills, offering steel, aluminium, and other metals manufacturers opportunities to reach new levels of operational performance through technology, boosting their processes and…
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…
Quality Digest
(Eagle Hill Consulting: Arlington, VA) -- More than one in three U.S. employees is frustrated with their technology at work every day, according to new research from Eagle Hill Consulting. Also, less than half say that their organization places a high importance on deploying technologies intended…
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…
Quality Digest
(Yaskawa Motoman: Waukegan, IL) -- Offering exceptionally fast and powerful operation for increased production throughput, the four-axis PL190 and PL320 models now join the PL500 robotFour-axis PL190 and PL320 models join the recently released PL500 robot, enabling a wide range of palletizing…
(ETQ: Burlington, MA) -- ETQ, the leading quality management system (QMS) provider, announces Reliance NXG, the next generation of the world’s most comprehensive, flexible, and proven quality management software for quality-centric customers in manufacturing, life sciences, electronics, food and…
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…
(Timmer GmbH: Neuenkirchen, Germany) -- Pioneering work in the field of paint delivery pumps: With timIOT, Timmer GmbH launches a digital solution that for the first time allows a location-independent real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance even for purely mechanical pumps. timIOT consists…
Clare Naden
(ISO: Geneva) -- Successful project management is fundamental to greater efficiency and better outcomes. It is also often inextricably linked with program and portfolio management along with related governance. Which is why two key standards in ISO’s series of documents for the sector have just…
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…
