All Features
Shaun Wissner
Sponsored Content
Connectivity has changed the world we live in. While today it is a trend, the true potential of connectivity lies in the future. As manufacturers begin to investigate how they can integrate this developing technology, they rely on solutions from organizations, like Hexagon…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
There is no shortage of weirdness in quantum mechanics, and the phenomenon known as entanglement is weird with a capital “W.” When two particles are entangled, they share a connection no matter how far the distance between them.
Measuring one particle can tell you what measuring the other…
Scott Gottlieb
It is incumbent upon the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure that we have the right policies in place to promote and encourage safe and effective innovation that can benefit consumers, and adopt regulatory approaches to enable the efficient development of these technologies. By…
Jason Furness
Following on from yesterday’s column (which can view here), we explore the right-hand side of the diagram below and see the outlook you can adopt that is the most productive for you personally. Transitioning the thought processes of your team to this ideal quadrant is a necessary and highly…
Mike Richman
The July 17, 2017, episode of QDL focused on some of the nitty-gritty of quality improvement, from the value of personal certifications to the opportunities of disruptive innovation, and to the fundamentals of risk management to the challenges of customer service. In case you missed it, here’s a…
Georgia Tech News Center
A marimba-playing robot with four arms and eight sticks is writing and playing its own compositions in a lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The pieces are generated using artificial intelligence and deep learning.
Researchers fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs—from Beethoven to…
Pat Toth
Recently a segment on my favorite morning news program stopped me in my tracks. The young and attractive hosts (why are they always so young and attractive?) were demonstrating new appliances, among them a smart refrigerator. The fridge was equipped with all kinds of high-tech features including…
Michael O’Shea
Sponsored Content
Opportunities are becoming more frequent to apply metrology to adaptive robot control for many applications. There are many different techniques to accomplish this, from regular calibration to real-time feedback, using anything from laser trackers to optical devices in order to…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
More than 2,000 years ago a huge ship crashed beneath the cliffs of Antikythera, a small island off the coast of Greece. Later discovered in 1900, the wreck yielded a trove of antiquities, including an amazing geared mechanism that, just for starters, predicted eclipses and the location of the sun…
MIT Sloan School of Management
There are few executives today who don’t wish they could be more productive. Even the most successful individuals are looking for new and better ways to get more accomplished while maintaining or increasing their quality of life.
“Regardless of location, industry, or occupation, productivity is a…
Ian Haydon
There’s a revolution happening in biology, and its name is CRISPR. CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) is a powerful technique for editing DNA. It has received an enormous amount of attention in the scientific and popular press, largely based on the promise of what this powerful gene-editing technology…
Mike Richman
If there was one key takeaway from Hexagon’s impressive and impressively large user conference, styled “HxGN Live,” which took place earlier this month, it’s that finding actionable information, not merely acquiring mountains of data, is the key to developing a truly smart factory. “It’s always…
Erin Connelly
For a long time, medieval medicine has been dismissed as irrelevant. This time period is popularly referred to as the “Dark Ages,” which erroneously suggests that it was unenlightened by science or reason. However, some medievalists and scientists are now looking back to history for clues to…
NETL
Contrary to that old cooking adage, “a watched pot never boils,” keeping a careful eye on things—in the kitchen or in the laboratory—can be essential to making a useable (or edible) final product.
Take chocolate, for instance, that foundational block of the food pyramid. An important part of…
Liri Andersson
Ten years ago, when we would ask senior executives or company directors what “digital” meant to them, their response would usually be something related to social media. Today, it might be apps, big data, 3D printing, the cloud, or another current example of digital technology. All such answers are…
Christopher Martin
Many of us are familiar with the concept of the Ohno Circle, innovated by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota during the 1940s. While familiarity with the technique and the goals it sets to accomplish is one thing, how many of us have actually participated? The surprising answer is… probably all of us, in a…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
Building airplanes and spaceships poses some of the most unique engineering and manufacturing challenges mankind has ever encountered. Fortunately, you don’t have to build rockets to benefit from rocket science. Manufacturers of most any product can improve their efficiency and…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
You can be known as a hard worker and counted on to tie up loose ends, but fall behind when co-workers’ tasks are on hold until yours are complete, and you’re perceived as needing an attitude adjustment. What would you want to do? Place blame or work on a remedy? There is a solution: Personal…
Barbara A. Cleary
In a 1995 interview, tech guru Steve Jobs posited that empires could crash and burn if the emphasis is on sales rather than on product. “Companies forget what it means to make great products,” he said. Instead, they direct resources to selling, rather than improving and innovating.
If empires can…
The American Ceramic Society
Almost two years ago, Micron3DP demonstrated one of the earliest forays into 3D printing with glass. Just a few months later, MIT backed up glass’s place in the additive manufacturing realm and showed just how beautiful the possibilities were.
Although intriguing, those early demonstrations were…
Ryan E. Day
I remember my first trip to Michigan in 2012. I was covering the Ford Motor Co.’s annual Trend Conference and had the opportunity to meet Alan Mulally, who gave a compelling presentation explaining the vision, strategy, and implementation of the One Ford plan. I was impressed more with the man…
Mark Rosenthal
It was September 1901, in Dayton, Ohio, and Wilbur Wright was frustrated. The previous year, 1900, he had built and tested, with his brother Orville’s help, their first full-size glider. It was designed using the most up-to-date information about wing design available. His plan had been to “kite”…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
Founded in 1927 to produce aluminum splints—cutting edge at the time—Zimmer Biomet is a medical device company commanding second place in the entire world’s overall orthopedic market share. The organization’s stated purpose is to “Restore mobility, alleviate pain, and improve the…
UC Davis
Three transportation revolutions are in sight, and together they could help reduce traffic, improve livability, eventually save trillions of dollars each year, and reduce urban transportation carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 80 percent or more worldwide by 2050. That’s according to a report…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
My eye was caught recently by a gossipy article concerning NASA’s suit situation. Spacesuits, that is, not the standard-issue coat and trousers worn by many earthbound employees at the agency. It seems its Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a thumbs down following a spacesuit audit, warning…
