All Features
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…
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…
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…
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…
NIST
Terahertz radiation can penetrate numerous materials—plastic, clothing, paper, and some biological tissues—making it an attractive candidate for applications such as concealed weapons detection, package inspection, and imaging skin tumors. However, to date there is no standard method for…
Tracker Handbook by Art Kietlinski
Despite a laser tracker’s many capabilities, its main function presents some limitations that can make it difficult to measure certain features of a part. Line-of-sight or scanning surfaces with a small radius or contour may be a challenge when using only a laser tracker.
Before other…
FARO
Variation Reduction Solutions Inc. (VRSI) is an independent integrator of machine vision and applied metrology technologies for automated manufacturing. The company focuses on achieving disruptive gains in assembly-process accuracy and efficiency through the innovative application of…
American College of Surgeons
The American College of Surgeons (ACS) has set a goal to enlist at least 1,000 hospitals into its respected National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP). The commitment is part of the ACS Inspiring Quality initiative, an effort to raise awareness of proven models of quality…
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
All types of snazzy technologies are available these days to make buildings greener: automated shades, electrochromic windows that know when to tint, intelligent lighting controls and smart cooling and heating systems, to name just a few. But how do these components work with each other and…
Knowledge at Wharton
In a recent article in The New York Times, Bryan Burrough, an author, former Wall Street Journal reporter, and now a correspondent for Vanity Fair, takes business writers to task for producing books that are of generally low quality. He gives many reasons for this: Some of the books are too…
William A. Levinson
Dr. Gary Brandeland’s article, “The Day Joy Died,” which appeared in the Oct. 20, 2006, edition of Modern Medicine, underscores the primitive nature of quality thinking—and more specifically, safety thinking—in hospitals. Although I’m not going to give formal engineering advice about medical…
Bill Kalmar
Sseems the Diet Police are once again running rampant in our nation. It has been said that close to 30 percent of Michigan residents are overweight, and thus there is a movement afoot to curtail our eating habits, not only in that state but also nationally. Believe it or not, there is some…