David C. Crosby, quality guru, Zero Defect proponent, and Quality Digest Daily contributor, died this past Monday. He was 80 years old.

Cummins Inc. designs, manufactures, sells, and services diesel engines and related technology around the world. It serves its customers through a network of 500 distributors and more than 5,200 dealer locations in more than 190 countries and territories.

You know what the third-quarter review meeting means: a packet will be handed out  with bar graphs and, no doubt, trend lines on each of about a zillion “key performance indicators” that show:

(Nikon Instruments: Melville, NY) -- Nikon Instruments Inc., innovator of advanced optical instruments, has introduced the C2 Confocal Laser Point Scanning Microscope, which incorporates the newest release of

(High Technology Seminars: Cold Spring, NY) -- High Technology Seminars has announced three events for the beginning of 2011:  “Visual Lean Basics—Lean Eyes—Learning to See Waste,” “Human Error Prevention,” and “Root Cause Analysis.”

(Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.: Madison, WI) --  Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.

(Laser Design: Minneapolis) -- Easy-to-use, low-cost Artec, Creaform, and 3Shape 3-D scanners are now being offered for sale by 3DScanCo, a division of Laser Design Inc.

(Baumer: Southington, CT) -- With the high-precision load cells of the DLRx series, Baumer offers sensors with passive temperature compensation for direct force measurement that boast a very low-temperature effect of < 0.005%/Kelvin (K).

(Control Point Design: Minnetonka, MN) -- For a company that has spent two decades shrouding the confidential nature of its work in secrecy, it now has something it can tell the world about. Online Systems Inc.

Publisher's note: It is with great sadness that I must report that David Crosby passed away on Monday, November 15.