‘How is it that in the middle of a relatively small town of about 125,000 people in Minnesota, you’ve got the No. 1-rated healthcare system probably in the world?”

With more than 110,000 expected attendees, IMTS is Chicago’s hottest suburb this week. (I like to refer to it as “Manufactureville.”) Here’s what we covered during our second show of the week, from the booth of today’s sponsor, Q-Mark Manufacturing:

“Tapping Your Employee’s Knowledge”

It’s no secret that the employees closest to a process know best how to improve it. But how do you tap that knowledge without ruffling feathers?

We arrived in Chicago over the weekend to luxuriously appointed accommodations and much fanfare (that’s how it is when you’re the cast and crew of the No. 1 talk show in the quality industry). In our first episodes of Quality Digest Live from the floor of IMTS 2018, we were truly given the red-carpet treatment by our wonderful sponsors at Nikon Metrology. Let’s take a look at what we covered:

News from IMTS

IMTS is almost here, so we previewed the show, considered an important industry-academia partnership within manufacturing, and asked serious questions about the nature of motivation. Let’s take a look:

 IMTS Preview

T

he federal government just made it a lot easier to form an employee-owned business.

A novel encryption method devised by MIT researchers secures data used in online neural networks, without dramatically slowing their runtimes. This approach holds promise for using cloud-based neural networks for medical-image analysis and other applications that use sensitive data.

Technological innovations on all fronts are evolving quickly and are developed, manufactured, and sold worldwide in aerospace, medical device, communications, automotive, and many other industry segments. It’s hard to keep up with these breakthroughs because they are growing exponentially. But despite all the technological innovations, one critical issue has persisted since the first industrial revolution during the mid-1800s: the engineering, manufacturing, and quality “interpretation” by companies’ suppliers, whether internal or external.

MIT researchers have developed novel photography optics that capture images based on the timing of reflecting light inside the optics, instead of the traditional approach that relies on the arrangement of optical components. These new principles, the researchers say, open doors to new capabilities for time- or depth-sensitive cameras, which are not possible with conventional photography optics.

Whether it’s the effort to redefine the kilogram or researching the Harry Potter realm of quantum mechanics where things can somehow be in two or more places at one time, quite a bit of the science carried out at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) can be hard for the average person on the street to understand or relate to.

As a consumer, it’s nearly impossible to get away from videos, advertising or otherwise. To give you a numeric sense of our collective obsession with online moving images: Since last year, YouTube has started registering more than a billion hours of video viewing every single day.