All Features
Benjamin Kessler
Suddenly, supply chains are in the spotlight. The practical details of how products arrive on supermarket shelves, for example, gained unwelcome relevance amid last year’s wave of panic buying caused by Covid-19 disruption. At the same time, the environmental damage wrought by wasteful industrial…
Merilee Kern
In many ways, being an effective leader boils down to your ability to influence people—a proficiency that is driven by one’s emotional intelligence (EQ). Leadership is more about soft skills—the ability to inspire, persuade, guide, sway, and communicate in a way that’s “heard” rather than just “…
Manufacturing Expert Predicts Manufacturing as a Service to Emerge From Manufacturing Transformation
LMA Consulting Group
(LMA Consulting: Claremont, CA) -- Manufacturing and supply chain expert, Lisa Anderson, president of LMA Consulting Group Inc., predicts manufacturing as a service (MaaS) will emerge as a result of that manufacturing transformation that is replacing the more traditional manufacturing model. LMA…
(Freedom: Cincinnati) -- Freedom IoT’s latest shop floor software release brings new voice-of-the-customer features and enhancements, including new artificial intelligence (AI) functionality and a self-help video library.
The AI feature notifies users and other systems of adverse machine and…
James Wells
I was talking recently with a friend who runs an academic program at a major U.S. university. She was telling me about solving a problem in her department and how the solution was obvious so she just did it. She then related how one of her colleagues protested that she should have used some Six…
Eric Brown
This story was originally published by MIT News.
Blade Kotelly is a senior lecturer at MIT on design thinking, user interfaces, and innovation. His enthusiasm for cars is intertwined with his passion for innovative design. But despite Kotelly’s love affair with the internal combustion engine, he…
Christopher Allan Smith
By 6:25 a.m., my fate was sealed.
That morning, 10 miles from my front door in Paradise, California, a poorly maintained power line owned by Pacific Gas & Electric arced, dropping molten metal into the brush at its base and starting a fire.
At the time, I was rousing myself and my high-school-…
Enterprise Minnesota
Based in Winona, Minnesota, Alliant Castings is a foundry manufacturing abrasion and impact-resistant castings for a variety of heavy-duty industries. Utilizing the latest technologies, they create custom, proprietary materials to meet their clients' needs for demanding and extreme performance. In…
Quality Digest
(Orange Photonics: New London, NH) -- Orange Photonics is pleased to announce that the LightLab 3 Cannabis Analyzer now reports Delta-8 THC (D8-THC), an increasingly popular cannabinoid found in hemp-derived cannabis products. In addition, Orange Photonics is releasing a new Mobile Monitoring…
(Zetec: Snoqualmie, WA) -- Zetec Inc., a global leader in nondestructive testing solutions, today introduced EMERALD, an advanced compact, industrial phased array ultrasonic testing (PAUT) system with the most powerful and versatile total focusing method (TFM) image processing capability in its…
Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Working from home—formally known as telework—is here to stay. A 2021 survey of approximately 30,000 Americans concluded that, after the pandemic, 20 percent of all work days may continue to take place at home, vs. just 5 percent before.…
Judah Levine
Frequency was originally considered to be the province of musicians. The pitches or frequencies of the notes in a musical scale are defined by ratios—octaves, for example, where the frequency of the higher note is twice the frequency of the lower one.
The 12 notes between octaves in Western music…
Isaac Maw
The ongoing pandemic has pushed many jobs to virtual settings and home-based working environments. In industries outside manufacturing, it can be seen how the pandemic has affected business. For example, take a look at Zoom stock, the price of which quadrupled during the five months following March…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Look around you. There are objects everywhere, and each one of them has a story. Are they interesting stories? Well, that depends on how you tell it.
1. There’s a bluebird house outside my office window. It’s one of nine that I’ve hung on trees around my yard. My mother loved bluebirds and wanted…
Nathan Furr
As soon as South Korea confirmed its first case of Covid-19 on January 20, 2020, the government set in motion a disease control protocol that was to become the envy of other developed nations. By the end of March 2020, South Korea had done more than 300,000 tests, more than 40 times higher per…
Quality Digest
(MTI Instruments: Albany, NY) -- MTI Instruments Inc. continues its impressive legacy of aircraft engine maintenance diagnostic systems with its newest addition of the PBS-4100+ Portable Vibration and Balancing System.
“We are excited to announce our new PBS Gen 4 as it is fully portable,…
Don Cox
Despite the high ratio of intelligent work-from-home (WFH) business professionals, the current cybersecurity landscape for that work model could best be described as disorganized and dysfunctional. Hackers have been busy exploiting these cyber risks, as evidenced from the reported 300-percent…
Christine Schaefer
If you care about improving your local economy, education, community health, or other aspects of residents’ quality of life, you may benefit from learning about the initiatives of Communities of Excellence 2026. One place you can read a concise summary of the innovative, Baldrige-based nonprofit…
Bryan Christiansen
Root cause analysis is not a singular way to an answer. It is a conceptual framework for investigating the true reasons behind the events we observe. Many frameworks are available to execute RCA that have been tried and tested by experimenters. None of these methods are foolproof, but they provide…
Barbara Cuthill
The internet of things (IoT) offers many attractions for small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) that may want to integrate IoT into their facilities and operations, or who seek to enter the IoT market with innovative products. However, when venturing into the IoT waters, it’s helpful to be…
Ryan E. Day
Just like its predecessors, this fourth industrial revolution (dubbed Industry 4.0 in 2011) is all about increasing productivity. Unlike the first three revolutions, today’s pivotal technologies hold forth the possibility to also improve efficiency, quality, and human satisfaction.
Steam power,…
Bruce Hamilton
This time of year the abundant ads for junk removal and cheap storage units remind us that it’s time for spring cleaning, an annual pastime that has perhaps been bolstered by the need to unlock extra space in the home during the pandemic. Businesses, too, have managed to find space to accommodate…
Clare Naden
The internet has been one of the biggest winners in the past year’s pandemic, with traffic and transactions reaching unprecedented levels in 2020. Unsurprisingly, the number of malicious attacks and activity has risen with it.
According to INTERPOL Secretary-General Jürgen Stock, “Cybercriminals…
David L. Chandler
This story was originally published by MIT News.
Two MIT professors have proposed a new approach to estimating the risks of exposure to Covid-19 under different indoor settings. The guideline they developed suggests a limit for exposure time, based on the number of people, the size of the space,…
Sabine Terrasi
In yacht and boat building, the most commonly used materials are composites. By combining the positive properties of at least two components, composites often have outstanding features—some of them even specially adapted to their respective areas of application.
It is hardly surprising that they…
