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In 1970, the Seabee Memorial Association began construction to build a monument in Washington, D.C. to honor the memory of those who served in Naval Construction Battalions. The famous Felix de Weldon—a former Seabee—designed the monument of dark brown marble with bronze figures and a bronze back…
Former FDA Chairman Robert Califf, M.D., stepped down on Jan. 20, 2017, and it’s not always easy to predict what the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), or any FDA agency, will accomplish under a new chairman. Efforts at quality management could be affected by what appears to be an…
Most often when we think of a wheel, it’s in the context of transportation, one of the more obvious and ever-present of the 7 wastes in lean. In fact, the first likely use of a wheel and axle was not for transport but for processing—actual work.
According to the Smithsonian, the potter’s wheel…
Genichi Taguchi is famous for his pioneering methods of robust quality engineering. One of the major contributions that he made to quality improvement methods is Taguchi designs.
Designed experiments were first used by agronomists during the last century. This method seemed highly theoretical at…
(Juran: Southington, CT) -- Management, consulting, and benchmarking firm Juran has launched a brand new website and branding package. Since joining the team as chief operations officer, Joseph M. DeFeo has made strides towards modernizing the organization’s image and digital offerings, and this…
‘Sitting is the new smoking” is a common new adage. James Levin, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic explains, “Too much sitting also seems to increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer.” He adds that sitting for four rather than two hours a day in front of a TV screen increases the…
Depending on whom you ask, it’s either the best of times or the worst of times for global trade. Protectionists villainize trade as damaging to U.S. workers, while on the other side of the coin, pure laissez faire free traders consider trade as a pure positive for the United States.
Mexico and…
Acquiring new knowledge and perspectives helps you grow within your general area of comfort or interest. To really grow, you need to stretch yourself outside of that comfort zone by learning or experiencing something completely different. In addition to acquiring the new skill, knowledge, or…
Businesses don’t have to chose between being “tree huggers” or “planet plunderers.” Black History Month: NIST employee was one of the developers of the computerized spreadsheet. Metrology: process signature analysis and large-field-of-view, multisensor systems.
“African-American History Month:…
The U.S. national debt currently stands at approximately $20 trillion. In the time it will take you to read this article, the debt will increase by a couple of million dollars more. Regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum, these facts are stark and shocking.
Thus, it’s no…
To any of his sports-fan colleagues, NIST mathematician and computer programmer Vernon Dantzler might have been somewhat of a celebrity. Dantzler had been a professional baseball player, and a star shortstop in the Texas circuit of the Negro Baseball League during the early 1940s, before the…
The world of systems is very wide and deep, and this column can’t be perfect and all-encompassing. My goal here is to emphasize that solutions based on incomplete models lead to incomplete solutions. I’m not calling them incorrect solutions, just incomplete solutions.
Every problem model is a…
Politicians have traditionally paid lip service to the plight of the worker, but with working class struggles at the top of the new administration’s fix-it list, we will likely hear them talking more than usual about the steps they will take to reduce income inequality or end three decades of wage…
Last month, 2001 Baldrige Award-winning University of Wisconsin-Stout hosted a lively campus engagement session. (See for yourself via this video of the live-streamed event, which kicked off with dancing.) The university holds the “You Said... We Did” sessions each January to demonstrate its…
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program is offering (for a fee) a limited number of seats for their 2017 examiner training course through its Baldrige Examiner Training Experience (BETE) program. BETE attendees learn the same methods and techniques used by examiners…
There’s a known rule-breaker among materials, and a new discovery by an international team of scientists adds more evidence to back up the metal’s nonconformist reputation. According to a new study led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab…
(ACSI: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Citizen satisfaction with the federal government reached a four-year high at the end of 2016, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Three years of eroding citizen satisfaction culminated in an all-time low score in 2015, but over the course of a…
(CMS: Weatherford, TX) -- The Coordinate Metrology Society (CMS) today launched its Call for Papers for the 33rd annual Coordinate Metrology Society Conference (CMSC), July 17–21, 2017, to be held in Snowbird, UT. The eminent association for measurement professionals worldwide is once again…
(QualityLogic: Simi Valley, CA) -- QualityLogic, a leading developer of interoperability test tools for the smart grid industry, is introducing independent integration consulting and testing services to help implement pilots, demonstrations, and full deployments that involve smart grid…
At times it can be difficult to have a common-sense discussion about the relationship between business and the natural environment. The discourse (maybe argument is a better word) tends to be highly charged, and the opposing camps seem to have lost the ability to listen to each other.
The…
Quality improvement initiatives are a mainstay for hospital care teams. They can also offer a fresh approach for raising patient satisfaction scores. To achieve maximum effectiveness, however, they require timely patient feedback.
Nowhere is this truer, perhaps, than in the high-volume/short-…
Employees who know and understand their company’s core values are 51 times more likely to be engaged fully in their work than those who don’t.
That’s an impressive stat that leaders can’t afford to ignore. Your company’s culture is often what sets you apart from the competition, so communicating…
Our most recent episode of QDL from this past Friday offered a nice mix of content covering the pros of regulations, transitioning to ISO 9001, the human case for going slow on artificial intelligence, and some dam risk management.
Here’s a closer look:
“Deregulation Under Trump Won’t Create a…
Before my bosses get wind of the artificial intelligence (AI) platform Quill (“perfectly written, meaningful narratives indistinguishable from a human-written one”) and decide its 18-month ROI would be a great exchange for my pay and complaining, I’d like to present this human-centric survey of…
The attempt to eliminate noise from an operating system or a business process is an interesting and perhaps worthwhile challenge, until one considers the question: What is the real signal? What is creating the noise?
In many businesses today, there are several signals, what we might call noise…
