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NIST
An improvement to a Nobel Prize-winning technology called a frequency comb enables it to measure light pulse arrival times with greater sensitivity than previously possible—potentially improving measurements of distance along with applications such as precision timing and atmospheric sensing.
The…
Stephen Bevan
The UK was supposed to be facing a spike in unemployment after the pandemic furlough schemes ended. But instead the job market is the tightest in a generation. Given that there are also more vacancies than active job seekers, and many sectors are struggling with skill shortages, you might expect to…
Anne Trafton
Taking advantage of a phenomenon known as emergent behavior in the microscale, MIT engineers have designed simple microparticles that can collectively generate complex behavior, much the same way that a colony of ants can dig tunnels or collect food.
Working together, the microparticles can…
Megean Blum, Nico Thomas
When Nico asked me if I wanted to collaborate on this year’s challenges blog, my second thought after agreeing to the idea was a scene from the 2007 film Music and Lyrics, which I likely haven’t seen since approximately 2008.
Why this popped into my head is unknown, but ha—pop! I had forgotten…
Bruno Ménard
While traditional image processing software relies on task-specific algorithms, deep learning software uses a network to implement user-trained algorithms to recognize good and bad images or regions.
Fortunately, the advent of specialized algorithms and graphical user interface (GUI) tools for…
Erika James
Patagonia, the sportswear brand, made headlines this summer when its founder and CEO, Yvon Chouinard, announced his intention to effectively give away the multibillion dollar business instead of selling it.
Chouinard, a famously “reluctant” entrepreneur, detailed his decision to an astonished…
Bryan Christiansen
Assets are resources owned and used by a company to generate a positive economic benefit. Assets can be physical items, like equipment or furniture, or they can be intangibles like software, patents, or documents.
As a business owner, it’s important to know which assets you own, their location,…
Leeza Garber, Allison Jegla
In late spring 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged an elite investment adviser for “misstatements and omissions” about environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations related to its managed mutual funds. This same financial firm has also faced myriad…
jeffdewar
This is the final installment of a five-part series.
We’ve considered two quality organizations. The first, ASQ, has been around since 1946. Founded by none other than W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran, Walter A. Shewhart, and George D. Edwards. Titans of the quality field. Visionaries before they…
S. Heather Duncan
A new deep-learning framework developed at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is speeding up the process of inspecting additively manufactured metal parts using X-ray computed tomography, or CT, while increasing the accuracy of the results. The reduced costs for time, labor,…
William A. Levinson
‘You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes told Dr. Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1891) A Scandal in Bohemia. Taiichi Ohno, who developed Henry Ford’s lean production system into the Toyota Production System, told managers to stand in a circle on the shop floor and observe everything…
Elizabeth Benham
Calling all teachers, parents, and students. It’s easy to learn the metric system—or, as it’s more formally called, the International System of Units (SI). Explore these top 10 tips for teaching the SI. Let’s begin the countdown with....
10. Make it fun!
Integrating metric measurements into play…
Gleb Tsipursky
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink claimed in a recent interview with Fox that “we have to get our employees back in the office.” According to him, doing so would result in “rising productivity that will offset some of the inflationary pressures.”
Fink didn’t provide any data in the form of statistics,…
Kerry Stevenson
Operating a desktop FFF 3D printer can be a ton of fun, except when you make mistakes. Mistakes can cause print failures, and also embarrassment when they are so obvious you really should not have made them.
Let’s take a look at my list of the eight dumbest FFF 3D printing mistakes you can make.…
Alex Waddell, Diki Tsering, Peter Bragge, Paul Kellner
Emergency medical workers, already at increased risk for burnout compared to other professions, continue to be challenged by the fallout of Covid-19.
Stretched to the breaking point by increased workloads, highly contagious and acutely ill patients, and limited resources, workers’ risk factors for…
jeffdewar
This is the fourth installment of a five-part series.
As detailed in our third installment, ASQE is a new legal entity connected to the ASQ we all know and love. It’s a trade organization to which organizations, rather than individuals, can belong. Current membership is about 180 organizations,…
Matthew Inniger
The inability to gather good data has challenged many food manufacturers for decades. But not anymore. As sensor technology has improved, and technology platforms have become more accessible and affordable to small and medium-sized manufacturers, the food industry is poised for transformation. Food…
Donald J. Wheeler
The cumulative sum (or Cusum) technique is occasionally offered as an alternative to process behavior charts, even though they have completely different objectives. Process behavior charts characterize whether a process has been operated predictably. Cusums assume that the process is already being…
Quy Huy
In September 2022, Boeing agreed to pay $200 million for charges that it misled investors about two crashes of its 737 Max aircraft that killed 346 people. The penalty imposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is small change compared to the $2.5 billion shelled out by the plane maker…
Matt Fieldman
Customer experience, or “CX,” is all the rage in marketing circles nationally. Customer experience refers to how a customer experiences your company at every point of their buying journey—from marketing to sales to customer service, and everywhere in between. It can be tangible actions, such as…
Ula Chrobak
Thirty miles east of Reno, Nevada, past dusty hills patched with muted blue sage and the occasional injury-lawyer billboard, a large concrete structure rises prominently in the desert landscape. When fully constructed, it will be a pilot for a business that entrepreneurs envision as a major facet…
Gleb Tsipursky
Do bosses trust employees to be productive when working out of the office? Microsoft released a new study in which it found that 85 percent of leaders say the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” More concretely, 49 percent of…
Dave Gilson
Like most of us, lawyers think they can be impartial when they rate other people’s work. “They say, ‘Who writes a brief doesn’t matter. A brief is a brief; it stands on its own merit,’” explains Lori Nishiura Mackenzie, the lead strategist for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Stanford Graduate…
James Gaines, Knowable Magazine
In 2004, the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) dangled a $1 million prize for any group that could design an autonomous car that could drive itself through 142 miles of rough terrain from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada. Thirteen years later, the U.S. Department…
Shelly Fan
I admit, if I see a beehive, I back away. But part of me is also fascinated. Beehives are a remarkable feat of engineering. Swarms of bees deposit materials ranging from tree buds to chewed-up wax into densely packed honeycombs—each a geometric masterpiece—while flying in the air.
In stark…
