The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) recently tweeted that they wanted to bring back apparel manufacturing to the United States. Why would anyone want more jobs with long hours and low pay, whether historically in the US or currently in places like Bangladesh? Thanks in part to international trade, the real price of […]
Google’s Engineering Practices documentation
A new technical paper titled “Hardware Security Failure Scenarios: Potential Hardware Weaknesses” was published by NIST. Abstract “Hardware is often assumed to be robust from a security perspective. However, chips are both created with software and contain complex encodings (e.g., circuit designs and firmware). This leads to bugs, some of which compromise security. This publication... » read more
The catastrophic breakup of a Boeing 747 sends investigators back to a botched repair 22 years earlier.
Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: About half of the processors packaged in Russia are defective. This has prompted Baikal Electronics, a Russian processor developer, to expand the number of packaging partners in the country, according to a report in Vedomosti, a Russian-language business dai...
Shopping for a simple couch or dresser is driving Americans mad. What does the future hold for one of North Carolina's most important industries?
Secure Data Recovery found that average failed hard drive spun for 25,233 hours before failing. That’s 1,051 days, or two years and ten months. Failed drive data recovery biz Secure Data Recovery has produced a report giving its experience of hard disk drive life expectancy from 2,007 damaged and defective drives it has received for […]
Many devices come equipped with an IP rating. It's not the only thing you need to know, but it is important. Here's what it means.
The Fort Worth apparel company celebrates a century as a blank cultural canvas.
The Japanese define quality in two ways — atarimae hinshitsu and miryokuteki hinshitsu. Understanding the difference between them is the key to building products that users love.
Eight Disciplines Methodology (8D) is a method or model developed at Ford Motor Company used to approach and to resolve problems, typically employed by quality engineers or other professionals. Focused on product and process improvement, its purpose is to identify, correct, and eliminate recurring problems.[1] It establishes a permanent corrective action based on statistical analysis of the problem and on the origin of the problem by determining the root causes. Although it originally comprised eight stages, or 'disciplines', it was later augmented by an initial planning stage. 8D follows the logic of the PDCA cycle. The disciplines are:
Failure mode and effects analysis is the process of reviewing as many components, assemblies, and subsystems as possible to identify potential failure modes in a system and their causes and effects. For each component, the failure modes and their resulting effects on the rest of the system are recorded in a specific FMEA worksheet. There are numerous variations of such worksheets. An FMEA can be a qualitative analysis, but may be put on a quantitative basis when mathematical failure rate models are combined with a statistical failure mode ratio database. It was one of the first highly structured, systematic techniques for failure analysis. It was developed by reliability engineers in the late 1950s to study problems that might arise from malfunctions of military systems. An FMEA is often the first step of a system reliability study.
‘The Problem with…’ series covers controversial topics related to efforts to improve healthcare quality, including widely recommended but deceptively difficult strategies for improvement and pervasive problems that seem to resist solution. The ‘5 whys’ technique is one of the most widely taught approaches to root-cause analysis (RCA) in healthcare. Its use is promoted by the WHO,1 the English National Health Service,2 the Institute for Healthcare Improvement,3 the Joint Commission4 and many other organisations in the field of healthcare quality and safety. Like most such tools, though, its popularity is not the result of any evidence that it is effective.5–8 Instead, it probably owes its place in the curriculum and practice of RCA to a combination of pedigree, simplicity and pedagogy. In terms of pedigree, ‘5 whys’ traces its roots back to the Toyota Production System (TPS).9 It also plays a key role in Lean10 (a generic version of TPS) as well as Six Sigma,11 another popular quality improvement (QI) methodology. Taiichi Ohno describes ‘5 whys’ as central to the TPS methodology:The basis of Toyota's scientific approach is to ask why five times whenever we find a problem … By repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear. The solution, or the how-to, is designated as ‘1H.’ Thus, ‘Five whys equal one how’ (5W=1H). (ref. 9, p. 123) This quote also makes the case for the technique's simplicity. Asking ‘why’ five times allows users to arrive at a single root cause that might not have been obvious at the outset. It may also inspire a single solution to address that root cause (though it is not clear that the ‘1H’ side of the equation has been adopted as widely). The pedagogical argument for …
The long read: Amid the complex web of international trade, proving the authenticity of a product can be near-impossible. But one company is taking the search to the atomic level
A seemingly silly gesture is done for the sake of safety.
Data is invading every nook and cranny of every team, department, and company in every industry, everywhere. Developing the talent needed to take full advantage must be a high priority. Indeed, everyone must be able to contribute to improving data quality, interpreting analyses, and conducting their own experiments. It will take decades for the public education systems to churn out enough people with the needed skills — far too long for companies to wait. Fortunately, managers, aided by a senior data scientist engaged for a few hours a week can introduce five powerful “tools” that will help their teams start to use analytics to solve important business problems.
