Christopher J. Scolese

After 30 years of missions, NASA is ending its Space Shuttle programme. Why was this decision taken, and what’s next for NASA ?

Christopher J. Scolese : The Space Shuttle has been around for 30 years and it has proven itself to be a remarkable machine that has accomplished some absolutely fantastic missions and tasks. The Hubble Space Telescope and astronomy would not be where they are today without the Space Shuttle and all the work NASA carried out with our international partners. Without the Shuttle, today’s International Space Station (ISS) could not have been built to serve all
15 partner countries. Our work on the ISS truly serves the whole world as more and more countries have come to

use it. Now NASA is ready to embark on the
next phase of space exploration. This will be the utilization of the ISS now that it has been built, and we have all started to understand how to exploit it. NASA is in a position to carry out necessary research in order to fully utilize the ISS and prepare, once again, to send humans beyond low-Earth orbit with the technologies of today. This was

the reason for moving on from the Space Shuttle to build upon the great legacy of that machine. Of course, like anything else, the space industry has changed over the past 30 to 40 years.

In 1970, roughly, when the Space Shuttle was conceived, there were really only two countries in the world that were sending people into space : the USA and the Soviet Union. Both  countries are very different today ; the world is very different. I like to joke with young engineers and say, “ Think about it : the power of your handheld cellular phone today is probably
greater than that of the computers that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon in the 1970s ”. So, clearly technology, the environment and globalization have changed the way we all look at the world. This is all factored into our plans for the future.

Space exploration and discovery are associated with innovation. Can standards act as a vehicle for disseminating innovation ? Are there particular areas in which ISO standards can help the industry move forward ?

Christopher J. Scolese :

Of course people think that standards and innovation do not go together and that they inhibit what you can do. And that is wrong. In my mind, there are two types of standards. First, there are systems specifications– standards that tell the user the right way to do things, regardless of the technology used. To give you some examples from my background as an electrical engineer :

Read more text http://www.iso.org

The Illustrated Toyota Production System, Vol. 2

We are pleased to bring to you The Illustrated Toyota Production System, Volume 2. This is a book that sheds light on lean manufacturing practices and in particular the Industrial Engineering underpinnings of TPS. Building on the overview of philosophy, principles and systems provided in Volume 1, the second half gives 60 practical lessons on kaizen and industrial engineering approaches and their use.

To celebrate the publishing of this book in English, we are offering a 2-for-1 sale through the month of June. Click on the banner above or visit www.gemba-shop.com and enter the coupon code TPSGEMBA upon checkout.

Each book is about 130 pages, half of which are illustrations of various principles and tools.

Volume 2 contains 60 lessons made up of one page of text and one supporting illustration, such as the one below from “Lesson 38: Education and Training Help People See Waste“.

The book is organized into four sections as shown below:

Section 1. What Is Kaizen?

1. Kaizen Is Built on Respect for People
2. A Key to Toyota’s Outstanding Success
3. Sharing Information through Visualization
4. Creating a Common Understanding of Work through Visual Management
5. Examples of Visual Management
6. Knowledge Is Not Sufficient–Creativity Is Needed
7. We Know Defects Are Waste–Why Can’t We Kaizen Them Away?
8. Understand Time-Tested and Proven Problem Solving Techniques
9. Kaizen Must Be Workplace-Centered
10. Understand the True Nature of Defects
11. How to Find the Root Causes of Defects in the Workplace
12. Getting Rid of the Waste of Inspection
13. Causes of Careless Mistakes & the Pokayoke Concept
14. Three Approaches to Pokayoke
15. How to Cope with Unplanned Minor Stops of Equipment
16. How Can We Learn to See Waste?
17. What to Do When You Cannot Find Topics for Kaizen

Read more text http://www.gembapantarei.com

Ionosphere Coupling, which hypothesizes that the heating in the ionosphere may have been caused by the impending earthquake as the fault line released radioactive radon. This theory, of course, is not actually proven, but is instead presented as a possible explanation for the presence of the high-density electrons and emitted infrared radiation that was observed.

Another explanation for this strange heating — and one that, upon analysis, seems much more likely — is that it was an indication that concentrated energy was used to induce the earthquake, and not the other way around. Numerous credible reports and scientific observations reveal that HAARP technology is fully capable of being used as a scalar weapon, meaning it can emit strong electromagnetic pulse bombs that can alter weather or trigger seismic fault lines.

read at http://www.naturalnews.com

fatigue, and other health defects while the flickering of fluorescent bulbs causes dizziness, headaches, weakness and illness in some sensitive people. And recently, a study conducted by Peter Braun at Berlin, Germany’s Alab Laboratory found CFLs to give off chemical vapors that are linked to cancer. CFLs also contain mercury, a neurotoxin that can damage the brain, liver, kidneys and central nervous system. As long as the mercury is contained in the bulb, CFLs are safe. But eventually bulbs break or burn out, even long-lasting CFLs. When they do, “consumers simply throw them out in the trash,” said Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University and editor of the journal Environmental Research. And this can have a collective effect on landfills once they start failing in large numbers.

What can consumers do?

Philips may have solution with the EcoVantage, a new line of incandescent light bulbs that, using halogen elements, provide energy savings of about 28 percent compared to conventional incandescents. According to a report from Sustainable Life Media, this meets or exceeds efficiency standards established in the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007.
While not as efficient as compact fluorescent or LED bulbs, which supposedly reduce energy use by up to 80 percent but are expensive, the EcoVantage is likely to appeal to consumers unhappy with the quality of light of the more energy efficient models.

read at http://www.naturalnews.com

IDG News Service — SAP and Dell are expanding their relationship in the areas of cloud computing and in-memory databases, the companies will announce on Monday during the Sapphire conference in Orlando.First off, SAP customers will be able to deploy the applications on Dell’s VIS Next Generation Datacenter Platform, which has been bolstered in recent years by acquisitions like storage optimization vendor Ocarina Networks and server provisioning provider Scalent.

SAP and Dell will be joined at Sapphire by a representative of the University of Kentucky, which is moving its SAP implementation to a Dell-managed cloud, said Kaj van de Loo, senior vice president of technology strategy at SAP.



While SAP completed the research and development work required to ensure its software can be easily virtualized years ago, some testing and certification was required to ensure compatibility with the management tools and other “edge” aspects of Dell’s platform, van de Loo said.

Dell is also joining the ranks of hardware vendors selling appliances based on SAP’s HANA in-memory database technology. The in-memory processing holds data to be processed in RAM instead of reading it from disks, providing a performance boost.

HANA boxes can tap data from both SAP and other sources, and will also support a series of specialized applications aimed at specific business problems.

Dell’s HANA machines will use PowerEdge R910 iron, according to a statement. An early customer includes alcoholic beverages distributor Charmer-Sunbelt Group, according to a statement.

Other HANA hardware partners include Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Fujitsu. All of them will release machines according to a standard bill of materials that defines “small, medium and large” sizes and, correspondingly, a rough idea of the underlying horsepower, according to van de Loo. Pricing details have been scarce so far, but should emerge when HANA enters general availability in June.

read at http://www.cio.com

“At each stage of the manufacture, trade and use of pulp and paper products, producers, customers and users need a precise language to communicate their performance expectations quantifiably and verifiably,” comments ISO/TC 6 Chair, Dr. Byron Jordan. “International Standards provide that precise language.”

Despite the rise of e-mail, Internet, texting, Twitter and other forms of electronic communication, words and symbols written and printed on paper remain the foundation of commerce, law, culture and education and support the archives of civilization around the world.

Standards developed by ISO/TC 6 support trade and ensure confidence between business partners by providing the basis for certification to confirm the performance and other characteristics of paper, board and pulp products.

For example, when objects are packaged for transportation or trade anywhere in the world, the packaging is likely to be made of recyclable paperboard. Paper and paperboard are marketed as commodities and are sold on the basis of performance specifications so that users can mix compatible material from multiple sources.

Books, magazines and newspapers can interleave pages printed on different papers as long as the appearance attributes, printability characteristics, strength and feel of these papers are known to match – which can be confirmed by reference to ISO standards.

Other examples of performance characteristics verified by standards include the following:

read at http://www.iso.org

The many different ways of using control charts in both service and manufacturing applications may be summarized under five major headings. These five categories are arranged in order of increasing sophistication below.



The first of these is that of Report Card Charts. Report Card Charts are charts kept for the files. They may be occasionally used for information about how things are going, or for verification that something has or has not occurred, but they are not used in real time for operating or improving the processes and systems present. This is a valid but weak usage of control charts.

The next category consists of Process Adjustment Charts. Some product characteristic may be plotted on a control chart and used in a feedback loop for making process adjustments, or some input characteristic may be tracked and used in a feed-forward loop for the same purpose. In many cases these Process Adjustment Charts will result in substantially more consistent operations than was the case prior to the use of control charts. (This assumes that one will know how to properly adjust the process. In some cases such knowledge can only be gained by some of the following uses of control charts.) However, once this initial improvement has been achieved, Process Adjustment Charts simply strive to preserve the new status quo. The potential for dynamic and continual improvement is missing from this usage of the charts. Unfortunately, this seems to be the only usage considered in most of the articles recently published in the journals.



The third category is Process Trial Charts. These are charts used to analyze the data from simple experiments performed upon the process. This short-term usage of control charts is a simple and easy-to- understand alternative to the use of ANOVA and other statistical techniques. This usage is often found in
conjunction with the next category.

read this article on SPC press

Typically on the left vertical axis is frequency of occurrence, but it can alternatively represent cost or other important unit of measure. The right vertical axis is the cumulative percentage of the total number of occurrences, total cost, or total of the particular unit of measure. The purpose is to highlight the most important among a (typically large) set of factors. In quality control, the Pareto chart often represents the most common sources of defects, the highest occurring type of defect, or the most frequent reasons for customer complaints, etc. See this help file how to use our tool.

Online pareto chart

Quality Control

Two small software vendors this week released business intelligence product upgrades that will allow manufacturers to more accurately and rapidly assess the cost and quality of their products.

SigmaQuest Inc., a provider of on-demand product quality analysis tools, released version 6.1 of its flagship SigmaSure product, which adds several new features, including support for identifying potentially costly, low-quality “maverick” products before they are shipped.



At the same time, aPriori, a provider of cost management analysis software, delivered version 5.5 of its self-named tool, which, among other things, allows manufacturers to compute the cost of a single component manufactured in multiple internal or supplier plants.

The most significant new feature in the 6.1 release of SigmaQuest’s SigmaSure is support for analysis of maverick parts and products, a capability that is increasingly important to manufacturers of electronics components, SigmaQuest’s largest customer base. A maverick part is defined by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association as an “atypical product that exhibits anomalistic characteristics causing higher-than-normal levels of failure in the end-user application.”



Maverick parts, for example, may fall within prescribed functional test parameters but still fail often in the field, leading to costly product returns. Many electronic equipment OEMs, said SigmaQuest CEO Nader Fathi, have begun to require component suppliers to certify that they have analyzed part lots for their potential to exhibit maverick behavior.

“Just looking at product yields is not good enough to determine if products will behave correctly,” Fathi told Managing Automation today.

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Pie charts

• Bar charts
• Run Charts
• Radar Charts
• Scatter Plots
• Histograms
• Pareto Charts
• Normal Test Plots
• Process Capability Calculations
• Control Charts
• Relations Diagram
• Pathway
• Affinity Diagrams
• Brainstorms
• Building Consensus
• Cause and Effect Diagrams
• Flowcharts
• Force Field Diagrams
• Tree Diagrams