After many years of blogging, and consistent with my desire to move toward retirement, we have ended the Insights blog. Thanks to Doug Bedell for his years of blog support.

As The Space Shuttle Flights End…

Posted on July 21, 2011
Filed Under Government, Technology | Leave a Comment

“Wheels stopped.” With those words this morning, Atlantis completed the final space shuttle flight and ended 30 years of U.S. orbital space flights.

It can be argued that the space flights were exorbitantly expensive and not worth the outlay. We’d disagree. Expensive, yes, but learning often has high costs. The point is the learning itself, and the experience it provides.

NASA has reason to appreciate the generosity of U.S. taxpayers, and we taxpayers have more than a little reason to be appreciative of NASA and its astronauts.

They’ve taken us into orbit, many times now, and helped provide, among other treasures, those magnificent photos of deep space from the Hubble telescope.
Read more

Comments

Daily Bearings In a Pressurized Economy

Posted on July 15, 2011
Filed Under Business | Leave a Comment

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has today’s job market pegged as he writes about “The Start-Up of You.” Something a lot of people, political leaders included, don’t seem to realize is that brainpower is powering today’s economic scene in more challenging ways than even. If you can’t envision new ways of doing things using the latest technology, you’re likely to lose out.

This writer discovered something like this two years ago after coming upon what became a course-changing client on Twitter.

Friedman cites the multi-billion dollar valuations of Silicon Valley companies like Facebook (nearly $100 billion), Twitter and Linked In ($8 billion each) and Groupon ($30 billion).

“These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world,” he notes, “and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don’t employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they’re all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers.”
Read more

Comments

Keep Repetitive Learning ‘Up Front’

Posted on July 11, 2011
Filed Under Technology, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Scott Nesbitt, a technical writing colleague on the Web, raises an interesting question: How do we write manuals or procedures with steps that might involve repetitive skills or insights without bogging the reader down?

Repetition, Scott notes, is an effective way of learning but “it gets tedious quite quickly.” So how do we keep procedures from working against themselves by inflicting too much cross-referencing on the reader?

A good question. I haven’t talked with Dennis Owen about this, but he can chime in whenever he pleases.

An approach that occurs to Scott is to state something like this af the beginning of a procedure:
Read more

Comments

Another Bookish Aim for the Ages – Digital This Time

Posted on June 14, 2011
Filed Under Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

It won’t come close to matching the great Royal Library of Alexandria in elegance, and doesn’t care to. But the just-launched Physical Archive of the Internet in Richmond, CA, already has over 300,000 books on hand, well on its way to bettering the 400,000 to 700,000 parchment scrolls that were stored at Alexandria, Egypt in ancient times.

The Physical Archive of the Internet is aiming to digitalize and preserve for long-term storage “one copy of every book, record, and movie we are able to attract or acquire” – 10 million or more items. This is a critical time for launching such an ambitious project, the archive notes, because “books are being thrown away, or sometimes packed away, as digitized versions become more available.”
Read more

Comments

Crisis Lessons That Go Unlearned

Posted on June 8, 2011
Filed Under Business, Government, Technology | Leave a Comment

Michael Coston has eclectic interests, so on his Avian Flu Diary he writes about the continuing mishandling of the communication aspects of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant accident. “When, oh when, will they ever learn?” one is prompted to ask. The question seems to hold both for the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, and Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA).

The earthquake-initiated accident was much worse than first reported, with three of the six reactors on the Fukushima Daiichi site experiencing meltdowns, and two of them possibly being melt throughs, with nuclear fuel actually “melted through the walls or floors of (the) reactor vessel.”

Yet the accident’s severity “was held at a 5 for a full month (the same as Three Mile Island), before being raised to a Chernobyl-comparable level 7 on April 11th,” Coston notes.
Read more

Comments

NASA Preparing, Ultimately, for Mars

Posted on May 26, 2011
Filed Under Government, Technology | Leave a Comment

With the space shuttle flights winding down, we’ve been wondering where NASA will be heading next. The answer is, first to an asteroid by 2025, then Mars, where they hope to arrive by the 2030s. The space agency won’t be building a brand new spaceship to get there. Instead, it will be modifying the Orion spacecraft that’s been part of the Constellation program.

Meanwhile, there will be unnmaned exploratory flights, like the Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled for launching this fall, and the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutionN (MAVEN) mission planned for late 2013.

NASA’s website is a fascinating place to roam all by itself. It has details of all that the space agency is planning to do, and the assistance in terms of engineering and science education needed to accomplish its space goals.

President Obama recalibrated NASA’s goals last year, with the cancellation of the Constellation program and the setting of the new asteroid and Mars goals.
Read more

Comments

‘Making a Beeline’ Comes Naturally – to Bees

Posted on May 17, 2011
Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment

It’s spring, and we’re called to note some of the wonders outside our window, like bees buzzing from blossom to blossom. They never seem to collide with anything, but always alight where they’re presumably headed. How do they do that?

It seems they have optic flow controllers that aviators envy. The website physorg.com advises that a bee’s tiny brain gets input from a visual system that includes a dorsal, or overhead, view. As a bee flies, it gets inputs from the front to the back of its visual field, optic flows that are “defined as the angular speed of environmental contrasts passing through its visual field.” All that feedback in a bee’s nervous system of a hundred thousand to a million neurons. Talk about tight packaging!

French scientists built a bee flight chamber, pictured here, with a complex geometric shape intended to baffle the insects. “This flight chamber had several constrictions where the floor and ceiling, or the side walls, converged. The researches observed that a bee’s speed decreased in proportion to the narrowest point of passage in the flight chamber, whether the constriction was horizontal or vertical.
Read more

Comments

Keeping Statistics Simple, Yet Profound

Posted on May 12, 2011
Filed Under Business, Government | Leave a Comment

Knowing what we’re doing requires ready, reliable observational methods – preferably, a method. The best method we know (though we wouldn’t claim to be expert in it) is statistical process control (SPC) based on principles espoused by the late Dr. W. Edwards Deming and the work and writings of Deming disciples like Donald J. Wheeler.

Dr. Deming was a godlike statistician who had a profound understanding of his discipline, so profound that he expressed it simply, and really caught your attention (if only on videotapes) with questions like: “What do you want to accomplish?,” “By what method will you accomplish it?” and “How will you know?”

Donald Wheeler had the good fortune of meeting Dr. Deming in 1972, working with him thereafter and writing or editing materials about him. He and his wife, Fran, founded SPC Press in 1986, which published Deming’s biography, The World of W. Edwards Deming, by his long-time secretary, Cecelia S. Kilian, in 1992. (Dr. Deming’s own “bible,” Out of the Crisis, was published by MIT a decade or so earlier.)

We noted that Don Wheeler is to receive the 2010 Deming Medal from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) in Pittsburgh this weekend, and felt it appropriate to note Dirk Dusharme’s May 4 interview with him at Quality Digest.
Read more

Comments

Siemens Renewed Via Vision and Values

Posted on May 1, 2011
Filed Under Business | Leave a Comment

Businessweek provides an example of why focus and inspired priorities are so important to building, or rebuilding, a business. Siemens’ return to prominence after a bribery scandal more than three years ago is a tribute to its new President and CEO, Peter Löscher, who, the magazine advises, put first things first and is keeping them there.

Vision, values and the processes to insure they are taken seriously are crucial to corporate renewal. “Being good today means you have to be better tomorrow, and even better the day after tomorrow,” Löscher says. “The biggest risk is complacency.”

Evidently, complacency almost brought Siemens down. The company was run as a collection of corporate fiefdoms with little accountability (values) by divisional managers. Now, under a new management roster, it’s been restructured partly around “green” businesses (vision) .

Read more

Comments

Another Nuclear Utility Muzzled in a Crisis

Posted on April 28, 2011
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

There is something about nuclear power emergency communication that seems extra daunting for utilities. Tokyo Electric Power Co., our colleague, Doug Bedell, notes, just turned its role as spokesperson for the Fukushima plant over to the Japanese government. That’s what happened at TMI-2 in 1979, when Harold Denton, of the NRC, took over from Metropolitan Edison Co. It took longer at Fukushima, but the utility couldn’t hold on to its lead communication role there either.

Comments

Email Subscribe

Recently


Categories


Archives


Blogroll