Sep
1
2010
Wordle word cloud of search key words that led visitors to Manufacturology over the past 30 days.
This blog recorded its 10000′th page view last week. The number of individual visitors is slightly lower as some people view many pages during one visit. However, most of the traffic here on Manufacturology is from search engines, and most visitors only view one page — their ‘landing page’. Therefore, I believe that the actual number of visitors should also be approaching 10000 any day now.
Disregarding variation I had on average about 40 visitors per day since I started Manufacturology in January. In reality some days there are more, perhaps 60, some days as few as 5. The peak was in April when I wrote about the Eyafjallajökull eruption, registering as much as 1871 page views on April 18. As you may realise, such days influence the overall statistics heavily. In fact, 25 percent of my 10000 visitors arrived within a few days in April searching for information about the volcanic ash cloud.
I find it much more rewarding when I find that my posts about strategic capabilities reach their audience. For example, my post called “What are strategic capabilities?” is currently showing up as result number five on a google search on “strategic capabilities”. That means that many interested readers end up here.
I’m actually quite pleased when I consider that I have, after all, been able to attract all these visitors without writing about sex, relations, gossip, media or any other mainstream subject that is known to drive traffic to blogs. It’s true that many popular blogs have 10k or even 100k page views per day, and compared to those, a total of 10k views during eight months is of course very modest. But I compare that number with the handful of readers that I reach when writing research papers, and from that perspective reaching 10000 persons is very rewarding indeed.
In order to give you an idea of what kind of keywords people that end up here on Manufacturology are searching for, I created a Wordle word cloud of all searches that were registered by my wordpress platform over the last 30 days. From it, you can see that the most used key words right now are “strategic”, “latex”, “cost”, “index”, “process”, “capabilities”, “lava” and “environment”. They reflect some of the different topics that are shown in the “popular posts” list in the sidebar.
Aug
27
2010
Alde Nilsson as portrayed on the award diploma.
The Alde Nilsson Award for production research is a Swedish award given annually to one or a few researchers who made notable contributions to the field of production research during the preceding year.
Alde Nilsson was born in 1917 and graduated from the Swedish technical college as ‘gymnasieingenjör’. He came to worked at ASEA and was advanced to become vice president responsible for manufacturing during 1960 to 1977.
Alde Nilsson was known to be exceptionally knowledgeable, dynamic, direct, persuasive and fair. On his 70′th birthday he was honoured through the establishment of the foundation that bears his name: Alde Nilsson’s ABB-foundation, along with the associated award.
The attention given to the prize has varied over the years. In the beginning of the 1990’s, it was awarded to recipients during a ceremony where the cheque and diploma was handed over by Swedish Prince Bertil. In recent years, it has been awarded during the Swedish Production Symposium, which is arranged annually by the Swedish Production Academy.
Most of the following (incomplete) list of award recipients was obtained through the aid of the current secretary of the Alde Nilsson ABB-foundation, Helena Malmqvist at ABB Corporate Research. Unfortunately she could only obtain the names of award winners starting from 2001. I was able to extend the list somewhat through internet searches for old press releases, as well as by e-mailing some of the older award winners and ask for more information.
Since this is, as far as I know, the only available list of Alde Nilsson award winners, I would greatly appreciate any help to further extend it with missing names.
Alde Nilsson award winners
1990
1991
1992 Robert Ohlsson, Bengt-Göran Rosén
1993
1994 Bo Erixon
1995
1996
1997 Anders Adlemo, Pia Sandvik Wiklund, Jan Wahlberg
1998
1999 Per Petersson
2000 Stephan Eskilander
2001 Pär Mårtensson
2002 Anders Karlsson, Johan Nielsen
2003 Thomas Grünberg, Kerstin Johansen, Björn Johansson, Henrik Kihlman, Stefan Tangen
2004 Petter Falkman, Arne Ingemansson, Patrik Kenger, Johan Richardsson
2005 Peter Almström, Jens von Axelson
2006 Johan Östlin
2007 Marcus Bjelkemyr, Hugo Flordal, Veronica Granell, Avenir Kobetski, Joakim Storck
2008 Jörgen Frohm, Anna Fredriksson, Kristin Andersson
2009 Johan Berglund, Jessica Bruch, Jenny Bäckstrand, Åsa Fasth, Fredrik Sikström
2010 Danfang Chen, Almir Heralic
See also
Aug
25
2010
From time to time I’ve read about companies that provide their employees with some fraction of their paid working time to do what they want. That is, to work on and elaborate any of their own ideas that they like as long as they fall reasonably within the company’s field of business.
The most famous example is perhaps Google, where employees are said to be granted 20 percent ‘innovation time’.
In a post on Harvard Business Review’s blog section, Chris Trimble expressed scepticism regarding whether the ‘Google myth’ is really true. It is, he argues, unlikely that such a strategy would pay off for a company with ‘normal’ resources. (Google apparently has nearly unlimited resources.)
In a comment the the HBR post, I mentioned an article in Ny Teknik last year (Google translation here) where former Ericsson CEO Sven-Christer Nilsson revealed how Ericsson got on the IP-telephony train. It happened, according to Nilsson, due to a strong tradition of ’skunk works’ among the company’s engineers. By the time firm management realised that they had missed the IP-train, it turned out that there was already active IP development at 15-16 places within the company.
I also know that I’ve been told how some of ABB’s products origin from the time when engineers at ASEA developed for fun in their spare time.
My opinion is that curiosity and playfulness are exceptional motivators. If you give the right people the right resources, they might actually achieve great things. It may not be what management expected, because the kind of people that I’m talking about have strong gut feelings about what they want to do. But since strategy is about catching opportunities, isn’t it a good idea that management nurture creativity and listen with one ear to what appears from below the surface?
Aug
23
2010
Summer is over, and I’ll be resuming my blogging. First off is a note about the 2010 Alde Nilsson award, which was announced last week. Two researchers were awarded 30000 SEK each for their contributions to production research.
Danfang Chen, KTH, works with factory information modelling. Her licentiate thesis, published in 2009, was titled “Information management for the factory planning process”. The thesis, which is available in PDF format here, provides a high level description of the design of a web based decision support tool known as the Production Pilot (Swedish “Produktionslotsen“).
Amir Heralic, University West, works with robotised laser metal wire deposition. Metal wire deposition is an approach to produce complex metal components rapidly and at low cost directly from a CAD drawing in a near net shape fashion. In his licentiate thesis, Heralic presents a system for on-line monitoring and control of this process. The thesis is available here.
The award diploma will be awarded during a ceremony at the next Swedish Production Symposium SPS11.
Jul
30
2010
I’m proud to announce that the literary quality of this blog allegedly meets the highest possible standards. When I applied the statistical text analysis tool found at “I Write Like” on some of the most read posts on Manufacturology over the last 24 hours, I was told that my writing resembles that of Arthur C Clarke (3 posts), Daniel Defoe (1 post), and David Foster Wallace (2 posts).
I’m therefore proud to present the following badge:
Btw, here is an interview with the software developer who wrote the “I Write Like” site and algorithm. The results aren’t based on any “real” analysis. Read criticism starting with the comments here.
Jul
12
2010
Home grown tomato plants on my veranda.
Summertime is here, and I’m more or less taking a break from the keyboard. Expect only sporadic postings until the end of August. For the next couple of weeks I will be having lazy days gardening and making some smaller maintenance jobs at our summer house.
Today was the first day back at home after a week of bathing and crab fishing with the kids on the beautiful island Syd Långö on the Swedish west coast. I was very pleased to find that my home grown tomato plants have survived my absence. Thirteen of the thirty seeds that I sowed in a planting box back in April have now grown into sturdy plants replanted in ten litre buckets. There are plenty of flowers, and I also found that one carries a small tomato.
The first big question now is, will I manage to keep them alive through the summer? And then if I do, will there be any tomatoes before the summer is over?
However, I’m not completely off work. Within a few days I can expect a list of names on students that have been granted admission to the Materials design programme, a 300 ECTS credit education in materials science for which I’m assistant program manager. Applicants are required to respond within about two weeks and confirm that they accept their place. During that time, I will keep an eye on my mailbox to ensure that no questions remain unanswered. All applicants will also receive a personal phone call to welcome them and give them a chance to ask questions.
Jun
24
2010
Tomorrow is midsummer’s eve, or solstice, the biggest holiday in Sweden next to Christmas. Feels like everyone is logging out early today, at least mentally, thinking more about garden parties and dancing around the midsummer pole to the sound of fiddles than about work.
A link to this video arrived in my mail. It reminds me of the “demos” that was circulated among game sharers back in the 1980’s when I hacked assembler on my old C64. My own efforts didn’t result in any memorable masterpieces, although I was very proud when I had managed to write my own moving “3D” starfield a la shoot’em ups of the time.
What we see here is, I think, something that could be thought of as a descendant of the “demo” genre. An animated video showing how New York gets invaded by pixels. Space invaders ships come alive bomb the streets, alive video game sprites play pong against brick walls, a gigantic game of tetris is played among the skyscrapers which are eliminated piece by piece. Brilliant, simply brilliant.
Jun
21
2010
How can the oil leak from the well below the collapsed Deepwater Horizon platform be stopped?
Despite all efforts BP has so far failed to stop the leak, which may now be up to 100000 barrels per day, a disaster of unpreceded proportions. An attempt to place a steel cone on top of the well failed. Currently BP claims to have capacity to collect 28000 barrels per day.
I and universal industrial problem solver/inventor Björn Sjögren, senior research engineer at MEFOS, spent some time by my office whiteboard today contemplating this problem.
Our sketches seen in the collage below shows our proposal. Feel free to use our image – creative commons CC BY-ND licence applies.
Method to collect from leaking deep sea oil well. Picture: Joakim Storck/CC BY-ND. Click to view larger version.
A 300m diameter and 300m tall collector cylinder of durable canvas is attached to a metal ring and lowered until it rests on the sea bottom enclosing the well. The metal ring should be heavy, made for example of linked railway beams, but could be attached to the sea bottom if considered necessary.
A 10m diameter canvas hose with an attached metal cone is lowered into the cylinder.
The top of the enclosing cylinder is then tightened until it fits around the hose and cone. The oil can then be floated through the hose to the surface where it is collected by waiting ships.
The canvas should be reinforced to cope with the weight and loads but can be quite sparesly woven. It may be preferable to use double layers in order to protect against larger leaks in case of damage.
Sounds simple or unrealistic? Neither. It’s a formidable project, but no more unrealistic than placing for example a metal cone on top of the well. We think this could work and offer our approach to those in charge at BP and to the US government.
Jun
21
2010
The 4th Swedish Production Symposium will be held in Lund on May 3 to 5 2011.
Abstract submission is from August 1 to September 20, and the date for full paper submission is January 15.
I’ll try to be there, although I know already that I’ll be short on time to get a paper ready.
Conference web site: http://www.sps11.se
Jun
20
2010
Royal wedding in Stockholm on June 19 2010. Photo: Michael Cavén/CC BY. Click to view on Flickr.
The wedding [SvD, SvD, DN] between Swedish Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel (Daniel Westling) is completely off topic for this blog. But here are some comments anyway.
Like so many other Swedes who live outside of Stockholm, I spent much of Saturday following the wedding and celebrations from the TV in my living room.
Although in favour of the current Swedish monarchy, I don’t normally spend much attention on the whereabouts of the royal family. However, yesterday’s wedding was formidable.
Enormous crowds filled the streets of Stockholm, and despite regular whinings in the media by some Swedish republicans it was more evident than ever that the Swedes love their royalties. Swedish TV SVT followed the wedding as it continued inside the royal castle. Similar pictures have rarely if ever been shown to the public before. In other words interesting in itself for that reason.
I was amazed by the talking skills of Prince Daniel and his father Olle Westling. Swedish king Carl XVI Gustav has always been known for his relatively poor rhetorical skills.
Much material including video is available on SVT’s website.
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Author
Joakim S. (75)