Manufacturology

Playing with refurbished cold rolling mill

Today was a big day at the new metal form­ing lab­o­ra­tory at Dalarna Uni­ver­sity (pre­vi­ously men­tioned in this post): After sev­eral years of talk­ing and plan­ning, our new cold rolling mill finally works. And I’ve spent the day play­ing with it to learn how it works.

I and a few om my col­leagues at the uni­ver­sity had a walk-though together with a Siemens con­sul­tant of the func­tion­al­ity pro­vided by the new con­trol sys­tems and oper­a­tor inter­face. The actual rolling mill is old, and has been rust­ing in a con­tainer for fif­teen years before it was finally been brought back to life. It has now been oiled up, repainted, and equipped with brand new Siemens S7 PLC logic and accom­pa­ny­ing visu­al­i­sa­tion soft­ware. The whole mill is run from the con­trol com­puter, which also col­lects and visu­alises logged out­put sig­nals that can be used to eval­u­ate how the mill performs.

Some work remains to be done — we already came up with a fairly exten­sive wish list. But fact remains: the mill works and we can start to design exper­i­ments and try out our ideas for how to use it in our research and edu­ca­tion. Some things can be improved, and new func­tion­al­ity wished for. How­ever, the next step now is to learn fully how to oper­ate the mill and start using it.

I’m cur­rently not famil­iar with the detailed specs, but you may get an idea about the size of the equip­ment from the above pho­tos. Max­i­mum roll force is, I’ve been told, 100 tonnes (1 MN), and max­i­mum strip width some­where around 100 mm.

Book roundup — recent reading

Here are short opin­ions on some of the books that I have read since the begin­ning of  June.

Smile or die: How pos­i­tive think­ing fooled Amer­ica and the world by Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich (2009). After fin­ish­ing this book last night, my pre­vi­ously sus­pi­cious atti­tude towards the plethora of self-help and pos­i­tive think­ing books out there has been reinforced.

Diag­nosed with breast can­cer, the author encoun­tered the cheer­fully pos­i­tive pink rib­bon cul­ture where all feel­ings of doubt, fear or anger were banned. Can­cer was an “oppor­tu­nity” and instead of vic­tims, patients (even in the final stages of dis­ease) were referred to as sur­vivors. Ehren­re­ich starts with dis­man­tling the pop­u­lar belief that pos­i­tive think­ing has any effect on can­cer sur­vival rates, and goes on to show how the deficit think­ing of unbi­ased pos­i­tive think­ing has infected almost all aspects of the Amer­i­can soci­ety includ­ing busi­ness and cor­po­rate man­age­ment. Who has time for ana­lyt­i­cal think­ing these days, she asks rhetor­i­cally? Instead, accord­ing to Ehren­re­ich, “pos­i­tive think­ing”, mean­ing con­scious blind­fold­ing  and avoid­ance of crit­i­cal and enlight­ened analy­sis in favour of cheer­ful yes-saying, has come to dom­i­nate Amer­i­can busi­ness in the last two decades.

We get a thor­ough back­ground on the his­tory of the pos­i­tive think­ing move­ment, which started out as a move­ment against Chris­t­ian Calvin­ism. Today it has become a cen­tral ide­ol­ogy in Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian “megachurches” as well as in busi­ness man­age­ment. The move­ment has sought to add sci­en­tific cred­i­bil­ity through the field of  “pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy”. How­ever, the efforts to add sci­en­tific sup­port to the promises of pos­i­tive think­ing have largely failed.

This book is an eye opener that should be read by any­one in busi­ness and acad­e­mia alike. I read with incred­u­lous scep­ti­cism about North Amer­i­can phe­nom­ena like megachurches, “pros­per­ity gospels” and absolute lack of social safety nets on the job mar­ket. Swe­den is appar­ently much less infected by the pos­i­tive thinking-disease, and much of what is described in the book appar­ently doesn’t apply here. How­ever, we are not totally unaf­fected. Con­sider this: When I asked a col­league for feed­back on my PhD the­sis I got the well mean­ing advice to replace the phrase “sci­en­tific prob­lems” with “sci­en­tific oppor­tu­ni­ties”. Are math­e­mati­cians work­ing on math­e­mat­i­cal oppor­tu­ni­ties as well?

More than ever I feel that my scep­ti­cism towards moti­va­tional talks and books by pop­u­lar speak­ers, artists, (self-help book) authors, ath­letes and adven­tur­ers is jus­ti­fied, and this is a genre towards which I’ve long had an uneasy feel­ing. Long live the grumpy crit­i­cal rationalist!

Satans raseri: en san­n­färdig berät­telse om det stora häx­oväsendet i Sverige och omgi­vande län­der by Bengt Ankar­loo (2007). [Rage of Satan — A truth­ful story of the Great Witch Noise in Swe­den and sur­round­ing nations (my trans­la­tion)] Still fresh in my mind; I fin­ished this book last week. Ankar­loo exam­ines the mech­a­nisms behind the witch pros­e­cu­tions in Swe­den and neigh­bour­ing coun­tries dur­ing the 16’th to 18’th cen­turies. He starts out by show­ing that the num­ber of vic­tims was actu­ally much lower than what is often claimed, in pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture as many as 9 mil­lion peo­ple are some­times said to have been killed. In real­ity, less than 2000 exe­cu­tions took place in Scan­di­navia, and at most 35000 in all of Europe. Still fright­en­ing num­bers though! The largest witch trial in Swe­den hap­pened in 1675 at Torsåker only 50 kilo­me­tres from where I live: 71 peo­ple were beheaded and burned in a sin­gle day.

So what caused the “great noise” as it was called in Swe­den by the time? No sin­gle fac­tor can be sin­gled out, and this is where the book shows its qual­i­ties, dis­cussing how dif­fer­ent cul­tural aspects coin­cided to cre­ate what must be described as a mass psy­chosis. The increas­ing avail­abil­ity of the new media — printed books(!) — was one. A the­o­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, includ­ing titles like Malleus Malefi­carum, agi­tat­ing for a non com­pro­mis­ing stance towards all forms of sor­cery was gain­ing read­ers at a time when writ­ten sources held great cred­i­bil­ity. The church and the increas­ingly pow­er­ful national states were fight­ing for power over people’s minds at a time where the judi­cial sys­tem was going through big changes. Addi­tion­ally, many forms of folk­loric magic and super­sti­tion with pagan roots was deeply rooted in society.

The use of child wit­nesses was not only wide­spread, but came to dom­i­nate the process. Tes­ti­mo­ni­als were often given under tor­ture in the form of answers to lead­ing ques­tions that the accused was only asked to deny or con­firm. The ques­tions were then edited to form a tes­ti­mo­nial in the form of a con­tin­u­ous “story”. Since the same ques­tions were used every­where, these “tes­ti­mo­ni­als” are often almost identical.

Although peo­ple are not being lit­er­ally beheaded and burned nowa­days, the processes of fear, the mas­sive group pres­sure in the small as well as in soci­ety at large, the intol­er­ance towards other opin­ions, and the mass psy­chosis that was the Great Noise still exist. From time to time there is an out­burst of sim­i­lar craze. If any­thing, this is evi­dent from another book that I’m writ­ing about in this post, Smile or Die by Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich (see above). I can highly rec­om­mend Ankarloo’s book, although unfor­tu­nately it is only avail­able in Swedish.

Pros­per­ity with­out growth: Eco­nom­ics for a finite planet by Tim Jack­son (2009). The recent eco­nomic cri­sis and the debate about global warm­ing woke my inter­est in the nature of eco­nomic growth. There is a strong con­sen­sus that con­tin­ued (and con­tin­u­ous) growth is a pre­req­ui­site for wealth and pros­per­ity, but why is it really nec­es­sary? The role of eco­nomic growth to make soci­eties pros­per is hardly ever dis­cussed in any depth, although in a world of lim­ited resources con­tin­u­ous growth is a log­i­cal impossibility.

Tim Jackson’s book promised to offer an alter­na­tive pos­si­bil­ity. As a sys­tem dynam­ics mod­eller and sim­u­la­tion­ist, I’m well aware of some of the sources that sets the frame of ref­er­ence for the book, for exam­ple Lim­its to growth by Donella Mead­ows. (Mead­ows worked at a team led by Jay For­rester who invented  the sys­tem dynam­ics method­ol­ogy.) Today there is an ongo­ing dis­cus­sion on if and when the world will face the chal­lenges of “peak oil”, dimin­ish­ing reserves of dif­fer­ent min­er­als and other resources, and an exhausted CO2 stor­age capac­ity in nature.

From an envi­ron­men­tal point of view, the prob­lem with eco­nomic growth is that it is linked to increased through­put of mate­r­ial goods. Increased through­put causes increas­ing emis­sions, even as pro­duc­tiv­ity (mean­ing effi­ciency) increases, because the increased resource and energy effi­ciency of pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of goods can­not com­pen­sate for the increased vol­ume. This is known as the prob­lem of “decou­pling” eco­nomic growth from emis­sions. Jack­son is con­vinced that decou­pling can­not be achieved, and thus the only option is reduced through­put. This means reduced eco­nomic growth.

A large part of Jackson’s book is used to dis­cussed the nature of pros­per­ity and wealth. As soon as the basic needs are sat­is­fied, fur­ther con­sump­tion adds lit­tle or noth­ing to increase hap­pi­ness which is a bet­ter mea­sure of pros­per­ity than GDP. Noth­ing wrong with this, and I agree fully that excess con­sump­tion does not make peo­ple happy, but how do you mea­sure hap­pi­ness objec­tively? The focus on the nature of pros­per­ity is also a weak­ness of the book, I believe, because in the end I don’t feel that I my level of insight regard­ing the mech­a­nisms of growth improved much. Jackson’s alter­na­tive solu­tion turns out to be that we must accept less growth, but that is fine he argues, since eco­nomic wealth is not the same thing as true pros­per­ity: We must aim for increased hap­pi­ness instead. Surely I too think it would be great if more peo­ple felt that they lead mean­ing­ful lives. How­ever, I find it far fetched to pro­pose this as a “solu­tion”, I hoped for some kind of deeper insight.

I fin­ished the book with a sense of uncer­tainty regard­ing the objec­tiv­ity of the book. Many of the cited sources appear to be writ­ten by peo­ple who believe strongly that the cur­rent eco­nomic sys­tem is cor­rupt. How­ever, it is inter­est­ing to imag­ine a world that does not rely on eco­nomic growth, because in the end con­tin­u­ous growth is an impos­si­bil­ity. I agree that the share of ser­vice work in the econ­omy should be increased, for exam­ple through directed tax relieves, and that ser­vice work­ers should earn a fair pay on par with for exam­ple indus­trial work­ers. How­ever, I still feel that I need to learn more about the mech­a­nisms of eco­nomic growth.

Pom­peji: livet i en romersk stad (orig­i­nal title; Pom­peii: The life of a Roman town) by Mary Beard (2010). Jump­ing back to ancient times when eco­nomic growth was hardly con­sid­ered a prob­lem. Exca­va­tions in Pom­peii began in the 18’th cen­tury, and inspired authors and musi­cians to com­pose and write roman­tic works like the Last days of Pom­peii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1834). A com­mon belief is that the peo­ple of Pom­peii was caught by sur­prise by the erup­tion of Vesu­vius on the 25’th of August 79 B.C. How­ever, the real­ity was that the Pom­pei­ians had lived though a period of esca­lat­ing earth­quakes for weeks or months, and dur­ing that time many had left the city and brought their belong­ings with them. When the pyro­clas­tic flow hit the city in the morn­ing on August 25, the remain­ing cit­i­zens were caught help­less. Build­ings, peo­ple, ani­mals, all was buried beneath a thick layer of ash. Time froze, but life in the city was not as it had always been. Many houses had been emp­tied, many peo­ple were already gone. Ongo­ing repairs revealed how those who stayed had tried to keep up some veneer of nor­mal­ity despite the earth­quakes and fear.

This book guides the reader through the city of Pom­peii as we can recon­struct it based on what is known today. Mary Beard is a highly respected researcher and gives a thor­ough and ini­ti­ated descrip­tion of the city; both its build­ings and archi­tec­ture, it’s social struc­tures, and the lives of peo­ple as far as they can be recon­structed. It is par­tic­u­larly fas­ci­nat­ing to learn how peo­ple lived in an ancient city. My impres­sion is that a mod­ern Euro­pean would have felt lost in the vivid, smelly, noisy and colour­ful streetlife. It seems to me that the way peo­ple lived their lives, in their homes and on the streets, with the many big and small gods present every­where, resem­bles life in mod­ern India more than Europe.

We get to meet real peo­ple through the recon­structed lives of a baker, a banker and a garum maker. In some cases researchers have been able to link names of peo­ple to their actual homes and for the case of the banker Cae­cilus Jucun­dus we may even know what he looked like. A sur­pris­ing lot is known about Jucun­dus’ busi­ness since 153 doc­u­ments (wax plates) that describe his finan­cial trans­ac­tions were found in his house.

Beard’s book suc­ceeds well in paint­ing a pic­ture of the social, eco­nomic, cul­tural, sex­ual and reli­gious lives of the Romans, of which less than at least I believed, is actu­ally known. The book can be a bit tedious in its atten­tion to detail, but at the same time this adds to the com­plex­ity and mys­tery of our under­stand­ing of life in an ancient Roman town. Recommended.

Freako­nom­ics: A rogue econ­o­mist explores the hid­den side of every­thing by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dub­ner (2005). This is what I’m read­ing now.

Tomato harvest

My first attempt to raise home grown tomato plants from seeds was fairly suc­cess­ful despite that I had no green­house. The Swedish sum­mer offers a nice and tem­per­ate cli­mate, but the warm sum­mer period is fairly short. Nights are also fairly cold, often below 10°C except for a period in July and August. Last week I decided to pick all fruits because of the risk of night frost.

Tomato har­vest sum­mer of 2010

That was a week ago. Only a cou­ple of toma­toes had grown red on the plants, although some were show­ing signs of a yel­low shift­ing. Now, a week later, sev­eral are turn­ing red or are about to go from green to yel­low as you can see in the photo above. The taste is great, a strong nice tomato taste. It would be fun to try some kind of green­house or plas­tic wall to improve grow­ing con­di­tions next year.

Related post: Sum­mer­time and growing tomatoes

Falun amateur bookbinders’ society website and 25’th anniversary exhibition

An obser­vant reader might have noticed that I men­tioned, on my about page, that I’m an ama­teur book­binder. As a mem­ber of the Falun ama­teur book­binders’ soci­ety (Falu amatör­bok­bindare), I try to get some time off to go down to the bindery every once in a while and make some progress on my var­i­ous book bind­ing projects.

Since I’m pro­fi­cient with web tech­nol­ogy, ear­lier this year I offered to cre­ate a web­site for the bindery. I got the site, http://www.falubokbind.se, up and run­ning in August, and it’s now start­ing to func­tion as a plat­form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion for our mem­bers. I based the site on the Word­Press plat­form, which I also use for this blog. I then spent some time to tweak the cho­sen theme in order to realise the design ideas pre­sented to me by other mem­bers of the soci­ety. This involved a few CSS and PHP hacks. You can see the result in the screen shot below.

Screen shot of the Falun ama­teur book­binders’ soci­ety web­site as of Octo­ber 7 2010.

How­ever, main­tain­ing the bindery web­site is a poor sub­sti­tute for work­ing on real books. I use a per­sonal note­book daily at work and for ideas con­cern­ing my research. I’ve just about filled my cur­rent note­book that I bound in the spring of 2008, but for­tu­nately I’ve now man­aged to com­plete the bind­ing of a new one a cou­ple of weeks ago.

The bindery web­site is cur­rently fea­tur­ing some pho­tos from the 25’th anniver­sary exhi­bi­tion, open through­out Octo­ber at the city of Falun pub­lic library — the Falun ama­teur book­binders soci­ety was founded in 1985. The exhi­bi­tion dis­plays work sam­ples by soci­ety mem­bers and book bind­ing equip­ment from our bindery. My note­book is included, indi­cated by an arrow in the photo below.

Work sam­ples from the Falun ama­teur book­binders’ soci­ety 25’th anniver­sary exhi­bi­tion. My note­book is indi­cated by the arrow.

I’m not very pro­duc­tive. My lat­est project, the note­book, took me some seven or eight evenings in the bindery to com­plete. In cal­en­dar time, this meant the entire spring semes­ter and a cou­ple of evenings after the sum­mer break.

But pro­duc­tiv­ity is of zero impor­tance in this case. I’m doing this for the fun and the joy of cre­at­ing some­thing beau­ti­ful with my hands. Some of that joy will come back to me every time I pick up my note­book for the com­ing two years or so. A hand bound high qual­ity book has a cer­tain feel­ing to it that you don’t get from books that you can buy in the stores. The weight of it, the feel­ing of flip­ping through the pages, the sound when you knock on the cover. It feels good, it looks good, it’s durable enough to last for cen­turies if stored appropriately.

On the web­site, we call our soci­ety the “Soci­ety for book­bind­ing and book arts in Falun”. Because that’s what it’s about, a mix of crafts and arts, where the com­bi­na­tion of tech­niques, mate­ri­als, colours and pat­terns pro­duces a unique book with unique qual­i­ties every time.

I wouldn’t be sur­prised if hand bound books become more pop­u­lar as “ordi­nary” books are replaced by other media. The paper­back may suc­cumb in the time of e-ink and e-books that is to come, but I believe that the hand bound book has a safe future.

Kobra at Googleplex

This evening I watched as Swedish cul­ture pro­gramme Kobra vis­ited Google’s head­quar­ters the Google­plex in Moun­tain View, Cal­i­for­nia. Google is known for tak­ing the idea of employee care to the next level with free food, free gyms, laun­dry at work, free trans­port to and from work, and a play­ful atmos­phere. No won­der Google is the most pop­u­lar employer among young engineers.

Google is in the envi­ous posi­tion that almost every­one on the planet with an inter­net con­nec­tion, except the Chi­nese then, use their ser­vices on a daily basis. Google has man­aged to develop a monopoly-like mar­ket for them­selves, and the results show. The Google­plex itself is evi­dence of the amaz­ing wealth that Google is gen­er­at­ing for itself and its own­ers — no signs of scarce resources as far as the eye can see.

You can watch the full pro­gramme online until Novem­ber 5.

Related posts: Google’s 20 per­cent inno­va­tion time policy

Product and process development in steel industries

What are the gen­eral char­ac­ter­is­tics that set the steel indus­try apart from con­ven­tional man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try? And, depend­ing on the answer, how do the processes of prod­uct devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion engi­neer­ing dif­fer from other man­u­fac­tur­ing industries?

One dif­fer­ence is that steel pro­duc­ers are faced with a diver­gent pro­duc­tion flow where a few con­stituent mate­ri­als are com­bined to form a homo­ge­neous com­pos­ite prod­uct like steel. This is in con­trast to other man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try where prod­ucts are typ­i­cally het­ero­ge­neous and con­sti­tuted of com­po­nents that are com­bined in a con­verg­ing flow. A few years ago I met a frus­trated lean pro­duc­tion expert work­ing at a steel plant who hoped to find a solu­tion for this “problem”.

Prod­uct prop­er­ties arise from small mod­i­fi­ca­tions of the pro­duc­tion process. As my friend and col­league Ylva Granbom writes in her fresh PhD the­sis (Granbom 2010), a steel’s mechan­i­cal behav­iour is largely a result of its microstruc­ture, which is a result of the chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion and the process para­me­ters dur­ing production.

Prod­uct and process inseparable

Small changes in the pro­duc­tion process (process devel­op­ment) can cause large and unex­pected changes in the prop­er­ties of the end prod­uct. In another PhD the­sis, Markus Bergfors refers to process indus­try and says that, unlike in man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­tries prod­uct devel­op­ment activ­i­ties and process devel­op­ment activ­i­ties are inter­twined and can­not be con­ducted as sep­a­rate tasks (Bergfors 2007).

It seems that due to how prod­uct prop­er­ties arise in steel pro­duc­tion, new prod­uct devel­op­ment is usu­ally a task for highly skilled experts in the fields of mate­ri­als sci­ence and mate­ri­als process engi­neer­ing. New prod­uct devel­op­ment takes place in the lab­o­ra­tory where small batches can be man­u­fac­tured and analysed in a con­trolled envi­ron­ment. Once a suc­cess­ful process path has been iden­ti­fied in the lab­o­ra­tory, a test batch is man­u­fac­tured in full scale pro­duc­tion. It is imper­a­tive that the process path defined in the lab­o­ra­tory can be repli­cated in full scale pro­duc­tion — a require­ment that puts high demands on process control.

Advanced process control

Due to strict require­ments on process con­trol, the process indus­try, includ­ing the steel indus­try, has devel­oped advanced process con­trol and process data man­age­ment sys­tems. Unlike in other man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­tries, reduc­tion of direct labour has not been the pri­mary dri­ver for automa­tion (this is my own hypothesis).

Admit­tedly, labour pro­duc­tiv­ity is not unim­por­tant, main­tained and improved prod­uct qual­ity com­bined with increas­ing through­put has grad­u­ally made man­ual oper­a­tion inad­e­quate. Instead, increas­ing automa­tion has been a con­se­quence of increas­ing require­ments on process con­trol, but also of increas­ing demands on worker well being and safety.. As a result, in com­par­i­son with other man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try, pro­duc­tion in mod­ern steel indus­tries can be char­ac­terised as cap­i­tal inten­sive, highly auto­mated high-tech pro­duc­tion. Old ‘rust belt’ indus­tries still exist, but they are get­ting fewer. Mod­ern steel plants are packed with advanced tech­nol­ogy, and the old ‘dirty fac­tory’ is grad­u­ally being recast as a clean and mod­ern workplace.

Sum­mary

So, return­ing to my ini­tial ques­tions, what are the gen­eral char­ac­ter­is­tics that set the steel indus­try apart from con­ven­tional man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try? And how does prod­uct devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion engi­neer­ing dif­fer from other industry?

• Diver­gent flow in production
• Prod­uct is defined by small mod­i­fi­ca­tions of the process
• Strict require­ments on process control
• Tight cou­pling between prod­uct design and process design

Prod­uct devel­op­ers must have pro­found knowl­edge of pro­duc­tion processes, and pro­duc­tion engi­neers a sim­i­lar under­stand­ing of how process mod­i­fi­ca­tions will influ­ence the prod­uct. In that way, there seems to be less room for spe­cial­i­sa­tion between dif­fer­ent engi­neer­ing roles com­pared to other man­u­fac­tur­ing industry.

Ref­er­ences

M. Bergfors (2007): Design­ing R&D organ­i­sa­tions in process indus­try: essays on con­text, process, and struc­ture, PhD the­sis, Luleå Uni­ver­sity of Tech­nol­ogy. http://epubl.luth.se/1402–1544/2007/48/index.html

Y. Granbom (2010): Struc­ture and mechan­i­cal prop­er­ties of dual-phase steels: an exper­i­men­tal and the­o­ret­i­cal analy­sis, PhD the­sis, Royal Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy, KTH, Stock­holm. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-24869

Swedish election leaves country in limbo

The Swedish par­lia­ment elec­tion held on Sun­day left the coun­try in a sort of limbo. The alliance of the Cen­ter party, lib­er­als, Chris­t­ian Democ­rats and con­ser­v­a­tive Mod­er­ate Party that ruled the coun­try for the past four years earned 172 out of 349 seats in the par­lia­ment. They beat the left wing alliance with the for­mer com­mu­nists, Social Democ­rats and Greens who earned a total of 157 seats. How­ever, the anti-immigrant nation­al­ist party the Swe­den Democ­rats were for the first time voted into par­lia­ment earn­ing 20 seats. This means that the con­ser­v­a­tive alliance did not get the nec­es­sary num­ber of seats to form a major­ity gov­ern­ment, and since all the estab­lished par­ties have declared that they are not going to rely on the Swe­den Democ­rats, the con­ser­v­a­tives are now seek­ing to form a sta­ble major­ity in some other way. For the moment this means that prime min­is­ter Fredrik Rein­feldt has invited the Green Party to nego­ti­a­tions, but although experts claim that the left wing alliance is doomed, the Greens have yet not shown any sign that they are will­ing to join the con­ser­v­a­tive alliance.

It should be noted that the Swedish con­ser­v­a­tives are best described as equiv­a­lent to the US Democ­rats, and that the US Repub­li­cans would be con­sid­ered an extreme right wing party if placed in the Swedish polit­i­cal landscape.

How­ever, the Swe­den Democ­rats party can­not be posi­tioned on the con­ven­tional right–left scale of Swedish pol­i­tics. It has adopted pieces of pol­i­tics from all estab­lished par­ties, but its unpleas­ant ori­gin as I know it from when I first heard about the part in the late 1980’s is from white power skin­head cul­ture and uncon­cealed racism. And the stripes have not worn off: The first thing that Swe­den Demo­c­rat lead­ers spoke about in inter­views as the elec­tion results came clear was the per­ceived need to cut down immi­gra­tion. It’s very sad that these unnu­anced extrem­ists have been able to earn a place in Swedish pol­i­tics, and I can only hope that prime min­is­ter Rein­feldt suc­ceeds to form a sta­ble alliance that exclude the Swe­den Democ­rats from any real polit­i­cal power for the next four years.

Sweden ranked as second most competitive nation

With Swedish par­lia­ment elec­tions com­ing up in a lit­tle more than a week, it is reported that the World Eco­nomic Forum (WEF) has, again, ranked Swe­den as one of the most com­pet­i­tive nations in the world.

Accord­ing to the new Global Com­pet­i­tive­ness Report 2010–2011, Swe­den is now the sec­ond most com­pet­i­tive nation in the world, sec­ond only to Switzerland.

Notably, the U.S. has lost ground and is now ranked as num­ber four (used to be second).

Here’s the top ten list:

Related posts:

Back in May I wrote a post called “Swe­den most com­pet­i­tive nation in the EU” in response to the WEF releas­ing its 2010 Lis­bon Review. I then made a direct com­par­i­son of how Swe­den com­pared to Greece, notable because of its ongo­ing cri­sis, and the U.S.

10000 page views on Manufacturology

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.

List of Alde Nilsson award winners

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
2011    Andreas Archenti, Andreas Feldmann

See also

• 2010 Alde Nils­son award to KTH and Uni­ver­sity West