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De misthoorn van Sumburgh, Schotland

De misthoorn van Sumburgh, Schotland

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Waarschijnlijk de enige nog werkende misthoorn van Schotland

De Misthoorn van Sumburgh, gebouwd in 1905 en onlangs weer in oude luister hersteld, is misschien wel de laatste nog werkende misthoorn in Schotland. Deze twee minuten durende film, die eenvoudig maar prachtig gefilmd is, documenteert het verrassend ingewikkelde proces van het blazen op de hoorn.

Buiten gebruik sinds 1987, werd de misthoorn nauwgezet gerestaureerd door Brian Johnson. In de video is het jaarlijkse ’testluiden’ van de misthoorn te zien bij de Vuurtoren van Sumburgh, Shetland, Schotland.

Brian start de Kelvin K-serie dieselmotoren van 44 pk uit 1951. De motoren drijven de Alley- en MacLellan-compressoren aan, die op hun beurt de misthoorn aandrijven.

Ter info: de misthoorn klonk op het eind veel luider en zwaarder dan nu te horen is, maar het audio-algoritme van YouTube heeft het volume automatisch lager gezet. Er zijn verschillende versies geprobeerd, maar YouTube bleef tegenstribbelen…. Helaas kun je zo de echte ‘luidheid’ van de hoorn via de video maar zeer gedeeltelijk ervaren en misschien maar goed ook. Ter illustratie: het geluid is zó krachtig dat het op mistige dagen op een afstand van 20 mijl ofwel ruim 32 Kilometer te horen is.

Bron: J. Kottke, Kottke.org

TOEOEOEoeoeoeoet!!!

Hij ligt niet echt om de hoek, die misthoorn…!
U schrijft uzelf wél een vrije wil toe, maar anderen nauwelijks…

U schrijft uzelf wél een vrije wil toe, maar anderen nauwelijks…

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People believe they have more free will than others

Wetenschappelijk onderzoek door:
Emily Pronin
Matthew B. Kugler

Abstract

Four experiments identify a tendency for people to believe that their own lives are more guided by the tenets of free will than are the lives of their peers. These tenets involve:
– the a priori unpredictability of personal action,
– the presence of multiple possible paths in a person’s future, and
– the causal power of one’s personal desires and intentions in guiding one’s actions.

In experiment 1, participants viewed their own pasts and futures as less predictable a priori than those of their peers.
In experiments 2 and 3, participants thought there were more possible paths (whether good or bad) in their own futures than their peers’ futures.
In experiment 4, participants viewed their own future behavior, compared with that of their peers, as uniquely driven by intentions and desires (rather than personality, random features of the situation, or history). Implications for the classic actor–observer bias, for debates about free will, and for perceptions of personal responsibility are discussed.

Mensen zijn dus inderdaad geneigd zichzelf meer elementen van een vrije wil toe te kennen dan anderen, concluderen de onderzoekers. Overschatten ze hun eigen vrije wil, of onderschatten ze die van de ander?

Daarop geeft dit onderzoek geen antwoord.

Bronnen, Meer lezen?
– https://noorderlicht.vpro.nl/artikelen/44291953/
– https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/12/08/1012046108.abstract

Kaizen niet alleen toepasbaar in industrie, maar ook in non-profit

Kaizen niet alleen toepasbaar in industrie, maar ook in non-profit

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In het volgende artikel wordt getoond dat specifieke technieken uit Toyota Productie Systeem / Lean ook prima ingezet kunnen worden om op een goede en voor mensen prettige manier, al samenwerkend, tot oplossingen voor problemen te komen in, in dit geval, een charity. Past ook uitstekend als instrument binnen gedachtegoed van ‘zelforganisatie’ en in organisaties in de publieke sector (zeker als die ook nog moeten bezuinigen)!

Original source article / originele bron artikel:
https://www.leanblog.org/

Toyota Applies Kaizen to Thanksgiving Charity Efforts

Here’s a nice story about the Toyota Supplier Support Center helping a charitable organization with their holiday operations: “Toyota applies production know-how to roll out holiday help for needy.” It just goes to show how there are processes in just about any type of organization that can be improved with Lean/TPS principles and the involvement of the people who do the work. Toyota experts helped St. Vincent de Paul improve their food basket assembly:

“From there, it was a matter of getting the SVDP volunteers to share their knowledge of the operation with us and together we created a smooth, efficient and steady flow of goods that would allow us to complete a basket every 15 seconds. That means baskets filled accurately with just the right amount of everything and fast enough to reduce wait time for the customers,” Thornberry said.

Instead of putting together wheels, seats and an engine to assemble a car, the volunteers lined up canned goods, produce and frozen turkeys in just the right order and just the right amount to deliver a Thanksgiving food basket that will be enjoyed by a family in need.

It’s a nice articulation of working together – it wasn’t the TSSC people who “fixed” SVDP, it required the input of all parties, those who know the work and those with an outside perspective. This is the same approach that works in manufacturing, healthcare, and other settings.Again, from the article:

Hideshi Yokoi, president of the Toyota Production System Support Center, pointed out that helping St. Vincent de Paul also helped the folks from Toyota. “It gives our team members experiences applying the Toyota Production System outside of the manufacturing environment and allows us to help improve our community,” he said. “Giving back in the community is also part of the Toyota Way.”

It’s nice of Toyota to share their expertise, but as you see it also benefits Toyota and their people.I can think back, personally, to a time a volunteered with a group of friends at a food bank — the processes and operations were so poorly organized, it was a very frustrating experience. And, unfortunately, as a volunteer, I was in a position to just “do as I was told” and was only allowed to work the way we had been shown. That was the last time I volunteered there.It’s not surprising that some community Lean clubs and groups volunteer their time to get involved with operations-intensive charities like food banks or Goodwill.Happy Thanksgiving!

Read more: Toyota Applies Kaizen to Thanksgiving Charity Efforts — Lean Blog https://www.leanblog.org/2010/11/toyota-applies-kaizen-to-thanksgiving-charity-efforts/#ixzz16mtMEXOi

Time to ditch the blood-sucking social media gurus

Time to ditch the blood-sucking social media gurus

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On the outskirts of a regional city in Britain – Bristol, perhaps – two hundred people gather to discuss “radical engagement strategies”. They are oddballs: a mixture of chippy girls with unruly fringes and sweaty, overweight blokes with bits of burger stuck in their beards. They fire cheap jibes at the Microsoft event they’re sharing a building with, and from which they’ve nicked a few chairs – a fact they crow about on Twitter as if it were some sort of victory over the “evil” corporation.

These are the social media gurus, a rag-tag crew of blood-sucking hucksters who are infesting companies of all sizes, on both sides of the Atlantic, blagging their way into consultancy roles and siphoning off valuable recession-era marketing spend to feed their comic book addictions. They claim to be able to improve your relationships with your customers by “executing 360 degree reignition programs”. But who are these people? Where did they come from? And how on earth have they managed to hoodwink so many big companies so quickly and so comprehensively?

Executives see their home-made clothes and the faint whiff of body odour as “alternative”: like programmers, who are expected to look and behave in an eccentric manner, these social media experts must know what they’re doing because, well, you know, only someone really brilliant would look so peculiar, right? So the gurus are hired, and promptly set about cutting and pasting “social media strategy guidelines” into Powerpoint presentations and swanning around the office instructing secretaries about “social media for social good” and how Twitter’s going to change the world, all the while leeching off the productive bit of the organisation.

Social media people are the management consultants of the internet age. One London-based freelancer – let’s call him Nosferatu – recently told me he was proud to have “re-ignited core kindness values through externalised social play” at a large multinational company. Imagine it! Your boss walks into the office one day and says, “I know half of you are losing your jobs, but don’t worry, we’ve hired a ‘social artist’ to ‘break down the silos’ and celebrate ‘creativity and beauty symbiotics’ among those of you who can still pay your mortgages. Oh, and guess what! We’ve got a Twitter!”I am not making this stuff up: these people are genuinely beyond parody. If you were to conduct an archaeological dig into a social media guru, you’d probably uncover layers of life coaches, yoga teachers, acupuncturists and feng shui consultants. That’s the level of business insight and mission-critical expertise we’re talking about here.
One of the conditions that has allowed the faux-academic colloquy of the social media industry to grow so fast is a lack of checks and balances online, especially within social networks. Highly questionable practices go either unremarked upon or purposefully ignored by the Twitter bubble. When someone gets caught with their trousers down, you’re more likely to see messages of support than opprobrium. Plus, the industry is well mobilised, and dishes out a number of ludicrous awards to itself.Why am I banging on about this?
Because the poisonous cult of the social media guru – or, get this, “swami” – is disastrous for pretty much every kind of business: it’s wasteful for large companies and potentially fatal for start-ups. Social media consulting amounts to little more than mastering the art of the bleeding obvious and no company, no matter what its size, should even consider hiring external social media consultants. Internally, the most you need is a couple of interns with laptops.Many of these charlatans are selling little more than common sense. But they’re doing it in such a pernicious and persuasive way that even younger companies are getting tempted into employing them – younger companies who really can’t afford to be throwing money down the drain, but who figure that this sort of marketing might be the way to achieve critical mass for their products. At best it’s disingenuous; at worst, downright fraudulent.
Fortunately, there are signs that the window of opportunity for all this silliness is closing. Firms are cottoning on to people who misrepresent and overstate their achievements and add no value to businesses while showing off to other “like minds” about how many Twitter followers they have. As far back as September 2009, social media people were becoming the butt of jokes in Silicon Valley (warning: video features extreme profanity); we’re starting to see the same thing happen now in London.But there’s some way to go yet. The rot of social media is, in a sense, only just setting in. A lot of corporates are announcing high-level social media-related appointments at the moment, and it will be a long time before brands are able to reliably distinguish useful technical tools like London-based Conversocial from the nonsense peddled by freelance social media morons and, to their shame, many of London’s top digital agencies.

There are several online guides that profess to help businesses separate the good guys from the quacks. But talk about needles and haystacks! In any case, that presupposes social media consultants are in any way useful or helpful. They aren’t, unless your marketing team is so hopelessly incapable of communicating that they need intermediaries in order to say “Hello” – in which case your problems run a little deeper than hiring the wrong contractors.Marketing directors tempted by social media consultants would be well advised to visit one of their extraordinary conferences and watch them as they waffle, endlessly and without any intelligible purpose, about “transformation and inspiration”, almost visibly rubbing their hands with glee. The red thread running through these events is, “I can’t believe we’re still getting away with this.”

In 2007, there were no social media consultants in London. Just a few short years later there are thousands of the blood-suckers clamouring for attention and lucrative contracts. It is offensive to anyone creating value in their company that social media consultants dare use the word “innovation” to describe what they do for a living. How do these people sleep at night?

Vuvuzela geluidsonderdrukking

Vuvuzela geluidsonderdrukking

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Vuvuzela geluidsonderdrukking

In reactie op de in de media breed uitgemeten kritiek van TV-kijkers en zendgemachtigden op de FIFA World Cup 2010, presenteert Waves, naar eigen zeggen, een oplossing die het geluid van de alomtegenwoordige en verafschuwde Vuvuzela-trompet, waarvan de Zuid-Afrikaanse voetbalfans zo houden, sterk reduceert. Zie: https://www.waves.com/content.aspx?id=5798

Een handigere oplossing schijnt te zijn om de equalizer op je TV (voor zover je die hebt) op de 100 Hertz frequentie te beperken of zelfs te blokken. Op die frequentie zijn normaal de Vuvuzela???s te horen. Aangezien de Belgische televisie de Vuvuzela???s ook sterk onderdrukt, is kijken naar de Belg ook een optie om van het gezoem af te zijn. Je kunt je eigen Vuvuzela???s natuurlijk ook, in je oren stoppen, a la Shrek. Dan hoor je ze ook niet meer. Wel wat omslachtig…??