Some "statistical analysis" to ponder next time you look for causation:
Spurious Correlations
etc., etc.
John L.
Spurious Correlations
etc., etc.
John L.
In the 1970's Motorola's product quality was pretty bad, as was the quality of pretty much every American company. The Quasar TV's were so bad that they sold the entire division to Panasonic and got out of the business. Freshly built products rolling off the assembly line didn't work, so technicians like me were hired to fix them. The Defects Per Unit (DPU) rate was a number greater than 1. This was expensive.
This started a revolution (1980's) in product design and manufacturing. Within 10 years the DPU rate had to be abandoned for the DPHU rate (Defects Per Hundred Units) which was a number less than 1.
Part of this were mandatory classes for all engineers in Design For Manufacturing, Design For Assembly, Failure Mode Analysis, Statistics and More Statistics. All of this was part of a new "revolution" called Six Sigma Design.
We all learned to worship Sigma. Fancy analysis tools were created to appease Sigma. Sometimes entire programs were held up because Sigma wasn't happy.
We had a particularly tough product design involving a lot of new previously unseen and untried technology, in which many of the product design specs were arbitrarily set by a bunch of suits in a meeting room. Several prototype runs were done, after which the results were distilled down into "management quality" charts that only presented the CP and CPK graphs which were not meeting the required Six Sigma Design numbers. A whole bunch of yelling and screaming ensued, which begat meetings and more meetings to "empower teams" to go off and solve the problems. I got stuck on one of those teams where most of the members were not hardware engineers, nor fully understanding of 6 Sigma. We were assigned to solve some CPK failures that had been with the product since first proto run.
Too often the real issues were overlooked. CPK is a measure to see how well the distribution of your product's performance measurements matches up with it's specifications. Ideally all the measured data should lie centered within the spec window. CPK will not compute with a one sided spec like transmitter power must be greater than 6 watts, so an arbitrary upper spec limit is set, say 10 watts.
It turns out that these arbitrary upper spec limits were the problem with two of the big CPK failures, so I wrote an Excel Macro that I dubbed "The Six Sigma Shuffle" and ran it against these two specs. It just iterated the upper spec limit against the raw data and solved for the highest CPK. Bingo...CPK is now OK, but we have to fail a small number of radios because they are too GOOD!
We reported our results in the weekly management meeting, management is happy, and our crisis team is disbanded, and we go back to our regular jobs. About 2 days later an engineer comes to me and asks if I can make the Shuffle work on a two sided spec, so I modify it.
They run the shuffle against the entire collected data set for the last several prototype runs to determine the NEW product design specs in order to make Sigma happy. Many of the original product design goals were modified to fit the data on what we could actually build and the product took a giant step toward being one of the most successful radios to ever come out of the Florida factory. That was over 20 years ago and I still see those units in use today.
This started a revolution (1980's) in product design and manufacturing. Within 10 years the DPU rate had to be abandoned for the DPHU rate (Defects Per Hundred Units) which was a number less than 1.
Part of this were mandatory classes for all engineers in Design For Manufacturing, Design For Assembly, Failure Mode Analysis, Statistics and More Statistics. All of this was part of a new "revolution" called Six Sigma Design.
We all learned to worship Sigma. Fancy analysis tools were created to appease Sigma. Sometimes entire programs were held up because Sigma wasn't happy.
We had a particularly tough product design involving a lot of new previously unseen and untried technology, in which many of the product design specs were arbitrarily set by a bunch of suits in a meeting room. Several prototype runs were done, after which the results were distilled down into "management quality" charts that only presented the CP and CPK graphs which were not meeting the required Six Sigma Design numbers. A whole bunch of yelling and screaming ensued, which begat meetings and more meetings to "empower teams" to go off and solve the problems. I got stuck on one of those teams where most of the members were not hardware engineers, nor fully understanding of 6 Sigma. We were assigned to solve some CPK failures that had been with the product since first proto run.
Too often the real issues were overlooked. CPK is a measure to see how well the distribution of your product's performance measurements matches up with it's specifications. Ideally all the measured data should lie centered within the spec window. CPK will not compute with a one sided spec like transmitter power must be greater than 6 watts, so an arbitrary upper spec limit is set, say 10 watts.
It turns out that these arbitrary upper spec limits were the problem with two of the big CPK failures, so I wrote an Excel Macro that I dubbed "The Six Sigma Shuffle" and ran it against these two specs. It just iterated the upper spec limit against the raw data and solved for the highest CPK. Bingo...CPK is now OK, but we have to fail a small number of radios because they are too GOOD!
We reported our results in the weekly management meeting, management is happy, and our crisis team is disbanded, and we go back to our regular jobs. About 2 days later an engineer comes to me and asks if I can make the Shuffle work on a two sided spec, so I modify it.
They run the shuffle against the entire collected data set for the last several prototype runs to determine the NEW product design specs in order to make Sigma happy. Many of the original product design goals were modified to fit the data on what we could actually build and the product took a giant step toward being one of the most successful radios to ever come out of the Florida factory. That was over 20 years ago and I still see those units in use today.
Too often people mistake data for information. Many years ago I was called into a PMR manufacturer who was having a lot of end of line failures of their new transceiver. we sat on the line for a morning and watched them gathering data to pass to management, none of which pointed to the problem. Data from each stage of the line showed units passed but a significant proportion failed final test. In the afternoon we sat at each station of the production line and talked to the operatives. We very quickly found the problem. The rf front end included a complex helical filter which was aligned by technicians. We soon discovered some filters were very hard to calibrate according to the instructions provided by R&D but the technicians had learned how to' tweak' them so they passed. Thing is, the troublesome units were faulty (a single wrong capacitor value) which is why they failed the alignment procedure. The next day we sat with the techs and insisted they follow the procedure and failed units that would no align. They all turned out to be faulty.
Cheers
Ian
Cheers
Ian
Possibly. It is also possible that, depending on when this happened, that QC didn't exist.
I started at Motorola in 1973, doing final test and tune on the famous HT220 Handie Talkie transceiver. At that time Mot could not make enough of them and the factory ran non stop. They were hiring anybody that could do the job, and the turnover rate was high. We worked 12 hour days, 6 days a week. There was extreme pressure to "make rate". Those who didn't disappeared. 3 people were hired the day that I was hired, and the manager told us that 2 of us would be gone within a few months. I lasted 41 years, but only 18 months in the factory.
One night we got a batch of maybe 50 radios in which the transmit oscillator did not oscillate. These were built up radios that had been through and passed several tests before being final assembled. The PC boards all had a tracking tag that showed that they passed a final test and tune where they were tested on an arbitrary frequency in the middle of the UHF band. They were then assembled into frames and fitted with crystals on the customers frequency, and sent to us for final tune up and test.
I found that a grossly wrong capacitor was installed in the feedback circuit of the oscillator and there was no way that it could have ever oscillated. All 50 units had the same wrong part. A big investigation ensued.
Several more of these incorrectly built boards were found in stock and ALL were signed off by the same people. The wrong parts were traced to a couple of women on the hand insertion line who decided to trade parts with other since they were different colors. Several inspectors and test technicians had been signing off tracking sheets without actually checking the units.
Several people lost their jobs and several more wound up in the penalty box over that one.
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/lounge/258192-favourite-t-shirt-slogans-3.html#post3976957
Don't forget this lads!
Don't forget this lads!
It was not a foreign language but it operated under the misapprehension that you could inspect quality in to a product.
Cheers
Ian
I think a little part of me died inside when I heard that a significant number of the human race don't believe that we went to the Moon and landed on there.
I believe that global warming exists though.
#1 I don't believe that worldwide Scientists are that gullible
#2 I don't believe that Scientists would willingly go to great lengths to falsify stories just to push a new tax in.
#3 David Suzuki would lie to me.
And Scientists that believe GCC exists aren't usually aligned with religious groups.
I also don't believe that wining the lottery has worser odds than getting stuck by lightning. I get struck by lightning all the time and you don't hear about me striking it rich.
Comeonnnn number 23!
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I have met a few mostly young people who believe that it was all a Hollywood movie. In fact there WAS a Hollywood movie about a faked Mars landing in 1977, titled Capricorn One. This only fueled the fire.
My response to those people was "have you ever watched the original Star Trek series?" It is entertaining but not believable. We do have the CGI tech and computer power to make a believable movie like this today, but we did not in the late 60's when we first flew a human to the moon.
My cell phone today has more computing power than all of Hollywood (and Nasa) had in 1968. I don't think that any of us who were gathered around the TV set to watch the live transmissions from the moon disbelieve.
I met a guy at the Dayton hamfest several years ago that had independently received and recorded all of the radio transmissions from the LEM to the earth. He played the tape for a packed hall at the hamfest, and explained what he used to receive the unencoded analog FM transmission on 2.6 GHz.
That was a Hollywood horror movie.
To say that they are annoying to me is an understatement, I think my appropriate response would be that of what Buzz Aldrin done to that person who yelled at him that we didn't go to the moon. That was to punch them in the face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRBesDx1WQc
Very very appropriate response if you ask me.
That is a good comeback.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhuX-UaQiS4
The problem is that they believe that we didn't go to the moon because they think that it is some kind of outrageously complicated thing to point a rocket straight up, fire it at exactly the right time, and then alter its course until it reaches a beachball accurate trajectory towards its intended location.
They are willing to believe that we can be nuked at any point in time by a ICBM but not this?
The problem is that they vehemently believe that technology back then was still valve and vacuum tube based and that computers were so dumb that none of them could play Tetris let alone do some mathematical calculations, receive telemetry data and display it on a screen, receive data from a flying object in space and then compute responses to retrorockets onboard according to a preprogramed set of instructions.
The other problem is that they conveniently forget that this was a Government funded program with an unlimited budget with state of the art technology of the time with the brightest scientists, engineers and mathematicians in the entire world all in one spot.
The problem is that their brains are so very well adapted to Apple and Microsoft that they figure that whatever they cannot compute in Excel or Calc for the iPhone TODAY is therefore: "COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE AND DIDN'T HAPPEN IN THE 60s". This is a factor in the massive massive disconnect between hardware and the human being that we have today. Software today is so bloated that its multi-gigabyte in size and needs updates regularly JUST so we can write text into a document on a computer screen and store that information in RAM and then eventually to hard disk/cd/usb flash/floppy.
The problem becomes when this process of bloating the crap out of our software dumbs down and stupifies anyone who uses computers nowdays. It used to be that there was a benchmark for people who could use a computer, now that benchmark is completely obliterated by easy to use interfaces.
But the people who use computers still think that they are JUST AS smart as anyone else who uses a computer, so in their minds back in the 1960s anyone who was working on the NASA program therefore must've been a dumbarse too and MUST therefore be a paid-for actor.
So therefore this fits into their wonderfully tiny little ecosystem of calling other people stupid because they believe we went to the moon.
When the truth is FAR from this.
Heh, well a home computer from 1975 would've been as powerful as the lunar lander computer and a late 90s Nokia mobile phone would've been as powerful as the mainframes on earth.
Think Texas Instruments and the microcomputers they made, those are MORE powerful than what we sent up back then.
The Lunar lander computer can be emulated on any desktop PC today and its honestly nothing more than a smart calculator that you feed a program into and it takes certian actions based upon predefined parameters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
A modern day cellphone would be the equivalent of the entire worlds mainframes computational power grouped together in 1990.
The distance between the 1960s and today is so staggering in technology sectors that I have no doubt in my mind that those kids who say we didn't go to the moon today will be the slaves of robotic cleaning/coffee-serving/welding/repairing/nursing/armies in no short time at all. Within my lifetime certianly if I live a very long life.
Amazing. I'm sure he was using the right equipment and antenna because from the moon that is one hell of a distance. Just the wrong kind of transistor used in his LO or LNB would've made the whole endeavour pointless.
I would love to hear it for myself because that is one hell of a Wildfeed!
Thanks for sharing
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DSKY AGC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj2IETkScWA
Power Up my Apollo Guidance Computer Block I hardware copy Apollo 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c796AtpZEzM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj2IETkScWA
Power Up my Apollo Guidance Computer Block I hardware copy Apollo 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c796AtpZEzM
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The task is definitely a challenge, but don't over-estimate its complexity. Just speculating that a home-brew receiver front end was probably done with vacuum tubes intended for point-to-point microwave radios - I believe several types designed and manufactured by Western Electric (remember that company?) were available through surplus channels in that time frame. Was "416B" one of the designations?
I graduated from High School in 1969, loved my first girlfriend that summer, and watched the moon landing on television with her. (Her parents bought a new, top-of-the-line color television, mainly for that event - or so they said. I don't recall the prices but I remember estimating that it probably cost him more than a month's take-home pay. ) Afterwards, as we were making out on her folks' back porch, we stumbled on the technical fact that would make it possible for any mere mortal with some electronics skills and a bit of money to intercept those transmissions: You can SEE the moon, and that means unobstructed line-of-sight communications.
(Well, we weren't thinking in EXACTLY those terms, but you get the idea.)
Dale
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