「華人戴明學院」是戴明哲學的學習共同體 ,致力於淵博型智識系統的研究、推廣和運用。 The purpose of this blog is to advance the ideas and ideals of W. Edwards Deming.

2016年1月27日 星期三

Ralph A. Evans (Feb 2, 1924–June 22, 2013)




王老師,新春氣爽!

建議您不要再提"三口.....",那是笑話,不談也罷。
我也是從IEEE 的Reliability 學刊讀到的。不過資料沒提此刊物,只提Reliability Symposium ---我們的中研院某院士也是靠此"二輪"雜誌的論文當選的。

這回您的記憶很好,他的大名和事業:

Ralph A. Evans - IEEE Xplore

ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4906862/4914625/04914634.pdf?arnumber...
The R. A. Evans ─ P. K. McElroy Award for 2008 Best Paper. Ralph A. Evans. RalphEvans has served the Reliability Symposium and its predecessors and the  ...


165篇,RS學會有收集給會員,似未出書。

  • The RS is pleased to announce that we have added a new benefit for members of the Reliability Society.  We have compiled a collection of the Editorials from the legendary Dr. Ralph A. Evans, written during his tenure as Editor in Chief and Managing Editor of the T-Rel.  There are 165 Editorials, written between February 1969 and June of 1990.  When you read them, you can understand why the TRel  articles have such a long half-life (in excess of 10 years).  Most of the editorials are as relevant today as they were when they were written.  If you are an RS member and would like to see the compendium of Ralph's editorials, click the "About RS" tab, then click the "For Reliability Society Members Only" link in the left panel


他過世了:

In Memoriam Remembering Ralph A. Evans (Feb 2, 1924 ...

ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel7/24/6587537/06587564.pdf?arnumber...
by WAY KUO - ‎2013

In Memoriam 
Remembering Ralph A. Evans (Feb 2, 1924–June 22, 2013)

 THE IEEE Reliability Society, RAMS, and the reliability community at large benefitted greatly from the work of the late Dr. Ralph Evans. We will miss him very much and we mourn his passing. 

Ralph was tenacious, setting the standard for others to follow as an engineer, physicist, educator, and editor-in-chief and managing editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY.

 Through his efforts, the TRANSACTIONS has become a great archival journal, arguably the best in the reliability field. By setting such high standards, he helped our contributors achieve a high degree of quality in their papers. He made sure every article was clear, correct, concise, and consistent, meeting the best of IEEE standards. He personally edited every accepted paper to appear in the TRANSACTIONS.

Through his great sense of humor, famous anecdotes, breathtaking wisdom, and in-depth knowledge, Ralph was able to bring to life the ideas that reliability engineers wished to pursue. He was best known for his many sayings, including such classics as:
 • making it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing;
 • a type III error is the right solution to the wrong problem; 
• all models are wrong but some of them are useful; 
• too many papers repeat the old stuff, and too few papers bring in new insight. 

Combining high standards with his entertaining demeanor, Ralph was a great educator, too. The IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY published many of his editorials, which were full of tutorial and textbook knowledge. 

Ralph defined reliability for IEEE for many years, being its leader for decades, having set the tone and standard for the publication even today, a full decade after he retired as managing editor. He received many awards over his long and distinguished career, too numerous to mention now, though we should remember that one award was even named after him. The IEEE awarded him the Centennial Medal, and he was made a Fellow, too. The Reliability Society awarded him its Annual Reliability Award in 1987.

 We appreciate his great work and spirit, and we are now tasked with maintaining the high standards that he set to help make the world a more reliable place. WAY KUO, Editor-in-Chief JASON RUPE, Managing Editor

2016年1月25日 星期一

Egyptian Museum Officials Face Tribunal for Damaging King Tutankhamen’s Mask

這是古物維護者品質和博物館環境問題。
中文標題沒將官員將受審翻譯出來。

埃及圖坦卡蒙黃金面具修復中受損

開羅——埃及行政檢察官表示,八名博物館員將面臨紀律審裁,因為他們對一次拙劣的圖坦卡蒙黃金面具修復工作負有責任。著名的圖坦卡蒙法老黃金喪葬面具是埃及最珍貴的文物之一,而前述修復工作給它造成了持久的損傷。
此次訴訟是一場發生在埃及博物館(Egyptian Museum)的尷尬事件的最新進展。事情始於2014年8月,當時開羅這座國家博物館的工人在修理面具展櫃里的一個燈具時,不慎將這件有3300年歷史的文物的鬍子撞掉,然後他們又試圖把鬍子粘回去,導致情況進一步惡化。
  • 檢視大圖圖坦卡蒙法老黃金面具在開羅的埃及博物館中展示。2014年8月,工人不慎撞掉了它的鬍鬚。
    Hassan Ammar/Associated Press
    圖坦卡蒙法老黃金面具在開羅的埃及博物館中展示。2014年8月,工人不慎撞掉了它的鬍鬚。
博物館員工使用不溶性環氧樹脂,將藍金兩色的鬍鬚粘回到面具上時,遊客拍下了他們的照片。修復行動在鬍鬚邊緣留下一圈明顯可見的膠水。有人擔心這種破壞是不可逆的,不過事實證明並非如此,德國專家小心翼翼地去除了環氧樹脂,並用古埃及人使用的粘接劑——蜂蠟——修復了純金面具。
上月,面具回到了公開展示區,不過工作人員最初嘗試用尖銳物體去除膠漬的時候,在面具上留下一些細微劃痕。負責調查涉公務員違法行為的行政檢察機關發表聲明,指控八名館員犯有「重大過失,公然違反科學和專業規則」,其中包括博物館的一名前任館長以及前修復工作負責人。
「為了掩蓋他們造成的破壞,他們用手術刀和金屬工具等鋒利的器械去除面具上的膠水痕迹,結果造成了持續的損傷和劃痕,」聲明稱。
遭到指控的館員已被停職,可能會面臨解僱和重金罰款,但不會入獄。
考古學家莫妮卡·漢娜(Monica Hanna)說,大多數遊客不會看到面具上的劃痕。她是旨在保護埃及文化遺產的文物工作組(Heritage Task Force)的成員。漢娜把這件事歸咎於埃及博物館的水平下降。這座博物館有104年歷史,是世界上最大的木乃伊和其他法老文物收藏館,但是近年來,它遭受了越來越嚴重的忽視。
「那裡的工作人員青黃不接,」她說。「經驗豐富的人退休了,新人又沒有接受過充分培訓。」
漢娜說,未來幾年,那裡的部分文物將被轉移到兩座新的博物館——一座是耗資8億美元的大埃及博物館(Grand Egyptian Museum),正在吉薩金字塔附近施工建設,計劃於2018年開放;另一座是已經竣工但尚未對公眾開放的埃及文明國家博物館(National Museum of Egyptian Civilization)。
1922年,英國考古學家霍華德·卡特(Howard Carter)在帝王谷發現了神秘的少年法老圖坦卡蒙的面具。從此之後,埃及古物學受到全球熱捧,成為埃及旅遊業的基石。
近年來,埃及旅遊業遭受了重創。最初是因為2011年埃及總統胡斯尼·穆巴拉克(Hosni Mubarak)倒台後發生的騷亂,然後在2013年,軍方推翻穆斯林兄弟會(Muslim Brotherhood)出身的總統穆罕默德·穆爾西(Mohamed Morsi)之後,埃及又出現了動蕩。
遊客遭到伊斯蘭極端分子的攻擊;八名墨西哥人被埃及安全部隊誤認為武裝分子並開槍射殺;去年10月,一架俄羅斯民航客機疑遭炸彈襲擊,224人命喪一處紅海度假勝地附近。
但是近幾個月來,圖坦卡蒙引起了新一輪的興趣,因為英國的埃及古物學者尼古拉斯·里夫斯(Nicholas Reeves)提出了一個很吸引人的假說,稱圖坦卡蒙的墓室背後隱藏着久尋不見的納芙蒂蒂王后(Queen Nefertiti)墓
翻譯:土土
Amina Ismail對本文有報道貢獻。

Egyptian Museum Officials Face Tribunal for Damaging King Tutankhamen’s Mask

The judicial action is the latest step in an embarrassing saga at the state-run Egyptian Museum in Cairo that started in August 2014 when workers accidentally knocked the beard from the 3,300-year-old artifact as they repaired a light fixture in its display case, and then made things worse by trying to glue it back on.
  • 檢視大圖The gold mask of King Tutankhamen in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Workers accidentally knocked the beard off in August 2014.
    Hassan Ammar/Associated Press
    The gold mask of King Tutankhamen in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Workers accidentally knocked the beard off in August 2014.
Tourists took photos of museum employees as they reattached the blue-and-gold beard using an insoluble epoxy resin that left a visible ring of glue around the edge of the beard. Fears that the damage was irreversible proved unfounded, however, after German experts carefully removed the epoxy and restored the solid gold mask using beeswax, the adhesive used by the ancient Egyptians.
The mask was returned to public display last month, albeit with some fine scratches caused by improvised earlier attempts to remove the glue stains using a sharp object. In a statement, the administrative prosecution authority, which investigates legal violations involving public servants, accused eight officials, including a former director of the museum and a former head of restoration, of “gross negligence and blatant violation of scientific and professional rules.”
“In an attempt to cover up the damage they inflicted, they used sharp instruments such as scalpels and metal tools to remove traces of the glue on the mask, causing damage and scratches that remain,” the statement said.
The accused officials have been suspended from their jobs and now face possible dismissal and heavy fines, but they will not go to prison.
The scratches to the mask will not be visible to most visitors, according to Monica Hanna, an archaeologist and a member of Egypt’s Heritage Task Force, an initiative to protect the nation’s cultural heritage. Ms. Hanna blamed the debacle on declining standards at the 104-year-old museum, which is home to the world’s largest collection of mummies and other Pharaonic antiquities but has become increasingly neglected in recent years.
“There’s been a shift in the people working there,” she said. “The experienced people have retired and the new ones do not have adequate training.”
Ms. Hanna said part of the collection was set to be shifted to two new museums in the coming years — the Grand Egyptian Museum, an $800 million project under construction near the Giza pyramids and scheduled to open in 2018, and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, which has been completed but is yet to open to the public.
The mask of Tutankhamen, an enigmatic young king, was discovered by the British archaeologist Howard Carter at the Valley of the Kings in 1922. It set off a global fascination with Egyptology that became a cornerstone of Egypt’s tourism industry.
That industry has suffered badly in recent years, first because of the unrest that followed the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, then because of the turmoil that erupted in 2013 after the military deposed President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Tourists have been attacked by Islamist extremists; eight Mexicans were killed by Egyptian security forces when they were mistaken for militants; and in October a suspected bomb brought down a Russian airliner, killing 224 people near a Red Sea resort.
In recent months, though, Tutankhamen became the focus of renewed interest after the British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves promoted a tantalizing theory that behind his burial chamber lies the long-sought tomb of Queen Nefertiti.
Amina Ismail contributed reporting.

2016年1月19日 星期二

英國大選的預測大錯誤?quota sampling instead random sampling

Election polling errors blamed on 'unrepresentative' samples

    The failure of pollsters to forecast the outcome of the general election was largely due to "unrepresentative" poll samples, an inquiry has found.
    The polling industry came under fire for predicting a virtual dead heat when the Conservatives ultimately went on to outpoll Labour by 36.9% to 30.4%.
    A panel of experts has concluded this was due to Tory voters being under-represented in phone and online polls.
    But it said it was impossible to say whether "late swing" was also a factor.
    The majority of polls taken during last year's five-week election campaign suggested that David Cameron's Conservatives and Ed Miliband's Labour were neck-and-neck.
    This led to speculation that Labour could be the largest party in a hung parliament and could potentially have to rely on SNP support to govern.
    But, as it turned out, the Conservatives secured an overall majority in May for the first time since 1992, winning 99 more seats than Labour, their margin of victory taking nearly all commentators by surprise.

    'Statistical consensus'

    The result prompted the polling industry to launch an independent inquiry into the accuracy of their research, the reasons for any inaccuracies and how polls were analysed and reported.
    Graphic showing how the results of the 2015 general election for Labour and the Conservatives compared to the poll predictions. The polls predicted Labour would receive 33% of the vote share, while the Tories would get 34%. However, the Tories won 36.9% and Labour got just 30.5%.
    An interim report by the panel of academics and statisticians found that the way in which people were recruited to take part - asking about their likely voting intentions - had resulted in "systematic over-representation of Labour voters and under-representation of Conservative voters".
    These oversights, it found, had resulted in a "statistical consensus".

    How opinion polls work

    Exit poll results projected onto BBC Broadcasting House in LondonImage copyrightAFP
    Image captionThe exit poll conducted on election day itself came much closer to the ultimate result than any of those conducted in the run-up
    Most general election opinion polls are either carried out over the phone or on the internet. They are not entirely random - the companies attempt to get a representative sample of the population, in age and gender, and the data is adjusted afterwards to try and iron out any bias, taking into account previous voting behaviour and other factors.
    But they are finding it increasingly difficult to reach a broad enough range of people. It is not a question of size - bigger sample sizes are not necessarily more accurate.
    YouGov, which pays a panel of thousands of online volunteers to complete surveys, admitted they did not have access to enough people in their seventies and older, who were more likely to vote Conservative. They have vowed to change their methods.
    Telephone polls have good coverage of the population, but they suffer from low response rates - people refusing to take part in their surveys, which can lead to bias.
    BBC poll of polls on 6 May 2015

    This, it said, was borne out by polls taken after the general election by the British Election Study and the British Social Attitudes Survey, which produced a much more accurate assessment of the Conservatives' lead over Labour.
    NatCen, who conducted the British Social Attitudes Survey, has described making "repeated efforts" to contact those it had selected to interview - and among those most easily reached, Labour had a six-point lead.
    However, among the harder-to-contact group, who took between three and six calls to track down, the Conservatives were 11 points ahead.

    'Herding'

    Evidence of a last-minute swing to the Conservatives was "inconsistent", the experts said, and if it did happen its effect was likely to have been modest.
    Former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has suggested such a swing, ascribing it to voters' fears about a hung parliament and a possible Labour-SNP tie-up.
    It also downplayed other potential explanations such as misreporting of voter turnout, problems with question wording or how overseas, postal or unregistered voters were treated in the polls.
    However, the panel said it could not rule out the possibility of "herding" - where firms configured their polls in a way that caused them to deviate less than could have been expected from others given the sample sizes. But it stressed that did not imply malpractice on behalf of the firms concerned.
    Prof Patrick Sturgis, director of the National Centre for Research Methods at the University of Southampton and chair of the panel, told the BBC: "They don't collect samples in the way the Office for National Statistics does by taking random samples and keeping knocking on doors until they have got enough people.
    "What they do is get anyone they can and try and match them to the population... That approach is perfectly fine in many cases but sometimes it goes wrong."
    Prof Sturgis said that sort of quota sampling was cheaper and quicker than the random sampling done by the likes of the ONS, but even if more money was spent - and all of the inquiry's recommendations were all implemented - polls would still never get it right every time.

    Analysis by the BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg
    Ed Miliband resigning after the 2015 general electionImage copyrightEPA
    I remember the audible gasp in the BBC's election studio when David Dimbleby read out the exit poll results.
    But for all that the consequences of that startling result were many and various, the reasons appear remarkably simple.
    Pollsters didn't ask enough of the right people how they planned to vote. Proportionately they asked too many likely Labour voters, and not enough likely Conservatives
    Politics is not a precise science and predicting how people will vote will still be a worthwhile endeavour. Political parties, journalists, and the public of course would be foolish to ignore them. But the memories and embarrassment for the polling industry of 2015 will take time to fade.

    Joe Twyman, from pollster YouGov, told the BBC it was becoming increasingly difficult to recruit people to take part in surveys - despite, in YouGov's case, paying them to do so - but all efforts would be made to recruit subjects in "a more targeted manner".
    "So more young people people who are disengaged with politics, for example, and more older people. We do have them on the panel, but we need to work harder to make sure they're represented sufficiently because it's clear they weren't at the election," he said.
    Pollsters criticised for their performance have pointed to the fact that they accurately predicted the stellar performance of the SNP in Scotland - which won 56 out of 59 seats - and the fact that the Lib Dems would get less than 10% of the vote and be overtaken by UKIP.


2015.5.17
我們靜待British Polling Council (BPC)專業分析報告。

Predicting the result
Pollderdash 看不懂標題。
Why the opinion polls went wrong
May 16th 2015 | From the print edition




IT WAS supposed to be the closest general election for several decades. At least ten final opinion polls put the Conservative and Labour parties within a percentage point of each other. Politicians were being told firmly that some kind of coalition government was inevitable. But all that turned out to be wrong. The Tories ended seven points ahead of Labour in the popular vote and won a majority in the House of Commons. Why were the projections wrong?

In 1992 pollsters made a similar error, putting Labour slightly ahead on the eve of an election that the Tories won by eight points. The often-cited explanation for this mistake is so-called “shy Tories”—blue voters who are ashamed to admit their allegiance to pollsters. In fact that was just one of several problems: another was that the census data used to make polling samples representative was out of date.


Following an inquiry, pollsters improved. A similar review has now been launched by the British Polling Council (BPC), but its conclusions may be less clear cut. In 1992 all the pollsters went wrong doing the same thing, says Joe Twyman of YouGov. This time they went wrong doing different things. Some firms contact people via telephone, others online, and they ask different questions. Statistical methods are hotly debated.

That has led to almost as many explanations for the error as there are polling firms. The “shy Tories” might have reappeared, but this cannot explain the whole picture. Ipsos MORI, for instance, only underestimated the Tory share of the vote by one percentage point—but it overestimated support for Labour. Bobby Duffy, the firm’s head of social research, says turnout might explain the miss. Respondents seemed unusually sure they would vote: 82% said they would definitely turn out. In the event only 66% of electors did so. The large shortfall may have hurt Labour more.

Others reckon there was a late swing to the Tories. Patrick Briône of Survation claims to have picked this up in a late poll which went unpublished, for fear that it was an outlier 異常值. Polls are often conducted over several days; Mr Briône says that slicing up the final published poll by day shows movement to the Tories, too. Yet this is contradicted by evidence from YouGov, which conducted a poll on election day itself and found no evidence of a Tory surge.

One firm, GQR, claims to have known all along that Labour was in trouble. The polls it conducted privately for the party consistently showed Labour trailing. Unlike most other pollsters, GQR “warms up” respondents by asking them about issues before their voting intention. Pollsters tend to be suspicious of so-called “priming” of voters, which seems just as likely to introduce bias as to correct it.

The BPC’s inquiry will weigh up the competing theories. Given the range of methods and the universal error, a late surge seems the most plausible explanation for now. That would vindicate Lynton Crosby, the Tory strategist, who insisted voters would turn blue late on. Next time expect more scepticism about polls—and more frantic last-minute campaigning.

2016年1月15日 星期五

Why Chinese Factories Fare Poorly in the U.S.





CURRENCYJANUARY 14, 2016
Why Chinese Factories Fare Poorly in the U.S.
BY JEFFREY ROTHFEDER




China’s manufacturing strategy, made possible by low wages and subpar conditions, can succeed in emerging nations, but it’s not feasible in developed economies.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON / THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY

In September, on an abandoned forty-acre Westinghouse factory site in Springfield, Massachusetts, the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (C.R.R.C.) broke ground on a sixty-million-dollar plant to assemble subway cars for Boston’s Orange and Red lines. Although commentary on the Chinese-American trade relationship is often colored by suspicion and xenophobia, virtually no one in Massachusetts publicly opposed the arrival of C.R.R.C., a state-owned enterprise controlled by Beijing.

After all, Springfield is not a position to be picky about its economic partners. Once a dominant manufacturing city—the assembly line and the concept of interchangeable parts were invented there, in munitions factories that were centers of global innovation for much of the nineteenth century—Springfield has been spiralling downward for decades. Currently, unemployment there stands just above the national level, but the city depends on state government and municipal services, not the private sector, for much of its cash flow and jobs. In just the past five years, even as U.S. industrial employment has surged some 7.5 per cent, representing nearly a million new jobs, about two thousand additional manufacturing positions have disappeared from Springfield.

Curiously, though, no one has been complaining about the growth of Chinese manufacturing elsewhere in the U.S., either. For at least the past seven years China has been the fastest-growing source of non-domestic business expansion in the U.S. In fact, Chinese foreign direct investment here—that is, the amount of money used to acquire American companies or to build factories and other commercial facilities—reached record levels in 2014, about twelve billion dollars, up from five billion in 2009. Moreover, in the first six months of 2015, Chinese direct investment in the U.S. rose nearly fifty per cent compared with the same period the year before, according to the Rhodium Group, which tracks Asian economies.

Lately, most of this investment has been in real estate (such as Anbang’s $1.95 billion purchase of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan, from Hilton) and technology (such as Lenovo’s $2.9 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility, from Google). But manufacturing has also been a frequent target, beginning as early as 2000, when the Qingdao-based appliance maker Haier made Camden, South Carolina, the site of the first Chinese factory in the U.S. Since then, Chinese manufacturers have acquired or built facilities to produce textiles, copper, steel, automobile supplies, renewable-energy equipment, and industrial machinery, among other items, in dozens of states.

China’s emergence in the U.S. economy recalls another transplant frenzy some three decades ago, when Japanese companies entered the U.S. in droves, swallowing up iconic symbols, like Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach Golf Club, and raising automobile and steel plants in the Rust Belt. Back then, the general response was anger and fear. After Honda Motors opened the first Japanese auto plant in the U.S., in Marysville, Ohio, in the early nineteen-eighties, followed by an engine factory in nearby Anna, Ohio, the company faced an onslaught of vicious anti-Japanese ads on TV and in print, often supported by American manufacturing trade and labor groups. In one memorable incident that grabbed headlines across the country, William Leitz, the mayor of Wapakoneta, Ohio, angrily resigned his position, saying that he could not work side by side with the Japanese. “I was on a destroyer [in the South Pacific] that was sunk,” he said. “I’m an American, and I love my country.”

The comparably subdued response to Chinese manufacturers speaks, on one hand, to changing circumstances, especially the broad acceptance of globalization in the United States and the desire, on the part of some politicians and business leaders, to create manufacturing jobs by whatever means necessary. But it also follows from a conclusion that American companies have reached about their Chinese counterparts: namely, that they are, thus far, relatively inconsequential rivals. Despite contracts like the one in Springfield, most U.S. producers don’t think Chinese manufacturing is good enough to pose nearly the same level of threat as Japanese companies did, decades ago.

The arrival in the U.S. of Japanese manufacturing methods precipitated a radical transformation in the accepted ideology behind how assembly lines should operate and how the highest levels of industrial productivity are achieved. This new factory model, which the Japanese call lean manufacturing, offered a blueprint for continuous plant improvement and innovation, driven by workers who are encouraged to experiment with new ways to enhance quality and productivity, and to minimize waste and inefficiency. In a lean factory, employee creativity and coöperation between management and assemblers are paramount, even if plant output is temporarily slowed to, for example, fix defects before a product is finished or to implement an untried process.

Armed with this uncluttered but potent set of ideas, Japanese factories were consistently more efficient and inexpensive to operate than their American counterparts, and their products were more reliable, durable, and attractive to consumers. Faced with these advantages, the initial disdain aimed at the Japanese companies was impossible to support for very long. In the early nineteen-nineties, Japanese manufacturing became the subject of an unlikely best-selling book, “The Machine That Changed the World,” and inspired a spate of analysis, implementation programs, educational programs, and self-help pamphlets. Today, no Western manufacturer can hope to compete on a global stage without adopting some version of lean production—an undertaking that remains difficult for many firms, because it can require altering not just assembly processes but a company’s culture, especially where worker roles, management, and methods of innovation are concerned.


It’s in these areas, though, that Chinese manufacturers are weakest. The country’s factory boom was made possible, instead, by low wages, subpar conditions, and few benefits. That strategy can succeed in emerging nations, especially ones with large labor pools, but it is not feasible in developed economies. The shortcomings of Chinese factories are most apparent in the relationship between managers and employees, which is based on an anachronistic top-down view of a factory as a place where the authority of supervisors is paramount, and workers are expected to take directions, perform tasks, do their work, and go home. There have been multiple reports of Chinese employers in the U.S. complaining that American workers are too outspoken and independent and are unable to follow rules. An American former executive of a Chinese firm operating in the U.S. told me that Chinese managers would complain, for example, that factory workers would arrive at a job five minutes late and not feel inclined to apologize. Such insouciance at plants inside China would lead laborers to be punished, for example by being sent home for the day, losing pay, forfeiting benefits, or being reassigned to more menial tasks. In the U.S., this approach has typically led employees to become more defiant and less assiduous. At Haier’s factory in South Carolina, Chinese managers had to be sent back to Asia because they were alienating workers and threatening productivity.

Perhaps the most extraordinary illustration of strained relations in Chinese factories occurred at the Golden Dragon copper-tube factory in Wilcox County, Alabama, last year, when workers voted to unionize the plant—an unlikely step in a right-to-work state where only about ten per cent of factory employees belong to organized labor, and in the face of a relentless and expensive “vote no” campaign led by Governor Robert Bentley. Golden Dragon workers complained that they received few benefits and that their wages, about eleven dollars an hour, were far below the pay for similar jobs in American copper plants in the South. Moreover, according to the union, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had found fourteen serious health and safety violations in the factory in the first few months after it opened, in May, 2014. The vote was an extraordinary step, and an indictment of the factory conditions that at least one Chinese manufacturer expected to be able to export.

The perception that employees are interchangeable and replaceable has led turnover at factories in China to average an astounding thirty-five per cent a year among workers employed at least six months, according to Renaud Anjoran, an operations manager at China Manufacturing Consultants, in Shenzhen. “They’re seeing similar rates in their American operations. That’s a death sentence in the U.S., where employee skills, loyalty, continuity, job satisfaction and creativity—in other words, lean requirements—determine profitability,” he said. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, given these dynamics, Chinese factories are rapidly automating. Chinese companies now account for more than twenty-five per cent of global robotic-equipment sales, and it’s not unusual to come across a Chinese facility where as many as ninety per cent of the tasks are assigned to robots. Japanese manufacturers are among the least automated, by contrast, because, in their view, removing the human element eliminates the possibility of innovation.)

Moreover, some of the new facilities in the U.S., including the new C.R.R.C. plant in Springfield, are unlikely to be able to adapt their methods to the Japanese-inspired ones that predominate elsewhere here. C.R.R.C., like many other Chinese manufacturers in the U.S., is a state-owned enterprise, controlled by the Chinese government. State-owned enterprises accounted for about twenty-five per cent of Chinese investment in the U.S. this year, and since 2000 they have backed seventy per cent of China’s North American forays in the auto industry, according to the Rhodium Group. These companies do not enjoy a good reputation: recent research from C.E.I.C. Data found that they own forty per cent of the assets in China but deliver only twenty per cent of the country’s profits, and that their average return on assets is a meager two per cent, about fifty per cent below the private sector. But precisely because they lack the imperative to be profitable, productive, or competitive, state-owned enterprises like C.R.R.C. can underbid most other companies, winning contracts even when contract stipulations about quality, timeliness, worker treatment, salaries, and benefits are beyond their capabilities. Indeed, C.R.R.C.’s price for the Boston subway-cars job was two hundred million dollars lower than its nearest rival. Analysts contend that C.R.R.C. will almost certainly lose money on the deal, but that it was a strategic bid to gain a foothold in the U.S.

Given the deficiencies of Chinese manufacturers, the ho-hum response from U.S. manufacturers to the influx of new rivals makes sense; the welcome mats laid out by cities like Springfield are another matter. New factories are generally viewed as a source of good jobs and long-term economic improvement, and for that reason communities frequently offer companies discounted land and substantial tax breaks to open them. Springfield is forgiving about fifty per cent of C.R.R.C’s property taxes for the first three years and thirty per cent over ten years. But if the manufacturers turn out to be nothing more than low-paying loss leaders, cities may find that they’ve given away more than they receive in return. This would, in fact, be something to complain about.

新經濟學實例:Joe Biden, The Vice President of United States, calls for A "Moonshot" to Cure Cancer.


Joe Biden, The Vice President of United States, calls for A "Moonshot" to Cure Cancer.
The plan is to do two things:
1.) Increase resources — both private and public — to fight cancer.
2.) Break down silos and bring all the cancer fighters together — to work together, share information, and end cancer as we know it.

Three months ago, I called for a “moonshot” to cure cancer.
MEDIUM.COM|由 VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN 上傳

2016年1月8日 星期五

中國、台灣的股市監管單位的無知;美國農業部和衛生部不能“亂”提建議

中國、台灣的股市監管單位的無知

中國處處有夸夸其談、一知半解的問題。
在30~40年前,中國學界處處大談什麼控制論、系統論等等。
2016年第一周的所謂"股市A股熔斷機制"災難,就充分顯示其"控制論"的誤解,即,從2015起,明目張膽地企圖干預或竄改股市等"穩定"或"隨機"系統,導致系統"一瀉千里" (周五的小升,不知是否是國家救火隊的做法)。
台灣的股市監管單位和"基金"的惡劣,類似中國。


育,毓,方針,熔斷機制 circuit breaker mechanism
http://chinese-watch.blogspot.tw/2008/06/blog-post_8913.html


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雞蛋和膽固醇名譽的翻身

加州一戶人家的一盒雞蛋。 (資料照)
加州一戶人家的一盒雞蛋。(資料照)
美國之音
美國農業部和衛生部最近推出了新的大眾營養建議排行表。根據這一排行表,民眾可以放心地吃雞蛋了,而不必過度擔心雞蛋裡含有的膽固醇,與此同時,每天最多可以考慮喝五杯咖啡,而不必擔心太多的副作用。
美國農業部和衛生部每隔幾年推出新的大眾營養建議。上一次推出類似的建議、或者說是排行表,是在2011年。
在1977年推出的大眾營養建議,讓大家盡量避免膽固醇,雞蛋的銷售也因此而受到影響。
米奇·坎特爾是美國“雞蛋營養中心”的負責人。他說,“美國政府終於也加入到其他很多國家的政府和'美國心臟協會'、'美國動脈學會'等組織的行列中來了,不再給每天攝入的膽固醇設限了。”
最新出台的大眾營養建議首次對糖的攝入提出了說法,建議美國民眾每天攝入的卡路里當中,糖的比例不要超過10%。
新的營養建議還指出,每天攝入的卡路里當中,來自牛肉等紅肉、奶油、奶酪、全脂牛奶和冰激凌等食物的比例,也應當限制在10%以下。
美國農業部和衛生部最新出台的指導性建議說,美國民眾最好從以動物蛋白為主的飲食結構,轉向基於植物型食品的飲食結構;這樣做,一來多吃蔬菜、水果、堅果,對人體健康有好處,二來也有益於自然環境。
最新出台的這一套“建議”當中,還頭一次沒有說,每天堅持吃早餐是保持身體健康的必須。
美國農業部和衛生部這次將膽固醇方面的警告拿掉,被那些對這類“建議”持有懷疑態度的人士當作一個例子說,這恰恰說明不能“亂”提建議;一時的建議,事後往往被證明是“不合時宜”、或者是不準確的。
美國農業部部長和衛生部部長兩人星期三都表示,隨著科學知識的不斷更新,政府部門提出的相關“建議”也隨之更新,但是政府方面一貫建議大眾多吃蔬菜、水果、穀物,少吃含糖、含鹽、含有動物脂肪多的食品。
美國政府每五年出台一份大眾營養建議,作用之一是幫助為公立中小學午餐以及聯邦政府為貧困人口提供的食品援助項目設置標準。

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