Much of a town flattened. Entire neighborhoods reduced to piles of debris. Hundreds injured. More than two dozen killed. It’s a grim reminder that the confluence of weather systems in the central U.S., specifically masses of cold, dry air from the north and fronts of warm, moist air from the south, don’t mix well. Kansas has the unfortunate distinction of the most reported tornadoes per square mile; Oklahoma is second. In any given year, Texas usually has the most tornadoes. Read the rest of this entry »

Fake Rolex® watches, knock-off Armani® handbags, counterfeit Nike® shoes, pirated movies of all sorts—if you’ve traveled to any countries that have lax trademark, patent, and copyright protection, you’ve seen plenty of faked goods. It’s pathetic, to say the least. The companies that make the original item lose out on sales, and risk losing some credibility because poor-quality copies are detrimental to the company’s image. Depending on the product, consumers put themselves at risk. Finally, at the risk of sounding overly righteous, the companies that make the counterfeits are just taking the lazy way out, rather than innovating to develop new products or improve existing ones. If everyone took the easy way out, we’d have never innovated our way out of the Stone Age. It’s hard to find a winner here. Read the rest of this entry »

My wife works with some pretty smart people. She's a math teacher, which puts her in day-to-day contact with talented teachers and highly intelligent students in her advanced placement courses.

On her staff is a former engineer who recently had received constructive criticism about his teaching skills during an appraisal. This engineer-turned-teacher confided that he wasn't quite sure how the appraiser had arrived at his opinion because his knowledge of math was unquestionable. Certainly, there must be some kind of mistake.

There's no mistake. Engineers and mathematically gifted people see the world differently  from others. As a result, they sometimes give off an aura of superiority, which is not the best way to win friends and influence people. Read the rest of this entry »

Can we write enough about safety in the pages of The FABRICATOR, its sister magazines, and thefabricator.com? Absolutely not.

Do we actually execute that strategy in the media wepublish? No, we do not.

And that's a shame.

Fabricators might argue that safety is a given in their facilities, much like quality efforts. But it's not that simple. Talking about it doesn't make it happen. It has to be ingrained into every aspect of every activity in the facility, so that employees feel empowered to do the safe thing, even if it's not the most cost effective decision.

Actually, it can boil down to one question: Do workers on the shop floor have the authority to halt production if they see an unsafe practice occurring? Most fabricators believe that if capital equipment is running, it's making money. Is company management ready to turn off the revenue spigot so that a work environment can be made safer? Read the rest of this entry »

Fabricating shop owners—and business owners in general—have voiced concern about increased regulations that their companies have had to face since the election of President Obama, but that may be nothing compared to the trouble they might find if they run into trouble involving the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). That agency is on the hunt for "indifferent employers" who don't take the necessary steps to keep workers safety.

That's the take of David Jones, an attorney and head of the workplace safety practice group for Ogletree Deakins, as he spoke to a crowd gathered for the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association's Safety Conference 2013 on April 23 in Nashville. Agency officials realize that it's difficult to pass any regulations because of the contentious nature of Congress right now and the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and that's why OSHA is focusing on "tough enforcement," Jones said. Read the rest of this entry »