The planet won’t notice you recycle, and your vote doesn’t count

Put a group of economists in a room to debate the wisdom and virtue of individual action, and soon they’ll be debating the value of casting one’s vote: zero—in some strict, narrow, “economic” sense of the world. We can’t leave things there. It would be both rather depressing and also rather narrow-minded. Maybe statistics and economics alone aren’t the right tools with which to analyze one’s personal action. Ethics, for one, plays an important role. Excerpted from “Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet” by Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman

Implementing the Lean Sigma Framework in an Indian SME: a case study

Lean and Six Sigma are two widely acknowledged business process improvement strategies available to organisations today for achieving dramatic results in cost, quality and time by focusing on process performance. Lately, Lean and Six Sigma practitioners are integrating the two strategies into a more powerful and effective hybrid, addressing many of the weaknesses and retaining most of the strengths of each strategy. Lean Sigma combines the variability reduction tools and techniques from Six Sigma with the waste and non-value added elimination tools and techniques from Lean Manufacturing, to generate savings to the bottom-line of an organisation. This paper proposes a Lean Sigma framework to reduce the defect occurring in the final product (automobile accessories) manufactured by a die-casting process. The proposed framework integrates Lean tools (current state map, 5S System, and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)) within Six Sigma DMAIC methodology to enhance the bottom-line results and win customer loyalty. Implementation of the proposed framework shows dramatic improvement in the key metrics (defect per unit (DPU), process capability index, mean and standard deviation of casting density, yield, and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)) and a substantial financial savings is generated by the organisation

Manufacturing process applications team (MATeam)

Activities of the manufacturing applications team (MATeam) in effecting widespread transfer of NASA technology to aid in the solution of manufacturing problems in the industrial sector are described. During the program's first year of operation, 450 companies, industry associations, and government agencies were contacted, 150 manufacturing problems were documented, and 20 potential technology transfers were identified. Although none of the technology transfers has been commercialized and put in use, several are in the applications engineering phase, and others are in the early stages of implementation. The technology transfer process is described and guidelines used for the preparation of problems statements are included

Product development in a consulting firm: scaling potential inspired by the best practices for startups

Successfully developing a software product from the scratch until launching to the market is not simple. This is the day-by-day of many startups, whose existence is based on building and selling scalable products. But what if a company built on a business model that is, by its nature, very different from startups, decided to venture into product development? This study analyzes a consulting firm that decided to develop and commercialize a Software as a Service (SaaS). Results show that, although the business drive is clear, several challenges must to be overcome for a consulting firm to operate closer to how a startup would. According to theory, consulting firms have high variable costs bound to consultants’ wages, causing the operating expenses to increase at the same rate as the revenue. In comparison, technology startups have higher fixed costs typically linked to licenses and developers’ salaries, operating with low variable costs, what creates potential to scale revenue faster than the operating expenses. By analyzing the financial figures of a real consulting firm, this theory was proven to be valid, and therefore, despite of achieving outstanding growth, scaling in the consultancy model is limited. Thus, this work explores well-consolidated theoretical frameworks for startups to successfully develop and launch products to the market, and in parallel, it dives deep into a real consulting firm’s processes, practices, and challenges for developing a SaaS. The analysis within this firm is done by first looking into project documents for elements that communicate the steps for developing the case product. To complement the analysis and discover the underlying practices and challenges in this process, members of the development team were surveyed and observed during a workshop to co-create the value proposition of the case product. Findings show that, even though the process is found to be closer to the traditional product development, an iterative approach with continuous learning was in use. Also, the team pointed out a lack of understanding on the potential customers, and the feeling that an internal competition for resources was compromising the workforce of the development team. Finally, discussions about the value proposition revealed difficulties for the company to detach itself from a consulting mindset towards a startup-oriented thinking. Although there are challenges, there are also ways to systematically overcome them, uncovering a better track to successfully accomplish such endeavor

The Use of Unusual Psychological Theories in Psychobiography: A Case Study and Discussion

This chapter argues for the use of ‘unusual’ theories in psychobiographical research through the presentation of a case study using such a theory. Historically, psychobiographical research has predominantly made use of the work of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theorists and developmental theorists, while more recent psychobiographical approaches have preferred more modern, empirically based. However, over reliance on a few theories within psychobiographical research creates the possibility for narrow explanations of complex lives. Given the proliferation of theoretical modes in psychology the current use of theory barely scratches the surface of available explanatory paradigms. This chapter argues for the value of casting the explanatory net wider, and for the inclusion of more psychological theories in psychobiographical work. Using a psychobiographical case study, the chapter illustrates how a ‘forgotten’ psychological theory (script theory, based on the work of Tomkins) can serve as an extremely useful explanatory paradigm for a complex religious figure. The case study focuses on Gordon Hinckley (b. 1910, d. 2008), the fifteenth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (commonly referred to as the Mormon Church), who remains a prominent figure in contemporary Mormonism and played a key role in the rapid growth and increasingly positive public profile of the Religion throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Using Tomkins’ script theory in conjunction with a psychobiographical method and the analysis of data gathered from published speeches, this study explores Hinckley’s personality structure and identifies three core psychological scripts

Why You Should Vote to Change the Outcome

Prevailing opinion—defended by Jason Brennan and others—is that voting to change the outcome is irrational, since although the payoffs of tipping an election can be quite large, the probability of doing so is extraordinarily small. This paper argues that prevailing opinion is incorrect. Voting is shown to be rational so long as two conditions are satisfied: First, the average social benefit of electing the better candidate must be at least twice as great as the individual cost of voting, and second, the chance of casting the decisive vote must be at least 1/N, where N stands for the number of citizens. It is argued that both of these conditions are often true in the real world