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What is the job of a Validation Engineer?

What is the job of a Validation Engineer?

Once upon a time in my former life, I served as the Quality Manager for a $300M tier-one automotive manufacturing plant that provided components and assemblies to OEM vehicle assembly plants.  You would recognize our customers – most of the big names.  This assignment was a departure from my previous roles in product development and testing.  To say that the job was eye-opening is an understatement.  Years later, I described this three-year experience to friends as my “tour of duty on the front lines.”  Anyone who has spent any time in manufacturing can certainly relate!  

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Boeing, Boeing, … Bugger. Now it’s the Starliner

Boeing, Boeing, … Bugger. Now it’s the Starliner

There might not ever be a better demonstration of the saying that …

… a fish rots from it’s head.

Boeing is responsible for the half-baked Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) that was forced into its new 737 Max aircraft. This involved a decidedly awful attempt to convince the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that there was no need to subject said aircraft through all the checks and balances that you need to go through if it is in fact a brand-new and different type of plane. Which it was. This resulted in the deaths of 346 passengers and crew (along with plenty of claims that it was pilot error). And just to be clear, Boeing has since admitted that it’s employees defrauded the FAA during the original certification process – an admission it was not required to make if it was able to complete a three-year period of increased monitoring and reporting. Which it could not.

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Reliability vs. Durability

Reliability vs. Durability

It seems a big misconception in different industries between those two terms “Reliability” and “Durability”. So, first thing first, I apply google research to find out what is definitions:

Reliability is defined as the probability that a product, system, or service will perform its intended function adequately for a specified period of time or will operate in a defined environment without failure. (Source American Society for Quality (ASQ))

Durability is the ability of a physical product to remain functional, without requiring excessive maintenance or repair, when faced with the challenges of normal operation over its design lifetime. (Source Wikipedia)

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How to not Suck at Probability and Statistics

How to not Suck at Probability and Statistics

A simple way of looking at our brain is by dividing it into the conscious, subconscious and unconscious minds. The conscious mind is all about what we are actively thinking about in the here and now. We might be navigating as we drive through the countryside. We might decide to take an exit from the main road because our conscious mind has worked out that the map we are looking at is showing us that’s what we need to do to get to where we want to go. 

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Always Looking for Someone to ‘Sign Off on That? … Your Organization is Probably Struggling

Always Looking for Someone to ‘Sign Off on That? … Your Organization is Probably Struggling

When I was a bright eyed, motivated (younger) officer in the Australian Army, one my many tasks when deployed overseas was to raise paperwork to formally request ‘battlefield material’ to be sent back home from whatever country we were in. ‘Battlefield material’ was items that included a range of mementos, keepsakes, and things you would typically see in a museum to add to the historical collections of my battalions and regiments back home.

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Preventive Maintenance and the Toxic ‘Need to do Something’

Preventive Maintenance and the Toxic ‘Need to do Something’

For thousands of years, doctors treated virtually every skin ailment by ‘letting’ or draining the blood of the patient. Leeches are really good at doing this as they quite literally drink up the allegedly ‘poisoned’ blood that is being removed. Of course, by the late 1800s, science had advanced to the point where it was realized that this was nonsense, and so leeches fell out of favour in the world of medicine.

But that same scientific revolution saw the development of drugs like heroin and cocaine to cure everything from schizophrenia through to children’s cough. With doctors prescribing these drugs left right and centre, and worldwide epidemic of drug-addiction misery was spawned. 

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