Podcasts about eth z

Are digital twins about to change the way we see the world?   Nilson Kufus is CEO and Co-Founder of Zurich-based Nokomo.  Nomoko creates digital twins that can be implemented for everything from urban planning to music festival security. The company  is on a mission to make the physical world accessible as a digital ecosystem using Digital Twins. With a focus on real estate, Nomoko strives to create virtual copies of individual buildings, larger districts, or even whole municipalities. This helps customers to visualize their projects and to gain informed insights in order to make the right decision at any time. Nilson has a degree in Liberal Arts & Sciences from the University College Maastricht, where he built his curriculum around business, artificial intelligence, and media. He has been a Digital Shaper of Switzerland 2019, a TedX Salon speaker, and Guest lecturer at ETH Zürich & FH HWZ. In this episode of the Drone Radio Show, Nilson talks about Nomoko, the company's quest to build a digital twin of the world and how digital twins will revolutionize the way we see and interact with the world.

In this episode, our guest is Mustafa Khammash. Mustafa is the director of the Control Theory and Systems Biology Lab at ETH Zürich and guides us in this episode as we explore Cybergenetics - the cutting-edge intersection of control theory and synthetic biology. From biomolecular control to antithetic motifs, we discuss real-world applications and ethical dilemmas. Don't miss it!Outline00:00 - Intro00:50 - Cybergenetics02:22 - Genetics 10105:07- Where control meets biology06:49 - Mustafa's early steps in biology: why do dairy cows get milk fever?12:05 - Systems and synthetic biology14:34 - History of synthetic biology17:16 - On biological computing23:23 - On biomolecular control29:27 - The birth of the Antithetic motif for molecular feedback control39:25 - Enabling technologies48:28 - How the antithetic motif works57:20 - Model organisms 01:00:45 - Applications of Cybergenetics 01:06:45 - Ethical dilemmas in Cybergenetics01:10:57 - On the internal model principle01:16:01 - Advice to future students01:19:51 - OutroLinks - Mustafa's website: https://bsse.ethz.ch/ctsb- Paper on calcium regulation: https://tinyurl.com/4p9xu8j2- History of synthetic biology: https://tinyurl.com/2p8ej8fw- Motifs: https://tinyurl.com/3vcnjvj3- Paper - In silico feedback for in vivo regulation of a gene expression circuit: https://tinyurl.com/yw98d8k8- Paper - A universal biomolecular integral feedback controller for robust perfect adaptation: https://tinyurl.com/bddux4x3- Optogenetics: https://tinyurl.com/r6yw9s37- About the fluorescent protein: https://tinyurl.com/bdzm37fs- Electroporation: https://tinyurl.com/3hhjxanp- Paper - Cybergenetics: Theory and Applications of Genetic Control Systems: https://tinyurl.com/222f8924- Paper - Universal structural requirements for maximal robust perfect adaptation in biomolecular networks: https://tinyurl.com/3a2bm35fPodcast infoPodcast website: https://www.incontrolpodcast.com/Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/5n84j85jSpotify: https://tinyurl.com/4rwztj3cRSS: https://tinyurl.com/yc2fcv4yYoutube: https://tinyurl.com/bdbvhsj6Facebook: https://tinyurl.com/3z24yr43Twitter: https://twitter.com/IncontrolPInstagram: https://tinyurl.com/35cu4kr4Acknowledgments and sponsorsThis episode was supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research on «Dependable, ubiquitous automation» and the IFAC Activity fund. The podcast benefits from the help of an incredibly talented and passionate team. Special thanks to B. Seward, E. Cahard, F. Banis, F. Dörfler, J. Lygeros, as well as the ETH and mirrorlake studios. Music was composed by A New Element. Support the show

Wie organisiert Russland seinen Cyberkrieg im Netz? Geheime Daten, die einem Rechtere-Netzwerk zugespielt wurden, geben offenbar Einblick in die digitale Waffenkammer des Kremls. Der Politologe Lennart Maschmayer forscht an der ETH Zürich zu Cyber Security: Wie glaubwürdig sind die Daten seiner Einschätzung nach? Weitere Themen: (06:06) Russlands Cyberkrieg: Geheime Daten offengelegt (14:08) Italien sperrt ChatGPT (17:07) Anklage gegen Trump: Reaktionen aus der US-Politik (20:04) «Trump könnte sogar vom Gefängnis aus regieren» (25:36) 100 Tage Bundesrat: Albert Rösti zieht Bilanz (29:56) Finnlands AKW-Renaissance (35:09) T-Rex «for sale» in Zürich

Der Westen ist genervt von der Schweiz. Mit Verweis auf ihre jahrhundertealte Neutralität, blockieren die Eidgenossen Waffen- und Munitionslieferungen, die NATO-Staaten an die Ukraine weiterreichen wollen. Beim umstrittenen Kriegswaffenkontrollgesetz reicht es nur für eine Mini-Lockerung, die der Ukraine nicht hilft.Mit? Mauro Mantovani, Dozent an der Militärakademie der ETH ZürichSie wollen keine Folge mehr verpassen? Dann abonnieren Sie "Wieder was gelernt" ab sofort als Push-Nachricht in der ntv App.Sie haben eine Frage an uns? Dann schreiben Sie gerne eine E-Mail an podcasts@n-tv.de oder wenden Sie sich direkt an Kevin Schulte. Sie wollen den Podcast abonnieren? RTL+ Musik, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify oder über den RSS-FeedSie möchten eine Bewertung schreiben? Apple Podcasts, Spotify+++ Weitere Infos zu unseren Werbepartnern finden Sie hier: https://linktr.ee/wiederwasgelernt +++Unsere allgemeinen Datenschutzrichtlinien finden Sie unter https://datenschutz.ad-alliance.de/podcast.html

Das Ringen um die Möglichkeiten, aber auch Grenzen der Genschere CRISPR am Human Genome Editing-Gipfel. Und: Weniger Fehler bei Quantencomputern. Ausserdem: Ein Hand-Exoskelett für hirngeschädigte Kinder - entwickelt in der Schweiz. (00.44) Ringen um CRISPR. In London beim Human Genome Editing Summit stecken Genforscher, Ethiker und Patienten die Köpfe zusammen: Wohin soll es gehen mit der Genschere CRISPR? Erste Therapien für Blutkrankheiten stehen kurz vor der Zulassung und sind unmässig teuer, und die Frage «Sollen wir, dürfen wir Embryonen editieren?» steht mitten im Raum. (08.00) Fehlerkorrektur im Quantencomputing. Die Fehleranfälligkeit ist eines der grossen Probleme bei der Entwicklung von Quantencomputern. Denn Quantenzustände können spontan zerfallen und durch kleinste Umwelteinflüsse verändert werden. Forschenden von Google ist nun ein Durchbruch in der Fehlerkorrektur von Quantencomputern gelungen. (13.44) Meldungen. Mikroben-Transfer zwischen Mutter und Kind. Steinabfälle bei Makaken ähneln prähistorischen Werkzeugen. Erster Schaltplan eines Drosophila-Hirns. (19.19) Wie von Zauberhand. Ein Forschungsteam der Kinder-Reha Schweiz und der ETH Zürich haben ein erstes, voll motorisiertes und tragbares Hand-Exoskelett entwickelt. Das Robotik-System soll hirnverletzten Kindern helfen, eine gelähmte Hand wieder zu bewegen.

On the show today, Dino Carpentras, a post-doctoral researcher at the Computational Social Science group at ETH Zürich joins us to discuss how opinion dynamics models are built and validated. He explained how quantifying opinions is complex, and strategies to develop robust models for measuring and predicting public opinions.

Jetzt also doch: Nach langem Zögern und Diskutieren wird Deutschland Kampfpanzer des Typs Leopard 2 an die Ukraine liefern. Eine historische Entscheidung. Und auch in Washington ist man gewillt, der Ukraine Kampfpanzer zur Verfügung zu stellen. Was heisst das für den weiteren Kriegsverlauf? Deutsche Kampfpanzer werden schon bald russischen Kampfpanzern in der Ukraine gegenüberstehen. Das steht nun schwarz auf weiss und das erklärt Kanzler Scholz am Mittwoch dem Bundestag. Die westliche Allianz steht zusammen, und auch die USA sollen nun ihre Abrams Panzer zur Verfügung stellen, trotz anfänglicher Abwehr, berichten US-Medien. Welche Bedeutung haben diese Entscheide neben des politischen Signals? Was heist das militärisch? Und werden nun auch Kampfflugzeuge, Kriegsschiffe und U-Boote folgen, wie das der ukrainische Aussenminister fordert? Antworten auf diese Fragen liefert Niklas Masur, Militärexperte der ETH-Zürich.

Alzheimer ist verbreitet, verheerend und schwer zu behandeln. Nun ist in den USA mit Lecanemab ein neues Alzheimer-Medikament zugelassen. Weiter: Darmbakterien verhindern womöglich Fressattacken; Heliummangel macht Forschenden zu schaffen. (00:36) (K)ein Funken Hoffnung? Alzheimer, diese fortschreitende Gehirnerkrankung ist wie auch weniger häufige Formen von Demenz schwer zu behandeln. Nun ist in den USA mit Lecanemab ein neues Alzheimer-Medikament zugelassen, das nach Studiendaten zumindest etwas helfen soll. Was kann das Medikament, was können andere Alzheimer-Medikamente, die heute im Einsatz sind, und was ist in Entwicklung? Wir schätzen ein. (08:13) Meldungen: Impfprämien haben keine negative Folgen; weniger Wasservögel im Winter; «Slicks» auf dem Genfersee. (13:41) Darmbakterien gegen Fressattacken Übergewicht, verursacht durch Heisshunger auf Süsses, sei Ausdruck von Willensschwäche, denken viele. Doch Studien mit Mäusen lassen annehmen: Das Problem liegt womöglich nicht im Kopf, sondern tiefer. (18:47) Es fehlt an Helium Nicht nur Erdgas ist momentan knapp, sondern in der Forschung ist auch Helium Mangelware. Mit Folgen: Rund die Hälfte der Tieftemperaturexperimente an der ETHZ etwa sind deshalb zweitweilig gestoppt. Ein klares Ende des Edelgasmangels ist zurzeit nicht absehbar.

Sie solle «zurück in den Balkan gehen», sie sei «nur eine Schweizerin auf dem Papier» und es sei «schlicht eine Frechheit» wenn sie sich in der Schweiz politisch einbringe: Auf ihrem Twitter-Profile teilt Sanija Ameti, die Co-Präsidentin von Operation Libero, an sie adressierte Hassnachrichten. Diese würden ihren Posteingang « täglich fluten». Ameti ist 30 Jahre alt, hat Migrationshintergrund, engagiert sich politisch und scheut dabei keine Konfrontation. Damit erhält sie online immer wieder üble Beschimpfungen.Davon berichten auch andere Politikerinnen in der Schweiz. Die Strategien, wie sie mit den Beschimpfungen umgehen, sind unterschiedlich: Den Hass publik machen, mit Humor reagieren, Kommentare anzeigen, löschen oder sich sogar aus der Politik zurückziehen. Eine Gruppe von Forschenden der ETH Zürich hat untersucht, wie Hate Speech sich auf die Demokratie auswirkt – und welche Strategie dagegen wirksam ist. Inlandredaktorin Jacqueline Büchi ordnet die Erkenntnisse in einer neuen Folge des täglichen Podcasts «Apropos» ein. Gastgeber ist Philipp Loser. Mehr zum Thema:Sie konfrontiert die Hater – doch bringt das etwas? https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/sie-konfrontiert-ihre-hater-doch-bringt-das-etwas-776837819936

Angesichts des bevorstehenden orthodoxen Weihnachtsfests hat Russlands Präsident Wladimir Putin eine anderthalbtägige Feuerpause in der Ukraine angeordnet. Das geht aus einer entsprechenden Mitteilung des Kremls hervor. Weitere Themen: Eine neue Studie der ETH Zürich kommt zum Schluss: Um das Ziel von netto Null Treibhausgasemissionen bis 2050 noch zu erreichen, müsse die EU ab sofort rund 302 Milliarden Euro pro Jahr in grüne Infrastrukturen investieren. Das wären rund 40 Prozent mehr als bisher. Die Studienautoren sind überzeugt: Das Geld dazu wäre vorhanden. Im November hatte SRF Investigativ über illegale Eheschliessungen in der Moschee im Haus der Religionen in Bern berichtet. Nun zieht der Imam des muslimischen Vereins die Konsequenzen und tritt zurück. Offiziellen Angaben zufolge starb in China am Mittwoch nur eine einzige Person an Covid. Doch die Realität zeigt ein anderes Bild: Tatsächlich füllten sich in den letzten Wochen die Krematorien und Spitäler im Land. Eindrücke aus einem der grössten Spitäler in der Millionen-Metropole Schanghai.

Timestamps: 07:35 - Curiosity Breeds Entrepreneurship 15:09 - The Fall of Dermintel 23:24 - Digital Transformation Best Practices for Companies 33:03 - Inclusivity in the Tech Space 39:14 - Cognitive Flexibility and the Future of Work About Tomoko Yokoi: Tomoko Yokoi is a researcher and advisor in digital transformation at the IMD Business School and a lecturer at ETH Zürich. She also co-founded a market research startup, Dermintel. Before working in business, she studied International Development and Human Rights at the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service. Although she had a huge passion for development and human rights, she wanted to venture into something different and decided to enter the corporate world. The more she learned about entrepreneurship, the more she realised the advantages of the entrepreneurial lifestyle, including time flexibility, which she felt was lacking in corporate life. In 2020, the covid pandemic forced Tomoko to pause Dermintel's development, allowing her to focus more on her passion for digital transformation. Digital transformation can be complicated, but Tomoko loves unpacking the complexity to help organisations succeed. For her, it's not just about technology: it's also about governance, innovation, culture change, leadership, and competency development. As part of her book, Hacking Digital: Best Practices for Implementing and Accelerating Your Business Transformation, Tomoko Yokoi shares more about how to implement digital transformation in the workplace by giving insight into: How to create the best business model that has value How to lead digital transformation New technologies in digital transformation Resources: Book: Hacking Digital: Best Practices to Implement and Accelerate Your Business Transformation Article: Emojis In The World Of Work Memorable Quotes: “So many opportunities exist, it really depends on how you can target what you need when you need it.” “It is important to think of inclusivity when you think about innovation.” If you want to tune into another conversation with a founder who left corporate to start a business, check out our episode with Robert Piconi, co-founder and CEO at Energy Vault. Don't forget to give us a follow on our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin accounts, so you can always stay up to date with our latest initiatives. That way, there's no excuse for missing out on live shows, weekly giveaways or founders' dinners!

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Katrien de Bock from ETH Zürich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. We discussed how exercise training increases blood vessels in skeletal muscle. Also muscle cells and blood vessels in regards to injury/repair and cancer. We also discussed exercise and leucine sensitivity. 0:00. Introduction 2:00. What is the vasculature. Blood vessels Endothelial cells etc 5:46. Redirecting blood to the muscle during exercise 7:16. Exercise training increases blood vessels in muscle 8:50. Exercise also improves blood vessel function 10:13. How does exercise increase muscle blood vessels? Called angiogenesis. It appears there is either sprouting or splitting into two. Not clear still. 14:32. Does every study you do work? Need resilience. “Negative data”. 19:06. Types of cells in blood vessels/ cell cross talk Satellite cells, white blood cells etc. 21:05. Muscle repair and blood vessel cells Timing important. Anti inflammatories 24:20. Too many anti inflammatories not ideal For adaptations to exercise and muscle repair. 24:44. Exercise blood flow stimulates blood vessel growth/angiogenesis Also vascular endothelial growth factor. 27:07. Hypoxia inducible factor 1 alpha (HIF1a) Exercise is an adaptive response to stress 29:28. Endothelial cells differ between organs The experimental models that she uses. Metabolically active endothelial cells. 33.17. Different types of exercise and blood vessel growth 35:35. Blood vessels and satellite cells 37:30. The importance of cell, animal and human studies 38:35. Keep eyes open to collaborations from left field Serendipity and persistence. Apold1. 43:07. Blood flow restriction/iliac artery endofibrosis 46:27. Exercise and leucine sensitivity Timing of protein intake after exercise not important. Anabolic resistance. 50:45. Takeaway messages 52:40. Exercise, cancer and blood vessels etc 54:34. Outro (9 seconds) Inside Exercise brings to you the who's who of exercise metabolism, exercise physiology and exercise's effects on health. With scientific rigor, these researchers discuss popular exercise topics while providing practical strategies for all. The interviewer, Emeritus Professor Glenn McConell, has an international research profile following 30 years of Exercise Metabolism research experience while at The University of Melbourne, Ball State University, Monash University, the University of Copenhagen and Victoria University. He has published over 120 peer reviewed journal articles and recently edited an Exercise Metabolism eBook written by world experts on 17 different topics (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-94305-9). Connect with Inside Exercise and Glenn McConell at: Twitter: @Inside_exercise and @GlennMcConell1 Instagram: insideexercise Facebook: Glenn McConell LinkedIn: Glenn McConell https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenn-mcconell-83475460 ResearchGate: Glenn McConell Email: glenn.mcconell@gmail.com Subscribe to Inside exercise: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3pSYnNSXDkNLH8rImzotgP?si=Whw_ThaERF6iIKwxutDoNA Apple Podcasts: https://podcastsconnect.apple.com/my-podcasts/show/inside-exercise/03a07373-888a-472b-bf7e-a0ff155209b2 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84ZTdiY2ZkMC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw Anchor: https://anchor.fm/insideexercise Podcast Addict: https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/4025218

Im Jahr 2000 gelang dem ETH-Pflanzenforscher Ingo Potrykus ein wissenschaftlicher Durchbruch: Er veränderte Reis genetisch, um dem Vitamin-A-Mangel entgegenzuwirken. Diesen Herbst wurde auf den Philippinen die erste Ernte eingefahren. Eine Erfolgsgeschichte ist es dennoch nicht. Der heute 89-jährige emeritierte Professor für Pflanzenforschung der ETH Zürich musste im Krieg sein Essen zusammenstehlen, um zu überleben. Mit seiner Forschung wollte er deshalb gegen den Hunger ankämpfen. Er schaffte einen wissenschaftlichen Durchbruch, den kaum jemand für möglich gehalten hätte: Reis genetisch so zu verändern, dass er dem Vitamin-A-Mangel entgegenwirken sollte. «Vitamin-A-Mangel ist der stille Hunger. Man spürt ihn erst, wenn es zu spät ist», sagt er. Sein Ziel: Millionen von Kindern vor dem Erblinden und dem Tod zu bewahren. Diesen Herbst ist auf den Philippinen die erste Ernte des sogenannten Goldenen Reises eingefahren worden. Doch die Widerstände dagegen sind ungebrochen gross. Ingo Potrykus schaut mit gemischten Gefühlen auf sein Lebenswerk zurück und auf die politischen Diskussionen rundum. Was ihn bis heute motiviert, sein Werk weiterzuführen, mit welchen Widerständen er nicht gerechnet hat, und warum er nicht weiss, ob er im Rückblick diesen riesigen Effort noch einmal machen würde – das erzählt er im Tagesgespräch bei Karoline Arn.

Jede Woche die neusten Forschungsergebnisse und die skurrilsten Geschichten aus der Wissenschaft. Schnell abonnieren, nicht verpassen! Kommt alle zum SWR Podcast-Festival! Von 12.-14.01.2023 in Mannheim. Tickets gibts hier: https://www.swr.de/home/podcastfestival-100.html Diese Woche mit Julia Nestlen und Sina Kürtz. Ihre Themen sind: - Forscher der ETH Zürich haben Gold-Nano-Beschichtung entwickelt, die Brillengläser erwärmt und so vor dem Beschlagen schützt. (00:35) - 165 Jahre alte Jeans aus Schiffswrack geborgen – und versteigert für 114.000 Dollar! Welche alten Sachen wurden sonst noch in Schiffswracks gefunden? (04:40) - Sehr spannende Hörerfrage: Warum ist Hundekot manchmal nach 4-5 Tagen verschwunden, und warum liegt er manchmal wochenlang rum? (13:00) - Archäochemiker*innen untersuchen biochemische Spuren an Graf Draculas Brief – wie war Vlad Dracula so drauf? (19:45) Habt ihr auch Nerd-Facts und schlechte Witze für uns? Schreibt uns bei WhatsApp oder schickt eine Sprachnachricht: 0174/4321508 Schreibt uns auf faktab@swr2.de Oder direkt auf http://swr.li/faktab Redaktion: Jochen Steiner und Henriette Schreurs Idee: Christoph König

Grossbritannien, Italien und Japan wollen einen gemeinsamen Kampfjet entwickeln. Die drei Staaten wollen sich die Entwicklungskosten teilen, die in zweistelliger Milliardenhöhe liegen dürften. Bis 2035 soll das Flugzeug einsatzbereit sein. Die britische Regierung sprach in diesem Zusammenhang von einer «beispiellosen internationalen Luft- und Raumfahrtkoalition». Gespräch mit dem Sicherheitsexperten Niklas Masuhr von der ETH Zürich. Weitere Themen: (05:19) Grossbritannien, Italien und Japan planen «Kampfjet der Zukunft» (11:42) Russischer Oppositioneller Jaschin verurteilt (16:07) Politische Einigkeit in der ukrainischen Gesellschaft (21:57) US-Senatorin verlässt Demokraten (25:31) Phänomen Reichsbürger und Staatsverweigerer (30:33) Limmattalbahn: Neues Tram für den Grossraum Zürich (34:07) SPD-Abgeordneter Hakan Demir: Einsatz für Sprach-Kitas

Dipender Saluja and Ion Yadigaroglu are Partners at Capricorn Investment Group. Capricorn is a sustainable investment group, one of the largest mission-aligned investment firms in the world, and our sponsor on Cleaning Up.Dipender Saluja is a Partner of Capricorn Investment Group, and a Managing Director of Capricorn's Technology Impact Fund. Prior to Capricorn, Saluja was Chief of Staff at Cadence, a global market leader in electronic design. Prior to Cadence, he worked at Data General (EMC), Honeywell, ROLM (IBM), and the GF Energy Research Center. Saluja is an electrical engineer by training, and attended UND, University of Minnesota and Stanford University.Ion Yadigaroglu has been Managing Partner at Capricorn Investment Group since 2004. Prior to Capricorn, Ion was Director of Business Development with Koch Industries, and a Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Bivio, a software startup in Colorado. Yadigaroglu was a research fellow at Columbia University and holds a master's in physics from ETH Zürich in Switzerland and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Stanford University. Yadigaroglu was a founding member in 2007 of GIIN, the Global Impact Investor Network.Capricorn was born from the desire to demonstrate the huge investment potential that resides in breakthrough commercial solutions to the world's most pressing problems, and as such is one of the original impact investors.  Ion appeared on Episode 89 of Cleaning Up: https://www.cleaningup.live/ep89-ion-yadigaroglu-pioneering-impact-investor/Take a closer look at Capricorn's portfolio: https://capricornllc.com/technology-impact-fund/Watch Episode 84 with Mark Carney here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtA5ufMzKAUWatch Episode 48 with Lord Stern here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O5Ge_wRmPA 

Enhancing Biodiversity and Resilience in Intensive Farming Systems: Results from an ETH Zürich-IFPRI Collaborative study Co-organized by IFPRI, ETH Zürich, and Bayer DEC 6, 2022 - 10:00 TO 11:30AM EST The growth of our global food production capacity over the past century is unprecedented, and has been facilitated by advances in crop breeding, mechanization, intensification, and the application of chemical inputs. This has come at a cost in terms of biodiversity loss and land degradation. This apparent trade-off between productivity and environment can be resolved through adoption of new farming practices that emphasize restoring and maintaining biodiversity on agricultural land to the benefit of soils and crops. The science underpinning such practices is still being developed and trialed, but we know enough to propose alternative management principles. Similarly, farmers have long been experimenting and adapting their farming systems, sometimes drawing on scientific outputs, but more often than not drawing on their own experiential learning and knowledge exchange across farmer networks. In recognition of the developing science coupled with the growing interest of farmers in exploring new approaches to enhance farm resilience, ETH Zurich and IFPRI are pleased to share their research findings undertaken as part of the Enhancing Biodiversity and Resilience in Crop Production project, supported by Bayer. Over the course 2021-2022, ETH Zurich and IFPRI, together with partners in Germany, France, Brazil, and the USA, conducted systematic reviews of the scientific literature, complemented with interviews with farmers in each country, to evaluate management options for enhancing biodiversity and resilience in crop production. A panel composed of farmers, researchers, government and private sector actors will then comment on these research findings through the lens of farm management realities, and offer their perspectives on how to advance this area of research and how to achieve greater coherence of multiple policies, programs, and efforts. Welcome Remarks Wei Zhang, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI Project Overview Jaboury Ghazoul, Chair of Ecosystem Management, ETH Zürich Presentations of key findings Practices and Technologies Maryam Yousefi Bardaskan, Postdoctoral researcher, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zürich Factors affecting farmers' participation in agri-environmental schemes Sergei Schaub, Postdoctoral researcher, Agroscope and ETH Zürich Spatial distribution of intensive soybean, maize, and wheat production systems in Brazil, France, Germany, the United States Zhe Guo, Senior GIS Coordinator, IFPRI Co-developing a framework and indicators for assessing the performance of biodiversity-enhancing practices Xin Zhang, Associate Professor, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Panel Discussion Wei Zhang, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI Adrian Ivory, Manager Strathisla Farms, Blairgowrie, Scotland Fernando Sampaio, Director, Produzir Conservar Incluir (PCI) Institute, Brazil Sergei Schaub, Postdoctoral researcher, Agroscope and ETH Zürich Celine Termote, Regional lead for Africa of the food environment and consumer behaviour research group, Alliance Bioversity International and CIAT Bärbel Hundt, Biodiversity Strategy Director, Bayer Crop Science Q&A Closing Remarks Xin Zhang, Associate Professor, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Note of Thanks Wei Zhang, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI Moderator Charlotte Hebebrand, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, IFPRI More about this seminar: https://www.ifpri.org/event/enhancing-biodiversity-and-resilience-intensive-farming-systems-results-eth-ifpri Subscribe IFPRI Insights newsletter and event announcements at www.ifpri.org/content/newsletter-subscription

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is "A Scandinavian Perspective on Industrial Operator Independence." Our guest is Johan Stahre (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jstahre/), Professor and Chair of Production Systems at Chalmers University in Sweden. In this conversation, we talk about how the field of human-centered automation has evolved, the contemporary notion of operator 4.0, Scandinavian worker independence, shop floor innovation at Volvo, factories of the future, modern production systems, robots, and cobots in manufacturing. If you like this show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/). If you like this episode, you might also like Episode 84 on The Evolution of Lean with Professor Torbjørn Netland from ETH Zürich (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/84). Augmented is a podcast for industry leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim (https://trondundheim.com/) and presented by Tulip (https://tulip.co/). Follow the podcast on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AugmentedPod) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/75424477/). Trond's Takeaway: Human-centered automation is the only kind of automation that we should be thinking about, and this is becoming more and more clear. Operators are fiercely independent, and so should they be. This is the only way they can spot problems on the shop floor, by combining human skills with automation in new ways augmenting workers. It seems the workforce does not so much need engagement as they need enablement. Fix that, and a lot can happen. Transcript: TROND: Welcome to another episode of the Augmented Podcast. Augmented brings industrial conversations that matter, serving up the most relevant conversations on industrial tech. Our vision is a world where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is A Scandinavian Perspective on Industrial Operator Independence. Our guest is Johan Stahre, Professor and Chair of Production Systems at Chalmers University in Sweden. In this conversation, we talk about how the field of human-centered automation has evolved, the contemporary notion of operator 4.0, Scandinavian worker independence, shop floor innovation at Volvo, factories of the future, modern production systems, robots, and cobots in manufacturing. Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim and presented by Tulip. Johan, Welcome. How are you? JOHAN: I'm fine, thank you, Trond. It's really nice to see you. TROND: Yeah, likewise. JOHAN: Fellow Nordic person. TROND: Fellow Nordic person. And I apologize for this very American greeting, you know, how are you? As you know, I'm from the Nordic region. I actually mean it, [laughs] you know, it was a question. So I do wonder. [laughs] JOHAN: I'm actually fine. It's just ending the vacation, so I'm a little bit sad about that because everyone...but it's a very nice time now because the rest of the world seems to be on vacation, so you can get a lot of work done. TROND: I concur; that is a wonderful time. Johan, I wanted to just briefly talk about your exciting background. You are an engineer, a mechanical engineer from Sweden. And you had your initial degree from Linköping University. Then you went on to do your Ph.D. a while back in manufacturing automation, and this was at Chalmers, the University in Sweden. And that's where you have done your career in manufacturing research. You are, I think, the first Scandinavian researcher certainly stationed currently in Sweden that we've had on the podcast. So I'm kind of curious, what is manufacturing like in Scandinavia? And what is it that fascinated you about this topic so that you have moved so deeply into it? JOHAN: Manufacturing in Sweden is the core; it's the backbone of our country in a sense. We have statistically too many large manufacturing companies in Sweden as compared to, I mean, we're only 10 million people, but we have like 10, 12 pretty large companies in the manufacturing area in automotive but also in electronics like Ericsson, you have Volvo, we have SKF. We have a lot of big companies. Sweden has an industrial structure that we have several small companies and a couple of large companies, not so many in the middle section there. This happened, actually, in the 1800s somewhere. There was a big growth of big companies, and there was a lot of effort from the government to support this, and that has been continued. So the Swedish government has supported the growth of industry in Sweden, and therefore we have a very strong industry and also quite good digital growth and maturity. TROND: So the Scandinavian background to me when I was there, I remember that one of the things that at least Scandinavian researchers think is distinct about Scandinavia is worker independence. And it's something that I kind of wanted to just tease out a little bit in the beginning of this podcast. Am I wrong in this, or is there something distinct about the relationship between, I guess, workers and managers in Scandinavia, particularly? One speaks about the Scandinavian model. Can you outline a little bit what that means in manufacturing if it still exists? It's an open question. JOHAN: From my perspective, Sweden usually ranks very high in innovation, also when it comes to international rankings. And I think some of that has to do with the openness and the freedom of thinking in a sense and not so hierarchical, more consensus-oriented, ability to test and check and experiment at work without getting repercussions from top management. And it is much easier. In fact, if you are at one department in a manufacturing company or in university as such and you want to collaborate with another colleague across the aisle, if you have a two hierarchical system, you need to go three levels up in order to be able to do that. But here, I think it's easier to just walk across the aisle to have this collaboration and establish a cooperative environment. I think that that's part of the reason. Also, we're not so many; I mean, I think historically, we needed to do a lot of things ourselves in Sweden. We were a country up north with not so many people, and we have harsh environments, and I think it's the same as Norway. I mean, you need to be self-sustainable in that sense, and that creates, I think, environmental collaboration. TROND: We'll go more deeply into your research on manufacturing and to what extent a question I asked here matters to that. But do you have a sense just at the outset here that this type of worker and operators sort of independence, relative independence, perhaps compared to other regions, is it changing at all? Or is this kind of a feature that is a staple of Scandinavian culture and will be hard to change both for good and for bad? JOHAN: I think that as everything...digitalization has sort of erased a lot of the cultural differences across the world in that sense. Because when I was a student, there was not this expressed digital environment, of course. The information environment was less complex. But I think now all the young people, as well as my mother, does her banking...she's 90, but she does her banking on her iPad; I mean, it's very well-spread. And I think that we are all moving towards a similar culture, and the technology is spreading so quick. So you cannot really have cultural differences in that sense. But I think that's still the way that we're using this. And I think that the collaborative sense I think that that is still there. The reason why Sweden is comparatively innovative still is that we still maintain our culture and use the technology to augment that capability. TROND: So, Johan, we'll talk about a bunch of your experiences because you obviously are based in Sweden. And because of Sweden's industrial situation, you have some examples, you know, Volvo, a world-famous company obviously, and also famous for its management practices, and its factory practices, we'll get into that. But you've also worked, and you're advising entities such as the World Economic Forum, and you are active on the European stage with the European Institute of Technology. Your activity clearly goes way, way beyond these borders. But why don't we maybe start with some of these Scandinavian experiences and research projects that you've done maybe with Volvo? What is it with Volvo that captured people's attention early on? And what sort of experience and research have you done with Volvo? JOHAN: I think that Volvo is very innovative, and Volvo today is two types of companies; one is the car company that has now gone fully electric. It was introduced at the stock market, most recently owned by a Chinese company, and before that, it was owned by Ford, and before that, it was also public. But you also have the other part, which is the Volvo Group, which is looking at trucks, and boats, and things like that. And they both share a high level of innovation, ambition, innovation, and power, I think, using the experiences already from the '60s, where you had a lot of freedom as an employee. And also very good collaboration with the union in investments and in all the changes in the company I think that has been very beneficial. And it's made them...what is now Volvo Cars was very, very early, for example, with digital twins. They were experimenting with digital twins already in the 1990s. And we work together with Volvo but also with SKF, which is a roller-bearing company here to look at how we can support frontline workers and augment their capabilities because they're very skilled and they're very experienced. But sometimes you need to have sensor input, and you need to have structures, and rules, and procedures, and instructions. So we worked quite early with them already, maybe in 2009, 2010, to see how can we transform their work situation, provide them with work instructions through wearable devices. It was very popular at that time. MIT was experimenting with cyborgs. And the people that were...I think it was Thad Starner; he was trying to put on a lot of computer equipment. Then he went through the security at the airport and had some problems there. But that's not the case for the operators. But it was a little bit too early, I think. We tried to experiment with some of the maintenance people at Volvo cars. And they were very interested in the technology, but the use for it was a little bit obscure. And this was at the time when you had the mobile connectivity was 9,600 kilobits through a mobile phone or in the modem, so Wi-Fi more or less did not exist. And the equipment: the batteries weighed two kilos, and the computer weighed one kilo. And then you had a headset that looked like you came from deployment in a war zone. So it was a little bit...it looked a little bit too spacy for them to be actually applicable. And then some 10 years later, we actually did a similar experiment with SKF, the roller bearing company where we deployed the first iPod touch, I think they were called. That was right before the iPhone. I think it was an experiment by Steve Jobs to see how can we create what then became the iPhone screen. And we put that on the arms of the operators and tried to see how can we give them an overview of the process situation. So they were constantly aware, and they were quite happy about this. And then, we wanted to finish the experiment. The operators actually said, "Well, we don't want to give the equipment back." And then we said, "Well, we need to have it back. Of course, you can use the software." So they brought their own phones, and they downloaded the software. And they're still using it, actually, not on their own phones anymore. But they use this kind of software that we developed at that time together with them. So that was quite interesting. TROND: That's fascinating. Extrapolating from some of these early experiences up until now, I wanted to just ask you this from a research perspective, but also, I guess, from a management perspective. So you work on production systems. What is really the goal here, or what has the objective been early on? You talked about these early MIT experiments. And I know control systems is a very old area of research. And from what I understand, in the early days, the use cases weren't just factories; they were also on spacecraft and things. But to your point, especially earlier, we were working with very, very different technology interfaces. But now, obviously, we are starting to roll out 5G, which gives a whole other type of richness. But does it really matter how rich the technology interface is? Or does it matter more what the objective is with these various types of augmentations that have been attempted really throughout the decades? Can you just give us a little sense of what researchers and yourself what you were trying to augment and how that depends or doesn't depend on the quality of technology? JOHAN: First, we need to realize that the manufacturing industry has always been a very, very early adopter. The first computers were used for war simulations and for making propellers for submarines to see how you can program the milling machines. This was in the 1950s. And the industrial robots in the '60s in the '70s were also very early applications of digitalization. Before anything else had computers, the manufacturing industry was using it, and that's still the case. That might surprise some people. When they walk out into a shop floor, they see no computers around because all the computers are built into the machines already. What is still missing is the link, perhaps to the people. So they are still using the screens. And they are the ones...people are the key components of handling complex and unforeseeable situations. So you need to provide them, I think...to be really productive, you need to provide the frontline staff with the equipment for them to avoid and to foresee and to handle unforeseen situations because that's what differs between the man and machine or a human and the machine. People are much more apt to solve a complex situation that was not programmed before. That's the augmentation part here; how can we augment the human capabilities? And people talk about augmented reality; I mean, I don't think it's the reality that needs to be augmented; it's the human to be handling the reality that needs to be augmented. TROND: Johan, this is so fascinating because, first of all, it's quite easy to dismiss manufacturing a little bit these days because, to the untrained eye, all the excitement is in the consumer space because that's where the new devices get released, and that's, obviously, where all the attention is these days unless you obviously are in manufacturing. But can you bring us back to those early days of computing when a lot of the use cases for computing were first explored with manufacturing? So you talked about MIT, and back at MIT and at Stanford, all the way back to the '60s, they were exploring this new and fascinating field of even artificial intelligence, but before that, just regular control systems, electronic interfaces. What fork in the road would you say happened there? Because clearly, the fascination has been with digitalizing everything and software kind of one for 30 years, but in manufacturing, it's more complicated. You say people, so it's people, and then it's kind of these production systems that you research. That's not the same as the use case of an individual with their phone, and they're sort of talking to people. There are many, many more variables in play here. What is the real difference? JOHAN: Last year actually the European Commission put forth industry 5.0, which should be the follower after industry 4.0. And they based that on three main challenges. One is sustainability, one is resilience, and the various kinds of resilience towards the shock of the war but also by climate, et cetera. And the third one is actually human-centeredness to see how can we really fully deploy human capabilities in a society and also in industry, of course. I think what you're referring to is the two guys at Stanford in the '60s; one was John McCarthy. He was the inventor of the artificial intelligence concept. His aim then was to replace human work. That was the ambition with the artificial intelligence because human work is not as productive as computing work, but it still has some drawbacks. But in the same place not so far away, in another department at Stanford, was a guy called Douglas Engelbart. And he was actually the father of...he called it intelligence augmentation. So it was AI and IA at that time. But his ambition was to augment human work to see how can you have this. And he was the one that invented hypertext and the mouse. And he put up the first hypermedia set in Silicon Valley. So this was a guy that inspired companies like Apple, and Xerox PARC, those kinds of institutions that had a huge bearing. There was a book by a research colleague at Oxford. He was comparing that over time, from the early industrial days and then forward, technology that replaces people always has more complications when introduced and scaled than technology that augments people. If you look at the acceptance and the adoption of the iPhone, that took months, or weeks, or whatever, seconds for some people, for me, for example. If you look at what happened in the industrial revolutions in the 1800s and the 1700s, you had a lot of upheaval, and already in the 1960s...I'm starting to sound like a university professor. But in '96, in the U.S., there was a Senate hearing about is automation taking the jobs from people or not? And the conclusion was that it is not, it is actually creating companies that then employ more people because of the productivity gains and the innovation gains. And you allow people to use the automation as augmentation, not only cognitive augmentation. We think a lot about augmentation as something that you do with your eyes and your brain. But robots are also augmenting people. It lifts heavy objects like cars or big containers, whatever. That's the kind of augmentation that maybe you don't consider when you look at it from an artificial or an augmented reality perspective. TROND: Well, so many things to pick up here. But the variety of meanings of augmentation are kind of astounding, aren't they? And you've written about this operator 4.0 several times. There's obviously cognitive augmentation, and then there's physical augmentation. Are there other types of augmentation that you can speak of? JOHAN: I really can't think of any. TROND: But those are the main ones. So it's either kind of your mentality or sort of your knowledge. So the work instruction parts go to the skills-based, I guess, augmentation, which perhaps is an additional one. Or I'm just thinking if manufacturing wants to make progress in these things, it would perhaps make sense to really verify what workers at any moment actually themselves express that they need. And I guess that's what I was fishing for a little bit here in this history of all of this, whether the technology developers at all moments really have a clear idea of what it is that the workers are saying themselves they're missing or that they obviously are missing. Because automation and augmentation, I mean, do you find them diametrically opposed, or are they merely complementary when it works well? JOHAN: I mean, automation traditionally has been the way to scale, and, I mean, in the beginning, you want to see what the machine is doing, right? And then you really don't want to see it. You just want it to work. So it's really helping you to scale up your work. And in that sense, automation, like collaborative robots, for example, which people are talking about robots, are something that is replacing jobs, but if you look at it, it is a very small portion of statistics. In Singapore, which is the highest user of robots installed, there were 950 maybe robots per 10,000 employees. And the average in the Americas is 100 robots per 10,000 employees, and that's not really a lot. And so there is plenty of space for robots to be the tools for people. So if you don't treat them as something that will replace you but something that will actually augment you, I think it would be much easier. What could happen, though, and I think that is maybe part of your question, is that, well, these tools are becoming so complex that you cannot use them unless you increase your skill. How do you do that? Because no company would like to end up in a situation where the tools that you have bought and invested a lot of money in are too complex for your employees to use. That's a lost investment. It's like you're building a big factory out in a very remote place, and you don't have enough electric power to run it. You don't want to end up in that situation. Like you expressed, I think that maybe what's missing and what's trending right now is that the upskilling of the workforce is becoming extremely important. TROND: And how do you do that, Johan? Because there's obviously...there's now an increased attention on upskilling. But that doesn't mean that everyone has the solution for it. And employers are always asking for other people to pay for it, for example, governments, or the initiative of the worker, perhaps. It seems like Europe has taken this challenge head-on. Germany, at least, is recognized as a leader in workforce training. The U.S. is a latecomer to the game from that perspective. But it typically shows up in a big way. So something is going to happen here in the U.S. when it comes to workforce training. What is the approach? I mean, there seems to be two approaches to me; one is to simplify the technology, so you need less training. And the other would be obviously an enormous reskilling effort that either is organized, perhaps ideally in the workplace itself, so it's not removed from the tasks. Or some enormous schooling effort that is highly efficient and perhaps online. What do you think are the winning approaches to re-skilling that entire manufacturing workforce continuously? Because it's not like you have to rescale them once, you have to rescale them every time. JOHAN: Well, I can only guess. I think that you need to do all of these, all of the above. One complicating factor is the demographics of, especially Japan; of course, we know that from a long time that, they have an aging population. But Europe is now becoming the new Japan in that sense. We have a very big problem in terms of aging populations, especially countries like Italy and perhaps Germany but also in northern countries. And we don't have perhaps...there's a lot of discussion on immigration right now. But actually, the workforce would need a lot of immigration to be able to respond to the needs of our industry in the forthcoming situation. I think that China is maybe 4 or 5 years behind Europe, and the U.S. is maybe 10-12 years behind Europe as well. So that will happen...the only non-affected regions right now are India and Africa. And that means that the European, and Chinese, and U.S. industries will have to compete with a rather young population in Africa and India. And so that will become over time, but it is a long time, so that means that it's not always on the political agenda. Things that take a long time are usually not the things that you speak about when you have election times that we have in Sweden right now. It's mostly what's on the table. So I think that how to do that is really complex. We had some collaboration within the World Economic Forum. It is a fantastic organization because it spans the whole globe. So that means that the information comes from different parts of the world, and you can see different aspects of this. And a country that has done a lot about this is Singapore, very good experiments, very nice projects, initiatives regarding upskilling. And Europe is now launching an innovation program where they want to go deeper into deep tech to try to...the commissioner for research and education in June launched a big initiative around innovation and how that can be supported by deep technology. So we'll see what comes out of that. It'll be very, very interesting to see. MID-ROLL AD: In the new book from Wiley, Augmented Lean: A Human-Centric Framework for Managing Frontline Operations, serial startup founder Dr. Natan Linder and futurist podcaster Dr. Trond Arne Undheim deliver an urgent and incisive exploration of when, how, and why to augment your workforce with technology, and how to do it in a way that scales, maintains innovation, and allows the organization to thrive. The key thing is to prioritize humans over machines. Here's what Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, says about the book: "Augmented Lean is an important puzzle piece in the fourth industrial revolution." Find out more on www.augmentedlean.com, and pick up the book in a bookstore near you. TROND: Speaking about the World Economic Forum for a minute, Johan, you have been part of this group project called the Augmented Workforce Initiative. You told me when we spoke earlier that, in your opinion, this initiative couldn't have existed even just five years ago. Can you explain what you mean by that? Because augmentation, the way that you've been speaking about it now, is a perspective that was nascent, even in the early days of computing and manufacturing control systems. Yet, it seems to have disappeared a little bit, at least from the top end of the political and research agenda. Yet here we are and you said this initiative couldn't have existed five years ago. Can you explain what you meant by that? JOHAN: That is a very, very nice initiative by the World Economic Forum, and it's run by the forum and Cambridge University, who has a very, very good group on this and some very nice people. And I'm honored to be part of that group together with my colleague from Mexico, David Romero. You may know him as well. And I think that what they're looking at is the increased understanding. And that was actually one of the sessions at this World Economic Forum, you know, the Davos days that were run this year. And it was actually part of those days as a theme about how to engage, and how to support, and to augment the workforce, which has never happened before on that level. So it's really, really high on the agenda. The Forum has been running previous projects also on the future of work and how the demographic situation is affecting or how the skill situation is affecting the companies. They have come up with suggestions that more or less half the workforce needs to be upskilled within the next couple of years. And that's a huge undertaking. TROND: The novelty here is that the world's elite managers, I guess, who are represented at the World Economic Forum are increasingly aware of the complexity of workforce issues generally, and then specifically of upskilling, and maybe even upskilling in this very specific meaning of augmenting a worker which, I guess to my mind, is a little bit different from just generally speaking about robotic automation and hammering these efficiency points. But obviously, it's a much more challenging debate because it's one thing to find a budget for an automation effort and introduce a lot of computers or introduce a lot of whatever technology, usually hardware, but what we're talking about here is a lot more challenging because you need to tailor it to these workers. And there are many workers, obviously, so it's a complicated phenomenon. How is that going? What would you say are some of the findings of the Augmented Workforce Initiative? JOHAN: I think that companies like Tulip, companies like Black & Decker, and others have a lot of good use cases actually already, which may or may not before have been labeled augmentation. It might have been labeled as operator support, or decision-making support, or things like that, or upskilling. But I think that the findings are that there is a lot out there, but it's not emphasized as something that is really important for the company's survival in that sense. TROND: It wasn't so glorified before. A lot of the decision support systems were viewed as lower-level systems that were just kind of more like HR systems or just tinkering with necessary stuff that people had to know kind of a thing. And so you're saying it's been elevated now, yeah, as having a much more essential impact on the quality of work. JOHAN: It has a leveraging impact for the whole company, I would say, but that's also part of this industry 4.0 approach. And you have the hierarchical integration of companies where the CEO should be aware of what's going on on the shop floor and vice versa, as well as the horizontal integration where you have the companies up and down the supply chain and value chain knowing what's going on early. And that is really something that maybe stopped at mid-management level before, but now it needs to be distributed out to the places where the complexity is higher, and that's the frontline workers. Maybe...now I'm guessing, but I think that also the understanding that the investments done by this company in complex manufacturing equipment could be at risk if you don't have the right skills to use them is now penetrating, I think, a lot of the companies. In Europe, in 2019 or something like that, there were almost 30 million people employed in the manufacturing industry. And if you look at the number of...if you say that half of these need to be upskilled somehow over a period of three years...and I actually made a mock calculation that the re-skilling need for in-person months in Europe if we were to fulfill this is 50 million person-months, 50 million person-months, just the time for the people to participate in these trainings. So that's a huge undertaking. And I think that that scares companies as well as governments because just imagine taking 50 million person-months out of productivity or the production equation. But the alternative might be worse. If you lose your capability to use your equipment, that might even be worse. TROND: Wow, these are daunting things. I guess that brings me to the last section here and some thoughts from you on the future outlook. When it comes to technology and these tools for human augmentation, what are the timelines for, well, either making the improvements or, as you said, not losing competitiveness because of this skills crisis? What are we looking at here? Is there some imminent challenge and opportunity? Or is this going to play out over 25 years? JOHAN: I think that in 25 years, the demographic situations will have changed again, so I assume that they will look different. But right now, we have a problem with an aging population. And we have a lot of people going into retirement. A lot of knowledge will disappear unless we can store it somehow. A lot of people will not go into industry. I mean, when I talk to colleagues, they say, "Well, we need to make the manufacturing industry more sexy. It should be cleaner, or it should be nicer because young people don't go to industry." But if I go to the healthcare section, they will say the same thing, "Oh, we need to make it much better because people are not applying for these educations." TROND: [laughs] Where are people applying, the tech companies? JOHAN: No, that's the problem. They don't exist. They were never born. TROND: [laughs] Right. JOHAN: So the demographic bomb is that they are actually not there. So you cannot rely on employing young people because they are not existing in Europe and soon not in the U.S. to the extent that they were before. So therefore, you need to focus on the older people. So you need to re-upskill not only the middle-aged people but the people in their 50s and even in their 60s. That adds to the complexity. In the next 5 to 10 years, there will be a lot of discussions on how to fill the missing places in industry to remain competitive. I also think that you can see the augmentation here as a fantastic tool together with the upskilling because upskilling the new skills together with the augmented tools like collaborative robots, like cognitive support, like whatever you can put in an iPhone, or whatever phone, or tool, or watch, or whatever, you can add the capability to make decisions. And that's the augmentation you will see. And you will see a lot of digital twins try to foresee problems. You will see a lot of transversal technologies going from different high-tech industry into manufacturing industry to support especially the frontline people and to enable their innovation capabilities. TROND: Johan, you said earlier that the complexity is higher at the level of frontline workers. Did you mean that, basically, the complexity of frontline work of itself at an individual level is also underestimated? Or were you simply saying that because there are so many frontline workers and the various situations of various types of frontline workers is so different that it's obviously an underappreciated management challenge? Or were you truly saying that frontline work in and of itself is either complicated or becoming more complex? JOHAN: If a task was not automated, it is inherently complex. So you couldn't automate it, right? TROND: Right. JOHAN: Because if you can teach a robot or whatever to do tasks, then it's not difficult, and you can foresee the results. There was a lady called Lisanne Bainbridge. She put out The Paradox of Automation that the more you automate, the more dependent you become on the few people that are still there to handle the situations that are so complex that you could not foresee them. So everything that is programmed is programmed by a programmer, and the programmer tries to foresee every foreseeable situation, and to that extent, the robots and the automation works. But if these situations go out of hand, if they're too complex, and something happens, then there is no robot that can fix that. Unfortunately, AI is not there yet. TROND: Well, you said, "Unfortunately, AI is not there yet," but I would also conjecture that, fortunately, AI is not there yet because you're pointing to something missing, I think. And a lot of the AI debate is starting to come back now. And it was there in the '60s because people realized that for lots of different reasons, to have a human oversight over robotic processes is actually a good thing. And you talked to me earlier about the experiments with imagining a trip to Mars and having to execute robotic actions on Mars in a control system environment where you actually had to foresee the action and plan; it was always a supervised type of situation. So the supervisory control concept has been there from the beginning of computing. If you were to think of a future where AI actually does get more advanced, and a lot of people feel like that's imminent, maybe you and I don't, but in any case, let's imagine that it does become more advanced and becomes sort of a challenge, how do we maintain human control over those kinds of decisions? I mean, there are researchers that have imagined, you know, famously in Superintelligence, Bostrom imagines this paperclip factory that goes amok and starts to optimize for producing paperclips, and everyone is suddenly producing, you know, and the machine then just reallocates resources to this enormously ridiculous task of producing only paper clips. It's a very memorable example. But a lot of people feel that AI could soon or at some point reach that level. How do we, as a failsafe, avoid that that becomes an issue? Or do you see it as such a far-fetched topic in manufacturing that it would be decades, if not centuries, away? JOHAN: I think that AI has been seasonal if you allow the expression. There's talk about these AI winters every now and then, and they tend to come every 10 or 15 years, and that matches two Ph.D. lifetimes, Ph.D. development. I mean, people tend to forget the problems, and then they tend to use these Gartner curves. If you look at the Gartner curve, you have the expectation part. I'm not being arrogant towards the AI research. I think that AI is fantastic, but it should be seen, from my perspective, as what it is, as an advanced form of automation that can be used as an augmentation tool. I think it was Kasparov that started to collaborate with a chess computer maker or developer, and they won every tournament because the combination of the human and the chess computer was astounding. And now I think there are even competitions with chess computers plus chess experts comes with them. There was, I think, in the 1800s, there was a traveling exhibitionist where they had the Mechanical Turk, I think it was called. It was a chess player that was competing then against the people in the audience. And actually, inside this box, there was a small human that was making all the chess moves. And they were beating all the chess champions. So there was a man inside this. I think that there is still a man inside a lot of the automation. TROND: A man and a woman. I wanted to just lastly end on a more positive note because you told me earlier that you are more optimistic now than ten years ago on behalf of your industry that you've researched for so many years. Why is that? JOHAN: I think that the technology, I mean, I'm a techno-optimist. And I think that we have also the full scale, the full attention from the ICT industry on various industrial processes right now. It was a lot of service-oriented. And I think that that is playing out now in the platform wars, the different services, but these different services are actually making a lot of good in the manufacturing and the tougher industries. And so, there is a bigger focus now on creating CO2-less steel. And there's an exploration of different industries that are going across; you look at the electrification of vehicles which is cutting across several sectors in the industry, automotive industry, electronics industry. And I think that the problems in industry are becoming so complex. So the ICT attention is on industry now more than perhaps on consumers, as it were, and I think that that's promising. I see companies like Ericsson promoting 5G. I see companies doing the Amazon Web Services and such companies looking at services that are useful for industry. And that's also augmenting the people's capability in that sense, so that's why I'm so positive. I see all the sensors coming. I see all the computing power coming into the hands of the frontline operators. And I see also the use for the upskilling and the skilling technologies that are emerging. How do you do that? What they do in Matrix when the leading lady downloads the instructions for the helicopter or motorcycle or whatever it is. But how do you do that in real life? How do you prepare for something that's coming in the next few minutes? That is something that people are now looking at using technologies, augmenting technologies, digital twins, and things like that in a completely different way than they were five years ago. TROND: Wow. So these are exciting moments for learning in manufacturing with perhaps wide-ranging consequences if we succeed. Johan, I thank you so much for these reflections. You've spent a career investigating production systems, and manufacturing, and workers. And these are very rich debates. And it seems like they're not over, Johan. So, hopefully, we'll have you back when something happens. And we'll have you comment on some developments. Thank you very much. JOHAN: Thank you, Trond. Thank you for a very interesting discussion. You always learn a lot by being asked a lot of questions, so thank you so much for this learning experience. Thank you. TROND: You're very gracious. Thank you, Johan. You have just listened to another episode of the Augmented Podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. The topic was a Scandinavian Perspective on Industrial Operator Independence. Our guest was Johan Stahre, Professor and Chair of Production Systems at Chalmers University of Sweden. In this conversation, we talked about how the field of human-centered automation has evolved. My takeaway is that human-centered automation is the only kind of automation that we should be thinking about, and this is becoming more and more clear. Operators are fiercely independent, and so should they be. This is the only way they can spot problems on the shop floor, by combining human skills with automation in new ways augmenting workers. It seems the workforce does not so much need engagement as they need enablement. Fix that, and a lot can happen. Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 84 on The Evolution of Lean with Professor Torbjørn Netland from ETH Zürich. Hopefully, you'll find something awesome in these or in other episodes and if so, do let us know by messaging us. We would love to share your thoughts with other listeners. The Augmented Podcast is created in association with Tulip, the frontline operation platform that connects people, machines, devices, and systems in a production or logistics process in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology and empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. Tulip is also hiring, and you can find Tulip at tulip.co. Please share this show with colleagues who care about where industry and especially about where industrial tech is heading. To find us on social media is easy; we are Augmented Pod on LinkedIn and Twitter and Augmented Podcast on Facebook and YouTube. Augmented — industrial conversations that matter. See you next time. Special Guest: Johan Stahre.

Physicist and honorary IAAP member Dr. Harald Atmanspacher is on the faculty of the ETH Zürich and the C.G. Jung Institute Zürich. We discuss his books, The Pauli-Jung Conjecture & Its Impact Today, and Dual-Aspect Monism & the Deep Structure of Meaning

Im «Club» stehen die SVP-Bundesratskandidaten Albert Rösti und Hans-Ueli Vogt ihren Kritikerinnen und Kritikern Rede und Antwort. Zudem wartet eine kleine Überraschung auf sie. Wer Kinder hat, weiss: Sie stellen ganz andere Fragen. Deshalb sind im «Club» auch vier Kinderreporterinnen und -reporter in der Runde und fühlen den Kandidaten auf den Zahn. Mit Barbara Lüthi diskutieren: – Albert Rösti, Nationalrat SVP und Bundesratskandidat SVP; – Hans-Ueli Vogt, Professor für Privat- und Wirtschaftsrecht und Bundesratskandidat SVP; – Caspar Hirschi, Historiker Universität St. Gallen; – Sanija Ameti, Co-Präsidentin Operation Libero; und – Reto Knutti, Professor für Klimaforschung, ETH Zürich. Und: Kinderreporterinnen und -reporter: Andrej, 12, Sophie, 12, Lino, 10, und Joëlle, 11.

2022 ist das Jahr, in dem Klimaaktivistinnen und -aktivisten sich in Kunstmuseen begeben, sich an Bilderrahmen festkleben oder Gemälde mit Flüssigkeiten oder Kartoffelbrei bewerfen. Warum tun sie das? Warum wird die Kunst zum Ziel von Klimaprotesten? Im September klebten sich Max Voegtli und ein weiterer Aktivist im Kunsthaus Zürich an Giovanni Segantinis «Alpenweide» fest. «Renovate Switzerland», die Organisation, der er angehört, begründete dies so: «Keine idyllischen Landschaften in einer brennenden Schweiz, keine Kunst auf einem toten Planeten.» Im «Kultur-Talk» unterhalten sich Max Voegtli und Philip Ursprung, Professor für Kunst- und Architekturgeschichte an der ETH Zürich, über Kunstmuseen als Schauplätze des Klimaprotests. Warum gerade Kunstmuseen? Was, wenn tatsächlich Kunstwerke beschädigt werden? Verscherzt sich «Renovate Switzerland» durch solche Aktionen nicht viele Sympathien?

In Polen ist eine Rakete eingeschlagen. Zum ersten Mal seit Ausbruch des Ukraine-Kriegs im Februar, ist NATO-Gebiet betroffen. Was passiert jetzt? Und wie ist die Reaktion des ukrainischen Präsidenten einzuordnen, der auf Russland zeigte, obwohl es möglicherweise eine ukrainische Abwehrrakete war? Die Nachrichtenlage änderte sich seit dem Einschlag gestern fast stündlich. Wir klären mit dem Strategieexperten Marcel Berni von der ETH Zürich, was man Stand jetzt weiss und welche Handlungsoptionen die NATO in einem Fall wie diesem in Erwägung ziehen kann.

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is Lean Manufacturing. Our guest is Michel Baudin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelbaudin/), author, and owner of Takt Times Group. In this conversation, we talk about how industrial engineering equals the engineering of human work and why manufacturing and industrial engineering education needs to change because it has drifted away from industrial work and a future where manufacturing is not going away. If you like this show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/). If you like this episode, you might also like Episode 84 on The Evolution of Lean with Professor Torbjørn Netland from ETH Zürich (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/84). Augmented is a podcast for industry leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim (https://trondundheim.com/) and presented by Tulip (https://tulip.co/). Follow the podcast on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AugmentedPod) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/75424477/). Trond's Takeaway: Lean manufacturing might mean many things, but industrial work has largely been a consistent practice over several hundred years, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Having said that, if we want to go about improving it, we might want to stay pretty close to the workforce and not sit in statistics labs far removed from it. Efficiency is tied to work practices, and they cannot be optimized beyond what the workforce can handle or want to deal with. As we attempt to be lean, whatever we mean by that, we need to remember that work is a thoroughly human endeavor. Transcript TROND: Welcome to another episode of the Augmented Podcast. Augmented brings industrial conversations that matter, serving up the most relevant conversations on industrial tech. Our vision is a world where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is Lean Manufacturing. Our guest is Michel Baudin, author, and owner of Takt Times Group. In this conversation, we talk about how industrial engineering equals the engineering of human work and why manufacturing and industrial engineering education needs to change because it has drifted away from industrial work and a future where manufacturing is not going away. Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim and presented by Tulip. Michel, welcome. How are you? MICHEL: Fine, thank you. How about yourself? TROND: Things are good. Things are looking up. I'm excited to talk about lean manufacturing with you, having had such a rich, professional background. Michel, you're French. You originally, I think, were thinking of becoming a probability researcher, or you were actually, and then you went to Japan and studied Toyota. You have had this career in English, German, Japanese sort of consulting all the way back from 1987 onwards on exciting topics, lean manufacturing, and especially implementing it, right? The real deal. You've authored at least four technical books that I know about. And I think you listed probably a while back, having written 900 blog posts. You've been very busy. You are the owner of the Takt Times Group, which is a consulting firm on lean manufacturing. And you love math, but you have this very interesting attitude, which we'll talk about, which is math is great, but it's not always the best communication tool. Tell me a little about that to start off. You're a probability researcher that doesn't use math; I think that's fascinating. MICHEL: I use it, but I don't brag about it with people that it turns off. So I have to be in the closet for this because people who work in manufacturing usually focus on concrete things, things that they can see and touch, and abstraction is not something that they respond well to. So whenever you explain a principle, my approach is to state this principle and then dig into some very specific examples right away; otherwise, I'm losing the people I'm talking to. But anyway, that's what I've had to do. TROND: So, did I capture your background okay? I mean, you've had a very international life so far. I hope it's been enjoyable and not just professional because you've spent your time in Germany, and Japan, and in the U.S., So you're really enjoying the different kinds of manufacturing environments. Or is it that you just want to be close to where it's all happening? MICHEL: I've enjoyed living in many different countries. And so you mentioned I'm French. I was born and raised in France, but I'm an American citizen, and I spent most of my life in the U.S. I think of myself as being part French, part American, part German, part Japanese. Because when I'm in a country, I tend to immerse myself in the culture; I don't stay aloof from it. TROND: Well, I'm curious about that because in the abstract... so if we are in the world of math, then you could maybe say that efficiency techniques are global; that was the idea. Some people have that idea, let's say, that efficiency is a global thing, and there's one thing called efficiency, and everybody should just learn it because then it's all better. It seems to me that because you spent a lot of time in three different places, it shows up differently. MICHEL: I don't use the word efficiency so much because it's limited. There are techniques to improve manufacturing performance in every aspect of it, efficiency only being one of them, and these techniques are pretty universal. Now, when you're trying to help people in different countries, it's a postulate. You have to postulate what works in one place will work in another. So far, I haven't found any reason to believe otherwise. I have encountered many people who are saying things like, "This is country X, and these techniques don't work because our people are from country X." It's one of the most common techniques to refuse to implement anything new. The fact is the Toyota Production System wasn't supposed to be applicable to American workers until Toyota applied it with American workers in its joint venture with GM in the early 1980s at NUMMI specifically. It became a showcase. Later, Toyota opened its own factory in the U.S. in Georgetown, Kentucky, and applied the system there. And then, a few years later, it opened its own factory in France, and it worked with French workers. So it's really the idea that this only works in certain cultures or this only works in Japan. It's just the reality is different. It works pretty much everywhere. TROND: Well, that's fascinating, though, because, like you said, you have immersed yourself in these different factory and industrial cultures, if you may, and you are implementing lean in all of them or advising on lean methods. Why don't we start with that, then, perhaps? Tell me a little bit, what is lean to you? MICHEL: Lean to me...and I use the term less and less because I think over the past 30 years, it's lost a lot of its meaning. When it first came out, it was the latest in a number of labels that have been applied to the same thing. In the early 1980s, you talked about just-in-time then there was world-class manufacturing. A number of different terms were used and never really caught on. This one caught on. And the way I took it, I took it to mean generic versions of the Toyota Production System. There are very good reasons why you can't call what you're proposing to a company that makes frozen foods a Toyota Production System. There are also very strong reasons why you can't even go to a car company and do this. It's very awkward for a car company to openly admit to be using a competitor's system. So you have to have a label that refers to the content but doesn't refer to where it's coming from. TROND: So for you, at the basic level, if you strip away everything, it still is essentially the Toyota Production System, and lean is just to you, I'm just paraphrasing, it's a convenient wrapping for a way to explain it in a way that's non-threatening. But it is essentially the lessons from the Toyota Production System from a while back. MICHEL: That's the way I took it. That's why I adopted this label in the early 1990s, but a lot of time has elapsed since then. Because it became popular, very many people started using that label. And the content they were putting under it was pretty much...they were attaching this label to whatever they were doing. It has lost a great deal of its meaning which is why at this point, I rarely refer to it. TROND: So you're saying a lot of people are attaching lean to whatever they're doing, I mean, understandably so, Michel, right? Because it's become a very successful term. It sells books. It sells consulting. It does refer back to something that you think is real. So can you understand why people would do this if you are in consulting, or even in teaching, or you work in an industry, and you're managing something, why people would resort to this label? MICHEL: First of all, consultants have to have a brand name for what they're selling. It was useful. As a brand name, you have to call what you're offering by a given name, and clients look for this. It's a keyword they look for, and that's how they find you. So it's really necessary. I'm not criticizing consultants for using that. TROND: No, no, I understand it. And, I mean, you're also a little bit in a glass box in the sense that you are within the general tent of lean yourself. So I understand that. I fully understand it. MICHEL: What happens when it's successful is that more and more people jump on this bandwagon and say, okay, I'm going to offer a lean. When you look at what they're saying, it does not reflect the original content. By about 2000s, it had evolved into...what most consultants were offering was drawing value stream maps and organizing Kaizen events. Those two keywords are absent from the Toyota Production System. TROND: Can you explain...so this is interesting. Because I was going to ask you exactly this, what are the types of elements that you react to the most that you feel is really...because one thing is to say it diverged from the original content, but if it is kind of a valuable extension of something...but you're saying value streams and the Kaizens, the Kaizen practices they have very little to do with the Toyota Production System in your reading. MICHEL: That's right. The value stream mapping is a new name for a technique that they call; I mean the translation of the original name is, Materials and Information Flow Analysis (MIFA), Mono to Joho no Nagare in Japanese, flow of materials and information. So that's one idea. And there is a particular graphic convention that has actually evolved from Toyota that became the value stream mapping graphic convention, but it never was in the Toyota context. Mike Rother's own admission (He wrote Learning to See, which promoted this technique.) said it was not an important topic at Toyota. It has some uses, but if you go on factory tours in Japan, you don't see a lot of value stream maps. And so it's been taken...it was a specific tool for a specific purpose like figuring out how to work with a particular supplier. And then it was made into this supposedly all-powerful analytical tool that is the first thing that you have to do when you go into a factory is map its value streams, so that's taking a very small part of what Toyota does and make it into this big thing. As for Kaizen Events, it's actually an American invention. It's something that came out of...in the early 1990s; there were a number of executives who were frustrated with the slow pace of lean implementation with other methods. So they came up with this format they called the Kaizen Blitz, that became the Kaizen events. It's also traced back to some Japanese consulting firms, which found this particular format as a convenient way to make good use of a trip from Japan to the U.S. They would organize one-week events at their clients because it was a good way to justify essentially the cost and the trouble of flying over. TROND: I'm going to go with your story here. So let's say these two are kind of examples for you of things diverting from the original content. Why don't we speak about what the original content then is for a minute? What is the core of the Toyota production method or of lean in its original form for you? MICHEL: Well, the Toyota Production System is something I'm very interested in and still studying. And it's not a static thing. It's something that, for example, the first publication about it was from the early 1970s, an internal document from Toyota with its suppliers. And then there have been many, many other publications about it through the decades. And it's changed in nature, and the concepts of manufacturing have evolved. By definition, the Toyota Production System is what Toyota does. They're very good at making cars. And so it's always important to try to keep up with what it is they're doing, knowing that there is a 5 to 10-year gap between the time they come up with new concepts and the time that the rest of the world gets to know about them. And so, in the early 1990s, there were essentially concepts of how to organize production lines, how to lay out production lines, how to design operator workstations. And there were concepts on how to regulate and manage the flow of materials and the flow of information between stations and lines and between suppliers and customers. And there was also an approach to the management of people and the whole human resource management aspect of hiring people for careers, having career plans for everybody, including shop floor operators, managing to improve the operations based on this infrastructure. So it's a very rich concept, and it encompasses every aspect of manufacturing, logistics, and production control, all the way to accountability. So it's compared with other things like the Theory of Constraints or TPM that are much more limited in scope. There is an approach to quality that Toyota has. The quality improvement is not all of the Toyota Production System. It's a complete system for making a product covering all the bases. TROND: Let me just pick up on one thing, so you're saying it's a complete system. So one thing you pointed out was the HR aspect, and hiring people for careers is one thing, but you also said the career plans for shop floor operators. So I took two things from that, and I was going to ask about this because this has been used as one example of why you cannot implement the Toyota Production System in the same way in different countries, namely because that is one aspect of society that a company doesn't fully control because it is regulated. So, for example, in Europe and in France, which you know, really well, and Germany, you know, employment is regulated in a different way. If a company was going to have the same HR policy in three different factories in three different countries, they would have to have, first of all, obviously, follow the national regulation. But then they would have to add things on top of that that would, you know, specific employee protections that are perhaps not part, for example, of U.S. work culture. So that's one thing I wanted to kind of point to. But the other thing is interesting. So you said career plans for shop floor operators meaning Toyota has a plan for even the basic level worker meaning the operators, the people who are on the floor. And that seems to me a little bit distinct. Because in the modern workplace, it is at least commonly thought that you spend more time both training and caring about people who are making career progression. And you don't always start at the bottom. You sort of hope that the smart people or whatever, the people who are doing the best job, are starting to advance, and then you invest in those people. But you're saying...is there something here in the Toyota Production System that cares about everybody? MICHEL: Yes. But let me be clear about something. The way Toyota manages HR is not something that there are a lot of publications about. There's probably a good reason for this is because they probably consider it to be their crown jewel, and they're not that keen to everybody knowing about it. A lot of the publications about it are quite old. But there's nothing in the regulations and labor laws of any country that prevent you from doing more for your employees than you're required to. TROND: That's a great point. That's a great point. MICHEL: So there are laws that forbid you from doing less than certain things, but they're not laws that prevent you from doing more. There is no rule that you have to offer career plans for production operators because there's nothing preventing you from doing it. In a completely different situation, a large company making personal products ranging from soap to frozen foods...I won't name what the company is, but they have a policy of not being committed to their workers. Essentially, if business is good, you hire people. If there's a downturn, you lay people off. They wanted to migrate from the situation where you have a lot of low-skilled employees that are essentially temps to a situation where they have higher level of qualification and fewer people. So the question is, how do you manage the transition? The way this company eventually did it in this particular plant was to define a new category of employee like, say, technical operator. And a technical operator will be recruited at higher a level of education than the general population of operators. They will be given more training in both hard skills and soft skills and the specific processes they're going to be running, and some additional training on how to manage the quality of these processes, that sort of thing. But at the level of a production operator, they will be put in charge of these processes. And this small group would be separate job categories than the others. And gradually, this evolves to a situation where you only hire into this group. You don't hire any more of the traditional operators. And then, you provide a transition path for the other operators to become members of that group so that over a period of time, gradually, the general population of less skilled, less stable operator shrinks. And you end up over a number of years with a situation where all of the operators that you have are these highly trained operators who are there for the duration. So that's one kind of pattern on how you can manage this kind of transition. TROND: Super interesting. Can I ask you a basic question? So you've been in this consulting part of this venture, you know, of this world for a long time. Where do you typically start? When do you get called, or when do you sign up to help a company, at what stage? What sort of challenge do they have? Do you visit them and tell them they do have a challenge? What is the typical problem a company might have that you can help with or that you choose to help with? MICHEL: There are a lot of different situations. One particular case was a company in defense electronics in the U.S. had a facility in Indiana, and they were migrating all this work to a new facility in Florida. What they told me...they called me in, and they told me that they wanted to take the opportunity of this move to change the way they were doing production. Generally, my answer to that would be, well, it's really difficult to combine a geographical change of facility with an improvement in the way you do the work. Normally, you improve first where you are. You don't try to combine transformation and migration. TROND: It's a funny thing, I would say. It seems like the opposite of what you should be doing to try to make one change at a time. MICHEL: But there were several circumstances that made it work. You can have general principles, and when you're in a real situation, it doesn't always apply. One is the circumstances under which they were doing this migration was such that the people in the old plant were in an environment where there was a labor shortage, so none of them had any problem finding jobs elsewhere if they didn't want to move to Florida. If they wanted to move to Florida, they could, if they didn't want to move to Florida, they had to leave the company, but there were plenty of other companies hiring around. And so there was not this kind of tension due to people losing their jobs and not having an alternative. And then, the transition was announced way ahead of time, so they had something like a 15-month period to plan for their transfer. And to my great surprise, the operators in the old plan were perfectly...were very helpful in figuring out the design for the new lines and contributed ideas. And there was no resentment of that situation. TROND: In this particular example and in other examples, to what extent is production, you know, process redesign a technology challenge, and to what extent is it a human workforce challenge? Or do you not separate the two? MICHEL: I try not to separate the two because you really have to consider them jointly. A technical solution that nobody wants to apply is not going to be helpful. And something everybody wants to apply but that doesn't work, is not going to be helpful either. So you have to consider both. And in this transition, by the way, between these two plants, most of the labor difficulties were in the new plant, not in the old one, because this plant became a section of the new plant. And none of the other lines in that new plant did anything similar, so it stood out as being very different from what all the other lines did. What all the other lines did is you had a structure that is common in electronics assembly where you have rows of benches at which people sat and did one operation, and then the parts were moved in batches between these rows of benches. And instead of that, we put cells where the parts moved one at a time between different operations. And it was also organized so that it could be expanded from the current volume of work to higher volume of work. And so a lot more went into the design. I was a consultant there, but I don't claim credit for the final design. It was the design of the people from the company. They actually got a prize within the company for having done something that was exceptionally good. And when I spoke with them a few years later, they had gone from having something like 20% of the space used for production in the new facility to having it completely full because they were able to expand this concept. MID-ROLL AD: In the new book from Wiley, Augmented Lean: A Human-Centric Framework for Managing Frontline Operations, serial startup founder Dr. Natan Linder and futurist podcaster Dr. Trond Arne Undheim deliver an urgent and incisive exploration of when, how, and why to augment your workforce with technology, and how to do it in a way that scales, maintains innovation, and allows the organization to thrive. The key thing is to prioritize humans over machines. Here's what Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, says about the book: "Augmented Lean is an important puzzle piece in the fourth industrial revolution." Find out more on www.augmentedlean.com, and pick up the book in a bookstore near you. TROND: Michel, I know that you have a consulting life and a consulting hat, but you also have a teaching hat and a teaching passion. Why did you write this recent textbook which is coming out on Routledge this fall, I believe, with Torbjø Netland from ETH? It's an Introduction to Manufacturing but with a very specific kind of industrial engineering perspective. You told me when we talked earlier that there's a really specific reason why you wrote this textbook, and you have some very, I guess, strong views or worries about how manufacturing education, but perhaps the way it's taught really needs to change. And you feel like some schools are drifting away from the core. What's happening there? MICHEL: Well, industrial engineering as a discipline is about 100 years old, take or leave a decade or two. It started out as...the way I describe it is the engineering of human work in the manufacturing environment. And it expanded to fields other than manufacturing, even at the time of pioneers like Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. For example, we know the way operating rooms in hospitals work with the surgeon being assisted by nurses who hand all the tools to the surgeon; that particular form of organization is due to Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, industrial engineers who looked at the way operating rooms worked and figured that you really don't want to leave a patient with his belly open on the table while the surgeon goes to fetch the tool. You got to have some people giving the tools to the surgeon so that the surgeon can keep operating on the patient. It sounds obvious now, but it wasn't obvious in 1910. And so they were immediately some applications outside of manufacturing, but the bulk of the work was on manufacturing. And the way it's evolved, especially in the past few decades, is that it's gotten away from that focus on human work. And when you look at the research interests of the academics in this field, you find that it's completely dominated by operations research and math. TROND: So we're back to the math. [chuckles] So I find it fascinating that...well, you obviously have a deep insight into it, so you are sensitized to the challenges of overfocusing on one technical discipline as kind of the mantra and the fodder, I guess, the research data for all kinds of processes. I mean, why is math such a big problem, and what do you mean by human work in industrial manufacturing? Because to many people, the advanced work right now is about digitization, digitalization, and it has to do with machines and computers, and one would assume with big data or at least with data. Are you arguing against that trend? MICHEL: No. I mean, if you ask the question of what is human work? The classical answer that I would give is what happens when the guy picks up the wrench. That's one answer. But what happens when the operator sees an alarm message on the control screen of a machine, that's a different answer, a more modern answer. So you had people with the torque wrench applying the right torque to a bolt manually, and then the torque wrench would tell him when the torque was achieved. That's one form of human work. But monitoring and looking after multiple machines that are connected and have a central control system is also human work. You also have people doing it. And they have to feed these machines. They have to make sure that the machines have the right kinds of tools and dyes available to them. They have to maintain these machines. They have to program these machines, and they have to monitor them during production. And one particular problem with automatic systems is micro stoppages. Are you familiar with that term? TROND: Well, explain it to all of us, micro stoppages. I mean stoppages, obviously, anything that stops the production line, whether it's a minor, major, I mean, that would be what I think you are saying. MICHEL: Well, if it's a big problem, the operator doesn't solve it. The operator calls maintenance, and maintenance sends somebody to solve it. Micro stoppage is a problem that's small enough for the operator to deal with. And so, in daily life or in any office life, one very common micro stoppage problem is the copier, right? You tell the copier to print 20 collated copies of a document, and you walk away expecting to find these 20 copies ready when you come back. It doesn't happen because there are some paper jams and so you have to clear the paper jam and restart. You have a lot of things like that in production where parts jam and shoots and stop coming down in automatic system. You have all sorts of issues like this which cause production lines to stop in a way that the operator can resolve in half a minute or a minute and restart. What these things cause is that you have to have an operator there. And so if you really want to have an automatic system that are fire and forget...when you press a button, you move away to do something else while the machine goes through an automatic cycle. When that automatic cycle is finished, you come back. Micro stoppages prevent you from doing that. And they're very difficult to avoid, but they're a major problem, even today. TROND: Michel, I wanted to keep talking about the educational part. But before that, I just wanted to benefit from your experience here and ask you a much more basic question which is so you're writing this textbook about the future or introducing prospective students to industrial engineering and manufacturing. My question is, historically, factories were a very, very big part of manufacturing. Nowadays, meaning in the last few years after the pandemic and other things, a lot of us start to spend a lot more time on an issue, which I'm assuming you have spent a lifetime working on as well, which is supply chain which goes far beyond the factory because it's not located in any one factory, if anything, it's a system of many factories, and it's obviously the supplies of material flows into the factory. And the reason I'm asking you about this is in thinking about the future, which I'll ask you about in a second, a lot of people are sort of factory of the future, this and that. And there are visions about how this is going to change. But it strikes me that manufacturing is and has always been so much more than the factory. What are the components that you really worry about? So, humans, you worry about humans. And you worry about materials. And then you obviously have to worry about the physical infrastructures that are regulating these things. What else goes into it on the macro level? What is this book about, I guess? MICHEL: We're talking about supply chains as well because, as you mentioned, they're a very important part of manufacturing. And when you design a manufacturing system to make a product, you have to make decisions about your products, about components of your product, and what you make in-house, and what you buy from the outside. And there's a major difference between supply chain issues relating to customers, on one hand, the suppliers on the other. It's not just suppliers; it's both sides, incoming supply chain and the outgoing as well. One major difference with what happens in the factory is that you don't control what other people decide, what other organizations decide. So when you manage a supply chain, you have to manage a network of organizations that are independent businesses. How do you get this network of independent businesses to work with you, to cooperate with you, to make your manufacturing successful? That is a big challenge in supply chain management. Inside a factory, that's an environment you control. It's your organization. What management says is supposed to go; it doesn't always, but it's supposed to go. And you have a lot more control over what happens inside than over what happens in the supply chain. And how much control you have over what happens in the supply chain depends greatly on your size. For example, if you're a small customer of a special kind of alloy that only has one manufacturer in the world, you're a very small customer to a very large manufacturer, a metals company. You're not in a position of strength to get that supplier to work with you. If you're a car company making 10 million cars a year and you're dealing with a company that is making forgings for engine parts, you have a lot of control. You have a lot of influence. You represent a large part of their business. They can't afford to lose you. You can't afford to lose them. You can replace them if they don't perform. They can't afford to lose you. They might go out of business if they did. So it's a very different kind of position to be in. And so when you deal with that sort of thing, you have to think through, what is my position with respect to suppliers and customers? Where is it? Where's the driving influence? And it's not always...power in a supply chain is not always resident with the company that does the final assembly of consumer products. In electronics, for example, semiconductor manufacturers are much more key than people who assemble computers. TROND: I wanted to ask you a little bit about the trends and how these things are evolving in the next decade and beyond that. And one example you gave me earlier when we talked was pilots and jetliners because manufacturing in...well, the aviation industry is an example of an industry that, yes, it has an enormous amount of high tech. It's a very advanced science-based development that has produced air travel. But yet these pilots...and I experienced it this summer, a pilot strike stops everything. So the role of people changes as we move into more advanced manufacturing. But people don't always disappear. What do you see as the biggest challenge of manufacturing and the role of manufacturing in the emerging society? What is going to happen here? MICHEL: What I think is going to happen is that in many countries, the manufacturing sector will remain a large part of the economy, but as economies advance, it will have a shrinking share of the labor market. So it's a distant future, maybe like that of agriculture, where 2% of the population does the work necessary to feed everybody else. And manufacturing is now about 10% of GDP in the U.S., 20% in Germany and Japan, about 10% in England, France, Italy. In China, we don't really know because they don't separate manufacturing from industry. And industry is a broader category that includes mining, and it includes road construction, et cetera. They don't separate out manufacturing, but really, it's a big sector of the economy. And so it can remain a big sector, that's not a problem. But you have to think through a transition where the number of people that you employ doing this kind of work goes down, their level of qualifications go up, and the nature of the work they do evolves towards telling machines what to do and maintaining machines. So telling machines what to do can be programming machines when you develop processes, or it can be scheduling what work the machines do. TROND: Is that incidentally why you have gone into teaching in a kind of an academic setting or at least influencing curriculum in an academic setting so much that you see a role here in the future? Beyond what's happening in factories today, you're quite concerned about what might happen in factories ten years from now, 20 years from now when these students become, I guess, managers, right? Because that's what happens if you get education in management at a good school, reading your hopefully great textbook. It takes a little time because you trickle down and become a manager and a leader in industry. So I guess my question then is, what is it that you want these people to know ten years from now when they become leaders? What sort of manufacturing processes should they foster? It is something where humans still matter for sure, and machines will have a bigger part of it. But there's things we need to do differently, you think? MICHEL: The airline pilot metaphor, you know, you have this $300 million piece of equipment. And how much money you make from operating it depends on these two people who are in the pilot's cabin. You have to pay attention to the work of people. And in most factories, the work of people today is an afterthought. So you put in machines. You put in production lines without thinking how will people get from the entrance of the building to where they actually work? TROND: I was going to say it's a fascinating example you had with the airline industry in the sense that, I mean, honestly, even in the old industrial revolution, these machines were expensive, but I guess even more so. I don't know if you've done any research on this, but the amount of dollars invested per worker presumably has to go up in this future you are talking about here where we're increasingly monitoring machines, even these perhaps in the past viewed as low-skilled jobs or operator jobs. I mean, you are operating, maybe not airplanes, but you're operating industrial 3D printers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars with presuming error rates that could be catastrophic, either for you, for the production line, or for the product you're making. MICHEL: Or photolithography machines that cost millions. TROND: Right. But then that begs the question for me, Michel, how on earth is it possible? If you are right about this that education has been somewhat neglected and skills has been neglected, how's that even explainable? If you are a responsible factory manager or executive of a large manufacturing firm, how could it have gotten...and I'm obviously paraphrasing here. I don't know if you think it's that bad. But how could it get this bad that you actually had to come out and say it's a massive problem? MICHEL: What happens is that you hear a lot about systems thinking, which, to me, it's pretty obvious there's more to a factory or more to a manufacturing system, to supply chain than the collection of its components; it's pretty obvious. And when you change the way a supplier delivers parts, it has an impact over what happens at the assembly workstations where these components are being used, for example. You have to think of the whole as a system. And you have to think about whenever you make any changes to it; you have to think through how these changes affect the whole. What's happening is that there has been a great deal of specialization of skills; I'm not talking about factory workers here. I'm talking about engineers and managers that have been put into silos where they run production control. They become production control manager in the factory. Their next career move is to become production control manager in the factory of a different company. TROND: So here's my open-ended question to you; you're sort of saying that industrial engineering, in one sense, needs to go back to its roots where it was. But the other side of the coin here is you're also talking about a world that's changing drastically. So my question is, the industrial engineer of the future, what kind of a person is this ideally, and what sort of skill sets and what sort of awareness does this person have? MICHEL: The skill sets that this person should have are both technical and managerial. It's management and technology considered together. So they may not be able to write code, or they may not be able to design how to cut a piece of metal, or how to tweak the electrical properties of a circuit, but they know the importance of these things. They've been exposed to them through their education and career. And they have an appreciation for what they are. So, for example, one particular task that has to be done in every manufacturing organization is technical data management. You have to manage the problem definition, the process definitions, which machines you use to do what, down to the process program that these machines run. All of this is data, technical data that has to be managed, put under revision control. And you'd expect someone with training in industrial engineering to understand the importance of revision control on this. If you change something to the cutting program of a milling machine, you may affect what happens elsewhere. You may affect the mechanical properties of the product and make it difficult to do a subsequent operation later. And that's why before you implement this change in production, you have to have a vetting process that results in revision management. So I would expect an industrial engineer to understand that. TROND: Well, you would expect an industrial engineer to understand that, but, I mean, some of the challenges that come from these observations that you're making here they impact all operators, not just engineers. And they certainly impact managers because they are about this whole system that you are explaining. So it sounds to me that you're mounting a pretty significant challenge to the future manufacturers, not just in skills development but in evolving the entire industrial system. Because if we're going to make this wonderful spacecraft, and solve the environmental crisis, and build these new, wonderful machines that everybody expects that are going to come churning out every decade, we certainly need an upskilled workforce, but we need a whole system that works differently, don't we? MICHEL: Yes. Can I give you a couple of examples? TROND: Yeah. MICHEL: One company outsourced the production of a particular component to a supplier then there were technical problems with actually producing this component with the supplier. So the customer company sent a couple of engineers to the supplier, and they found some problems with the drawing that had been provided to the supplier. And they made manual corrections to the drawings, the copies of the drawing in possession of the supplier. And it worked. It solved the immediate problem. But then, at the customer company, they didn't have the exact drawing. The only place with the exact drawings was at the suppliers. And a few years later, they wanted to terminate this supplier. TROND: Aha. MICHEL: You can see the situation. You want people to be able to understand that you just don't do that sort of thing. TROND: Right. So there are so many kinds of multiple dependencies that start to develop in a manufacturing production line, yeah. MICHEL: And then you find a company that's a subcontractor to the aircraft industry. And you find out they route parts through a process that has about 15 different operations. And the way they route these parts is they print a traveler that is 50 pages long, and it's on paper. And the measurements they make on the parts that they're required to make by their customer they actually record by hand on this paper. What's wrong with this picture? TROND: So yeah, multiple challenges here. MICHEL: Yes. TROND: Are you sensing that these things are fixable? Are you optimistic in terms of this awareness of all aspects of the systems changing both among managers and next-generation industrial engineers, and perhaps even among the operators themselves to realize they're getting a more and more central role in the production system? MICHEL: I won't try to prophesy what will happen to industry as a whole but what I'm confident about is that the companies that know how to address these problems will be dominant. Those are the sort of basic mistakes that really hurt you and hurt your competitive position. So there will be a selection over time that will eliminate people who do these kinds of mistakes. TROND: Michel, I don't want to put you on the spot here. And you have spent your career researching and tracking Toyota as an excellent, excellent manufacturer that has graciously taught other manufacturers a lot. And also, people have copied and tried to teach them Toyota methods, even if Toyota wasn't trying to teach everyone. Are there any other either individual companies or things that you would point to for the eager learner who is trying to stay on top of these things? I mean, so lean, obviously, and the Toyota Production System is still a reference point. But are there any other sources that in your career or as you're looking at the future where there is something to learn here? MICHEL: Oh yes. Toyota is a great source of information, but it's by far...it's not the only one. One of the key parts of Toyota's management system is Hoshin Planning. Hoshin Planning didn't come from Toyota; it came from Bridgestone tires. And so that's one case where a different company came up with a particular method. Honda is a remarkable company as well, so there are things to learn from Honda. HP was, under the leadership of its founders, a remarkable company. And they had their own way of doing things which they called The HP Way. Companies have recruited a lot of people...electronic companies have recruited a lot of people out of HP. And you feel when you meet the old timers who have experienced The HP Way, they feel nostalgia for it. And there were a lot of good things in The HP Way. They're worth learning about. So I also believe that it's worth learning about historical examples because history is still with us in a lot of ways. The Ford Model T plant of 100 years ago was a model for a lot of things at the time. It also had some pretty serious flaws, namely, its flexibility. And you still see people putting up the modern-day equivalent of a Model T plant with new products and new technology but without thinking about the need. That particular plant may have to be converted in the not-too-distant future into making a different product. So it's always worth looking at examples from 100 years ago, even today, not for the sake of history but because, in a lot of ways, history is still with us. TROND: Well, on that note, history is still with us; I thank you for this, Michel. And I shall remember to forget the right things, right? So history is still with us, but [laughs] you got to know what to remember and what to forget. Thank you so much. MICHEL: Culture is what remains once you've forgotten everything. TROND: [laughs] On that note, Michel, thank you so much for your time here and for sharing from your remarkable journey. Thank you. MICHEL: You're welcome. TROND: You have just listened to another episode of the Augmented Podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. The topic was Lean Manufacturing. Our guest was Michel Baudin, author, and owner of The Takt Times Group. In this conversation, we talked about how industrial engineering equals the engineering of human work and why manufacturing and industrial engineering education needs to change because it has drifted away from industrial work. And indeed, we are looking at a future where manufacturing is not going away. My takeaway is that lean manufacturing might mean many things, but industrial work has largely been a consistent practice over several hundred years, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Having said that, if we want to go about improving it, we might want to stay pretty close to the workforce and not sit in statistics labs far removed from it. Efficiency is tied to work practices, and they cannot be optimized beyond what the workforce can handle or want to deal with. As we attempt to be lean, whatever we mean by that, we need to remember that work is a thoroughly human endeavor. Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 84 on The Evolution of Lean with Professor Torbjørn Netland from ETH Zürich. Hopefully, you'll find something awesome in these or in other episodes, and if so, do let us know by messaging us because we would love to share your thoughts with other listeners. The Augmented Podcast is created in association with Tulip, the frontline operation platform connecting people, machines, devices, and systems used in a production or logistics process in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology and empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. Tulip is also hiring, and you can find Tulip at tulip.co. Please share this show with colleagues who care about where industry and especially where industrial tech is heading. To find us on social media is easy; we are Augmented Pod on LinkedIn and Twitter and Augmented Podcast on Facebook and YouTube. Augmented — industrial conversations that matter. See you next time. Special Guest: Michel Baudin.

Gletscher - sie sind die sichtbarsten Zeugen der Klimakrise, man nennt sie auch die Fieberthermometer des Klimawandels. Für die Schweizer Gletscher war 2022 ein katastrophales Jahr, es gingen rund drei Kubikkilometer Eis verloren. Besonders drastisch zeigt sich der Verlust am Rhonegletscher im Kanton Wallis. Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler der ETH Zürich erforschen und dokumentieren den Rückzug des Rhonegletschers schon lange. Die ARD-Korrespondentin Kathrin Hondl hat das Team seit Herbst 2021 bei den Messungen auf dem Rhonegletscher immer wieder begleitet.

In den USA wurde gestern nicht nur gewählt, in einigen Staaten fanden auch Abstimmungen statt. Dabei haben sich mehrere Staaten für Abtreibungsrechte ausgesprochen – auch solche, die eigentlich republikanisch geprägt sind. Darüber sprechen wir mit der USA-Expertin Claudia Brühwiler. Die weiteren Thema: * Noch keinen Monat im Amt – und schon fliegt dem neuen britischen Premierminister Rishi Sunak der erste Skandal um die Ohren. Sein Staatsminister Gavin Williamson ist wegen Mobbing-Vorwürfen zurückgetreten. Der 46-Jährige soll eigene Partei-Mitglieder gequält haben. Grossbritannien-Korrespondent Michael Gerber ordnet ein. * Es wurde geschmiert bei der Fussball-WM-Vergabe nach Katar. Das zeigt der Dok-Film «FIFA – das Monster», der heute Abend bei SRF1 ausgestrahlt wird. Im Zentrum stehen drei ehemalige Fussball-Funktionäre aus Südamerika – zwei davon sind inzwischen verstorben. Wir sprechen mit Hansjörg Zumstein, der den Film zusammen mit Kollegen von RTS und RSI gedreht hat. * Der grösste aktive Vulkan der Welt ist unruhig: Beim Mauna Loa auf Hawaii kommt es vermehrt zu Erdbeben, es droht ein Ausbruch. Die lokale Zivilschutzbehörde hat deshalb bereits letzte Woche vorsorglich eine Warnung an die Bevölkerung verschickt. Wie gross ist die Gefahr durch Vulkane – und wird weltweit genügend in ihre Überwachung investiert? Nachgefragt bei Peter Ulmer, Vulkanologe an der ETH Zürich.

In der (vierten) Folge der Reihe UnderDocs x Leopoldina spricht Liska mit Prof. Dr. Viola Vogel, Professorin an der ETH Zürich. Sie war u.a. die Gründungsdirektorin des Zentrums für Nanotechnologie der University of Washington und hat sogar im wissenschaftlichen Beratungsteam von Bill Clinton gearbeitet. Ihre Forschung dreht sich um Nanopartikel und darum, wie Bindungen zwischen Proteinen und Molekülen entstehen und verstärkt werden. So entwickelte sie etwa einen bakteriellen Nanokleber. In dieser Folge erklärt sie, was Bakterien können und wie ihr Forschungsprojekt dazu in der Klinik angewendet werden kann, vergleicht die Forschungslandschaften in den USA zu denen im deutschsprachigen Raum und spricht über das Vertrauensverhältnis zwischen Laien und Wissenschaftler*innen.

Wie viel bringt die 27. Weltklimakonferenz, die am 6. November im ägyptischen Badeort Sharm el Sheikh startet? Es ist zweifellos ein wichtiges Treffen, um beim Klimaschutz weiterzukommen. Trotzdem hadern Klimawissenschaftlerinnen wie Sonia Seneviratne von der ETH Zürich mit diesem Anlass. * Warum sind die Resultate der Klimakonferenzen derart bescheiden? * Wie hat Sonia Seneviratne als Klimawissenschaftlerin die letzte Konferenz erlebt? * Was würde sie am gigantischen Treffen der fast 200 Länder verändern wollen? * Schafft Sonia Seneviratne den Spagat zwischen Wissenschaft und Klima-Aktivismus? * Was ist von der 27. Klimakonferenz in Ägypten zu erwarten? Im Podcast zu hören sind: * Sonia Seneviratne, Klimawissenschaftlerin an der ETH Zürich * Franz Perrez, Chefunterhändler der Schweiz an der Klimakonferenz Bei Fragen, Anregungen oder Themenvorschlägen schreibt uns: kontext@srf.ch Mehr zum Kontext Podcast: https://srf.ch/audio/kontext

Der Baumarkt Jumbo wirbt mit einem Aktionsangebot für einen Terrassenheizer. Reto Knutti, Klimaforscher an der ETH Zürich, entdeckt es auf einem Prospekt und macht seinem Ärger via Twitter Luft. Nicht zuletzt auch deshalb, weil sich Jumbo laut Eigenwerbung die Nachhaltigkeit auf die Fahne geschrieben hat. Trotz drohender Strommangellage verkauft der Baumarkt aber solche Energiefresser – und dies auch noch zum halben Preis. Jumbo verspricht nun, man werde in Zukunft keine solchen Aktionen mehr durchführen, das Gerät bleibe aber im Sortiment. Man wolle der Kundschaft die Wahlfreiheit lassen. Weitere Themen: - «Muss ich die Versandkosten bezahlen, wenn ich Ware retourniere?»

Eine aktuelle Studie zeigt: Der Konsum von Opioiden in der Schweiz hat stark zugenommen. Verschrieben werden die Betäubungsmittel mit Suchtpotenzial auch bei chronischen Schmerzen – entgegen anerkannten Leitlinien und wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen. «Puls» sagt weshalb und nennt Alternativen. Bedenklicher Trend – Wachsender Opioid-Konsum in der Schweiz Die kürzlich erschienene Studie der ETH Zürich bestätigt einen sich schon länger abzeichnenden Trend: Die Verschreibungen von Opioiden und damit zusammenhängende Vergiftungsfälle haben in der Schweiz stark zugenommen. Auffallend dabei: Vor allem die stark wirksamen Opioide werden immer mehr verschrieben. Fünf Jahre süchtig – Eine Opioid-Aussteigerin erzählt Berüchtigt wurden Opiate durch ihre massive Verschreibung in den USA. Dabei zeigte sich nämlich, dass der Körper nach einer Woche ununterbrochener Einnahme bereits eine Abhängigkeit entwickelt. Die kann sich weiterentwickeln zur Sucht mit Konsumzwang, Kontrollverlust und Gewöhnung an höhere Dosen. So erging es auch Stefanie Eschmann. Die Mutter von zwei Kindern war fünf Jahre lang süchtig nach Opioiden. Vor zweieinhalb Jahren zog sie den Entzug durch und versucht seither, ihre chronischen Schmerzen ohne Medikamente in den Griff zu bekommen. Nutzlos und schädlich – Wieso immer noch verschrieben? Dass Opioide gegen chronische Schmerzen nicht helfen, ist erwiesen. Und doch werden sie in vielen Fällen weiterhin verschrieben. Das liegt am verzweifelten Kampf der Schmerzbetroffenen um Lebensqualität. Aber auch am Druck auf die Betroffenen, in der Gesellschaft und der Familie funktionieren zu müssen. Dies alles schürt den Wunsch nach einer einfachen Minderung der Schmerzen. Die lässt sich mit Medikamenten allein aber leider nicht immer erreichen. Alternative im Alltag – Schmerz beeinflussen statt nur bekämpfen Herausfinden, was den Schmerz beeinflusst und ihn nicht einfach nur als Symptom bekämpfen: Das ist der Ansatz der psychosomatischen Schmerztherapie. Die Betroffenen lernen dabei, ein gewisses Mass an Schmerzen zu akzeptieren und mit ihnen im Alltag umzugehen. Eine junge Studentin und ein ehemaliger Krebspatient mit Phantomschmerzen erzählen, wie sie es geschafft haben, mit ihrem Schmerz zu leben. «Puls Chat» – Wie umgehen mit chronischen Schmerzen? Welche Alternativen gibt es zu Opioiden bei chronischen Schmerzen? Was hilft ausser Medikamenten? Wie gehe ich mit Schmerzen um, die sich nicht heilen lassen? Isabelle Brunner, Anne-Katrin Hickmann und Manfred Koch haben Ihre Fragen beantwortet. «Puls Check» – Wirkung und Risiken von Opioiden Schmerzmittel mit Suchtpotenzial: Opioide docken direkt im zentralen Nervensystem an und lindern dort nicht nur Schmerzen, sondern lösen auch Entspannung und Glücksgefühle aus. Klingt eigentlich ganz angenehm, führt in Tat und Wahrheit aber schnell zu einer fatalen Abhängigkeit. Willi und Afreed ordnen ein.

Auf dem Mars hat es laut dem Seismologen Simon Stähler von der ETH Zürich Ende 2021 einen Meteoriteneinschlag gegeben. Aus den entstandenen Wellen ließen sich wertvolle Informationen ableiten - etwa über die Beschaffenheit der Kruste des Planeten.Böddeker, Michaelwww.deutschlandfunk.de, Forschung aktuellDirekter Link zur Audiodatei

Wir nehmen Euch mit auf eine Reise: Von der EPFL Lausanne und den Logitech Labs geht es an die ETH Zürich an einen KI Hackathon. Am Schluss landen wir in unserer eigenen virtuellen Welt. Der ganze Podcast im Überblick: (00:01:22) Station 1: San Francisco - Meta mit neuem Headset (00:16:24) Station 2: Lausanne - Besuch in den Logitech Labors (00:42:27) Station 3: Zürich - Wie entdeckt man Betrug in einem Onlineshop mit KI? (00:54:20) Station 4: Unreal Engine - Wir bauen uns eine eigene virtuelle Welt (01:07:20) Station 5: Ländle - Ein Blitzbesuch Peter Buchmann SRF Geek-Sofa bei Discord: https://discord.gg/geeksofa

Was stärkt unsere Abwehr? - Anke Plättner diskutiert mit Prof. Daniela Schwarzer (Politikwissenschaftlerin), Marcus Keupp (Militärökonom, ETH Zürich), Johannes Rundfeldt (Gründer AG KRITIS) und Georg Mascolo, Publizist

Der Schweizer Wirtschaft nach wie vor gut. Trotz steigender Inflation und turbulenten Energiepreisen. Dennoch musste die Konjunkturforschungsstelle der ETH Zürich ihre Prognosen für das Schweizer Wirtschaftswachstum zuletzt nach unten korrigieren. Was sind die Gründe? Weitere Themen: Der Chemie-Nobelpreis geht dieses Jahr an zwei Forscher und eine Forscherin, deren Fachgebiet sich «Klick-Chemie» nennt. Die drei Preisträger haben Techniken entwickelt, die es möglich machen, Bestandteile von Molekülen zu komplexen Molekülen zusammenzusetzen. Ähnlich wie beim Legospielen. Doch ganz so einfach ist es nicht. In den vergangenen Wochen meldeten Kinderspitäler und Arztpraxen teilweise bis zu 50 Prozent mehr Kinder-Notfälle als im Vorjahr. Zurückzuführen ist das vor allem auf den Personalmangel, aber auch auf die Coronapandemie. Nun ist die Politik gefordert, das Problem anzugehen.

Verglichen mit anderen europäischen Ländern, geht es der Schweizer Wirtschaft nach wie vor gut. Trotz gestiegener Inflation und Turbulenzen bei den Energiepreisen. Dennoch musste die Konjunkturforschungsstelle KOF der ETH Zürich ihre Prognosen für das Wirtschaftswachstum nach unten korrigieren. Wie geht es weiter? Diese Frage wurde an einer Tagung der KOF diskutiert. Weitere Themen: (01:26) Wohin steuert die Schweizer Wirtschaft? (09:12) Tory-Parteitag in Birmingham unter schlechten Vorzeichen (15:33) Dänemark: Minderheitsregierung vor dem Aus (19:47) Opec drosselt Ölförderung (23:29) Schweizer Kinderärzte und -ärztinnen am Limit (27:44) Nobelpreis für Forschung über «Klick-Chemie» (31:43) Wisconsin: Ein demokratischer Hoffnungsträger namens Mandela (37:34) Neue Betrugsvorwürfe gegen US-Schachmeister

Fliegen schadet dem Klima – das wissen wir. Aber welche Alternativen gibt es? Auf kurzen Strecken und in kleinen Fliegern könnte man in Zukunft elektrisch fliegen. «Einstein» zeigt, wo diese Technologie heute steht und weshalb gerade in der Schweiz so viele elektrische Flugzeuge entwickelt werden. In der Schweiz gehört die Luftfahrt zu den klimaschädlichsten Sektoren, denn wir sind ein Land von Vielfliegern. 2019 verursachte die Fliegerei 29 Prozent der Emissionen und lag damit vor dem Strassenverkehr und noch deutlicher vor der Industrie. Weshalb gibt es bis heute so wenig Alternativen? Weltweit arbeitet zwar die Flugindustrie mit Hochdruck daran, den Luftverkehr sauberer zu machen. Und trotzdem geht im Vergleich zur Automobilindustrie alles sehr langsam. PIONIERE DER ELEKTROFLIEGEREI SIND SCHWEIZER Während elektrische Autos heute schon zum Alltag gehören, gibt es bis heute kaum elektrische Flugzeuge am Himmel. Vor allem bei Kurzstreckenflügen und Kleinflugzeugen könnten aber elektrische Antriebe in Zukunft eine grosse Rolle spielen. Einstein zeigt, wenn es um die Neuentwicklung solcher Flugzeuge geht, gilt die Schweiz als ein Hotspot. Die Pioniere Bertrand Piccard und André Borschberg bewiesen mit Solarimpuls als erste, dass elektrische Motoren auch in der Luftfahrt Sinn machen. Auch heute setzt der Ingenieur André Borschberg sein damals erworbenes Knowhow für die Elektrifizierung der Luftfahrt ein. Er entwickelt mit der Firma H55 elektrische Motoren und Batterien, die dereinst ganz einfach in schon bestehende Flugzeuge eingebaut werden könnten. Aber eine grosse Hürde ist die Zertifizierung dieser Flugzeuge. In der Luft gelten viel strengere Sicherheitsvorschriften als am Boden, deshalb dauerte es oft Jahre, bis ein elektrisches Flugzeug abheben darf. ETH INVESTIERT IN ELEKTRIFIZIERUNG DER LUFTFAHRT Auch Schweizer Universitäten investieren in die elektrische Luftfahrt: An der ETH Zürich bauen Bachelor-Studenten mit Unterstützung der Industrie ein Elektroflugzeug. Ihre Arbeit zeigt – in der Schweiz ist das ganze Knowhow vorhanden, es muss einfach auf die Luftfahrtindustrie angepasst werden. Die Zusammenarbeit zeigt erste Erfolge. Bald schon wollen die Studenten mit ihrem Elektroflieger erste Flugversuche wagen. ELEKTRISCHE SENKRECHTSTARTER Elektrische Flugzeuge könnten in Zukunft aber auch Helikopter ersetzten. Vertical Flying heisst das Zauberwort in der modernen Flugindustrie: Elektrische Flieger die senkrecht starten und landen. Sie könnten dereinst in grösseren Städten als Lufttaxis eingesetzt werden oder zum Beispiel auch Helikopter der REGA ersetzen. Das Schweizer Startup Dufour sieht vor allem in Letzterem ein grosses Potential und baut deshalb einen Schweizer Senkrechtstarter, der auch für medizinische Transporte genutzt werden könnte. Aber die Mühlen in der Luftfahrtindustrie mahlen langsam. All diese Projekte sind sehr kostspielig und brauchen unglaublich viel Geduld. Bis elektrische Flugzeuge am Himmel zum Alltag gehören, werden noch einige Jahre vergehen.