In my last post, I noted the apparent contradiction between supply curves and learning curves. Both display a relationship between cost/price and quantity, but one displays a positive correlation between the two while the other…
I recently taught a training class on learning curve theory, which is a basic cost estimating concept for production. Engineers working on aircraft manufacturing in the early- and mid-twentieth century noticed that for a specific…
With the recent news about the Ever Given cargo container ship blocking the Suez Canal, the large artificial waterway has gotten a lot of attention recently. It also reminded me that I had once read…
According to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on March 31st, COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2020, behind only heart disease and…
On average, more than 50 ships pass through the Suez Canal each day, carrying 12% of global trade. Some twenty-thousand ships pass through the canal each year. There have been 75 incidents with ships passing…
I continue to see comments that the count of COVID-19 deaths in 2020 are overstated. As Edwards Deming, the 20th century quality control guru, was fond of saying “In God we trust, all other bring…
In my last blog post, I projected that if everything continues to go well with the increase in vaccinations and the decrease of new cases, we could potentially reach herd immunity from COVID-19 in the…
A recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal claimed that the United States may be able to reach herd immunity from COVID-19 by the end of April. Is this reasonable? Some of the assumptions…
Today, March 11th, marks the one-year anniversary of the acceptance of my book proposal by McGraw Hill. I had first contacted them on February 1st about my manuscript on cost and schedule risk in defense…
Depending on the event, the answer is yes. Extreme events tend to be rare, but they occur on a regular basis. A case in point is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been affecting our lives…