Table of contents for Deming v Dilbert
- Deming Vs Dilbert: Background
- Deming Vs Dilbert: In the Army
- The Dilbert Model
- Deming Vs Dilbert: Teacher & Student Irrationality
When I was in college, the Korean War was just ended and the Draft was still active. I joined ROTC to insure uninterrupted education. I was lucky enough to get into graduate school and worked, got married had kids and then the ARMY said “Time to Serve”.
Again, I got lucky.
Some of the research I was helping with at Northeastern University (NU) in Boston was for a Professor who had Army & Air Force contracts to study the biological effects of laser radiation. Among other things, I had designed and built for him several Carbon Dioxide lasers after the then exciting new work at Bell Labs, published by C.K.N Patel.
The professor, Dr. Sam Fine, wanted me to stay at NU and asked some people in the Army Surgeon General’s Office if they would got to bat for him (and me). In a matter of a few phone calls and one visit to Washington DC, my Service Branch changed from Ordnance Corps to Medical Service Corps.
It seems the Army had slightly different ideas, however. They were expanding their own Laser Safety work and wanted someone with my background working in the US Army Medical Research Lab (USAMRL) at Ft Knox, Kentucky.
They also had plans for a recent Ophthalmology Research Fellow to work on setting up a program to study thresholds of eye injury from various lasers at the lab, too. He arrived shortly after I did.
My jobs would be to help set up and run the lasers, do some thermal modeling and handle the dosimetry tasks.
After my Officer’s Basic at Ft Sam Houston, Texas, I reported for duty at Ft Knox, raring to go and eager to get back with my wife and kids and into the familiar R&D environment.
Imagine my surprise when the Division Director, who knew me as just another replacement for an officer about to retire, asked on my first day if I wished to become a specialist in the use of an Electron Beam (E-beam) Microscope. It was a different environment than the University, that’s for sure
According to him, all the existing R&D plans for the year were already written in stone and the only opening he had was for someone to learn how to use the new E-Beam, Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) system they had obtained the year earlier; it had never operated.
Being surprised, plus young and a little impulsive, used to the free-wheeling, almost self-directed atmosphere we had at NU, I said “no” to SEM. Then I asked about the laser work; he was surprised in turn. No one, it seemed, had told him I was ever involved in lasers at all.
The lab already had a great group of civilian scientists at work on studies with some lasers in house, but almost half-heartedly. They had been given so many different missions in the previous decade that there was little interest in investing serious effort into something new again.
The in-house lasers included a brand, spanking new custom Carbon Dioxide laser built under Army contract by the Martin Marietta Company in their Florida labs. This unit hadn’t been activated, either and there were no plans as yet to use it. It had just arrived and no one knew even how to turn it on! I did!
We changed a lot is a short time. A few calls to the chiefs in DC and orders came to update the annual plan; more money was found to support some new laser work. Laser Safety R&D was a high priority effort, but setting all the pieces into a plan had taken a little while and they had gotten behind.
The Civilian Scientists then realized the urgency of the mission, caught our enthusiasm and plunged into laser work with renewed purpose and excitement. Dr. Stan Brownell, Dr. Wordie Parr and others were soon on the road to some exciting work right along side the rest of us. They were thorough and careful researchers, too.
What’s the Deming lesson here?
Seems like communications was lacking from the top down. If I hadn’t spoken up, it would have been several months before any work even got started. I might have learned something about E-Beams, but probably would have dragged my feet.
Instead, once the emphasis of the mission for laser work was evident, it grew like wildfire.
I found that it is possible to do meaningful work in a heavily bureaucratic environment, and have fun. Good communications and an understanding of the goals by all is, and was, key.
The frosting on the cake, aside from the fantastic toys we had to play with, was the fabulous work we accomplished in less than two years and the great people we got to know.
We worked with almost every type of laser source, Ruby, Q-Switched Ruby, Nd-Glass, CO2. I designed and built several novel laser calorimeters, learned how to measure the crossbeam uniformity of high-power Ruby Laser beams and much more - it was like Grad School on steroids - and they paid me, too!
We even had the loan of a brand new Erbium-eye safe unit before I left active duty and the first high-power, commercial multi-hundred T00 mode CO2laser ordered for further studies by our successors.
Personally, over that period, I also authored or co-authored more than 14 technical reports and papers, attended two Gordon Research Conferences and several specialized military research symposia and make a bunch of new friends.
Others garnered enhanced careers and, believe it or not, several significantly changed their personal lives for the better.
It was one of the best experiences of my life, something I’ll never forget, and it took less than two years in a Lab that opened at 8:00 am and locked its doors at 5:00 pm! (Some things we couldn’t change!)
PS: As I was reviewing this, I wondered what had happened to the USAMRL group that used to be a Ft. Knox, in particular, the Biophysics Group and the people who did laser work. So, I did a web search.
I knew that the Laser Group had been moved to the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia PA and was merged with a related group from the Army Material Command. Later I had heard it was moved again to the Presidio in San Francisco CA. But that Army facility closed a few years back.
It was a little tricky to find, but he unit is now called The Ocular Hazards Research Branch, U.S. Army Medical Research Detachment of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. It is collocated with the U.S Air Force and U.S. Navy’s directed energy bioeffects research activities at Brooks City-Base, San Antonio, Texas..
They have some interesting things on their website, including a free, downloadable program called ProbitFit. It is a program used to analyze binary response data. The program performs a probit fit to the data, and estimates the ED50 response dose and the corresponding fiducial limits. Boy, did that ring a bell for me!
Heck, I remember learning about Log-Probit analysis back in the good old days from Stan Brownell at the original USAMRL. He used it in many of his studies and reports and urged that we adopt it, too, as we did subsequently in designing several of our studies.
It’s good to see it continues even today and with a computer program available to make the analysis easier. When Stan and I did some of that work in the ’60s, the best thing we had was one of those new-fangled desktop electronic calculators. [One of Stan's excellent reports was: Brownell, A. S., W. H. Parr, D. K. Hysell and R. S. Dedrick. 1968. “CO2 Laser Induced Skin Lesions.” USAMRL Report No. 769 (AD 669610). One of my simple modeling reports was: Peacock, G. R. 1967. “Surface Temperature as a Parameter in Estimating Laser Injury Thresholds.” USAMRL Report No. 733 (AD 658967).]
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