In The News

Beyond the Hype: The Industrial Challenges for 3D Printing

April 16, 2014
Many anticipate 3D printing to revolutionize the manufacturing of toys, biomedical products, weapons and more. “The machine – which can also handle resins, powders or food pastes – implements software instructions to build up successive layers of the matter to form the final object,” reports ParisTech Review. “Medical applications – printed human organs – are close to hand now… The University of...

How We Can Manufacture Forests Like Toyota Makes Cars

Marcus Wohlsen April 2, 2014
Forests and individual trees offer numerous benefits that include absorbing carbon emissions and noise, conserving energy and shielding shelters, preventing water pollution or soil erosion, and even increasing property values and reducing violence along city streets. An industrial engineer with Toyota applied strategies from the car manufacturer and Japanese forester Akira Miyawaki to growing...

China’s Environmental Concerns Could Be GM Problem

Emanuele Berry February 14, 2014
Cars and other fossil fuel-using vehicles contribute to smog, and regulations to reduce notorious urban pollution in China could put a dent in GM and other foreign auto sales there. In recent years, GM has sold more cars in China than were sold in the United States during any years, notes Bruce M. Belzowski of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan, in the report....

China Exports Pollution to US, Study Finds

Edward Wongjan January 27, 2014
Pollution knows no borders. A study by nine researchers in three nations quantifies “how air pollution in the United States is affected by China’s production of goods for export and by global consumer demand for those goods,” reports Edward Wongjan for the New York Times: “The scientists wrote that ‘outsourcing production to China does not always relieve consumers in the United States – or for...

Fears for Bangladeshi Democracy Rumble Across Region

Victor Mallet January 16, 2014
Some Asian democracies are not handling polarization well and fail to contain extreme responses by political parties after election or policy defeats. In Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Thailand, “parliamentary democracies have fallen prey to the diseases of authoritarianism, violence and strident populism,” reports Victor Mallet for the Financial Times. Amid the political problems for the...

Why Chinese-Japanese Economic Relations Are Improving

Richard Katz January 9, 2014
Despite heated political and online rhetoric, trade between China and Japan continues to grow. “In short, China has started to delink economics from politics,” no longer encouraging boycotts or protests in a quest for territorial concessions, explains Richard Katz for Foreign Affairs. “Chinese-Japanese economic relations (but not political ties) are set to get better, not worse.” The Chinese...

The Great Skill Recession

Nayan Chanda December 2, 2013
The world has an unemployment problem. Most modern jobs require technological skills, and technology is supplanting increasing numbers of jobs. How this gap, first raised as a possibility by John Maynard Keynes in 1930, is addressed will shape the economic future of the United States, China, India and other nations, explains Nayan Chanda, YaleGlobal editor, in his column for Businessworld....