I’ve uploaded nearly 1300 of my Japan pictures to Flickr. For reasons I’m sure you’ll understand, I haven’t added titles or tags or descriptions proactively, but please add comments or questions on flickr and I’ll gladly offer a story or explanation.
Meanwhile, I’m including some of my faves here, as well as part 1 and part 3.
It’s fascinating how most successful products lead to an ecosystem of supporting products. The Crocs fad has provided the fan-base to support charms, little decorations that attach to the holes on the shoe’s surface and let the wearer further establish their individual identity within the trend of people who have established a unique identity by wearing Crocs in the first place.
Acknowledging that following a trend has a very different meaning in Japan, we bring you the Crocs family, who we saw on a bus in Kyoto, each with their own charms.
Dad
Mom
Son
Baby
In addition to aftermarket personalization, many trends also generate a safety backlash meme (iPod muggings, anyone?). In Taipei, it’s dangerous to wear Crocs on escalators.
Manufacturers like Apple are very savvy about creating/controlling their aftermarket, but I wonder about the backlashes. Are PR people planting those stories or doing damage control or not realizing their significance?
Update: Karl Long on the Crocs backlash (safety and others) here
The tainted pet food story gets worse.
Menu Foods told the FDA it received the first complaints of kidney failure and deaths among cats and dogs from pet owners on Feb. 20. It began new tests on Feb. 27. During those tests, the company fed its product to 40 to 50 dogs and cats, and seven of those animals died.
I think the horror this induces is a clue to our naivete about how stuff is made. This story brings up the recent food-supply fears (i.e., spinach, green onions), with the added pathos of beloved pets innocently suffering and dying. So what does the company do when safety concerns are raised? Well, nothing for SEVEN DAYS (while people around North America are feeding their beloved pets), and then takes some of their own animals (perhaps not-so-beloved) and gives the food to them and then waits to see how many die (meanwhile, people around North America continue to feed their beloved pets this stuff).
It’s easy (see?) to cast the company as callous and heartless and incompetent – and maybe they are; the twist of giving potentially deadly food to more animals as a way to test its safety is wrenching. But then one has to ask, how do they normally product test their pet food before putting it on the market? Presumably by feeding it to animals and seeing what happens.
Yet another backstage aspect of product development that we don’t know and don’t want to know. Every time you scoop some Kibbles-n-Grits Extra Chunky Sauce into Rover’s bowl, how many other animals died to ensure that he’s not going to?
Fresh and Clean International Food Safety Standards
When I took this picture (in Bangkok) I marveled at the fact that something as basic as food safety was advertised as a benefit to shoppers. What about taste? Value? Good times? Good friends? An interesting menu? Nope. Fresh. Clean. Safe.
Yet here in the U.S. we’ve got scallion problems at Taco Bell and recent problems with spinach. Am I having a Michael Pollan-induced panic or are we not as far ahead as we kid ourselves into believing?
Some recent product recalls
Wild Planet Toys Inc. of San Francisco is recalling 273,000 Jet Streamers Water Blasters pool toys. When partially filled with water, the pool toy can stand upright on the pool floor with the rigid narrow end pointed upward, posing an impalement risk.
— LeapFrog Enterprises Inc. of Emeryville is recalling 186,000 Playground Activity Centers. A child’s arm can become caught in the activity center’s plastic tube.
— Olympus Imaging America Inc. of Center Valley, Pa., is recalling 1.2 million Olympus 35mm film cameras. A defect with the flash circuit in the cameras can cause it to smoke and overheat when the camera is turned on, posing a burn hazard.
— Syratech Corp. of East Boston, Mass., is recalling 10,000 frog, fish and duck lawn sprinklers. The plastic body of the lawn sprinkler can crack when placed under intense water pressure, and pieces of it can break off and be projected 5 to 10 feet in the air.
— Pier 1 Imports (U.S.) Inc. of Fort Worth, Texas, is recalling 4,300 Ming television stands. If a person leans on the stand’s drawer when open, the unit can tilt forward and cause a television on top to slide off, posing a risk of injury or death.
— Ballard Designs Inc. of Atlanta is recalling 775 candles and candle sets. The packaging or holder can ignite, posing a fire hazard.
— Agio International Co. Ltd. of Hong Kong is recalling 33,800 Garden Treasures steel dome fireplaces. Touch-up paint used on the fireplace’s exterior can ignite during use, posing a fire hazard.
— True Religion of Los Angeles is recalling 150 hooded fleece jackets. A drawstring is threaded through the hood, posing a strangulation hazard to children.
— Onward Manufacturing of Waterloo, Ontario, Mi-T-M Corp. of Peosta, Iowa, and Deere & Co. of Moline, Ill. are recalling 3,100 John Deere gas barbecue grills. Operating the grill in windy conditions can blow the flame under the control panel, causing the grill to overheat or cause flashbacks. Flames could damage the hose that supplies gas to the burner, causing an uncontrolled flame. Also, the grill’s control knobs could overheat, resulting in burns to hands.
— Deere & Co. of Moline, Ill., is recalling 16,000 John Deere X300 Select Series lawn tractors. A problem in the manufacturing process could cause damage to the circuit in the interlock module. If the module fails, the mower blades will be able to run with no operator on the tractor seat.
— Kindermusik International Inc. of Greensboro, N.C., is recalling 10,000 cage bells. If the bell inside the instrument is damaged during manufacturing, the bell can be pulled out of the instrument, posing a choking hazard.
— Triangle Tube/Phase III of Blackwood, N.J., is recalling 3,000 water heaters. The burner plate and flue hood seal on the water heaters can fail due to an improper seal, causing a leak of flue gases and deadly carbon monoxide.
— Gotham Architectural Lighting, a division of Acuity Lighting Group Inc. of Conyers, Ga., is recalling 4,700 lighting fixtures. The reflector/trim pieces may not be properly attached to each other. The lower portion of the reflector/trim assembly could detach and fall from the ceiling, striking people below.
Of course, being injured by a product you’ve purchased is not funny, but something about the tone of the descriptions is funny (if you find police blotter sections of local papers funny, then you’ll know what I mean here) in a Simpsonsesque fashion (or the famous German Forklift Safety Video).
And in blogosphere synchronicity, Niti’s last story in this post is a slightly more sober take on a product recall.
Low-cost airline pilot ‘tried to fly drunk’
An Indian low-cost airline suspended a pilot after he was found drunk shortly before he was due to fly an aircraft with about 100 passengers on board, officials said on Wednesday.
The surprise Tuesday check at Mumbai airport — India’s busiest — threw up several minor violations of safety norms by airlines, including an instance of a pilot in another low-cost carrier trying to fly in a T-shirt because his only uniform had gone to the laundry.
“threw up several minor violations” is an interesting choice of words.
Bombay Sapphire, anyone?
Simulator technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and car designers are building new understanding of the causes (and techniques for preventing) accidents. Lab testing absolutely has its place, but what are these tools doing to help understand the impact of real-world stress (road rage, traffic jams, late for a meeting) or distractions (your favorite song, an annoying cell phone call) – in other words, the context that doesn’t naturally occur in a laboratory. I fear the model is more to consider the human as a component with performance parameters and therefor engineer the hell out of the situation.
Driving simulators are interior mock-ups (or in some cases, complete cars) placed on hydraulically actuated platforms and surrounded by video screens and speakers. Drivers at the wheel feel vibrations, acceleration and deceleration just as if they were driving on the roads projected around them.
“You save 50 percent of your research time,” said Beuzit, noting one reason companies build multimillion-dollar simulators. “It has transformed the automobile industry in the last 20 to 30 years.”
Because the simulator experience is so close to reality, providing the physical sensation of going around a curve or bouncing over a badly paved road, scientists can use it to do fundamental research on how all the senses contribute to what a driver perceives, said Andras Kemeny, a research director at the technical center.
For Renault, he said, “It is absolutely necessary to understand the driver’s strategy in driving, and then design industrial objects according to this knowledge.” Kemeny said it would take a decade to complete the loop of bringing fundamental research results to showrooms.
Who is handling safety/quality at NASA these days? This just brings to mind a painful-to-watch Simpsons episode involving ironic and painful crashing, cracking, breaking, and hurting.
With the countdown for Discovery in its final hours, NASA was dealt a setback Tuesday when a window cover fell off the shuttle and damaged thermal tiles near the tail.
The plastic-and-foam cover on one of Discovery’s cockpit windows fell at the launch pad and struck a bulge in the fuselage that houses an orbital-maneuvering engine.
No workers were nearby when the window cover fell off and dropped about 60 feet, the space agency said. It was not immediately clear why the cover – which was held by tape – came loose.
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FreshMeat #4 from Steve Portigal
(__)
(oo) Fresh
\\/ MeatYou’re gonna have to serve somebody…serve FreshMeat!
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Tune in, log on, drop out, uhhh, drop in, uhhh…
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In Woody Allen’s “Sleeper,” Miles Monroe wakes up in the
Year 2173 to discover (among other things) that tobacco
and hot fudge sundaes are commonly regarded as the
healthiest substances for the body. As they say, it’s
funny cuz it’s true. Just look at today’s example…
Recently, Robert Kraut (a CMU social psychologist in the
field of human-computer interaction) has begun to make
public his ongoing findings into the effect of computers
and Internet use on personal well-being. The first
results of the study, from 1998, showed us that usage led
to poor social involvement and feelings of stress and
unhappiness. And the media had a field day with those
findings.
Going back to the same subjects, and conducting other
studies, Kraut now retracts that finding and says that
Internet use does not lead to detachment or alienation.
Indeed, life imitates life, and extroverts make more
connections online, while introverts may make fewer.
It’s interesting that as the business viability of the
Internet falls lower still, it turns out to be not so bad
for us after all. And the media has not made anywhere near
the fuss over the latest study. In 1998, the Internet being
bad for us was a bang – an incredible story that permeated
our culture, but the retraction in 2001 is merely a whimper.
—
This is a highly summarized version of some complicated
research. Read abstracts of Kraut’s papers, or request
copies of the full papers here
An article in the New York Times that describes how
our web habits have shifted can be found here.