James L Adams—People and Products

Participation or Observation —Technology, sports, and athletics

 Some time ago I spent ten years chairing, teaching, and doing research in the Stanford University program in Science, Technology, and Society, which focuses on attempting to understand the interaction between the three.  I caught the habit, and think about this relationship every time I come up on an obvious change in one.

 The present Americas Cup races are a case in point.  The boats and the TV coverage are amazing. If you haven’t been watching, the capsizing of one of the Oracle boat six months ago is shown here. It gives  you some idea of the complicated and sophisticated nature of these boats. A long video of a race between the Italian boat and the New Zealand boat, which won the Vuitton cup in race #8 with the necessary help of GPS technology, since the race was run partly in heavy fog, is here (search through the video for the actual racing footage).

 The boats are at the edge, if not over the edge, of technology—hydrofoil catamarans with a vertical wing rather than a fabric mainsail, 72 feet long, 7 tons, 134 foot mast, and the latest in carbon fiber and titanium fittings, capable of 50 knots speed in a 15 knot wind.  But over the edge in cost, dependability, and skill and strength requirements for the crews.  They are huge, but relatively delicate, tending to get in trouble if winds are too strong or water too rough, but wonderful to watch—and apparently it costs on the order of 100 million dollars to participate in this event. 

 My wife and I probably will make the short trip  up to San Francisco and watch one or two of the races between the U.S. and New Zealand boat, but as in most major sports, we will miss the superimposed information and various up-close and overhead camera angles of the TV.  And I will be entertained, but not feel part of the game, since I will certainly never be on the crew of, or probably even ride on one of these superboats. If I owned a traditional sail boat, I don’t know whether they would inspire me or kind of spoil my fun.

I often wonder whether increasing technology and investment in sports/athletics and other activities is turning us slowly into a nation of watchers, rather than participants.

When I was in high school, our crummy cars were a big deal to us.  The “sport” of informal drag racing from stoplights, or on empty sections of lightly used roads, was part of the game.  I don’t remember any accidents due to this, because traffic was much lighter then than now, and our cars wouldn’t go all that fast. 

 There had been specially built cars competing for speed over a quarter mile on various desert dry lakes, but no precise timing available in informal competitions.  In 1950  an “official” drag strip was started in Santa Ana, California, and the sport of professional (pay to participate) drag racing began.  Originally it was possible to enter these races with modified production cars because entry fees were low, and car expenses consisted to gasoline to drive to Santa Ana. 

 But now, amateurs can’t play.  It once was considered noteworthy to get ones car up to 60 miles an hour in a quarter mile. Top dragsters are breaking 300 miles per hour in an elapsed time of under four seconds.  To put this in perspective, if a car traveling at 100 mile an hour passed the starting line and a waiting dragster and tripped the green light signaling the dragster to go, the dragster would catch up with the 100 mph car 1/3 of the way down the quarter mile course.  By the time the 100 mph car reached the half way point of the course, the dragster would have crossed the finish line. Another interesting number—the 500 cubic inch engine of a top fuel driver produces about 7000 horsepower during its brief run, more than the first eight rows of cars at the NASCAR Daytona 500.This kind of performance requires very high technical sophistication and vast amounts of money.

 If you never have seen an example, click here and turn your volume up.  It is a very short video of a race between two people,  John Force, who  is one of the all time heroes of drag facing and who has several kids now racing, and his daughter Courtney —a sweet father-daughter experience that my daughter and I cannot duplicate—too expensive and the technology is too sophisticated (also we would kill outselves).

 This is clearly a different world from my high school days.  After the sport became professionalized, and laws tightened up, street drags became much rarer, if not nonexistent in areas such as the one in which I now live. For a while,  I went to races to watch the action and be amazed at the equipment.  But then the cars became so fast that I quit going, because I couldn’t identify with the cars or the drivers any longer.  So I, like many people, ended up watching them on television or the internet.  Interestingly, my grandchildren and their friends seem to have little interest in owning or driving a car—  Perhaps because automobiles are so sophisticated that they are boring?  Certainly they are more difficult to modify than old ones, and it is more difficult to find and legally drive cheap old relative wrecks such as we had in high school.

The same thing has happend in athletics.  When I was in college, it was not such a big deal to play inter-collegiate athletics (especially in schools with crummy teams like the one I attended) because this was before the days of recruiting, sports scholarships, and big TV money.  I certainly was never an outstanding athlete, but I spent a lot of time playing basketball and other sports.

But now it is essentially impossible to “walk onto ” the varsity team of a major sport in universities such as Stanford, and equipment continues to become more expensive and facilities more difficult to find,   so people who are very good athletes are reduced to watching sports on TV or the internet and observing people wearing and using the latest equipment including vast stadiums and arenas outfitted with the latest communication equipment (and if in college enjoying an athletic scholarship or if professional a few million dollars a year), and try to get their exercise in gyms full of stale air and expensive high-tech equipment that looks like it should be in a rehabilitation center and gives us little sense of accomplishment or joy of being part of a competing team. Great strides have been made in arranging team sports accessible to kids.   Maybe we need to put more effort into amateur sports for adults, complete with less formidable financial and technological barriers to entry and participation.

 

 

 

 

Internet Quality and Socialbots

I have been posting on Mondays and Thursdays for a while, but I am going to go to one post per week on Mondays.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First of all, I want to better focus my time on a couple of books I have underway.  The  books have to do with creativity and innovation when very large numbers of people are involved (governments, religions, nations, etc) and the advantages of working with the hands.  Secondly, I need to spend some time thinking about how I can best take advantage of the internet.  In order to do this, I need to learn more about the internet and the directions it is taking.

 Networking is obviously a work in progress, and faces continual problems. I am a user, but not aware enough of the pitfalls involved.  For instance I did not know about socialbots and the increasing resources going into their development. An article in the  New York Times of August 11, 2013, entitled "I Flirt and Tweet.  Follow Me at #Socialbot" by Ian Urbina is here, if you haven’t seen it.  It describes the increasing sophistication and use of software robots to communicate with people on social networking sites for various reasons, varying from marketing through politics to attempts to annoy them or push various causes.  The article claims that more than half of Web traffic is from non-humans.  But messages composed by non-humans are increasing in the social networking area.  Some researchers are estimating that only 35% of the followers of the average Twitter user are real people, and estimate that within two years, 10% of  all social networking traffic will be by bots masquerading as real people.

 Apparently many of these bots have been provided with real social networking accounts and the article contains entertaining and worrisome examples of their power.  One quotes  Christian Rudder, manager and cofounder of OkCupid, a dating site.  Apparently at one point, his group bought and redesigned a smaller dating site.  The result was a sizeable drop of non-human participants, but also a 15% drop in real human users,  because the robot participants provided a major amount of flirtatiousness and romance.  The article mentions that his programmers are trying to design bots which will flirt with socialbots joining his site and lure them away to another location.  

 And I need to think harder about who I really want to communicate with.

 But I will continue to babble on Mondays.

 

Good Products —The Sippy Cup

If you read the August 11 Sunday New York Times, you probably noticed that the “Who Made That” article in the magazine featured the Sippy Cup.  If you are not aware of these wonderful devices, the photo on the left shows one of my grand daughters happily guzzling away, and the photo below and to the right shows a closer view of two different models of Sippy cup.   The New York Times Article is here.  Credit for the invention is given to a (brilliant) mechanical engineer named Richard Belanger in 1988, who was inspired by his dislike of constantly cleaning up spills from cups, glasses, and the like resulting from his toddlers in their transition from bottle to dexterity.  He later negotiated a licensing deal with Playtex in the early 90’s, and the rest is history.

 The good news is that small kids like them, and they do not spill.  People quibble with that, saying that some of them do leak a bit if held upside down, but they perhaps did not have the good fortune of experiencing the constant dropping and knocking over of whole cups and glasses of liquid, and sometimes conscious glee at simply rapidly pouring liquid from the highchair onto the floor, that used to be a continual part of pre- Sippy Cup parenting.

 But to me, since these devices do not require the highest of technology, it is  amazing that they weren’t available, for instance, when my own kids were spilling their drinks on the floor.  Often people approach me with ideas for inventions for products and ask me what I think of them.  If they seem so obvious that I am sure they exist, but they don’t, I usually tell the inventor they are brilliant.  Such is my reaction to the Sippy Cup.  For centuries, people had probably snarled at their two year old children when they spilled their drinks on the floor.  And then Richard Belanger came along and solved the problem. 

 

Brilliant, Richard!

Product Quality, Marketing/Sales, and Life—A Minor Diatribe

When I arrived at Stanford, eagerly trying to understand such things as creativity/innovation and business, I cooperated in a number of workshops with a wonderful marketing professor in the business school named Bob Davis.  He was a very entertaining guy and devoted to defining marketing as not only different than sales, but a higher calling.  This is an activity that is common in graduate schools of business, even though it is a difficult line to draw.  This was before the days of digital communications, big data, esoteric analytical techniques, and involvement of top level statisticians and psychologists.  I was fascinated by the field of marketing, which seemed to be striving to better match products and people. 

 Now I am appreciably older, comfortably well off, seemingly equipped with everything I want, and amazingly annoyed by the inescapable presence of marketing/sales. Granted that I am not a typical consumer, but I am finding it insulting to have postcards trying to get me to subscribe to magazines drop out of magazines I already subscribe to, seemingly every store I enter trying to get me to join their “club”, endless attempts to get me to fill out surveys so that they have more information on me, and a world blanketed with advertisements everywhere I look and awash in commercials in all media I enter.

 I know what I want/need, and resent people trying to add to the list or alter my choices.  Do they think they know more about me than I do?  I find the self-marketing attitude of many internet addicts somewhat obnoxious (even though I admit I was talked into social networking by my publisher, who told me that otherwise no one would notice my Good Products Bad Products book).  I wonder at my wife’s daily ritual of rapidly going through our surface mail while standing over the re-cycling barrel, trying to avoid throwing something important away with the overwhelming majority of marketing-oriented junk.

 Is there no end to this?  I realize that we  humans seem to love “deals”, and that it is possible to show that this marketing “works”.   The recent trauma that J.C. Penney went through in seeking to move from hundreds of sales per year to constant lower prices (which I thought made great sense) resulted in a huge backlash and the resignation of its president after only eight months in office.  So I was wrong. Of course an organization called One Million Moms turned against the company for using Ellen De Generes  as a spokesperson.  Not being one of the Million Moms, I can’t claim any insight on that one.

 And of course, look at our ability to create “celebrities”, political campaigns, and national propaganda.

 But how much does this constantly increasingly sophisticated and wide-spread marketing/sales actually benefit us and the economy?  It definitely makes jobs, but is the noise it creates perhaps greater than the good it accomplishes? 

 I find myself avoiding products and being against people whose marketing interferes with the quality of my life, whether through producing billboards that mar beautiful country or attractive buildings, commercials that interrupt things I am interested in, messages repeated so constantly that I assume someone thinks I am so stupid I don’t understand them, junk mail, internet ads, phone calls that are unerringly synchronized with my meals, questionnaires, coupons, clubs, and other tools intended to influence me in ways the producers of goods and services think are positive.

 I want good stuff, and can’t clearly see the correlation between the quality of the marketing effort and the quality of the product or person being marketed.  I wish we would just produce outstanding choices and let me choose!   

Product Quality—Tesla Motors and How to Make an Impact

Tesla Motors was incorporated in 2003.  One of my sons. a green engineer who loves small companies and working on exciting things, but who had not worked in the automotive industry, joined them in 2005.  I have therefore been following the company, I must say with increasing pleasure.  When my son joined the company, it consisted of people who were highly motivated to convince the world that electricity was a feasible and in fact very attractive way to power automobiles.  In fact, electrically powered automobiles had been a long ambition of Elon Musk, one of its founders, its leading investor, and now its CEO.

 Due to the dismal performance of attempts to start car companies (Fisker, DeLorean), I suspect many people thought they would not succeed, especially because the employees were more Silicon Valley than Detroit.  Even I thought they had picked a very large challenge, although certainly a worthy one. But the company is succeeding beautifully, and in the process changing opinions and values in a very conservative industry with very conservative customers.  Even now, there are rumors of troubles and problems with the cars and the company running around, but these are founded on love of large V-8 engines. the smell of gasoline, and on nostalgia, not on reality. Reality can better be seen by the awards and enthusiasm the model S is getting, by its sales and back orders, and better yet, by driving one.

Last Sunday my son took my wife and I out riding in a model S that he was acquiring some data on, and it is very difficult to criticize.  It is beautiful, luxurious, handles magnificently, reaches 60 mph in slightly over 4 seconds, and has a range of over 200 miles.  If you are not familiar with the car, here is its Wikipedia write-up.

 The only concern I would have if I owned one is that the digital opportunities are so lavish that one might worry about driver distraction.  The company is building rapid charging stations and battery swapping stations as fast as it can to augment the basic process of charging the battery through 220 volt house current. And it is exporting to Europe and about to start exporting to Asia (but built in California).

 The Model S is pricey.  But that is reasonable to expect from a radically new product.  The first Tesla product, the roadster, was relatively more expensive, since it was a simpler and a less luxuriously finished machine.  It received a great deal of attention, not only because of its energy saving, but also because if its performance, its striking appearance, and perhaps because only 1000 of them were made.  The model S will be followed by the model X, which will be a crossover (a combination of a sports sedan and a minivan) built on the same platform with the same performance. Following that the company plans to release what they call Generation 3, which is targeted to cost approximately half of the price of the Model S, and be aimed for mass market sales—one of Tesla’s original goals.  Musk promises that it will be consistent with the Model S —a unique, advanced, and exciting machine with no desire for gasoline.

 Say what you will, but in only ten years, Tesla has produced two sensational automobiles, is producing electric drive trains for other manufacturers (Daimler and Toyota), and has changed the attitude of many doubters of the attractiveness and desirability of electrically powered cars.  And it has done so through undeniably high quality products.