Archive for 2010

More sudden acceleration phantoms for Toyota.  Sigh.

At this point the sharks are circling in the water and an ambulance chaser mentality has arisen.  With $39 billion of cash on hand Toyota is going to be in the sights of every lawyer on the planet.  I guess Toyota deserves it but I suspect it’s soon going to get very hard to separate fact from fiction. 

As hard as they’ve worked to pin this down as a mechanical failure, the specter of some electronic or software glitch just simply isn’t going to go away.  Sorry. 

What’s Toyota to do???? They’re sort of pinned between a rock and a hard place here.  Even if they HAVE completely investigated this (which I’m starting to doubt) and if they really believe there is no problem with their electronics (which I’m starting to doubt) people are definitely starting to doubt (of which I’m sure). 

So here’s a wild proposal.   What if Toyota were to openly publish ALL their electronic technical information on the internet?  Both throttle and brake systems –   everything…  Schematics, board layouts, component specs, firmware code, test reports, theories of operation… the whole thing.

Publish it on line and throw it out for open-source collaboration on finding a technical problem. 

Why not?  What is there to lose? Confidentiality? It can’t be that proprietary – every other car company has the same things (oh and they don’t seem to be backpedaling quite as fast so perhaps your stuff isn’t all that good anyway).  Worried about disclosure and lawsuits?  I think that horse has left the barn! 

What would happen?  Would it work?   Can you imagine chat boards with electrical engineers trading theories and exchanging findings?  Engineers at GM working on their evenings looking for glitches on Toyotas as a point of professional pride??  Real time tweats as people traded hypotheses back and forth?  PhD electronics wizards, weekend code warriors and crackpot conspiracy theorists all with total access?  What would happen?  Could – or would – the collective power of thousands of fresh pairs of eyes bring new clarity to the problem?  Would we find anything or just how damn complex all this stuff really is?  Would anything credible arise? Would a Wikipedia like organization and singular point of view evolve or would chaos reign supreme?   

I know – It’s never going to happen but I’d love to see it just for the fun of the experiment!

There was a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal today on a brewing conflict between natural gas and windmill power.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704188104575083982637451248.html?mod=rss_Today’s_Most_Popular

If you didn’t catch the article the basic gist is that growth of wind power in Texas is primarily coming at the expense of the natural gas consumption which is projected to drop by up to 18% by 2013.

Wind power is, of course, in tremendous favor right now and has garnered (probably rightfully) a series of government subsidies and favorable legislation intended to promote adoption, refinement and R&D in what is perceived as a cleaner technology.  Which seems like great idea I guess unless you’re a natural gas manufacturer in which case you’d be inclined to cry foul.   As a citizen of the planet it seems like a reasonable approach (although I am more than willing to bet the natural gas manufacturers are armed with reams of compelling charts and studies on the relative “cleanness” of their industry or the “dirt” on wind turbines).  As a business owner I can only imagine the frustration of watching your competitor get a helping hand from the government. 

It reminds me of a couple of external factors that have tremendous impact on the development of emerging technologies.  First, is that new technologies are inherently fragile.  They are almost always more problematic, expensive and complex that the constituency they’re replacing.  Meaning with only rare exceptions they often require a bit of life-support .  Within a company this life support can take the form of tolerating a lower profitability – or perhaps even unprofitability while the bugs are worked out.  In my opinion this can take incredible courage , foresight and is rare and seldom appreciated.  Most companies are incapable or politically unwilling to make this kind of investment and are content to follow on with a series of Honey Nut Cheerios like brand extensions.  On a larger scale where grand shifts in technology may be required, only governments are capable of providing this life support and have to be willing and able to act with the greater good in mind- think the Space program… or wind mills.   Same courage and foresight.  Just as rare if not more so.

Finally is the understanding that tinkering with the free market always has unexpected consequences and very real winners and losers for whom the decisions become matters of fiscal life and death.  A responsibility that should not be taken lightly. 

Oh, by the way… we’re playing around with a low cost low power vertical axis wind turbine here at Design Concepts.  Here’s the Alpha prototype… Hope to have the Beta on line by this summer and take my office “off grid!”  Wish us luck!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed3nPQMS6YM

I would be interested in your opinions on the topic but the following headline certainly seems like a glaring grammatical faux pas to me…

Unless I’m mistaken, the correct word here should have been ratchet; not ratch.  Full disclosure – I was a bit more outraged until I went running for my dictionary and learned that perhaps the linguistical sin is a tad less egregious than I’d originally thought.  It turns out that “ratch” is synonymous with “ratchet” –  but only as a noun which allowed me to preserve some degree of smugness.   

For engineers (and mechanics) ratchet is a pretty evocative word.  A ratchet is, of course, a mechanical device consisting of a toothed wheel or rack engaged with a pawl that permits it to move in only one direction”.  Unlike ratch (which frankly I’d never even heard before), ratchet can be used a verb.    Thus telling someone to “ratchet it up” conveys (to me anyway) exerting some degree of force which results in a significant “step” in your position – be it a car with a flat tire or a hockey team with the collective weight of its country’s expectations behind it.  As near as I can figure, telling someone to “ratch” it up is meaningless although it certainly sounds like some catchy new slang for nausea.  So that’s what kids call it these days???

The linguistic world is full of words and phrases that are either derived or at the very least illuminated by their technical context.  In mechanics, STRESS means exerting force on an object whereas STRAIN is the change in shape or size that occurs as a result.  Likewise in tough professional situations I can be under stress, and therefore likely to be showing strain. The brilliant 17th century British scientist Robert Hooke    experimentally derived that within a certain range, strain is directly proportional to stress after which all hell can break loose.   I’ve empirically observed that in both my design work and occasionally my own behavior.  Hey, nothing personal – it’s just physics. 

My electrical engineering friends know that resistance doesn’t mean they’re being obstinate – just that they’re obeying Ohm’s law.    Knowledge may be power but that’s just energy per unit of time… We may live for the moment but only if our force is applied though an appropriate radius.  OK… so maybe that’s getting a bit obtuse  but just because it’s greater than 90 degrees… the fun goes on and on. 

So come on people… let’s pay attention to our technical grammar and ratchet it up a notch ok?   Errors like the one above really make me want to ratch.

To continue along an Olympic – or at least a sports minded theme, I’ve been reflecting lately on the gradual encroachment of new forms of viewing technology in our sports entertainment.  Of course, technological innovation has always gone hand-in-hand with sports – I suspect that the somewhat oxymoronic phrase “sports entertainment” was coined shortly after the first instant replay – by most accounts in the 1950s.  By the mid 1960s we had slow motion instant replay and with the advent of digital technologies the race was on.  Now I have my daughters asking me if the football players can see the yellow first down line on the field.  Perhaps soon they’ll be able to.  I read an article about NFL players pausing to watch their own highlights on the stadium Jumbotron (what a great word huh>).  Why bother waiting for Sports Center when you can get your adulation in real-time?

These technological aids have gradually become an indispensible part of our sports enjoyment experience.  I know more than a few people who eschew live events for the comforts of their living room (or local bar) combined with the ability to enjoy multiple view of virtually every conceivable minutia. 

Watching the Olympics provides ample reminder of how sophisticated these technologies have become.  Cross Country skiers race virtual lines showing previous competitor’s times… Speed skaters race world records and down hill skiers even race against each other in quasi-real time.   Mostly I think this is all good…

Interestingly enough, the Olympic events don’t seem as prone to having the technology become part of the event itself – as instant replay in basketball, baseball and football now factor prominently in event outcomes.  I’m sure that’s in the works. 

As much as the technology factors in I wonder if the net result can’t be to somehow subtract from the magic and wonder of a live sporting event.    When we find ourselves looking up from the actual action to wait to gaze in rapture at the instant replay how long can it be until there’s no longer any need to live in the moment.  If we miss it we can always catch it on Sports Center anyway…

I’ve noticed that the Winter Olympics have rekindled a fascinating discussion here at work … thoughts and opinions on subjectively judged versus non-subjectively judged sports.  Hockey, downhill skiing and speed skating with their purely quantifiable goals (literally) and seconds (chronologically) are vehemently contrasted with figure skating (a subjective sport if there ever were one) and moguls (a quant/qual hybrid… who knew???) where varying degrees of subjectivity factor and sometimes reign. Either the best or worst of both worlds depending on your perspective I guess.  My father – a philosophical guy if there ever were one – used to argue that subjectivity in sports was deeply healthy since this subjectivity bred conflict which was where all our passions surfaced anyway.  And isn’t that what we truly want in our sports???… he argues.  ( I see your point but sorry Dad… I’d still like to see the BCS replaced with an 8 team playoff).  At the other extreme end of the spectrum in my office are a camp of individuals who a minimum are profoundly frustrated if not offended by subjectively judged sports – to the extent that some argue a subjectively judged activity can’t even be called a sport.  And there is a certain appeal, if not elegance to their arguments.  From a visceral perspective, first-one-to-the-finish-line wins has a profoundly satisfying finality when compared to a disputed 5.3-from-the-Russian-judge-with-an-agenda-and-cultural-axe-to-grind.

Without getting too philosophical it is pretty easy to extend these arguments and sentiments fairly deeply into our professional lives.  We generally seek ways to root out the subjective from our decision making process.  Quantitative market research, return on investment analysis, Pugh rating and the like all represent technique s to reduce complex, often subjective topics to easily scored values .  Who can argue with that?  13% is better than 10% – 8 is more than 6, etc.  I feel that as human beings, for a variety of reasons, we are intrinsically “wired” to seek ways to reduce our decision making process to the non-subjective quantitative world.   

Upon further reflection, however, I think our ability to both operate and navigate comfortably within an ambiguous world is often both a business imperative and the sign of professional maturity and courage.  In business (as in the reset of life), most complicated decisions boil down to a degree of “informed intuition” or using the best available information to develop logical frameworks from which to consider various courses of action.  Even highly technical professions such as engineering operate far more in the subjective than most laypeople would suspect.  Which concept is the riskiest?  Which design will be the most reliable? While developing quantified frameworks for comparison can be tremendously useful in framing discussions in my career I have yet to see a weighted ranking evaluation produce a compelling new business innovation.  In the absence of complete information the experienced business professional will use a combination of data, analysis and intuition to frame the discussion and ultimately select a course of action. 

So perhaps our business decision making process need to take a cue from our sports – or visa-versa and learn to tolerate, if not embrace the inherent ambiguity that exists in all complex endeavors.  Besides… within non-subjectively scored sports, even though my favorite team may win or lose, that won’t stop the Monday morning “we-were-robbed-by-the-ref” whining.  It’s all subjective anyway…