Some time ago in this space, I did an ethics post on pilferage, and how this actually hurts everybody who does business with the pilfered company much more than it does the business itself. I’ve also had a few choice comments in this space about personal responsibility, and how there are times when suing someone over matters of strict liability is more complicated than people seem to think it is. I hadn’t expected, however, that both threads would be picked up in a single news story…
There’s a case out of Honolulu being reported by Fox News online about a man who died after allegedly taking two 12-packs of beer out of a hotel convenience store without paying for them, was confronted by the store manager and another hotel patrol about the theft, initiated a fight with the store owner, and subsequently died of injuries sustained during the confrontation. Because this is a Fox case the linked story is leaving out the fact that the man actually died of mechanical asphyxia after the convenience store manager and the other hotel guest sat on his back while waiting for the police to arrive, which complicates matters a bit, but I think the ethical questions are essentially the same whether we give the original story a pro-business/anti-crime slant or not – at least, once we realize that the shoplifter’s wife is now suing for wrongful death…
On the one hand, the dead man was committing a crime; if the facts of the case as stated are accurate, we can easily conclude that if he’d just paid for the beer instead of trying to steal it, he would still be alive. We can also attack the shoplifter on moral grounds, in that his theft wasn’t motivated by the necessity of feeding his family or any other worthwhile enterprise; the man in question was on vacation from California and was just trying to save money on his vacation expenses. The loss of merchandise would certainly have impacted the livelihood of the store owner, and might easily have driven up the price of everything in the store for everyone else who shops there. But even if all of this is true, it’s still difficult to ethically defend the practice of killing someone over misdemeanor theft, in this case for less than $50 worth of merchandise. Stealing beer may be a heinous offense, but it’s still difficult to support making it a capital one…
On the other side of the case, the shoplifter’s wife most certainly has been deprived of his companionship and income (California is a community-property state; therefore his income is also hers) without due process or compensation, and it would be impossible to argue that the store manager and his companion had any right to take the shoplifter’s life. It seems unlikely that they meant to do so, and even more unlikely that you’d be able to convince an jury to convict them of murder (negligent homicide will be hard enough to prosecute), but negligence seems fairly straightforward in this case. If you don’t know how to safely apprehend someone you shouldn’t try; and if you kill them in the process you are, in fact, being negligent. But by the same token, all the manager and his companion were trying to do was their civic duty (e.g. preventing a criminal from escaping the police). Many people would criticize them for ducking that obligation, although it isn’t usually considered a crime to do so…
In fact, there are actually two ethical questions here. First, should the widow of the shoplifter be compensated because the two men in our story killed him for a trivial offense, and if so, should the chain of convenience stores and the resort in which the store was located share responsibility for the award? And second, should the killers be sent to prison for attempting to stop a tourist from stealing from the store?
It’s worth thinking about…
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
The Grad School Diaries: The Cottonwood Conundrum
As winter in East Lansing starts to merge into spring a bizarre phenomenon has been gradually filling our streets, stray corners, and sometimes most of our deck. It’s a strange white fluff, which looks almost like snow from a distance, but is clearly some kind of plant matter – there’s no way it could be snow given the warm daytime temperatures and the fact that it doesn’t melt. For the past few weeks we’ve been seeing it all over town, drifting by on the wind and piling up wherever it bumps into something solid, but there’s no clear sign of where it’s coming from. It’s another mystery about our new home…
Back in Los Angeles there are a variety of annual drifts and jettisons that you get used to, at least after a while. Probably the best known are the jacaranda trees, and their huge output of brilliant purple flowers, which go through two cycles each calendar year. The blossoms are beautiful, and the tree in bloom is amazing to see, but when the flowers fall off they stick to anything they land on like glue – and they stain it the same vibrant purple until you’ve soaked whatever it is in bleach. Which isn’t always possible – imagine having your car stained purple, for example. At our home in Redondo Beach we had an excellent view of a colossal (40 feet tall at least, and nearly as wide!) jacaranda, which grew in the back yard of the people across the street. I always said it was the ideal situation: we got to see the tree in bloom, but we didn’t have to clean up after it…
We have falling leaves in the Southwest, too; despite the fact that people from other parts of the country persist in believing that Los Angeles has no seasons (or that the seasons are, actually, flash-flood season, fire season and earthquake season), the leaves do turn colors and fall off the trees; our microscopic front yard in Redondo was often covered with the output of the single large tree that grew there for weeks at a time. And you also get odd drifts of pollen, seed pods, pine cones, flowers and whatnot. But in all of my life, I’ve never seen anything like these drifts of white fluff that are now floating around town like flurries of snow…
Eventually we started looking things up online and asking around. A few short searches revealed that the fluff we were seeing was part of the reproductive cycle of the cottonwood tree; the fluff contains seeds that will germinate to form the next generation of the species – if the seeds were properly fertilized before they set out on the wind. That’s right, folks; the output we were seeing was limited to female cottonwood trees. This surprised me for two reasons: one was that we don’t have a cottonwood tree anywhere on our property, and neither do our neighbors on either side, across the street, or behind us. But just as important, in my opinion, was the fact that trees can be female in the first place…
Now, I know that plants come in male and female varieties; that’s why you need bees carrying pollen from one to the other, and all of that other stuff we were supposed to learn about in high school biology class when I was asleep. But you don’t think about trees working the same way, even though they obviously do. One can easily get these lunatic images of what sorts of creatures would pollinate very large plants, with owls or hawks pollinating oaks and pines, condors taking care of giant sequoias, ospreys looking after anything that grows along the banks of rivers, and small, slimy things that scuttle through the air ducts pollinating whatever it is that keeps growing along the interior walls of the Business School complex…
But I digress…
A year ago, while I had certainly heard of cottonwood trees, I don’t believe I’d ever seen one, and I’d certainly never seen their fine white fluff drifting by on the wind. Today it’s just another sign of spring in the town where we live. I can’t help wondering what other routine mysteries are still waiting to sprout around us…
Back in Los Angeles there are a variety of annual drifts and jettisons that you get used to, at least after a while. Probably the best known are the jacaranda trees, and their huge output of brilliant purple flowers, which go through two cycles each calendar year. The blossoms are beautiful, and the tree in bloom is amazing to see, but when the flowers fall off they stick to anything they land on like glue – and they stain it the same vibrant purple until you’ve soaked whatever it is in bleach. Which isn’t always possible – imagine having your car stained purple, for example. At our home in Redondo Beach we had an excellent view of a colossal (40 feet tall at least, and nearly as wide!) jacaranda, which grew in the back yard of the people across the street. I always said it was the ideal situation: we got to see the tree in bloom, but we didn’t have to clean up after it…
We have falling leaves in the Southwest, too; despite the fact that people from other parts of the country persist in believing that Los Angeles has no seasons (or that the seasons are, actually, flash-flood season, fire season and earthquake season), the leaves do turn colors and fall off the trees; our microscopic front yard in Redondo was often covered with the output of the single large tree that grew there for weeks at a time. And you also get odd drifts of pollen, seed pods, pine cones, flowers and whatnot. But in all of my life, I’ve never seen anything like these drifts of white fluff that are now floating around town like flurries of snow…
Eventually we started looking things up online and asking around. A few short searches revealed that the fluff we were seeing was part of the reproductive cycle of the cottonwood tree; the fluff contains seeds that will germinate to form the next generation of the species – if the seeds were properly fertilized before they set out on the wind. That’s right, folks; the output we were seeing was limited to female cottonwood trees. This surprised me for two reasons: one was that we don’t have a cottonwood tree anywhere on our property, and neither do our neighbors on either side, across the street, or behind us. But just as important, in my opinion, was the fact that trees can be female in the first place…
Now, I know that plants come in male and female varieties; that’s why you need bees carrying pollen from one to the other, and all of that other stuff we were supposed to learn about in high school biology class when I was asleep. But you don’t think about trees working the same way, even though they obviously do. One can easily get these lunatic images of what sorts of creatures would pollinate very large plants, with owls or hawks pollinating oaks and pines, condors taking care of giant sequoias, ospreys looking after anything that grows along the banks of rivers, and small, slimy things that scuttle through the air ducts pollinating whatever it is that keeps growing along the interior walls of the Business School complex…
But I digress…
A year ago, while I had certainly heard of cottonwood trees, I don’t believe I’d ever seen one, and I’d certainly never seen their fine white fluff drifting by on the wind. Today it’s just another sign of spring in the town where we live. I can’t help wondering what other routine mysteries are still waiting to sprout around us…
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Couldn’t Agree More
When the story first came out about the full-service airlines planning to charge for checked baggage – and more for each additional bag – I remember commenting that this was playing directly into the hands of Southwest Airlines, and any other discount carrier who decided to enact a similar “free luggage” policy. Even assuming that the profits made on the bag fees would cover the cost of passengers who were sufficiently irritated by the policy to change airlines – which I think we have reason to doubt – this still would not change the fact that many customers would jump ship to Southwest, increasing that airline’s profitability and cash position, and giving them a bigger club with which to beat on their full-service rivals. I didn’t make a big deal out of it at the time – it’s elementary business development theory and nothing that any first-year business school student couldn’t tell you without pausing to think. But now it seems like the President of Southwest agrees with me…
A few weeks back, the President of Southwest Airlines, Gary Kelly, was interviewed on CNBC regarding the new, increased baggage fees being charged by some of the major airlines. Kelly was pleased, to say the least, commenting that he hoped the competition would start charging $100 per bag, and more for the second one, and quipping that Southwest would be grateful for any customers the full-service airlines wanted to send him – implying that there would be quite a few of them. It’s a rather unkind remark, especially when you consider that Southwest recorded a profit of $116 million last year, during a period when most of their competition was in the red (and some of it was begging for Federal bail-out money). My question is: how come nobody else thought of an idea this simple?
Granted that Southwest has been one of the more profitable carriers for a while now, and therefore was in the best position to avoid following the industry trend toward new fees, it still seems amazing that no other company was able to figure out that baggage fees would end up being wildly unpopular, or to work out that taking the position of being the “only” airline not to charge them would be good for business. Certainly, there was no great difficulty in predicting that these new fee programs would spread industry-wide; even bloggers without any industry connections were able to work that out. Nor was it any great leap that these charges would generate widespread outrage; consumer advocates were practically foaming at the mouth as soon as these charges appeared. The only logical answer is that all of the companies in question believed that the bonanza of revenue to be gained with new fees would make up for the loss in business – which remains to be seen…
It’s bad science to claim that Southwest’s excellent year lies entirely in their refusal to charge baggage fees; there might well have been other factors involved. However, when you consider the implications of that refusal, a different picture emerges. If we consider that Southwest was moved to make this decision based on a superior understanding of what their key customer base actually wants – and of what actions might draw customers away from the competition – then this move is more than just an opportunistic move away from their industry’s mainstream, but rather the natural result of superior strategy and forward planning. It should be interesting to see what happens going forward; if the full-service carriers continue to annoy their customers to little financial benefit; if Southwest continues to give people service they want at prices that appeal to them; if the American public (or at least that part of it that travels by airplane) continues to vote with their feet…
A few weeks back, the President of Southwest Airlines, Gary Kelly, was interviewed on CNBC regarding the new, increased baggage fees being charged by some of the major airlines. Kelly was pleased, to say the least, commenting that he hoped the competition would start charging $100 per bag, and more for the second one, and quipping that Southwest would be grateful for any customers the full-service airlines wanted to send him – implying that there would be quite a few of them. It’s a rather unkind remark, especially when you consider that Southwest recorded a profit of $116 million last year, during a period when most of their competition was in the red (and some of it was begging for Federal bail-out money). My question is: how come nobody else thought of an idea this simple?
Granted that Southwest has been one of the more profitable carriers for a while now, and therefore was in the best position to avoid following the industry trend toward new fees, it still seems amazing that no other company was able to figure out that baggage fees would end up being wildly unpopular, or to work out that taking the position of being the “only” airline not to charge them would be good for business. Certainly, there was no great difficulty in predicting that these new fee programs would spread industry-wide; even bloggers without any industry connections were able to work that out. Nor was it any great leap that these charges would generate widespread outrage; consumer advocates were practically foaming at the mouth as soon as these charges appeared. The only logical answer is that all of the companies in question believed that the bonanza of revenue to be gained with new fees would make up for the loss in business – which remains to be seen…
It’s bad science to claim that Southwest’s excellent year lies entirely in their refusal to charge baggage fees; there might well have been other factors involved. However, when you consider the implications of that refusal, a different picture emerges. If we consider that Southwest was moved to make this decision based on a superior understanding of what their key customer base actually wants – and of what actions might draw customers away from the competition – then this move is more than just an opportunistic move away from their industry’s mainstream, but rather the natural result of superior strategy and forward planning. It should be interesting to see what happens going forward; if the full-service carriers continue to annoy their customers to little financial benefit; if Southwest continues to give people service they want at prices that appeal to them; if the American public (or at least that part of it that travels by airplane) continues to vote with their feet…
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Fair and Balanced?
I was online reading news stories this week, and I came across a gleeful piece about how Newsday, the Long Island daily paper, made a huge mistake in making its web side a pay service. The authors were obviously appalled that anyone would be trying to charge for web content – even as little as $5 per week – and were crowing that after three months, only 35 people had signed up for the pay service. The authors also mentioned the $4 million that Newsday spent redesigning their website, and calculated that the paper has grossed $9,000 – suggesting that the remaining $3,991,000 was a waste of money, and that the site’s readership has dropped from millions of people each month to just 35. If you didn’t already assume a healthy skepticism about anything you read on line, let me suggest that this article would be a good place to start…
If you actually read down through the rest of the story, which you can find in the New York Observer online site, you will find out that the drop in traffic to the Newsday site is significant – it goes from 2.2 million unique visits in October to 1.5 million in December – but hardly the disaster the headline would imply. You will also note that the site is available free of charge to anyone who already has a subscription to the paper or subscribes to Optimum Cable, one of the local cable providers (which happens to be owned by the same people who own the newspaper). Together, that’s believed to be something along the lines of 75% of the population of Long Island. We might also wonder if the drop is actually going to affect the long-term performance of the paper, since it has only been three months since it became a pay service…
Now, no one is claiming that charging money for content on the Internet is an especially successful business strategy; most of the companies that have tried it so far have met with marginal results at best. It’s especially problematic in the news business, since there are still a large number of free news services available online, and all of them will carry the same news stories – sometimes literally, as in the case of stories purchased from the AP, UPI, Reuter’s and other wire services. And it probably is true that if the traffic flow to the Newsday site continues to drop the owners will find it increasingly difficult to sell advertising space on the page. I’m even willing to concede that life has become hellish for the local reporting staff working for Newsday, and that they are desperately unhappy with the current configuration of their employer (to the point of resurrecting the nickname “Hellville” for Long Island). The headline is still deceptive…
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it hardly matters if someone who runs a free-content website is complaining about pay-for-access sites; even assuming that they’re not jealous of the $9,000 in subscription money (that’s the equivalent of a LOT of paid Internet advertising, folks), they’re still right that charging for content is both obnoxious and silly – especially given the availability of alternate websites. I just can’t help thinking that if we’re going to hold up unpaid web producers (and bloggers) as some pure and unbiased reporting source, then we have the same responsibility for telling the truth and checking the facts as any other news source – and we deserve the same mockery and contempt when we slant the news to suit our own particular biases…
Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong…
If you actually read down through the rest of the story, which you can find in the New York Observer online site, you will find out that the drop in traffic to the Newsday site is significant – it goes from 2.2 million unique visits in October to 1.5 million in December – but hardly the disaster the headline would imply. You will also note that the site is available free of charge to anyone who already has a subscription to the paper or subscribes to Optimum Cable, one of the local cable providers (which happens to be owned by the same people who own the newspaper). Together, that’s believed to be something along the lines of 75% of the population of Long Island. We might also wonder if the drop is actually going to affect the long-term performance of the paper, since it has only been three months since it became a pay service…
Now, no one is claiming that charging money for content on the Internet is an especially successful business strategy; most of the companies that have tried it so far have met with marginal results at best. It’s especially problematic in the news business, since there are still a large number of free news services available online, and all of them will carry the same news stories – sometimes literally, as in the case of stories purchased from the AP, UPI, Reuter’s and other wire services. And it probably is true that if the traffic flow to the Newsday site continues to drop the owners will find it increasingly difficult to sell advertising space on the page. I’m even willing to concede that life has become hellish for the local reporting staff working for Newsday, and that they are desperately unhappy with the current configuration of their employer (to the point of resurrecting the nickname “Hellville” for Long Island). The headline is still deceptive…
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it hardly matters if someone who runs a free-content website is complaining about pay-for-access sites; even assuming that they’re not jealous of the $9,000 in subscription money (that’s the equivalent of a LOT of paid Internet advertising, folks), they’re still right that charging for content is both obnoxious and silly – especially given the availability of alternate websites. I just can’t help thinking that if we’re going to hold up unpaid web producers (and bloggers) as some pure and unbiased reporting source, then we have the same responsibility for telling the truth and checking the facts as any other news source – and we deserve the same mockery and contempt when we slant the news to suit our own particular biases…
Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong…
Sunday, January 24, 2010
The Ethics of Special Promotions
There was a humorous news story online this week about a bar in Singapore that is planning to take the traditional “Ladies Night” promotion to an extreme never seen in the Western World: called “Fill My Cups” it’s a merchandise give-away program that offers free drinks to women based on bra size. The better endowed the woman is, the more free drinks she gets, with those in the “D” or higher sizes getting a free bottle of premium vodka (which retails locally for the equivalent of $168 USD). You can read the story here if you want to, but assuming that the news site offering the story isn’t just having one on us, the piece offers a number of interesting ethical questions…
First off, doesn’t this count as discrimination? In the U.S. there have already been lawsuits complaining that conventional “Ladies Night” programs, which merely feature discounted drinks for all persons claiming to be female, unfairly discriminate against male bar patrons. Most of these cases have been thrown out on the grounds that the businesses are merely attempting to attract a segment of the population that has traditionally be underserved in their industry (and that most male bar patrons would rather have more women in the place than lower booze prices anyway), but when we start getting into the range of two or three days of take-home pay at minimum wage (or a week’s worth of groceries for a family of four) this doesn’t seem as funny, somehow. Giving one class of customer with specific appearance characteristics free merchandise while excluding all of the others is just one small step away from having different pricing scales for people on the basis of whether or not you like them, which is one even smaller step away from doing so based on skin color or ethnicity – which isn’t funny at all…
On the other side of the issue, the bar in this story isn’t planning to make a regular policy of giving away merchandise to anyone; the promotion is a single-night event for which they are taking reservations in advance. Moreover, the event is clearly a loss-leader; the owners are hoping that the women receiving free drinks will bring male companions (who will have to pay for their own drinks) or attract single males who will, in turn, consider a venue populated by large-breasted women who have been drinking heavily to be suitable to their own requirements. Viewed in this context, the event isn’t any more discriminatory than any other loss-leader, and if the women in the bar’s market consider the idea offensive or derogatory, they have the very simple action of not attending. This leads us to consider the question of whether it is ethically correct for people who are not being harmed in any substantive way to interfere with a business development stunt simply because they don’t approve of it. If the owners feel this program will increase their business, don’t they have a right to stage such an event in peace?
Of course, we can also argue about the corrosive effects of additional appearance-based value judgments, the promotion of alcohol consumption, the objectification of women, or inappropriate loss-leader promotions on our society (or Singapore’s society, anyway) in general, and the ethics of all of those things, but that’s really beyond the scope of the story – and today’s question. Is the loss-leader promotion described in the linked news story an unethical business practice that promotes the worst elements of society in order to sell more intoxicants, or is it a harmless business-development exercise? It’s worth thinking about…
First off, doesn’t this count as discrimination? In the U.S. there have already been lawsuits complaining that conventional “Ladies Night” programs, which merely feature discounted drinks for all persons claiming to be female, unfairly discriminate against male bar patrons. Most of these cases have been thrown out on the grounds that the businesses are merely attempting to attract a segment of the population that has traditionally be underserved in their industry (and that most male bar patrons would rather have more women in the place than lower booze prices anyway), but when we start getting into the range of two or three days of take-home pay at minimum wage (or a week’s worth of groceries for a family of four) this doesn’t seem as funny, somehow. Giving one class of customer with specific appearance characteristics free merchandise while excluding all of the others is just one small step away from having different pricing scales for people on the basis of whether or not you like them, which is one even smaller step away from doing so based on skin color or ethnicity – which isn’t funny at all…
On the other side of the issue, the bar in this story isn’t planning to make a regular policy of giving away merchandise to anyone; the promotion is a single-night event for which they are taking reservations in advance. Moreover, the event is clearly a loss-leader; the owners are hoping that the women receiving free drinks will bring male companions (who will have to pay for their own drinks) or attract single males who will, in turn, consider a venue populated by large-breasted women who have been drinking heavily to be suitable to their own requirements. Viewed in this context, the event isn’t any more discriminatory than any other loss-leader, and if the women in the bar’s market consider the idea offensive or derogatory, they have the very simple action of not attending. This leads us to consider the question of whether it is ethically correct for people who are not being harmed in any substantive way to interfere with a business development stunt simply because they don’t approve of it. If the owners feel this program will increase their business, don’t they have a right to stage such an event in peace?
Of course, we can also argue about the corrosive effects of additional appearance-based value judgments, the promotion of alcohol consumption, the objectification of women, or inappropriate loss-leader promotions on our society (or Singapore’s society, anyway) in general, and the ethics of all of those things, but that’s really beyond the scope of the story – and today’s question. Is the loss-leader promotion described in the linked news story an unethical business practice that promotes the worst elements of society in order to sell more intoxicants, or is it a harmless business-development exercise? It’s worth thinking about…
Saturday, January 23, 2010
The Grad School Diaries: Still At the Zoo
“Another cracker, my dear?” I asked, offering the package to my wife. She accepted one gracefully, and we leaned back into the patio furniture. I took another sip from my drink, and considered the show going on before us. About a hundred yards away, a brightly-painted airplane came screaming down the runway and vanished again into the mist.
“Was that a CRJ?” my wife asked, referring to the commonly-used short-haul aircraft formally called a Canadair Regional Jet by the manufacturer.
“One of the early ones,” I agreed. “All of the CRJ family have the same basic form – narrow fuselage, T-tail, tip spoilers, fuselage-mounted engines and so on, but the 100 and 200 models are about ten meters shorter than the later 700 and 1000 types.”
It’s trivia that only an airplane hobbyist (or flight crew member, perhaps) would care about, but my long-suffering spouse has had many years of experience with my obsession and knows to expect this sort of behavior when there are airplanes around. We’re sitting on the enclosed patio at the Air Zoo’s original facility, a much smaller building located a quarter-mile or so closer to the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport. I’d imagine that having the museum located right next to the runway of a full-sized airport was very appealing when they were first getting organized, but today most of the attention is on the newer building, which includes an actual snack bar and a dining area overlooking the main gallery. The only food facilities here at the original facility are a trio of vending machines on the glassed-in patio overlooking the airfield…
We spent most of the morning walking around and looking at airplanes in the new facility, then drove down the service road to this smaller building, which has a definite 1970s flavor to it, with a focus on space exploration and the (then new) Space Shuttle program. I always enjoy that sort of exhibit, but for me the real treasure here is the World War II exhibits, which include old friends like the Corsair and Hellcat, but also include much rarer birds, like the Douglas Dauntless and the Waco glider. It’s one of the only collections I’ve ever seen that has the Hellcat and the earlier Wildcat displayed side-by-side with the graceful Corsair and the powerful Skyraider. They also feature classics like the F-80 Shooting Star and F-86 SaberJet, and a military version of the DC-3 (called a Skytrain) that you can actually climb into. And the only examples of the B-57 Canberra and F-84F Thunderstreak I’ve ever gotten to see up close…
Not that long ago I was still thinking about one day pursuing an advanced degree in history, most likely as a retirement project. Without a college degree in history (or any reason for graduate programs to take me seriously), getting in would have been a challenge, and with my middle-aged-man’s memory getting worse every year, I don’t know how I could have passed Comprehensive exams. But over many years of frantic scrambling, working multiple minimum-wage jobs just to stay alive and being bewildered by many aspects of my life, there have been times when spending the whole day pottering around a facility like this, studying the subject of my obsession at close range in the dry, cool silence, sounded like heaven itself…
I know it’s an illusion, of course. I’ve experienced a real doctoral program now, and serenity does not seem to be a regular part of the experience. Going for a doctorate in history would probably be just as stressful and just as bewildering as the program I’m in now, and it seems doubtful that anyone is going to let me take a degree in The History of Airplanes anyway. All things considered, there’s probably more serenity to be had sitting here, on a comfortable patio that apparently no one ever uses, watching the world go by and having a vending-machine snack with the love of my life. The serenity here is also illusory; soon enough we will have to get back in the Torrent and head back to East Lansing, so I can spend the rest of Spring Break working madly to try to catch up. But for the moment, it seems like more than enough to just be here today…
“Was that a CRJ?” my wife asked, referring to the commonly-used short-haul aircraft formally called a Canadair Regional Jet by the manufacturer.
“One of the early ones,” I agreed. “All of the CRJ family have the same basic form – narrow fuselage, T-tail, tip spoilers, fuselage-mounted engines and so on, but the 100 and 200 models are about ten meters shorter than the later 700 and 1000 types.”
It’s trivia that only an airplane hobbyist (or flight crew member, perhaps) would care about, but my long-suffering spouse has had many years of experience with my obsession and knows to expect this sort of behavior when there are airplanes around. We’re sitting on the enclosed patio at the Air Zoo’s original facility, a much smaller building located a quarter-mile or so closer to the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport. I’d imagine that having the museum located right next to the runway of a full-sized airport was very appealing when they were first getting organized, but today most of the attention is on the newer building, which includes an actual snack bar and a dining area overlooking the main gallery. The only food facilities here at the original facility are a trio of vending machines on the glassed-in patio overlooking the airfield…
We spent most of the morning walking around and looking at airplanes in the new facility, then drove down the service road to this smaller building, which has a definite 1970s flavor to it, with a focus on space exploration and the (then new) Space Shuttle program. I always enjoy that sort of exhibit, but for me the real treasure here is the World War II exhibits, which include old friends like the Corsair and Hellcat, but also include much rarer birds, like the Douglas Dauntless and the Waco glider. It’s one of the only collections I’ve ever seen that has the Hellcat and the earlier Wildcat displayed side-by-side with the graceful Corsair and the powerful Skyraider. They also feature classics like the F-80 Shooting Star and F-86 SaberJet, and a military version of the DC-3 (called a Skytrain) that you can actually climb into. And the only examples of the B-57 Canberra and F-84F Thunderstreak I’ve ever gotten to see up close…
Not that long ago I was still thinking about one day pursuing an advanced degree in history, most likely as a retirement project. Without a college degree in history (or any reason for graduate programs to take me seriously), getting in would have been a challenge, and with my middle-aged-man’s memory getting worse every year, I don’t know how I could have passed Comprehensive exams. But over many years of frantic scrambling, working multiple minimum-wage jobs just to stay alive and being bewildered by many aspects of my life, there have been times when spending the whole day pottering around a facility like this, studying the subject of my obsession at close range in the dry, cool silence, sounded like heaven itself…
I know it’s an illusion, of course. I’ve experienced a real doctoral program now, and serenity does not seem to be a regular part of the experience. Going for a doctorate in history would probably be just as stressful and just as bewildering as the program I’m in now, and it seems doubtful that anyone is going to let me take a degree in The History of Airplanes anyway. All things considered, there’s probably more serenity to be had sitting here, on a comfortable patio that apparently no one ever uses, watching the world go by and having a vending-machine snack with the love of my life. The serenity here is also illusory; soon enough we will have to get back in the Torrent and head back to East Lansing, so I can spend the rest of Spring Break working madly to try to catch up. But for the moment, it seems like more than enough to just be here today…
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Don’t Respect the Wolf
I was reading through some news stories online today while I waited for the overworked printer in the Management office to chug through the articles I’m supposed to bring to class on Tuesday, and I noticed a certain amount of controversy over Photoshop, and the modified pictures it can produce. Some people have gone to great lengths to express their disapproval and dismay at these pictures; the reactions range from calls for stronger self-regulatory measures within the various media to t-shirts that mock bad Photoshop work being sold on the “Fail Blog” website. It’s a silly thing to get worked up over, of course – retouched pictures and other photographic fakes have been around for over a century and easily predate the electronic computer itself, and they’ve never actually brought down our civilization. But then I noticed a story that proves you don’t even need Photoshop to throw a spanner in the works…
A story available on the UPI Online “Odd News” page details the controversy surrounding the winning entry in the British Natural History Museum’s annual photography contest, which has now been disqualified because the photo depicts a rented wolf. I was not previously aware that it was possible to rent large carnivores for photo shoots, but it appears that this particular wolf, named “Ossian,” is a well-known specimen from a wildlife park outside of Madrid. The Museum is insisting that the photographer return the cash prize ($16,300 USD), and says it intends to ban him from future competitions. Meanwhile, other nature photographers (and zoologists) are saying that the Museum should have known the photograph was a fake immediately, since the wolf in it is hurdling a fence like a racehorse, instead of sensibly pushing through the opening in the rails, the way an actual wild animal would…
My immediate reaction was “you can’t blame a guy for trying,” followed by puzzlement that anyone really cares if the wolf is wild, rented or part of a three-year carnivore lease program from GMAC. Unless the contest specified that the photos had to be of wild animals, captured in the wild by a photographer who had slept on the ground and eaten freeze-dried beans for a week, in order to qualify, I can’t imagine why it matters where, when or how the winning entry was obtained. It’s not like the animal in the picture isn’t actually a wolf, or that wolves can’t (or for that matter absolutely wouldn’t ever) jump over fences, especially if there are tasty farm animals on the other side. But I think the key thing to consider here is that there was almost certainly someone going over these pictures to make sure they hadn’t been altered in Photoshop (or the equivalent), and that individual did not notice anything was wrong – because he or she was probably just looking for digitally altered photos, and this one hadn’t been tampered with. It just wasn’t real in the first place…
The lesson here is that the threat isn’t always where you expect it to be, and the counter-measures you’ve emplaced aren’t always the right ones. You could have hired the MIT Media Lab to analyze this picture, spent tens of millions of dollars going over it pixel by pixel, and still never spotted a hoax that was created using a method that would have been possible a century ago. Computerized security is only as good as the people using it, and if the managers involved don’t stop to consider the possibilities, then there’s an excellent chance that the product you just bought really exists, and does what the seller claims it does, but is still not what it appears to be. Because, let’s face it: sooner or later, somebody is going to present you with your industry’s equivalent of a rented wolf. The question is, are you going to notice that they’ve done so…
A story available on the UPI Online “Odd News” page details the controversy surrounding the winning entry in the British Natural History Museum’s annual photography contest, which has now been disqualified because the photo depicts a rented wolf. I was not previously aware that it was possible to rent large carnivores for photo shoots, but it appears that this particular wolf, named “Ossian,” is a well-known specimen from a wildlife park outside of Madrid. The Museum is insisting that the photographer return the cash prize ($16,300 USD), and says it intends to ban him from future competitions. Meanwhile, other nature photographers (and zoologists) are saying that the Museum should have known the photograph was a fake immediately, since the wolf in it is hurdling a fence like a racehorse, instead of sensibly pushing through the opening in the rails, the way an actual wild animal would…
My immediate reaction was “you can’t blame a guy for trying,” followed by puzzlement that anyone really cares if the wolf is wild, rented or part of a three-year carnivore lease program from GMAC. Unless the contest specified that the photos had to be of wild animals, captured in the wild by a photographer who had slept on the ground and eaten freeze-dried beans for a week, in order to qualify, I can’t imagine why it matters where, when or how the winning entry was obtained. It’s not like the animal in the picture isn’t actually a wolf, or that wolves can’t (or for that matter absolutely wouldn’t ever) jump over fences, especially if there are tasty farm animals on the other side. But I think the key thing to consider here is that there was almost certainly someone going over these pictures to make sure they hadn’t been altered in Photoshop (or the equivalent), and that individual did not notice anything was wrong – because he or she was probably just looking for digitally altered photos, and this one hadn’t been tampered with. It just wasn’t real in the first place…
The lesson here is that the threat isn’t always where you expect it to be, and the counter-measures you’ve emplaced aren’t always the right ones. You could have hired the MIT Media Lab to analyze this picture, spent tens of millions of dollars going over it pixel by pixel, and still never spotted a hoax that was created using a method that would have been possible a century ago. Computerized security is only as good as the people using it, and if the managers involved don’t stop to consider the possibilities, then there’s an excellent chance that the product you just bought really exists, and does what the seller claims it does, but is still not what it appears to be. Because, let’s face it: sooner or later, somebody is going to present you with your industry’s equivalent of a rented wolf. The question is, are you going to notice that they’ve done so…
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