Flickr Foundr Stewart Butterfield comments about his time in Tokyo in the kind embrace of culinary navigator Shinji Nohara. Shinji has gone live with his new website, Tokyo Fixer.
One of his services is described as “location hunting”, which is a wonderful term (and familiar from my publishing period in Tokyo) and is a superset to “culinary navigation”, as it encompasses finding sites for various moments or experiences, such as photoshoots.
We picked a Schoolhouse Rock compilation from ABC and Rhino Records recently. First conclusion: my long-held fuzzy warm sentiment towards Schoolhouse Rock was based more on misty childhood nostalgia - Schoolhouse Rock is brilliant. It’s now on heavy rotation in my son’s room.
Renewed also is my appreciation for De La Soul and Prince Paul for combining Three is a Magic Number with Led Zeppelin’s The Crunge. Now to find my old copy of 3 Feet High and Rising.
Man slices off finger, applies pixie dust, finger grows back.
The “pixie dust” comes from the University of Pittsburgh, though in the lab Dr Stephen Badylak prefers to call it extra cellular matrix.
I’ve been doing research on enhancements in man-machine interface, i.e., the means of enabling interaction and transfer of information back and forth between you and your computer or wireless device. Examples include “earcons” or “tactons“, which, as the names might imply, are audio or tactile icons, or phones with broader, icon-based touchscreens like the iPhone or HTC Touch.
My favorite category so far = neural interface, or brain-computer interface. The category is verdant, with product releases over the past few months from companies like Emotiv, Neurosky, and OCZ Technology. All three have launched headset products for the gaming industry.
On April 9th the FCC adopted rules in keeping with the WARN (Warning, Alert, and Response Network) Act of 2006, extending emergency alerts to wireless carriers. The Commission opened a docket (04-296) on the subject in 2004, pre-Katrina and pre-Virginia Tech, but both lent urgency to the task.
“Participating” wireless carriers will carry emergency alerts in three categories:
- Presidential Alerts - national emergency-related alerts delivered to the American public that would preempt any other pending alerts;
- Imminent Threat Alerts - alerts with information on emergencies that may pose an imminent risk to people’s lives or well-being; and
- Child Abduction Emergency/AMBER Alerts - alerts related to missing or endangered children due to an abduction or runaway situation.
In my view “Imminent Threat” (a hazmat plume? a train crash? a Cessna in the wrong air space?) leaves some gray area for interpretation and many municipalities, such as San Francisco and Contra Costa, are proceeding with their own initiatives.
The underlying assumption behind all this is that the age where the bulk of the population could be reached through their TV or radio has ended. ~85% of the US population carries a cellphone with them at all times. For college students, this figure is probably around 100%, hence the relevance of wireless alerts during an incident like Virginia Tech.
This assumes that wireless networks will stay operational during times of duress and heavy network load, which was not the case during 9/11, the Northeast blackout, and Katrina. This was one reason a working group was created at the FCC to determine what kind of alerts would be carried and in what format, as the carriers were worried about network burden if sending out massive amounts of text-based alerts (along with vibrating and visual notification for the hearing impaired.) The FCC has required carriers to have back-up power of 8 hours, which was the subject of an earlier post.
Linking to a past contributed article on the subject of wireless alerts and location.
The FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is holding a summit on the subject of Promoting an Effective Emergency Alert System on the Road to a Next Generation EAS on May 19.
Yahoo Sports, Deadspin, FanIQ and Reuters Oddly Enough deservedly covered the story that a Japanese high school pitcher threw 250 pitches in giving up 66 runs in two innings before his manager called the game. Truly a mercy yanking.
To lend some perspective, in US major league baseball today, going over 100 pitches is generally considered a “high” pitch count.
But before we get up in arms about this modern day Billy Martin ruining this poor kid’s arm (and head) for life, let’s reflect back on the whole Daisuke Matsuzaka legend, which began during his own high school career in Japan and was cemented by precisely that same feat - throwing 250 pitches in a 17-inning win, as a high schooler, during the Koshien High School Baseball Tournament, which is kinda like our March Madness, but involves…teenage high school kids, playing baseball in front of rabid fans and a more rabid press. He did this the day after throwing a 148-pitch, complete game shutout, and threw in relief the following night. Obviously he survived the experience and went on to take a lot of Boston owner John Henry’s money.
Dusty Baker should be so lucky as to coach high school baseball in Japan.
Here’s a link to Japanese coverage in Sankei Sports (Sanspo) of the incident. Apparently the game between Shinshukan and Kawamoto was scored as 9-0 in favor of Shinshukan, after Kawamoto Manager Iida requested the game be halted after the pitcher threw his…250th pitch. The pitcher’s name was mercifully withheld.
250 = it’s the new 100.
On April 13 the Chronicle ran an enlightening and frightening article on the state of emergency response in San Francisco. Slow call response times and dispatch lags are believed to have led to increased fatalities on the part of patients in need of rapid resuscitation.
Gustave Grialou was one of at least 439 people who have died in San Francisco since February 2004 while waiting for a late ambulance or after delayed medical help arrived, according to a Chronicle analysis of dispatch logs for about 200,000 high-priority medical calls.In 27 percent of those calls, first responders failed to meet the city’s standard for getting help to the scene of high-priority medical calls. In some areas of the city, such as the Ingleside and Excelsior districts, the odds of an ambulance being late are almost 40 percent.
While it is impossible to know how many of the 439 people who died would have survived had medical help arrived earlier, studies show a direct relationship between ambulance delays and the survival rates of patients in need of immediate resuscitation.
You can break emergency response to a 9-1-1 roughly into 3 parts.
1) time it takes to get through to a calltaker
2) time it takes to derive enough information about the caller and his location to dispatch emergency response
3) time it takes to get EMTs to the caller
Judging from the article, San Francisco has flaws in all 3 parts.
(more…)
Simple yet great pleasure: putting my kid to sleep to Kind of Blue.
Links:
- MilesDavis.com Kind of Blue page
- Lavish Kind of Blue fan site
- Tohru, who first turned me on to Miles Davis in high school.
Dear United Airlines:
Over the years I have flown about 330,000 miles on you. Not a million, but not a small number either. Flights to Tokyo, flights to Dulles, flights to Orlando. Flights that may have cost a little more than competition but preserved my status, which, at the time, seemed important.
9/11 came and went. Travel went down, then came back. The government handed out money, and you spent it.
I’ve watched you go in and out of bankruptcy. I’ve watched you *not* hedge in the face of rising oil prices and then complain about rising oil prices. Your competition, at least some of it, was able to hedge and talks about it each quarter in its investor filings so I know it’s possible. I’ve made money on one competitor’s stock. Repeatedly.
In recent years, with parenthood, with competition (on on-time record, on destination, on price, on service, and on total flight duration), and due to general frustration at poor service from you, I’ve been less faithful. In particular, JetBlue and Southwest have taken business that used to go to you. I’ve used up my miles as much as possible, either on free travel or on Red Carpet Club memberships.
And well, you’ve rewarded me for it, by reducing my status, or better yet, by limiting the amount of co-passengers I can lift up with me to better seats to one. Basically, at the time of greatest need, i.e., when traveling with my wife and toddler son, you boot me to the back of the bus. To add insult to injury, there was a time when you boarded “families traveling with small children or needing extra time to board” first. Apparently that courtesy has been forgotten. A gate agent today told us that “children are a blessing, not a burden.” Great spin, but as my wife and I stand with toddler, car seat, diaper bag, and his and hers laptop bags, I can see why that’s a false dichotomy.
Today was the last straw. We’re traveling to see relatives on short notice. Concern is a co-passenger, plus we’re traveling with a toddler, which is as we’ve established, complicates things already. (See this post on the danger boiled water presents to the homeland.)
But nonetheless, we are doughty, hardy souls. We got to the airport early. You punted on seating us and sent us to the gate agent, who punted until he was done dealing with the previous flight. In the end, you didn’t punt, you just dropped the ball, and in the ensuing mess decided that seating a 14-month-old by himself was a fine idea. We weren’t alone - other parents were similarly hosed and this led to a long horsetrading process that only complicated departure further as parents tried to, um, sit with their kids.
And that, my friends in the friendly skies, was the last straw. I will be taking the remainder of my business over to JetBlue, Southwest, Virgin, ANA, or ABU - Anyone But United, whenever possible. A drop in a big bucket, perhaps, but a drop nonetheless. In the wireless business they call this churn. It adds up. Smart companies try to prevent this by preserving customer loyalty. It’s easier - and cheaper - to keep a customer than attract a new one. (Hmm. Perhaps you could secure customers through offering two-year service contracts with some subsidized hardware like the wireless carriers do?)
I imagine you must feel some schadenfreude watching ATA and Aloha go belly-up (and now Frontier?), especially since they probably don’t have the scale or lobbying schwack to cadge out a bailout. Remember, there but for the grace and non-economic reasoning of Uncle Sam go you. Multiple times.
Sincerely yours,
Jon Metzler
ex-United frequent flyer
