Monthly Archives: June 2003

The Truth About Better Mousetraps

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From today’s NewsScan Daily:

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE TRUTH ABOUT BETTER MOUSETRAPS

In his interesting new book “How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising
Truth About How Companies Innovate,” UC-Davis technology management profess
Andrew Hargadon writes:

“Rarely, if ever, are the networks that surround an innovation in its
earliest stages given the credit they are due. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous
advice, ‘Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your
door,’ simply isn’t true. The world will *not* build a path to your door. As
John H. Lienhard, professor of mechanical engineering and history at the
University of Houston, notes, the patent office has issued some 4,400
patents for better mousetraps, and only 20 or so have made any money (the
most successful, the spring trap, was patented in 1899). Each year, 400 more
people apply for patents on improved mousetraps, maybe set out a doormat,
and wait for the world to beat its path to them.

“But a better mousetrap, like anything else, will succeed only when
those who envision the idea convince others to join in their new venture –
as investors, suppliers, employees, retailers, customers, and even
competitors. These other bring their own connections with them, like Walter
Flanders brought some of the best ideas and machines of mass production to
the Ford Motor Company. The impacts we see are often the result of the
community that picked up and ran with the initial well-intentioned, but
underdeveloped, ideas. Take Emerson’s now-famous quote. In actuality, he
never said it. The quote originated some seven years after Emerson’s death.
What Emerson actually said was, ‘[I]f a man has good corn, or wood, or
boards, or pigs to sell… you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his
house.’ Emerson was not talking about innovation but simply about selling a
good product. The quote became so much more because others picked it up and
ran with it. This is the same story we see for many, if not most,
innovations.”

[See
Andrew Hargadon's "How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About
How Companies Innovate" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We
donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy
programs.)]

Poster Child

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A few years ago, when I went out to see live music once or twice a week, I began to amass a small collection of posters (including the two pictured in this posting). Chicago is home to a few really excellent artists who design and often hand-print their own posters, usually for concerts, but of course for other stuff too.
A few weeks ago I stumbled across a few links for two of Chicago’s finest (and I don’t mean police officers), and I’ve been meaning to post them ever since:

Jay Ryan‘s virtual gallery, The Bird Machine,
Dan Grzeca @ GigPosters.com, and
some of Dan Grzeca’s work for sale via Atavistic.com.

The Chinese car

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Within 10 to 20 years the Chinese will be able to sell a car that is very similar to today’s rental car:  4 doors, 4 seats, air conditioner, radio, new but not fancy.  It will cost between $2000 and $3000 in today’s dollars.  With cars that cheap it will be unthinkable to manufacture in the U.S.  Consumers won’t bother to finance a $2000 purchase separately (maybe they’ll add it to their credit card debt).  Drivers will still carry liability insurance but won’t bother with collision or theft coverage.  With cars that cheap it won’t make sense to advertise.  If Ford or Toyota tried to sell the average person a $25,000 car they would simply laugh, much as a Walmart shopper would think you’re crazy if you tried to persuade him to spend $2,000 on a TV.

People react with disbelief to this idea.  Americans love their cars and identify with them.  Consumers will pay for prestige and image.  All true, of course, but think of how liberating it is to drive a rental Camry or Taurus with the Collision Damage Waiver.  You don’t lock it.  You don’t worry about it.  You’re care-free.  You don’t say “this is the greatest driving experience of my life” but the car is more than fine for sitting in traffic, which is mostly what urbanites do.  After three years when it begins to require service you re-export it to Latin America and buy yourself a new one.

excerpted from The Chinese Car at Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

MusicMoz : The Open Music Project

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Today I came across the Open Music Project, aka MusicMoz. It’s an effort to collaboratively compile open, shareable music-oriented data.
This is reminiscent of the first idea I had for a web project, back in 1993 when I hacked up the WNUR JazzWeb. Except that these guys know what they are doing. It’s mildly embarassing that the JazzWeb is still online, and in many places unchanged in the last ten years. At the time, people were very excited about it, but then, this was just slightly before people were actually doing interesting things with the web. (Please, if you go poking around the JazzWeb, cut me some slack. I haven’t had an account with access to those files for years, and apparently no one at WNUR is keeping them up…)
Anyway, reminiscent of the JazzWeb, except that these guys have much more of a clue about how to do it. The founders are meta-editors in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and have at least some technology behind MusicMoz. I just had emacs and the occasional files harvested from rec.music.bluenote or the improv mailing lists.
Can it be done? Certainly the Internet Movie Database compiled a remarkable amount of information from enthusiastic volunteers (before it was bought by Amazon, who have crassly put ads for the new Harry Potter book on the front page of a movie database.) And even though the CDDB doesn’t have much meta-data, it’s still incredibly great to not have to punch in the track details when I go to rip a CD. (Although with my somewhat esoteric listening habits, I still occasionally have the privilege of entering in an album myself, as earlier today when Gino Robair’s Other Destinations came up blank.)
Well, I submitted release details to MusicMoz for the CD issue of Max Roach’s M’Boom today. I was tempted to volunteer as an editor, but then I remembered that my enthusiasm for maintaining the JazzWeb didn’t survive for all that long. But kudos to them for having the spirit of the old-school internet days, and best of luck to them.

Republican Ralph?

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Agence France Presse has the latest report on Ralph Nader‘s presidential plans. Looks like he’s mulling an independent run or — even Republican primary challenge to Bush — if the Green Party does the sensible thing and avoids a repeat of his 2000 bid.
    ”Wouldn’t that be interesting? A Republican run?” Nader says, arguing that even GOP voters deserve a choice. This eye-catching but bizarre notion will last about as long as one of Ralph’s speeches, and not much longer. But by staying coy and not making his intentions clear, Nader is
actually repeating a core mistake of his 2000 run, which was to declare
his candidacy too late to maximize his campaign potential. He even
admitted as much in his book, Crashing the Party. Which, of course, will make a lot of Nader detractors happy.

from TOMPAINE.com

My Name In Lights… er, Pictures

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Meg Hourihan referred to a suggestion of doing a Google images search for images of people with your surname.
As “germuska” is an uncommon name in most of the world outside of Slovakia and Hungary (and not all that common there), this seemed promising. The search turned up the photo to the left, apparently from the time of the 1956 revolution in Hungary, which no longer shows up in the page purported to be its source. It’s fun to imagine that I’m related to someone in the photo. I suppose it’s possible, although it would be indirectly; my Grandfather and his family came to the US from Budapest during World War One. Besides, the way these image searches work, there’s no reason to believe that my name has anything to do with anyone in the picture. More likely it was somehow associated with this researcher who shows up in a Google search for my name on that site. Of course, I don’t speak or read a word of Hungarian, and of course it’s not a language served well by online translation systems.
I’ve also known for a while that there’s a pocket of Germuskas in Florida, although I have no reason to think I’m related to any of them. But one of them is an officer of the Florida School Counselor Association.
It also turns up a couple of shots from my days at Northwestern, including me with Senator Dick Durbin and me behind the soundboard at WNUR.
On an unrelated and quite silly note: while checking to see if Google would translate the pages I found from Hungarian to English, I found that among the foreign languages which Google supports are Elmer Fudd, Bork bork bork! Pig Latin and Klingon.

Changed the Subject

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In Bush’s 9/11 Coverup, Salon.com reports on the administrations successes in diverting public attention from a full investigation into the intelligence failures which preceded the terrorist strikes. A few interview subjects note how the war in Iraq pretty much distracted the news media from the unanswered questions. In the meantime, historically, it hasn’t always taken this long to get to the bottom of similar catastrophic surprises:

For instance, on April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg, killing approximately 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers. According to historians, Titanic survivors began disembarking in New York at 10 o’clock on the night of April 18. The next morning at 10:30, a special panel of the Senate Commerce Committee was gaveled into session inside the ornate East Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Last year, when Cheney called Daschle to urge him to limit any hearings into 9/11, the V.P. argued it would drain sources away from the war on terrorism. By contrast, just 11 days after Japanese bombers hit the U.S. with a sneak attack killing nearly 3,000 people, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating a commission to “ascertain and report the facts relating to the attack made by Japanese armed forces upon the Territory of Hawaii on December 7, 1941 … and to provide bases for sound decisions whether any derelictions of duty or errors of judgment on the part of United States Army or Navy personnel contributed to such successes as were achieved by the enemy on the occasion mentioned.” It was the first of eight government-led investigations into the Pearl Harbor.

The Warren Commission, headed by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, was formed just seven days after President Kennedy was assassinated. Last February, after seven astronauts died when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated 200,000 feet above Texas, NASA’s Columbia Accident Investigation Board was created 90 minutes after the incident; $50 million was immediately set aside for the probe. And in just four months, the board has already made public significant findings about the crash investigation.

By contrast, nearly two years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the 9/11 commission only recently opened up its New York City office. The commission’s budget has been increased to $14 million, but many experts say that’s still far short of the sum needed to do the job right.

It’s good to be reminded that things haven’t always been this way. I think that Americans should insist on the release of a report before next years elections, so as to be able to make an informed decision at the polls.

Google-jacking?

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Since I’ve been using Synergy (a fantastic i-Tunes controller), I’ve been mildly obsessed with getting album cover images for all the music in my iTunes library. See, synergy pops up a floating window each time a new track comes on and it includes the image if you have it (or if it can find it using the Amazon Web Services API). I guess I take it as a Google challenge to see if I can find digital cover images for some of the older and more obscure albums in my collection.
Anyway, one family of albums with hard to find covers are world music albums released by the much-missed but now defunct Original Music. I picked up a big box of CDs a few years ago when the label’s founder, John Storm Roberts was in the process of clearing out his back catalog. That was good timing.
Getting to the point (although I love Original Music so much that it’s hard to get to the point), I went looking for the cover of “Songs The Swahili Sing”, which Amazon lists, but without an image. After googling for the literal string “Songs The Swahili Sing” and poking through all five pages, I find this on the last page:

automatic dancing is Fotz teen nude
… Don Giovanni Finch han del vino Champag Some misc music files we would like to show
to you: Little Charles Give Me A Chance – Various Songs The Swahili Sing. …

lesbiannude.123456.nu/automatic_dancing.html – 5k – Cached – Similar pages

As you might guess from some of the text, it leads to a pretty racy page, not to a page about the album I was listening to. Is this some kind of “google-jacking”? How (and more importantly, why) did they get that string of text into the google search results for that page? It’s not actually in the text at the destination page. Very strange.

Travelling Shoes

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We just got back from a few days in muggy Virginia and Washington, DC. We visited some good friends and met their adorable newborn baby, and then went and celebrated the marriage of two good friends. We return jealous of the lovely rolling hills and greenery but very happy that Chicago won’t be that humid for at least a month or two. We noted the peculiar tendency of strip malls in the Richmond, VA area to have the word “festival” in their name (I suppose as we might have “commons” or “crossing”. )

I think I’ll check out one of those PHP photo album applications, but in the meantime, I’ll attach a couple of snaps to this blog entry.

We definitely came back with a share of the general inspiration that travel can bring… but nothing like Stefano Mazzocchi’s recent reflection on his travels in Peru…