Consumer Reports: the paradox of a consumer organization that hates its customers

Consumer Reports Ratings and recommendations available at ConsumerReports.org

This would be funny, if it weren't so irritating. I think there are broader lessons here than a single dysfunctional company. Many of us feel the pain of "brand reputation and quality" in a world where price competition is severe and consumers are overwhelmed with choices and making consistently "wrong" (IMHO) value decisions. Consider the story of Consumer Reports and my quest for a reliable air conditioner.

Consumer Reports is an old (once non-profit?) consumer oriented organization. It's not ad supported, I pay to get access to their web site. I went there looking for a quality of service and repair record information on air conditioners [1]. It might be there, but I couldn't find it. So I decided I was annoyed enough to send them some feedback.

So I find it quite amazing that, after 15 minutes of searching, I couldn't find any way to send them feedback on CR's services [1]. Maybe it's there, but it's professionally hidden (they've outsourced their web support to a separate company). I gave up. I expect that kind of thing from Amazon.com, but from Consumer Reports?

Did they get bought out by a some evil entity? Alas, the more likely explanation is that they're far more interested in their newly launched health services rating and education program than they are in providing the services I'm interested in. I suspect a deeply introspective and dysfunctional service company in a non-competitive niche. I wish they'd provide the services I need, but they so dominate this niche that I'm probably still better off paying for the crummy service they provide.

Of course give me an alternative and I'll be gone in a heartbeat ...

Quality of Consumer Reports and their outsourced customer support operation. Quality of Samsung air conditioners. Quality of Best Buy and their outsourced repair services. Getting data and providing feedback. It's a theme.

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[1] The feedback was that I don't care about 'air conditioner' test attributes as much as I care about reliability records and quality of service; CR doesn't provide the key data I want. In this case we'd bought a highly rated Samsung air conditioner from Best Buy. It worked for about a year, then it apparently lost coolant. We had it serviced under warrantee by a Best Buy contractor, after a one week repair, and upon later reinstallation, it still doesn't work. We don't have time to waste on this stuff, so we wrote off both Best Buy and Samsung (sorry guys, you only get one chance to deeply annoy us). I went to CR looking for some repair and service measures and couldn't find them. No wonder vendors don't bother to invest in quality!

Update 6/5: To be fair to CR, I wrote out a business plan for their recovery. In a not-unrelated event, today at the gym my one year old delicately handled SONY walkman died on me. I'm replacing it for now with a much abused "Jensen" device that I bought at a garage sale, it was made in China perhaps 8 years ago. Grr. The aggravation of disposable devices is never-ending.

Self-replicating device -- another step on the road

CNN.com - The machine that can copy anything - Jun 2, 2005

A device that can supposedly create some of its own most critical components. If it can also create other interesting devices, in theory it could allow massive distributed manufacturing. It's not 'grey-goo' nano-stuff, it still needs conventional raw materials and human activity.

Remember that quaint 1970s book by Toffler called 'Future Shock'? He greatly underestimated the ability to humans to adopt to change. The Future Shocks he described described are now beneath our everyday notice.

I wonder what our adaptive limit will be?

Apple has crummy server performance?

AnandTech: No more mysteries: Apple's G5 versus x86, Mac OS X versus Linux

A very technical analysis finds the G5 to be a reasonable workstation choice, but OS X fares poorly as a server solution.

The server performance of the Apple platform is, however, catastrophic. When we asked Apple for a reaction, they told us that some database vendors, Sybase and Oracle, have found a way around the threading problems. We'll try Sybase later, but frankly, we are very sceptical. The whole 'multi-threaded Mach microkernel trapped inside a monolithic FreeBSD cocoon with several threading wrappers and coarse-grained threading access to the kernel', with a 'backwards compatibility' millstone around its neck sounds like a bad fusion recipe for performance.

Workstation apps will hardly mind, but the performance of server applications depends greatly on the threading, signalling and locking engine. I am no operating system expert, but with the data that we have today, I think that a PowerPC optimised Linux such as Yellow Dog is a better idea for the Xserve than Mac OS X server.

I think they used 10.3 for testing. I wonder how the server results would look with 10.4? Apple made major challenges to the threading model.

Neandertal shall rise again

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Extinct cave bear DNA sequenced

Sequencing cave bear DNA was the test case. The real focus is on Neandertal DNA. Can anyone doubt that within 40 years a Neandertal infant will be born?

Revenge of the Bell Curve: selection for IQ in European Jews

Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes - New York Times

...Ashkenazi Jews occupied a different social niche from their European hosts, and that is where any selective effect must have operated, the Utah researchers say. From A.D. 800, when the Ashkenazi presence in Europe is first recorded, to about 1700, Ashkenazi Jews held a restricted range of occupations, which required considerable intellectual acumen. In France, most were moneylenders by A.D. 1100. Expelled from France in 1394, and from parts of Germany in the 15th century, they moved eastward and were employed by Polish rulers first as moneylenders and then as agents who paid a large tax to a noble and then tried to collect the amount, at a profit, from the peasantry. After 1700, the occupational restrictions on Jews were eased.

As to how the disease mutations might affect intelligence, the Utah researchers cite evidence that the sphingolipid disorders promote the growth and interconnection of brain cells. Mutations in the DNA repair genes, involved in second cluster of Ashkenazic diseases, may also unleash growth of neurons.

In describing what they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions. They say that the reason for this unusual record may be that differences in Ashkenazic and northern European I.Q. are not large at the average, where most people fall, but become more noticeable at the extremes; for people with an I.Q. over 140, the proportion is 4 per 1,000 among northern Europeans but 23 per 1,000 with Ashkenazim.

A 600% relative increase in near-genius. If the averages are in fact similar, however, this may imply a roughly 600% increase in the rate of retardation (autism?). (Note if 1/250 humans are almost-genius, imagine how clever the 6,500 1/1 million minds on earth are.)

This article appears in the Times next to one about the genetic determinants of gender preference in fruit flies. A useful coincidence. I'm amazed this article was written without mention of the infamous Bell Curve book. Similar comments about ethnicity and IQ, by the way, have been made about Scots and South Koreans.

If I were to bet I'd guess most of the diseases the authors refer to are in fact 'founder effect' diseases and unrelated to a selection for extreme IQ variability (both high and low); in other words, the main point of the paper is incorrect. I would further guess that the IQ variability is real and is genetically, not environmentally, determined.

I'd also guess that the IQ variability is primarily among males, and that the "genius" outcome operates through the same gene family variation produces autism in some people.

Of course the extremely incorrect aspect of this article is that if an ethnic group has a selection for higher IQ, the converse is also likely. Let's assume this were found to be so. Consider now my recent comments on the genetics of behavior. IF we have still have an advanced technological human culture in 2025, I suspect "meritocracy" may carry little more moral approval than plutocracy. Both represent the outcomes of chance.

Omelettes not in America

Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.

... you may have accidentally happened upon a few bodies halfway across the world (Afwhatsistan? Bagrawho?), which may or may not have pricked whatever remains of a long-dormant and desensitized National Conscience. And you may be asking yourself what the point of all this has been, what has driven Americans halfway around the globe to sieze innocent men, beat their legs to pulp, and chain them to ceilings until they die.

Regrettable, yes, but let us remember that these two eggs, like the dozens before them, and the tens of thousands before them, were broken to make the greatest and worthiest of omelettes, the most succulent of breakfasttime generational commitments, the proudest and most visionary of truck stop slop.

And there's more.

One gene, one gender preference

For Fruit Flies, Gene Shift Tilts Sex Orientation - New York Times

Gender behavior in the fruit fly is specified with a single gene.

"We have shown that a single gene in the fruit fly is sufficient to determine all aspects of the flies' sexual orientation and behavior," said the paper's lead author, Dr. Barry Dickson, senior scientist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. "It's very surprising.

"What it tells us is that instinctive behaviors can be specified by genetic programs, just like the morphologic development of an organ or a nose."...

...The finding supports scientific evidence accumulating over the past decade that sexual orientation may be innately programmed into the brains of men and women. Equally intriguing, the researchers say, is the possibility that a number of behaviors - hitting back when feeling threatened, fleeing when scared or laughing when amused - may also be programmed into human brains, a product of genetic heritage.

One might think a fly is quite different from a human, but genes that code for things as fundamental as gender preference tend to be highly conserved by evolution. If there's a similar gene in humans it may well have a significant effect on male gender behavior. (Gender preference in female humans is thought to more fluid than in male humans; we may not be the same as the fruit fly.)

The more we learn, the more programmed and machine-like humans seem. The research has been pretty consistent over the past 20 years. When popular books strive to preserve a role for the environment they provide examples that are frail and tend to fall quickly to further research. In contrast genetic control of behavior has held up well. Identical twin studies seemed to preserve more room for the environment, but since then we've learned that there's a large amount of variability in gene expression even among identical twins (esp. female twins).

What will we do with this knowledge? How will it alter our thinking on self-determination, on "merit", on responsibility, on punishment? If modern Republicanism rewards the luck of parental wealth, does not the meritocratic alternative reward the luck of parental genes? (Parental wealth and parental genes, of course, are generally correlated in any event.)

If we come to see all fortune, goodness and badness as merely the expressions of random chance, will we look differently at winners and losers alike? Will we one day return to the marxist doctrine of 'from each according to their means, to each according to their needs'?

Come back in twenty years and let's see.

Coalition casualties in Iraq: tally, details and news

I was thinking this morning of how little I know about what's going on in Iraq. It's a reasonably large, populous, and complex country. A bigger Yugoslavia. With Oil. Occupied too.

I wondered again why nobody seems to have a web site that that provides an english language digest of the editorial and news pages of 6 or so Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite daily newspapers.

The New York Times could do this. Forget about investing in journalists in Baghdad. They're expensive and prone to be kidnapped and murdered. Translate and summarize some Iraqi newspapers instead. Safer and more effective.

Odd.

While looking half-heartedly for such a thing, I came across this: Iraq Coalition Casualties. They have a news summary from the usual suspects (BBC, Guardian, etc) but also a tally of coalition (not Iraqi) casualties. The totals link to details and thus to death notices. They also provide links to similar pages in the "about" page. Somewhere to go when your child next Memorial day asks about soldiers.

iPod battery settlement: $50?

iPodlounge | Apple to offer $50 credit in iPod battery settlement

Maybe. It's not clear this is official yet.

Based on past experience I would not send a working iPod to Apple for a battery replacement. I did that once and it took two replacements and a letter to the MN attorney general to get another working iPod back.

I will, however, happily take the $50 credit. My wife will inherit my current iPod, and I will move to the 30G color version ...

At the moment the settlement site is hard to reach.

Office 12's promised Open XML file format: I'll chew my hat.

InformationWeek > Breaking News > Office 12 To Boost XML Support, Document Security > June 1, 2005

When Office 12 debuts next year, the default 'save-to' file format of the applications will be XML. Or at least a version which Microsoft is calling Microsoft Open XML Formats.

If Office 12 actually uses well documented file formats without intellectual property entanglements that other applications can readily and safely read and write, I'll (at least) chew my hat. File format control is so fundamental to Microsoft's business model this would only make sense if they are planning a radical transformation of their business model.

It does make sense if Microsoft plans to move to a 'rented software' model rather than the current no expiration 'licensed model'. Since I believe they very much want to move to a rented software model this move is not utterly inconceivable. So I'm only promising to chew rather than eat my hat.

BTW, Microsoft promised XML file formats for Office XP, but the implementation ended up being very proprietary and basically useless. This implementation resembles the OpenOffice file design: ascii XML with binary objects embedded in an enclosing zip file. Apple does something quite similar with their Office competitors.

Washing keyboards -- in the dishwasher

You CAN Put Your Keyboard in the Dishwasher

This is an old practice -- clean out a dirty keyboard by washing it. I read of this practice at least 8 years ago, and it's probably older.

Surprisingly it's said to work well for a variety of electronics, but not motors of any kind. Don't rapid-dry the keyboard. Fan drying is fine. Most people don't remove the keys, but older or somewhat loose keys may fall off and should be removed and stored prior to the dishwasher. Some say to avoid soap, but most agree a small amount of standard dishwasher soap works well.

The drying stage can take a few days.

Camera vendors of Brooklyn -- home of the "great deal"

Central Digital, d.b.a. dBuys.com, IBuyDigital.com, IBuyPlasma.com, RealDealShop.com, DigitalMegaStore.com, and CentralDigital.com

Brooklyn is the home of the low cost camera "deal". The companies selling these cameras operate on very low margins, and it turns out they have store fronts to match (and about 7 different names each).

Some of these vendors make money by cheating their customers. Others make their money on bundled accessories. I had a good personal experience with iBuyDigital, and, by comparison to their peers, they have a palatial store front (link above).

(iBuyDigital did pester me to buy some higher margin accessories, but that's only fair. I only used them once however. My other purchases have been at more traditional venues and Amazon.)

Making a threat threatening: six strategies for business

HBS Working Knowledge: Strategy: Six Steps for Making Your Threat Credible

Did you know there are entire journals dedicated to Negotiation? This is taken from an article by Deepak Malhotra (Harvard Business School). The tactics only work, however, if the opponent is clever enough to recognize them. I don't think that's always true. It's possible to be too clever ...

Israeli hackers use trojan software to spy on rival companies: Neuromancer lives

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli firms 'ran vast spy ring'

Neuromancer was not the first science fiction novel to describe a world of corporate hackers spying upon one another's software -- but it was the best of this genre. I hope someone interviews William Gibson for his commentary on this historic story. Historic because the events described will soon be so commonplace...

Police in Israel say they have uncovered a huge industrial spying ring which used computer viruses to probe the systems of many major companies.

At least 15 Israeli firms have been implicated in the espionage plot, with 18 people arrested in Israel and two more held by British police.

Among those under suspicion are major Israeli telecoms and media companies.

Police say the companies used a "Trojan horse" computer virus written by an Israeli to hack into rivals' systems.

Interpol and the authorities in Britain, Germany and the US are already involved in investigating the espionage, which Israeli police fear may involve major international companies.

Imagine the situation in Russia and China.

The last remaining shards of the media squeak up.

Washington Post: Assault On the Media

The barbarians have leveled the house and set fire to the fields. They advance on a loan scribe deep in the rubble. It gradually dawns on him that there's a war on, and maybe he should "fight back".

...I resisted writing about this subject precisely because I do not want anyone to confuse my own views with Newsweek's or The Post's.

I write about it now because of the new reports and because I fear that too many people in traditional journalism are becoming dangerously defensive in the face of a brilliantly conceived conservative attack on the independent media.

Conservative academics have long attacked "postmodernist" philosophies for questioning whether "truth" exists at all and claiming that what we take as "truths" are merely "narratives" woven around some ideological predisposition. Today's conservative activists have become the new postmodernists. They shift attention away from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations -- and move the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media organizations putting them forward. Just a modest number of failures can be used to discredit an entire enterprise.

Logic, rationality, empiricism. That's so Enlightenment. Bush is either pre-Enlightenment or post-modernist or both. BTW, I don't think he would have much of a problem with that assertion. Bush famously remarked that the "jury is still out on natural selection". He's no rationalist.