Talking Heads

I have gotten quite fed up with most of the media outlets, especially the visual ones. Points:

• It seems that most of the time the news media gets it wrong in the first several days of covering any story
• Each outlet has its own group of talking heads that it pays to give opinions
• Many experts are just wrong

The first bullet point is proven with recent coverage of the Northwest airline pilots fiasco, the "balloon boy", and, going much further back, runaway brides, WMD's, the Olympic Park bomber, etc. The media jumps on the first information, finds 8-10 seconds of video to play in a continuous loop, and finds some talking head to explain what has happened, even before the facts are out. There must have been six networks convinced that the Northwest pilots had simply fallen asleep. Then there were talking heads going on and on about pilot fatigue, airline cutbacks, and federal oversight - oh, and the aging air traffic control system. Two weeks later we find out that the pilots really were doing what they said, arguing over a Delta scheduling system (Northwest was acquired by Delta - typical problems with merging two companies) on their laptops. No fatigue at all.

Second, the talking heads. Fox News and CNN are great at this. They hire a bunch of retired whatevers (army generals, Newt Gingrich among cast off politicians, folks who work for "think tanks", and guys who have a consulting business that is essentially a contract with the networks) who come on and pontificate about their view of something. Fox is especially good a pitting two folks against one another (read as "fair and balanced") and letting them duke it out on air. Nobody changes the other's mind and it is more like a schoolyard brawl.

Third, this week really hit it for me, the "experts". ABC is doing an "investigative report" (I remember when these were really professionally done back in the 70's and led to the fall of a Presidency) on food safety: "What's in your food?" Yesterday it was beef. Today it was field greens. In both cases, the problem is e-coli contamination. They find some expert at some agency, usually a group for consumer rights, and let them ramble on about "we need more testing", "the government is not inspecting", "the companies only have voluntary compliance". These experts are idiots. It is impossible and prohibitively expensive to test everything. Also, since the testing is destructive, in order to achieve 100% test reliability, there would be no product to consume. For beef, they take hamburger patties at random and remove 8 sub-samples for testing. Frequency of testing was not discussed, but even for the patties tested, 8 small samples from a patty leaves a lot of it untested. Anyway, the consumer expert was upset because the meat was shown to be from 4 cows (genetic testing) instead of what she thought should be one cow. The producer defended his product. In order to get the right mix of fat and lean, different cuts of beef are used and blended to make the finished product. No big deal.

My real "beef" is that the expert is an idiot. Anyone who knows anything about quality management knows that finished product testing is inefficient. It is a disaster check only. True quality management, by the way this is required to get manufacturing costs down, is process driven. If the process is optimized and in-process testing is implemented, then the product will be high quality. As my German colleagues say ... end of story; full stop.

So, for the beef industry that means segregating sick and well animals, proper training of each employee on food safety, automation, temperature control, maintenance schedules, etc. For the greens grower it means testing of water used for irrigation, segregation of cattle land from fields, and all of the same things that the meat packer should do. Are there companies that try to skirt around this? Yes, and they don't survive long but they can harm people by not doing things right. So, spot check these companies and have them certified and re-certify often. Eventually it becomes culture or you close them down. Hefty fines works well too, especially if they are multiplicative: X dollars for the finding and Y dollars more for every day from the date of the problem (findings can be retroactive) until the problem is fixed. Under any circumstances, more testing, which seems to be the only answer the expert has, will not help.

The problem is compounded. Hopefully our younger generation is more news savvy, but way too many folks depend on network or cable outlets for "facts". They hear this tripe and then believe it and suddenly, you have a bunch of folks yelling at Congress to act and those nuts usually put on the whole show and make a mockery out of real science. It really seems to me that our national IQ is low into the double digits.

Antwerp

The train ride from Amsterdam to Antwerp was just over 2 hours. The low country, laced with canals, was quite pretty.When I got out in Amsterdam at the train station, I thought it would be a good place to film a WWII movie.


We had daily meetings in Antwerp so there was little time for sightseeing. I did manage to get lost once in the old quarter on a walkabout before dinner. The second night, the company arranged for a little walking tour of Antwerp, home of Reubens. The theater was quite unique as were the bizarre ghost statues made by some Russian artist working in plastic media. The fact that they are in the courtyard of a hospital made them more eerie.


The highlight of the walk was a story about a guy who liked to go to the pub often and came back rather smashed. He had a special lock made for his house to help him get the key in the door.

Amsterdam Part 2

When I arrived in Amsterdam I had such fond memories of my first visit to see my son. I almost expected him to greet me at the airport again. My second day in the Netherlands I spent in Leiden, where he went to school for a semester. I took the opportunity to get some of the pictures that I had messed up on that trip by having an old battery in my camera that affected the light sensing meter.


I decided to take the self-guided walking tour of Leiden's old city. The folks at the travel bureau in Leiden were really nice about it. So I started out past the first windmill and passed the Mayflower Hotel where I stayed last time. A circuitous path through the old city was quite rewarding. There was a team sculling on one of the canals, Reubens' art studio (I think it was Reubens), another windmill, a couple of Bentley's, Peter's Church, John Robinson's alms house, the old fort, and more. I had lunch at the same place where my son and I had a beer the last time around.


I finished out the day at the museum that has all of the old science equipment. It was cool seeing 400 year old telescopes and microscopes, although I must admit that the preserved body parts were pretty creepy.

In the early afternoon I boarded the train for Antwerp. I love train travel in Europe. As is always the case though, some underling will try to slip into a first class seat with a second class ticket. The view out the window was great and I could follow my progress on my cell phone GPS.

I never tire of visiting Europe.

Return to Amsterdam

I have been extremely busy these past few weeks and have let my posts slide. I did want to get back to them, though. During my two-week stint in Europe, I had one free weekend. Really, it is more like a half of a weekend since I would not get to any city before late Friday night and would have to leave midday on Sunday. I chose Amsterdam since it was close to my next business destination, Antwerp, and since I had been there before to visit with my son while he was at Leiden University for a semester.

I will pick up with Saturday as my Friday was mostly travel with a harried, short layover in a Swiss airport. Saturday morning I took the train to Amstel and then the bus to Muiden in search of Muiderslot, the moated castle well known in that region. It is different from the many castles I have seen in Germany, perhaps because of the lowlands in Holland, a moat was necessary, something I have never seen in the German castles perched on the hills. The castle tour was quite nice and I learned that the children ate standing up. From the time that they could reach the table. Further, the children were not allowed to speak during dinner. If they did so, they were sent to bed without food. Other snippets included the fact that people slept in a sitting position for fear of passing away.


The grounds of the castle were nice with two outdoor gardens, one for vegetables and herbs and the other for fruit trees and shrubs. All of the gardens were interlaced with walking paths. The castle also has a falconry as falcons were considered part of the power of the resident of the castle. The Castle also looks back upon the town, up a canal lined with beautiful ships. There is a lock in the canal to raise and lower the ships as they move further within the town. I had a delightful lunch beside the canal at a restaurant that I found on the web.


For me, the trips from Amsterdam are interesting now. I think Amsterdam is interesting and has quite a variety of night life, but I enjoyed the quiet street that my hotel was on (very near the Centraal station) and the restaurants less traveled by tourists.