Sign of Airline Desperation: In Flight Air Time for Sale

Get a load of this e-mail I received from a CNN affiliate selling air time on American Airlines flights. And consider further that this was sent to my day-job e-mail address, which is, to put it mildly, not very easy to find (ie, I don't subscribe to small business or consulting publications that would put my business on any sort of mailing list). The creativity in monetizing airline services knows no bounds.

Now it isn't clear how the economics work (as in who gets what), but one might assume that the marketing and production costs are borne by CNN and American gets paid a set rate for its airtime (if I were American, that's the deal I'd want)

The punch line is at the very end:

I'm contacting you on behalf of Sky Radio and Video Network and I'm pleased to announce an exciting new partnership with CNN Airport Network.

For the month of December, we will be producing our Best of Breed: Industry Innovators segment, which will be broadcast exclusively throughout the CNN Airport Network and on the American Airlines "Business and Technology Report" In-Flight Radio Channel. This program focuses on innovative companies, both large and small, from a variety of industries.

We invite you to participate and share your story with our captive audience of millions of executive business travelers -- decision makers, early adopters, and influencers with a high household income. Our production team will produce a one-on-one radio interview to air on American Airlines and the content will be extended in a video commercial to air on the CNN Airport Network.

CNN's Airport network has a total audience of nearly 16 million viewers per month with an average household income of $104,157. Our video programs play at 43 of the busiest airports and 2,000 of the busiest gates in the United States during the CNN broadcast. To view a sample clip, visit http://www.skyradionet.com/tvother.cfm.

The audio interviews play on 29,000 audio-equipped American Airlines worldwide flights reaching approximately 4.2 million travelers during December 2008. To hear recent audio interviews, click on http://www.skyradionet.com/americanbiz.cfm.

Your participation includes:

1. Production/placement of 2+ minute interview to air worldwide throughout December 2008 on 29,000 American Airlines flights reaching 4.2 million.
2. Program listing in American's ON in-flight publication (176,000 monthly copies).
3. Production/placement of a 30-second commercial to air once daily Monday, Wednesday and Friday during prime time 5pm-8pm on the CNN Airport Network for 4 consecutive weeks.
4. Production of CNN commercial includes using still photos, logos, graphics and voice over talent and any existing b-roll footage you may have.
5. Rebroadcast on www.skyradionet.com with hotlink to your website for one year.
6. Re-usage rights for promotional purposes.
7. Right to use "As heard on... " logos for airing on your site.
8. All production including scripting, recording, editing, mastering and delivery.
9. Introductory special rate for all of the above: $6,995

Space is limited and our recording deadline is September 17th.

Please call or email me if you're interested or have any questions.

Antidote du Jour 8/11/08

Disses du Jour

This exchange from Institutional Risk Analytics is a bit light on the vitriol, but the observation is acute:

The IRA: But speaking of certainty, don't you believe that it is impossible to give our leaders a pass with respect to the mortgage bubble? How can we look at Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers or Bob Rubin and allow them to say that they were surprised by the magnitude of the bubble and the horrible consequences?

Timothy Dickinson: Well, partly because these massive egos believe that they had "fine tuned" things and would not take any of the consequences of a break. They thought that their record of qualification would distinguish them and keep them from being blamed. The reality is, in my view, than none of them had the courage to overturn a few apple carts early in the game and thereby forewarn the public before the 18-wheeler overturned.

And a great jab from Jeremy Grantham's July newsletter (no online source):

Didn’t we all expect at least modest competence from most of our financial companies? I always thought it was the Bear Stearns of the world who knew what was going on, and that when the music stopped, the financial junk would be safely (from our point of view) in the hands of, say, Taiwanese banks. How did the guys who put some dead rats in the pot end up eating some of their own stew? (To be charitable, perhaps the head chefs did not realize that the kitchen staff was throwing in the odd rat to increase their Christmas bonus!)....

Given the growing perception of incompetence that is broadly distributed throughout the system, we run a serious risk of a meltdown in confidence in leadership totally unlike anything we have seen since World War II. And with substantial justification! Why should we trust the financial system the way we used to? We should distrust the general competence of financial management: of governments and of corporations and of all bankers, whether commercial, investment, or central bankers.

Diss du Jour

From the New York Times:

“I cannot find a single convincing argument that tells me that astrologers won’t do better than economists,” Mr. [Nassim Nicholas] Taleb said last week by telephone from Lebanon, where he was mountain hiking.

“The problem is the arrogance of these economists,” he said. “They’re making people rely on theories that have not worked, do not work, and are really dangerous.”

Airlines to Charge Fatties More?

I sincerely doubt this will ever happen (imagine the backlash from groups arguing that excess avoirdupois isn't a person's fault and hence shouldn't be punished) but those who have beenn compressed more than once by an overweight neighbor on a plane might applaud. From Bloomberg:

Imagine two scales at the airline ticket counter, one for your bags and one for you. The price of a ticket depends upon the weight of both.

That may not be so far-fetched.

``You listen to the airline CEOs, and nothing is beyond their imagination,'' said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group. ``They have already begun to think exotically. Nothing is not under the microscope.'' He declined to discuss what any individual airline might be contemplating, including charging passengers based on weight.

If this were to happen, would you see arbitrage? I'd certainly consider sending things ahead by Fedex of UPS if my schedule permitted it and the savings were material.

Whopper Du Jour

From the New York Times:

“Taxpayers shouldn’t be taking on the risk of foreclosure,” said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman.

A little late to try to prevent that....

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (Triple Crown Edition)

Today a brave filly died at Churchill Downs. Eight Belles was the only one of a huge field of twenty to break from the pack in the homestretch of the Kentucky Derby and attempt to run down the hard charging winner, Big Brown. She collapsed almost immediately after crossing the finish line, both ankles broken, and was euthanized. Unlike Barbaro, who suffered an ultimately fatal leg break in the Preakness in 2006, she had the good taste to collapse off camera, so her death is unlikely to get the national interest his did.

Yet this level of tragic deaths at the very top tier of this sport says something is badly wrong. The industry has long been cavalier about injury, despite the expense of breeding and training racehorses. Being a jockey is one of the most dangerous professions. Every professional jockey has taken a bad fall in a race; it's unavoidable given that the riders do not sit their mounts but are really perched above them, and horses are bumped, stumble, and fall. Paralysis and death are not uncommon.

So given how badly the human athletes in racing are treated, it isn't surprising that the horses don't fare much better. Thoroughbreds don't reach full maturity until they are four, but they start racing as two year olds, which some believe increases the odds of injury. I've also had my doubts about how they are trained, since horses in the wild move about all day, while racehorses are kept in their stalls except for their daily workouts, which are very short. This unnatural activity, torpor interrupted by intense training, may also set them up for breaks and sprains.

Two essays in the Times today take the industry to task, and William Rhoaden comes close to the mark:

Why do we keep giving thoroughbred horse racing a pass? Is it the tradition? The millions upon millions invested in the betting?

Why isn’t there more pressure to put the sport of kings under the umbrella of animal cruelty?

The sport is at least as inhumane as greyhound racing and only a couple of steps removed from animal fighting.

Is it the fact that horse racing is imbedded in the American fabric? And the Triple Crown is a nationally televised spectacle? Or is it the fact that death on the track is rarely seen by a mainstream television audience?

The sentiment was summed up by Dr. Larry Bramlage on Saturday when, asked about fillies racing against colts, he said, “One death is not an epidemic.”

But this isn’t about one death. This is about the nature of a sport that routinely grinds up young horses.

A national audience was exposed to the bittersweet experience of a tremendous victory by Big Brown and — moments later — the stunning news that Eight Belles had been euthanized. As we watched Big Brown’s owner celebrate the unmitigated joy of winning the Derby, we watched Bramlage describe the details of Eight Belles’s horrible death: She had completed the race, finishing a heroic second to Big Brown. She was around the turn at the start of the backstretch when her front ankles collapsed.

Bramlage described the sickening image of what had happened: a condylar fracture on the left side and the left front that opened the skin, went through it and was contaminated.

“She didn’t have a front leg to stand on to be splinted and hauled off in the ambulance, so she was immediately euthanized,” Bramlage said.

And that was that.

After the race, Larry Jones, Eight Belles’s trainer, choked back tears as he answered questions about the filly’s death. But even through the grief, Jones instinctively toed the industry line about racing. He discounted the notion — and veiled criticism — that the dirt surface might have contributed to her death. He also refused to concede the point that horse racing is an extremely dangerous sport, saying that these types of injuries occur in any sport.

Within the racing industry, Eight Belles was a tragic but glorious casualty. The industry is in denial: racing grinds up horses, and we dress up the sport with large hats, mint juleps and string bands.

Why do we refuse to put the brutal game of racing in the realm of mistreatment of animals? At what point do we at least raise the question about the efficacy of thousand-pound horses racing at full throttle on spindly legs?

This is bullfighting.

Eight Belles was another victim of a brutal sport that is carried, literally, on the backs of horses. Horsemen like to talk about their thoroughbreds and how they were born to run and live to run. The reality is that they are made to run, forced to run for profits they never see.

On Saturday, it was Eight Belles in Louisville. Two years ago, it was Barbaro in Baltimore, with a misstep at the Preakness. And who knows how many horses die anonymous deaths? Eight Belles, we’ll write, was merely the casualty of a brutal game.

But one death is too many. The miracle of the sport of kings is that there aren’t more. But how many more do we need?

Jane Smiley notes that Eight Belles may have been predisposed to push too hard, but to my mind, that is not a sufficient excuse:

I have a friend who trains a jumper who is a relative of Eight Belles, a son of her grandsire, Unbridled. When my friend got the horse, a woman he knows, a steward at Santa Anita, told him to watch out, because Unbridleds tend to be unsound and fearless, and my friend has found this to be the case. Where most horses have at least some caution, my friend’s horse will try anything. His mental toughness and competitiveness always take over, no matter what the circumstances.

This is what we saw in Eight Belles: she was more resolute and competitive than was good for her, and she literally ran herself to death. When the race was finished, every part of her was exhausted, including, I am sure, the support apparatus of ligaments and tendons that were keeping her bones together. She probably stumbled and broke one ankle, then stepped hard on the other and broke that one. Then she fell....

It is not racing per se that is cruel, it is American racing as it has been, on dirt tracks at continuous high speeds, for lots of money. Horses in Europe, who run on the turf and only exert themselves all out at the end of fairly long races, do not break down as frequently as American horses on American tracks. American horses bred like European horses, that run in races on the grass, also break down less. American horses have been expected to start racing early and to go fast from the post to the wire, because the people in the grandstands can see the whole race and like plenty of speed.

Rhoades is closer to the mark, but still fails to enumerate the industry's failings. The hard dirt tracks are one; turf or synthetic turf lower injury rates enormously. Due to the American preference for speed at all cost, we breed for that, and our Thoroughbreds are allegedly more fragile that their European counterparts.

But the real dirty secrets are that too many horses that are not fully sound are being raced, and worse, being doped in a way that predisposes them to harm. First, a report from Thoroughbred Times on the second Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit held in 2008:

The California Horse Racing Board has compiled necropsy statistics since the early 1990s, and the summit recommendation is for similar programs to be enacted nationwide.

“Dr. Sue Stover at the University of California at Davis has done a tremendous amount of work on looking at bone and soft tissue and how it relates to ultimate fatal catastrophic injuries,” said Rick Arthur, D.V.M., the CHRB’s equine medical director. “One of the issues … is that almost all fatalities have some evidence of pre-existing pathology in the tissue somewhere. That doesn’t mean that someone abused the horse, it just tells us that we have to improve diagnosis.

But the nasty bit is the possible role of the use of Lasix, a diuretic. Think of handicapping. The addition of five pounds is a huge difference in a race. Lasix can cause a horse to lose 20 pounds, so imagine the advantage it derives, and conversely, the disadvantage a horse is at if it competes against a racer using Lasix.

Diuretics leech potassium, and potassium is a factor in bone health. The widespread use of Lasix in racehorses may be a major culprit in breakdowns. From the New York Times in 2007 (hat tip Culture of Life News):

There’s another big difference between the United States and much of the rest of the racing world: medication. Horses racing in America are allowed to be injected with various drugs on race day, the most common being Lasix, a powerful diuretic, and phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory medication. Many trainers use whatever medications are permitted whether or not they believe a horse needs it. If they don’t, the thinking goes, they will be giving an advantage to a competitor.

Brian Stewart, head of veterinary regulation for the Hong Kong Jockey Club, said that while it was impossible to scientifically link drugs to injuries, “we believe medication adds a risk factor, not only to injury, but to inconsistent racing performance.”

Hong Kong has a zero-tolerance policy on any medication in a horse’s system on race day.

This is from a 1999 article:

According to Associate Professor Kenneth Hinchcliff, of Ohio State, "We've found excellent evidence that associates furosemide with better performance." Although Hinchcliff and his colleagues stopped short, of saying that the drug definitively improves performance.

Hinchcliff 's team analysed the race records of 22,589 thoroughbreds, the researchers found that 74 percent (16,761) of the horses were given furosemide prior to a race. These horses raced faster, were 1.4 times more likely to win a race, 1.2 times more likely to finish in the top three and earned an average of $416.00 more than the horses not receiving the drug. While 85 percent of the horses in the study had received furosemide at some point in their lives, about 74 percent of thoroughbreds are likely to be running on the drug during a race, Gross said.

The trade name for furosemide is Lasix and it is according to one team member, "frequently used by humans for its diuretic effects" (the editor wonders if this may be an oblique reference to jockeys)? In any case the diuretic effect may cause enhanced racing performance, and other studies found that horses on furosemide lost about 20 pounds of their pre-race body weight through urination.

The romance of the sport is to produce superior performance, but to what avail if it means a race to the bottom with doping and breeding programs that emphasize speed over soundness?

And consider that the sport's most spectacular performance came in an era before these practices were in place. ESPN rated this the second best individual sports achievement, second only to Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point game:



Update 6/2/08, 9:00 PM: This comes considerably after the fact, but William Nack wrote an article, "The Breaking Point" in Sports Illustrated in which he described the factors that led to a large increase in fatal breakdowns among racehorses. Drugs, changed in how horses are raised and trained (significantly less activity to keep them pretty for yearling sales) and inbreeding are the culprits.

NZ man 'used hedgehog as weapon'

Forgive me, I couldn't resist this oddity. From the BBC:

A man in New Zealand has been charged with using a hedgehog as a weapon, the New Zealand Herald has reported.

Police said William Singalargh, 27, had hurled the hedgehog about 5m (16ft) at a 15-year-old boy.

"It hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks," said Senior Sgt Bruce Jenkins, in the North Island town of Whakatane.

It was unclear whether the hedgehog was still alive when it was thrown, though it was dead when collected as evidence.
The police spokesman said the suspect was arrested "for assault with a weapon, namely the hedgehog."

Mr Singalargh is due to appear in court on 17 April. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.

Dolphin Rescues Beached Whales

This is such a good story that I decided it deserved its own slot, rather than being featured in links.

Dolphins haven't been studied as intensively as monkeys, but there is ample anecdotal evidence, and some research, suggesting that they approach humans in intelligence (one philosopher, having surveyed the literature, argued that they are "non-human persons"). Dolphins are the only non-human species known to form ad hoc groups across established social lines to perform specific tasks and to seek out humans out of what appears to be curiosity.

One incident: two dolphins in a research program did routines for the public. The first would do a sonar demonstration, blindfolded; the second did a program made of tricks she had invented.

One day both dolphins, each in its holding tank, were very agitated. During their performances, the sonar dolphin was hesitant and the one who did the tricks did them out of order. The researchers later found they had mixed the dolphins up. Each dolphin understood that it was expected to execute the other's program and did it as well as she could.

I wish I had employees that had that much sense.

From the BBC:

A dolphin has come to the rescue of two whales which had become stranded on a beach in New Zealand.

Conservation officer Malcolm Smith told the BBC that he and a group of other people had tried in vain for an hour and a half to get the whales to sea.

The pygmy sperm whales had repeatedly beached, and both they and the humans were tired and set to give up, he said.

But then the dolphin appeared, communicated with the whales, and led them to safety.

The bottlenose dolphin, called Moko by local residents, is well known for playing with swimmers off Mahia beach on the east coast of the North Island.

Mr Smith said that just when his team was flagging, the dolphin showed up and made straight for them.

"I don't speak whale and I don't speak dolphin," Mr Smith told the BBC, "but there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea."

He added: "The dolphin did what we had failed to do. It was all over in a matter of minutes."

Mr Smith said he felt fortunate to have witnessed the extraordinary event, and was delighted for the whales, as in the past he has had to put down animals which have become beached.

He said that the whales have not been seen since, but that the dolphin had returned to its usual practice of playing with swimmers in the bay.

"I shouldn't do this I know, we are meant to remain scientific," Mr Smith said, "but I actually went into the water with the dolphin and gave it a pat afterwards because she really did save the day."

That's a picture of Moko, not a stock photo. The BBC also has a little video (BBC videos always crash my browsers, but I suspect it's worth watching). And there's a more detailed version of the story here.

Clinton/Obama Video

Irrespective of one's political persuasion (well, almost), this is amusing:

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Sexual Deviant?

According to a University of New Hampshire study, children who are spanked are more likely to have an appetite for kinky less-than-savory sexual practices. So is the anti-spanking movement really about sexual conformity?

From PhysOrg:

New research by a University of New Hampshire domestic abuse expert says spanking children affects their sex lives as adults. Professor Murray Straus concludes that children who are spanked are more likely as adults to coerce partners to have sex, to have unprotected sex and to have masochistic sex.

Other studies have shown the link between spanking and physical violence, but Straus said his research is the first to show a link between corporal punishment and sexual behavior.

"My underlying motive was to bring this to the attention of parents and of more people," Straus said, "in the hope it will help continue the decrease in the use of corporal punishment."

Straus, co-director of UNH's Family Research Laboratory, conducted a study in the mid-1990s in which he asked 207 students at three colleges whether they'd ever been aroused by masochistic sex. He also asked them if they'd been spanked as children. He found that students who were spanked were nearly twice as likely to like masochistic sex.

He has bundled that study with three new ones that explore the connections between corporal punishment, coerced sex and risky sex. He presented all four studies this week at the American Psychological Association's Summit on Violence and Abuse in Relationships in Bethesda, Md.

Straus said his study found adults who were spanked as children are more likely to coerce their partners to have sex.

Straus asked 14,000 college students in 32 different countries whether they strongly disagreed, disagreed, agreed or strongly agreed with this statement: "I was spanked or hit a lot before age 12." He also asked whether they had ever verbally or physically coerced an uninterested partner to have sex.

He found a big difference between students who said they'd been hit a lot before age 12 and those who said they hadn't. For every increased step on Straus's four-step scale of agreement, men were 10 percent more likely to have verbally coerced sex from a partner by insisting on sex or threatening to end the relationship if the partner refused. Women were 12 percent more likely to have done that.

Previous studies have shown that 90 percent of parents strike their toddlers, a statistic that's held steady throughout the 30 years Straus has researched corporal punishment. Meanwhile, the number of parents who hit older children has drastically decreased. Straus said it's unclear why, though he has some theories. One is that 2- and 3-year-olds are less likely to respond to repeated verbal warnings.

Straus said he would like more pediatricians and child-rearing experts to warn against spanking. He'd also like lawmakers to take a stand by dedicating state money to teaching parents about the dangers of corporal punishment.

"The best-kept secret in child psychology is that children who were never spanked are among the best behaved," Straus said.

World Water, Visualized

Clever, but also surprising (at least for those of us who don't ponder these matters deeply). Hat tip Gristmill:



Left: All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc.

Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth.

Total Lunar Eclipse Map

The powers that be say this eclipse, which reaches totality around 10:00 PM EST on February 20, will be dramatic. As NASA tell us:

A lunar eclipse happens when the Moon passes through the shadow of Earth. You might expect the Moon to grow even more ashen than usual, but in fact it transforms into an orb of vivid red.

Why red? That is the color of Earth's shadow.



Consider the following: Most shadows we're familiar with are black or gray; step outside on a sunny day and look at your own. Earth's shadow is different because, unlike you, Earth has an atmosphere. The delicate layer of dusty air surrounding our planet reddens and redirects the light of the sun, filling the dark behind Earth with a sunset-red glow. The exact tint--anything from bright orange to blood red is possible--depends on the unpredictable state of the atmosphere at the time of the eclipse. "Only the shadow knows," says astronomer Jack Horkheimer of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium.

Transiting the shadow's core takes about an hour. The first hints of red appear around 10 pm EST (7 pm PST), heralding a profusion of coppery hues that roll across the Moon's surface enveloping every crater, mountain and moon rock, only to fade away again after 11 pm EST (8 pm PST). No special filter or telescope is required to see this spectacular event. It is a bright and leisurely display visible from cities and countryside alike.

While you're watching, be alert for another color: turquoise. Observers of several recent lunar eclipses have reported a flash of turquoise bracketing the red of totality.

Per this NASA map, all of South America and most of North America will have a good view:

"Wall Street Meltdown"

Clever.

Hot Ladies Talking With Bald Dudes

Funny and too true. Hat tip The Big Picture via reader Doug.

Darwin Awards 2007

The Darwin Awards are out! As the website reminds us:

Named in honor of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, the Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.

Here are some of the runners up for this year (the winner is Coitus Interruptus and there is a host of other close contenders):

Electronic Fireworks

(1 January 2007, Netherlands) The first Darwin Award of 2007 goes to Serge Sluijters, 36, who thought it reasonable to hover over an illegal professional firework and light the electronic ignition with an open flame. But this was not a traditional wick; it was a device designed for precision timing. The flame triggered an immediate launch, and the fireworks catapulted upwards, killing our amateur pyrotechnician enroute to a spectacular burst across the night sky.

Serge had purchased the firework legally in Belgium, but then transported it illegally into the Netherlands. His father disputed the notion that Serge was careless, characterizing his son as a man who gave due consideration to his acts. A witness told reporters, "His face disappeared. If someone has no face left, you know it's serious."

Oil Tank Trampoline

(24 June 2007, Colorado) If you get "Footloose" and cut the rug on an oil tank, be careful not to light a cigarette or bong of weed, else you may soon be climbing the proverbial "Stairway to Heaven".

After smoking marijuana and liquoring themselves up at a popular party spot in Routt National Forest, the teens decided that it would be fun to leap and cavort upon a mostly-empty oil tank.

Mostly empty...

"There were several ignitions sources," according to the sheriff. Teenagers were smoking, and there was a bonfire nearby. The energetic gyrations of the dancers caused fumes to leak from the relief valve, and an ignition source sparked a "flashdance" as the crude oil storage tank exploded, hurling two teens 150 yards to their deaths.

The deceased were identified as Samuel and Christopher, 17 and 19.

Not to spoil the fun of this year's winners, but here are some past examples:

1997 Winner:

Japan Times-April 16, 1997 "The government must crack down on this disgusting craze of "Pumping", a spokesman for the Nakhon Ratchasima hospital told reporters. "If this perversion catches on, it will destroy the cream of Thailand's manhood." He was speaking after the remains of 13 year-old Charnchai Puanmuangpak had been rushed into the hospital's emergency room. "Most 'Pumpers' use a standard bicycle pump," he explained, "inserting the nozzle far up their rectum, giving themselves a rush of air, creating a momentary high.This act is a sin against God."

Charnchai took it further still. He started using a two-cylinder foot pump, but even that wasn't exciting enough for him, and he boasted to friends that he was going to try the compressed air hose at a nearby gasoline station. They dared him to do it, so,under cover of darkness, he snuck in. Not realizing how powerful the machine was, he inserted the tube deep into his rectum, and placed a coin in the slot. As a result, he died virtually instantly, passers-by are still in shock. One woman thought she was watching a twilight fireworks display, and started clapping. "We still haven't located all of him.", say the police authorities. "When that quantity of air interacted with the gas in his system, he nearly exploded. It was like a bomb went off or something." "Pumping is the devil's pastime, your tires by all means, but then hide your bicycle pump where it cannot tempt you."

2000 Winner:

(2000, Colorado) Summer is the most blissful of seasons, when our favorite summertime activity - do it yourself stupidity - kicks into high gear. Meet Charles, 34, a Denver masonry contractor who created brick and mortar edifices. Charles was in construction. He had worked on houses, he had watched electricians install wiring. He believed this qualified him as a member of the Junior Electrician Society. He figured he could handle any electrical issue that came up around his own home.

One day on the job, Charles was apparently bonked in the head by his bricks. He had the great idea! He would build an electric fence in his own backyard. "An electric fence will keep the dogs in." Charles connected a wire to an extension cord, and managed to encircle his backyard with a 120-V strand of wire without mishap. His dogs will not be sued for puppy support with this security system in place!

The household became accustomed to the fence, and things settled down to normal, until Charles picked up a passion for gardening. Charles had a real nice set of tomatoes, and I'm not referring to his wife. One day he reached for a tomato, put his hand on the electrified wire, and there's really no need to explain what happened next.

Why did this man die? Like other inexperienced people, he thought he knew what he was doing. But his design had two major flaws. Fences constructed for dogs use one-tenth the voltage of cattle fences (which do use 120 volts.) And he needed to install a repeater, which transmits 150-microsecond pulses, to hit a cow with a jolt of juice that cuts off in time to avoid creating a pile of rare steaks by the fence.

The Darwin Awards folks do indicate whether their tales have been verified or not, since some past faves (Ronald Opus, the JATO rocket car) have turned out to be apochryphal.

Holiday Special: Something That Changed My Perspective (#5)

This holiday week, I thought it might be a useful break from our usual programming to present ideas that had an impact on me and might be thought-provoking for you as well.

Today's offering is on how pursuing objectives in a direct manner may not produce the desired outcome. Why? Because many systems are sufficiently complex that we can't chart a simple course through them. We lack sufficient understanding, and worse, these systems change in response to our actions.

Instead, John Kay of the Financial Times in 2004 made the case for obliquity, which is going after goals indirectly. His article is an introduction to the concept; he doesn't give guidelines as to when the roundabout route might be the best. Nevertheless, it's an important reminder to linear thinkers that their approach isn't always the best.

From the Financial Times:

If you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve going in the other. Paradoxical as it sounds, goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. So the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, and the happiest people are not those who make happiness their main aim. The name of this idea? Obliquity

The American continent separates the Atlantic Ocean in the east from the Pacific Ocean in the west. But the shortest crossing of America follows the route of the Panama Canal, and you arrive at Balboa Port on the Pacific Coast some 30 miles to the east of the Atlantic entrance at Colon.

A map of the isthmus shows how the best route west follows a south-easterly direction. The builders of the Panama Canal had comprehensive maps, and understood the paradoxical character of the best route. But only rarely in life do we have such detailed knowledge. We are lucky even to have a rough outline of the terrain.

Before the canal, anyone looking for the shortest traverse from the Atlantic to the Pacific would naturally have gazed westward. The south-east route was found by Vasco Nunez de Balboa, a Spanish conquistador who was looking for gold, not oceans.

George W. Bush speaks mangled English rather than mangled French because James Wolfe captured Quebec in 1759 and made the British crown the dominant influence in Northern America. Eschewing obvious lines of attack, Wolfe's men scaled the precipitous Heights of Abraham and took the city from the unprepared defenders. There are many such episodes in military history. The Germans defeated the Maginot Line by going round it, while Japanese invaders bicycled through the Malayan jungle to capture Singapore, whose guns faced out to sea. Oblique approaches are most effective in difficult terrain, or where outcomes depend on interactions with other people. Obliquity is the idea that goals are often best achieved when pursued indirectly.

Obliquity is characteristic of systems that are complex, imperfectly understood, and change their nature as we engage with them. Forests have all these features. Fire is the greatest enemy of the forest. From the late 19th century, the policy of the US National Parks Service was of zero tolerance towards fire. Every outbreak, however small, would be extinguished. But the incidence of fire did not fall: it increased.

Computer simulation of fire control policies suggests the explanation. Most forest fires are small, and burn themselves out. In doing so, they remove combustible undergrowth, and create firebreaks that limit the spread of future fires. In 1972, the National Park Service determined a new policy: it would put out man-made fires, but allow natural ones to burn.
Sixteen years later, the largest fire known swept through Yellowstone National Park. In extremely dry conditions, several fires - some sparked by lightning, some by arsonists - joined together. The blaze was fought by 25,000 firefighters at a cost of $120m; more than a third of the park's vegetation was destroyed.

Today's guidelines allow forest rangers to use their judgment in deciding which fires should be tackled and which left to burn. Experience has shown that too much effort devoted to fire extinction is counterproductive. Time demonstrates, but only slowly, whether policy has gone too far in one direction, or the other. Forest management illustrates obliquity: the preservation of the forest is not best pursued directly, but managed through a holistic approach that considers and balances multiple objectives.

Forests are not the only systems structured in this way. Obliquity is equally relevant to our businesses and our bodies, to the management of our lives and our national economies. We do not maximise shareholder value or the length of our lives, our happiness or the gross national product, for the simple but fundamental reason that we do not know how to and never will. No one will ever be buried with the epitaph "He maximised shareholder value". Not just because it is a less than inspiring objective, but because even with hindsight there is no way of recognising whether the objective has been achieved.

For most of the 20th century, ICI was Britain's largest and most successful manufacturing company. In 1987, ICI described its business purpose thus: "ICI aims to be the world's leading chemical company, serving customers internationally through the innovative and responsible application of chemistry and related science.

"Through achievement of our aim, we will enhance the wealth and well-being of our shareholders, our employees, our customers and the communities which we serve and in which we operate."

ICI's corporate portfolio had evolved over the decades - the company's traditional strengths had been dyes and explosives, but its chemical expertise had taken it into other industrial feedstocks and agricultural fertilisers. After the second world war, the management of ICI concluded that in future "the responsible application of chemistry" was most likely to be found in pharmaceuticals. ICI recruited a team of able, young, academic scientists but the team was slow to bring returns.

The pharmaceutical division was a drain of ICI resources until, in the 1960s, the discovery of beta-blockers gave the company the first effective drug for controlling hypertension. More discoveries followed and, by the 1980s, pharmaceuticals had become the growth engine of the company.

In 1991, Hanson, the predatory UK conglomerate that had successfully acquired and reorganised sluggish British manufacturing businesses such as Ever Ready and Imperial Tobacco, bought a modest stake in ICI. While the threat to the company's independence did not last long, the effects were galvanising. ICI restructured its operations and floated the pharmaceutical division as a separate business, Zeneca. The rump business of ICI declared a new mission statement: "Our objective is to maximise value for our shareholders by focusing on businesses where we have market leadership, a technological edge and a world competitive cost base."

While the National Parks Service had moved from a narrow, focused objective to a broader holistic view of forest management. ICI made the opposite shift - from a grand vision of the responsible application of chemistry to a narrow concentration on established, successful activities. The aim of bringing benefit to a wide range of stakeholders was replaced by the specific objective of creating shareholder value from narrowly focused operations. The company translated this into an operational strategy by disposing of the company's interests in bulk chemicals to acquire a niche group of speciality businesses: ICI, once the main supplier of chemical products to one third of the world, was reinvented as a smells company.

The outcome was not successful in any terms, including those of creating shareholder value. The share price peaked in 1998, soon after the new strategy was announced. The decline since then has been relentless. After two successive dividend cuts the company was ejected in early 2003 from the FTSE 100 index, the transition from industrial giant to mid-cap corporation had taken only 12 years.

ICI is not the only company for whom greater emphasis on corporate financial goals led to less success in achieving them. I once said that Boeing's grip on the world civil aviation market made it the most powerful market leader in world business. Bill Allen was chief executive from 1945 to 1968, as the company created its dominant position. He said that his spirit and that of his colleagues was to eat, breathe, and sleep the world of aeronautics. "The greatest pleasure life has to offer is the satisfaction that flows from participating in a difficult and constructive undertaking," he explained.

Boeing's 737, with almost 4,000 aircraft in the air, is the most successful commercial airliner in history. But the company's largest and riskiest project was the development of the 747 jumbo jet. When a non-executive director asked about the expected return on investment, he was brushed off: there had been some studies, he was told, but the manager concerned couldn't remember the results.

It took only 10 years for Boeing to prove me wrong in asserting that its market position in civil aviation was impregnable. The decisive shift in corporate culture followed the acquisition of its principal US rival, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997. The transformation was exemplified by the CEO, Phil Condit. The company's previous preoccupation with meeting "technological challenges of supreme magnitude" would, he told Business Week, now have to change. "We are going into a value-based environment where unit cost, return on investment and shareholder return are the measures by which you'll be judged. That's a big shift."

The company's senior executives agreed to move from Seattle, where the main production facilities were located, to Chicago. More importantly, the more focused business reviewed risky investments in new civil projects with much greater scepticism. The strategic decision was to redirect resources towards projects for the US military that involved low financial risk. Chicago had the advantage of being nearer to Washington, where government funds were dispensed.

So Boeing's civil orderbook today lags that of Airbus, the European consortium whose aims were not initially commercial but which has, almost by chance, become a profitable business. And the strategy of getting close to the Pentagon proved counter- productive: the company got too close to the Pentagon, and faced allegations of corruption. And what was the market's verdict on the company's performance in terms of unit cost, return on investment and shareholder return? Boeing stock, $48 when Condit took over, rose to $70 as he affirmed the commitment to shareholder value; by the time of his enforced resignation in December 2003 it had fallen to $38.

In Yellowstone National Park, at ICI and at Boeing, the attempt to focus on simple, well defined objectives proved less successful than management with a broader, more comprehensive conception of objectives.

The 20th century saw the rise and fall of modernist rationalism in many activities. Nowhere was the change more visible, or the results more disastrous, than in architecture and town planning. In the modernist vision, technology emancipated builders from tradition and accumulated knowledge. Twentieth- century planners could redesign our environment from first principles.

Charles Jencks, the architectural commentator, announced that modernism ended at 3.32pm on July 15 1972, when demolition contractors detonated the fuses to blow up the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St Louis, Missouri. Less than two decades earlier, the scheme had won awards for its pioneering, visionary architecture. Tower blocks were the supreme expression of Le Corbusier's view that "a house is a machine for living in". Corbusier himself designed the first such buildings, the Unite d'Habitation on the edge of Marseilles.

But a house is not simply a machine for living in. There is a difference between a house and a home. The functions of a home are complex and the utility of a building depends not only on its design but on the reactions of those who live in it. The occupants of the Pruitt-Igoe scheme, like those of similar buildings, were alienated by the isolation of a living environment that saw no need for accidental, unplanned social interactions. They showed no respect for its public spaces. The functionality of the blocks proved, in the end, not to be functional.

Communities are complex organisms, imperfectly understood, and their functioning depends on their social relations. Great architects implicitly understand obliquity, but obliquity is so important to the design of towns that the most successful towns have no designer at all. The planned city was conceived in the late 19th century. Baron Hausmann swept away the jumble of Paris streets that had developed over the centuries to create grand boulevards. From the 1920s to 1968, the powerful, autocratic Robert Moses controlled the physical environment of New York, driving expressways through apartments, offices and factories.

The zenith of these ideas was reached in planned cities such as the designed capitals of Brasilia, Canberra and Chandigarh. But all these cities are dull. They lack the vitality of real communities. As with tower blocks, their very functionality is dysfunctional.

The National Park officials who thought they could eliminate fire; the managers who thought they could reinvent ICI and Boeing; the architects who believed they could discard thousands of years of experience and redesign buildings on purely functional lines; the planners who attempted to rationalise the patchwork evolution of historic cities: all made the same mistake of underestimating the complexity of the system with which they dealt and the value of the traditional knowledge they inherited. And the answer to their problem is not better analysis and more sophisticated modelling, but more humility.

Such humility is not commonly found in the business world. Re-engineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy became a New York Times bestseller in 1993. Hammer and Champy are as radical in aspiration as Le Corbusier: "Re-engineering means asking the question `If I were re-creating this company today, given what I know and given current technology, what would it look like?' Re-engineering a company means tossing aside old systems and starting over. It involves going back to the beginning and inventing a better way of doing work."

Obliquity gives rise to the profit-seeking paradox: the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented. ICI and Boeing illustrate how a greater focus on shareholder returns was self-defeating in its own narrow terms. Comparisons of the same companies over time are mirrored in contrasts between different companies in the same industries. In their 2002 book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras compared outstanding companies with adequate but less remarkable companies with similar operations.

Merck and Pfizer was one such comparison. Collins and Porras compared the philosophy of George Merck ("We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been") with that of John McKeen of Pfizer ("So far as humanly possible, we aim to get profit out of everything we do").

Collins and Porras also paired Hewlett Packard with Texas Instruments, Procter & Gamble with Colgate, Marriott with Howard Johnson, and found the same result in each case: the company that put more emphasis on profit in its declaration of objectives was the less profitable in its financial statements.

Similarly the richest men are not the most materialistic. Sam Walton, founder and principal shareholder of Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, drove himself around in a pick-up truck. "I have concentrated all along on building the finest retailing company that we possibly could. Period. Creating a huge personal fortune was never particularly a goal of mine," Walton said. Still, five of the top 10 places in the Forbes rich list are occupied by members of the Walton family.

Henry Ford was sued by stockholders who resented his determination to expand his automotive business rather than distribute the profits. When they won their case, most of the dividend that the court required the Ford Motor Company to pay went to Henry himself. He used the money to buy back stock and regain freedom of operations. The dissatisfied stockholders would have done better to keep quiet.

Warren Buffett, the most successful investor in history, still lives in the Omaha bungalow he bought almost 50 years ago and continues to take pleasure in a Nebraskan steak washed down with cherry Coke. For Buffett: "It's not that I want money. It's the fun of making money and watching it grow."

The individuals who are most successful at making money are not those who are most interested in making money. This is not surprising. The principal route to great wealth is the creation of a successful business, and building a successful business demands exceptional talents and hard work. There is no reason to think these characteristics are associated with greed and materialism: rather the opposite. People who are obsessively interested in money are drawn to get-rich-quick schemes rather than to business opportunities, and when these schemes come off, as occasionally they do, they retire to their villas in the sun.

And so, the greatest happiness is rarely achieved by those who set out to be happy. The development of psychology and neurophysiology gives us more insight into the real determinants of happiness. Author and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explores the nature of happiness by listening to what people say about their activities through what he calls experience sampling. He pages people frequently to write down structured reports of exactly how they feel about what they are doing at that moment.

Although we crave time for passive leisure, people engaged in watching television reported low levels of contentment. Csikszentmihalyi's systematic finding is that the activities that yield the highest for satisfaction with life require the successful performance of challenging tasks. These moments are encountered as frequently in work as outside it, and they constitute the state of mind which Csikszentmihalyi describes as flow. "Flow tends to occur when a person's skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable."

Csikszentmihalyi's formulation exactly parallels that of Boeing's Bill Allen - "the greatest pleasure that life has to offer is the satisfaction that flows from participating in a difficult and challenging undertaking." Flow is as characteristic of the successful business as of the contented individual.

Yet there are fundamental differences. While the quest for happiness is complementary - by achieving it we make it easier, not harder, for others to achieve the same goal - the development of business is competitive. Tolstoy claimed in Anna Karenina that "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

However, the opposite is true in commercial life. Unhappy businesses resemble one another: each successful company is successful in its own way. Business achievement depends on doing things that others cannot do - and still find difficult to do even after others have seen the benefits they bring to the imitators. So the most profitable companies are those that are successful with major challenges - like Boeing's creation of the jumbo jet or ICI's development of a pharmaceutical division. For Csikszentmihalyi, flow is the accomplishment of a difficult task, involving the successful match of capabilities to environment. In the less elegant language of business gurus, Collins and Porras describe the same phenomenon in business as the achievement of "big hairy audacious goals".

Companies that succeed in such challenges are disproportionately represented in the case studies of business schools. We don't hear much about business innovators who adopted big hairy audacious goals and failed, although failure, not success is the norm. For every Bill Gates, Sam Walton and Warren Buffett, there are a hundred people with similar ambitions, and not necessarily much less talent, whose pictures will never be seen on the front cover of Fortune magazine.

Success through obliquity is a product of natural selection in an uncertain, but competitive, environment. It is almost certainly true that, on average, profit-oriented companies are more profitable than less profit-oriented companies. It is very likely that on average people who are interested in money are richer than people who are not. But at the same time that the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, the richest people are not those most interested in money.

Outstanding success is the product of obliquity.

This oblique relationship between intention and outcome is the subtle, but frequently misunderstood, message contained in Richard Dawkins' metaphor of the selfish gene. The gene is not actually selfish: the gene has no motive at all, in the sense in which we normally talk about motive. Genes that survive the processes of selection are those well adapted to their environment, and such adaptation was not the product of any conscious design. And this is also true of the forests we travel thousands of miles to see, the great capital cities of history, the traditions of classical architecture, and the development of great businesses. All of them are the product of evolution in a universe too complex and unpredictable for any of us fully to understand. All of them survive and prosper because they are well adapted to their environment.

The University of Sheffield Sports Engineering Research Group, after analysing David Beckham's performance on the football field, announced in 2002 that they had discovered a physics genius. The scientists had identified the complex differential equations that need to be solved to bend it like Beckham. No doubt their computers are already crunching numbers to tell Jonny Wilkinson how to drop a goal.

But little research is needed to confirm that Beckham is not a physics genius. Solving equations of motion is a means of understanding what happens, but is not a means of making it happen. Similarly, the financial returns of a business record what it achieves but are not the means by which it is achieved. Successful companies do maximise long-term shareholder value, or at least create large quantities of it. But that does not imply they were any more capable of formally calculating the results of their activities than Beckham can. Still less can we infer that such calculations were the basis of their achievement.

Would Boeing really have benefited from careful analyses in the mid-1960s of the prospective return on investment from development of the 747? An analyst would have had to anticipate the oil shock, the globalisation of world markets and the development of the aviation industry through to the end of the century. Anyone who has built models of these kinds, or scrutinised them carefully, knows that the range of possible assumptions is always wide enough to allow the analyst to come up with whatever answer the person commissioning the assessment wants to hear.

ICI might have made calculations in the 1950s that estimated the market capitalisation Zeneca would have achieved in the year 2000. Their strategists could then have put that number into a discounted cash flow calculation to estimate a return on the company's early investment in its pharmaceutical business. But no one would or should have taken such a calculation seriously.

The distinction between intent and outcome is central to obliquity. Wealth, family relationships, employment all contribute to happiness but these activities are not best conducted with happiness as their goal. The pursuit of happiness is a strange phrase in the US constitution because happiness is not best achieved when pursued. A satisfying life depends above all on building good personal relationships with other people - but we entirely miss the point if we seek to develop these relationships with our personal happiness as a primary goal.

Humans have well developed capacities to detect purely instrumental behaviour. The actions of the man who buys us a drink in the hope that we will buy his mutual funds are formally the same as those of the friend who buys us a drink because he likes our company, but it is usually not too difficult to spot the difference. And the difference matters to us. "Honesty is the best policy, but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man," wrote Archbishop Whately three centuries ago. If we deal with someone for whom honesty is the best policy, we can never be sure that this is not the occasion on which he will conclude that honesty is no longer the best policy. Such experiences have been frequent in financial markets in the last decade. We do better to rely on people who are honest by character rather than honest by choice.

In a similar way, the statement "we look after employees because we care" is not the same as the statement "we have introduced new compensation arrangements because, having calculated the relative costs of benefits enhancements and staff turnover, and commissioned a consultant's report on the policies of competitors, we believe it will produce a net enhancement of earnings per share". Even if the pensions and healthcare benefits are the same, the response from those affected is different. That is why companies that put the second statement in their board papers and investor presentations typically put the first statement in their press releases and communications to employees. But people who work in a business generally know its nature well enough to see the instrumentality at work.

Marks and Spencer was famous for decades for the breadth of its staff welfare programme. In particular, the company pioneered the provision of high-quality meals at nominal prices. The policy did not originate in any nice calculation of costs and benefits. It was adopted when a shop assistant fainted as Simon Marks was making one of his legendary store visits. Marks discovered that her husband was unemployed and the family did not have enough to eat. Marks was not engaged in philanthropy - he did not offer to feed his employee's family. Nor was his purpose the creation of shareholder value. Marks was making a sincerely felt statement about the kind of business he wanted his company to be. Such statements about the nature of the business defined the iconic company Marks and Spencer became. As at ICI and Boeing, Marks and Spencer was to sacrifice that status in the rationalist 1990s in the ultimately unsuccessful pursuit of growth in earnings per share.
You don't prolong life much by adopting long life as your goal. Nor do you learn much about the sources of longevity by asking very old people how they did it. Medical interventions don't have a large overall impact on life expectancy - med