Chinese Gooseberries and Alligator Pears

In my early years in California, a colleague gave me three or four huge avocados.  They were from her father's farm in Lindsay, which was only a few minutes of a drive away.

I was new to this fruit--until I came to graduate school in Los Angeles, I had't even heard of avocados.  I was just about getting used to eating chips with store-bought guacamole, and now three huge avocados were staring at me on the kitchen counter.

All I knew was that they were not ripe.  They felt rock solid.  

I let a couple of days go by.  They didn't seem to get any less solid.  

After another couple of days, I lost my patience.  I was now beginning to behave like one of those characters in "Three men in a boat."  

I knifed one of those avocados.  They were solid, and raw, and now I was stuck with a wasted fruit.

Undeterred, I decided to chop them down to pieces in the Cuisinart.  And then added salt to taste.

I threw the whole thing into the trash can.

Over time, I learnt how to make good use of avocados.  A few years later, when I started teaching at the local university, Juan, who was a Mexican-American student, shared with me his family recipe to make guacamole.  The first couple of times, I faithfully followed the recipe.  And then I started freewheeling like I always do in the kitchen.

If only I had known avocados back when I was a kid in India--maybe like some of the southeast Asians, I too would have had avocado milkshakes ;)

Eating something alien to us is not easy.  Consider even the name avocado; in most of the US, avocados were not even how they were referred to.

While avocados were popular in California, that wasn’t true for the rest of the country. In the beginning of the 20th-century, they were called “alligator pears.” Their bumpy, olive skin connected them to those denizens of the swamp, and it’s shape resembled, well, a pear.  They had a marketing problem.

I am not sure if I would have eagerly sought out alligator pears.  We might quote "what's in a name"; but, the reality is that the name makes a huge difference.  Names can be misleading too--like how when I was new in the country, I thought that Chinese Gooseberries were the gooseberries back in the old country!

And then the alligator pears went through an intense marketing and branding makeover.  The rest, as they say, is history.

At the end of the day, avocados have a place on today’s table thanks in part to a tireless campaign to redefine and redraft their identity. Some of it was misguided, some of it was weird and some of it was good. That is the nature of advertising.

Phones are newer and smarter ... this user is older and dumber!

I got into the smartphone habit much later than most in my circle.  I simply had no need for it--my old flip-phone worked fine.  My daughter was surprised; she thought I loved such gadgets.  I do.  But, when I evaluated the costs and the benefits, it just didn't seem worth it.

I finally made the switch to a smartphone.  I have now had that phone for a few years.  A couple of more generations of that phone have come and gone, but I am fine with what I have.  

In the US, most of us don't shell out the entire cost of a new smartphone.  Instead, we enter into a contract with a telephone company, which then provides the phone at a low price.  That remarkably low upfront cost makes the upgrades "easier" for customers.

With my contract, I was "eligible" for an upgrade a while ago.  I don't bother with that.  Because, I worry.  Unnecessary it might be; but, I worry.  Worry is all I seem to do, when I don't engage in sophomoric jokes ;)

The experience with the television set was tough enough.  I continued to soldier on with my cathode-ray-tube TV until the cable company's digital transmission started messing up things.  I then became the recipient of the daughter's gift!

I routinely force students to think about where their old smartphones end up when they upgrade to the latest gadget.  I have assigned essays, like this one, which then provide the context for them to pause for a few minutes and think about the resource consumption.  I practice--at least try to--what I teach.  Thus, I have a difficult time getting rid of my old smartphone even when it serves all my purposes. Last December, when I was taking photographs of the high school classmates who had come to the niece's wedding, one friend laughingly said "ever since the first time I reconnected with Sriram, he has been using the same camera."  Yes, it has been the same camera too for a few years now.  Just because it is old I should dump it?  I don't operate that way.  

I would suggest that you, too, think about those issues before you do whatever you do, especially if you are an environmental nutcase like me.  (Yes, shocking to you, eh, given my right-wing politics!)

It takes a lot of energy to use a smartphone. You charge the phone daily, you browse and exchange messages, you create tweets and Instagram posts that are saved on some faraway energy-guzzling server. Yet the biggest way to lessen the environmental impact of your phone doesn't have anything to do with how you use it, according to a new review

I have no idea why they had to do a big review to figure things out.  I have been saying the same stuff for years; oh yeah, nobody cares for what I have to say! ;)

All of that activity pales in comparison to how much energy it takes to extract and refine the dozens of precious metals that go into a smartphone. In other words, abstaining from replacing your smartphone more frequently than need be—and recycling it when you're done with it—may be the best way to make a difference.
"The current business model of mobile contracts encourages consumers to upgrade frequently, regardless of whether their current phone is fit for purpose," University of Surrey physicist James Suckling, one of the review's authors, said in a statement. "This isn't a trend that can continue if we are to have the mobile lifestyle we want, while still ensuring a sustainable future."

So, there!

I way prefer my clear approach to planned obsolescence ;)

Source

Chief Marketing Officers at universities? What next?

My neighbor "J" has for years criticized the "education business" as he calls it for a big reason that it behaves like a business but doesn't want to actually follow the rules of business.  This WSJ report will add more to his argument:



Marketing the institution is not really new, of course.  Even our small little university sends its administrative personnel to far flung states like Alaska or Hawaii to recruit students, and the president and provost even led delegations to China to recruit students from there.  Last year, a student told me that she went to China in one such recruitment trip, with all expenses paid for by the university.  I am not sure if the university paid for the trip with taxpayer dollars or privately raised money, though odds are high that the trip was publicly financed.

It was only a matter of time, therefore, that universities went that one additional step and hired Chief Marketing Officers.  As per Parkinson's Law, this office will quickly morph into a monstrous division with quite a few employees, and ... oh well, if only I did not cherish some outdated Platonic version of the academy--I could have financially gained as well from all the marketing.

As Professor Harry Frankfurt poignantly noted, bullshit is what happens when we have to market anything, even if that is higher education!



The line between a university and a diploma mill is getting increasingly blurry :(

If you wondered what the heck professors were smoking ...

From a collection of 48 ads from the old days ... a collection to remind ourselves how awful those days were ...

The marketing of Obama

When I reconnected with a high school friend more than 25 years since graduation, he said that he was into brand management consulting, or something along those lines.  A successful operation he runs.  I bet he will be interested in this piece about how the Obama brand is not seemingly working well:

In his November 2008 essay in the Harvard Business Review, “How Better Marketing Elected Barack Obama,” Quelch cited “Obama's personal charisma, his listening and public speaking skills, his consistently positive and unruffled demeanor and his compelling biography” as components of a brand that “attracted the attention and empathy of voters.” He added that “Obama chose an excellent marketing and campaign team, and managed them well. From start to finish, there was no public dissension.”
But nearly two years later, the marketing challenge for President Obama is far more complicated than for candidate Obama. ...
Quelch warns that “after you are elected, you are only as good as the product and performance you deliver, and the brand promise has to be lived up to. If the promise has been very substantial and the performance has been average, that’s going to put you in a bigger hole than if the promise was modest and the performance has been average. Individual citizens run, if you like, a gap analysis on promise versus performance.”

iPad: packaging + marketing = $$$?

Outsourced

I'm sure you've heard about reverse engineering and industrial espionage -- they are the bread and butter of a competitive tech industry! -- but I had no idea there were firms, such as Chipworks, that specialize in the process. They've just released glorious, revealing details of the Apple iPad's hardware, and a complete breakdown of the new, top-secret A4 processor. For the less-technically-minded, iFixit has a walkthrough for the reverse engineering, too.

The pictures and details are juicy -- you can even order a bunch of die photos! -- but ultimately, there isn't anything exciting under the hood. The iPad is merely a large iPod Touch, with almost identical hardware in places. Chipworks calls the iPad 'a giant battery with a tiny [circuit] board attached to it' -- and looking at the picture above, you can see why!

So, no real news here I'm afraid, unless you're trying to mollify a Mac fanatic. What you're paying for is a large touch-screen and a giant battery -- you are not buying a piece of 'magic', but simply a large iPod Touch. The devil, as always, is in the software. It would not be the first time that Apple has shoehorned some fantastic software into a shiny, but otherwise lackluster hardware package.

In my opinion, the coolest part of this story is that Chipworks tears apart of bleeding-edge technology to produce full, reproducible schematics of a device's circuitry. Nothing is sacred!