Finally, an alternative to Facebook's Like button, DISLIKE by EnemyGraph
The adage says: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." And that's exactly what the creators of EnemyGraph had in mind. It's an application that allows users to list their "enemies," whether these are ideological enemies of your mind, Facebook friends, pages or even groups. Hate a politician? Name that person as an enemy on EnemyGraph. If you install EnemyGraph and declare yourself a hater, you should know that you're certainly not alone. EnemyGraph currently has 10,000 users.
EnemyGraph screenshot (Click Image To Enlarge)
EnemyGraph presents an interesting alternative to the homogenous liking culture that Facebook engenders. That is, if you don't want to like something, you have only two options: ignore it completely, or leave a snarky "dislike" type of comment. If you do the latter, it's easy to come off as a jerk - and you don't want to feign negativity on a network based on positive interaction, now do you? With EnemyGraph, you can silently hate without causing any harm to others. Change the settings to "Only You" and no one has to see how much you dislike others on Facebook. Because haters gonna hate, ya dig?
The idea behind EnemyGraph is counter to Facebook's like culture, which connects people based on common interests such as sports, brands, celebrities, artists or food. The entire Facebook culture is predicated on either liking something and amplifying that, or completely ignoring. There is no middle ground or place to be uncomfortable, aside from just saying "it's complicated," leaving it at that, and then leaving it alone.
Of course, EnemyGraph seems to be just as simplistic as the Facebook like culture it aims to disrupt. Facebook exhibits a culture of liking, of feigned positivity, of outwardly looking good in front of others. The Facebook like button has been written about and discussed, hailed as the thing that has "propelled the company to a galaxy-orbit valuation" in its IPO offering.
But like is more than just a marketing gimmick; it is the tiniest of emotional intent, filtered into the walled garden social network. The world's largest social network doesn't sell you products directly, or even ask you to do something active. It is a social network of people who are ready to share their lives with one another. It is a tangled emotional Web, and the like button is the smallest indicator of a positive feeling.
"The Like button is such a tiny nugget of connection. Something that was not actually a feeling wouldn't be able to communicate the same thing."
EnemyGraph was created as part of Facebook's invitation to "Hack the Graph," which works off of the three Facebook core elements of social design: utilizing community, building conversation and curating identity. While it's possible to connect with others based on your mutual dislikes and content that you both can agree sucks, making a list of enemies is uncomfortable, yet important to do. Know thyself.
"Relationships always include differences, and often these differences are a critical part of the fabric of a friendship. In the country club atmosphere of Facebook and its platform, such differences are ignored. It's not part of their 'social philosophy.'"
COMMENTARY: I have always disliked the fact that you either Liked something, or you remained silent, because you had no other alternative. If you didn't like something, you were forced to post a comment if that alternative was available. EnemyGraph is my dream come true. As a blogger, I try to remain objective, but there are definitely some things that I don't like. The EnemyGraph app is now a part of my Facebook page.
Click Image To Enlarge
EnemyGraph is going to be a true game-changer because if enough people download the app, and I have a feeling that millions of Facebook users will, that we will know just how users feel about brands, people, things, whatever. Marketers knew that users liked their brand content, but now they will have to deal with dislike. It's a game-changer for sure.
Courtesy of an article dated March 27, 2012 appearing in ReadWriteWeb
Of all of the Steve Jobs interviews, and believe me, there are not many videos of the King of Magical Devices being interviewed and put under the hot seat. Steve Jobs would never subject himself to that, or admit any wrong doing. However, Steve agreed to be interviewed by All Things Digital at the D8 Conference in 2010, about accusations of horrible sweatshop working conditions, unsafe working conditions, and 13 plant worker suicides at Foxconn International's plant in China, the company that manufacturer's Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod.
I would've loved to have had Steve Jobs "wired" at the time of the interview. And just to prove that I have balls, I would've wired the other end to myself. Everytime Steve lied, it would send a fiew volts of electricity that would give me a nice jolt. It would've been like the 4th of July. I would've litup like a candle, and I am sure Apple Evangelists would enjoy the spectacle. I wonder what other wonderful tidbits of information we could've learned about Time's "Person of the Year for 2010?"
Here's the video. Please, no more hateful mail or nasty comments.
Don't get me wrong. I love Apple products, I think they are beautifully designed and engineered products that people absolutely lust for. Steve Jobs is without any doubt the greatest entrepreneur and technology innovator of the modern era even though he did get some help from alien technology along the way.
In a blog post dated March 29, 2012, I reported that Apple CEO Tim Cook had visited Foxconn International's plant in China, and he looked dapper in that yellow rubberized plant worker outfit, don't you think? I love it when the CEO of a major company "grabs the bull by the horns," and personally takes the time to visit the site of all the carnage and widespread pollution. If anybody knew what was going on over in China it was Tim, the architect of Apple's outsourced manufacturing model.
Wildfire, the global leader in social media marketing software, announced that over 13,000 paying customers are using its Social Marketing Suite, making it the largest social media marketing platform in the world. The Wildfire Platform has powered over 200,000 social marketing campaigns. More than half of the world’s Top 50 Most Valuable Brands, including Facebook itself, use the Wildfire platform to engage with audiences across the mobile and social web.
In 2011, Wildfire experienced explosive growth. Its revenues grew by 300 percent, while maintaining strong margins, and expanded the team to over 300 employees worldwide by March of 2012. With new offices in London, Paris, Munich, and Singapore, the company also grew its international business by 500 percent, with more than 24 percent of the company’s revenue now coming from outside the U.S.
The company’s growth has been fueled in large part by the exceptional results brands achieve with Wildfire, which has led to significant repeat business and strong organic customer growth. On average, Wildfire customers gain a 3x increase in fan growth rate while working with Wildfire. With 300 new subscription clients in the last 6 months of 2011, Wildfire is adding mid- and enterprise-level customers at a faster rate than any direct competitor.
Employee satisfaction and retention rates have also contributed to the company’s growth in today’s competitive tech hiring climate: in 2011 and 2012, Wildfire was named one of the Top 10 Best Places To Work by the San Francisco Business Times, and is currently ranked in the top 1% of best places to work in the U.S. by Glassdoor.com.
New technology innovations have also played a substantial role in the company’s growth over the past year. In July of 2011, the company introduced its Social Marketing Suite, integrating best-of-breed social promotion software, robust page management, messaging and sophisticated real-time analytics into one complete platform. In early 2012, the company expanded its offerings to include mobile Facebook marketing, and most recently, through partnership with Adaptly, Wildfire integrated ad buying and ad optimization capabilities into its Social Marketing Suite, enabling organizations to drive greater return on their paid, owned and earned media.
Wildfire co-founders Alain Chuard and Victoria Ransom (Click Image To Enlarge)
Last month, co-founder and CEO Victoria Ransom was named a TechFellow by the Founders Fund, NEA and TechCrunch, for outstanding technology leadership and innovation.
Victoria Ransom, co-founder and CEO of Wildfire says.
“Social media has evolved from a stand-alone channel to one that permeates every marketing program. As brands continue to integrate social into all their marketing programs, they will need sophisticated, enterprise-grade software like Wildfire’s to successfully manage and optimize every customer interaction. With our continued technology innovation, our strong customer base and our outstanding team, Wildfire is extremely well-positioned to further scale the business in the coming years.”
Wildfire Interactive CEO Victoria Ransom interviewed by Bloomberg TV in London about the social media marketing company and its quick and successful growth.
COMMENTARY:
Wildfire Background
Wildfire is the second profitable company co-founded by Alain Chuard and Victoria Ransom, who were long-time friends before becoming romantic partners. In 2010, they sold the adventure travel company they started a decade ago, now called Access Adventure Travel, after building it into a multimillion dollarbusiness.
The sale allowed them to focus full-time on Wildfire, which got its start in the summer of 2008 after Ransom and Chuard beat 600 other entrants to win a $250,000 first prize from the Facebook Fund, the social network's investment vehicle. In 2009, Facebook made an equity investment of another $100,000 in Wildfire, which has raised a total of $4.1 million dollars from the venture capital firm Summit Partners and angel investors, such as Jeff Clavier, who also owns a piece of Groupon. Most of that money is still in the bank, CEO Ransom says, because the company has been “consistently cash flow positive on a quarterly basis.”
So what's the secret of their business success?
According to one of their backers, Ransom and Chuard have complementary skills.
Andrew Collins, a partner at Summit Partners, a venture capital firm with $11 billion under management and offices in London, Boston and Palo Alto, Calif. says.
"They play well off each other's strengths. Victoria is a gifted leader and business mind, while Alain has a wonderful vision for product."
Ransom sets the company's strategic direction, runs operations and has been its chief fundraiser and public face, all while building a reputation as a leader in social-media marketing. She is the one who can rally a team around a common vision and "figure out any problem you throw at her," says Chuard, who's in charge of product design and development for Wildfire.
Ransom says about Alain.
"His strength is a good intuition for product and a good eye for what [software] design is best for customers. With us, it's very clear who's doing what day to day."
In some ways, the two are an unlikely pair.
Chuard, who speaks four languages, was raised in Switzerland, part of an entrepreneurial family that saw both his father and uncle run successful businesses. Ransom, meanwhile, was raised on a New Zealand farm in the small village of Scott's Ferry.
They met at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., when Chuard, who was a professional snowboarder for several years, agreed to teach Ransom the winter sport. After starting off as friends at college, they never lost touch and have been romantically involved for more than a decade. But after moving to New York together, they found themselves working, unhappily, as financial analysts at rival New York investment banks.
Ransom says.
"We weren't passionate about it and were trying to decide what to do with the rest of our lives."
But then the pair noticed the startup founders who came in to pitch to their banks did have passion for their work. So they quit their jobs and followed their passion for adventure by founding a company that let them travel the world teaching clients things like surfing, snowboarding and mountain biking.
When they needed Internet-based software to help run the business, Chuard, who majored in math and economics, designed and developed it. That application helped earn each of them spots in the entrepreneurial internship program at Highland Capital Partners in Boston, where Ransom had moved to earn a master's of business administration from Harvard.
The "aha" moment for Wildfire Interactive came when the pair wanted to run a sweepstakes campaign for adventure travelers on Facebook, but were disappointed in the software offerings available. So Chuard, who had earned his MBA from Stanford, created one called Promotion Builder.
So how do Ransom and Chuard balance their personal and professional lives in the ultra-competitive world of Silicon Valley Internet startups?
The couple says that while business is part of their relationship, their relationship isn't part of the business.
Ransom says.
"When we're at work, no one would even know we're engaged. It's not relevant. When we do disagree, we take it offline."
She thinks it's easier to have a partner who understands the 24/7 nature of running a startup, although Wildfire’s rapid growth has put their marriage plans on hold.
“Someone who doesn’t know what that’s like might feel neglected.”
Hitting the slopes or the surf together in their precious spare time also helps, according to Chuard.
He says.
"It's a good thing we have so many other interests in common."
What is Wildfire?
Wildfire Products
Wildfire Offers Five Different Products:
Promotion Builder - Build and track powerful custom promotions across multiple social networks. Grow and engage your audience on Facebook, Twitter and more.
Grow and engage your audience. It's a fact: promotions build fans and followers and drive sales. Run best-in-class campaigns to build and engage your audience.
Track powerful analytics. Access real-time metrics. Analyze user behavior, aggregate demographic profiles and viral campaign information.
Customize Branding & Design. Receive complete branding control and advanced design capabilities to push your campaign to the next level.
Page Manager - Easily create custom social pages with our design toolkit. Efficiently manage content across multiple networks and your own website.
Build better Facebook or Twitter pages. Choose from several templates. Add your custom content and have your page up and running in on your Facebook tab, website or mobile site in minutes.
Drive Engagement. Spark conversation and engagement among your fans and followers with social plugins, shareable stores, galleries, promotions and more.
Maintain Total Control. Manage content publishing rights with Wildfire's sophisticated permissioning, and control which users see your content with advanced audience targeting.
Messenger - View, manage and moderate messaging across all of your social properties. Target messages by geography and demographics, and schedule them to post any time.
Message Anywhere, Anytime. Schedule targeted, custom messages to post to one or all of your social properties now or later.
Target Your Global Audience. Target messages to specific languages and locations so your fans receive personalized messages every time.
Engage With Every Post. Compose and publish interative media-rich posts to all of your fan pages in one simple interface.
Analytics - Track audience growth and engagement across all of your social properties. Find out who your brand ambassadors are.
See How You Stack Up. Identify exactly where you should focus to outperform your competitors and industry as a whole.
Get Your Message Right. Use per-post engagement analytics to test your messaging and select the messages with the highest conversion.
Interactive, Powerful Reports. Get real-time results for all your social efforts, plus easy-to-understand indicators of ROI.
Monitor - Use the Wildfire Social Media Monitor to glean insights about the growth of your social media fanbase on the leading social networks. With daily tracking, you have visibility into growth trends small and large.
Track Your Competitors. No company is an island. Gauge your social media success against others in your industry by comparing your follower bases across the leading social networks. Quickly find out if you're gaining traction or leaving your competitors in the dust.
Receive Alerts. Whether you're just starting out or already an expert in social media, Wildfire's alert system will inform you of meaningful trends and activity that's relevant to your social presence.
Scout The Leaderboards. Find out which social properties are leading the pack from among the millions we track every day. Browse the top Facebook pages based on number of Likes or Checkins, and check out the top Twitter users based on number ofFollowers, Following or Tweets.
Plans & Pricing
Promotion Builder pricing is as follows:
Click Image To Enlarge
Social Marketing Suite (Call Wildfire for pricing). Here is a summary of the Social Marketing Suite:
Complete Social Marketing Solution - Promotions, page management, ads, messaging and advanced analytics.
Subscription - Unlimited social campaigns for one monthly fee.
Dedicated Social Strategy Team - All clients receive a team of experienced social strategists to set, measure and achieve their social marketing goals.
Wildfire sure looks like a startup that is really on a role and has developed a suite of solutions for managing entire social media campaigns across multiple social networks. When will they have their IPO?
USING TECHNIQUES IMPORTED FROM TOYOTA, HERMAN MILLER HAS ACHIEVED STUNNING EFFICIENCY WHILE EMPOWERING ITS WORKERS.
Amidst all the doom-and-gloom about the death of American manufacturing, the one, simple fact that’s usually forgotten is that we’re still the world’s No. 1 manufacturer. No joke, and not a typo: We produce one fifth of the world’s total manufacturing output.
Herman Miller factory worker assembles Aeron chair (Click Image To Enlarge)
Herman Miller puts all Aeron chairs through stringent quality control tests to insure quality and reliability (Click Image To Enlarge)
Herman Miller puts all Aeron chairs through stringent quality control tests. Here test chairs backs are pulled by cables numerous times to insure quality and reliability (Click Image To Enlarge)
The difference between how Americans once made stuff and how that stuff is made today is that manufacturing in the U.S. has reached a stunning level of efficiency that can be hard to really comprehend. Unless, of course, you visit a factory like the one that makes Herman Miller’s Aeron chair. We recently did, and saw a process which has yielded a 500% increase in productivity and a 1,000% increase in quality since 1998. Those numbers sound made up, but bear with me for a second, and I’ll explain.
The Kaizen ("continual improvement") process that yielded all those results was imported directly from Toyota, in the 1990s. At the time, Herman Miller was hoping to bring down costs in order to stay competitive across the world. And Toyota was hoping to build better relationships in the U.S., as part of its effort to build more cars in America. Herman Miller’s present EVP of operations, Ken Goodson, eventually cajoled Toyota into making Herman Miller one of the first companies in a pilot program to teach American companies Japanese manufacturing techniques. Toyota eventually sent Hajime Oba, a legendary manufacturing genius, to lead the lessons. (Oba himself, humble to the end, prefers that he be called sensei or coach.)
The sloped feeder that delivers chair bases to the worker use gravity rather than machinery to do the job--thus decreasing the breakdowns. (Click Image To Enlarge)
Herman Miller assembly worker places paper wrapping on completed Aeron chair for packing (Click Image To Enlarge)
Herman Miller assembly worker takes notes on production performance to insure everything is going according to plan (Click Image To Enlarge)
Kaizen, as many people will tell you, isn’t about grand ideas or huge structural changes. Rather, it’s about tiny improvements that accrue over time. So for Herman Miller, these involve adjustments as minute as the placement of a bin of washers so someone has to reach over 6 inches less, or the height of an assembly line, so people don’t waste a fraction of a second bending over.
The process is as important as the results: It’s the individual employees on the line that are suggesting these improvements. At Herman Miller, they average 1,200 "plan-do-check acts"--that is, little proposed changes to the assembly process--ever year. Eric VanDam, Herman Miller's director of operations in seating says.
"The biggest thing is to empower people to change the work in ways that matter to them."
All of these tiny improvements, in the course of 13 years, have meant that a new Aeron chair, which used to come off the line every 82 seconds, is now boxed and finished every 17 seconds. A decade ago, an Aeron took more than 600 seconds in total to build. Today, it’s about 340. Meanwhile, safety metrics have improved by a factor of 6. Quality metrics have improved by a factor of 10. A single Aeron takes one fifth of the labor to make that it once did. The actual factory itself is 10 times smaller.
Today, Herman Miller is doing far more with the same labor force that was once producing a sum total of five different office chairs. Today, they produce 17, using roughly the same number of people. And all the while, lead times have shrunk from two months to as little as 10 days.
You might think that all this means that Herman Miller should be running into a practical limit in how efficient they can be. But they’re still getting improvements of a quarter to a half of a second at a time, month by month. They’re on track this year to beat all their records--again.
COMMENTARY: I wish I could put together a new office chair in 340 seconds. If you have ever had to put together an office chair, or even a wodden desk, it can be a very time-consuming and frustrating experience, even with a set of written instructions to work from. SmartFurniture, Herman Miller's San Francisco distributor, makes it look easy in this video.
I do love Herman Miller office furniture, especially those ergonomic and comfortable Aeron chairs. I view them as a form of art, not just office furniture. Plus, they are 100% made in the U.S.A. They are a bit pricey, but you get what you pay for. Herman Miller products are sold only through authorized office furniture distributors.
The basic price for the Aeron chair is $629.00, and can be customized with lumbar support adjustment, leather arm rests, fully-adjustable arm support and other goodies. It costs $50.00 extra to buy one fully-assembled. Beware of cheap foreign imitators. There are several of them out there, but they are just not the same thing.
Courtesy of an article dated March 28, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design
Featured in the Swiss architectural magzine Hochparterre’s “Raumtraum”section, these visualizations of future architectures employ the accidental in computer driven manufacturing processes.
Based on iconic housing shapes, these buildings were intended as prototypes for mass-customization. Yet, as things go with computerized manufacturing, there have been misplots. The cartridge was not loaded properly. The concrete was set to the wrong parameters or scale. The printer module falsely translated a data set…
These misprints are the rejects of this early process, and they are now being used as shared homes by elderly people from the former squatter scene.
Concrete Misplots - Marginal archictures of the future by German designer Zeitguised (Click Images To Enlarge)
COMMENTARY: I love the beauty of designs of all times, but when I first saw Zeitguised's "Concrete Misplots," I knew that I had write a piece about them in my blog.
Zeitguised describes his monolithic "Concrete Misplots" as the random outcome of an accident in computerized design of the architecture of the future. However, there is nothing really random in the art form itself.
Concrete Misplots took some work on the part of Zeitguised. We are so used to pouring concrete into slabs or using cement in stucco to cover the outside of homes, then adding some texture to give it surface tone, character and uniqueness, but Zeitguised is on the very outer edge of "concrete design," if there is such a thing.
The textures in Zeitguised's Concrete Misplots are not minute or subtle, but thick, robust, undulating, powerful and definitely not uniform straight angles as we are accustomed to seeing, but everything still fits together whether its the stacked clay balls design of image #2, the deflated rubber inner tubes of image #4 or the undulating intestinal tract design of image #5. All of it has form and purpose, so it is definitely not "misplotted" by any means. This is true concrete art on steroids for lack of a better description.
I do hope that Zeitguised will not stop with just designing Concrete Misplots prints, but actually take his concrete art to the next level--building full-scale concrete housing that incorporate his concrete art form. Certainly there must be a gifted architect out there who can colloborate with Zeitguised and build the real thing.
Frustro, a 3D typeface that will play tricks with your eyes and blow your mind (Click Image To Enlarge)
If you like typography and appreciate the mind-bending genius of M.C. Escher, this typeface has no equal: An alphabet made entirely of “undecidable” figures, two-dimensional objects that look like 3-D projections but, on closer examination, are geometrically impossible.
Frustro, the 3D typeface that plays tricks with your eyes and will blow your mind (Click Images To Enlarge)
Frustro is the work of Martzi Hegedűs, a 25-year-old graphic designer at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts who was inspired to create a typeface inspired by Escher. He tells Co.Design.
“At the beginning I did not expect Frustro to be used. However, I started to make it as a computer font just for the challenge.”
The principle behind the Frustro 3D typeface is the optical illusion created by two competing planes (the two typefaces above) are combined within the same typeface (the single typeface below). The mind becomes confused and the viewer sees the "R" letter differently depending on which plane it focuses its eyes on. If you focus your eyes on the top part of the bottom "R" the letter tips downward. If you focus your eyes on the bottom part of the "R" the letter tips upward. Weird, isn't it? (Click Image To Enlarge)
He’s now finalizing an OpenType version, which he hopes to make available more widely. Hegedűs has done a fine job of producing perfectly legible letters that still meet the "impossible" criteria.
More Frustro 3D typeface images and the original concept for the typeface (Click Images To Enlarge)
COMMENTARY: Boy, that Frustro 3D typeface really does play tricks with your mind. I would love to do at least one blog post using Frustro just to blow my readers minds and get the feedback.
Courtesy of an article dated March 28, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design
A NEW STUDY SUGGESTS SOME TERRIFYING RISKS THAT COME WITH EATING JUST A LITTLE RED MEAT. BUT RED MEAT IS AN ALARMINGLY LARGE PORTION OF THE AMERICAN DIET.
No meal seems quite so American--or even quite so mouth-watering--as a nice thick porterhouse steak, or a hamburger straight off the grill. The only problem is that these meals appear to be killing us.
That was the recent finding of a study that showed that with each additional 3-ounce portion of red meat you eat each day, you get a 12% greater risk of dying in a given year, a 10% greater risk of cancer, and a 16% greater risk of cardiovascular disease. Let me repeat that, because it’s absolutely crazy: A 12% greater risk of dying in a given year, a 10% greater risk of cancer, and a 16% greater risk of cardiovascular disease.
If you just saw a bunch of meaningless words and numbers in the paragraph above, here’s the gory details laid out in one infographic. (The numbers for early death and cancer are slightly different; this is presumably because the designers used an older study.) The truly scary part is that not only is red meat dangerous, but Americans, more than virtually every country on Earth, love red meat:
Click Image To Enlarge
Perhaps the most quietly alarming detail in the infographic above is the figures about processed meat. And it squares with the most recent study available--the same one I cited above found that the 12% risk of dying jumps to 20%. Your risk of cardiovascular disease rises to 21%, and your risk of cancer rises to 16%. That’s right: The cancer risk resulting from eating a hot dog everyday is 60% greater than from a hamburger.
The infographic then tries to posit a reason: Something called pink slime:
Click Image To Enlarge
This is where the data is starting to tip to shaky ground: Pink slime, though it does appear in many processed meats, hasn’t been thoroughly studied for its health effects. Nonetheless, that recent study about red meat has essentially caused a collapse in the industry. Which is something of a red herring (pun intended): I suspect that when the furor about red-meat dies down, we’ll all go back to our usual ways, happy to now avoid a little pink slime where we can. Not so fast. Red meat is really the problem.
COMMENTARY: I seem to recall that back in the 90's there was a red meat scare, and several steak houses like the Sizzler, and fast food restaurants serving hamburgers suffered declines in business, and some of them even had to close locations or shutdown. Well, it now appears that the warning that red meat is dangerous to us was all true.
Out of curiosity I researched the Average Annual Per Capita Consumption of Meat, and the following chart confirms that red meat consumption is down on a per capita basis, and chicken consumption is substantially up. That's a good thing, but red meat is so dangerous that even if you eat red meat just a couple of times a week, that's all it takes to do longterm damage to your health.
Courtesy of an article dated March 28, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design
Apple Inc's Tim Cook, on his first trip to China as the chief executive officer, has visited an iPhone production plant run by the Foxconn Technology Group, which is being accused of improper labor practices.
China is the world's largest mobile market and already Apple's second-biggest market overall, but its growth there is clouded by issues ranging from a contested iPad trademark to treatment of local labor.
Picture handouts dated March 28 and e-mailed to Reuters show Cook seen smiling and meeting workers in the newly built Foxconn ZhengzhouTechnology Park in the north central province of Hebei. The facility employs 120,000 people, the handouts said.
Foxconn is a major part of Apple's global supply chain, assembling most of its iPhones and iPads, but has been hit by a string of worker suicides in recent years that activist groups blame on tough working conditions.
The group is the Taiwan parent of Hong Kong-listed Foxconn International Holdings and Taiwan-listed Hon Hai Precision.
Cook took the reins at Apple in August after the death of the firm's visionary founder, Steve Jobs. His closely guarded itinerary has included talks with Vice Premier Li Keqiang, Beijing's mayor and a visit to one of Apple's two stores in the capital.
On Wednesday, state media reported that China's vice premier promised Cook the country would boost intellectual property protection.
the official Xinhua news agency cited Vice Premier Li Keqiang as saying.
"To be more open to the outside is a condition for China to transform its economic development, expand domestic demands and conduct technological innovation."
Apple has tie-ups with China Telecom and China Unicom to sell its iPhone, with the only other Chinese carrier, China Mobile, the country's biggest mobile operator, also looking to clinch a deal.
Apple is embroiled in a long-running dispute with Proview - a financially weak technology company that claims to have registered the iPad trademark - that is making its way through Chinese courts and threatens to disrupt iPad sales.
COMMENTARY: I would gladly give up one case of Chateauneuf du Pape '04 to find out what Apple CEO Tim Cook told Foxconn management during his visit to the plant concerning their sweat shop conditions, progress on Apple inspections of their plant, and plan to improve worker relations and pay.
Cook's visit to Foxconn makes good public relations--images of the powerful new Apple CEO visiting Foxconn, gives one confidence that finally those sweat shop conditions will end, Foxconn will comply with Apple's Code of Suppliers and everything will be hunky-dorey. As I said in my post prior to this one, Apple is not a socially conscience company. They are all about increasing shareholder value and profitability.
If Apple CEO Tim Cook really wanted to impress me, he would give Foxconn an ultimatum, and if they failed to comply after regular inspections, he would promise to move the manufacturing all Apple products to the U.S. This would create an estimated 250,000 jobs, many of them right here in Silicon Valley, where we need them the most.
I would be very interested in hearing from Apple evangelists--owners of Apple magical devices whether the iPhone, iPad or iPod. Foxconn makes all of them, so you can enjoy that magical experience.
Courtesy of an article dated March 29, 2012 appearing in Reuters and an article dated March 28, 2012 appearing in Brian Fontenot Blog
Apple should do more than just pay off stockholders with a dividend. It should take the opportunity to redefine what it means to be a corporation.
It's hard to imagine how big a billion is. Now try with $97.6 billion (call it an even $100 billion), the wad of cash Apple has squirreled away. One hundred billion one-dollar bills weighabout 200 million pounds (or 100,000 tons, give or take) and if you laid them end-to-end they'd circle the earth 40 times at its widest point, the equator. Layer one bill on top of the other and you could build a tower 6.8 miles (36,000 feet) into the air, high enough to obstruct air traffic. Convert Apple's cash stash into a giant stack of pennies and you could reach the moon. Twice. The company that sprouted modestly from Steve Jobs' garage on April Fool's Day 36 years ago has enough cash on hand to pay off the total public debt of eight European Union countries. It could buy Facebook outright, or spring for 33 billion Starbucks tall cappuccinos or 100 billion packs of Skittles.
That's just cash. Apple's market capitalization is, as I write this, $566 billion, bigger than the entire U.S. retail sector, and some predict Apple could become the first trillion-dollar company. It's already worth more than Ford, GM, Boeing, and General Electric combined, twice the size of Microsoft, and equal to two Walmarts, five Amazons, or 10 eBays. Its half-a-trillion-dollar market cap would place it 25th in the world in gross domestic product between Thailand + South Africa (not an exact comparison, but you get my drift). Meanwhile, Apple gets richer, reporting revenue of $46.33 billion and net profit of $13.06 billion in its last quarter.
So I was disappointed that Apple's big announcement earlier this week turned out to involve dividends to stockholders. The company had issued a press release on a Sunday, which gave the impression that CEO Tim Cook planned an earth-shattering announcement. Instead we hear news only a stockholder could love. What happened to the company that once lionized "the crazy ones," "the misfits," "the rebels," "the troublemakers," "the round pegs in the square holes," "the ones who see things differently," and "push the human race forward"?
Now that Apple is the richest company in the world, it has an historic opportunity to redefine the role a corporation can play, and if Apple leads others will follow. When Steve Jobs recruited Pepsi president John Scully to jump to Apple, he asked,
"Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
Now that Jobs is gone, I'm throwing down a similar challenge to Tim Cook and Apple's board:
"Do you want to sell entertainment devices for the rest of your collective lives? Or would like to do something that takes real courage and make the world a better place?"
Here's how I propose Apple spend some of its billions and invest in the collective good:
Education
About the iPad Apple boasts "the device that changed everything is now changing the classroom." If Apple is serious about changing education it should invest in the classroom of the future. The company could work with top educators to create a learning environment that would not only improve the efficiency of education, but would tap the imaginations of our nation's school children. In other words, do to education what the Apple Store has done to retail.
Training
In Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs says he told President Obama that Apple could relocate more manufacturing plants from China to the U.S. if the company could hire an additional 30,000 American engineers. They would not have to be PhDs from MIT or Carnegie Mellon. They just needed basic engineering skills for manufacturing, which could be learned at community colleges or trade schools. Apple could--and should--fund programs across the country to train these engineers. It could provide grants to these trade schools and community colleges and offer free tuition as an incentive.
Foreign Factories
Steve Jobs believed that Apple's success ultimate depended on controlling the entire ecosystem so that hardware and software worked seamlessly together. Yet this tightfisted control hasn't extended to its supply chain management. A former Apple executive toldThe New York Times.
"We've known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they're still going on Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn't have another choice."
Apple should apply the same ironfisted control it exerts over its design process to its working conditions overseas. This, admittedly, is a much taller order, as the factories are not owned and operated by Apple. There has been speculation lately that bringing production to the U.S. would not crush the company's bottom line, but the issue is complicated, as the Times has illuminated in a recent series.
Far-Out Fantasies
Nicholas Thompson, the editor of New Yorker.com, served up a suggestion over Twitter:
"Personally, I wish Apple decided to use its cash on futuristic R&D---like the old Xerox model."
Apple could create the modern equivalent to Bell Labs and let great minds working in tandem conceive of even greater inventions, the kind that dazzle the mind and nourish the human spirit. Realize that "the minute that you understand that you can poke life ... that you can change it, you can mold it ... that's maybe the most important thing."
Yep, that's Steve Jobs. Here's hoping Apple grows up to change the world beyond selling mere electronics, that it embraces a new kind of corporate heroism at a time when we could use some heroes.
COMMENTARY: I was also very disappointed when I heard that Apple CEO Tim Cook had announced, subject to declaration by the Board of Directors, Apple plans to initiate a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share sometime in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2012, which begins on July 1, 2012.
Additionally, Apple’s Board of Directors has authorized a $10 billion share repurchase program commencing in the Company’s fiscal 2013, which begins on September 30, 2012. The repurchase program is expected to be executed over three years, with the primary objective of neutralizing the impact of dilution from future employee equity grants and employee stock purchase programs.
Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO said.
"Combining dividends, share repurchases, and cash used to net-share-settle vesting RSUs, we anticipate utilizing approximately $45 billion of domestic cash in the first three years of our programs. We are extremely confident in our future and see tremendous opportunities ahead.”
It is not too uncommon for corporations whose stock price skyrockets, to buyback shares in order to keep earnings-per-share manageable. That's the only reason they are instituting a share repurchase program.
It is my opinion that Apple is not a socially conscience company, but one driven strictly by increasing shareholder value and profitability. Steve Jobs never really cared about people, particularly Chinese workers. In fact, he was incredulous when presented with the facts. He said during an interview with All Things Digital, "Our plants don't operate sweat shops." He was obviously wrong.
It was only after the true situation with the Chinese factories, the factory worker suicides, complaints by Chinese environmental protection agencies over massive pollution caused by Apple's Chinese plants, and the actions of thousands of people complaining through the press and workers rights organizations, that Steve Jobs, and now Tim Cook, have taken action to improve worker conditions, increase factory worker wages and reduce hazardous wastes. How those efforts finally pan out remains to be seen. I am not so confident.
It would be nice for Apple to "think differently," but I just don't see it happening. Apple culture cannot be changed overnight. Tim Cook, the Steve Jobs estate, and other Apple executivs will benefit substantially from the any dividends declared. I looked into the matter, and Tim Cook alone stands to gain the most--dividends of $240,000 per year beginning in late 2012. Over three years, that's $720,000, not including the increased value of the stock options he will have vested over the next ten years.
Apple does intend to sell iPads to the schools, but don't expect the company to offer the schools much in the way of discounts. The schools that bought the originally iPad paid about $500 each, which isn't much of a discount. I don't expect much to change. Apple will screw the schools on price. You can count on that.
I also think that Steve Jobs lied or was joking around when he told Obama he would move manufacturing jobs from China to the U.S. Apple is not about to giveup the highest profit margins in the computer industry. I think Apple will continue to manufacture its magical devices in China in order to insure those high profit margins. No corporation that I know would fund the training of engineers. They can get them a whole lot cheaper from India, China, Western Europe, Russia and other nations. Apple keeps nearly $50 billion of that $100 billion in cash in foreign banks to avoid U.S. income taxes on foreign earnings. This is all wishful thinking. Like I said before, Apple is not a socially conscience company. They put up a nice front, but its all fake.
When it comes to R&D Apple spends the least of any high-tech company because its entire business model is based on producing just a few truly great products. Apple's R&D does not operate like a GE, HP, Intel or any other high-tech company. Apple's R&D is structured like Lockheed's Skunkworks. Super secret, small teams of designers and engineers. Steve Jobs wanted it that way. Something he adapted while working on secret alien technology for NASA. The least number of people who know things, the better. Once Apple decides on what the new product will be, Apple's R&D sets up small R&D teams, all working on a few key aspects of the new product.
Sure, I would love for Apple to "think differently," but it is never going to happen. However, it sure is cool to dream and fantasize, isn't it?
Courtesy of an article dated March 19, 2012 appearing in Fast Company
Click Image to view the first-ever views of the complete remains of the ship in full profile appearing in the April 2012 edition of National Geographic Magazine
At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic disappeared beneath the waves, taking with her 1,500 souls. One hundred years later, new technologies have revealed the most complete—and most intimate—images of the famous wreck.
The wreck sleeps in darkness, a puzzlement of corroded steel strewn across a thousand acres of the North Atlantic seabed. Fungi feed on it. Weird colorless life-forms, unfazed by the crushing pressure, prowl its jagged ramparts. From time to time, beginning with the discovery of the wreck in 1985 by Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, a robot or a manned submersible has swept over Titanic’s gloomy facets, pinged a sonar beam in its direction, taken some images—and left.
In recent years explorers like James Cameron and Paul-Henry Nargeolet have brought back increasingly vivid pictures of the wreck. Yet we’ve mainly glimpsed the site as though through a keyhole, our view limited by the dreck suspended in the water and the ambit of a submersible’s lights. Never have we been able to grasp the relationships between all the disparate pieces of wreckage. Never have we taken the full measure of what’s down there.
Until now. In a tricked-out trailer on a back lot of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), William Lange stands over a blown-up sonar survey map of theTitanic site—a meticulously stitched-together mosaic that has taken months to construct. At first look the ghostly image resembles the surface of the moon, with innumerable striations in the seabed, as well as craters caused by boulders dropped over millennia from melting icebergs.
Sonar images of the forward (bow) and rear sections (stern) of the RMS Titanic and the entire debris field of the Titanic lying at the bottom of the Northern Atlantic Ocean (Click Images To Enlarge)
On closer inspection, though, the site appears to be littered with man-made detritus—a Jackson Pollock-like scattering of lines and spheres, scraps and shards. Lange turns to his computer and points to a portion of the map that has been brought to life by layering optical data onto the sonar image. He zooms in, and in, and in again. Now we can see the Titanic’s bow in gritty clarity, a gaping black hole where its forward funnel once sprouted, an ejected hatch cover resting in the mud a few hundred feet to the north. The image is rich in detail: In one frame we can even make out a white crab clawing at a railing.
Here, in the sweep of a computer mouse, is the entire wreck of the Titanic—every bollard, every davit, every boiler. What was once a largely indecipherable mess has become a high-resolution crash scene photograph, with clear patterns emerging from the murk. Lange says.
“Now we know where everything is. After a hundred years, the lights are finally on.”
Bill Lange is the head of WHOI’s Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory, a kind of high-tech photographic studio of the deep. A few blocks from Woods Hole’s picturesque harbor, on the southwestern elbow of Cape Cod, the laboratory is an acoustic-tiled cave crammed with high-definition television monitors and banks of humming computers. Lange was part of the original Ballard expedition that found the wreck, and he’s been training ever more sophisticated cameras on the site ever since.
Sonar images of the forward half of the RMS Titanic at the bottom of the Northern Atlantic Ocean and image of the ship showing the application forward section (Click Image To Enlarge)
This imagery, the result of an ambitious multi-million-dollar expedition undertaken in August-September 2010, was captured by three state-of-the-art robotic vehicles that flew at various altitudes above the abyssal plain in long, preprogrammed swaths. Bristling with side-scan and multibeam sonar as well as high-definition optical cameras snapping hundreds of images a second, the robots systematically “mowed the lawn,” as the technique is called, working back and forth across a three-by-five-mile target area of the ocean floor. These ribbons of data have now been digitally stitched together to assemble a massive high-definition picture in which everything has been precisely gridded and geo-referenced.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) archaeologist James Delgado, the expedition’s chief scientist said.
“This is a game-changer. In the past, trying to understand Titanic was like trying to understand Manhattan at midnight in a rainstorm—with a flashlight. Now we have a site that can be understood and measured, with definite things to tell us. In years to come this historic map may give voice to those people who were silenced, seemingly forever, when the cold water closed over them.”
What is it about the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic? Why, a century later, do people still lavish so much brainpower and technological ingenuity upon this graveyard of metal more than two miles beneath the ocean surface? Why, like Pearl Harbor, ground zero, and only a few other hallowed disaster zones, does it exert such a magnetic pull on our imagination?
These new photos, shot using state-of-the-are technology by independent research group Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, provide viewers with a greater understanding of what happened on that fateful April 15, 1912.
RMS Titanic bucked as it blowed nose-first into the seabed, leaving the forward hull buried deep in mud--obscuring, possibly forever, the damage inflicted by the iceberg (Click Image To Enlarge)
RMS Titanic's battered stern is captured overhead here. Making sense of this tangle of metal presents endless challenges to experts. (Click Image To Enlarge)
RMS Titanic's battered stern, captured here in profile, bears witness to the extreme trauma inflicted upon it as it corkscrewed to the bottom (Click Image To Enlarge)
Ethereal views of Titanic's bow (modeled) offer a comprehensiveness of detail never seen before (Click Image To Enlarge)
Researchers Kirk Wolfinger, top left, Rushmore DeNooyer, and Tony Bacon put together the 100,000 sonar images of the RMS Titanic for a History Channel documentary (Click Image To Enlarge)
For some the sheer extravagance of Titanic’s demise lies at the heart of its attraction. This has always been a story of superlatives: A ship so strong and so grand, sinking in water so cold and so deep. For others the Titanic’s fascination begins and ends with the people on board. It took two hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to sink, just long enough for 2,208 tragic-epic performances to unfold, with the ship’s lights blazing. One coward is said to have made for the lifeboats dressed in women’s clothing, but most people were honorable, many heroic. The captain stayed at the bridge, the band played on, the Marconi wireless radio operators continued sending their distress signals until the very end. The passengers, for the most part, kept to their Edwardian stations. How they lived their final moments is the stuff of universal interest, a danse macabre that never ends.
But something else, beyond human lives, went down with the Titanic: An illusion of orderliness, a faith in technological progress, a yearning for the future that, as Europe drifted toward full-scale war, was soon replaced by fears and dreads all too familiar to our modern world. James Cameron told me.
“The Titanic disaster was the bursting of a bubble. There was such a sense of bounty in the first decade of the 20th century. Elevators! Automobiles! Airplanes! Wireless radio! Everything seemed so wondrous, on an endless upward spiral. Then it all came crashing down.”
A portion of RMS Titanic's steel hull that broke off when she sunk. Shows several portals and hundreds of rivets (Click Image To Enlarge)
The mother of all shipwrecks has many homes—literal, legal, and metaphorical—but none more surreal than the Las Vegas Strip. At the Luxor Hotel, in an upstairs entertainment court situated next to a striptease show and a production of Menopause the Musical, is a semipermanent exhibition of Titanic artifacts brought up from the ocean depths by RMS Titanic, Inc., the wreck’s legal salvager since 1994. More than 25 million people have seen this exhibit and similar RMST shows that have been staged in 20 countries around the world.
I spent a day at the Luxor in mid-October, wandering among the Titanic relics: A chef’s toque, a razor, lumps of coal, a set of perfectly preserved serving dishes, innumerable pairs of shoes, bottles of perfume, a leather gladstone bag, a champagne bottle with the cork still in it. They are mostly ordinary objects made extraordinary for the long, terrible journey that brought them to these clean Plexiglas cases.
I passed through a darkened chamber kept as cold as a meat locker, with a Freon-fed “iceberg” that visitors can go up to and touch. Piped-in sighs and groans of rending metal contributed to the sensation of being trapped in the belly of a fatally wounded beast. The exhibit’s centerpiece, however, was a gargantuan slab of Titanic’s hull, known as the “big piece,” that weighs 15 tons and was, after several mishaps, hoisted by crane from the seabed in 1998. Studded with rivets, ribbed with steel, this monstrosity of black metal reminded me of a T. rex at a natural history museum: impossibly huge, pinned and braced at great expense—an extinct species hauled back from a lost world.
The RMST exhibit is well-done, but over the years many marine archaeologists have had harsh words for the company and its executives, calling them grave robbers, treasure hunters, carnival barkers—and worse. Robert Ballard, who has long argued that the wreck and all its contents should be preserved in situ, has been particularly caustic in his criticism of RMST’s methodologies. Ballard told me.
“You don’t go to the Louvre and stick your finger on the Mona Lisa. You don’t visit Gettysburg with a shovel. These guys are driven by greed—just look at their sordid history.”
In recent years, however, RMST has come under new management and has taken a different course, shifting its focus away from pure salvage toward a long-term plan for approaching the wreck as an archaeological site—while working in concert with scientific and governmental organizations most concerned with the Titanic. In fact, the 2010 expedition that captured the first view of the entire wreck site was organized, led, and paid for by RMST. In a reversal from years past, the company now supports calls for legislation creating a protected Titanic maritime memorial. Late in 2011 RMST announced plans to auction off its entire $189 million collection of artifacts and related intellectual property in time for the disaster’s hundredth anniversary—but only if it can find a bidder willing to abide by the stringent conditions imposed by a federal court, including that the collection be kept intact.
I met RMST’s president, Chris Davino, at the company’s artifacts warehouse, tucked next to a dog grooming parlor in a nondescript block on the edge of Atlanta’s Buckhead district. Deep inside the climate-controlled brick building, a forklift trundled down the long aisles of industrial shelving stacked with meticulously labeled crates containing relics—dishes, clothing, letters, bottles, plumbing pieces, portholes—that were retrieved from the site over the past three decades. Here Davino, a dapper, Jersey shore-raised “turnaround professional” who has led RMST since 2009, explained the company’s new tack. Davino said.
“For years, the only thing that all the voices in the Titanic community could agree on was their disdain of us. So it was time to reassess everything. We had to do something beyond artifact recovery. We had to stop fighting with the experts and start collaborating with them.”
Which is exactly what’s happened. Government agencies such as NOAA that were formerly embroiled in lawsuits against RMST and its parent company, Premier Exhibitions, Inc., are now working directly with RMST on various long-range scientific projects as part of a new consortium dedicated to protecting the wreck site. Dave Conlin, chief marine archaeologist at the National Park Service, another agency that had been vehemently critical of the company says.
“It’s not easy to thread the needle between preservation and profit. RMST deserved the flak they got in years past, but they also deserve credit for taking this new leap of faith.”
Scholars praise RMST for recently hiring one of the world’s preeminent Titanic experts to analyze the 2010 images and begin to identify the many unsorted puzzle pieces on the ocean floor. Bill Sauder is a gnome-like man with thick glasses and a great shaggy beard that flexes and snags on itself when he laughs. His business card identifies him as a “director of Titanic research,” but that doesn’t begin to hint at his encyclopedic mastery of the Titanic’s class of ocean liners. (Sauder himself prefers to say that he is RMST’s “keeper of odd knowledge.”)
When I met him in Atlanta, he was parked at his computer, attempting to make head or tail of a heap of rubbish photographed in 2010 near the Titanic’s stern. Most Titanic expeditions have focused on the more photogenic bow section, which lies over a third of a mile to the north of most of the wreckage, but Sauder thinks that the area in the vicinity of the stern is where the real action will likely be concentrated in years to come—especially with the new RMST images providing a clearer guide. Sauder said.
“The bow’s very sexy, but we’ve been to it hundreds of times. All this wreckage here to the south is what I’m interested in.”
In essence Sauder was hunting for anything recognizable, any pattern amid the chaos around the stern. He told me.
“We like to picture shipwrecks as Greek temples on a hill—you know, very picturesque. But they’re not. They’re ruined industrial sites: piles of plates and rivets and stiffeners. If you’re going to interpret this stuff, you gotta love Picasso.”
Sauder zoomed in on the image at hand, and within a few minutes had solved at least a small part of the mystery near the stern: Lying atop the wreckage was the crumpled brass frame of a revolving door, probably from a first-class lounge. It is the kind of painstaking work that only someone who knows every inch of the ship could perform—a tiny part of an enormous Where’s Waldo? sleuthing project that could keep Bill Sauder busy for years.
In late October I found myself in Manhattan Beach, California, inside a hangar-size film studio where James Cameron, surrounded by dazzling props and models from his 1997 movie, Titanic, had assembled a roundtable of some of the world’s foremost nautical authorities—quite possibly the most illustrious conclave of Titanic experts ever gathered. Along with Cameron, Bill Sauder, and RMST explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet, the roundtable boasted Titanic historian Don Lynch and famed Titanic artist Ken Marschall, along with a naval engineer, a Woods Hole oceanographer, and two U.S. Navy architects.
Cameron could more than hold his own in this select company. A self-described “rivet-counting Titanic geek,” the filmmaker has led three expeditions to the site. He developed and piloted a new class of nimble, fiber-spooling robots that brought back never before seen images of the ship’s interior, including tantalizing glimpses of the Turkish bath and some of the opulent staterooms.
Cameron has white hair and a close-clipped white goatee, and when he’s wound up on Titanic matters, a certain Melvillean intensity weighs on his brow. Cameron has also filmed the wreck of the Bismarck and is now building a submarine to take him and his cameras to the Mariana Trench. But the Titanic still holds him; he keeps swearing off the subject, only to return. He told me at his Malibu compound.
“There’s this very strange mixture of biology and architecture down there—this sort of biomechanoid quality. I think it’s gorgeous and otherworldly. You really feel like this is something that’s gone to Tartarus—to the underworld.”
At Cameron’s request, the two-day roundtable would concentrate entirely on forensics: Why did the Titanic break up the way she did? Precisely where did the hull fail? At what angle did the myriad components smash into the seabed? It was to be a kind of inquest, in other words, nearly a hundred years after the fact.
Cameron said.
“What you’re looking at is a crime scene. Once you understand that, you really get sucked into the minutiae. You want to know: How’d it get like that? How’d the knife wind up over here and the gun over there?”
Perhaps inevitably, the roundtable took off in esoteric directions—with discussion of glide ratios, shearing forces, turbidity studies. Listeners lacking an engineering sensibility would have extracted one indelible impression from the seminar: Titanic’s final moments were hideously, horrifically violent. Many accounts depict the ship as “slipping beneath the ocean waves,” as though she drifted tranquilly off to sleep, but nothing could be further from the truth. Building on many years of close analysis of the wreck, and employing state-of-the-art flooding models and “finite element” simulations used in the modern shipping industry, the experts painted a gruesome portrait of Titanic’s death throes.
The ship sideswiped the iceberg at 11:40 p.m., buckling portions of the starboard hull along a 300-foot span and exposing the six forward watertight compartments to the sea. From this moment onward, sinking was a certainty. The demise may have been hastened, however, when crewmen pushed open a gangway door on the port side in an aborted attempt to load lifeboats from a lower level. Since the ship had begun listing to port, they could not reclose the massive door against gravity, and by 1:50 a.m., the bow had settled enough to allow seawater to rush in through the gangway.
By 2:18, with the last lifeboat having departed 13 minutes earlier, the bow had filled with water and the stern had risen high enough into the air to expose the propellers and create catastrophic stresses on the middle of the ship. Then the Titanic cracked in half.
Cameron stood up and demonstrated how it happened. He grabbed a banana and began to wrench it in his hands:
“Watch how it flexes and pooches in the middle before it breaks—see that?”
The banana skin at the bottom, which was supposed to represent the doubly reinforced bottom of the hull, was the last part to snap.
Once released from the stern section, the bow shot for the bottom at a fairly steep angle. Gaining velocity as it dropped, parts began to shear away: Funnels snapped. The wheelhouse crumbled. Finally, after five minutes of relentless descent, the bow nosed into the mud with such massive force that its ejecta patterns are still visible on the seafloor today.
The stern, lacking a hydrodynamic leading edge like the bow, descended even more traumatically, tumbling and corkscrewing as it fell. A large forward section, already weakened by the fracture at the surface, completely disintegrated, spitting its contents into the abyss. Compartments exploded. Decks pancaked. Hull plates ripped out. The poop deck twisted back over itself. Heavier pieces such as the boilers dropped straight down, while other pieces were flung off “like Frisbees.” For more than two miles, the stern made its tortured descent—rupturing, buckling, warping, compressing, and gradually disintegrating. By the time it hit the ocean floor, it was unrecognizable.
Sitting back down, Cameron popped a pinched piece of banana in his mouth and ate it. He said.
“We didn’t want the Titanic to have broken up like this. We wanted her to have gone down in some kind of ghostly perfection.”
Listening to this learned disquisition on the Titanic’s death, I kept wondering: What happened to the people still on board as she sank? Most of the 1,496 victims died of hypothermia at the surface, bobbing in a patch of cork life preservers. But hundreds of people may still have been alive inside, most of them immigrant families in steerage class, looking forward to a new life in America. How did they, during their last moments, experience these colossal wrenchings and shudderings of metal? What would they have heard and felt? It was, even a hundred years later, too awful to contemplate.
St. John’s, Newfoundland, is another of Titanic’s homes. On June 8, 1912, a rescue ship returned to St. John’s bearing the last recovered Titanic corpse. For months, deck chairs, pieces of wood paneling, and other relics were reported to have washed up on the Newfoundland coast.
I had hoped to pay my respects to the people who literally went down with the ship by flying to the wreck site from St. John’s with the International Ice Patrol, the agency created in the disaster’s aftermath to keep watch for icebergs in the North Atlantic sea lanes. When a nor’easter canceled all flights, I found my way instead to a tavern in the George Street district, where I was treated to a locally made vodka distilled with iceberg water. To complete the effect, the bartender plopped into my glass an angular nub of ice chipped from an iceberg, supposedly calved from the same Greenlandic glacier that birthed the berg that sank Titanic. The ice ticked and fizzed in my glass—the exhalations, I was told, of ancient atmospheres trapped inside.
I could still get a little closer, physically and figuratively, to those who rest forever with the ship. A few years before the disaster, Guglielmo Marconi built a permanent wireless station on a desolate, wind-battered spit south of St. John’s, called Cape Race. Locals claim that the first person to receive the distress signal from the sinking ship was Jim Myrick, a 14-year-old wireless apprentice at the station who went on to a career with the Marconi Company. Initially, the transmission came in as a standard emergency code, CQD. But then Cape Race received a new signal, seldom used before: SOS.
One morning at Cape Race, amid the carcasses of old Marconi machines and crystal receivers, I met David Myrick, Jim’s great-nephew, a marine radio operator and the last of a proud line of antique communicators. David said his uncle never spoke about the night the Titanic sank until he was a frail old man. By that point, Jim had lost his hearing so completely that the only way the family could converse with him was through Morse code—manipulating a smoke detector to produce high-pitched dots and dashes. David said.
“A Marconi man to the end. He thought in Morse code—hell, he dreamed in it.”
We went out by the lighthouse and looked over the cold sea, which crashed into the cliffs below. An oil tanker cruised in the distance. Farther out, on the Grand Banks, new icebergs had been reported. Farther out still, somewhere beyond the bulge of the horizon, lay the most famous shipwreck in the world. My mind raced with thoughts of signals bouncing in the ionosphere—the propagation of radio waves, the cry of ages submerged in time. And I imagined I could hear the voice of the Titanic herself: A vessel with too much pride in her name, sprinting smartly toward a new world, only to be mortally nicked by something as old and slow as ice.
COMMENTARY: Everytime I watch the movie "Titanic," I get goosebumps. It's such an incredible love story emersed with the grandeur of the RMS Titanic on her maiden voyage that would end so tragically. Let's hope we never have to experience another tragedy like the Titanic.
Director/Producer John Cameron did an incredible job filming the events of that terrible night in the original film "Titanic." Cameron is bringing back "Titanic" in all her glory in 3D this time, and the film will be shown for a limited engagement beginning in April 2012. Hope to see you there. Now the Titanic 3D Official Trailer.
For an authentic history of the RMS Titanic, check out the Titanic Stories , RMS Titanic, Inc and Titanic Historical Society websites. These sites are the best of several and include some incredible content including images and videos of the ship, her passengers, the survivors and many other interesting facts about Titanic.
Courtesy in an article of the April 2012 issue of National Geographic Magazine and an article dated March 9, 2012 appearing in the Daily Mail and an article dated March 21, 2012 appearing in the Daily Mail
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