It comes from a must-read story in The New York Times about Terry Jones, a Florida pastor who will “memorialize” September 11 this year by burning copies of the Qur’an (a book he’s never read but is confident it’s “full of lies”):
For local Muslims like Saeed Khan, who came here in the 1970s to study for a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Florida, the collective rejection of Mr. Jones represents the America they want to believe in. In an interview at an Islamic center that used to be a Brown Derby restaurant, Dr. Khan said that “Mr. Jones is hijacking Christianity” just as “ hijacked Islam.”
What saddens him most, he said, is the lasting effect on Muslim youth. He now has three grandchildren under age 3 growing up in Gainesville, and he shook his head at the story of a friend’s daughter who woke up in the middle of the night and asked her mother, “Why don’t they like us?”
Still, like many others, he rejected the moment’s swirl of anger. Even if Muslims outside the United States respond to the planned Qur’an burning with protests, or worse, Mr. Khan said he would spend his Sept. 11 doing the same thing he did last year. He will be downtown, a few miles from Mr. Jones, feeding the homeless.
Re: The “Ground Zero” Mosque
I’ve avoided commenting on this subject for a number of reasons. But things have gotten so out of hand that I decided to enter the fray. So here goes.
In the winter of 2001 about three months after 9/11 I traveled to Normandy to visit the D-Day beaches and the American Cemetery and Battle Memorial. It was a profound experience. Men - mostly boys really - so much younger than I was then (25) died taking those beaches. Almost all of the soldiers in the first wave were killed or mounded. There was nothing between them and the German guns. When you stand on the beach and look up at where the German bunkers were you can’t help but shiver. To be on that beach on that day was to be death.
But they prevailed. They took the beach. And then, one town at at time, they took France and marched all the way into Berlin. My father, a native of Lyons, was 13 years old on D-Day. After his parents were carted off to their deaths in a concentration camp in 1942 he became part of the French Resistance. He did and saw terrible things to survive. He helped American troops find their way around and pointed out German positions. He saw men get kill and be killed.
These soldiers died to end a war. They died to stop Hitler’s war machine. Say what you will about America in the 1940’s, but America stepped up, got involved and ended WWII (quite convincingly). The Cemetery at Normandy is a living memorial to the Americans who died not only on D-Day but throughout WWII.
On September 14, 2001 my mother decided that we were going to walk to Ground Zero. My dad and I thought this was a terrible idea but she insisted. We got as close as we could, about ten blocks away. The devastation was amazing. We saw burning wreckage, cars flattened like pancakes hundreds of police, fireman, soldiers and EMT’s. It was still very chaotic. I don’t know why she wanted to go down there but she said she just wanted to get as close to it as she could. My mom and I are native New Yorker’s. Our home had been attacked and she needed to see it. I will forever be grateful that she made us walk down there. Seeing it in person provided a perspective that was impossible to get via television.
Many people who use 9/11 as an excuse for their politics or as a basis for their arguments were not affected by 9/11. I knew no one who died on 9/11. I am very lucky. But New York City, Manhattan, is my home. It is the only home I have ever had. And people attacked it. They also attacked the Pentagon in Washington, DC and would have done more damage if not for the heroic efforts of the passengers on United Flight # 93. America was not attacked. ”America” was attacked. And the proxy was New York and Washington, DC. Alaska was not attacked. Alabama was not attacked. Mississippi was not attacked. Arizona was not attacked. Minnesota was not attacked.
I am tired of people using what happened to my city as the basis for their hate. I am tired of people so fundamentally misinterpreting our Constitution and Bill of Rights. I am tired of people turning the word “Muslim” into the word “terrorist.”
We are coming dangerously close to a point in our history where those who died on D-Day and are buried in French soil at Normandy died for naught. Those men saved my dad. Those men defeated a tyrant. Those men died to ensure others could have the freedoms it is so often said we take for granted. It is our duty, our most important job as citizens, to make sure their sacrifice continues to be for the cause of freedom, justice and acceptance.
We need to take a stand. We need to stop this madness. I will fight to protect what America stands for at all costs. If I have to stand in front of that Mosque with a shotgun so young Muslim children can safely pray to their God, I will. We are allowing a scary and dangerous faction to control the course of our society. If it takes force to stop them, then this is what we must do. The stakes are too high. It is time rational people took a stand. It is time Americans took a stand.
Doug, from Nostalgia Critic, framed this tweet from Roger Ebert. I would’ve framed it, too.
That’s pretty great.
You may want to think twice before your next visit to the doctor’s office. According to Dr. Barbara Starfield’s now-famous study (in JAMA), iatrogenic deaths (those resulting from treatment by physicians or surgeons) are the third leading cause of mortality in the United States, resulting in the loss of 225,000 lives per year. Of that total, nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections kill 80,000, physician errors claim 27,000, and unnecessary surgery results in 12,000 deaths.
But iatrogenic errors aren’t the only reason people should avoid hospitals, says physician and health care administrator Archelle Georgiou. She tells Big Think that relying on doctors may actually shorten your lifespan. Georgiou bases this idea on her studies of the earth’s so-called “blue zones,” isolated communities around the world whose inhabitants live longer and healthier lives than the greater populace.
In the Greek blue zone, the island of Ikaria, inhabitants are more than 4 times more likely to live to age 90 than Americans are—yet there is virtually no health care infrastructure. Georgiou tells us: “There are no hospitals or major surgery capabilities…. People needing emergency care are transported by helicopter to Samos (a neighboring island), and all elective surgery is done in Athens.”
Further, when I analyzed the One Touch data, I found the largest contributors to Hulu Plus’s 3,345 incremental episodes are The X-Files (201 episodes), Law & Order SVU (191), Saturday Night Live (190), Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (176) and Family Guy (142). But when I perused Netflix’s streaming catalog I discovered that all of the episodes of The X-Files and Family Guy seasons are now available. For SVU, Netflix has the first 10 seasons for streaming, though not the 11th which Hulu Plus has. For SNL, Netflix has only a hodgepodge of seasons but it does have the “Best of” specials for popular comedians, which Hulu Plus doesn’t appear to offer. Fallon is the one big Hulu Plus differentiator; Netflix doesn’t have any of these episodes.
A new analysis of all the content available on Hulu Plus reveals that over 88% of all the full-length TV program episodes available in the $10/mo subscription service are already freely accessible on Hulu.com. For clips, it’s almost 98%. Research firm One Touch Intelligence found that out of 28K+ episodes on Hulu Plus, just 3,345 of them can’t also found on Hulu.com. Two-thirds of these incremental program episodes are sourced from Hulu’s broadcast TV network partners/owners, ABC, Fox and NBC.
Another way to put this: 12% of the content on Hulu+ is exclusive premium content that is not available to non-Plus Hulu users.
Sometimes – about Sarah Palin – you just have to laugh…. But it’s not really funny. In this charged political environment, her kind of talk gets dangerous. “Don’t retreat… reload” may seem clever, the kind of bull you hear all the time, but put it in context. She’s using crosshairs to illustrate targeted legislators. She’s on the wrong side of the line there. She’s getting close to calling for violence. And some of her fans take that stuff seriously. We’ve got legislators in America who have been living with death threats since the health care votes. And down in Tyler, Texas, she’s talking about—and I quote— “union thugs.” What? Her husband’s a union man. Is she calling him a thug? Sarah Palin ought to know what union men and women are. Oh, she goes to great pains to talk differently about unions and the working people who belong to them, knowing full well we’re one and the same. But using the term “union thug.” That’s poisonous. There’s history behind that rhetoric. That’s how bosses and politicians in decades past justified the terrorizing of workers, the murdering of organizers.
UX Won’t Save You
I have this sneaking suspicion that a fair number of people are under the impression that User Experience is the hot new “silver-bullet”. Sorry to burst any bubbles, but I am afraid that just isn’t the case. While there can be no doubt that UX plays an important role in shaping, defining and creating a successful product, it is important to understand that there are often other factors at work that can cancel out even the best designs.
It is entirely possible to provide a great user experience while your business is running straight into the ground. Being aware of the following points will allow you and your business to put the appropriate time and focus on the right pain-points at the right time.
Product-market fit can be one of the most difficult pieces of this puzzle and, especially with startups, the source of much agony, turmoil and potentially a company’s undoing. This quote from Marc Andreessen illustrates how serious this one factor is to the health and vitality of a company and how disruptive it can be at the same time:
“Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required.”Of course, a great user experience is central to getting people to use a product. But if that product still fails to meet an actual need that the people have, no amount of UX will fix that.
Customer Acquisition is one of fundamental keys to growth for any new (or existing) company. There is a significant cost (both in time and resources) that goes into understanding who you are targeting. It could be customers that have never seen or heard of your product or customers who have bought/used a product/service from one of your competitors. However, if no one uses your product you are going to have a very hard time winning them with your amazing UX.
Customer feature requests are closely tied to Customer Acquisition. Every product should have a clear roadmap and a clear understanding of what the product does and does not do. If your team does not have this in place, you will find yourself in an endless cycle of catering to customer requests instead of building out the roadmap you had outlined. This reminds me of my favorite quote from Henry Ford, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”
Competitors are always a concern and a disruptive factor you have to be watching out for. In this day and age, time-to-market is getting shorter and shorter. Scrappy startups disrupt and un-seat the incumbents by moving quicker and operating on a significantly tighter release schedule. Everyone is watching everyone. An insignificant tweet can signal a major change in direction if you are watching for it. Down-playing your competitors is a dangerous thing. Be constantly mindful of what the other guy is doing and do it better, faster and with more impact.
Feature wars with your competitors are one of the surefire ways to derail real progress on your product and get yourself into a vicious cycle of trying match features to appease potential customers. Your time is better spent focusing on features that differentiate your product from the rest than the ones that are just a checkbox on a long list.
Scalability is another component that most people don’t think about until its too late but can lead to customer abandonment and potentially harmful press. This is a potential problem in both the real world (shipping, packaging, distribution) and online (servers, databases, etc). A wise company will invest in the Engineering talent that can address this problem before it becomes a problem—or at least know what to do when it does.
As I said at the beginning, UX (alone) wont save you. It will not fix or address the other challenges you will face bringing your product to market. But as you know, it is an integral part creating a successful product that engages and captures your customers. Any company that begins with a focus on the user’s experience will always have a completive advantage over the rest.
There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
Dr. Mengele’s Victim:
Why One Auschwitz Survivor Avoided Doctors for 65 Years
Sixty-five years ago, infamous Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele removed Yitzhak Ganon’s kidney without anesthesia. The Greek-born Jew swore never to see a doctor again — until a heart attack last month brought his horrific tale into the open.
He is a thin man. His wine-red cardigan is a little too big, and his legs are like matchsticks in his brown pants. Yitzhak Ganon takes care of himself. He’s freshly shaven, his white mustache neatly trimmed. The 85-year-old sits on a gray sofa, with a cushion supporting his back. He is too weak to stand by himself, but he still greets a guest in German: “Guten Tag.”
Speaking is hard for him. “Slowly, Abba,” his daughter Iris says, and brings him a glass of water. Her father has never in his life complained of any pain, she says.
