Zoolander ipod

(Photo by Simon Davison/Flickr)

I liked much about Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book Outliers. While I disagreed with its premise that luck trumps drive when it comes to success – and let us remember that critique comes from someone who writes about things like toilet naps –  I enjoyed many of the chapters.
 
The best was entitled “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes,” which also could be called “Proof That Asians Can’t Drive in The Sky Either.” I can say that. I was rear-ended at a stop sign in Hollywood by a minivan full of Chinese people. When we pulled over to exchange information, person after person spilled out. It was like a clown car that released an endless stream of embarrassed, mumbling people.

In the chapter on plane crashes Gladwell links a pilot’s nationality to the likelihood he or she will crash. He used Korean Air as an example. In 1997 Korean Air Flight 801 hit the side of a mountain in Guam and killed 228 people. Twenty years earlier, a Korean Air Boeing 707 flew into Russian airspace and was shot down by a Soviet military jet. Two years after that a Korean Air Boeing 747 crashed in Seoul. Three years later the airline lost another 747 in Russia, followed by a 707 that went down over the Andaman Sea in 1987. They were followed by crashes in Tripoli in 1989 and in South Korea in 1994. While the 1997 Flight 801 crash was being investigated Korean Air experienced five more crashes. The airline failed at a stunning rate.
 
What caused Korean Air to crash so often? The answer is mitigated speech. Mitigated speech occurs when an individual attempts to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. It happens when people defer to authority.

A tragic example of mitigated speech occurred when the flight engineer of Korean Airlines 801 (Guam crash) tried to tell the captain that bad weather made it too dangerous to land the plane by sight. Instead of questioning the captain’s tactics and saying exactly that, the first engineer said, “Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot.”

The sentence sounds innocuous, but in 1997, on a Korean Airlines flight, a subordinate saying those words to a superior should have been tantamount to screaming danger. Unfortunately, the pilot was not listening. Mitigated speech depends on the listener for interpretation.

Passive or ambiguous speech is pervasive in countries with a high Power Distance Index

(PDI). The PDI measures how much a culture respects authority. In a high-PDI country like Korea, an employee is less likely to disagree with his boss. The top five pilot PDIs by country are Brazil, South Korea, Morocco, Mexico and Philippines. That list, writes Gladwell, matches up similarly to the ranking of plane crashes by country. (Korean Air has since taken successful steps to improve cockpit communications.)

(This man is Brazilian. Instead of saying, “I am not wearing a shirt,” he might say, “A shirt rests comfortably in a closet, not on my body.” Photo by Arpenas Imagens/Flickr.)

American pilots have one of the lowest PDIs because Americans are not afraid to speak up.

I recently witnessed this in action. My mom – whom I would describe as very American – is an active backseat driver. She has put thousands of extra miles on both her car and my dad. While I was home for the holidays, I drove mom around while we shopped. As I approached the street I knew we needed to turn down to get home – the street I grew up on and trick-or-treated on and rode my bike up and down a thousand times – my mom actually tapped my elbow and said, “Turn here.”

She thought I would miss it. She spoke up. It is what Americans do.

Imagine the scene inside the minivan I mentioned earlier. The vehicle is barreling down on my red 1991 Buick LeSabre, which might be the largest car ever made. I would describe the 1991 Buick LeSabre as having Mafia-pleasing trunk space. You could not miss it. But the man driving the minivan is not stopping. He is headed right for me. My rear bumper is getting closer. The back of my car is growing larger and larger in the windshield. The minivan is almost on top of my Buick. And none of the 175 other people in the minivan says a word. Or maybe one of them says, “Father, the front bumper will help us a lot.”

Bang!

He hits me.

The minivan smashes into my Buick in a stereotype-confirming collision of rubber and steel.

The 007 Living Daylights ipod

It was a couch on wheels. My God, I loved it.

Red Planet rip

The one-year anniversary of its death recently passed, and I marked the occasion by pouring a little coolant out on the concrete.

Godspeed, LeSabre.

I recently read an Associated Press story on how people are forming emotional attachments with their robots. The robot mentioned in the story was the Roomba, which is a vacuum cleaner developed by iRobot Corp.

Here is the lead from that story:

They give them nicknames, worry when they signal for help and sometimes even treat them like a trusted pet. A new study shows how deeply some Roomba owners become attached to the robotic vacuums, and suggests there’s a measure of public readiness to accept robots in the house – even flawed ones.

This story deals with human behavior, technology and love – a perfect topic for one of my columns. So I contacted iRobot and asked to speak with one of its spokespeople. I spent almost two weeks trying to make this happen. I even e-mailed my questions and asked a representative from the company to write me back.

All of my requests were rejected.

The media relations representative for iRobot wrote:

Hi Joe,

I received your questions and although this would make for a fun article, the iRobot team has declined to participate. I’ll be sure to keep you abreast of new product announcements and let you know if things change in the near future.

The first word that popped into my head when I read that was “cowards.” So many corporations are so spineless. It amazes me that people actually fear big business. But that’s a whole other column.

I wrote back:

I am sorry to hear that no one from iRobot will speak with me. This would have been a fun piece and I think it would have showed iRobot is hip and has a sense of humor. Clearly that is not the case. It appears to me that iRobot refuses to laugh. It refuses to enjoy existence. Almost like — a real robot. I can only conclude that the company is now run by a robot and that your spokesrobots are afraid I will expose them for what they are — humanoid beings with internal battery organs, blinking light eyes and monotone voices who lack the ability to enjoy life and want to punish humans for our irrational emotion-feelings by taking control the world.

Do NOT keep me abreast of new product announcements. Your incremental steps toward world domination need not flood my in-box.

May God have mercy on your souls.

Go Humans,
Joe

Below I have listed the questions that iRobot refused to answer. (The * indicates that the question was written by my brother Dan, who is a hilarious human writer.) Tell me this would not have been a fun interview.

Why do you think people have formed such personal attachments to their Roombas?

What are some of the ways that people have personalized their Roombas?

Do you have a Roomba? What is its name?

If you had to characterize your Roomba’s personality, would you say it’s “saucy?”

Isn’t iRobot’s Roomba just a low-tech rip-off of Rosie from The Jetsons? Have Hanna-Barbera’s lawyers contacted you yet?

Can the Roomba feel love?

* Do you have any tips for how NOT to fall in love with a Roomba?

Was the first Roomba constructed by a horribly disfigured scientist working alone in his abandoned castle?

How do you think robots 1,000 years from now will react when they discover they were descended from vacuum cleaners?

Do you think it’s possible that robots 1,000 years from now will lie and say they were descended from the military’s unmanned aerial vehicles, just so they don’t get their butts kicked by cyborg punks in high school?

Given that history has a way of repeating itself, do you think it is possible that the first human beings were vacuum cleaners of some type? That maybe we climbed out of the primordial ooze to clean up the shore and simply overstayed our welcome?

* Is there some sort of large, drone-bearing Mother Roomba that we need to be worried about?

* Can you feed your Roomba after midnight?

Have you ever had a Roomba turn against its human master like the first law enforcement robot from Robocop?

Just so we are clear, the settings on the Roomba do NOT include Human Extinction or Global Domination. Is that correct?

Could one order the Global Domination setting optional? Maybe I’m a military strongman and I’m building an army of robots. Would it be possible to launch a division of Roombas to vacuum my opponents while I hid three miles beneath the earth in my secret futuristic-looking lair?

Since no one at iRobot spoke with me, I can only speculate on the robot-human attachment. So here’s my take. Human beings form attachments with everything. I have a friend with a deep emotional attachment to Diet Coke. I have another friend who has an emotional attachment with the worst franchise in sports history, the Cincinnati Bengals. I myself had a deep emotional attachment with a 1991 Buick LeSabre.
(Above: A little part of me died when I sold that car. And that part, was my kidney.)

These are all healthy attachments because all of these things in some way bring joy into our lives. Especially that LeSabre. It was like a couch on wheels. I miss that car the way a fat kid misses shoving people out of the way to get cake.

So that’s my theory. People can love anything. Robots qualify as anything. Therefore people can love robots.

If you sense a little disappointment in my writing voice, iRobot, it is because I have the capacity to smile and laugh and love and hurt and cry. That is something you and your uber-rational sentinels will never comprehend. So go ahead. Enslave the human race. Send us down to work in your robot mines where we will dig for robot gold for your robot king. I will still pity you. Because you will never know what it is to feel joy or pain, you heartless, soulless bastards.

Go Humans.

To read Joe’s previous column “Deloitte & Touche & Women” click here.

In a stunningly unprecedented turn of events, research has managed the once unthinkable. It has proved men correct on an issue of vast social significance — marriage.

I’ll admit it. As a gender we were wrong on the not letting women vote thing. Same with sexual harassment. Now that we think about it — bad idea. And we’re still apologizing for the XFL.

But according to a report authored by Richard E. Lucas of Michigan State University in the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,” our ages-old argument that marriage will not improve our lives now appears legitimate.

Marriage, as many of you know, is the phase of life that begins when two people publicly profess their love for each other in front of family and bored co-workers. The bride wears a very expensive gown she will never wear again. Oddly, the groom’s clothes are rented.

Afterward there is a reception where the best man’s struggle to remain coherent leads to the following toast: “Of all the chicks Todd hooked up with, and there were lots, I always thought Jody was the hottest. I think it’s cool she’s a bridesmaid. That could have been awkward. To a cool couple. Burp!”

After the guests inhale breaded chicken and green beans with slivered almonds, a DJ plays “It Takes Two,” “Celebrate,” “The Chicken Dance” and the same 60 songs you hear at every reception.

Hours later the best man wakes up on the hood of his Buick LeSabre in a Denny’s parking lot. He reaches in his pocket for his keys but pulls out a breaded chicken cutlet. To his dismay, it does not fit in the ignition.

The next day the happy couple flies as far from their families as they can afford.

Thus concludes the happiest day of their lives together.

For good reason, men have long debated the value of marriage, though never eloquently. Until this report, our strongest argument against betrothal was, “Why buy the cow when the milk is free?”

(Upon further reflection, that statement is entirely inappropriate. I would like to apologize to bovines everywhere for dragging you into our species’ inter-gender squabble. It was a poor analogy on our part.)

The cow is nature’s slutty whore. Always giving it away.

With this report, which I’ll go out on a limb and call the most important document since the Constitution, men finally have official confirmation that marriage will not improve our lives. The report found that most married couples experienced brief emotional bliss after their weddings but eventually returned to the same outlook they had on life while they were dating.

In other words, marriage is like Fruit Stripe gum. For 10 seconds, your taste buds are treated to a crack-like euphoria. But the more you chew, the more it tastes like your mouth before you started.

The report also says that people who were happy with themselves before marriage were still happy after tying the knot and stayed married longer. For people who were not happy before they wed, marriage did not make them happier.

So, if I’m interpreting this correctly, the only couples that should marry are the ones who are so happy they would stay together whether or not they ever walked down the aisle. It is only when neither person needs marriage that it actually works.

I have to say, that sounds way better than comparing your would-be fiancee to a certain animal (apologies, again) that gives away certain dairy-type products free.

(Originally published 3/31/03.)

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If you have a comment, e-mail me at joedonatellicolumn@gmail.com.