Way too cool
Using two recent real-world examples, Howard Johnson considers the drawbacks of rapid adoption of large-scale societal change.
By Howard Johnson, PhD -- EDN, February 4, 2010
In mid-2005, the Hilton family of hotels mandated installation of the official Hilton Family Clock Radio in 250,000 rooms. This wonderful labor-saving device was designed to rectify two long-standing problems at the hotel: the tendency of guests to foul up traditional clock-radio settings and the burden imposed on hotel staff of checking and maintaining the correct time.
Hilton’s clock designers overcame the first difficulty with four buttons atop the unit. These buttons are pre-set to radio stations that local hotel management selects. With this design, you can wake to one of the hotel’s stations, the buzzer, or nothing. No longer can pesky hotel guests leave the machine inadvertently dialed to an alternative radio station or white noise (my personal favorite wake-up sound).
Regarding the time-maintenance burden, careful studies of clock inaccuracy must have implicated those same pesky hotel guests. I can just imagine the hotel’s management, red-faced and furious, demanding that guests be forever barred from messing up the otherwise perfectly good time-keeping technology provided to them. In response, the designers removed all user-accessible time-adjustment controls from the new clock.
There is no little “time” switch on the back, no pinhole for a paper clip, and no combination of buttons that can adjust the time. Only a certified hotel maintenance engineer can adjust it. The engineer must physically access the clock, remove a Phillips screw near the top on the back, pop off the lid, and depress the “time” button inside to make the adjustment. It’s a slow process.
The “no user-accessible controls” strategy requires that the clock be made superaccurate; otherwise, the extreme maintenance hassle of making even occasional adjustments would invalidate the new clock’s entire raison d’être. Toward that end, the developers equipped the clock with a precise internal time reference and a computer-controlled feature that automatically adjusts for daylight-saving time. The clock is so smart and so accurate that, in the opinion of its designers, it never requires adjustment. Initial user reviews said things like “Best clock ever made by man” and “Nice features, easy to read.”
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Fast-forward to Sunday, Oct 30, 2005. That day, hotel guests all across Arizona missed their flights. Arizona does not observe daylight-saving time, yet the Hilton family clocks in Arizona hotels did. Early Sunday morning, all the new clocks “fell back” precisely one hour, according to their programming, and all the guests woke an hour late. Needless to say, panic ensued. A month later, when I visited a Hilton family hotel in Tucson, AZ, the hotel building engineer still wasn’t finished changing all the clocks. He said, “We’ll be done in about six months.” Official word from Hilton headquarters came down that the problem affected only some states, and those states would still be required to use the new clocks.
Fast-forward again to March 11, 2007. During that year, Congress changed the daylight-saving-time law in the United States to a different day than previously. Most Hilton family clocks in the United States now require major engineering maintenance four times a year.
Am I making a point? Anyone who ships product to a vast number of installations covering a wide range of application scenarios can tell you what I am talking about. Unanticipated effects always crop up in the field.
This winter, we as a nation found out that incandescent traffic lights emit plenty of infrared heat through the colored lens—enough to melt drifting snow that otherwise would accumulate, obscuring the lens. Wonderful new, energy-efficient LED traffic lights do not emit that much heat (Reference 1).
Bad clocks just make people late. LED traffic lights clog with snow, become indiscernible, and cause fatal traffic accidents.
Rapid adoption of large-scale societal change is a bad idea. For example, when our government talks about nationwide health care, I think we should try it for a while in one state first to see whether it works. How about, say, Massachusetts?
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The problem with all the comments about health care - what is the plan? We don't know what all 2000+ pages said as the bill was created behind closed doors. On the other hand, over the past 50 years or more, what major US government plan, that congress created, has worked?
Dr. J is right, IMHO!
EigenFunctions - 2010-18-2 09:23:00 PST -
Don't worry about that nationwide health-care thing, it works! We tried it extensively in Europe for more than 60 years, believe me it really works! And we're not starving to death yet in order to pay for it... we still earn decent money. And everybody is admitted in hospital in case of urgency, they don't check your credit card first, they first save your life.
Jacques.
Jacques Tiete - 2010-16-2 15:20:00 PST -
You say "when our government talks about nationwide health care, I think we should try it for a while in one state first to see whether it works." It's been done, for about 40 years now, in Hawaii ... and it works fine by all accounts. What I don't understand is why the media continues to ignore this example of so-called "evil socialized medicine." One of my current consulting projects is a simple, elegant solution to the LED traffic light problem. IMHO, one of the biggest problems with younger engineers is that their thinking rarely goes beyond the immediate "gee-whiz" ... this LED problem should have been obvious!
Bill Whitlock - 2010-16-2 14:09:00 PST -
Problem the engineers were given a bad spec.
Spec should read, dual master clock/time source, controlled by a PC (front office area)PC to be programes for local time with auto update confirmed manually)
clock in each room requires:
Display
WiFi receiver (Min)
AM/FM radio able to select 3/4 stations etc.
Bill Tainsh - 2010-16-2 13:56:00 PST -
Why didn't they make it sync to WWVB? Or to a local time standard maintained by the hotel staff? Heck, in '05 they could have made an Ethernet appliance clock - power & time sync thru Cat-5!
Michael Nootbaar - 2010-8-2 16:28:00 PST
