Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Democratising Big Data

Why a not for profit disrupting Google and the Big Data industry is important for business and society

Common Crawl is a not-for-profit web crawler service that makes the data collected open for all to use. A post on the MIT Technology Review blog speculates how the initiative might spawn the next Google.

One of the problems with Big Data is that it’s held mainly by large corporations and government agencies, both of which have the tendency to keep their data private on that basis that information is power and power means money.

We see this in the business models of Facebook, Google and many of Silicon Valley’s startups; the information garnered about users is as, if not more so, valuable as an utility from the product.

Initiatives like Common Crawl tilt the balance somewhat back towards consumers, citizens, and smaller businesses.

How well Common Crawl and other similar initiatives fare remains to be seen – Wikileaks was a good example of how such projects can flare out, collapse under the weight of egos or be harrassed by corporatist interests.

In search, Google are open to disruption as they tweak their results to suit initiatives like Google Plus. During the company’s earnings call earlier this week Larry Page spoke of the challenges of staying focused on the opportunities that matter, it may well be the company is more distracted from its core business than it should be.

Whether Common Crawl disrupts Google is up to history, it could just as well be a couple of kids called Sergei and Larry with a smart idea.

The imperative now though is to try and keep as much public data available for everyone to use and not lock it away for the privileged few. That will let the future Googles develop while making our societies more fairer and open.

Tracking the knowledge graph

Facebook Graph search is powerful and dangerous which means we have to be careful about what we like and who we become friends with

“Married Men Who Like Prostitutes” is juicy search term and the results can wreck marriages, careers and lives.

This is one of the Facebook Graph searches UK tech commentator Tom Scott posted on his Actual Searches on Facebook Tumblr site which lists, mercifully anonymised, the results.

What should worry anybody who uses Facebook is that this data has been in the system all along, advertisers for instance have been able to target their marketing based on exactly this information, Graph Search just makes it quicker and easier to access. This is why you should be careful of what you like and who you friend online.

Tom Scott has a terrific Ignite London presentation which looks at just how vulnerable an individual is by over sharing online. In I know what you did five minutes ago, Tom finds an individual, discovers his mother’s maiden name and phone number all within two minutes.

Facebook isn’t the only service we should be careful of, it just happens to be the one we overshare data with the most. When you start stitching together social media services with government and corporate databases then a pretty comprehensive picture can be made of a person’s likes and preferences.

The best we can hope for in such a society is that picture is accurate, fair and doesn’t cast us in too unfavourable a light.

In same cases though that data can be dangerous, if not fatal.

As potential employers, spouses and the media can easily access this information, it might be worthwhile unliking obnoxious, racist and downright stupid stuff. There’s a very good chance you’ll be asked about them.

PayPal struggles with the Soviet customer service model

Just as Silicon Valley’s new businesses has challenged a whole range of incumbent operators, they too are at risk from upstarts who value their customers. This is something PayPal’s management has to face.

CNN reports that internet payment giant PayPal is looking at an “aggressive changes” to its fraud detection systems which see thousands of customers accounts frozen every year.

PayPal’s announcement follows last year’s promise by CEO David Marcus to institute a “culture change” at the company,

Our intention has always been to protect our customers. Not to mess around with our merchants.
I want to share two things with all of you:

#1 — there’s a massive culture change happening at PayPal right now. If we suck at something, we now face it, and we do something about it.

#2 — you have my commitment to make this company GREAT again. We’re reinventing how we work, our products, our platforms, our APIs, and our policies. This WILL change, and we won’t rest until you all see it. The first installments are due very soon. So stay tuned…

Screwing around merchants and buyers has become synonymous with PayPal and their parent company eBay who together are the poster children for the Silicon Valley Soviet Customer Service Model.

Reader comments to the CNN article cited at the beginning of this post give a taste of just how bad the problem is at PayPal.

Once your business attracts the attention of PayPal’s algorithms, you’re locked into a Kafkaesque maze of dead ends and arbitrary, made up rules.

To be fair to PayPal and eBay this problem isn’t just theirs, it’s shared by Google, Amazon and almost every major online company. Their view of customer service is to shoot first and ask no questions, they certainly won’t answer anything from their victim beyond a trite passive-aggressive corporate statement.

Part of the current Silicon Valley mania around web and app based services is that, along with providing free content, users will provide support for each other and that customer service is an unnecessary overhead which should be kept to a minimum.

In this respect, many of these new businesses are little different from the legacy airlines, telcos and declining department stores who have spent the last thirty years stripping away customer service with the result of locking them into shrinking commodity markets.

That failure to value customer service is the biggest weakness for companies like eBay, Amazon and Google. The very forces that favour them, the reduction of the entry barriers, also makes it easier for more customer orientated businesses to grab market share.

Why you won’t retire

Can we afford to retire at 65 when life expectancy is over 80 and could be 150 in a generation?

Outliving Our Super is the headline of an Australian Financial Review story on the problems of an aging population.

Jacqui Hayes cites a billboard in San Francisco declaring that life expectancy will soon be 150 and we have to plan for longer retirements.

The flaw in this discussion is the idea of retiring in our 60s. When the age pension was introduced in 1910, a new-born boy could expect to live 55 years and a girl, 59 years. The odds were against the average person every receiving the pension which was an effective, if ruthless, way of ensuring the solvency of social security programs.

A hundred years later, a new born can expect to live well into their eighties. Meaning the average person will spend two decades in retirement.

Making matters worse is the nature of that Millennial’s work pattern – when great, great grandpa entered the workforce in the 1920s, he was almost certainly in his early teens and worked a solid fifty years paying his taxes before prospect of retirement arrived.

Today, that child won’t enter the workforce until at least their late teens and more likely until their early twenties. A modern child is also going to have a much more fragmented work career and will likely have periods of unemployment or low earnings as a casual or contract worker.

For today’s child to retire at 65 it would mean he or she will have had to saved enough over a forty year working life to sustain them for fifteen years of retirement, those numbers are tough and to achieve it most won’t be living the millionaire lifestyle during their golden years.

With a life expectancy of 150, the early twentieth century model of retiring at 60 or 65 means today’s child would spend less than 30% of their lives in the workforce. Put simply, the numbers don’t add up.

The reality is most of us won’t be retiring at 65, the baby boomers reaching retirement age now are learning this and it’s a lesson that’s going to get harder for the Gen X’s and Y’s following them.

As a society, or an electorate, we can pretend there’s no problem and policy makers and politicians will pander to our refusal to face the truth by keeping structures that reflect early Twentieth Century aspirations rather than Twenty-First Century realities.

We have to face the reality that the retiring at 65 is unaffordable dream for most of us. Once we accept this, we can get on with building longer lasting careers.

Picture of pensioners courtesy of andreyutzu on SXC.HU

2013 – the year of the incumbents

Deloitte consulting’s technology, media and telecommunications predictions for 2013 sees smartphones, tablet computers and televisions causing a data crunch.

Bigger, quicker and more congested are the predictions from consulting firm Deloitte’s 2013 Technology, Media and Telecommunications survey.

In Sydney last Friday, the Australian aspects of the report were discussed by Clare Harding and Stuart Johnston, both partners in Deloitte’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications practice.

Most of the predictions tie into global trends, with the main exception being the National Broadband network which Stuart sees as addressing some of the bandwidth problems that telecommunication companies are going to struggle with in 2013.

Technology predictions

For the technology industry, Deloitte sees 2013 as being a consolidation of existing trends with the trend away from passwords continuing, crowdfunding growing, conflict over BYOD policies and enterprise social networks finding their niches.

Some technologies are not dead; Deloitte sees the the PC retaining its place in the home and office, with over 80% of internet traffic and 70% of time still being consumed on desktop and laptop computers.

Deloitte also sees gesture based interfaces struggling as users stick with the mouse, keyboard and touchscreen.

Media predictions

Like 3D TV two years ago, the push from vendors is now onto smart TVs and high definition 4K televisions. As with 3DTV, much of the market share of smart and hard definition TVs is going to be because television manufacturers will include these features in base models.

Deloitte’s consultants see 2013 as one where “over the top” services (OTT) like Fetch TV and those provided by incumbents delivered start to get traction on smart TVs with 2% of industry revenues coming from these platforms.

Catch up TV is the main driver of the over the top services with 75% of traffic being around viewers watching previously broadcast content. This will see OTT services firmly become part of the incumbent broadcasters’ suite of services.

The bad news for some incumbents is the increase in ‘cord cutters’ as consumers move from pay-TV services to internet based content.

Smartphone and tablet computer adoption which is expected to treble will be a driver of OTT adoption as viewers move to ‘dual screen’ consumption, the connections required to deliver these services will put further load on already strained telco infrastructure which is going to see prices rise as providers respond to shortages.

Telecommunications predictions

The telecommunications industry is probably seeing the greatest disruption in 2013. With smartphones dominating the market world wide as price points collapse.

One of the big product lines pushed at this year’s CES was the “phablet” – while the Deloitte consultants find it interesting hey don’t seem convinced that the bigger form factors will displace the standard 5″ screen size during 2013.

As a consequence of the smartphone explosion is that apps will become more pervasive and telcos will try and build in their own walled gardens with All You Can App to lock customers onto their services.

With smartphones moving down market, largely because of the cost benefits for manufacturers, Deloitte also predicts many new users won’t access data plans given they’ll use the devices as sophisticated ‘feature phones’.

Data usage will continue to grow, particularly with the adoption of LTE/4G networks, although much of the growth will still be on the older 2 and 3G networks as lower income users choose plans which don’t require high speed data.

The looming data crunch

There is a cost to booming data usage and that’s the looming shortage of bandwidth, Deloitte sees this as getting far worse before it gets better.

With bandwidth becoming crowded, prices are expected to rise. In the United States, the “all you can eat” nature of internet plans is being replaced with “pay as you go” while in Australia data plans are becoming stingier and per unit costs are rising.

The London Olympics were cited as an example of how the shortages are appearing – while the Olympic site itself was fine, outside events like the long distance cycle races strained infrastructure along the route. We can expect this to become common as smartphones push base station capacity.

Where to in 2013

Deloitte’s view of where the telecom, technology and media industries are heading in 2013 is that incumbents will take advantage of their market positions as technology runs ahead of available bandwidth.

In Australia, governments might be disappointed as telcos internationally aren’t interested in bidding huge amounts for bandwidth. As Stuart Johnston says “globally what we’re seeing is that carriers are not as willing to spend. It’s not the cash cow that governments are expecting.”

For government and consumers, we’re going to get squeezed a little bit harder.

While things do look slightly better for telcos, broadcasters and other incumbents there’s always the unexpected which eludes all but the most outrageous pundits, it’s hard to see what the disruptive technologies of 2013 will be but we can be sure they are there.

The main takeaway from the 2013 Deloitte report is that smart TVs, 4K broadcasting, tablet computers and smartphones are going to be the biggest drivers for the technology, media and telecommunications industry for this year. There’s some opportunities for some canny entrepreneurs.

Firing your customers

Getting bad clients out of your life can be very therapeutic, it’s something all business owners should do on a regular basis

Running your own business can be tough, but one of the therapeutic advantages of dealing with the stresses of self-employment is the ability to fire stroppy customers.

Steve Cody, the proprietor of marketing agency Peppercom, gives a list of five types of clients worth sacking in Inc Magazine.

It’s a good list although it misses the general “pain in the ass” client who demands a solid gold level of service for a pittance. These are particularly common if you pitch to the lowest end of the market.

Lists like Steve’s are good reminder of Pareto’s Law, or the 80/20 rule which is usually put in terms of 80% of business revenues come from 20% of customers.

The converse is also true, 80% of business hassles come from just 20% of customers and they are almost certainly not the most profitable ones.

Pandering too much to the bad customers can hurt your health as well – running your own business is stressful enough without dealing with troublesome clients.

So sacking bad clients is good, not only is it therapeutic but it also helps the bank account. It’s worthwhile doing whenever a customer drives you too far.

Go on, you know you want to.

Australia’s grapes of wrath

The Australian wine industry is a good example of where the country’s industrial policies and business leadership have failed.

In a great post, The Wine Rules looks at what ails the Australian wine industry after the news of Cassella Wine’s problems.

Three things jump out of Dudley Brown’s article – how industry bodies are generally ineffectual, the failure of 1980s conglomerate thinking and how fragile your position is when you sell on price.

Selling on price

It’s tough being the cheapest supplier, you constantly have to be on guard against lower cost suppliers coming onto the market and you can’t do your best work.

Customers come to you not because you’re good, but because you’re cheap and will switch the moment someone beats you on price.

Worse still, you’re exposed to external shocks like supply interruptions, technological change or currency movement.

The latter is exactly what’s smashed Australia’s commodity wine sector.

A similar thing happened to the Australian movie industry – at fifty US cents to the Aussie dollar filming The Matrix in Sydney was a bargain, at eighty producers competitiveness falls away and at parity filming down under makes no sense at all.

Yet the movie industry persists in the model and still tries to compete in the zero-sum game of producer incentives which is possibly the most egregious example of corporate welfare on the planet.

When you’re a high cost country then you have to sell high value products, something that’s lost on those who see Australia’s future as lying in digging stuff up or chopping it down to sell cheaply in bulk.

Industry associations

“It’s like a Labor party candidate pre-selection convention” says Brown in describing the lack of talent among the leadership of the Australian wine industry. To be fair, it’s little better in Liberal Party.

There’s no surprise there’s an overlap between politics and industry associations, with no shortage of superannuated mediocre MPs supplementing their tragically inadequate lifetime pensions with a well paid job representing some hapless group of business people.

Not that the professional business lobbyists are any better as they pop up on various industry boards and government panels doing little. The only positive thing is these roles keep such folk away from positions where they could destroy shareholder or taxpayer wealth.

Basically, few Australian industry groups are worth spending time on and the wine industry is no exception.

Australia conglomerate theory

One of the conceits of 1980s Australia was the idea that local businesses had to dominate the domestic market in order to compete internationally.

A succession of business leaders took gullible useful idiots like Paul Keating and Graheme Richardson, or the Liberal Party equivalents to lunch at Machiavelli’s or The Flower Drum, stroked their not insubstantial egos over a few bottles of top French wine and came away with a plan to merge entire industries, or unions, into one or two mega-operations.

It ended in tears.

The best example is the brewing industry, where the state based brewers were hoovered up in two massive conglomerates in 1980s. Thirty years later Australia’s brewing industry is almost foreign owned and has failed in every export venture it has attempted.

Fosters Brewing Group was, ironically, one of the companies that managed to screw the Australian wine industry through poorly planned and executed conglomeration. Again every attempt at expanding overseas failed dismally.

In many ways, the Australian wine industry represents the missed opportunities of the country’s lost generation as what should have been one of the nation’s leading sectors – that had a genuine shot at being world leader – became mired in managerialism, corporatism and cronyism.

All isn’t lost for the nation’s vintners or any other Aussie industry, Dudley Brown describes how some individuals are committed to delivering great products to the world. There’s people like them in every sector.

Hopefully we’ll be able to harness those talents and enthusiasm to build the industries, not just in wine, that will drive Australia in the Twenty-First Century.

Picture courtesy of Krappweis on SXC.HU

Who rules the company parking spots?

While at school I worked at a local shopping centre and one of the many ways to irritate managers was to park in the spots closest to the shops.

“If the staff take all the spaces near the shops” said the store manager, “then customers have to walk further and might go somewhere else. The customers alway comes before the staff.”

That’s true and one of the surest signs of a poorly run business is the location of the staff parking spots, particularly when they are reserved for management.

Similarly the type of company cars management award themselves with can be a warning sign for wary partners.

If customers, staff and suppliers have to walk past an array of expensive prestige cars in the shady and sheltered executive parking spots they can be pretty certain they are not going to be the number one priority at that business.

While running PC Rescue I quickly learned this when visiting potential customers, one client in particular invited me to review their network and make recommendations.

On arriving, I had to feed a parking meter in the street before picking my way past a series of high end Mercedes, two Porsches and a Maserati.

After looking at their network, which hadn’t had a cent spent on it for the best part of a decade, I gave the Managing Director a ballpark figure of what he was looking at to bring his systems into this century.

“That’s way too much!” he thundered and proceeded to lecture me on why my rates were extortionate – all the while I politely listened while thinking I’d driven to the job in a base model Holden Barina and was paying for parking.

Needless to say we didn’t get the job.

One of the worst, most soul destroying things in business is dealing with entitled customers and this client was a classic example. I genuinely feel sorry for whoever landed the job.

Who parks where and what they drive is a good measure for the calibre of a business’ leadership and the egos of management. It’s a good starting place for deciding who you’re going to do business with.

What happens when software is wrong

A phone company software glitch puts one man’s life and the safety of thousands at risk. It reminds us that computers are not always correct.

The Las Vegas Review Journal yesterday told the story of Wayne Dobson, a retiree living to the north of the city whose home is being fingered as harbouring lost cellphones thanks to a software bug at US telco Sprint which is giving out the wrong location of customer’s mobile devices.

While it appears funny at first the situation is quite serious for Mr Dobson as angry phone owners are showing up at his home to claim their lost mobiles back.

Making the situation even more serious is that 911 calls are being flagged at coming from his home and already he has had to deal with one police raid.

While the local cops have flagged this problem, it’s likely other agencies won’t know about this bug which exposes the home owner to some serious nastiness.

That a simple software bug can cause such risk to an innocent man illustrates why we need to be careful with what technology tells us – the computer is not always right.

Another aspect is our rush to judgement, we assume because a smartphone app indicates a lost mobile is in a house that everyone inside is a thief. That the app could be wrong, or we don’t understand the data to properly interpret it, doesn’t enter our minds. This is more a function of our tabloid way of thinking rather than any flaws in technology.

The whole Find My Phone phenomenon is an interesting experiment in our lack of understanding risk; not only is there a possibility of going to the wrong place but there’s also a strong chance that an angry middle class boy is going to find himself quickly out of his depth when confronted by a genuine armed thief.

For Wayne Dobson, we should pray that Sprint fixes this problem before he encounters a stupid, violent person. For the rest of us we should remember that the computer is not always right.

Towards the post car society

Is the era of the automobile coming to an end as our society adapts to new technologies?

We don’t often think about it, but the design or our cities reflect the technologies of the day. Right now the way we live is built around the motor vehicle, but are we moving into a new era?

After a visit to Ford Australia’s Centre of Excellence For Design and Engineering, Neerav Bhatt has some thoughts on the role of the motor car in an era where people don’t have to travel to their workplaces.

One of Neerav’s points is that car use is falling among younger workers, a trend that’s happening across the western world.

Much of this is put down to the generations of Millennials and Gen-Ys being more interested in technology purchases rather than cars along with changing work patterns.

A more fundamental reason could be that we’re reaching the end of the motor car era.

If there is one technology that represents the Twentieth Century it is the motor car; the automobile has shaped our cities, our lifestyles and our culture.

However we are now in the Twenty-First Century.

The three eras of motoring

Roughly speaking, we could break the Twentieth Century’s love affair with the motor car into three phases; development, consolidation and dependency.

In the first period, the automotive industry was developing with thousands of manufacturers experimenting with the technology and production methods. At the same time governments were beginning to build road networks and communities were demanding improved links.

By the beginning of World War II, the motor car was an important part of life but ownership was largely restricted to affluent households and business.

Following World War II governments made huge investments in road networks and automobiles became cheaper to own.

This gave a generation a new taste of freedom as you could go anywhere with a tank of gas. It also changed the layout of our suburbs as people could now travel further to work, allowing them to move into bigger houses on the fringe of town.

As government investment was focused on road building, passenger train and tram networks were starved of capital with many cities abandoning their transit systems altogether.

Suburbs built in the early to mid Twentieth Century had evolved around trams and the legacy of that can still be seen today. However customers no longer wanted to fight for parking spots on crowded streets designed for horse drawn carriages and trams.

Responding to this developers started building supermarkets and shopping malls which became popular largely because they offered easier parking. Cheaper goods made available by improved logistics systems – another effect of the motor car – was the other main reason.

The beginning of dependency

With the advent of the 1970s oil shock, the role of the motor car turned from being a tool of liberation into one of dependency. The suburbs of the 1960s and 70s had been built around the assumption of universal car ownership and cheap fuel. When fuel ceased being cheap, then households budgets were affected.

Not coincidentally after the oil shock the reversal of ‘white flight’ – the movement of the middle classes to outer suburbs – started with the gentrification of inner suburbs that had been abandoned by the working class.

Through the 1970s and 80s the cost of owning a motor car became more expensive as governments stopped externalising the costs of maintaining roads and saw car use and petrol taxes as a revenue source.

At the same time the obvious effects of saturating society motor cars became obvious as roads increasingly became choked and planners began to realise that building more roads only attracted more traffic.

Times of decline

By the turn of the Twenty-first Century technology had also started to move away from centralised offices and factories. Today technologies like the internet and increasingly 3D printing mean that workers don’t have to commute vast distances. Automation also means many levels of management are no longer necessary.

Changing work patterns is also affecting incomes, with car ownership being expensive many employees – particularly young workers – don’t want to buy automobiles.

This all means that the era of the motor car is coming to an end, it’s not going to vanish quickly but the decline has started.

For business, this means the post World War II assumptions that saw the rise of the supermarket, shopping mall and big box discount store are no longer valid.

Some managers, most notably those of doomed department stores, won’t learn these lessons and will pass into history like the stagecoach companies.

Just as the end of the horse and carriage era saw the demise of buggy whip makers and blacksmiths, the rise of the motor car saw an unprecedented rise in wealth, employment and productivity. Not only were the lost jobs created elsewhere, but many more were created.

While the motor car isn’t going to disappear overnight, the decline has started and our society is adapting. For business and government leaders, the task is to understand those changes and adapt.

Image courtesy of a Norwegian motorway by Ayla87 through SXC

Australia and the Dutch Disease

Australia’s greatest management challenge is dealing with the country’s dose of the Dutch Disease

This week sees the launch of the annual G’Day USA festival where Australian exporters and various celebrities extol the virues of the country across the United States.

One of Australia’s success stories of the last decade has been Yellowtail Wines which carved a niche for Australian wines in the US in the same way Jacob’s Creek did a decade earlier in the UK.

Today the Australian Financial Review reports that Cassella Wines, the maker of Yellowtail, is in breach of its banking covenants due to the high Australian dollar.

Cassella Wines is another victim of Australia’s Dutch Disease infection.

Dutch Disease owes its name to the Netherlands’ gas boom of the 1960s. By the early 1970s the strong Guilder damaged the rest of the Dutch economy which didn’t profit from extracting natural gas.

Having sleepwalked into the Dutch Disease, it’s fascinating how Australia’s electorate, policy makers and business leaders are in denial about the effects as successful exporters like Cassella Wines struggle with a high dollar and accelerating costs.

When commodity prices and the dollar turn, and they always do, its going to be tough for the economy to adapt as much of the industry capacity that was competitive at lower rates won’t be available to take advantage of the lower costs and to pick up the slack from a declining mining sector.

For Australian businesses, the onus is on managers and proprietors to protect their organisations from the short term effects of a high currency and the medium term effect of a falling dollar pushing up the input prices of imports.

In other words, getting costs down without becoming too reliant on offshored labour or suppliers. The companies that manage this are going to be very strong after the initial adjustment, but it’s a tough management task.

While that task can, and will be, done by smart and hardworking leaders no-one should expect any recognition of the scale of this task from governments, media or business organisations who seem to be in denial of reality.

The Dutch and Australian flags image is courtesy of Emilev through SXC

Revolution and disconnected leaders

Revolutions are unexpected, but the causes are often obvious to all. The West shouldn’t be too smug about the economies of other nations.

China expert Patrick Chovanec has a provocative blog post on What Causes Revolutions, building upon the Financial Times’ description of how the Chinese Communist Party is struggling with corruption.

In his article Chovanec quotes Richard Pipes’ Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution which looked at how the fall of the Tsarist government was largely unexpected.

This is true with the fall of all great regimes, in the late 1980s the idea that the Soviet Union would cease to exist within a decade was unthinkable.

Chavonec quotes a key part of Pipes’ book;

In 1982 [Pipes writes], when I worked in the National Security Council, I was asked to contribute ideas to a major speech that President Reagan was scheduled to deliver in London. My contribution consisted of a reference to Marx’s dictum that, when there develops a significant disparity between the political form and the socio-economic context, the prospect is revolution.

“A significant disparity between the political form and social-economic context” could be just as applicable to Western democracies.

The Economist article makes a point about the French revolution “the widely accepted theory now is that the French Revolution was one of rising expectations that eventually could not be met.”

As Stratfor’s George Freedman pointed out last week, a generation of Americans have expectations that are not going to be met. The same is true in Europe.

While there’s no doubt the China’s political structures – like those in all totalitarian nations – are more brittle than those in established democracies, it might not be a good idea for those of us in the West to be smug and complacent about our own systems.

Zapata image is courtesy of Ferferfer through SXC.