Friday Humor

Pedal Power: How bikes saved American roads

This is a really interesting note about how the decent roadways we enjoy now, have more to do with the development of the bicycle industry rather than the automobile industry.

Despite what you may believe after driving through Detroit on I-75, we enjoy an excellent road system here in the United States. Few of us take the time to think about exactly where those roads came from or how the federal government got into the road building business at all. We just assume that as transportation evolved, so did roads. As you might by now suspect, that's not exactly the case. It turns out that the government's interest in decent roadways has more to do with the evolution of the bicylcle than it does the growth of the automobile.

In the late 1800s, a business man by the name of Albert Pope had noticed the growing popularity of bicycles and started up his own manufacturing company. In order to make his product more appealing to those who lived outside of well-manicured city streets, Pope began a crusade that would shape the face of transportation in America. He started a magazine with the sole purpose of bringing road quality to the public eye, donated vast sums of money to MIT to start a new road engineering program and eventually succeeded in convincing congress to found the Office of Road Inquiry – what would eventually become the Federal Highway Administration.

So the next time you have to wait to pass a bicyclist on a two lane road, be patient. Their contraption is likely more responsible for the silky tarmac you're driving on than the car you're in.

Port Mann 2.0

Great Flickr photo stream from Russ Beinder photography here - showing construction progress of the new Port Mann bridge in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Growing with the Oil Sands

From Aggregates & Roadbuilding Magazine:

Growing with the Oil Sands This Fort McMurray sand and gravel operation has built its business around Alberta’s oil patch.

Written by Bill Tice

When many Canadians think about Alberta’s Oil Sands, they picture the big names such as Suncor, Shell, Syncrude and Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL). These huge multinational corporations play a major role in the economic boom this region of the country has realized, but so do many other smaller companies that support the major oil producers.

A CEO’s guide to innovation in China

Via McKinsey Quarterly

China is innovating. Some of its achievements are visible: a doubling of the global percentage of patents granted to Chinese inventors since 2005, for example, and the growing role of Chinese companies in the wind- and solar-power industries. Other developments—such as advances by local companies in domestically oriented consumer electronics, instant messaging, and online gaming—may well be escaping the notice of executives who aren’t on the ground in China.
As innovation gains steam there, the stakes are rising for domestic and multinational companies alike. Prowess in innovation will not only become an increasingly important differentiator inside China but should also yield ideas and products that become serious competitors on the international stage.
Chinese companies and multinationals bring different strengths and weaknesses to this competition. The Chinese have traditionally had a bias toward innovation through commercialization—they are more comfortable than many Western companies are with putting a new product or service into the market quickly and improving its performance through subsequent generations. It is common for products to launch in a fraction of the time that it would take in more developed markets. While the quality of these early versions may be variable, subsequent ones improve rapidly.¹