Tim Harford is the Financial Times' Undercover Economist, and his book of the same name applies economic theory to explain everyday curiosities, in a similar manner to Freakonomics. Also like Freakonomics, The Undercover Economist is a fascinating read with no economics pre-requisites, which should appeal to any non-economists.

Why are airport departure lounges so crappy and uncomfortable? Is it because the airport is struggling for money and can't afford more comfortable chairs? Perhaps. How about Tesco own-brand products, with their plain red and blue packaging; is the cost of a few more colours a limiting factor in the design of this packaging? In truth, the regular departure lounges have to be sufficiently bare and uncomfortable to motivate the business and first class passengers to fork out for their drastically more expensive plane tickets (and the associated departure lounge experience). It's not that better product design would break the bank for Tesco’s own-brand vegetable soup, just that better design would make the customer less likely to fork out for the more expensive alternative option.

It is important for retailers to keep the “premium gap” open, and not let the budget options trail too closely behind the premium option. If the premium gap gets too narrow, then some premium customers will “leak” to the budget option when they decide it’s good enough for them.

This is the sort of analysis you can expect from The Undercover Economist, illustrated with engaging examples (such as explaining the effect of zero-marginal-cost by looking at the drunken chaos that results from offering fixed-entry unlimited-drinks parties to university students).

And if you haven’t had enough after reading the book, you can follow the More or Less radio show (also available as a podcast) hosted by Tim Harford and packed with more amusing and topical analysis.

Thursday Evening

First we took the overnight sleeper train to Carlisle on Thursday night — they woke us up with tea and biscuits at about 4:30am. A former colleague of mine, David, lives near Carlisle in a village called Caldbeck and graciously offered to pick us up at our rather anti-social arrival time.

Friday

After a few more hours sleep at his house, and after the kids were off to school, we were out for a walk with David and his wife, Clare. We went up Ullock Pike, along Longside Edge, to Carl Side with the option of continuing to Skiddaw. The weather was not the “clear skies” that were forecast. We spent a good time being buffeted by wind and sleet, and opted out of Skiddaw extension:

Kelley on the descent from Karl Side; David and Clare up ahead.

 
Later on: Back down to sea level.

Saturday

Saturday’s main event was Kelley’s poetry reading at the Wordsworth Trust, where she was representing Flambard Press in the final of a series of three events highlighting small independent publishers. But not before we’d had a tour of Dove Cottage and lunch, courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust.

Saturday: A tour of Dove Cottage before the poetry event.

The view from William Wordsworth’s own private piece of mountain.

Kelley participating in the question panel, after everyone had spoken.

 
The view from Grasmere.

Sunday

On Sunday we got up early and managed to sneak up the nearby Helm Crag whilst the weather was relatively nice. We were back in time for a hearty lunch, though not before Kelley managed to sink calf-deep into a concealed bog near the Far Easedale Gill.

Sunday: Walking up Helm Crag near Grasmere; the weather a little more pleasant.

45 minutes later: Atop Helm Crag.

The sheep were un-phased by the giant snow flakes.

 
Nutrition: Welsh Rarebit with bacon and poached egg; chocolate milkshake on the side.

Monday

Finally on Monday, it was time for a leisurely morning and a trip on the bus to Windermere in time to catch our afternoon train back to London. The regular train was faster, though not nearly as roomy nor quiet as the sleeper train we took up there. Still, it was a good acclimatisation exercise to prepare us for our return from the peaceful countryside to the bustling city of London.

I ended up renewing my policy with Admiral, after discovering that their customer service is absolutely awesome, their renewal quote was reasonable, and they gave me a discount just for asking!

Admiral: Their website is a bit clunky, but the customer service is awesome. These are definitely the people I’d want to be dealing with if I ever need to make a claim. (Now, if only every call centre could be this good.)

The Process

To save dealing directly with insurers one-by-one you can go to comparison sites that gather quotes from dozens of insurers at once; and to save having to choose which of the comparison sites to use, you go to Martin Lewis’ Car Insurance Guide. There he will tell you not only which comparison sites to use, but the most efficient order to use them in! (Updated every quarter based on a full survey!) He’ll even optimise your job role: if you’re a software consultant you can save ~5% on your premium just by calling yourself a computer engineer instead.

After some eye-watering “best” quotes from the comparison sites, the renewal quote from Admiral wasn’t looking so bad. To take it down further I took my wife off the policy — she has decided not to go through with getting a full UK license for now, so taking her off the policy as a provisional driver was bound to help.

I also checked in with my friends at A-Plan insurance brokers to see if they could work some magic (don’t bother filling out the form on the website — call them on the phone and you’ll get a ballpark figure in 5 minutes. Ask for Jason Jarratt; tell him I sent you :-) Unfortunately Jason’s quick search yielded similarly eye-watering quotes to what I’d seen before,  so much so that he didn’t think there was much hope of finessing down the price with some direct negotiations. He advised me to stick with my current insurer.

The Findings

In the end, after about half a day of research I was barely able to beat my renewal quote. This came as quite a surprise; I thought insurers were meant to screw you on the renewals to exploit the inattentive and lazy? Maybe they only do that after the first couple of renewals, once they know you’re not paying attention and don’t have enough spare time to shop around...

I had already called Admiral to see about taking my wife off the policy and Tiffany was very friendly and helpful, so I figured there was nothing to lose in calling them again. Much to my surprise they were accepting calls at 8:30pm, how nice! I think their call centre is in the USA since both times I called the person I spoke to had an accent; I guess it makes it easier for them to be so friendly if it’s only 3:30pm where they are (rather than 2am for a call centre in India).

The Clincher

So I called Admiral and said I’d found a slightly cheaper quote; could they match it? After confirming the details of the policy to check everything was up to date (it was), the also-super-friendly Bethann put me on hold and went to speak to her manager. A minute later she was back with the offer of a discount that was almost 10% off the premium! My premium is pretty hefty, so that discount is nothing to scoff at. That’s quite a result for just asking!

It’s a good thing I got that discount too, because before she let me go the super-friendly-Bethann also managed to charm me in to an optional courtesy car upgrade. I got a bit of a spiel from Tiffany as well, before she’d let me go, so I assume it’s their ploy to win you over with awesome customer service then try for the up-sell. It’s okay; she earned it.

Clive Wearing has a neurological disorder called anterograde amnesia which is a condition that doesn't allow new memories to transfer into long-term memory. This means that he will never remember anything since his incident, similar to Leonard in the movie Memento.

On March 29, 1985 Clive came home with a very bad headache which wouldn’t go away for days, and wouldn’t respond to any medication. By the fourth day he had a high fever, and forgot his daughter’s name; by the fifth day he was very delirious.

Clive had contracted the Herpes simplex virus which attacked his brain and caused damage to the left and right temporal lobes as well as the frontal lobe. The temporal lobes contain a structure called the hippocampus which is involved in memory function, and in Clive’s case the hippocampus has almost certainly been destroyed in both sides of the brain.

Before his illness, Clive was a successful musicologist and conductor. One of the few things that have survived intact is his ability to read music and play the piano.

Now his memory-span is so short that he will often forget the beginning of a sentence before you have completed it. Or he may begin answering a question but forget the question before he’s finished with his answer. It’s not uncommon to forget what you ordered for lunch by the time the food is served; but Clive additionally doesn’t remember which flavours belong to which foods.

This book is essentially a mash-up of an easy-going children’s story with hard-core mathematical concepts that will stretch your mind. Flatland is a 2-dimensional world where females are lines with razor-sharp end-points; males are two-dimensional shapes; browsing the interline is always wireless because otherwise you’d be trapped inside a network of cables with no way to get out; meat comes mainly from oxagons – hexagons crossed with octagons; and books come as long lines rolled up into a spiral.

Vikki, a line from Flatland, is taken on a tour of different worlds by her guide, a space-hopper. On the way, they explore 3-dimensional space, 4-dimensional space, higher-dimensions, fractional dimensions, and more.

Although the story is fictional, the facts and concepts are most certainly not fictional. They explain the concepts of Hamming distance and error-detecting/error-correcting encodings in a way that is remarkably clearer than my university lectures on information theory! They visit topological worlds where doughnuts and two-holed doughnuts turn into teacups and teapots respectively. The milk comes from a one-sided cow named moobius, whose tail is joined to its nose with a twist; oh, and the milk is served in Klein bottles.

The book is full of incredibly witty puns, which are highly amusing for the scientifically-minded reader who has come across some of these mathematical concepts, and enjoys geeky jokes. One example: Moobius, the one-sided cow, has a loud marching band playing from within – this music cannot be stopped because that would be incredibly “orienting”, and besides, he is nothing without his “band”. (Geeky-pun explanation: A Möbius strip is a single-sided non-orientable two-dimensional surface embedded in three dimensions, and can be constructed by taking a band of paper and gluing its ends together with a twist.)

A non-technical reader can just ignore all the incredible puns and still enjoy the book, with all its challenging thought experiments and odd situations, written in an easy-to-read style.

2008 Speed Test Results

We’re on the O2 Standard Home package, which is rated at "Up to 8 meg" downstream and "Up to 1.3 meg" upstream, so I was quite impressed to be getting rather close to these ideals.

Let’s see how things are a year on:

2009 Speed Test Results

• The SpeedTest.net test server is allegedly 300 miles closer than it was last year.
• Which might be why the ping is marginally down, from 39ms to 32ms.
• Upload speed has decreased by 8% since last year’s value (from 1.11Mb/s to 1.02Mb/s).
• Download speed has decreased by 12% since last year’s value (from 8.05Mb/s to 7.05Mb/s).

So overall marginally worse than last year, but still quite good when you consider the variability of home broadband connection speeds. And given the level of customer service I received recently, I'm in no hurry to switch broadband providers.

I finally decided to upgrade my ageing Orange SmartPhone E650 (which is just a re-branded HTC s710) to something a little modern, namely the HTC Touch HD. It’s kind of like an iPhone, except that it runs Windows Mobile. Also, the screen is larger, and has more than twice the resolution of an iPhone. The built-in camera has a 5 megapixel resolution, which is nice (also more than twice that of the iPhone). The only thing is that it doesn’t support multi-touch, but I’m not too bothered about that. The full-screen video streaming experience is enough to compensate for that. And it comes with a handy little soft carry pouch, to protect the screen from knocks and scratches in your pockets. Very practical!

It’s nice to see that HTC has made a brand name for themselves, and entered the market without re-branding their gear. They even sponsored one of the pro-cycling teams participating in the Tour de France this year, so they must be doing well! (It looks like they made a good choice in team to sponsor too, because Columbia-HTC was the team with that guy who’s a bit good at winning sprints, and breaking British cycling records: Mark Cavendish.)

After last time I negotiated an upgrade with the Orange “disconnections” department I knew that a hard bargain was the route to success. By the end of the conversation they were offering me a free phone upgrade, on a cheap contract, with unlimited minutes and texts, and unlimited mobile internet for free! (This was after the previous guy I spoke to advised me that for ~£7.50 per month I could have up to 250MB of mobile internet browsing per month, but told me there was absolutely no unlimited plan available from Orange.) I really think the “disconnections” (i.e. “customer retention”) department has pretty much free reign to offer you whatever deal is needed to keep you on as a customer.

Alas, Orange discontinued the HTC Touch HD a few months ago; something to do with software problems — perhaps as a result of the branding “customisations” they do on the phones they sell — although I didn’t find out the reason for sure.

Instead I decided to go with O2 as a provider, who have a (publically advertised) unlimited web bundle for £7.50 per month, and very good contract deals available through mobiles.co.uk. My base contract is only £20 per month, with a good chunk of minutes, unlimited texts, and a £5 monthly discount on the O2 Home Broadband which we already have!

So far, so good.

The book is not just about the 2004 Tour de France — only the final one-third covers the Tour. The first two-thirds are all about the rest of the season before that, the wider pro-cycling peloton in 2004, and all the things around it. Training and preparations for the tour, including long hours in the saddle during the off-season, meticulously procuring the best equipment available (which Lance affectionately terms “The Shit”) and the equipment which he hopes will blow away the opposition (“The Shit That Will Kill Them”); Lance’s every-day life, interactions with his then-girlfriend, Sheryl Crow, and his kids. And although Lance is obviously the main subject, Dan does a good job of covering a number of other riders and teams as well.

Dan has an engaging writing style and covers a lot of interesting details, from the style with which Floyd Landis entered the road racing scene, to the words coming over the radio into Lance’s ear during the final time trial. I don’t think this book is just for the cycling enthusiasts; I read a little to my wife (who has no interest in cycling) and she was pleasantly surprised, saying that the writing was a lot more colourful and dynamic, talking more about the riders than the technicalities of cycling. Dan also includes a succinct appendix which can get the complete novice up-to-speed on pro cycling, types of races, teams, tactics, and cheating, in under 9 pages.

“Riders eat and drink the equivalent of three Thanksgiving dinners a day during the Tour.”

Here is a description of Floyd’s initial entry into the cyclist road racing scene:

He showed up for his first road race wearing a garish jersey, a visored helmet, and a pair of brilliantly colored Argyle socks, pulled high. He made his way slowly to the front row... wheeling a bike with a monstrously big 56-tooth front chain ring, so large that it resembled a pie plate. A slow crater of disgusted amazement widened around Landis... Then in a loud voice that rang with Mennonite clarity, Landis said what he'd planned to say, a reading from the First Book of Floyd:

"If there's anyone here who can stay with me, I will buy you dinner."

Laughter. Landis remained quiet, then replied.

"You shouldn't laugh, because that gets me angry. And if you make me angry, then I'm going to blow you all up."¹

More Laughter.

The race began, and Floyd rode up to the leaders. Then past them. He pressed the pace, slowly at first and then faster and faster, pushing his pie plate until it hummed, until the others felt like they were trying to follow a motorcycle.

"You like my socks?" he asked. "How do you like them now?"

They gasped for air.

"I'll take that for a yes," Landis continued. "How about if I go a little farther up the road, and you can tell me how they look from there?"

Landis won his first race by fifteen minutes, including a stop to repair his punctured tire. He won his second race by 45 minutes.

"Get Floyd emotionally involved and there's no way he'll back down," Geoghegan said. "He will go until his heart literally explodes."

           — Tour de Force, by Daniel Coyle

And before his entry into road racing he was a competitive mountain biker, known for riding wheelies during races... going uphill.

Footnote:
¹No, he wasn't threatening terrorist activity. In cycling, to "blow up" means to run out of energy, usually in a spectacular and catastrophic manner.

Thursday Morning 6:30am: Internet connection is not working. Try re-setting the modem (very occasionally we get connectivity problems that are fixed by a reset — this is probably the only thing I could complain about with my O2 Broadband experience to date). Mess around with the computer: try the Windows 7 networking wizard, reset network adaptor, run the O2 Broadband software CD diagnostics, reboot, pray to the gods, cross fingers, etc.

6:45am: Still no joy. Call the Customer Services number on the CD case. Someone picks up on the first ring. Wait a minute, it’s 6:45 in the morning and there’s someone to take my call? I wasn’t actually expecting someone to pick up so it takes me a moment to answer.

Me: Hi, there’s a problem with our home broadband. The “Broadband” light on the router is alternating between being off, and being lit red. I’ve tried resetting it.

CSR: Okay, what’s your home phone number? Let me see... Okay, there was a fault reported at your exchanged 17 minutes ago. Let’s see here... Okay, we have an engineer on-site at the exchange who is working on the problem right now.

Me: Wow, okay. I guess I’ll just wait for it to be resolved. Thanks.

It’s 6:45am and they not only have the Customer Services call-centre up and running, but they have engineers on-site with a sub-15-minute response time on exchange faults? Can you spell LOCKDOWN?

The icing on the cake:

9:05am: (Text message) O2 Broadband: We’ve noticed a line fault that might affect broadband in your area. Sorry. We’re working on it and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s fixed.

(I wonder if this message would have come sooner if the fault had not arisen so early in the morning.)

10:00am: (Text message) O2 Broadband: We got your broadband back up and running at 9:30 today. It should be back to normal now.

Talk about keeping your customers informed!

I’m sure O2 will keep their well-earned top ratings for Customer Service and Reliability — this is by far the best Broadband internet experience I’ve ever had, or even heard of!

Aside:

The book Freakonomics was an interesting look into the economic forces that drive everyday things. It doesn’t look like I ever got around to reviewing this book, but it comes highly recommended. Don’t let the “economics” put you off — it is suitable for those who are not inclined toward economics!

Chapter 3 of the book is “Why do drug dealers still live with their Moms?” and covers “The economics of drug dealing, including the surprisingly low earnings and abject working conditions of crack cocaine dealers”.

As a sociology student, Sudhir finds himself spending time with a local gang leader and discovering the intricate details of gangland Chicago.

The structure of a drug gang is not unlike that of a multi-site manufacturing company. There is a hierarchy of bosses who make decisions at various levels. People try to climb the ladder to get more money (and safer work). Violations such as stealing are met with standard disciplinary action.

Gang wars are often the result of “foot soldiers” (the peons of the drug gang) starting fights due to their inflated egos, but are highly undesirable in the grand scheme of things because violence drives away customers. “Turf wars” are more often conducted in controlled inter-gang meetings where negotiations take place without violence. Gangs even engage in mergers with other gangs!

The resemblance to more conventional enterprises is uncanny; I’m curious if this evolved completely independently, or if some gang boss once upon a time happened to have an MBA!

Police and ambulances often don’t attend calls in to gangland, so the gangs and local residents have to make their own structure and justice system. It’s like a miniature country with its own structure of jobs, policies, and taxation (by way of extortion, bribes, protection).

Sudhir, now Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Columbia University, spent a decade studying the gangs and local residents in Chicago’s South Side.

This book is a truly fascinating glimpse into a world that few outsiders get to see.

In this book Jamie Whyte, a former philosophy lecturer at Cambridge University, does pretty much what he promises in the subtitle: “Exposing the bogus arguments of politicians, priests, journalists, and other serial offenders.”

This book starts off with a very in-depth logical approach that is, at times, a little bit too pedantic even for my taste. For example, the first chapter talks about the cliché “You are entitled to your opinion” and goes through the painstaking logical deduction that, although you are free to hold an opinion, it is obviously not guaranteed to be correct. Therefore, when debating the correctness of your opinion versus another opinion, the cop-out “I’m entitled to my opinion” is entirely irrelevant to the topic under debate. Roughly equivalent in merit to a statement such as “I am wearing leather shoes!”

Later in the book he mellows out a little and gets closer to Ben Goldacre’s style in Bad Science — pointing out public blunders and pseudo-scientific nonsense. Such as New Labour’s 1997 claim that 35% of British children live in ‘poverty’, under the rather unconventional definition of ‘poverty’ as “household income less than 60% of the national median household income”. His analysis is sound and comprehensive, but I’ll be flippant and say that this statistic is about as useful as declaring that 50% of children live in ‘poverty’ because they have a below-average household income. Something must be done! Increase taxes!

Another amusing part that makes a good anecdote is The Times reporting a BMA statistic in 2000, saying that anorexia affects 2% of young women and kills a fifth of sufferers. Jamie ran the numbers and concluded that, at this rate, anorexia is so deadly that it kills sixteen times the number of young women that die from any causes, including anorexia. Something must be done!

Overall this book is an interesting read and at only 150 pages in length, it’s not an epic. Persevere through the beginning — it gets better in the latter half and there are a few great gems waiting there for you.

I was visiting the USA and on the look-out for a digital camera. I visited all the usual big-name consumer electronics stores and the technology counters in department stores, but was continually disappointed by the apparent lack of sales expertise in the products. When I ended up in New York and met up with Zack, he recommended B&H to me, he said it was the place to go for a camera. It turned out I had walked past the store earlier that very day, without so much as noticing. I'm observant like that. (Maybe it was because they didn't have a shiny store-front with lots of eye-catching technology right in the window, like all the other over-priced tourist-trap camera stores in New York City.)

Zack was right. This store was huge, and had all sorts of photo/video related stuff inside. I went in and started looking at cameras. The nearest salesperson closed a sale and then asked me if I needed assistance so I started talking to him about the cameras I was considering. He clearly knew what he was talking about when he started talking about comparative CCD sensor sizes between the models, then breifly paused to help another customer change the language on a camera from Japanese — he seemed to know the menu structure on that particular model off by heart, since I'm pretty sure he wasn't fluent in Japanese.

Most of the employees were Jewish and the store ran to military precision. The workflow was like this:

1. As soon as you go near the cameras some guy starts explaining every feature to you, answers all your questions, and generally knows what he's talking about (most of the people at other places I'd been to didn't know the cameras that intimately)
2. You eventually decide on a camera, after having the sales assistant explain the intricate details and relative merits of your candidate selections
3. He scribbles down some product codes for your chosen camera and accessories and tells you to take it to a guy at a computer terminal
4. The guy at the computer punches in the barcodes and takes some details down, then says "It'll be here in a minute"
5. Some other guy brings over your order in a green crate, with a receipt
6. You take the receipt to the payment counter (without the goods) where you pay using the method of your choice and get a receipt
7. Finally, you take your receipt to the goods counter and pick up your neatly packed order.

I'm not sure why their system is so arcane, but I expect it's to deal with high demand situations. I was there at closing time on a weekday, and people were buying cameras at the rate of one every few minutes. At peak times I expect their system deals admirably. (Joel postulates that the system is an anti-theft measure, by involving multiple staff in each sale, but I doubt that's the reason.)

Each of the "counters" I mentioned above have an airport-check-in-style zig-zag queue cordoned off in front and room for about 5-10 staff members at the counter.

They also have an elaborate roof-mounted transport system for moving orders out of the stock rooms.

If you're looking for a camera and happen to be in or near New York City, go to B&H. Heck, go there even if you're not looking for a camera, just for the cultural experience!

For instance, the elevators at my office have a sleek control panel in brushed steel. Modern in appearance, minimalistic, utilitarian, and robust.

It’s usually the details that make the difference in design, and this interface has some subtle shortcomings:

1. Poor contrast of the engraved markings makes them difficult to read.
2. Restricted viewing angle of the light for each button makes it difficult to see what floors are already selected when at the front of a packed elevator.
3. Minimal differentiation between the “door open” and “door close” decals makes it difficult find the correct button to hold the elevator for someone as the doors begin to close.

Not that, I’m not complaining. There is worse design elsewhere.

He also introduces the reader to a lot of knowledge about scientific methods, the traits of effective (and ineffective) research: control groups; the role of placebos; double-blind trials; why brand name drugs are no better than generic brands, except by virtue of the fact that you pay more for them which, paradoxically, gives you a greater placebo effect (because, subconsciously, a drug that is more expensive must be more effective)!

Two of the biggest medical abbreviations from UK media in the past decade, in my mind, are MMR (the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella combined vaccination, and its links to autism) and MSRA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the hospital ‘superbug’ outbreak). In his book, Ben calmly presents some facts and details that the mass media may have forgotten to go in to (perhaps because “just kidding, we’re not all going to die after all!” is not quite as newsworthy).

He also covers common “knowledge” such as vitamins, antioxidants, other nutritionists’ products and claims, homeopathy, and more.

I’m trying hard not to enter into too much detail here because I know that I’ll degenerate into a cynical rant that simply won’t do justice to Ben’s carefully measured words and well-balanced arguments. Instead, here is a quotation from my favourite part of the book:

“What you are seeing here is a tabloid journalist telling a department of a world-class research microbiologists that they are mistaken about microbiology. This is an excellent example of a phenomenon described in one of my favourite psychology papers: ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’, by Justin Kruger and David Dunning.

They noted that people who are incompetent suffer a dual burden: not only are they incompetent, but they may also be too incompetent  to assay their own incompetence, because the skills which underlie an ability to make a correct judgement are the same as the skills required to recognise a correct judgement.
[…]
People who performed particularly poorly relative to their peers were unaware of their own incompetence; but more than that, they were also less able to recognize competence in others, because this, too, relied on ‘meta-cognition’, or knowledge about the skill.”
         — Ben Goldacre, Bad Science, pp.267-269.

See also: The Dangers of Bread

1. Cool: The short stay car park has a camera at the entrance barriers which reads your number plate and prints it on your parking ticket moments later. (I wonder if they've had problems with ticket transferral in the past.)
2. Expensive: A one-hour stay will cost you over £6.
3. Annoying: There is no passenger pick-up point. Just a drop-off point. The signs for "pick-up" lead down a one-way route to the car park. If you want to pick someone up, arrange to meet them at the departures drop-off point instead.
4. Confusing: The international arrivals area has two gates from which passengers emerge, separated by a good distance. There is no indication of which side a given flight will emerge (and it is not clear if this is even deterministic). There is no single area through which all exiting passengers pass through. There is enough curvature and pylons in the layout that, at even a moderately busy time, it is neigh on impossible for a single person to monitor both sides simultaneously, even with a lot of constant side-to-side neck twisting.
5. Useful: Now that they know your number plate, next to the pay machine there is a "find lost car" machine to help you find out where you parked you car! I should have tried it to see what kind of granularity it works to. I'm not sure if they continue to use cameras throughout the car park to track your location, or perhaps they have an embedded RFID chip in the parking ticket.
6. Practical: Checked luggage was delivered to the passengers!

It all sounds a bit gung ho but it's exactly the opposite. They reviewed driver transcripts from similar things that had been done previously so they could learn everything they could. Analysed fuel economies in Excel spreadsheets. Looked up potential speed-trap locations, reviewed low-angle air photographs of the areas, marked them up on their GPS guidance. Looked at traffic laws and maximal jail sentences in each state so they could set the cruise control 1mph below the relevant thresholds. They developed threat analyses and operational protocols that dictated what should be done in various situations.

These people are, basically, insane.

Here's an informative presentation Alex did at Google to promote his book.

Alex Roy clearly subscribes to the policy that "If you're gonna do it right you've gotta do it hard-core."