Solution for: CBT AC Reading Test 3: Scent of success

Scent of success

{A} Innovation and entrepreneurship, in the right mix, can bring spectacular results and propel a business ahead of the pack. Across a diverse range of commercial successes, from the Hills Hoist clothesline to the Cochlear ear implant, it is hard to generalize beyond saying the creators tapped into something consumers could not wait to get their hands on. However, most ideas never make it to the market. Some ideas that innovators are spruiking to potential investors include new water-saving showerheads, a keyless locking system, ping-pong balls that keep pollution out of rainwater tanks, making teeth grow from stem cells inserted in the gum, and technology to stop LPG tanks from exploding. Grant Kearney, chief executive of the Innovation Xchange, which connects businesses to innovation networks, says he hears of great business ideas that he knows will never get on the market. "Ideas by themselves are absolutely useless," he says. "An idea only becomes innovation when it is connected to the right resources and capabilities."

{B} One of Australia's latest innovation successes stems from a lemon-scented bathroom cleaner called Shower Power, the formula for which was concocted in a factory in Yatala, Queensland. In 1995, Tom Quinn and John Heron bought a struggling cleaning products business, OzKleen, for 250,000. It was selling 100 different kinds of cleaning products, mainly in bulk. The business was in bad shape, the cleaning formulas were ineffective and environmentally harsh, and there were few regular clients. Now Shower Power is claimed to be the top-selling bathroom cleaning product in the country. In the past 12 months, almost four million bottles of OzKleen's Power products have been sold and the company forecasts 2004 sales of 10 million bottles. The company's. sales in 2003 reached $11 million, with 700k of business being exported. In particular, Shower Power is making big inroads on the British market.

{C} OzKleen's turnaround began when Quinn and Heron hired an industrial chemist to revitalize the product line. Market research showed that people were looking for a better cleaner for the bathroom, universally regarded as the hardest room in the home to clean. The company also wanted to make the product formulas more environmentally friendly. One of Tom Quinn's sons, Peter, aged 24 at the time, began working with the chemist on the formulas, looking at the potential for citrus-based cleaning products. He detested all the chlorine-based cleaning products that dominated the market. "We didn't want to use chlorine, simple as that," he says. "It offers bad working conditions and there's no money in it." Peter looked at citrus ingredients, such as orange peel, to replace the petroleum by-products in cleaners. He is credited with finding the Shower Power formula. "The head," he says. The company's recipe is in a vault somewhere and is my sole owner of the intellectual property.

{D} To begin with, Shower Power was sold only in commercial quantities but Tom Quinn decided to sell it in 750ml bottles after the constant "raves" from customers at their retail store at Beenleigh, near Brisbane. Customers were travelled- ling long distances to buy supplies. Others began writing to OzKleen to say how good Shower Power was. "We did a dummy label and went to see Woolworths," Tom Quinn says. The Woolworths buyer took a bottle home and was able to remove a stain from her basin that had been impossible to shift. From that point on, she championed the product and OzKleen had its first supermarket order, for a palette of Shower Power worth $3000. "We were over the moon," says OzKleen's financial controller, Belinda McDonnell.

{E} Shower Power was released in Australian supermarkets in 1997 and became the top-selling product in its category within six months. It was all hands on deck at the factory, labelling and bottling Shower Power to keep up with demand. OzKleen ditched all other products and rebuilt the business around Shower Power. This stage, recalls McDonnell, was very tough. "It was hand-to-mouth, cash flow was very difficult," she says. OzKleen had to pay new-line fees to supermarket chains, which also squeezed margins.

{F} OzKleen's next big break came when the daughter of a Coles Myer executive 1 used the product while on holidays in Queensland and convinced her father that Shower Power should be in Coles supermarkets. Despite the product success, Peter Quinn says the company was wary of how long the sales would last and hesitate to spend money on upgrading the manufacturing process. As a result, he remembers long periods of working around the clock to keep up with orders. Small tanks were still being used so batches were small and bottles were labelled and filled manually The privately-owned OzKleen relied on cash flow to expand. "The equipment could not keep up with demand," Peter Quinn says. Eventually, a new bottling machine was bought for $50,000 in the hope of streamlining production, but he says: "We got ripped off." Since then he has been developing a new automated bottling machine that can control the amount of foam produced in the liquid so that bottles can be filled more effectively - "I love coming up with new ideas." The machine is being patented.

{G} Peter Quinn says OzKleen's approach to research and development is open slather. "If I need it, I get it. It is about doing something simple that no one else is doing. Most of these things are jus sitting in front of people ... it's just seeing the opportunities." With a tried and tested product, OzKleen is expanding overseas and developing more Power-brand household products. Tom Quinn, who previously ran a real estate agency, says: "We are competing with the same market all over the world; the (cleaning) products are sold everywhere." Shower Power, known as Bath Power in Britain, was launched four years ago with the help of an export development grant from the Federal Government. "We wanted to do it straight away because we realized we had the same opportunities worldwide." OzKleen is already number three in the British market, and the next stop is France. The Power range includes cleaning products for carpets, kitchens and pre-wash stain removal. The Quinn and Heron families are still involved. OzKleen has been approached with offers to buy the company, but Tom Quinn says he is happy with things as they are. "We're having too much fun."

Roller Coaster

{A} 600 years ago, roller coaster pioneers never would have imagined the advancements that have been made to create the roller coasters of today. The tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world is the Kingda Ka, a coaster in New Jersey that launches its passengers from zero to 128 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds. It then heaves its riders skyward at a 90-degree angle until it reaches a height of 456 feet, over one and a half football fields, above the ground, before dropping another 418 feet With that said, roller coasters are about more than just speed and height, they are about the creativity of the designers that build them, each coaster having its own unique way of producing intense thrills at a lesser risk than the average car ride. Roller coasters have evolved drastically over the years, from their primitive beginnings as Russian ice slides, to the metal monsters of today. Their combination of creativity and structural elements make them one of the purest forms of architecture.

{B} At first glance, a roller coaster is something like a passenger train. It consists of a series of connected cars that move on tracks. But unlike a passenger train, a roller coaster has no engine or power source of its own. For most of the ride, the train is moved by gravity and momentum. To build up this momentum, you need to get the train to the top of the first hill or give it a powerful launch. The traditional lifting mechanism is a long length of chain running up the hill under the track. The chain is fastened in a loop, which is wound around a gear at the top of the hill and another one at the bottom of the hill. The gear at the bottom of the hill is turned by a simple motor. This turns the chain loop so that it continually moves up the hill like a long conveyor belt. The coaster cars grip onto the chain with several chain dogs, sturdy hinged hooks. When the train rolls to the bottom of the hill, the dogs catch onto the chain links. Once the chain dog is hooked, the chain simply pulls the train to the top of the hill. At the summit, the chain dog is released and the train starts its descent down the hill.

{C} Roller coasters have a long, fascinating history. The direct ancestors of roller coasters were monumental ice slides -- long, steep wooden slides covered in ice, some as high as 70 feet -- that were popular in Russia in the 16th and 17th centuries. Riders shot down the slope in sleds made out of wood or blocks of ice, crash-landing in a sand pile. Coaster historians diverge on the exact evolution of these ice slides into actual rolling carts. The most widespread account is that a few entrepreneurial Frenchmen imported the ice slide idea to France. The warmer climate of France tended to melt the ice, so the French started building waxed slides instead, eventually adding wheels to the sleds. In 1817, the Russes a Belleville became the first roller coaster where the train was attached to the track. The French continued to expand on this idea, coming up with more complex track layouts, with multiple cars and all sorts of twists and turns.

{D} In comparison to the world's first roller coaster, there is perhaps an even greater debate over what was America's first true coaster. Many will say that it is Pennsylvania's own Maunch Chunk-Summit Hill and Switch Back Railroad. The Maunch Chunk-Summit Hill and Switch Back Railroad was originally America's second railroad, and considered my many to be the greatest coaster of all time. Located in the Lehigh valley, it was originally used to transport coal from the top of Mount Pisgah to the bottom of Mount Jefferson, until Josiah White, a mining entrepreneur, had the idea of turning it into a part-time thrill ride. Because of its immediate popularity, it soon became strictly a passenger train. A steam engine would haul passengers to the top of the mountain, before letting them coast back down, with speeds rumored to reach 100 miles per hour! The reason that it was called a switch back railroad, a switch back track was located at the top-where the steam engine would let the riders coast back down. This type of track featured a dead end where the steam engine would detach its cars, allowing riders to coast down backwards. The railway went through a couple of minor track changes and name changes over the years, but managed to last from 1829 to 1937, over 100 years.

{E} The coaster craze in America was just starting to build. The creation of the SwitchBack Railway, by La Marcus Thompson, gave roller coasters national attention. Originally built at New York's Coney Island in 1884, SwitchBack Railways began popping up all over the country. The popularity of these rides may puzzle the modern-day thrill seeker, due to the mild ride they gave in comparison to the modern-day roller coaster. Guests would pay a nickel to wait in line up to five hours just to go down a pair of side-by-side tracks with gradual hills that vehicles coasted down at a top speed around six miles per hour. Regardless, Switchback Railways were very popular, and sparked many people, including Thompson, to design coasters that were bigger and better.

{F} The 1910s and 1920s were probably the best decade that the roller coaster has ever seen. The new wave of technology, such as the upstop wheels, an arrangement that kept a coaster's wheels to its tracks by resisting high gravitational forces, showed coasters a realm of possibilities that has never been seen before. In 1919, North America alone had about 1,500 roller coasters, a number that was rising rampantly. Then, the Great Depression gave a crushing blow to amusement parks all over America. As bad as it was, amusement parks had an optimistic look on the future in the late 1930s. But, in 1942, roller coasters could already feel the effects of World War Two, as they were forced into a shadow of neglect. Most, nearly all of America's roller coasters were torn down. To this very day, the number of roller coaster in America is just a very tiny fraction of the amount of roller coasters in the 1920s.

Multitasking Debate Can you do them at the same time?

{A} Talking on the phone while driving isn't the only situation where we're worse at multitasking than we might like to think we are. New studies have identified a bottleneck in our brains that some say means we are fundamentally incapable of true multitasking. If experimental findings reflect real-world performance, people who think they are multitasking are probably just underperforming in all - or at best, all but one - of their parallel pursuits. Practice might improve your performance, but you will never be as good as when focusing on one task at a time.

{B} The problem, according to René Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is that there's a sticking point in the brain. To demonstrate this, Marois devised an experiment to locate it. Volunteers watch a screen and when a particular image appears, a red circle, say, they have to press a key with their index finger. Different coloured circles require presses from different fingers. Typical response time is about half a second, and the volunteers quickly reach their peak performance. Then they learn to listen to different recordings and respond by making a specific sound. For instance, when they hear a bird chirp, they have to say "ba"; an electronic sound should elicit a "ko", and so on. Again, no problem. A normal person can do that in about half a second, with almost no effort.

{C} The trouble comes when Marois shows the volunteers an image, and then almost immediately plays them a sound. Now they're flummoxed. “If you show an image and play a sound at the same time, one task is postponed,” he says. In fact, if the second task is introduced within the half-second or so it takes to process and react to the first, it will simply be delayed until the first one is done. The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presented simultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presenting the tasks lengthens.

{D} There are at least three points where we seem to get stuck, says Marois. The first is in simply identifying what we're looking at. This can take a few tenths of a second, during which time we are not able to see and recognise a second item. This limitation is known as the "attentional blink": experiments have shown that if you're watching out for a particular event and a second one shows up unexpectedly any time within this crucial window of concentration, it may register in your visual cortex but you will be unable to act upon it. Interestingly, if you don't expect the first event, you have no trouble responding to the second. What exactly causes the attentional blink is still a matter for debate.

{E} A second limitation is in our short-term visual memory. It's estimated that we can keep track of about four items at a time, fewer if they are complex. This capacity shortage is thought to explain, in part, our astonishing inability to detect even huge changes in scenes that are otherwise identical, so-called "change blindness” . Show people pairs of near-identical photos - say, aircraft engines in one picture have disappeared in the other - and they will fail to spot the differences. Here again, though, there is disagreement about what the essential limiting factor really is. Does it come down to a dearth of storage capacity, or is it about how much attention a viewer is paying?

{F} A third limitation is that choosing a response to a stimulus - braking when you see a child in the road, for instance, or replying when your mother tells you over the phone that she's thinking of leaving your dad - also takes brainpower. Selecting a response to one of these things will delay by some tenths of a second your ability to respond to the other. This is called the “response selection bottleneck” theory, first proposed in 1952.

{G} But David Meyer, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, doesn't buy the bottleneck idea. He thinks dual-task interference is just evidence of a strategy used by the brain to prioritise multiple activities. Meyer is known as something of an optimist by his peers. He has written papers with titles like "Virtually perfect time-sharing in dual-task performance: Uncorking the central cognitive bottleneck". His experiments have shown that with enough practice - at least 2000 tries - some people can execute two tasks simultaneously as competently as if they were doing them one after the other. He suggests that there is a central cognitive processor that coordinates all this and, what's more, he thinks it uses discretion: sometimes it chooses to delay one task while completing another.

{H} Marois agrees that practice can sometimes erase interference effects. He has found that with just 1 hour of practice each day for two weeks, volunteers show a huge improvement at managing both his tasks at once. Where he disagrees with Meyer is in what the brain is doing to achieve this. Marois speculates that practice might give us the chance to find less congested circuits to execute a task - rather like finding trusty back streets to avoid heavy traffic on main roads - effectively making our response to the task subconscious. After all, there are plenty of examples of subconscious multitasking that most of us routinely manage: walking and talking, eating and reading, watching TV and folding the laundry.

{I} It probably comes as no surprise that, generally speaking, we get worse at multitasking as we age. According to Art Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who studies how ageing affects our cognitive abilities, we peak in our 20s. Though the decline is slow through our 30s and on into our 50s, it is there; and after 55, it becomes more precipitous. In one study, he and his colleagues had both young and old participants do a simulated driving task while carrying on a conversation. He found that while young drivers tended to miss background changes, older drivers failed to notice things that were highly relevant. Likewise, older subjects had more trouble paying attention to the more important parts of a scene than young drivers.

{J} It's not all bad news for over-55s, though. Kramer also found that older people can benefit from practice. Not only did they learn to perform better, brain scans showed that underlying that improvement was a change in the way their brains become active. While it's clear that practice can often make a difference, especially as we age, the basic facts remain sobering. "We have this impression of an almighty complex brain," says Marois, "and yet we have very humbling and crippling limits.” For most of our history, we probably never needed to do more than one thing at a time, he says, and so we haven't evolved to be able to. Perhaps we will in the future, though. We might yet look back one day on people like Debbie and Alun as ancestors of a new breed of true multitaskers.