Monday, August 31, 2009
The fly in the urinal
A company called Urinal Fly manufactures a sticker to place inside urinals to "reduce spillage." The founder explains the origin of the idea on the company website:
I often get asked about where I came up with the idea for the UrinalFly. The original idea belongs to economist Aad Kieboom. From a 1999 Whole Earth Aricle talking about bringing the UrinalFly to JFK airport:
“Each urinal at the Amsterdam airport has the black outline of a fly etched into the porcelain-”This improves the man’s aim,” says Aad Kieboom, an economist. His staff conducted fly-in-urinal trials and found that etchings reduce spillage by 80 per cent. The Dutch will transfer the technology to New York. “It gives a guy something to think about,” says Jan Jansen, the new Dutch general manager in New York. “It’s a perfect example of process control.”
Economist Jodi Beggs talked about this in an August 26, 2009 post on her blog Economists Do It With Models.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
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