3 Tips to Improve Product Images

Originally published on Amazon's Webstore blog (now defunct), Jan 2013

Three Tips for Better Product Images

CC-BY 2.0 Flickr user Shermeee

Photography in eCommerce is almost a foregone conclusion. Of course you need great photos in order to sell products online. And yet, spending just a few minutes looking around the eCommerce world, it’s pretty apparent there are plenty of sites that still haven’t gotten the message. This is unfortunate, because images on the product page are a customer’s most direct contact with what you’re selling. A bad image isn’t just a bad image for your product, it’s a bad image for your company.

1. Use only professional, high-resolution photos. Even the best product looks unappealing in a bad picture. Make sure that your photos are taken professionally—if you’re not sure what that means, refer to this guide from Smashing Magazine[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/08/24/improve-your-e-commerce-design-with-brilliant-product-photos/]—and at a high resolution. You won’t be able to display the image at full size directly on your product page, so make sure the image scales well also.
   
   A professional photo should be taken with the customer in mind. Because online shopping removes the element of direct interaction with your product, the photo itself should provide that interaction. It should answer common customer questions about your product, by displaying features like texture, color, and fit.
   
   
2. Include features that let the user see more. As a high-resolution image doesn’t fit in the space allotted on a normal webpage, you’ll need to include features like mouseover zoom, color swatches, and quick view. You may also consider more advanced visual effects[http://www.getelastic.com/how-top-retailers-show-product-images/] such as the rotating images Apple uses, or something as simple as allowing a user to click a color swatch to change the color of the product image.
   
   Essentially, these features give your customer the chance to see the product in more depth than they would with just a photo. As the main product image answers basic customer questions about the product, these additional features answer more in-depth questions the customer may have.
   
   
3. Back up the images with quality website organization. Paying attention to the little things like search features, social media widgets, and “breadcrumbs” will make it so that customers can find the right product pages. Images will do no good if the customer is frustrated and can’t find the right product.
   
   Consider what Alternative Apparel does with their search features, where a search on “white shirt” immediately returns a search for “shirt” filtered to just white products. Look around at other eCommerce sites for these little features that make it easier to find just the right thing, and implement them right away (many of these features may be available out of the box with the right eCommerce SaaS solution).

In the end, the most important thing to keep in mind about product images is this: they need to be as accurate and detailed a representation of your product as possible. The goal of your eCommerce site should be to help potential customers decide on which products to buy as quickly as possible. If they have to squint, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Taking the “Lethal” Out of “Lethal Injection”

How the FDA’s drug regulations may mean the death of capital punishment.

original post date: April 6, 2011

Last month, Eric John King was put to death in Florence, Arizona, for committing a double homicide during a convenience store robbery gone wrong. As is their duty, King’s attorneys worked every last angle in an attempt to spare their client the ultimate punishment. As the burden is on the state to execute people by the book, so much of the legal jockeying is less focused on proving innocence than snagging the process in the bramble of regulation surrounding capital punishment. It may come as a surprise to note that, even in the world of executions, some of those regulations came from the FDA.

The majority of states in the US practice capital punishment, and all of them that do use lethal injection as their primary method. Most of these states use a method of injection that requires drugs that are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain legally, and as a result, incidents are cropping up in which the drugs’ origins are being called into question. These questions involve complex rules, licenses, and procedures that, in the end, are designed to keep us safe from harmful substances. In a great irony, these rules are proving tight enough to keep even the condemned from injections that—to put it mildly—may be hazardous to their health.

The Arizona Republic for example, recently reported that one of the drugs used in Arizona executions had been labeled for animal use. The furor over this died as it was found to be a clerical error, but the incident shows how touchy and intricate death penalty drug issues can be.

Arizona, along with all but three states that perform lethal injections, uses three drugs to execute prisoners. Sodium thiopental is used as an anesthetic—outside of an execution chamber, it has been used to induce coma. Pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant, paralyzes the prisoner. Potassium chloride is the third drug, administered to induce a severe case of hyperkalemia, an excess of potassium, which prevents the heart muscle from contracting. The anesthetic, sodium thiopental, is no longer produced in the United States at all, causing a problem for any three-drug execution state.

How do the prison systems get around this? By importing it from other countries—and from domestic labs with inexplicable surplus. Kentucky, for example, contacted a pharmaceutical company in India, then obtained a supply from an entity in the state of Georgia. The legality of both their contact with the Indian company and the manner in which the Georgia group came to be in possession of the drug are being questioned by public defenders.

Another public defender, Dale Baich of Phoenix, called for a Justice Department probe after Arizona got its supply from Dream Pharma in the UK. The company “appears to be a closely held corporation run by a husband and wife. According to press reports, the entire operation is run out of the back of a West London driving school,” says Baich in a letter to the DOJ. In November of last year, Britain shut down its export of sodium thiopental for non-medical purposes. Baich’s letter to the DOJ indicates that Arizona obtained the drug in September, before the ban was instated. By now, you may be asking questions as to why the DOJ would want to get involved—it doesn’t look like anything clearly illegal has taken place.

The answer? It’s all about the paperwork. Baich’s letter alleges that ADC failed to file proper paperwork in the DEA, a registration to import controlled substances, and a declaration document when Arizona actually imported the thiopental. That could end up being Baich’s silver bullet. To drive the point home, he cites an email sent from an FDA official in Phoenix to one in Memphis, where the shipment was to land, saying “Please do not detain this entry.” Allegedly, the email was sent following a request for assistance by ADC Director Ryan.

The email is significant because of a similar development regarding another state’s importation of the same drug. Georgia Department of Corrections had a delivery of sodium thiopental held up by customs in Memphis, then seized by the DEA. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia had failed to register with the DEA for the importation of drugs, and had failed to declare the shipment—exactly what Baich accuses Arizona of doing. According to documents he received, Georgia had even obtained their supply from the same British company that supplied Arizona. Due to the seizure of Georgia’s thiopental, the state has delayed executions indefinitely.

All of this adds up to a threat to capital punishment in Arizona, and any other state that uses thiopental in executions. If the situation were deemed by DOJ to be a “threat to public health or safety,” the law allows DEA to take more than just the thiopental. According to Baich, because ADC’s license to possess controlled substances could be revoked, all controlled substances—which would include the other execution drugs—in the department’s possession could be ordered to be sealed or delivered to the DEA. In this situation, executions in Arizona might be delayed indefinitely, as in Georgia.

It doesn’t look good for other states, either. Sodium thiopental, like most drugs, has an expiration date, so even those states that don’t have a high death row population will need to seek out new batches of the drug in the near future. Europe on the whole (except Belarus) opposes the death penalty, so if the British ban on thiopental exports is any indication, European countries will not help US states in this matter.

ADC has claimed innocence; a representative told BioMindShare via email, “[Our] Documents show the chemicals were obtained lawfully and with the assistance of the FDA and Customs. We also have a DEA certificate that allows for the importation of the chemicals.” Nevertheless, Ryan plans to switch to a one-drug procotol for lethal injections in the near future.

The one drug will likely be pentobarbitol, a drug already used to euthanize animals—Ohio used it in March of this year to execute prisoner Johnnie Baston. The switch to one drug might actually allow lethal injection to continue in Arizona without interruption, even if the DEA intercedes—in the Georgia case, the agency only took the thiopental, leaving them with the other two drugs. A one-drug system avoids that contingency entirely, as they don’t need the thiopental to proceed.

If it looks to you like ADC wins and the public defenders lose, remember that, for an attorney in the service of a death row inmate, any delay to the system could potentially save your client’s life. This comes out in Baich’s opinion on the one-drug switch, “Even if Arizona switches to a one drug protocol, the fact remains that the sodium thiopental was illegally imported.” He added, “The drug should still be seized as it could be used for another purpose.”

And that is what all of the legal wrangling is driving at—while states may be sovereign enough to decide whether or not they execute prisoners, they cannot override the FDA’s and the DEA’s mission to keep drugs from killing people. Even if the drugs they want are meant to kill people.

The Printed Kidney

Originally posted Feb 2011.

Researchers may soon make human organs with an inkjet printer. Really.

At TED, everyone’s favorite meetup of really amazing nerds, strange things are expected, but none quite as strange, to me at least, as Anthony Atala’s live fabrication of a kidney shape in front of the auditorium audience, using a specially designed printer. I had heard of making plastic or metal parts via “rapid prototyping”, also known as “3D printing”, but I had never heard of it being done for tissue. Let me reiterate, though, this kidney is not yet real.

Reports of real kidneys popping out of Hewlett-Packards are greatly, and accidentally, exaggerated. Popular Science reported that the kidney was real, and linked to another article that also said the kidney was real. Fast Company reported that Luke Massella, the young man who appeared as Dr. Atala’s guest for the presentation had received a regenerated kidney, not a regenerated bladder. Wake Forest University, Dr. Atala’s employer, had to put out a press release correcting the errors. (Note that @TEDNews, one of the official TED Twitter accounts, posted “Today's #TED, fresh from TED2011: Anthony Atala prints a human kidney” even after that press release.)

On the one hand this is unfortunate, because it makes this breakthrough seem a little less amazing than it really is (and could lead people to mistakenly believe that the need for organ donors is diminishing). On the other hand, this is terrible, because there were so many amazingly cool parts of that presentation that went largely unnoticed by the press.

For example, some of this regenerative stuff is already being done. Not just “kidney shapes”, but actual reconstruction of body parts. Dr. Atala showed two x-rays of a patient with what appeared to be a collapsed vein or duct (further research showed it to be a urethra), then a later x-ray with the urethra intact, having been partially replaced with lab-grown tissue. That’s pretty amazing stuff! Dr. Atala also showed how some prototype organ construction has taken place inside repurposed commercial inkjet printers, which struck a chord with me, as an admirer of the DIY ethos. (Note that the kidney was not printed on an inkjet.)

As for the speculative part of the talk, Dr. Atala showed how people with flesh wounds might one day be scanned by an optical scanner while lying on an operating table, then have the right replacement tissue printed right onto the existing tissue. You know in episodes of Star Trek, where the doctor waves his or her magical cylinder in front of the patient, and the wound just disappears? That.

There were enough truly amazing parts of the presentation that it’s just a shame that the facts were distorted. My advice? Go to the source; watch the TED video, and check out the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine site. It’s truly amazing what these researchers are doing.

Biting Back

Originally posted Mar 2011

Genetically engineered fungi may eradicate malaria.

Scientists from University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins, and University of Westminster (UK) have done something very impressive. They’ve managed to develop a method which might make malaria a thing of the past, even in the developing world, using genetically-modified fungi that either kill the parasites responsible, or prevent them from entering the human bloodstream from mosquito bites.

Malaria is a particularly difficult problem for biologists, because of the nature of the organism responsible for it. Protists of the genus Plasmodium are the culprits, and as protists, they have features similar to those of animal cells. This makes it difficult to target them with drugs, and the parasites (there are 11 species of Plasmodium that cause human malaria) have evolved resistance to a number of drugs that had at one point proved effective.

The scientists’ plan, then, was to attack the mosquito that carries Plasmodium. They had heard that certain types of fungus acted as a sort of natural insecticide, and started from there. This fungus, Metarhizium anisopliae, doesn’t kill the mosquitoes until they are older, allowing them time to reproduce. This prevents them from building an evolutionary resistance to this new agent. The fungus was then modified in two ways: one change caused the mosquito salivary glands to be coated with a film, preventing the entry of Plasmodium into the glands (and hence its subsequent injection into humans), the second expressed a venom found in scorpions, which killed Plasmodium.

The fungus would likely be applied as a spray or a liquid to the mosquitoes’ habitat, or perhaps the humans’. Existing fungal agents intended to be used as insecticides are sold as suspensions of the fungal spores in water. It might also be possible to grow the fungus in the regions affected, increasing their ability to protect humans at even lower cost.

If this fungus could be made into an effective anti-malarial agent (and there’s little reason to believe it couldn’t), it would go a very long way toward freeing the developing world of the third most deadly single infectious disease. What’s more, it would show the biological community and the world that there are still giant advances to be made in disease control.

Today’s disease-fighting world is itching for good news. Cancer and AIDS are still raging, and even less-sophisticated diseases like tuberculosis are vexing, complicated by unpredictable patterns of human behavior. Assuming this cure will work in the world at large, and eradicates malaria as expected, the benefit to biology in general would likely be tremendous, if only to raise its spirits.

These scientists took a problem and presented a good possible solution that wasn’t simple, wasn’t obvious, and required knowledge of several sub-fields. They are perfect examples of what modern scientists should be: widely knowledgeable and able to draw on previous research without being constrained by it. Congratulations, researchers, and thank you.

For further information on the fungus and the research behind it, refer to this Wired / Ars Technica article.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Robot Doctor Overlords

Originally posted Feb 2011

Jeopardy-playing robots are attempting to enter the medical field, and will terminate all human resistance.

IBM's Watson artificial intelligence program wowed the nation last Wednesday with a major victory against the quiz show's prima donna Ken Jennings, and Brad Rutter, holder of the record for most money won on the program. Jennings, in a moment of snark, forewent a Final Jeopardy answer for a reference to The Simpsons: “I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.” Medical interns may soon have reason to say the same thing, only without the sarcasm.

IBM has been partnering with Nuance Communications, producers of artificial intelligence software applications that read text and recognize speech, to retool Watson for use in making diagnoses. Doctors at Columbia University and University of Maryland are working to decide just how best Watson could help them. This is an amazing opportunity to quickly advance humans' ability to diagnose disease, but it could be frightening for those just entering the medical profession.

Will Watson put recent med school graduates out on the street? Jennings said, in an essay he wrote for Slate, “Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of "thinking" machines. "Quiz show contestant" may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I'm sure it won't be the last.” It's conceivable that a number of medical professionals may be afraid that they'll be next on the list.

Dr. Herbert Chase of Columbia doesn't think so: “My hunch is that [Watson] is going to be embraced...it is very painful...for a physician...to be aware of the information gaps they can't bridge, even using the most current, up-to-date technology,” he stated at a TED-sponsored discussion at IBM's research facility. David Ferrucci, the project's principal investigator, said, “[it] isn't about giving you the final and end-all answer.”

The consensus appeared to be that Watson provides a non-human value to a physician's judgment, rather than replacing doctors or assistants (the term Dr. Chase used was “Physician Support”). For doctors, answering their own questions is a very time intensive task, as research is the only cure for the inevitable gaps in professionals' medical knowledge. As Chase put it, “Humans are incapable of managing the opus.” Watson's gift to doctors, then, is to slash book-and-journal research time from hours to seconds.

As the “opus” increases to even more unwieldy sizes, technological research assistants are going to become more and more necessary. If humans want to maintain mastery over the tremendous amount of data in the world, they'll need machines that can read and recall at rates beyond our limited capacity. But these machines lack curiosity, the one area humans will eternally dominate.

The Soy Sauce Incident

Originally posted Mar 2011.

A UVA freshman gets a crash course in biochemistry.

On February 28th, University of Virginia student John Paul Boldrick was dared by members of the Zeta Psi fraternity to drink a whole bottle of soy sauce. He accepted the challenge, and was later found on the second floor of the fraternity house, foaming at the mouth and seizing. He was rushed to a nearby hospital and treated. Could drinking a bottle of a common household condiment really be so dangerous? The short answer: Absolutely.

Mr. Boldrick was suffering from hypernatremia, or an excess of sodium. Most people who experience hypernatremia do so in conjunction with a larger set of symptoms we are familiar with as dehydration. In that condition, the hypovolemic type as it is called, reintroduction of water generally resolves any problems before they become severe.

Of course, being a college student off to explore new territory, Mr. Boldrick chose the less common, hypervolemic type, in which a high-sodium fluid is introduced into the system. Generally, this only happens in resuscitation cases, when patients are often given sodium bicarbonate, or in nautical accident victims, as seawater is often ingested. Doing some quick back of the napkin calculations based on a bottle I have in my fridge, I found that if Boldrick drank what I have (Kikkoman 10 fl oz bottle), he got a whopping 18,400 mg of sodium, almost 9 times the FDA’s Daily Reference Value level.

Contracting hypernatremia from ingesting sodium is particularly tricky to treat. The fact that most hypernatremics are also dehydrated makes adding fluids fairly easy; their problem isn’t as much the excess sodium but the high concentration of it due to lack of water. This case however, would have required a more delicate touch, as much more sodium was in his system than could have been easily diluted. Doctors proceeded with caution, as rebalancing his sodium levels too quickly could have led to cerebral edema, causing seizure, brain damage, or death.

The story of Sacramento resident Jennifer Strange is similar to Boldrick’s, the Zeta pledge. In 2007 Strange was competing in a radio contest entitled “Hold Your Wee for a Wii.” In Strange’s case, however, it was an excess of water rather than sodium that caused the problem. Holding back from urinating gave Strange an acute case of water intoxication, also known as hyponatremia (in contrast to Boldrick’s hypernatremia). Lower concentrations of sodium in the blood can also be dangerous.

Four days after his hospitalization, Boldrick was released, returning to his life of fraternity partying hopefully the wiser. Strange, however, was less fortunate—she died in her home the day of the contest. The takeaway from all this? Don’t participate in stunts like these. They are far more dangerous than most people realize.

Why Myriad Still Matters

Originally posted Feb 2011

The bellwether case in genetic rights will set the tone for the foreseeable future of biotech.

Filed in May 2009, Association for Molecular Pathology v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, often called the Myriad case, pits Myriad Genetics and the Patent Office against an assortment of professional associations and individual plaintiffs. The case is to determine whether BRCA1 and BRCA2, genes associated with breast and ovarian cancers, can be patented. Myriad, the University of Utah, and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences were granted patents on the two genes in the late 1990s.

District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet ruled against the defendants in March of last year, saying that “patents ... directed to 'isolated DNA' containing sequences found in nature are unsustainable as a matter of law”. This is a serious ruling for biotech firms, people at risk for cancer, and civil rights activists in general. Beyond that, however, it also invalidated the rest of the essentially immeasurable pool of patents on genes. (And I mean “immeasurable”: sources list the number anywhere between 2,000 and 500,000.)

The ruling is, of course, being appealed. Considering the effects this change in operating procedures would have on the entire genetic world, the Myriad case will almost certainly reach the Supreme Court of the United States. What the highest court in the land will do is anyone’s guess—while the justices have a tendency to break toward the interests of corporations, Mr. Sweet’s opinion appears to be well-founded. The Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs in the most recent appeal.

Well, sort of. What they did was to file a brief that supported the concept that an unmodified human gene is unpatentable. They did not comment on the patenting of cDNA (complimentary DNA, a type of DNA created in the lab) that contains identical information. Judge Sweet’s ruling made all isolated DNA encoding sequences found in nature ineligible for patent. Essentially, the DoJ disagreed that the genetic information was protected from patent by virtue of being found in nature; only the DNA itself was out of reach.

This is much different from precedent set on other information licensing. If, for example, a work is in the public domain, it remains in the public domain, no matter where it resides. You cannot patent the concept of having the complete works of William Shakespeare on a USB drive. You can patent the USB drive, but you cannot patent the work that is already free for public use. However, apparently, you can patent the expression of BRCA1 in cDNA without having to patent either BRCA1 or cDNA.

It appears (if only to me) that, in the end, the Supreme Court decision will at the very least invalidate the patents held by the defendants on genetic information already expressed on existing non-synthesized human DNA. This will likely open the way for most of the rest of the patented genome to be released.

To this reporter, that sounds like a good thing. What could possibly be wrong with an open genome?