This Post Is Not About Books

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The relief out there must be palpable.

Driving along the other day in Sharjah, doing bang on 99kph in an 80kph area. The guy in front of me's doing the same. We come up to a forward-facing radar (ie: it's facing away from us as we approach it.). These are a good thing, sportsmanlike and all that. You can see 'em, the game's fair, like. Not quite as sportsmanlike as the UK's stripy 'I'M A RADAR' decoration, but one takes what one can get.

Digression. What's not sportsmanlike is the Wile E. Coyote type who's taken to infesting the 'Middle Road' outside the new Islamic institutions that have been built on the brown field land that was Formerly The Sharjah Landfill. He's got a wee super-slim portable radar and he likes to slide it in behind sprinklers, discarded plastic barriers or road signs, then sit in his plain 4WD on the slip road and cackle insanely to himself as he waits to trap unwary motorists like a particularly obnoxious spider. Bad form, that man.

Anyway back to our 99kph drive. Guy in front comes abreast of radar and moves across into the slow lane and BLAM he's flashed. I drive past the radar at the same speed, and I'm good. I got to thinking about that as I've been flashed before doing under the limit but changing lanes. And I think I might be on to a bit of relativity in action here.

If you move away from the radar by changing lanes, you're compounding your speed relative to the radar by the speed of your lateral movement. That plus the speed of your forward movement means that although you are moving forwards at under the speed limit, you are moving away from the radar at beyond the speed limit. You'd have to be relatively unlucky, because the beam is reasonably tight for a radar working in what they call 'across the road' configuration. But travelling along that beam as well as across it means that, for the 0.2 seconds or so that the radar is sampling your speed, you're adding a couple of metres of travel at least. Even a metre of travel is equivalent to five metres per second, or 300 metres per minute. Or 18,000 metres per hour - 18 kph.

So by changing lanes in front of that radar, it's likely my buddy was actually doing something like 110 kph relative to the radar.

Einstein would have been proud of me, I'm sure...

You can, SHOULD actually, pre-order Irish thriller A Decent Bomber here. Hurry, there's only 24 hours or so left. And stop complaining, the whole damn post was about radars, this is just, oh, a message from our sponsor...

Manaa - Abu Dhabi Names And Shames

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The Abu Dhabi Quality and Conformity Council has launched a new portal called 'Manaa' which lists the products it has recalled from the Abu Dhabi market because of safety concerns - over 15,000 items have been taken off the shelves in the last year.

The story ran on national news agency WAM and, therefore, in all the papers.

It's a remarkable move in its own quiet little way - it's unusual to see acceptance of a 'name and shame' strategy around here and this website certainly does that. Each nonconformant product is identified with a photograph and its brand name, product number and batch number. Categorised into product types, the archive of recalled products is searchable and a search through the database quickly reveals a number of surprises.

The first surprise is in the electrical appliances category. There's a huge dominance of Chinese products for a start, sort of what you'd expect, but there are also some major brands featured, including Moulinex and Kenwood. Added to that, a number of locally known brands are prominent, too, with multiple product recalls from Elekta, Geepas, Nikai and Aftron. Nearly every supermarket in the country will sell you Oshtraco socket strips and electrical accessories, and yet they've had recalls too. Who knew?

Some of the reasons for recalling products can seem a bit obtuse. The Aftron AFGSM1800 contact grill (sounds more like a mobile to me!) was withdrawn because "The temperature rise beyond the standard limit" and an Elekta fan withdrawn because "Fan blade is accessible with the test finger which may cut the users fingers when running." Another Elekta fan didn't make the grade because "The temperature rose beyond the standard limit of motor winding by resistance method the and ball pressure test of speed selector insulation did not comply."

I'm sure it didn't...

Perhaps amusingly, one of the recalled brands of socket strip was 'Terminator'.

But the real surprise comes when you dig into the archive beyond the electrical appliances and children's toys categories. Because beyond these, the cupboard is bare. Not a thing. All the other categories are empty, including vehicle tires,vehicle parts, containers and packaging, cigarette fuel, lighter, firework and chemicals and cosmetics. Presumably these have yet to be regulated.

The scheme, albeit young, is a good one and great news for consumers. The Council is a relatively new body with a huge job ahead of it - and, from the website, appears to be implementing a rounded standards, regulation and conformity system for product safety. For instance, it only announced its electrical appliances certification initiative in January this year. So we can presumably look forward to the database being further populated as that work continues.

The Council appears to have a remit to cover Abu Dhabi emirate only rather than being a Federal body - however a chat with Abdalla Muami on Twitter clarifies that ADQCC liaises with Federal bodies on non-conforming products, which would mean, presumably, that products Abu Dhabi finds unsafe are withdrawn from all markets.

However, now you can actually check for yourself before buying stuff thanks to the database!

UAE Driving. We Need To Change The Moral Climate.

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There has been some disbelief expressed on Twitter this morning as The National's story on UAE national footballer Hamdan Al Kamali and his involvement in a new road safety campaign to ask reckless drivers to consider the people they'll leave behind. (Mind you, there's been more expressed about this rather silly post on The National's blog!)

Kamali's best friend, talented footballer and fellow member of the natioanal team Theyab Awana, died two years ago in a car crash when he ploughed into a parked lorry whilst texting. He was driving Kamali's car and was on the way to Kamali's house at the time he died. The two had grown up together, gone to training camp together.

Kamali freely admits he was a former 'bad boy' on the roads himself. He'd thought nothing about driving at 180kph and above. It is this that seems to have got Twitter in a twist (or, as Gulf News would have it, 'Twitter outrage') - why should we listen to a young man who quite clearly has no compunction about driving like a lunatic?

I find myself at odds with the tide of opinion. I don't think it's about whether we listen to him - it's about his peer group and whether they'll listen to him. The young men - and women - who look up to him, who would listen to a member of the national football team, of an age with themselves. Who would follow the example of a young man who holds his hand up and says, 'I did what you do every day. And I have had the opportunity, at an appalling personal price, to consider the consequence. And now I stand as an example for change.'

It think that's an incredibly powerful message. And it's timely. We're finding out that the law alone will not change things (it's all too infrequently applied. I was recently badly cut up by a speeding lunatic on the Emirates Road only to find out my aggressive friend was wearing a Dubai police officer's uniform). We have pretty much a radar every 2 kilometers and yet you'll still look around to find a Lexus or FJ Cruiser glued to your rear giving it disco lights when you're already topping out the speed limit including the 20kph 'grace'. And the accident rate on the UAE's roads is still unacceptably high - particularly among young Emiratis.

I was involved in a round table chat gig a couple of years ago at Dubai Men's College. People from the private sector are invited in just to chat with groups of students for a couple of hours. I quite enjoyed it and we all learned lots from each other. I was considerably taken aback when our chat moved to driving and my youthful friends started talking about the friends and relatives they had lost to mad driving. 'What can we do? It's in our blood! It's something we do, how we express ourselves.' were typical comments.

So Kamali, poacher turned gamekeeper, is surely worth a shot. If his campaign for drivers to consider others, not their victims on the road but family and friends - the ones they'll leave behind, results in even the slightest change in the moral environment, in attitudes towards driving in the UAE, it will have been well worthwhile.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in The National, the opinions of its Emirati 'speed freak' commentator are triggering more and more of a Twitter backlash, with Kipp Report finally giving us that 'Twitter outrage' story! :)

Sharjah's Speed Radar Shooting Spree

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Sharjah police have an unusual case on their hands at the moment - someone's going around shooting out the traffic radars that the UAE's traffic cops are all so inordinately fond of.

While there is much debate about the efficacy of fixed radars in other parts of the world, for instance in the UK, the UAE has festooned its roads with a remarkable number of these snappy little devices, Dubai alone aiming, apparently, at a radar every two kilometres. That's quite a lot of radar and they can be expensive for those not used to cruise control. A colleague of mine with a particularly heavy right foot has paid out fines totalling Dhs 23,000 (About $6,300 to you) in the past, although thankfully she's now got that habit down to a more manageable Dhs 2,000.

There's been a 9% drop in the year on year fatality rate on Dubai's roads, although the accident rate has actually increased by 7% - something the anti-radar lobby would doubtless seize upon like ravening wolves - or Wordpress users finding your Blogger blog has been deleted.

But one chap has come up with his own argument, and it's a compelling one. It's getting expensive for Sharjah's finest, too - so far a total of fourteen radars have been shot along the Mileiha/Madam highway according to a story in Gulf News over the weekend, the latest such incident being last Wednesday. The story carries a pithy quote from Sharjah police:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

This has been going on for some time, in fact. The first  11 of the Dhs 250,000 ($68,500) devices were shot out early in November, with Gulf News reporting on the incident on the 12th of that month. That story carried a particularly pithy quote from Sharjah police, who said:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

As if not satisfied with his very expensive shooting spree (he's knocked up quite a tab by now), the vandal struck again in December, taking out a further two radars on the same stretch of road. Sharjah police commented pithily to Gulf News at the time, saying:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

More cut and paste journalism, then - merely recycling the same old quote every time. At least it's not copied from a blog or another paper this time. But it's still reprehensible and shoddy not least because it misrepresents Sharjah police's reaction to the updated story.

Golly, but it's beginning to feel like Private Eye around here...