But, when the first flood of orders started coming in for the Expedition, the factory was entirely given over to S.U.V.s. ... By the late nineteen-nineties, it had become the most profitable factory of any industry in the world. In 1998, the Michigan Truck Plant grossed eleven billion dollars, almost as much as McDonald's made that year. Profits were $3.7 billion.

... Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. ... internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.

... In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade--the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator--has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan--a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame--are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.

... "Then there's this notion that you need to be up high. That's a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I'm safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That's why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it's soft, and if I'm high, then I feel safe. It's amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has." During the design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller--and thereby reducing visibility--makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.

I'm digging through bits of SCORM. The first 18 pages of a 57-page document are the typical waste you can expect from DoD-related projects, but by page 19 there are some words that suggest what SCORM might actually be:

The speed with which different individuals can progress through instruction varies by factors of three to seven ­ even in classes of carefully selected students [8].

On average, a student in classroom instruction asks about 0.1 questions an hour
[9].

In individual tutoring, providing increased opportunities for direct student-to-instructor communication, students may ask or answer as many as 120 questions per hour [9].

The achievement of individually tutored students may exceed that of classroom
students by as much as two standard deviations - an improvement that is roughly
equivalent to raising the performance of 50th percentile students to that of 98th
percentile students [10].

SCORM is a framework for storing educational data, like tests and lessons. Or it's a framework for a framework. Or a standard for a mechanism that might potentially exchange frameworks that might implement an environment containing content that could conceivably be relevant to education. I swear they must have used Java just to write the spec document, it's got so many buzzwords. Anyway, I'll see if I can figure it out.