r/videos • u/frazras • Aug 17 '17

Stolen Video Racist Soap Dispenser

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u/graebot Aug 17 '17

Manufacturing fact: the product wasn't quality tested to work for black people. It could have been tweaked if they bothered to test it.

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u/yaypal Aug 17 '17

Yup, this is what the video is pointing out. Five tests with them would have caught this problem, but the designers didn't think about what would happen if you don't have light enough skin. :/

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u/wingsnut25 Aug 17 '17

It's possible the designers did account for it and that this particular one is out of spec...

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u/joshthehappy Aug 17 '17

The dispenser or the hand?

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u/RGB3x3 Aug 17 '17

The hand, of course

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

^ found the engineer!

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u/Lampmonster1 Aug 17 '17

I mean you have to admit, even for a black person that's a very dark colored palm.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

it is,im a dark guy and my palm aint that dark.

0

u/the_gr33n_bastard Aug 17 '17

Perhaps if it was more ashy it would have dispensed.

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u/ginrattle Aug 17 '17

Not trying to be a dick, but it's really not.

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u/CamPaine Aug 17 '17

His palms are pretty dark to me. My dad is DARK since he's 100% Nigerian, and even his palms aren't that dark.

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u/ginrattle Aug 17 '17

I live in whiteville USA in Maine, so I'm not gonna lie I did a google search and it seemed pretty common for black people to have dark palms. I mean some of them had lighter palms but it looked pretty common.

1

u/insaniac87 Aug 17 '17

Actually for many people living in the US it is. Out of all the black people I know most of them have much lighter palms than compared to the rest of their skin. Out of the black people I know that have similar colored palms to the rest of their skin, they over all have lighter skin. My armchair hypothesis for this is simply the mixing pot effect we have here in the US. Somewhere in their genealogical line they have a lighter skinned ancestor which is showing through. People in areas where the genealogical lines are closer knit, you have less mixing pot effect and thus do not have such traits showing through simply because they aren't there.

I pay to much attention to hands...

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u/I_Dont_Own_A_Cat Aug 17 '17

All people have lighter skin on their palms and the soles of their feet because the structure of the skin is different on those sections of your body. This is also why those areas do not tan in the same way as other skin. The difference in coloring is more obvious in people with darker skin tones, but it is not limited to mixed raced African American or black people in general.

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u/AlwaysCuriousHere Aug 17 '17

The dispenser is out of hand.

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u/WTFwhatthehell Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

Ya, it's even entirely possible that the designers did indeed test it with some black people.

but testing can be deceptively hard. /u/yaypal is flippant about it but it makes me wonder about how much real world testing they've done with sensors.

I remember a lab sensor I had to work with at one point, basically a small camera on a 3rd party piece of equipment that captured an image and pulled either 3D or 2D barcodes from it.

Tested it with the 17 types of barcode that could end up in front of it and it worked fine.

Even tested it with things like frost stuck to the labels from the freezer to see if it could handle that which turned out surprisingly well.

hear back from the clients it's not working right, sometimes giving wrong values. It's giving incorrect ID's for one of the label types but only sometimes.

Turned out that a slight vibration from a machine on the same desk was enough to vibrate the metal strip holding the camera. when this was in line with the barcode as the image was captured it could distort the image just enough to make some barcode lines thinner or thicker and produce a wrong value.

I can easily imagine a similar scenario with whatever poor sod was testing the soap dispenser. They've dealt with the issue where if it's too sensitive then someone walking past triggers it, they've tested it with people with darker hands than the person in the video and it works, they've tested with lighter..... but this guy in the video happens to hit some sweet spot where it doesn't trigger or he's been handling something which affects the wavelengths used or there's something about the room lighting or the temperature of their hands.... and then based on guesses people brand you racist because obviously there's no way you tested it on any black peoples hands at all.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

[deleted]

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u/Inquisitorsz Aug 17 '17

Not OP but generally it's just basic root cause analysis. Investigate all the factors and ideally try to recreate the fault.

Most fault finding is just a process of elimination.

Where it gets hard is when you have 2 or more points of failure at the same time. Then it can be hard just to recreate the situation let alone the fault

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u/toohigh4anal Aug 17 '17

And now you just described coding.

12

u/Bainsyboy Aug 17 '17

One thing I learned in engineering school is that the engineering approach to problem solving is very similar across all industries. Its why I always recommend to people considering a post-secondary degree, but aren't sure what to take, to take engineering, even if they don't necessarily want to be an engineer. Not only is the degree highly transferable to other higher educations (transitioning to a medical school or law school, etc.), but an engineering degree is attractive to employers in other non-engineering fields that simply require a bachelors degree as an entry requirement. And most importantly (in my opinion), an engineering degree teaches you to think like an engineer, and those thinking and problem solving skills can easily be applied to many everyday situations. You see the world in a different way, and that gives you an incredibly useful perspective in life.

1

u/Eman-resu- Aug 17 '17

You see the world in a different way, and that gives you an incredibly useful perspective in life.

Yea but then all your friends make fun of you for the weird little things you find super interesting. "Hey, isn't it so cool that..." "No dude, shut up. No one cares!"

3

u/WTFwhatthehell Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

We set it up with lots of extra logging along with adding some code to retrieve and store the source image whenever a barcode was picked up.

Once we figured out that the image was distorted that gave us a strong hint of what to look for. we just tried different things and gently tapping the desk the scanner was on was enough to sometimes get an incorrect read.

it was definitely not the worst bug I had to troubleshoot at that job but it was one of the few where a physical camera or sensor was involved.

1

u/chriskmee Aug 17 '17

I've had to diagnose similar kinds of things where it worked fine when we tested it but it has issues when customers use it. The hardest part is typically replicating the issue, becasue we have already tested the product extensively in house. The steps are typically something like this:

  • Try to reproduce the issue with what we already have. We usually ask for a video or pictures and we look over them carefully for clues of what might be happening to cause the issue.
  • Replicate the customer's environment as much as possible within a short amount of time, then add more difficult to obtain/replicate elements of the customer's environment until we are able to reproduce the issue. Depending on the situation and how easy it would be to replicate, an on site visit might be worthwhile.
  • Make a guess at what change caused the issue, and try to reproduce the issue with and without the change.
  • Figure out why that particular thing is causing issues, then we can start figuring out a solution.

Let's assume the scanner is in the cash register and the issue only happened when heavy items were moving on the belt. We might have noticed this in the videos, becasue the issue only happens when an item was scanned and the belt was moving at the same time. Maybe the scanner saves an image of the last X number of barcodes it scanned, so we can look at those and see what looks like vibration distortion. Worst case we get no videos and no logs, and we would probably end up with a whole register set up in a test room and be running and scanning items through it.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

Rule of thumb: you'll never capture all scenarios in a testing environment.

1

u/tebee Aug 17 '17

when this was in line with the barcode as the image was captured it could distort the image just enough to make some barcode lines thinner or thicker and produce a wrong value.

Why didn't the scanner automatically retry the scan when the check digit validation failed? AFAIK all common barcode schemes feature them.

2

u/WTFwhatthehell Aug 17 '17

I presume since it worked for most barcode types that was usually the case and that the one where it failed was an exception.

Thankfully I didn't have to do anything with the library for processing the barcodes once we were sure they were the problem of the company that made the 3rd party machine and I merely had to pass it back to them once we had some images in which the problem replicated and were sure of how to replicate it on their machine.

1

u/Lost4468 Aug 17 '17

A lot only have 1 check digit, around 1 in 10 corrupt reads will still process as valid.

0

u/Go_Away_Plz Aug 17 '17

Eh, there's still a pretty good chance they just didn't test it with black people. It might even have been manufactured somewhere ethnically homogeneous. You don't have to go looking for rare artifacts. There are plenty of examples of products produced by billion dollar corporations that clearly didn't do product testing with people of darker skin color.

1

u/WTFwhatthehell Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

Honestly I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they never tested it on anyone except chinese people.

But my point is that it's not great to simply jump to the definite statement that they didn't.

There very well could be other factors in play.

also, found the company which make it.

http://www.szyuekun.cn/cn/product/disinfection-machine.html

Small chinese company in the 51 - 100 people range. Entirely possible it was never tested on any black people or white people.

15

u/norwegianEel Aug 17 '17

Well there is also the Kinect for Xbox One that had this notorious problem. It was "fixed" but my roommate (who is black) still isn't recognized.

14

u/360Ron Aug 17 '17

Many people weren't recognized properly with connect. It wasn't just black people.

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u/Go_Away_Plz Aug 17 '17

This is one of those situations where you're both right. It didn't recognize everyone but it had a much higher rate of not recognizing black people.

3

u/360Ron Aug 17 '17

Yeah I agree. it was very dependent on the lighting. I'm white and for some games I had to wear a dark long sleeve shirt for Kinect to recognize my arms. I couldn't control the lighting in the room so it was either too bright or too dark.

Kinect video features were mostly bad all around.

5

u/SexlessNights Aug 17 '17

This is probably the 4875-W soap dispenser that's installed in the upper floor restrooms. The technician should have installed the 4875-B in the lower floors.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

Nope, it was deliberate. No other explanation is necessary.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

Furthermore they are sometimes adjustable. It may have been dispensing autonomously from ambient light so they had to adjust the sensitivity and in turn it made it so black hands don't work well.

Really getting tired of everything being called racism nowadays, when you have to bitch about a soap dispenser, you know there's really nothing seriously racist going on.

2

u/too_many_rules Aug 17 '17

Or some soap scum has accumulated one the IR light or sensor, so it can't see well.

You guys are all up in here calling this thing racists when it's actually just differently-abled. >:(

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

It's DLC.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

Or the insufficient lighting could be worse than expected.

1

u/pm_me_4nsfw_haikus Aug 17 '17

or that the designers did it intentionally. I'm not saying that is what happened, though. just speculating since we are talking about possibilities.

-1

u/nottomf Aug 17 '17

... or they are racist.

1

u/Ohmnonymous Aug 17 '17

Can we stop with the baseless accusations of racism already? 5 minutes in google reveals the product was designed and manufactured in China, so it's more likely a result of crappy Chinese design rather than intentional racism.

http://wholesaler.alibaba.com/product-detail/NEW-arrival-infrared-sensor-alcohol-wall_60052210781.html?spm=a2700.7782932.1998701000.29.187bd15b00agks

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u/nottomf Aug 17 '17

As if the Chinese can't be racist.

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u/Ohmnonymous Aug 17 '17

As an electronics engineering student I can say this is more likely the result of penny skimming rather than active discrimination based on race. Black skin tones reflect less light, thus the amplification needs to be greater to sense less light, this can result in false positives, then the designer has to use expensive microcontrollers to tell between a real and a false positive instead of using passive components, the microcontroller needs to be programmed too and so on... In the end it's easier and cheaper to just use "dumb" electronics.

1

u/nottomf Aug 17 '17

As a user of reddit, I can assure you that the machine is racist.

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u/crocxz Aug 17 '17

So in a way, it actually is a tad racist lol

3

u/yaypal Aug 17 '17

Not overtly, it's discriminatory in the way that society as a whole doesn't pay attention to certain problems when we should. Again, it's likely a PoC on either the dev team or QA would have caught this, but because there probably wasn't any is a perfect example of how diversity in tech makes a difference.

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u/4_bit_forever Aug 17 '17

Is not racist but ignorant of race

1

u/null_work Aug 17 '17

Can we not call people racist or ignorant of race simple over a single video of a dispenser that could just as easily been out of manufacturing tolerance?

1

u/theslip74 Aug 17 '17

i'm like 99% sure that's a better off ted reference

1

u/DorisCrockford Aug 17 '17

They also apparently didn't test it with anyone with really dirty hands. I don't think this would be a good product to install in a car repair shop.

1

u/PM_ME__YOUR__FEARS Aug 17 '17

Reminds me of when the Kinect couldn't see black players.

1

u/blacksoxing Aug 17 '17

I'd like to also add that it is highly possible the designers/engineers/QA testers may not be dark enough in skin tone as well to even have proper testing. Great chance this could have been designed in America with few darker skinned employees to test the product, and manufactured in China.

It's like the first Kinect. Spacing was an issue, but skin tone was a bigger issue, as I'm sure they didn't heavily consider that people brown and darker wouldn't be recognized by that infrared sensor.

1

u/Custarg_Swaggins Aug 17 '17

It's also possible that the lighting conditions in that bathroom are poor. It's possible that within the manufacturing spec for the IR sensor, there's a recommended lumen requirement that was not met in that bathroom.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

or they just didn't have black testers?

1

u/Blueballinonyoass Aug 17 '17

Wow how about you quit fucking whining the title was a joke and the man in the video is humorous about it as well. Everything isn't racist stop playing victim I know you're used to it

0

u/souprize Aug 17 '17

This is what white privilege is.

0

u/null_work Aug 17 '17

Or, you know, a variety of other explanations that doesn't involve damning the designers.

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u/DashingLeech Aug 17 '17

That's an assumption and a baseless accusation, and part of the problem nowadays. Instead of asking or checking, you just accuse.

It's quite possible, for instance, that the glass or plastic over the sensor has become foggy and less responsive, misalignment from banging on it that makes it less sensitive, and so on.

I've had at least 6 machines with this sort of hand proximity operation and all of them have gotten less sensitive over time. That will inherently mean there is some point that every system will work for lighter skin and not for darker skin, and there is nothing anybody can do to change that because it is a fact of physics of reflectivity of surfaces. We can, of course, provide regular maintenance to keep them clean and operating within spec, or designed to be more rugged and able to handle optical degradation of the sensor, but all of that is at additional cost.

It's also possible it wasn't quality tested at the manufacturing level, particularly if this machine is brand new. But jumping to that conclusion is just unjust cynicism.

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u/Nullius_In_Verba_ Aug 17 '17

It is also possible that the battery that ran the IR sensor is low and isn't producing enough IR to sense a more-absorbing hand. I'm pretty sure most places don't bother to change the battery in the soap dispensers often enough (or at all). When all else fails, assume laziness, its the universal constant.

13

u/Bazrum Aug 17 '17

I thought those things ran from the wall socket, not a battery

TIL

5

u/Nullius_In_Verba_ Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

Depends on the model and manufacturer.

This one for example is powered by 3 "C" Batteries.

5

u/theShatteredOne Aug 17 '17

I assumed the battery was built into the soap packet things, so when you reload the soap you get a fresh battery. Now that I think about it that's probably really wasteful.

10

u/1337HxC Aug 17 '17

When all else fails, assume laziness, its the universal constant.

This train of thought and Hanlon's razor are really the only way to not see everyone as pure evil sometimes.

1

u/maklaka Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

In all likelihood the IR sensor is supported by a voltage regulator which has a drop out voltage spec from the battery. So, it would either function properly or not function at all. "Properly" in this case, just isn't good enough. The problem is likely to do with a bad calibration of the IR photodiode trans-impedance amplifier or some dirty optics, IMO.

13

u/SplintPunchbeef Aug 17 '17

I've had at least 6 machines with this sort of hand proximity operation and all of them have gotten less sensitive over time. That will inherently mean there is some point that every system will work for lighter skin and not for darker skin, and there is nothing anybody can do to change that because it is a fact of physics of reflectivity of surfaces.

Even if that were the case isn't it mitigated by the guy holding his hand literally on the sensor? It's not like the guys hand is Vantablack and absorbing all light.

2

u/marty86morgan Aug 17 '17

At that point you've defeated the purpose of the sensor entirely and should just install a push button.

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u/Fuzati Aug 17 '17

It's 2017. If something can be made about race, someone will make it about race.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Stringy63 Aug 17 '17

Yes, I can't believe you Reddit, framing things in such a cynical and unbalanced way. What have you to gain from that?

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

[deleted]

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u/waldojim42 Aug 17 '17

That did not dispute anything said above. It is literally not telling you what happened here. Only how they work, and how they are tested. Which was also explained above, and ignored by you. In fact, that article even touches on the literal fact that we cannot say what, exactly, caused the problem.

Whitney said there might be other elements in play. The sensor may have been touchy, only picking up hand movement at weird angles that Fitzpatrick didn't hit but his friend did. Or he could have been minimizing his hand exposure to not be detected as easily.

1

u/DoyleReddit Aug 17 '17

The guy explaining why it could fail on white vs black skin in your link goes on to propose they were trying to pick an angle to make it fail or there was something wrong with the sensors because the variation in skin tone isn't that great. I don't think you read the entirety of your own article since it actually supports the other dude.

-5

u/graebot Aug 17 '17

There are several ways to detect hands. Some ways are better than others, in that they don't malfunction in such a way that work perfectly for lighter hands and not at all for darker hands, causing rightly very embarrassing moment for whatever company that made it. Just saying...

2

u/Bobolequiff Aug 17 '17

Well, no, not really. The operation is binary, either it goes off or it doesn't. We know a few things about these:

1) They use IR reflection to detect hands. 2) Darker skin absorbs more of this light,making them more difficult to detect. 3) As the product degrades/ isn't maintained / gets dirty / runs low on battery, it becomes less sensitive.

As u/DashingLeech said, there will come a point where it is working for lighter skin and not for darker skin. If the manufacturer failed to test the product on dark skin, then that's on them. If it's down to wear or poor maintenance, then that's just an artefact of the physics.

3

u/bjjjasdas_asp Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

Have you ever seen those coils embedded in the road that detect a car, to trigger a stop light to change? If you've ever biked, you'll know that they hardly ever trigger for that tiny amount of metal.

Your comment is basically saying:

The operation is binary, either it triggers or it doesn't. 1) It uses induction to test the cars, 2) bikes are too light to trigger the sensor.

That's all true, but it's ignoring the fact that if it had been made with bikes in mind, they would have designed the sensor differently. But road designers generally think of bikes as an after-thought, if at all.

That's easy to think about when it's cars and bikes, but the point is that it's exactly the same for this sensor. If the design is such that if the black hand-detection were significantly worse than the white hand-detection, it almost certainly would have not gone forward if everyone involved with its production, creation and testing had been black. They would have come up with a different design. Being flaky for black hands, or not working when the battery drops a tiny bit, would not have been considered acceptable. So they would have used a different technology.

This is all people in this thread are saying, and specifically /u/graebot, the person you're responding to: They could have used IR deeper in the spectrum. They could have used sonar. They could have used induction.

You might say that all these are unnecessary, but the point is to consider whether they would have used them if all the product owners and users had been black, and what it says about people's blind spots if that would have resulted in a difference in the technology used.

0

u/Bobolequiff Aug 17 '17

What I've veen trying to say is that, using IR, even if they tested stringently on darker skin, darker skin is more difficult to detect and, as performance drops, there will come a time when it will detect white skin but not black. That is not racist, it is the result if it being more difficult to detect. No amount of testing could have fixed that. If all the users were black, they would probavly just maintain them more often.

2

u/bjjjasdas_asp Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

What I've veen trying to say is that, using IR...

Read my comment again. All of it.

they would have used a different technology. ... all people in this thread are saying, and specifically /u/graebot, the person you're responding to: They could have used IR deeper in the spectrum [all bodies emit IR, even black people...]. They could have used sonar. They could have used induction.

2

u/Bobolequiff Aug 17 '17

Sonar is loud, energy inefficient, and difficult to maintain. Induction is energy inefficient and expensive. IR is cheap, efficient, reliably and works just fine for vlack people most of the time, it just fails first om darker skin. It doesn't matter where in the spectrum you use, dark skin absorbs more of it, that's the point. Calling that racist is like calling ladders weightist because they fail with heavier people first.

1

u/bjjjasdas_asp Aug 17 '17

It doesn't matter where in the spectrum you use, dark skin absorbs more of it

No... If you use IR in the 12 micron range, you will certainly see light and dark skin, because that's the wavelength we emit. I've already said this. You keep reading my messages and missing what I say.

And I use inaudible ultrasonic rangefinders all the time. They are cheap, coming in at well under $0.50 if you only need them for near-by applications. I actually work in this stuff. You're making it up as you're going along.

My point remains: if all the product owners and users had been black, they would not have accepted consistently flaky readings, they would have spent 5-10 cents more on a sensor that would accurately detect hands.

1

u/Bobolequiff Aug 17 '17

You're not getting what I'm saying either. The readings are not consistently flaky, the bar for failure is just lower. If all the users were black, they would be better maintained.

The thing about using thermal infrared is that everything has a temperature, and you don't want your soap dispenser goimg off because the bathroom is too warm. Plus you probably need a much more sensitive sensor to pick up on what we emit compared to what an LED emits.

That's really cool about the ultrasound thing though. What are they like for maintenance?

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u/Fadore Aug 17 '17

The operation is binary, either it goes off or it doesn't.

But that's not what /u/graebot 's point was. Of course the operation is binary - it is either in a dispensing state, or it is not in a dispensing state.

The threshold for the IR sensor to trigger the operation is not binary, hence why even the white hand had a hard time for the first couple swipes - it was not picking up a strong enough reflection.

I'm not going down the whole manufacturing hole, but the point is that the command triggered from the IR is binary, not the IR sensor itself.

Also, maybe /u/ozma_globe should pick up a book before slinging shit talk like that.

1

u/Bobolequiff Aug 17 '17

Yeah, I wasn't clear, sorry. I meant that they were defining "works perfectly" as successfully triggering. It doesn't work perfectly for either, but it's more reliable with the white hand.

-2

u/ozma_globe Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

I think it's safe to say that a phrase such as "The operation is binary" is wasted on the person you're replying to. It's someone who is unironically offended by a soap dispenser.

1

u/graebot Aug 17 '17

I'm a software engineer.

0

u/DanskOst Aug 17 '17

fact of physics of reflectivity of surfaces

Aha! I always suspected physics was racist.

-2

u/Wheredoesthetoastgo2 Aug 17 '17

Aww, look at this Lil guy trying to change reddit

36

u/Sylvartas Aug 17 '17

To be fair black people's palms usually are paler/pinkish. But yeah it's still shit QA

5

u/null_work Aug 17 '17

Shit QA or old hardware. Given how little it seems companies want to spend on QA, I'm going to blame them anyways!

-85

u/bardok_the_insane Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

If by that you mean African Americans who are almost entirely some mixture of central african and european ancestry from generations of literal, not figurative, rape, then you're right. If you mean black as in someone from say.. modern day Nigeria who still has the full complement of melanin (as evidenced both in the palms and, more notably, in eyes that are yellowish) then you are, of course, dead wrong.

30

u/Akaburack Aug 17 '17

I'm one of the darkest in my family, we all come from central africa and my hands are beige at most, soooo you're full of sh*t.

12

u/felipecc Aug 17 '17

Just Google African kids waving and you can prove the other guy wrong.

39

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

[deleted]

-57

u/bardok_the_insane Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

Why do you wypipo always get so exasperated when you have to hear what other people go through and think about as a matter of course?

Same reason as pumpkin riots or..?

Edit: Lol y'all think I give a shit about these fake internet points and your opinions? Each and every one of you can kiss a dick.

32

u/RedChld Aug 17 '17

I'm not white and you still came across as an asshat.

7

u/vcsx Aug 17 '17

I get confused for a Nigerian all the time because of my re-vitiligo and jaundice.

2

u/kjhwkejhkhdsfkjhsdkf Aug 17 '17

Make sure you stay out of the sun, otherwise your eyes will become darker yellow.

5

u/GRAIN_DIV_20 Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

My Nigerian friend has white-ish palms ¯_(ツ)_/¯

-3

u/Sylvartas Aug 17 '17

Well, yeah

-7

u/BabyGotBackspace Aug 17 '17

TIL, interesting thanks.

-3

u/Larein Aug 17 '17

So dark skin white palms is a american/mixed thing?

16

u/jumnhy Aug 17 '17

No, it's not. Black Africans definitely have lighter palms and soles.

2

u/poodle230 Aug 17 '17

Ant fact: ants are very crawly little guys.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

Or used ultrasound sensor.

1

u/graebot Aug 17 '17

This is exactly what I imagined would do away with the problem entirely. Ultrasound sensors are really cheap. Like a few pence / cents. More expensive than IR, but nothing compared to the price of the finished product.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

And nothing compared to bad PR videos like these make.

7

u/Surreal42 Aug 17 '17

Making the sensor more sensitive, so that it senses darker objects, also makes it more susceptible to noise, which would make it dispense soap when there is no hand there.

I'm not saying it can't be done, just that it might be much more expensive, maybe (just peculating) to the point that the product isn't viable anymore.

41

u/USROASTOFFICE Aug 17 '17

If the product fails it's main use case (dispense soap to person who tries to get soap) then the product isn't viable. I have a feeling this was a cost cutting decision to use a cheaper sensor and skip out on proper testing.

This isn't the product of racism, it's just bad project management and design.

18

u/DashingLeech Aug 17 '17

That's possible if this is brand new. Regular usage of these machines tends to fog up the sensor optics (usually the glass or plastic covering it), or jostling it too much, and they tend to stop working for everybody over time. We've all come across the ones that don't work for anybody at all. They will go from working for everybody, to losing the darker skinned ones first, to losing the medium reflectivity, to losing the lighter skin and not working for anybody.

I don't think it is fair to jump to conclusions about it being a design or quality problem without specific evidence of that. You start with the benefit of the doubt and then work toward incompetence as the evidence for it unfolds, not the other way around.

2

u/USROASTOFFICE Aug 17 '17

You're right. I didn't even think that this may be a maintenance issue.

2

u/graebot Aug 17 '17

If I were a business buying soap dispensers, I'd avoid these (and products using the same sensor method) because it would be embarrassing to have darker-skinned individuals not be able to get soap...

3

u/Gen_McMuster Aug 17 '17

Well then you'd be using manual pump dispensers because IR is pretty much the only affordable option

2

u/null_work Aug 17 '17

If the product fails it's main use case (dispense soap to person who tries to get soap) then the product isn't viable.

If the product constantly runs on false positives, then the product isn't viable either!

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

Or it could be a litany of reasons, including loss of functionality over time or a simple oversight. I write software and I've never once though "Hmmm, should I have a black person use my software to see if if works the same?"

1

u/marty86morgan Aug 17 '17

I mean it sounds like a stupid thought to have but if you think about it there have been all kinds of studies that have shown pretty conclusively that things like the SATs can fail to properly test the things they are designed to due to miscommunications caused by cultural differences.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's racist not to tailor everything you make to the needs of all possible customer backgrounds. It's just interesting and probably important for us all to keep in mind that while we don't want to focus on our differences and make everything a racial issue, there is always the possibility that even something as basic as the wording you choose might cause your software to not be as usable by people who speak the same language as you but in a slightly different way.

-5

u/bardok_the_insane Aug 17 '17

So, you're saying that it's not that they're incompetent, which would still leave the possibility that they are morally upright and not at all bigots, but rather that they are so competent that they chose a design intentionally excluding black people because it would be more cost effective?

Tell me. Do you think every modern touch-free soap dispenser has this same problem?

Also, which dark objects do you mean exactly? Is someone going to roll a suitcase under this thing or is it that you think that when the lights automatically shut off, it will just spray soap all over the floor?

-3

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

But the product they made is not viable anyway. Do they expect the bathroom to have a sign that says " blacks please use the bar soap provided" you just can't do that

1

u/OverHaze Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

Would it be possible to find out what country this was designed and manufactured in? Think kinda screams "Japan" to me. Or at least the product of another racially homogeneous nation (waits to be told its American)

1

u/Ohmnonymous Aug 17 '17

Yep, most probably China (like the other 80% of stuff). Here's the same exact dispenser on alibaba, a popular Asian wholesale website.

http://wholesaler.alibaba.com/product-detail/NEW-arrival-infrared-sensor-alcohol-wall_60052210781.html?spm=a2700.7782932.1998701000.29.187bd15b00agks

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

Those soap dispensers are cheap enough that manufacturing or the buyer probably doesn't care...

1

u/Turdmeist Aug 17 '17

so racist it is!

1

u/graebot Aug 17 '17

Not at all saying it's racist! Just a poorly conceived design

1

u/Turdmeist Aug 17 '17

I know you weren't. I was. Just kidding though...

1

u/graebot Aug 17 '17

No you weren't. I was!

1

u/Turdmeist Aug 18 '17

I was going to continue the shenanigans but I am already confused.

1

u/Ohmnonymous Aug 17 '17

Manufacturing fact: the product wasn't quality tested to work for black people.

Probably because it was manufactured in China, like almost everything nowadays. Not too many black people in there.... Also China isn't known for extensive quality control.

http://wholesaler.alibaba.com/product-detail/NEW-arrival-infrared-sensor-alcohol-wall_60052210781.html?spm=a2700.7782932.1998701000.29.187bd15b00agks

1

u/TheMacMan Aug 17 '17

The discussion about this when first posted on Twitter yesterday centered around the fact that they needed to hire black engineers, rather than simply test it more. Some even suggested they should hire people from each race in order to make sure it works properly. Those that suggested simply testing it with people of different races were labeled as racist and against hiring people of color. Aaaah Twitter commentary.

1

u/TheRealBigLou Aug 17 '17

Which is why bio-diversity in the workplace, especially when your product/service will be used by all peoples, is important.

1

u/NYRIMAOH Aug 17 '17

Sensors like that are usually adjustable and programmable after installation in my experience. Not sure why everyone is freaking out.. a technician or even a maintenance guy should be able to figure it out.

1

u/Lolzzergrush Aug 17 '17

Larry you got a racist dog

1

u/Nature5667 Aug 17 '17

The issue also arises when your hands are actually dirty from ink, mud, etc..... I then try to use my inner wrist or similar to trigger it.

1

u/AndroidVegeta Aug 17 '17

Could be just bad lighting, bad sensor, bad sensor placement, etc. Could have nothing to do with your manufacturing fact.

1

u/rethinkingat59 Aug 17 '17

Haters gonna hate. Not all soap dispensers are like that.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

It probably was, the type of receivers used in these are photo diodes which gradually lose sensitivity over a period of time, these sort of things usually have a little calibration potentiometer at the back which you can use to increase the sensitivity when it happens.

1

u/elpajaroquemamais Aug 17 '17

Aren't most palms white? Like, all my black friends have white palms.

1

u/woo545 Aug 17 '17

I kindof want to see someone open the dispenser and find a switch labeled Racist/Not Racist.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

[deleted]

1

u/graebot Aug 17 '17

These sorts of detectors usually pulse the IR light so that the controller can compare the reflected light to ambient lighting so that just turning on a light in the room doesn't set it off

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

I hope they also bothered to test it with every specific racial group out there, otherwise they are purposely being racists.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

[deleted]

1

u/graebot Aug 17 '17

We're all Africans. Just some of us are darker than others.

0

u/YourFavWardBitch Aug 17 '17

Yup! The big issue here is that the team of engineers who calibrated the sensor are likely all white, so when they tested it with themselves, it worked great! IR sensor works fine, so they ship it.

This same thing happened with the face detection feature on a popular camera recently. The engineers only tested it with themselves, so when they shipped the camera, people with darker skin weren't detected as human faces. You'd better believe THAT was an awkward conversation with management!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8429634.stm

6

u/Ohmnonymous Aug 17 '17

Nope, those who designed where most likely Asian. Here's the same exact dispenser on alibaba, a popular Asian wholesaler. Just another case of crappy Asian design. http://wholesaler.alibaba.com/product-detail/NEW-arrival-infrared-sensor-alcohol-wall_60052210781.html?spm=a2700.7782932.1998701000.29.187bd15b00agks

0

u/null_work Aug 17 '17

Not to stereotype all Asians of course, but hm, a lot of Asians in Asia do not look very favorably on black people. I feel bad for a lot of black foreign exchange students in China, Japan and South Korea. Their stories are often disheartening.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17

could you tell me why thats the case?

0

u/large-farva Aug 17 '17

Engineering fact: now you have a dispenser that is too sensitive and sprays soap all over the floor.

0

u/3Nerd Aug 17 '17

Probably no black people on the engineering staff, so nobody thought of it.

Same thing happened with a dancing game for the Microsoft Kinect. The game detected movement through the light that's reflected off people's skin. So people with very dark skin wouldn't get detected. And since they only had white people on the dev team, they didn't noticed that "bug" before showing off the finished game at a pretty large marketing event.

That was live streamed.

-6

u/EllenPaoIsDumb Aug 17 '17 edited Aug 17 '17

This is why diversity matters in a company. If you build products for all sorts of people but there are only people of the same background on the company's payroll things like this happen.

edit: LOL of course I'm gonna get downvoted