Quality on Michael’s Domain

Review: Wenger Synergy rucksack after 5 years of daily use

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am a fan of rucksacks with many pockets. No wonder I like the Wenger Synergy , which has been on the market for over 10 years with only minor modifications. However, I had my fair share of quality issues with this model. Unlike my >40-year-old Swiss knife, this rucksack kept breaking within its warranty period or soon after. It was never a problem exchanging it when it broke within the warranty period, but I got fed up with the exchange hassle after doing it twice. The rucksack’s failing part was always the same: the seams of the shoulder straps started to open. I reported the issue directly to the producer, hoping they would change something to improve the shoulder straps. However, when also the third rucksack developed the same problem, I decided not to exchange it but to fix it. My fix is optically not very pleasing, but it has lasted long enough that I can report the second point of failure: the bottom pane. It ripped where the bottom piece contacts the backplane of the rucksack. I also repaired that one because I was interested in which part would fail next. The upside: these repairs were quick and easy, and they have already lasted for 4 months without any sign of failure due to the high-quality material. The zippers limit the ultimate lifetime of perhaps all rucksacksNow I know: the zippers are starting to have problems. I am surprised that the zippers are still sort of working. The zippers have been the Achilles heel with almost all of my other rucksacks. And unlike a shoulder strap, it takes quite an effort to fix (= exchange) a badly failing zipper. This rucksack is now five years old. I have been using it literally every single day. I cycle or run with it to work, and I do my shopping with it. I travel with it and take it to the summer cottage. Am I expecting too much of a ~100€ rucksack? Is five years’ lifetime the maximum I can get out of a rucksack these days? Sustainability is mostly just lip service, whatever the industry. I am determined to keep this rucksack for another 5 years, but exchanging the zippers will cost me at least 2 to 3 hours of work. As a quick fix, I used pliers to tighten the top and bottom wings of the metal slider (like in this youtube video ). That has been working, but according to my experience, this tightening needs to be repeated in increasingly shorter intervals, and finally, the metal will break. To avoid replacing the whole zipper, you can add buttons to create a new closure , which is perhaps less work if you are not very skillful at sewing.

MDPI peer review reviewed

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Finally, our most recent review got published in the journal Biology. For my taste, its title is too long: Proteolytic Cleavages in the VEGF Family: Generating Diversity Among Angiogenic VEGFs, Essential for the Activation of Lymphangiogenic VEGFs . On top of this, the title contains an abbreviation: VEGF.Most publishers are in for the moneyThis is the first time we published with MDPI . Although the criticism of MDPI has not entirely gone away after its 2015 vindication from Beall’s List , the critique is now mostly centered around the accusation that MDPI is after the money and not the quality. That said, most publishers are in it for the money. Especially the stock-market listed publishers are by law forced to be in it for the money: Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, etc. And many others such as Springer Nature are desperately trying to become also a member of the stock-market listed club. We as scientists could probably use a little bit of this attitude because we are naturally bad at making money (we can generate knowledge, but not revenues).Concerns over review qualityAdditionally, MDPI’s review process has been criticized as being not very rigorous. What was our experience? Our paper was apparently scrutinized by four reviewers and you can read the reviewers’ comments here: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-7737/10/2/167/review_report .**How did we experience the reviewers’ quality of feedback?**Three out of the four reviewers gave real feedback. Reviewer 3 could be - for all what matters - replaced by Grammarly.com or the Microsoft Word spell checker. Reviewer 2 focuses also almost entirely on style and presentation. Don’t get me wrong: Good style and presentation are very important! But, first of all, let’s get the science right! The remaining two reviewers were apparently not extremely familiar with the research topic vascular biology. This agrees with my own experience, that I often get requests from MPDI journals to review papers outside or only tangential to my area of expertise (which I immediately reject since I anyway have too many papers to review).You could argue in favor of MDPI, that our manuscript was already quite good when we first submitted it. But please: we cobbled this together in a hurry during the month of December and I know that there are still quite a few errors (which we realized a few minutes after the paper was published).We wanted to try an Open Review, but failedIt strikes me that we had opted for open review (i.e. only to use reviewers that were agreeing to publish their identity together with their reviews). However, none of our reviewers revealed their identity. There is probably some fine print somewhere that says that the editor can override this choice when no reviewers are found that agree to give up their anonymity. To a certain extent, I can feel the editor’s pain. It is difficult enough to find good peer reviewers in the first place, because - despite many attempts for a change - reviewing manuscripts is not rewarded in the current scientific system. Is it fast? Imho, some of it was too fastThe review process was fast. The revisions were even faster. And the publishing was much too fast. I was terrified when I saw that we might not get a second set of proofs. The first proofs had to be modified extensively because the layout had changed the image placement. As a consequence, almost all the references needed renumbering. Moreover, during the proof generation, some parts of the figure legends got mistaken as body text. Therefore we had to shift large portions of text around during the proofing. And if you ever have used Word, you know that this is nothing to be excited about. At least, MS Word doesn’t crash anymore as it used to do in the old days. Back then, pushing the Crtl-S key combo after every minute of editing was outsourced from the brain to the spinal cord. But also this time, Word did not disappoint us by introducing unwanted formatting changes that were impossible to undo.None of us managed to have even a look at the second proofs this Monday before the paper went online, after which the link to the second proofs expired. We have lots of other things to do: prepare lectures, participate in faculty meetings, take care of students, and - last but not least - we occasionally also like to do some research. Fast publishing is not a virtue in itself. But it certainly helps to keep the expenses in check.**After the game is before the game.**And this time it’s not a review, but original research and we will choose another publisher. The experience was definitely not a catastrophe, but I can clearly see that such an over-streamlined process can go wrong once in while with less scrupulous authors. And there are many examples (see the Wikipedia entry ).For those interested, here is the link to the translation of the Norwegian article discussing the MDPI quality issue.**UPDATE (15.01.2022)*After this experience, a scientific analysis of MDPI journals was performed, looking at self-citations, citation cartels, special issues, APC charges, and review- and acceptance times: https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvab020 . I only became aware of this article more than half a year after its publication. The take-home message of it is that MDPI , as well as the publisher OMICS Interntional , engage in editorial behaviours that fall under the umbrella of predatory practices. At the same time, their operation “has reached such a level of sophistication that they totally or partially comply with the formal criteria that serve to differentiate between predatory and legitimate journals”. The authors of this analysis use the term “non-evident/hidden predatory publisher”.At the same time, many legitimate and respected scientists are working on the Editorial Boards of MDPI journals. I personally know quite a few. As always, the truth is not black or white but some shade of grey. Besides, this article was published by the reputable publisher Oxford University Press , which could be interpreted as a conflict of interest. *

Review of GE Healthcare's Äkta Avant 25

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

About one year ago, we secured funding in an internal faculty call to replace the old Pharmacia Äkta Explorer 100 FPLC machine of the Protein Production and Purification core facility . The Äkta Explorer had been purchased in 1996(?) when the Swedish brand Pharmacia still existed. In 2014, the worse case scenerio happened and both monochromator and Xenon flash lamp broke almost simultaneously, which left us with a bill of almost 10000€. Hence we wanted to replace the machine with a contemporary model. There are only two companies offering serious devices in this space, which is GE Healthcare ( Äkta product line ) and BioRad ( NGC product line ). GE Healthcare inherited the Äkta brand from Pharmacia via multiple mergers, while BioRad is a relatively new contender with their NGC models, which they released only a few years back.We opted for the Äkta Avant 25 . We definitely wanted to have a cased, refrigerated fraction collector. And we wanted to have a familiar user experience. We often run automated purifications and we do not like our proteins to be for longer times at room temperature in open tubes into which bacteria and dust from the air can enter.By now, we have operated the Äkta Avant for about half a year and we have meanwhile a good idea how it compares to the Äkta Explorer. Even though the Avant is more modern than the Explorer, all users of our core facility still use the Explorer. They are familiar with the user interface of Unicorn 5.11 and seemingly have no interest in learning the - admittedly - more complicated UI of the Avant. But the other reason it was only in internal use so far was the fair amount of problems that we have encountered. With our old Äkta Explorer, we have never seen so many problems in such rapid succession. I don’t know whether our situation is typical (according to GE Healthcare’s representatives it is not). Nevertheless, here are the issues that we encountered:

Helkama Jääkäri - everything but the frame broke within the first 3 years

Thu, 07 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

For one last time, I have to write about the Finnish bicycle company Helkama . I own the Helkama Jääkäri , which is a military style bicycle and marketed as extremely tough. The frame has 25 years warranty. However, pretty much everything else has been braking within the first 3 years, which ridicules the whole concept. During this year’s spring overhaul, I had to replace three parts: The stand, the saddle and the bell. And I see already signs of future trouble… In none of my previous bikes, saddle or stand have been breaking that fast. And that includes cheap bikes for half the price that I paid for the Jääkäri. Apparently, Helkama does not vet its component suppliers sufficiently. My Jääkäri’s rear wheel had to be replaced already after the first winter and the carrier meanwhile two times. When it broke the third time, I did not even bother to get it replaced again, instead I repaired and reinforced it myself . I really hope that Helkama’s advertisement is just a lie and that the Finnish Army does not use this bicycle.

Helkama quality woes

Sun, 25 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a follow-up of my post from 2 years ago about my new bicycle, a Helkama Jääkäri . It had its fair share of problems, and even though the customer service was very responsive, the repetitive problems with its luggage carrier were too much for me. Last December, the third carrier broke. I had received also the this one as a free-of-charge replacement, but it is a nuisance when it breaks, even though replacing takes only about 10 minutes. It is not in very heavy use: the stuff I transport on it weighs about 2-3 kg, but apparently the welded/soldered connections are prone to fatigue breakage. Helkama knows that it has a quality problem with its carriers. When I asked for the second replacement carrier, the customer service told me, that they are trying to identify a suitable replacement for the subcontractor who makes these carriers. This time I thought to repair the carrier instead of asking for another replacement, which took less time and will probably last longer. I don’t know whether they have changed their component supplier. If my own repair breaks, I still have two old broken carriers I can repair, but most likely, my next bicycle is not going to be a Helkama .