Is Your Coat Fur Fake, or Is It Fido? | World Latest | Guardian UnlimitedI think I can reconstruct the real story, based on what's written here and my crotchety knowledge of how the world works. I bet that US retailers have known for years that Chinese manufacturers were using a wild canine, mostly farmed and hideously abused, to make convincing "fake fur". As long as the US retailers had plausible deniability they didn't care, and there was no law against using racoon dog fur. The mislabeling is merely a misdemeanor offense if the garment costs more than $150, and no label is required for under $150. US retailers probably didn't know, however, that some Chinese manufacturers were using dog breeds that, in many nations, are pets. That's a felony, and that's why they're anxious. If an executive were found to do this knowingly they'd get a criminal record, but I doubt any are guilty of that.
... The Humane Society of the United States said it purchased coats from reputable outlets, such as upscale Nordstrom, with designer labels - Andrew Marc, Tommy Hilfiger, for example - and found them trimmed with fur from domestic dogs [jf: this is misleading, see below], even though the fur was advertised as fake.
The investigation began after the society got a tip from someone who bought a coat with trim labeled as faux fur that felt real. Leppert and her team began buying coats from popular retailers and then had the coats tested by mass spectrometry, which measures the mass and sequence of proteins.
Of the 25 coats tested, 24 were mislabeled or misadvertised, the society said.
Three coats ... contained fur from domesticated [jf: meaning breeds domesticated in the US] dogs. The others had fur from raccoon dogs ... Most of the fur came from China.
Importing domestic dog and cat fur was outlawed in 2000. Intentionally importing and selling dog fur is a federal crime punishable by a $10,000 fine for each violation.
... The discovery of domestic dog fur is the latest twist in the investigation that ensnared retail giants Macy's and J.C. Penney late last year. Both of those retailers were discovered selling coats with raccoon dog fur labeled as raccoon.
J.C. Penney initially removed the offending garments from its stores around Christmas - but eventually it had employees scratch out the 'raccoon' label with black magic marker and put the coats back on the shelves. Macy's immediately pulled the items from its shelves.
... Mislabeling fur is a misdemeanor punishable by a $5,000 fine or a year in prison. Fur valued at less than $150 is not required to be labeled.
A bill introduced by Reps. Jim Moran, D-Va., and Mike Ferguson, R-N.J., would close that loophole by requiring labels for all fur regardless of its value. It also would ban fur from raccoon dogs.
... Other retailers the Humane Society said sold mislabeled raccoon dog fur included Lord & Taylor, BergdorfGoodman.com and Neiman Marcus.com. Designers whose clothes were mismarked included Donna Karan's DKNY and Michael Kors. A coat from Oscar de la Renta advertised as raccoon had raccoon dog fur.
Why Does E=mc2? | Cosmic Variance
...Now let’s think about a second thought experiment, which is closely related to the first. All I want to make different is to replace the cannon by a powerful laser. Instead of a cannonball being propelled across the box, we’ll now think about the laser firing a pulse of light. Now, the light carries momentum, and so when the laser fires and the pulse sets off, the box will once again begin a backwards slide in order that momentum be conserved. Also once again, when the light reaches the other side and is absorbed by the opposite wall, the momentum will be transferred back to the box, which will then come to a halt. But now you see the problem. The distribution of mass in the box is the same as it was at the beginning, and no external forces have acted on the system, and yet because the box has slid backwards and no mass has been moved, the center of mass of the entire system has moved! All no longer seems right with the world...
Be the Best You can Be: Are cognitive improvements preceded by behavioral deterioration?I'm sure it's been studied, perhaps the results were uninteresting (no correlation) ...
....We would then expect .... that major changes to critical cortical systems would be associated with substantial behavior and cognitive disruptions.
The Bayesian Heresy: Understanding InnovationI don't buy it. There are confounding variables such as communications latency, ability to cooperate, response to incentives, and solution collision (multiple semi-compatible good quality solutions that, when combined, produce a weak result). Diversity is valuable, but I've never seen it trump ability by itself.
...First, for any problem there exists a perspective that makes it easy to grasp a solution, though that may mean waiting for a person as unique as Edison to come along. Second, across all problems no perspective or no heuristic is any better than any other. In plain English, any approach may be just as good as any other until it is tested.
Third, teams of problem solvers—viewed as bundles of perspectives and heuristics brought together to solve a particular problem—do better when the diversity of perspectives and heuristics is greater than the overall ability or talent of the team’s members. In other words, diverse teams outperform teams composed of the very best individuals. Diversity trumps ability.
This last result requires further explanation. A team, a group, or even an entire society innovates through iterative application of perspectives and heuristics. Individuals who perform best obviously possess good perspectives and heuristics (think Edison), yet 30 Edisons each may have 20 useful heuristics while collectively possessing a mere 25. In contrast, the diverse team’s individual members may on average only know 15 heuristics apiece but collectively know 40.
OO’s and BB’s | Cosmic VarianceThere's a lot of time in a universe that's open (expanding). Time enough for spacetime to dream the lives of mortals ....... The idea Don put forward is this: there’s us, the ordinary observers (OO’s) in the world, who have achieved a certain stature after billions of years of evolution in the universe, and are now capable of making quite refined (or so we think) observations of the universe. ...
Then, though, there are the BB’s in the universe: Boltzmann Brains. Random fluctuations of the fabric of spacetime itself which, most of the time, are rather insignificant puffs which evaporate immediately. But sometimes they stick around. More rarely, they are complex. Sometimes (very very rarely) they are really quite as complex as us human types. (Actually, “very very rarely” does not quite convey just how rare we are talking now.) And sometimes these vacuum quantum fluctuations attain the status of actual observers in the world. But, the rarest of them all, the BB’s, are able to (however briefly) make actual observations in the universe which are, in fact, “not erroneous” as Don Page put it.
The man was a compelling speaker, and soon I realized there was an actual intellectual debate underway in the high end of the cosmology/high energy community as to what the role of these BB’s might be in the universe, in the very far (or maybe not so far) future...
The thing is, when you start talking about very very…very rare things like Boltzmann Brains, you are talking about REALLY long times. Much longer than we’ve had on earth (and I mean 4.5 billion years) by many orders of magnitude. Numbers like 10 to the 60th years were being batted around like it was next week in this talk. By those times, all the stars and all the galaxies have gone out, and gone cold, and space has continued to expand exponentially and things are long past looking pretty bleak for the OO’s still around, who (we presume) need heat and light and at least a little energy of some sort to survive, even if we are talking about very slow machine intelligence (even slower than humans for example).
So eventually, the mere fact that there is, at these long times, just oodles of space in the universe means that the BB’s become more and more common (even if they are rare) and eventually dominate the, uh, intellectual landscape of the universe...
...I am mangling this horribly, and of course before writing this I took just a glimpse at the already voluminous amount of literature on this topic, and realized that I have a lot of reading to do, both blog and academic. So it’s best I stop and let you all go look up Boltzmann Brains, as I will, and do some more reading...
Conservapedia | Cosmic VarianceCV provides some hilarious Conservapedia entries, please do read the post. At the moment the site is being overwhelmed by parody posts, but I'm sure it will settle down to a duller, but no less foolish, state. The good news is that any migration from Wikipedia to Conservapedia can only raise the IQ of Wikipedia.
.... Everyone is having their fun with Conservapedia, a rightward-tilting alternative to Wikipedia that aims to ensure that future generations of conservatives grow up really dumb. A mildly-close look reveals that the major biases of Wikipedia that made this new project worth launching are (1) their insistence in using “CE” (Common Era) rather than “AD” (Anno Domini) in giving dates, and (2) the occasional Anglicized spelling....
In the World of Life-Saving Drugs, a Growing Epidemic of Deadly Fakes - New York TimesI'm generally not in favor of the death penalty, but it is tempting to make an exception for wealthy entrepreneurs who kill thousands of people.
Estimates of the deaths caused by fakes run from tens of thousands a year to 200,000 or more. The World Health Organization has estimated that a fifth of the one million annual deaths from malaria would be prevented if all medicines for it were genuine and taken properly...
Edwards Gets It Right - New York TimesThis is a great example of why I need Krugman. I skimmed the Edwards plan and came away feeling a bit disappointed. On quick glance it seemed to miss the key issues. Krugman is smarter and looks deeper, and reveals that the Edwards plan is serious and meaningful. Put me down in the Edwards camp -- unless, as Robert Reich half-predicts -- Gore announces his candidacy at the Academy Awards. Then I'd be torn ...
...People who don't get insurance from their employers wouldn't have to deal individually with insurance companies: they'd purchase insurance through ''Health Markets'': government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public's behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills -- not the function of granting insurance in the first place -- outsourced to private insurers.
Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting -- the process of screening out high-risk clients -- are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies' overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.
Better still, ''Health Markets,'' the press release says, ''will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare.'' This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now -- after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan's low premiums, or lose the competition.
And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. ''Over time,'' the press release says, ''the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan.'"
So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable...
...If you’d like to contact me, please send me email. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out my email address...Yikes! This guy hasn't figured out that his blog is a part of his sales strategy ... or, in this case, his anti-sales strategy! (Name intentionally withheld.)
