I not as lazy as I thought I was

I rarely feel I'm working hard enough (don't tell my employer), but I may have been choosing the wrong comparisons ...

Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent - New York Times

... American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. And Steve Pavlina, whose Web site (stevepavlina.com) describes him as a “personal development expert” and who keeps incremental logs of how he spends each working day, urging others to do the same, finds that we actually work only about 1.5 hours a day. “The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”

The experts disagree on how we are wasting all this time. The AOL survey says time is lost to surfing the Internet (given the source, that is either self-congratulatory or self-incriminating).

The Microsoft survey pointed to worthless meetings. Respondents said they spent 5.6 hours each week in meetings and 71 percent of them thought that those meetings “aren’t productive.”

Searching through clutter is another diversion, says Peggy Duncan, a “personal productivity coach” in Atlanta, who maintains that rifling though messy desks wastes 1.5 hours a day...

... The average professional workweek has expanded steadily over the last 10 years, according to the Center for Work Life Policy, and logging 70-plus hours is now the norm at the top....

... We are wasting time because we are working harder.

“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity and time-management consulting firm in Norwell, Mass. He says workers are like athletes in that they are most efficient in concentrated bursts. Elite athletes “play a set of tennis, a down of football or an inning of baseball and have a pause in between,” he says. Working energy, like physical energy, “is best used in spurts where we work hard on a few focused activities and then take a brief respite,” he says...

Wow. I'm not as bad as I thought I was. It helps that I like my work, and circumstances limit me to a 50 hour week. My colleagues know not to invite me to pointless meetings, and the meetings I do attend are (really) educational or productive. If I could fit in 70 hours for my employer I would be wasting a lot more of the week, particularly given the effects of travel and sleep deprivation.

The 70 plus hour weeks I've seen over the years have been substantially social and recreational -- though the difficulties of modern air travel are making them nastier. The people who do it seem to enjoy the distraction from everyday life, but I don't think the time is well spent. The 70 hour crew are always sleep deprived and a bit manic, and they spend a lot of time recovering from their own mistaken decisions. A few people can be productive for 70 hours, but mostly it's counter-productive.

Evolution by Stephen Baxter - my late review

I read Stephen Baxter's Evolution over a year ago. It was a chance discovery at the local library; I got rather more than I'd expected. I was a bit stunned after I finished it, but the story stayed with me. Life flew by though, and the book was long returned. I couldn't remember who wrote it, and Google was, oddly, no help at all. Apparently the book was not as famous as it deserved to be -- I couldn't find it amongst the chaos.

Today I again came across it in the library. I resolved to write an Amazon review of what was clearly an undeservedly neglected book. To my surprise I found 60 reviews ahead of me and a all-but-five star rating, with reviewers deploring the five star limit. I am hopeful that book is now being rediscovered. Despite the crowd, I added my review (reissued here):

Amazon.com: Reviews for Evolution: Books: Stephen Baxter

... I'm pleased to see that Baxter's book has earned such high ratings. It's little known, but it's one of the most remarkable books of the past decade. It deserves to be read.

It's not a comforting book, which is perhaps why it's not a best seller. On the other hand it's entertaining, even to the very end of the end. It's profoundly educational, without being didactic. If you read this book carefully, you'll understand natural selection and evolution in a new and deep way. If I were teaching an undergraduate class in introductory biology I'd make this a required text.

Like all of Baxter's books it's also a rich source of ideas. Do you think there's only been one self-aware, sentient, animal in all of evolutionary history? Baxter will make you wonder about that. In retrospect, it seems rather unlikely that we're the first to think about past, future and fate -- though we are probably the first and last to drain the earth of fossil fuels. He deals with that too.

Memorable. Educational. Disturbing. Hardly an inviting description, but it is very readable, quite entertaining, and certainly unforgettable. You can read some escapist fiction (escape from what?!) and feel you're being scholarly as well...

21st century deception and the evolution of the emergent mind

I had two (or is it one?) idiosyncratic talents as a wastrel youth. I had a knack for great boondoggles, and I could, upon a cursory book reading, write a persuasive this-is-connected-to-that high school English essay.

This is one of those connectionist essays. I'm going to claim that many of the themes of this blog, such as

• brain and mind, emergence, enlightenment 2.0, and the intelligence of the mass
• politics, war and the GOP's (many) con jobs
  
• globalization, libertarianism's limits and the the death of the toaster. Not to mention melamine
  
• natural selection in organisms and economics
• the duty the strong owe the weak
• spam and reputation management
• future shock, drm and privacy as a luxury
  

are fundamentally related to the quintessential human activity - the detection and execution of fraud and deception [1]. Quintessential, because it is likely that deceiving and detecting deception played a central role in the evolution of human mind and culture.

My hunch is that each transformation of the human landscape, either by technology or culture, opens new avenues for fraud and deception. I suspect, for example, that if we looked closely we'd find that widespread adoption of printing and reading led to a vast array of newly effective cons and schemes. Print must have been very persuasive in those days; anything that was printed would bypass the fraud detection measures of the pre-print era.

We live now in another golden age of fraud. It's not just the obvious spam driven stock manipulation, the raging identity theft, Hilary's friends at InfoUSA, or even fake gluten, medications, glycerine, and surgical supplies. It's also the vast array of extremely unreliable consumer goods that are so cheap they've eliminated the alternatives, incidentally creating a deceptive inflation picture.

There's a bright side - I hope. We're overwhelmed at the moment, but our children will grow up in this world. They will spot the Bush/Rove cons their parents missed, they will resurrect the concept of a brand reputation and push the fakes back into dark alleys, they'll recognize the limits of "caveat emptor" and resurrect the FDA. Best of all, just as deception detection upgraded brains tends of thousands of years ago, so too will "social" deception detection raise our emergent IQ. Maybe just in time to respond to Sachs call for a new enlightenment.

So I am an optimist, after all. True, the glass is half empty. True, the contents are poisoned. Nonetheless, we will live to quaff again ...

[1] I need to here credit my 1994 UMN cognitive science professor - Paul Johnson. I thought harder and read more in his class than any other in far too many years of education. Dr. Johnson's research focuses on the cognitive science aspects of deception.

The great eye sees all

Google is expanding on Amazon's imaging effort, using specially equipped vehicles to capture images of streets and homes. These now extend the reach of Google's sat maps. Sometimes the images reveal too much.

It is likely that at least one picture somewhere shows a man stepping through an open door while a spouse is away. It's only beginning. We've been seeing experimental gigapexel images for years -- a single image allows one to zoom from a cityscape to a window sill. Soon we'll have multiple 10-100 gpix images of cityscapes to compliment .1 gpix images of streets. [3]

We all know that job interviews and even business meetings start with Google searches, which is why my blog is lightly pseudonymous -- though in fact Google's backchaining logic exposes the relationship between the blog and my "true name" [1]. I can run, but I can't hide. [2]

Privacy is a luxury good now. It is available only to the rich and the lost. We have returned to the village from whence we came.

[1] Copyright Amazon.com
[2] On the one hand, I won't get any job offers from the GOP. On the other hand, I'm really quite a harmless sort so I enjoy the somewhat stunned looks I get at some business partner meetings.
[3] They are time slices of course, but they capture a lot instances across one time slice.

The toothpaste? In the US. Of course.

I am neither shocked, nor astounded, to discover that poisonous Chinese toothpaste does not list the poison when sold in the US. I'm sure that omission is coincidental. Credit to the FDA this time, they began running tests after diethylene glycol was found as a listed ingredient in Panama:

Toxic Toothpaste Made in China Is Found in U.S. - New York Times

... Agency officials said they found toothpaste containing a small amount of diethylene glycol, a sweet, syrupy poison, at a Dollar Plus retail store in Miami, sold under the brand name ShiR Fresh Mint Fluoride Paste. The F.D.A. also identified nine other brands of Chinese toothpaste that contain diethylene glycol, some with concentrations of 3 percent to 4 percent.

Previously, only a few brands had been identified by health officials around the world as containing diethylene glycol and all of them listed the chemical on the label.

But diethylene glycol was not listed on the label of the toothpaste found in the Miami store. Its presence was detected only because the F.D.A. began testing imported Chinese toothpaste last month. That precaution was prompted by the discovery in Latin America of tens of thousands of tubes of tainted toothpaste made in China.

Over the years, counterfeiters have found it profitable to substitute diethylene glycol for its chemical cousin, glycerin, which is usually more expensive. Glycerin is a safe additive commonly found in food, drugs and household products. In toothpaste, glycerin is used as a thickening agent.

Chinese regulators said Thursday that their investigation of toothpaste manufacturers there had found they had done nothing wrong. Chinese officials also said that while small amounts of diethylene glycol could be safely used in toothpaste, new controls would be imposed on its use in toothpaste.

The F.D.A. said diethylene glycol in any amount was not suitable for use in toothpaste.

Allegedly it's a "legal" ingredient in China (don't swallow your toothpaste kids), that might explain why the ingredient was on the label in Lation America. They probably ran out of room to list it in the US.

American lawyers, please start your engines.

A reasonable article on the science of slowing aging

Most of the popular literature on slowing senescence tends to extravagant predictions. By comparison, this brief 5/6/07 NYT article is quite modest. If everything works today's 30 year olds might get another 10 years, and today's 10 year olds might get more.

I also like the description of the aging brain, though I think they're being optimistic about the relationship between disability in your 70s and forgetting your keys in your 40s. Emphases mine.

Baby Boomer - Aging - Longevity - Dementia - New York Times

May 6, 2007

Participants: Lenny GUARENTE, PH.D.: Novartis professor of biology at M.I.T. and author of “Ageless Quest: One Scientist’s Search for Genes That Prolong Youth.”; Robert N. BUTLER, M.D.: Founding director of the National Institute on Aging, a founder of the Alzheimer’s Disease Association and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for “Why Survive? Being Old in America.” He heads the International Longevity Center.; SARA DAVIDSON: Author, most recently, of “Leap! What Will We Do With the Rest of Our Lives?”

... LENNY GUARENTE: The research that I’m involved in is not about extending life after people are infirm. I don’t think of life span as the gold standard. The gold standard is health span. All the indicators from the laboratory are that the genes we’re studying and the kinds of drugs we would be developing would extend health span. If you can extend health span, and you also happen to extend life span, so be it. That’s a side benefit...

... The genes we study counteract aging. First we studied yeast cells, and it took us eight years to identify a gene called SIR2, which protects the cells from damage during the aging process. Then we did a similar experiment in a more complex critter, the roundworm, and what was remarkable is, we identified the same gene. That told us that this type of gene is performing an antiaging function broadly in nature.

Do humans have this gene?

GUARENTE: There’s one gene in our genome, SIRT1, that would be a dead ringer for this one — the technical term is ortholog — but we also have six other genes that have a related sequence to this. They’re called sirtuins, and they’re all going to play a role, but I think the dead ringer is undoubtedly the most important based on experiments that have been done.

... We think the sirtuin genes are there to recognize lack of food or other stressful situations and to spring into action to create a physiology that will promote longevity. The evolutionary value is that in times of stress — food scarcity, for example — this gene would slow down the aging process and keep you alive longer, so that when times are better, you could reproduce. ..

... In our lifetimes, could this happen?

GUARENTE: I think one can expect perhaps another decade of robust health...

... How close are we to such a drug being available?

GUARENTE: Ten, maybe 15 years. I think the drugs that aim at sirtuins, for example, will be tested initially for a particular disease, say, diabetes. And it will turn out that the drugs have broader benefits than one initially imagined.

What about resveratrol? There has been a lot of publicity about this substance that’s found in red wine. Does it do the same thing as calorie restriction?

GUARENTE: It’s a natural product, made by plants, and recently one of my former postdoctoral students, David Sinclair, found that resveratrol can regulate the activity of SIRT1.

Do you take resveratrol?

GUARENTE: No, partly because neutraceuticals are not regulated by the F.D.A. If I was sure of the quality control, I would consider it, but I’m still not certain I would do it, because you may have to take a lot — one or two grams a day.

What intrigues me is that I read that if fruit flies are fed resveratrol, they live longer and can eat all they want...

... BUTLER: .. we don’t even have the means to evaluate or measure whether a substance prolongs life. We have yet to create biomarkers that would measure, short of death, actual changes in the body that reflect aging...

... BUTLER: There are many types of dementia, which result from different causes. The most common is Alzheimer’s, which is characterized by neurofibrillary tangles — misshaped proteins — and plaques. The second most common is multi-infarct dementia, which is the result of small, repeated strokes. Scientists who are studying Alzheimer’s have differentiated three categories for research purposes. The first is what’s called age-associated memory impairment. These are the kinds of things ordinary people are going through: forgetfulness, not remembering why you’ve walked into a room or where you put the paper you were just holding in your hand. If you’re in this category, we have no data that suggest you’re necessarily on your way to Alzheimer’s.

The second category is mild cognitive impairment — getting confused on the street, not remembering you’re supposed to have coins when you get on a bus. At that point, the conversion rate to the third — full-blown Alzheimer’s — sadly, is very high. After three years, about half the people will not be able to take care of themselves, but the conversion is not total. Some people plateau and seem to go on for a long time.

How do you know when to be concerned?

BUTLER: One of the rules we use as clinicians is: if you forget your keys, that’s not so terrible, but if you forget what a key is for, that becomes serious...

... BUTLER: I’m afraid there’s a lot of romance in the literature suggesting that we can stop Alzheimer’s disease by cognitive exercises...

... There’s a distinction between advancing life expectancy and breaking the genetic barrier. Every species has a predetermined genetic life span. Certain fish live about a year. Some turtles live 200 years. Humans have about 110, 120 years at the outside of their genetic life span. We’re talking about increasing healthy years within that life span.

But wait you say -- what about us boomers feeling the steel jaws closing? Ask not for whom the bell tolls ... I do think there's hope that we'll delay our cognitive disability by a few years.

BTW, bravo to Butler for breaking the happy illusion that crossword puzzles are going to slow dementia development. It's such a sweet idea, but it's silly.

del.icio.us tags: dementia, aging, senescence, SIR2, resveratrol

Industrial food and medications from unregulated markets

Regulatory and litigation costs substantially increase the costs of manufactured products, including medications and manufactured food. The obvious solution is to transfer production to non-regulated markets. Emphases mine. (See also and also and the American Meat Industry is fighting traceability.)

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 05/31/2007 | China has cornered the global market for vitamins

SHIJIAZHUANG, China...

... In less than a decade, China has captured 90 percent of the U.S. market for vitamin C, driving almost everyone else out of business.

Chinese pharmaceutical companies also have taken over much of the world market in the production of antibiotics, analgesics, enzymes and primary amino acids. According to an industry group, China makes 70 percent of the world's penicillin, 50 percent of its aspirin and 35 percent of its acetaminophen (often sold under the brand name Tylenol), as well as the bulk of vitamins A, B12, C and E.

In the wake of a pet food scandal, in which adulterated wheat gluten from China led to the deaths of thousands of pets in North America, and other instances of food and toothpaste tampering, China's vitamin producers are reaching out to reassure U.S. consumers that their vitamins are safe.

Whether that's true isn't clear, however. Foreign food-safety experts say China's larger companies have reputations to protect. The question is how they maintain quality control.

In this pharmaceutical hub, a two-hour train ride south of Beijing, managers at what may be the world's largest vitamin C factory said they're constantly improving quality control to keep pace with the tenfold increase in production this decade.

"We used to only comply with domestic standards. Now we must comply with international standards," said Liu Lifeng, an aide to the general manager at the Weisheng Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.

Food and drug safety inspectors drop in at the plant from time to time.

"The authorities come unexpectedly without telling us," added Tian Yumiao, the senior director of the quality control department of Weisheng.

But the inspectors aren't exactly neutral guardians of public health. They work for the city government, which is a part owner of the parent company of Weisheng Pharmaceutical. That kind of relationship between food and drug inspectors and China's booming agricultural and pharmaceutical industries is coming to the fore as an issue in the food safety debate. The local government in this thriving city of 2 million people would suffer if it did anything to hurt the growth of local vitamin and drug producers, and local officials might be reluctant to admit that a public safety issue had arisen....

... Since U.S. laws don't require food and drug sellers to label products with the country of origin of ingredients, it's impossible for consumers to know where food or supplements are coming from, not to mention what factory produced them. [jf: the American Meat Industry is fighting traceability. Europe requires traceability.]

Vitamins fall into an area in China that straddles the food industry, comprising some 2 million businesses that exported $2.5 billion worth of goods last year, and the drug industry, which has 5,000 companies. Cases of adulterated or mislabeled products have hit both food and drug companies.

Fake drugs to treat impotency and help with weight loss are legion in China. Some African nations complain of fake Chinese medicines hitting their pharmacy shelves. Shady small pharmaceutical firms have exported bogus anti-malaria medication to Southeast Asia, where the illness is prevalent, allowing sick people to grow sicker...

... "Cheap labor has given China Inc. its edge in manufacturing. But pharmaceutical laboratories, which aren't labor intensive, benefit from subsidized rates on water and energy consumption, and often-lax oversight of environmental rules.

China's entry into vitamin C involved ingenuity - and an unwitting assist from the U.S. Department of Justice. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several big Chinese drug companies, working with the government-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences, devised a method to cut the normal five-step process for making vitamin C to a two-step fermentation process, leaving European, U.S. and Japanese firms a step behind.

The new method cut costs and gave China a manufacturing edge. It wasn't until 1997, when U.S. attorneys broke up what they said was a price-fixing cartel of European and Japanese producers, [jf: "said" is an understatement -- it was a major criminal cartel beyond a doubt] that the door swung wide open for the Chinese producers...

... then Weisheng and three other big vitamin C producers appeared to take cues from their shattered competitors. Critics say the Chinese companies practiced predatory pricing, undercutting the remaining producers, with an eye to cornering the world market and making an eventual killing.

"They formed the cartel in December 2001 when the prices were under $3 a kilogram...

Today, only one Western company still makes vitamin C - Dutch-based DSM - and as China monopolizes vitamin C production, prices have hit $6 a kilogram...

This is in line with an April 23/07 article in WaPO by a food ingredient management consultant. This story adds some important background. China's dominance in part arose from technological innovation, partly from criminal corruption in the European monopolies, and lastly from development of a predatory Chinese monopoly. Underlying it all, however, is the ability to evade the costs of regulation and litigation borne by European and American manufacturers.

The next step is clear. Contact your representative and tell them you want European-class traceability of products and ingredients to the factory level

There's on other interesting angle to this story. In the last few years a number of clinical trials of vitamin therapy have had surprisingly negative results in the experimental groups. Not just no effect, but a negative effect. I believe that's intrinsic to the biological activity of the vitamin, but our experience with production of pet food by non-litigated non-regulated markets suggests that we should at least review the data associated with those studies.

del.icio.us tags: globalization, economics, industrial food

Krugman: 2006 article on health care reform

Brad DeLong pulled a post from his archives about a Krugman and Wells 2006 essay on health care reform. It's a great summary. For example:

The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It - The New York Review of Books

...Employer-based insurance is a peculiarly American institution. As Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein tell us in The Health Care Mess, the dominant role of such insurance is the result of historical accident rather than deliberate policy. World War II caused a labor shortage, but employers were subject to controls that prevented them from attracting workers by offering higher wages. Health benefits, however, weren't controlled, and so became a way for employers to compete for workers. Once employers began offering medical benefits, they also realized that it was a form of compensation workers valued highly because it protected them from risk. Moreover, the tax law favored employer-based insurance, because employers' contributions weren't considered part of workers' taxable income. Today, the value of the tax subsidy for employer-based insurance is estimated at around $150 billion a year....

Never fails. If you want to understand strange behavior, begin with the tax laws. The entire article is worth reading and tucking away for future reference.

In a similar vein DeLong joins the discussion about whether Hilary's plan was "right" after all (but see how a comment catches him out) and Gawande finishes his NYT series with an outline of the road ahead (emphases mine):

... This is what that road looks like. It is not single-payer. It instead follows the lead of European countries ranging from the Netherlands to Switzerland to Germany that provide universal coverage (and more doctors, hospitals and access to primary care) through multiple private insurers while spending less money than we do. The proposals all define basic benefits that insurers must offer without penalty for pre-existing conditions. They cover not just expensive sickness care, but also preventive care and cost-saving programs to give patients better control of chronic illnesses like diabetes and asthma.

We’d have a choice of competing private plans, and, with Edwards and Obama, a Medicare-like public option, too. An income-related federal subsidy or voucher would help individuals pay for that coverage. And the proposals also embrace what’s been called shared responsibility — requiring that individuals buy health insurance (at minimum for their children) and that employers bigger than 10 or 15 employees either provide health benefits or pay into a subsidy fund.

It is a coherent approach. And it seems to be our one politically viable approach, too. No question, proponents have crucial differences — like what the individual versus employer payments should be. And attacks are certain to label this as tax-and-spend liberalism and government-controlled health care. But these are not what will sabotage success.

Instead, the crucial matter is our reaction as a country when the attacks come. If we as consumers, health professionals and business leaders sit on our hands, unwilling to compromise and defend change, we will be doomed to our sliding global competitiveness and self-defeating system. Avoiding this will take extraordinary political leadership. So we should not even consider a candidate without a plan capable of producing agreement.

I studied the Clinton I plan reasonably carefully, and I spoke on it to community groups in my prior home of Escanaba, Michigan (in the UP!). I remember it as very clever, but paternalistically dishonest. We were told nobody would lose anything, but that didn't make sense. One man's 'adverse selection' is another man's bargain -- so eliminating adverse selection means some people lose out on their personal bargain. I suppose that's simply the way politics works -- the public has a limited appetite for the truth. Even so, it rankled. Maybe this time we should try the truth for a change.

I'm curious to see what we'll do. I'm with Gawande, who says elsewhere in his article:

.... whether as a doctor or as a citizen, I would take almost any system — from Medicare-for-all to a private insurance voucher system — over the one we now have. Job-based insurance is bleeding away the viability of American businesses — even doctors complain about the cost of insuring employees. And it has left large numbers of patients without adequate coverage when they need it. In the last two years, for example, 51 percent of Americans surveyed did not fill a prescription or visit a doctor for a known medical issue because of cost....

A commencement address, from Salon

Salon features a commencement address today:

Words in a time of war | Salon.com:

This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California at Berkeley, on May 10, 2007...

It's a brief review of the conquest of Iraq with a recurring theme of the relationship of power to reality. It's worth reading, though there's nothing there we don't know. Even so, it's useful to cover the territory every few months.

Cringely retrospective

My favorite tech writer reflects on 10 years of opining for (!) PBS. It's a weird gig, but it works for me. A quote explains why:

... As a former member of that [fourth] estate I have to tell you how consistently I have been disappointed over the last decade, not just by how poorly the press understands technology, but how easily manipulated they are by the technology industry. My friends in the press are not stupid, but they have bosses, and those bosses have commercial agendas, while I just write what I think should be written...

Cringely is more talented than most, but his other great strength is PBS. He's somewhat removed from the commercial influences that have made most of the trade press worthless.

Thanks PBS! Thanks Cringely! Keep on writing ...

What do climate change deniers have to do with Philip Morris and DDT?

Crooked Timber connects the GOP's tobacco stalwards with global warming denialists and an allegedly planted story that DDT bans increased malaria deaths. CT reports "the DDT campaign was pitched to the tobacco industry as a diversionary attack on the World Health Organization which was playing a leading role in campaigns against smoking. The leading figure in the exercise was Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute and its front organization, Africans Fighting Malaria.".

It's a great post with a nice aside about the relationship of global warming denialists to Philip Morris. The only catch for me is that I thought it was true that the WHO turned away from DDT for emotional and political rather than technical reasons. DDT has relatively safe uses, though it is true that any circulation of DDT means that it will also be misused. The WHO does favor some DDT use nowadays.

Bate's mission to distract the WHO from an anti-smoking campaign would, of course, be all the more effective if he had a point....

Industrial food part XVI: your melamine update

I'm in the small minority group that thinks we have significant issues with our food chain. So I'll keep posting about interesting discoveries, such as the use of melamine (melamime is a common but incorrect variant spelling) by a US company as a "binder" in animal food:

Problem Pet Food Ingredient in US Feed:

...The announcement by the Food and Drug Administration was the first indication that a U.S. company had used melamine as an animal feed ingredient. Agency officials said that melamine and related compounds were used to bind feed for cattle, sheep and goats, or fish and shrimp.

...The FDA alerted feed manufacturers that ingredients containing melamine and related compounds were found in products made by Tembec BTLSR Inc. of Toledo, Ohio, and used by Uniscope Inc. of Johnstown, Colo.

Tembec makes two products, AquaBond and Aqua-Tec II, which it distributes for Uniscope. The products are used in fish feed.

Uniscope also makes a product for livestock feed called Xtra-Bond, and it uses ingredients produced by Tembec. The FDA advised feed manufacturers and others not to use the products and to contact the two manufacturers...

I'm sure Tembec and Uniscope are unique. (joke)

Meanwhile Wikipedia has assembled two good articles on melamine and on the 2007 pet food crisis. The researchers think there's something lethal in the toxic stew other than melamine and cyanuric acid, but they can't identify it. The melamine/cyanuric acid combo is still a suspect though:

... a study by USSR researchers in the 1980s suggested melamine cyanurate (a salt formed between melamine and cyanuric acid, commonly used as a fire retardant ...) could be more toxic than either melamine or cyanuric acid alone...

Fragments of information, presumably coming from pet centric community sites continue to show up in obscure publications. The Catoosa County news, for example, reports on relatively stringent measures taken in South Africa.

I continue to look for pet food manufacturers who make measurable safety claims. Eukanuba doesn't certify their food as melanine free, but they are marketing their advantages including buying Google AdWords (emphasis mine, I'm surprised they don't use farmed fish.)

...* Eukanuba dog and cat dry foods DO NOT include wheat gluten, corn gluten or rice protein concentrate..
* All Eukanuba dog and cat dry foods are manufactured in our own facilities in Nebraska, Ohio and North Carolina...

... Eukanuba dog and cat foods are made with our own exclusive formulas, unique recipes and high-quality ingredients.

* Eukanuba diets are natural with added vitamins and minerals and DO NOT contain fillers or artificial preservatives.
* All Eukanuba dog and cat dry foods are made with natural chicken, lamb or ocean fish.

Not perfect of course, but better than average. Our mongrel has been on Eukanuba for over a year, so we're lazily stayed with them rather than preparing our own food.

Lastly, the ASPCA continues to disappoint. This was their big chance to identify manufacturers with better practices, but they chose to play it safe with their donors. Shame.

NYT has made "permalinks" official - another good sign

The New York Times has quietly made "permalinks" official. There's been a semi-approved way to do this since an odd agreement with UserLand software in 2003, but now there's a "share" dropdown (in IE anyway) next to most articles. One option is the permalink. It's a bit awkward to get at, Aaron Swart's permalink bookmarklet is still faster. Nonetheless, it's remarkable and commendable. The NYT is indeed on the way back from the brink.

Air travel is for the strong alone

Last week my return flight from Denver was delayed by 6 hours. If it had been cancelled I'd have had to fly to Chicago, get a hotel, and look for a flight to MSP the next day. There were no seats from Denver to MSP for over a day.

This is now the rule. Underpaid junior analysts attempt to quantify the chaotic and airlines have increased overbook rates. I suspect academic mathematicians will ultimately show that the system is non-linear, and that the consequences of overbooking cannot be predicted within reasonable bounds.

Eventually a few people will die from the stress of travel, there will be litigation, and the airlines will reform.

Air travel is now for the strong alone. I do not encourage my elderly parents to fly.

Gasoline prices: refining or secular trend - the 11 year chart

I was wondering the other day, how much gasoline costs in Europe. It's about $3.40 a gallon in the Twin Cities, and over $5.00 a gallon in Canada, but what about in France or Germany? Have gas prices reached the "magic" $7.00 a gallon mark? I'd long imagined that was a price point that would change consumer choices about where to work and live, and what to drive.

Is the effect entirely due to refining capacity, as some suppose? If so, wouldn't the effect differ between the US and Europe?

Once upon a time this would have been a hard question to answer. Tonight Google gave me the answer within a minute of asking the question: Weekly Retail PrPemium Motor Gasoline Prices (Including Taxes) - DOE)

I've graphed [1] the results, click the image below to see a more readable graph (Europeans, of course, have far more taxation on gasoline, that's the big gap in the chart):



In 12/2001 the US price was $1.25 and the French price was $3.24.
In 5/2007 the US price was $3.28 and the French price was $6.72.

The French price has doubled (2.07x) in a bit more than 6 years and the US prices have more than doubled (2.6x). (I assume the numbers are not corrected for inflation.)

Lately the US prices have risen somewhat faster than the European, that fits with part of the price increase being a refining capacity issue. Overall though there's a reasonably clear trend, albeit with more than a few reversals. If we accept the trend then French gasoline will be $13.50 @ 2013 and $27 @ 2019. I wonder how close this is to the "tipping point" where the ROI on petroleum storage starts to become persuasive.

Without adjusting for income in any way, it's noteworthy that US gasoline is now as expensive as French gasoline @ 2001 and French gasoline today is nearing the "magic" $7/gallon mark. I've long assumed that consumers will only change their behavior substantively when gas passes $7/gallon. It will be interesting to watch what European consumers do now.

[1] I tried to do this without resorting to Excel, but, really, non-Microsoft spreadsheets on the Mac are mediocre and Google's Spreadsheet app is really only a handy list manager. Excel still rules with an iron fist.