Tuesday, November 4, 2008

team work


I'm impressed, although the little guys are as often as not a menace when I take my lunch in the park.

The cheeky greys decided to team up when they realised the swinging cylinder would not stay still long enough for them to reach inside and grab food.

One clambered up the tree to hold the container, while his pal happily swiped seeds down below.

They then swapped positions when the diner had eaten enough.

via Gene Expression

Monday, November 3, 2008

Deal me out

If you think we need another FDR during these economically troubled times, take a look at this article, which describes work by two UCLA economists, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian:
"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

"President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services," said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. "So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."

...In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt's policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Iran's economic stimulus package



With the price of oil crashing, look for an "incident" to scare it back up, says Galrahn at Information Dissemination:
As the price of oil drops, the pursuit of nuclear power doesn't justify the economic costs to the autocratic driven economy in Iran. The loss of government revenue due to lower oil prices comes at the same time the UN is discussing the next round of sanctions. It also comes at the same time that Iran's biggest supporter Russia suffers a stock market crash, which is noteworthy because the Micex is where a lot of Iranian autocrats go with their investments.

So what will Iran do? Raise the price of oil, and they have a time tested strategy for doing exactly that.

unique elegance and nimbus

For your next holiday, China's own Dead Sea: Yuncheng Salt Lake. "Compared with the bath place at the Dead Sea in lsrael,it is endowed with more vitality and unique elegance and nimbus." Perhaps so:


From the November 30, 2002, Ottawa Citizen:
The potential of Yuncheng Salt Lake as a tourist area was not spotted until the president of the Nanfeng Chemical Industry Group, which mines the lake for salt, read an article about the Dead Sea.

Wang Mengfei flew to Israel last year and returned with mineral compounds which were subsequently found to be similar to those at Yuncheng.

But tourism experts said the similarities with the Dead Sea ended there, and predicted bosses of the Yuncheng Salt Lake resort would struggle to capture the public's imagination.

Zhang Guangrui, director of the Tourism Research Centre at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: "Shanxi has few tourist attractions in comparison with Israel's appeal as the birthplace of Jesus.

"It is also far from big cities. Affluent Chinese people will travel to nearby places for recuperation, but not hundreds of kilometres."
Wang was not discouraged.


Apparently Nanfeng is Nafine these days. Their Chinese website is much more fun; be sure to have the sound on. Here you'll find commercials for their many household products.

Friday, October 10, 2008

All your translation are belong to us


From the quality control page of Shanghai Ju Peng Translation Co., a representative sample:
★1.We have a sound and stable pool of translation team, tasks of translation are strictly selected and assigned in accordance with languages and specialty fields.

★4.We track up and monitor text pieces in the course they are being translated, and deal with and resolve all the way those key points and pitfalls involved; project team is so created whenever for any large project of translation work and senior translators, professors or foreign experts are initiated to be in charge of jobs of aligning, tuning glossary and of ensuring texts consistent to the style of overall work translated.

★5.Once pieces of translation completed, there are other translators assigned to conduct follow-up proofreading in order to eliminate occurrences of usual errors as letter omission, mistranslation, wrong figures and improper typeset.
If you need work, offer to clean up their copy....

Thursday, October 9, 2008

More piratey stuff




If you thought my pirate post was interesting, check out EagleSpeak, who really gives the topic a working over.

And if Pirate Jack Muller (at right) catches your fancy, go here.

HPV isn't cervical cancer










An AP story today says 1/4 of all US teen girls have received Merck's vaccine against human papilloma virus, Gardasil. HPV causes genital warts; it also predisposes a woman to cervical cancer, hence the recommendation that girls be vaccinated. But just how do you think /women are exposed to HPV? Holding hands with other females? Sex with men, obviously; who almost certainly were exposed via sex with women. So: why aren't boys asked to get the vaccination?

I think it's odd that feminists haven't made anything of this.




The question becomes even more pressing when you consider that as of July, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service requires girls and women between the ages of 11 and 26 looking for permanent residence to be vaccinated against HPV. The requirement does not apply to males. As a consequence, women must fork over $300 to $1400 more than men, according to this article.

Worse, the committee responsible for the new regulation was unaware that "Under a 1996 immigration law, any vaccination recommended by the U.S. government for its citizens becomes a requirement for anyone seeking permanent residency in the U.S." when it recommended Gardasil for girls ages 11 through 26 in 2006.
Officials at the CDC say that the agency’s Gardasil recommendation was not meant to make the Gardasil vaccine mandatory for immigrants. A CDC spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that the vaccination committee did not realized the way its Gardasil recommendation would impact immigrants.