Category: Fourth Estate

A zillion kids and and adults know “WWF” as the initials of the World Wrestling Foundation, the steroid opera that makes Miss Cleo look like a model of integrity.

And that’s the problem, because those initials were used and publicized far earlier (trademarked in the US 1961, in fact) by the World Wildlife Federation. Though it now goes, internationally, by the name World Wide Fund for Nature, it still uses the WWF initials and panda logo.

The two organizations have negotiated over the years over the conflicting initials, and reached an agreement in 1994. But subsequent alleged violations led the wildlife group to sue the wrestlers in Britain, leading to an injunction, which has now stood up to an appeal.

A London court ruled last year that the wresting organization was permitted a limited use of the initials in the United States, but could no longer use its wwf.com Web site address. The wildlife group has wwf.org.
Judges Sir Robert Carnwath, Lord Phillips and Sir Igor Judge ruled Wednesday that the federation was guilty of “clear and repeated” breaches of the agreement.
The federation estimates change of name will cost it $50 million. “The costs of rebranding now, after some five years of development, are entirely attributable to its own decision to take that risk,” Carnwath said.

I know it’s an emotionalistic response, but there’s a real joy in seeing a ultra-macho utterly-fake, seriously-lowbrow multimillion dollar media organization lose out to an international organization focused on nature and its preservation.

Go Pandas!

You know you’re in trouble when the Car & Driver review of your flagship vehicle model reads more like a stand-up routine than the normal lyrical car-enthusiast twaddle.

Cadillac says 20 percent of EXT buyers will be women with a $125,000 household income. This is lucky. It means they’ll already own their own ladders. We predict that the EXT will be snapped up by buyers whose lifelong credo is “Hey, watch this!”
Only in America could something like the Cadillac EXT be built. This makes you wonder why it’s built in Silao, Mexico.
There are lots of things on which you could spend $49,990. This is one of them.

(Via Rooba)

Some thought-provoking commentary on Enron, and why we shouldn’t be surprised that corporate big-wigs act that way when everyone else does, too:

AMERICANS OUTRAGED THAT
CORPORATIONS CHEAT JUST LIKE THEY DO
“Companies Should Be More Honest,” Says Nation That Walks Away
Quickly If Inadvertently Given Too Much Change by Cashier
New York, N.Y. (SatireWire.com) — From Enron to Global Crossing, Andersen to AIG, allegations that U.S. corporations have been cheating, lying, and even breaking the law have caused a firestorm of indignation across America, where most inhabitants regularly exceed posted speed limits, have “permanently borrowed” something from the office, and will say pretty much anything to get out of jury duty.
“It takes a lot of gall for these companies to talk about values and integrity, but all the while fudge their books and hide the truth,” said Philadelphia data processor Marty Lewis, who has yet to tell his bank that an extra $48.19 showed up on his last checking account statement.
“It’s like somehow they think the law doesn’t apply to them,” added Lewis, who really only tried that stuff in college, and then it was just at parties, and it’s not like he ever bought it himself.

I find James “The Amazing” Randi an interesting fellow. A former stage magician and mentalist, he as taken it as his vocation to debunk folks who claim to have psychic or magical powers.

He has two main tactics. First, he explains how he could do something that the other person claims to be able to do. That’s not conclusive of course. Second, he challenges the other person to perform their routine under controlled circumstances. So far, nobody whose taken the challenge has succeeded.

In this article, he talks about how psychics such as John Edwards can perform their stunts without any otherworldly or paranormal explanations, simply by using basic mentalist tricks. It’s fascinating reading.

Whether it’s actually what’s going on is another matter. I find that Randi is more often than not just as rabidly anti-belief as those people who are way too willing to believe in such phenomena. Still, true believer or true skeptic, the article’s worth a look-see.

(Via WMT)

A woman is suing Nintendo because her 30-year old son, after playing Nintendo for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, for some undefined length of time (though he bought the N-64 in ’99), died when he had a seizure and hit his head on the table.

Yeah. Right.

(Via Blather)

Since time immemorial (when I was growing up), kids were admonished at the dinner table, in no uncertain terms, “Don’t play with your food!”

Now Heinz contributes to the heat death of Western Civilization by insisting that black is white, good is evil, freedom is slavery, and playing with your food is a thing to be encouraged.

The evil tool being used to this end? Heinz EZ Squirt Mystery Color Ketchup. Inside of the bottles is ketchup in Awesome Orange, Passion Pink, and Totally Teal.

(As an aside, I once read that SF movies use blue for foods because it’s not a natural color for food here on earth, a few odd berries notwithstanding. What does that say about teal ketchup? For that matter what does it say about Heinz ketchup that it is so easy for them to screw around with its colors?)

The real trick here is that you can’t tell what color it is until you open it (the store prefers that you open it at home, not there). So you have no clue. Literally.

“Thanks to its cool curves & thin nozzle, EZ Squirt gives kids the opportunity to be artists at the table, expressing their creativity by drawing with bright colors.”
Families that buy two or more bottles may find they have different colors, allowing pint-sized Picassos to blend one Mystery Color with another. They’ll also enjoy the same benefits consumers have come to expect from this popular kid condiment. Heinz EZ Squirt Mystery Color boasts a special nozzle for accuracy and an ergonomic shape designed so smaller hands can hold on tight, allowing them to create mealtime masterpieces. And for little fries [or, more likely, their parents] who want no surprise, try regular red Heinz Tomato Ketchup in the fun EZ Squirt bottle.

Mercifully, this “promotion” will end … eventually. “Only 1 million bottles of Heinz EZ Squirt Mystery Color are being produced, for a limited time. When they’re gone, they’re gone.”

One can but hope.

(That’s actually not true. The three mystery colors will then be voted upon on the Internet, the winner joining the pantheon of “Colors Not Found in Nature, or at Least Not in Tomatoes” that Heinz proudly sells.)

(Via Blather)

My sainted wife, Margie, is a biostatistician. That’s good, because while I have always admired the statistical arts, I’m darned bad at them, and Margie’s good at pointing out where statistics are used in a bad and/or misleading way.

So are the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) folks. They give out the “Dubious Data” awards annually to “journalists who mangled statistics and subverted science in the way they reported stories.”

The focus for 2001 was the media’s literal feeding frenzy over a set of shark attacks along the Atlantic coast.

The frenzy was extraordinary. According to a NEXIS search, there were a mere 58 stories about shark attacks in the U.S. print media in June. This increased tenfold in July to 592, and it rose again in August to 684. September was the month the story would have consumed all others, with 624 entries up to and including September 11. The advent of another dangerous but unseen villain stopped all that.
[…] What happened to produce all this attention? An eight year-old boy in Florida had his arm ripped off by a shark in July. Then two people were killed in North Carolina and Virginia within a few days. The last time two people had been killed by sharks in one year was in 1994. So 2001 seemed unusual, with two fatalities close together, and Virginia had never seen a shark attack fatality, while North Carolina had not seen one since 1957.

Of course, this was just a statistical blip, easy with such small numbers, but the media attention drew pundits who saw sinister patterns with no basis in fact, blaming everything from global warming to Bill Clinton’s fisheries policy.

And the final, crowning glory? There were, by the end fo the year, only 76 attacks and five fatalities in 2001 — down from 85 and 12 in 2000.

Good article. More people should read it than are likely to.

(Via InstaPundit)

Huzzah and hey-nonny-nonny. California has decided to start numbering freeway exits, that last state in the union to do so.

Growing up in California, I never realized this lack. Exits were by street name, period. Oh, yeah, there was the old San Bernadino Freeway (Californians call their freeways and interstates by name, not number — and when they call interstates by number, they just use the number, e.g., “We drove to LA on the 10”), which had exit numbers, and that was kinda cool, but hardly necessary.

(It is, though, the genesis of 47 being identified as the Universal Number by members of the Claremont Colleges, as Exit 47 is Indian Hill Blvd., the exit for the Claremont Colleges. But I digress.)

It was only when I moved to Colorado that I realized this amazing technique. Imagine … you’re driving somewhere, and you know you have to take Exit 121 (because that’s what you were told, or what’s in the AAA book) … and you’re just passing Exit 110, so you know you have 11 miles to go. Such magic! Directions can be given by exit number, too, saving space and ambiguity. No longer dependent on mileage signs (“Santa Carla 23 mi.), you can use your maps to know how far to the next town … or state.

It’s remarkably simple and elegant … and California, home of the automobile suburbs and the commuting culture, has just never gotten around to implementing it, like every other state did in 1950.

Until now. Wow.

Numbering will start with 0 at Mexico (for north-south freeways) and at 0 at the Pacific Ocean (for east-west ones).

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” says my Michigan-born wife, who notes the state has enough Santas (Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Santa Clarita, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara) to befuddle a tour bus full of cartographers and GTS (Global Tracking System) executives.
“Now I can tell my friends, you get off at exit number thus-and-so and there’s no chance of a screw up,” she says.
Such a system also helps when more than one freeway exits into the same community: the “El Camino Real” exit from Interstate 5 in San Clemente, for instance, as distinguished from “El Camino Real” exit from nearby route 91.
Or the bewilderment of travelers reading notices such as, “San Diego, next 12 exits.”

Of course, some Californians are oddly terrified that all their exit names will be replaced by numbers, not supplemented by them, and thus residents of Claremont will feel like they’ve blurred into Montclair, with only a number distinguishing them. Well, they’re right, in that if you’re driving long the 10 there’s pretty much no other sign that you’ve crossed from one to the other — but city and street names will continue to be posted — it’s just that there will be exit numbers as well.

Believe me. It works. You’ll like it.

It’s the end of the line for Miss Cleo, the Caribbean-sounding psychic who’s a staple of late night television. FTC suits against the parent companies of various Miss Cleo fronts have led those companies to pull the plug on the lady.

In some way it’s a shame, since certainly her persona came across (usually) as no-nonsense advice to “kick de bum out!” and “face up to what you’ve been doing, mon!” But the array of charges against the companies that were using the Miss Cleo (a/k/a Youree Dell Harris) indicate that somebody ought to have known that this end was coming.

(Via Blather, who has an amusing intro to the whole story)

The pure, unmitigated, horrifying evil of sippy cups.

Before anyone gets too worried, the terrifying dangers that are discussed are:

• Kids who spend all their time drinking out of sippy cups may have a (very temporary) minor speech impediment. Maybe. They think. But they’re not sure.
• Kids who always have a sippy cup at hand full of sugary drinks get more cavities.

• Parents who don’t keep track of the sippy cups their kids have may let them sit around for days, leading to sippy cups full of germs.

Next thing you know, they’ll be reporting the awful truth that kids who have sippy cups and fall off of cliffs can suffer severe contusions.

(Via Blather)

We haven’t been watching the Olympics until this evening. But one bit of tech we’re seeing that’s very cool — on the downhill skiing, the digital overlay of two competitors so that you can see how each tightened (or increased) the lead, handled things differently, and so forth. Very cool.

United Airline mechanics have rejected the most recent contract offer. They could go on strike as soon as 10:01 p.m., next Tuesday.

Margie’s folks are flying into town over the weekend. They leave two hours or so before H-Hour.

On the other hand, a week from Sunday I go flying off to Oak Ridge, TN. And reading the article, it sounds unlikely that things will clear up, or be mandated cleared up, by then.

I won’t debate the legitimacy of either side’s position here. I’m afraid I’m enough of a selfish git to wish they’d just get it resolved, justly or un-, in time for my flight.

Okay, this one’s getting some harsh play out there, but I’m not all that certain that it’s yet another example of airline security run amok.

The Feds have adopted a “no getting out of your seat for 30 minutes before the plan lands” rule for Salt Lake City flights, modeled after one recently put in place for National Airport in Washington. The idea makes a certain measure of sense. With sky marshalls on board, trying to hijack a flight at the beginning has gotten dicier, but some nut somehow forcing his way into the cockpit for a few crucial moments as a plane approaches the Olympics (or all of Washington, DC) might be easier to pull off.

So the pilot lets everyone know about this, twice. And as they enter the final 30 minutes, a large gent (unfortunately named Bizarro), gets up out of his seat anyway, and uses the head.

A flight attendant exhorted him to return to his seat immediately. He acted in a hostile fashion, and was observed by two undercover sky marshalls, one of whom thought he saw the gent flash a thumbs-up signal to another passenger.

Taking no risks (that’s what they’re paid for, after all), the sky marshalls took control of the cabin, and forced all passengers to keep their hands on their heads for the rest of the flight.

Now, to read some accounts, this was just plane stupid. I’m not so sure. I think it falls into the “better safe than sorry” category, especially since the guy was breaking a twice-announced rule, and was behaving in a less than apologetic fashion.

Bottom line, this is not a time to be rude or disobedient to flight crews. If you really have to go to the head in that thirty minutes, you damned well run to it with your legs crossed, and be damned apologetic when you exit. Better yet, go before the announced deadline.

Cough medicine manufacturers have managed to do away with at least one effect of their products — cough medicine does not seem to do all that much to stop coughs, according to some English research. A U. of Bristol study indicates there little evidence that cough medicine does any more than placebos in keeping people from coughing.

Denver keeps forking over fines to Adams County, the neighbor to Denver International, because of noise from the airport.

But the noise is calculated by computer model instead of real measurements, the agreement was based on a different number of runways than what are actually really there … and, in some cases, the “noise violations” are lower than the ambient noise in neighborhoods.

“There was never a commitment on the part of the communities of Adams County that we would be quiet,” said Rob Coney, director of planning and development for the Adams County who took part in the airport annexation and noise issue talks 14 years ago.
The situation is frustrating to Denver officials, who are obligated to keep average annual airplane noise over three large chunks of Adams County and Aurora to within a range from 31.4 to 51.7 decibels in neighborhoods where existing noise is louder.
[…] For example, the 1988 agreement sets a limit of 37.7 decibels for average annual airplane noise at Washington Street and Thornton Parkway in Thornton. Denver is facing a $500,000 fine because noise there for last year’s flights was calculated at 45.2 decibels, well over the limit.
But a monitoring station nearby registered neighborhood noise at an average of 56.5 decibels on both Sept. 11 and 12. That’s 1.6 decibels higher than on Sept. 4 and just 0.3 decibels lower than what was measured there on Sept. 5.

And, remarkably enough, the Adams Co. officials complain that Denver is being “blatantly arrogant” in not offering to buy up a bunch of houses.

Some airport security screeners have been using pat-downs to do some not-so-subtle groping. And, until this weekend, nobody was really doing anything about it.

Is anyone else shocked that Argenbright security is involved in this sort of mess again?

Current research indicates the Oracles at Delphi, who basically gave advice to everyone from Oedipus to Croesus on behalf of Apollo, were high sniffing ethylene fumes.

Scientists don’t know about Apollo, but evidence is growing that the priestesses, known as pythia, were ripped on hydrocarbon gases, especially ethylene, a sometime anesthetic which, taken in modest doses, can induce lively conversation of a somewhat incoherent nature.
[…] Ethylene, Spiller explained, produces “stages” of anesthesia. Low doses induce “disembodied euphoria, with periods of excitation and amnesia,” he said. But at higher doses, “you get delirium, hysteria and a combative, agitated state,” he added. Further along comes unconsciousness and, if one is not careful, death.

Groovy, man. Watch out for those Persians, y’know? And, pass the chips.

(Via Blather)

Education, Darwin-style.

Stupid Idea 1: Police officer decides to pass around gun for “show & tell” in a school classroom.

Stupid Idea 2: Police officer removes clip, but doesn’t check for a bullet in the chamber.

Stupid Idea 3: Police officer eventually gets gun back (nobody having pullled the trigger, mercifully), reloads clip, inadvertently discharges bullet in chamber, grazing the face of a 10-year-old.

Hopefully a number of lessons were learned in that particular class.

The officer in question was not even there on duty.

Philadelphia Police Capt. Edward Chiodetti said that about 3 p.m., the officer went to the school to pick up her son and was interacting with the students in the boy’s classroom. Chiodetti said the children first wanted to see her badge, which she displayed, and then asked to see her weapon, a 9 mm Glock semiautomatic.
[…] The officer, Vanessa Carter-Moragne, 39, a five-year veteran assigned to the Ninth Police District in Center City, was removed from street duty and is now the subject of an Internal Affairs investigation, police said.

Yeesh. One would hope so.

(Via Xkot)

Denver’s parking meter enforcers have to write a minimum of 75 tickets per day (150 on street-sweeping days). If they go 10-20 minutes without writing a ticket, they have to explain themselves. Write over 100 on a given day, and they stand to get a bonus.

John Oglesby, director of parking management, insisted Thursday the minimums aren’t quotas. The distinction, he said, is that employees are given the opportunity to explain why they failed to meet them.
“It’s not a quota; it’s a performance standard,” Oglesby said.
Prior to September, the ticket writers’ job description had no objective measurement against which to rate their performance, he said, which violates city personnel policy.

Yeah. Right.

After visiting a largely federally-funded Portland job training center in January, and getting photos taken and shaking hands and hearing stirring stories and all that, the President praised the work being done there. “I went by and saw the good instructors there that are trying to help people help themselves.”

Which, of course, explains why 80% of the center’s funding (and funding for similar centers) is chopped in the President’s proposed budget, less than a month later.