Igor Delovski Board

[XNote]

SuperSize Me!

The Movie!

[Dasani water]

"Dasani water was found not to be mineral water at all, but just purified
tap water (i.e. water from the Thames river) The company still planned to
launch the product even after that giant dose of bad publicity, until later it
was found that the Dasani product contained more than the allowed legal
limit of bromate, a chemical known to cause cancer of the kidneys. That
killed Dasani in the UK. The ensuing scandal was compared to the New Coke
fiasco as one of the worst marketing disasters in the history of the Coca-
Cola company. As such, launch of the Dasani was cancelled in Europe. It´s
launch was also postponed in Asia and South America. For legal reasons I
wasn´t even allowed to obtain a copy of the commercial we shot for my
reel. So, imagine my surprise when I came back to the US about a year
later, opened my mother´s refrigerator, and voilá two bottles of Dasani."

The Most Isolated Country in the World

[XNote]

BBC: Who are you calling fat?

"Britain is the fattest country in Europe and part of the problem is
people don't realise they are overweight, says the government. So what
does obesity look like?"

[XNote]

Slashdot: Keeping Cool May be the Key to Longevity

"New Scientist reports that Scripps Research Institute scientists have
found that lowering the body temperature of mice by just 0.5C extends
their lifespan by around 15%. Until now the only proven way of increasing
longevity has been calorie restriction — but as this also causes a lowering
of body temperature the researchers speculate that this cooling may be
the underlying mechanism retarding aging. In this study mice with a
defect in their lateral hypothalamus, which has the side effect of cooling
body temperature, not only lived longer but also ate normal amounts."

[Ike]

Environment drowning in bottled water

"Evian, the woman says. It's naive spelled backwards.

The Earth Policy Institute reports that global consumption of bottled
water reached in 2004 was up 57 percent from the amount consumed five
years earlier. Even where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled
water is producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of
energy.

Although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap
water, it can cost up to 10,000 times more," states an article at the Earth
Policy Institute Web site. "At as much as $2.50 per liter ($10 per gallon),
bottled water costs more than gasoline.

The French Senate advises people who drink bottled mineral water to
change brands frequently because the added minerals are helpful in
small amounts but may be dangerous in higher doses."

[delovski]

Doctors Rate New Salad Entrées Hyped by Chains

Offering a salad entrée is the latest marketing push for fast-food and
quick-serve chains, but according to a new analysis by the nutrition
experts at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM),
many fast-food salads are not any more healthful than a greasy burger.
For example, McDonald’s Crispy Chicken Bacon Ranch Salad with
dressing has a hefty 51 grams of fat and 660 calories while a Big Mac has
34 grams of fat and 590 calories. Surprisingly, this salad entrée also has
just as much cholesterol, 85 milligrams, as the Big Mac.

[XNote]

What happens to your body if you drink a Coke right now?

"Have you ever wondered why Coke comes with a smile? It’s because it
gets you high. They took the cocaine out almost a hundred years ago.
You know why? It was redundant."

[Ike]

Consumerist: 14 Hewlett-Packard Company Secrets From A Former Employee

"A former Hewlett-Packard worker could barely wait for their non-disclosure-agreement
to end so they could spill 14 company secrets to The Consumerist."

[XNote]

ATHLETIC FOOTWEAR AND RUNNING INJURIES

"It seems that the earliest sports shoes were developed in the 1830's by
the Liverpool rubber company owned by John Boyd Dunlop. Although they
were first called sand shoes because they were worn on the beach by the
Victorian middle classes, they eventually became known as plimsolls
because the lines formed by the rubber and canvas bond looked similar
to the Plimsoll line on a ship's hull."

[delovski]

TimesOnline: The exercise craze that crippled a generation

"They were promised the body beautiful and their mantra was 'No pain no
gain'. Two decades later they are feeling it again — in their knees, hips and
lower backs. They are the casualties of the aerobics boom."

[delovski]

Professor fights against plastic: Vom Saal says obesity linked to chemical.

"Plastic companies use bisphenol-A to make a lot of things - food containers,
water bottles and even baby bottles. But there’s only one thing Fredrick
vom Saal would like the industry to do with it: Take it off the market."

[delovski]

TUAW: New Get a Mac Ad: Stuffed



"While Apple may have conveniently forgotten to mention their own included
trialware, any who has ever set up a PC can tell you that there is absolutely
no comparison. The included Mac trialware doesn't launch at startup and is
as easy as dragging to the trash if you wish to remove them."

[Ike]

the Inquirer: Avoid the Vista badge, it means DRM inside

"It will then be broken in a few hours, and you will have to make a new set
of drivers with a different encryption scheme. Who pays for this massive
engineering effort in the end? The user, that would be you. What do you get
for your added money? Less compatibility, devices that don't work, much less
work together, and forced updates that will break your machine if you don't
apply them. You are roadkill that is forced to pay for your pain, a wallet with
legs."

[delovski]

Wired: How Security Companies Sucker Us With Lemons, by Bruce Schneier

"This means that the best cars don't get sold; their prices are too high. Which
means that the owners of these best cars don't put their cars on the market.
And then this starts spiraling. The removal of the good cars from the market
reduces the average price buyers are willing to pay, and then the very good
cars no longer sell, and disappear from the market. And then the good cars,
and so on until only the lemons are left.

In a market where the seller has more information about the product than
the buyer, bad products can drive the good ones out of the market.

Of course, it's more expensive to make an actually secure USB drive. Good
security design takes time, and necessarily means limiting functionality.
Good security testing takes even more time, especially if the product is any
good. This means the less-secure product will be cheaper, sooner to market
and have more features. In this market, the more-secure USB drive is going
to lose out."

[delovski]

Bottled Water, Bottled Hype Part 2

'Los Angeles-based Fiji Water runs magazine ads for its bottled water with
the headline "The Label Says Fiji Because It's Not Bottled in Cleveland."

Cleveland officials retaliate by running tests revealing that Fiji bottled water
contains 6.3 micrograms of arsenic per liter, while the city's tap water has
none.'

[Maja]

Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we?

"A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew
that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing
obesity, infertility...and worse."

[delovski]

UTNE: The Dark Side of Soy

"When I began studying holistic health and nutrition, I kept running across
risks associated with eating soy. Endocrine disruption? Check. Digestive
problems? Check. I researched soy's deleterious effects on thyroid, fertility,
hormones, sex drive, digestion, and even its potential to contribute to certain
cancers. For every study that proved a connection between soy and reduced
disease risk another cropped up to challenge the claims. What was going on?"

[delovski]

Bottled water and snake oil

"The company became a laughing stock, as readers were reminded of
an episode of a popular TV comedy, “Only Fools and Horses”. In it Del
Boy, a decidedly dodgy businessman, decides to bottle tap water, selling
it as “Peckham Spring”, named after the unprepossessing inner-London
borough."

[Ike]

The incredible true story of how the food industry is legally allowed to lie

"Most people don't realize that "0g Trans Fat" on a package doesn't mean
that the product actually has 0 grams of trans fats. In fact, the product in
question could have quite a bit of the trans fats that it claims to have none
of, and it's all perfectly legal."

[delovski]

Articles from the New Yorker: Big and Bad - How the S.U.V. ran
over automotive safety.

"According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that
S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered,
and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and
who lack confidence in their driving skills.

In a thirty-five m.p.h. crash test, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade has a
sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-
cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent
chance of a leg injury.

The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan, a vehicle engineered from
the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame,
are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.

The SUV driver who navigates the driveway and street without difficulty
until she tries to brake may not find out that the road is slippery until it is
too late. " Jettas are safe because they make their drivers feel unsafe.
S.U.V.s are unsafe because they make their drivers feel safe. That feeling
of safety isn't the solution; it's the problem."

[Ike]

rense.com - Sean Dix, The American Dream, And Justice

"His next patented invention was sterilized dental floss in five-inch segments
that would be inserted into the FlossRings. These were revolutionary advan-
cements in dental health care, but Sean did not realize how revolutionary they
were at the time. He would not discover until 1995, that his would be the only
sterilized and sterilely packaged floss in the industry.

Like most of us, Sean assumed that all dental floss was sterile. The unfortu-
nate truth is that it is not."

[XNote]

nyt - Stretching: The Truth

"The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds — known as
static stretching — primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually
weakens them. In a recent study conducted at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas, athletes generated less force from their leg muscles after static stret-
ching than they did after not stretching at all."

[delovski]

Bernard Madoff: How to Create your own Ponzi Scheme

"The criminal complaint filed against Madoff alleges that investors lost $50
billion because of the scheme. That is right. $50 billion. He now faces 20
years in prison and a fine of $5 million if convicted."

[delovski]

Semyon Dukach - The mathematics of probability that govern the
trade-offs of risk and reward are fundamentally counter-intuitive

"The reason that societies ban pyramid schemes outright, instead of
relying on the market to make them unprofitable, is that most people
trust their intuition, and their intuition leads them astray."

[delovski]

alternet.org - The Woman Who Could Have Prevented This Financial
Mess Was Silenced by Greenspan, Rubin and Summers

"A sad tale emerges of willfully arrogant behavior designed to undermine a
wise woman's good judgment."

From TFA:

"George Soros, the prominent financier, avoids using the financial contra-
cts known as derivatives “because we don’t really understand how they
work.” Felix G. Rohatyn, the investment banker who saved New York from
financial catastrophe in the 1970s, described derivatives as potential hydro-
gen bombs."

[Ike]

Gregory J. Knox - Knox Machinery Letter to GM: A MUST READ!

"I have six children, so I am not unfamiliar with the concept of wanting so-
meone to bail you out of a mess that you have gotten yourself into - my ch-
ildren do this on a weekly, if not daily basis, as I did when I was their age."

[Ike]

AppleInsider - Jon Stewart exposes Apple stock manipulation

"Following the original iPhone pre-launch rumors Cramer talked about in The
Street video clip, his site continued a merciless attack on the iPhone over the
next year, including a "report" by Brett Arends which claimed that buying the
iPhone would actually cost users $17,670, followed up by Arends' lists of re-
ason not to buy it, many provided directly by industry flacks working for com-
peting companies."

[delovski]

the bottomline - Chasing Madoff: A Finance Geek’s Obsession Ends
In Tragedy

"So I go to Harry and say, why can’t you do this for us? And he looks at it
for five minutes I swear, and he says, this thing’s a fraud. I said, Wow.

That’s when they knew, all the way back in 1999, that Bernard Madoff, the
respected former NASDAQ chairman and adviser to the feds, was a fraud."

[delovski]

JoS: $350m for a contacts database

"Projects on this scale are nearly always late and over budget. Big business
has learned that a big bang approach doesn't work, government hasn't."

[delovski]

newyorker.com - XXXL - Why are we so fat?

"A decade later, Wallerstein had retired from the movie business and was s-
erving on McDonald’s board of directors when the chain confronted a similar
problem. Customers were purchasing a burger and perhaps a soft drink or a
bag of fries, and then leaving. How could they be persuaded to buy more?

Wallerstein’s suggestion—a bigger bag of fries—was greeted skeptically by t-
he company’s founder, Ray Kroc. Kroc pointed out that if people wanted mo-
re fries they could always order a second bag.

“But Ray,” Wallerstein is reputed to have said, “they don’t want to eat two
bags—they don’t want to look like a glutton.” Eventually, Kroc let himself be
convinced; the rest, as they say, is supersizing."

[Ike]

maximumpc.com - Display Myths Shattered: How Monitor & HDTV
Companies Cook Their Specs

"Take everything you think you know about displays and throw it out the
window. It's time for a clinic on what display specs really mean—brace
yourself for the alarming truth."

[delovski]

justadventure.com - How to Solve a Slider Puzzle

"As it turned out, that was the only way to solve that particular challenge.
You had to physically take the little blocks out and transpose the 14 and
the 15, then glue the thing back together. This in fact is what kept Loyd
from getting a patent on the maddening little device. He had to admit to
the Patent Office agent that it was not actually possible to solve the puzzle
as it was constructed."

[Ike]

alternet.org - Michael Moore: Why Republicans Are Always Worried
About Their Pet Corporations Facing Any Real Free Market Competition

"Whenever corporate executives begin talking about how they support "free
markets" and "competition," check to see if you still have your wallet."

[Ike]

Slashdot - Scientists Say People Aren't Smart Enough For Democracy To Flourish

"The inability of the incompetent to recognize their own limitations is a
story that has been covered before on Slashdot. But, what happens
when you apply that finding to politics? From the article: 'The democratic
process relies on the assumption that citizens can recognize the best po-
litical candidate, or best policy idea. But a growing body of research has
revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to
disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce
mediocre leadership and policies. The research shows that incompetent
people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or
the quality of those people's ideas. If people lack expertise on tax reform,
it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts.

They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments...
democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over
dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively
prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."'"

[delovski]

rafaelkino - Capitalism is failing

"If you have a decent paying job in a developed country, those needs are
pretty much fulfilled. It's the rest of the pyramid that we are now making
products for. The problem with that is simple: consumers have no idea about
their psychological needs, and can be easily manipulated into thinking they
need something when they actually don't. That wasn't as true for physical
products."

[Ike]

bi - Five Ways Bernie Madoff Was Right

"His resume, added to year by year, is truly impressive. He was chairman of
the board of directors of Nasdaq, a founding member of the board of the
International Securities Clearing Corp. in London and was on the board of
directors of the Securities Industry Association (now the Securities Industry
and Financial Markets Association)."