Back to the Drawing Board

Ford Motor Company released a series of ads in India that depicted women celebrities being bound and gagged in the back seat of one of its car models. It still boggles my mind that a company like this can generate these sorts of ideas which are screened and then approved by scads of people.

Best Buy's Big Blunder

Have you ever opened up your google email account and delved into your spam folder to try and find an email that may have accidentally wound up there? If you've looked towards the top you can always see a bunch of google ads that feature delicious spam recipes. I've always found it a hoot that google ads will pick up on key words or phrases and not determine the context that they're in. Hence the spam folder advertising spam delicacies.

I got a kick out of it, but I didn't really think much about it in a broader scope. Say for instance if you were running an online website and you also had google ads on the pages. And for instance, if google ads picked up on your products' keywords and then started advertising for similar products on your competitors' websites. Google noticed this early on and allows you to block competitor's websites from google ads so that this doesn't happen.

However, as Best Buy found out on Friday and through the weekend, the filter only works if you turn it on.

Yep, while people were attempting to buy dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, other large household appliances, Best Buy was running ads for its competitors allowing people to determine which one had the best price or the exact product that they wanted.

I can only imagine the CMO must be thinking along the lines of "DADGUMMIT!" right about now.

How Would Rock 'n' Roll Sound without Fender Guitars?

Because I was unable to fall asleep thanks to a late afternoon nap, I checked the news and was kind of dismayed to read about Fender not proceeding with its Initial Public Offering (IPO). Not that I wanted them to go through with it (heck, I didn't even know they were going public), but it made me wonder why they were going public in the first place. The only reason I could think of is that they need the money for one reason or another.

But as I got further into the article, I read that a private equity firm owns a pretty good portion of Fender which could be good or bad depending on how you look at it. This much I know after listening to three weeks' worth of NPR's Planet Money:  private equity firms generally work by people in the firm establishing a private equity fund. This fund is created by borrowing money from banks, money put up by investors, and also some of the firm's own money. The private equity firm will figure out what the problem is with a company, buy all of their stocks, fix the company, and then have an IPO to recoup their own investment and to repay the borrowed money to the bank. Prior to the IPO, the firm will usually go around to other investors and describe why they should own stock in the company. I think the analogy NPR used was flipping houses. It's pretty similar.
This is all fine and gravy, baby, but there's only one catch. When the company is bought by the firm, the company essentially takes on whatever debt it cost for the firm to acquire them and if nobody wants to buy their stock they go bankrupt or are sold off bit by bit.
So with all the musicians and rock fans in the world, why wouldn't Fender want to continue with its IPO?
Well, if you can't find anybody to buy your stock, that would be a pretty good reason.
CNNMoney reports that Fender chose not to continue after several investors claimed that the company was overvalued and that they didn't see a lot of growth for the company. But it could also just be that the stock market isn't that great right now and that they're holding out for the right time. Then again, their guitars that are made in the USA are a tad pricey which would be hard to justify in this economy. Who knows? Fender makes their own brands, but they also make Gretsch and Jackson. Maybe Fender can start selling off some of its lesser assets until it's just a big custom shop in California with another manufacturing plant in Mexico.
But if they do go bankrupt that would be the death of an icon for the music industry. Think of the reaction if General Motors went bankrupt. Oh wait, they already did. But think of it as if General Motors just shuttered everything, paid off whatever debt they could, and just quit making cars.
Fender guitars are the most well-known guitars all over the world, and that's no lie. Buddy Holly played a strat. So did Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, John Mayer, George Harrison, Bonnie Raitt, Eddie Van Halen, Mark Knopfler and lots of other musicians. Strats started off with the burgeoning of rock and roll in the 50's, tripped through the weird, experimental 60's, continued through the 70's with its hard rock bands, marched smartly through the 80's, grunged out in the 90's, and they're still being used to this day.
How would rock and roll sound without a Fender?

Breaking Newsflash

This just in: a model who's of the average size of most American women had a photo in Glamour magazine. The result? An unimaginable uproar in the fashion world and an appearance on The Today Show and a featurette on msnbc.com.

What is the world coming to? Will the supermodels who subsist on a diet of heroin and cigarettes disappear completely? Will models from now on be a healthy, normal weight? Say it ain't so! Oh the humanity!

Isn't it Ironic? Don't you think?

Hear ye, hear ye!

Spanish research who studied Mad Cow Disease is suspected to have succumbed to it.

OH the irony!

The Ultimate Irony

Anti-Kidnapping expert kidnapped in Mexico

O, sweet irony!

Daten zum Abschluss

The report I mentioned earlier conducted by a Dakota dermatologist postulating a high risk of lead blood levels in game killed by hunters is refuted by the CDC of all public health organizations. The CDC helped organize a cohort study of 740 people in the same region of North Dakota (the cohort, I guess) and they accounted for a common confounder (socioeconomic background and more importantly housing) in lead studies. As you can expect, the study found older people and people who worked with lead to have higher lead-blood levels. And it also found a significant increase in lead-blood levels with people who ate wild game. The only problem was that people usually ate several types of wild game, so it was hard to account which wild game had the most impact (I'm guessing birds since the shot used in shotgun shells is uncoated and very hard to find due to the small size), but there was a significant increase in the lead-blood levels among participants who had recently eaten game.
The study did note that the cohort had lower lead-blood levels than the average person, but they conclude that careful cleaning practices could reduce amounts of ingested lead, and that there's an unknown effect of children eating wild game since children are more susceptible to lower lead levels in their development stage.

So what does this mean? There's probably an increased risk of having higher blood levels than people who don't eat wild game, but this depends on the amount of wild game you eat. And, you might have to work with lead and eat a lot of wild game in order to get dangerously high lead-blood levels.
The report does also mention that a previous study done on lead levels in wild game were focused primarily on ground venison. The meat you use to grind is not high quality. As a matter of fact, if the deer were harvested humanely with a chest shot, the ribs and brisket would have a large amount of lead in them (assuming lead flakes off from the bullet), so you can see the problem with trying to assume that all venison would have the same amount of lead as the meat close to the entrance and exit hole. Ultimately if you use copper jacketed bullets or completely lead free bullets, like Barnes XXX, your exposure to lead will be very low.

Data and Conclusions

I read an article on MSNBC that said people eating wild game that had been shot with lead bullets are more likely to have higher lead blood levels. But not a word is given to how the study was conducted. Did they compare blood samples of the subjects prior to eating game and after eating game? Or did they just compare blood samples of hunters and eaters of all things wild and hairy to a control group? If they did the latter, they have a slight problem.

Hunters are probably exposed to lead more than the average person. They handle lead bullets, they clean their gun barrels that are dirty with burnt gunpowder, lead dust, and copper fouling, they might even make their own bullets and ammunition. And, even if this wasn't enough, another story on the same site goes on to say that "Copper or copper-jacketed bullets fragmented less than bullets designed to mushroom quickly," and reduced the actual spread of lead.

There's just one thing absolutely wrong. Most bullets are designed to mushroom quickly. And most of these bullets are copper-jacketed so that they retain a large amount of their weight, which translates: the bullet expands but stays mostly intact, lead and all. There probably is lead remaining in some of the meat from the expansion of the bullet and the lead brushing off into the muscle. But it's likely limited, as the study shows, to the area where the animal was shot, and even if the bullet did expand out to the 18 inches as claimed as the extreme in the report, bone would stop the fragments which would remain in the offal.

As for the bullets that explode into tiny fragments? I've only heard of that happening to magnum calibers fired at a short range (which magnums aren't intended to do) where the bullet doesn't penetrate effectively, but literally explodes and leaves a shallow wound on the animal. Nasty stuff indeed.

So, as my old Epidemiology professor famously once said, "So now that we have all this data, what does it mean? Well, nothing really." And I think that sums up this report nicely.

Napoleon Dynamite

Apparently this guy has never seen Napoleon Dynamite! Otherwise, he'd have known just how dangerous those things are.

Causal Inference

Once again, just because there are two things that coincide with each other doesn't mean they have any effect on one another. The only way to actually determine if an infant sleeping with a fan provided any sort of benefit or not would be to randomly assign fans to a test group. However, like the debate over smoking's deleterious effects, this is unethical to actually force subjects to do something which might be dangerous to their health. But, there is no validity to this kind of study in the article, since it's based on a hypothesis and the results of the study do not prove or disprove the hypothesis. After all, the infants of families that have fans simply might be less likely to suffer from SIDS.
I could also argue that for infants in households that have dogs or cats, the infants are less likely to suffer from SIDS. There might be some actual valid reason for why this might be, but more likely than not, having dogs or cats would not directly affect an infant's susceptibility to SIDS, and it would just be a random chance that families more susceptible to SIDS would have fewer pets.

On another note, this is about as good as CNN reporting that scientists are worried that redheads might disappear, as if heterozygosity can't occur. Sheesh.

No Sh!t File Reopened

Johnson, file this under the No Shit File!