Fascinating Threads
There are some interesting stories, today. At Pink Truth: Facts, there is a discussion about how the sales techniques taught to the consultants to use on their customers are being used against the consultants. The particular technique discussed is "overcoming an objection before it is verbalized". You might thought that the consultants were be more aware and resist -but apparently not.
Over at the ($) Wall Street Journal, Cynthia Crossen has a story called "Gossip: So Much Fun People Once Tried To Make It Illegal". "Some public officials went so far as to try to criminalize gossip. In Tennessee, state Sen. John W. Butler introduced a bill in 1927 that would have made gossip a misdemeanor. He was less successful with his antigossip bill than his antievolution one, which two years earlier had sparked the Scopes trial. As a Tennessee "society matron" told a reporter, "I know this bill is aimed at slanderous misstatement, but if you interpreted it in a technical way, every bridge party would end by all the ladies being jailed for gossip." I suspect that any thorough analysis of fraud will also have to confront the brute fact that we love to lie, make up information, and disseminate.
Nicholas Carr, with another great title, The Ignorance of the Crowd, has a timely skeptical view about how well open source actually works. "What makes the open source model so well suited to finding and fixing software flaws is that debugging is a task that requires little coordination among workers. Debuggers are able to sift through chunks of code in isolation -- whether "splendid" or not -- without knowing or caring what their fellow bug finders are doing. "Debugging," as Raymond puts it, "is parallelizable." All the debuggers have to do is communicate their findings and fixes to some central authority, like Linus Torvalds. The central authority takes care of synthesizing the work of the crowd, choosing the best contributions, melding them together into a coherent product, and then redistributing the work to the crowd for the next go-round." Carr trains his skeptical eye on technology, and does not accept the easy answer.
Janet Sparks, at www.bluemaumau, casts a critical eye on Health Care Franchising in Kenya. "A PBS NOW expose' on May 25 took a hard look at a for profit-healthcare program that was eager to provide basic care and essential drugs to treat millions of sick people in rural Africa through the same principle used to make fast food franchises a success. It's plan is to use a business-format franchise system to open healthcare franchises in Kenya that could help diagnosis illnesses and distribute medications for easy-to-treat diseases, services urgently needed to cut down the sky-rocketing death rate among the poorest of people. On the surface it sounds like a noble undertaking, but with their desire to open thousands of these shops under a "Subway-type" model of consistency and growth, some are questioning the dynamics of the program. ..."
At Marginal Revolution, I found a nice reference to a new work on the tulip mania in Holland, 1630-1637, TULIPMANIA: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, by Anne Goldgar. The Financial Times reviewed the book, "We think we know the story of 'tulipmania': the 17th-century Dutch dropped fortunes on tulips, ruined their economy, even killed themselves over the bulbs. In short, tulipmania is remembered as the first market bubble. It has been used as an analogy for subsequent ones, most recently during the dotcom boom. However, Anne Goldgar tells us at the start of her excellent debunking book: "Most of what we have heard of it is not true." For instance, Goldgar couldn't identify a single person bankrupted by tulipmania. In this dense academic work - with longueurs for readers who aren't themselves tulipmaniacs - she tells a new story."
Finally, although I wasn't knocked out with ABC's 20/20 story on Mannatech, it provided me with a chance to review Barron's original story in May, 2005. "Mannatech is selling Ambrotose only as a food supplement and so needs no blessing from regulators. However, the company is strictly prohibited from claiming Ambrotose "treats" or "cures" anything. Moreover, the Federal Trade Commission requires Mannatech to have "adequate substantiation" for its claims, meaning they must be based on "competent and reliable scientific evidence." Associates receive clear guidelines about what they can claim, Caster asserts, and the company disciplines or dismisses those who break the rules. Yet even the most cursory visit to the Websites of Mannatech associates reveals that these sites are replete with the most astonishing of claims. For example, one such Website, with no readily visible disclaimer, tells with graphic visuals and somewhat primitive prose the remarkable story of Jaclyn, a young woman suffering from multiple sclerosis. She is shown first sitting in a wheelchair and then, in a second photo, working out on a treadmill!" Pascal's Wager strikes again.
