aubreyturner.org

This is interesting:

Shoppers with a nose for fashion will soon be able to buy perfumed clothes thanks to new technology that allows scents to be woven into fabric.

The technology, called Sensory Perception Technologies (SPT), will allow firms to weave particles of moisturisers, deodorants, fragrances and even anti-tobacco agents into fabrics.

“Early trials have proved SPT a success with many global clothing companies interested in a host of products from moisturisers and deodorisers to signature scents,” ICI, whose fragrances unit Quest developed the technology with marketing body, The Woolmark Company, said in a statement on Monday.

ICI said the technology will allow fabric makers to incorporate tiny droplets in miniature waterproof particles into fabrics that can be activated by movement or touch.

I can see plenty of uses for a fabric with a built-in deodorizer.  Perhaps we wouldn’t be forced to share other people’s B.O. in elevators and other confined spaces.

Link via Slashdot.

I can’t verify this yet, as it is an advance blurb for a planned “investigative report” on a Phoenix TV station (ABC Channel 15, KNX-TV).  Here’s the meat of the story:

Curt Avallone, Vice President for Marketing and New Technology at Ahold-owned Stop & Shop (the largest grocery chain on the east coast), admits that Stop & Shop has developed software to analyze the eating habits of individual shoppers, converting their shopper card records into detailed nutritional and dietary profiles. 

Apparently, it was quite expensive to develop the software, so to recoup expenses the company plans to share the data with several HMO’s, Avallone reveals.

Why doesn’t this surprise me?  It was only a matter of time (if true, that is).

See the “MORE” section for the full email alert.

Update:(2/26/2003)  This morning I got an email that the news report did not include the statements from Avallone.  So the above is definitely unconfirmed.

PHOENIX ANTI-CARD BOMBSHELL AIRS TONIGHT:
LANDS AHOLD DEEPER IN HOT WATER

The ABC affiliate in Phoenix will air explosive footage tonight of a
major Ahold supermarket executive admitting to planned abuses of his
store’s shopper card database. (Details on news program below.)

Curt Avallone, Vice President for Marketing and New Technology at
Ahold-owned Stop & Shop (the largest grocery chain on the east coast),
admits that Stop & Shop has developed software to analyze the eating
habits of individual shoppers, converting their shopper card records
into detailed nutritional and dietary profiles.

Apparently, it was quite expensive to develop the software, so to recoup
expenses the company plans to share the data with several HMO’s,
Avallone reveals.

CASPIAN has been warning shoppers for years of this very development.

Curt Avallone is the same man who recently boasted of Stop & Shop’s
plans to utilize “tracking technology in store ceilings [that] could
pinpoint a customer’s whereabouts and. . .cross-reference special offers
with personal data.” [1]

In addition, the Stop & Shop chain recently intoduced RFID-based
“Speedpass” payment technology into three of its Boston-area stores —
the only supermarket chain in the nation to do so. Shoppers can now
“wave” their Speedpass “wands” to pay for their groceries instandly
through an automatic credit card charge or checking account deduction.
Since the Speedpass is linked with the store’s data collection card
program, those who participate have their purchases automatically
recorded in Stop & Shop’s database. [2][3]

Stop & Shop has fared quite poorly in CASPIAN pricing surveys in the
past. Perhaps all the money the chain has invested in misguided tracking
and surveillance technologies explains why their prices are consistently
higher than their competitors. That and a little problem with corporate
ethics… (see next story)

Sources:
[1] http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,3959,43528,00.asp
[2] http://www.speedpass.com/news/article.jsp?id=55
[3] http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/030212/120397_1.html

=========================================================================
ABC NEWS PROGRAM DETAILS – WATCH TONIGHT!

If you are in the Phoenix area, you can watch the story tonight at 10:00
PM on ABC Channel 15 (KNX-TV). The segment will include footage of last
week’s protest against Safeway stores in Phoenix, along with interviews
with CASPIAN founder Katherine Albrecht and CASPIAN volunteer Alan
Stang.

If you are not in the Phoenix area, you can view the segment in
streaming video once it is made available at KNXV-TV’s website at:

The Investigators: “Card Tricks”
http://www.abc15.com/

=========================================================================

AHOLD: THE NEXT “ENRON”

Who is controlling the data collected on Stop & Shop customers? Not the
sort of people you would want to trust with intimate details on your
family’s eating habits, apparently.

Royal Ahold, the Dutch-based multinational supermarket corporation that
owns Stop & Shop, Giant, Bi-Lo, and Tops Markets, stunned Wall Street
yesterday with revelations that it has engaged in accounting fraud
rivalling that of (former) energy giant Enron.

Ahold’s stock went into freefall over the disclosure of massive
accounting fraud, losing over 60% of its value and being downgraded to
“junk status” in a single day. Ahold stock is currently trading below
$3.50 a share, down from a high last year of over $26.00.

Ahold’s board of directors has fired the company’s CEO and chief
financial officer, and faces massive class action lawsuits filed by at
least two law firm stemming from its fraudulent practices.

This is a company that clearly can’t be trusted to tell the truth to its
shareholders – can we trust it to tell the truth to its customers?

=========================================================================
Withdraw your support of ethically challenged grocery corporations
BOYCOTT AHOLD-OWNED STOP & SHOP, GIANT, BI-LO, AND TOPS CHAINS!
=========================================================================

CASPIAN – Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering
A national consumer organization opposing supermarket “loyalty” cards
and other retail surveillance schemes since 1999

http://www.nocards.org

We encourage you to duplicate and distribute this message to others.

==========================================================

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the CASPIAN mailing list, click the
following link or cut and paste it into your browser:

http://www.nocards.org/cgi/mojo/mojo.cgi

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was searching for answers on Condolezza Rice’s stand on gun control.  I’ve only recently gotten back to Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story, but it didn’t take long to find the goods.  Ms. Rice grew up in Birmingham, Alabama during the civil-rights movement.  This is from a section describing the bombings and related violence of 1963 (p. 50):

With the bombings that summer came marauding groups of armed white vigilantes called “nightriders” who drove through black neighborhoods shooting and setting fires.  Condi’s father and other neighborhood men guarded their streets at night to keep the nightriders away from their homes.  Armed with shotguns, they formed night-long patrols.  The memory of her father out on patrol forms Condi’s opposition to gun control today.  Had those guns been registered, she argues, Bull Connor would have had a legal right to take them away, thereby removing one of the black community’s only means of defense.  “I have a sort of pure Second Amendment view of the right to bear arms,” Condi said in 2001.

I can hear the objections brewing.  Just call the police.  They’ll protect you.  But what do you do when the police are in on it?

Shores [a friend of the Rice family and a prominent black lawyer—Ed] and others knew that going to the police didn’t help because the police department itself played a role in the bombings.  “The police would show up and tell everybody to get off the streets,” said Birmingham historian Pam King.  “They’d clear the streets and the Klan would come through and throw the bombs.  They weren’t looking out for the safety of the citizens, they were just trying to clear the way for the Klu Klux Klan to come through and bomb.”  When a firebomb landed in the Rices’ neighborhood—a dud that didn’t go off—John Rice took it to the police and requested an investigation, but they would not conduct an inquiry.

When the authorities are corrupt or indifferent, you’re on your own.  Heck, you’re on your own anyway, it’s just that most people aren’t ready to admit it.

Working from home today has really made me appreciate the equipment that my employer has invested in, especially when I started looking around to find something to duplicate that here.  I use a noise-cancelling binaural headset with an amplifier/adapter from Plantronics at work because I spend a lot of time on the phone.  Since we have to share an office, they won’t let us use speaker phones, and I’m not very fond of them anyway.  I spent a large portion of today using a speaker phone and it convinced me that I need a decent headset.  Together, the above products cost $240, so I guess I’ll have to settle for something a bit less. 

My main requirement is that it be a corded phone with a headset.  I have never had much luck with wireless phones, even ones with headsets.  My main problem is that I can’t hear very well on them.  I can never get the volume high enough to clearly hear the caller.

This product looks promising, since I found an online dealer selling it for $49.95, but I hate buying phones because you never know how they’re going to perform until you get them home (and returns are often a big hassle with some online retailers).

My aunt sent me this via email today:

Three conference calls (one with a demo, where I was doing the demoing), 34 emails (all with one problem or another), and a blizzard of instant messages.  Now just why did I think working from home would be less hectic?

My. Brain. Hurts.

I see that Acidman has a song stuck in his head.  And it’s a mind-numbing one at that.  I just hope that he gets over it soon.  I can relate, since I once spent a two week period with Rush’s Tom Sawyer stuck in my head.

No, his mind is not for rent
To any God or government…

After that two weeks I would have rented my mind to anyone who could make the song go away.  Maybe that’s what college does to your brain (and, no, I wasn’t using any illicit mind-altering substances).

Somebody definitely forgot to pay the heating bill for this part of Texas.  It’s been sleeting, snowing and generally disagreeable just about all day.  We don’t know how to handle this crap here in Texas, so I guess I’ll just stay inside and work from home until this mess melts away.

I may share my pictures from this afternoon as soon as I get them developed (I was using a disposable camera that I keep in the truck “just in case”, rather than my digital).  I got a pretty good shot of some cows huddled under a tree looking miserable and covered with sleet and snow.  Or at least I hope I got a good picture.  I shot it one-handed while driving (don’t worry, we weren’t going that fast, the drivers in front of me wouldn’t go over 20 mph 🙁 ).

Dang, there goes the sleet again (and just to liven things up I’ve been hearing thunder in the distance).

Steven Den Beste gives us his thoughts on real liberalism and the decidely anti-liberal positions of the “Liberals.”  He closes with this:

Berkeley Liberals advocate strong use of governmental powers in many other interventionist ways, always with the best of intentions, but with little concern for my fundamental right to be left alone. And that is why they are not liberal, because the fundamental liberal position is that government should not needlessly meddle in the lives of citizens.

Thus the paradoxical result: I am a “Conservative” because I am a liberal. Berkeley Liberals are “Liberal” because they are not liberal. They believe in government intervention, including censorship and direct punishment of dissent, so as to enforce orthodox thought and behavior. That’s not liberalism, that’s tyranny.

One of the things I’ve found so disturbing about so much of what is entailed in the whole “Politically Correct” doctrine is that is seems diametrically opposed to diversity of thought while disingenously claiming to hold up the ideal of free speech.  By squashing dissent (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase ), they manage to drive their opponents underground.  Only in a robust marketplace of ideas will we be able to determine how a person truly thinks about a topic.  I’d rather know that my neighbour is a Klan member ahead of time (instead of finding out when he and his friends are at my door in robes with a cross).

I disagree with almost everything the left and the “Liberals” stand for (and with much of the right as well).  I will fight to the death for their right to say what they believe, but I will also fight to the death over any attempts to implement their ideas.

In an earlier post I wondered where Condoleeza Rice stood on the issue of guns and gun ownership.  I couldn’t find much on the topic, so I decided to read Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story by Antonia Felix.  But it didn’t take long before I discovered the author’s biases on this issue.

“W is for Women” was one part of a calculated move to undo what previous Republican campaigns and National Conventions had done—create a gender gap between the parties.  Barbara Bush and her group sought to portray George W. as the face of a new and improved Republican party committed to education and women’s health—a far cry from the angry, warrior-like tone of the pro-gun, anti-abortion, macho-white-male party of past GOP conventions.  (Pg. 16, emphasis added)

The author makes the frustrating equation between “group identity” and politics that has become so much in vogue these days, most commonly among those who would practice divide-and-conquer politics.  I fail to see how being pro-gun automatically equates to being anti-woman.  In fact, I would suspect that this woman and these women would beg to differ.  Anyhow, at this point, I’m beginning to wonder if the author will be able to move past her biases to address this topic.

My searches for other sources of information on Ms. Rice’s views on guns have turned up little of relevance (the main problem being that of late the term “smoking gun” is often associated with any search for her name, making it hard to find the relevant hits).  I found one encouraging article, but unfortunately I could not find the original source.  The copy is being hosted by the New York State Amateur Trapshooting Assocation on their website.  It appears to be a copy of a George F. Will article from Sunday, August 6, 2000.

In a pleasantly meandering conversation over lunch in San Francisco last summer, Condoleezza Rice, then still provost of Stanford but already unofficially what she now is officially, George W. Bush’s senior foreign policy adviser, was asked her thoughts about gun control. “I am,” she answered crisply, “a Second Amendment absolutist.” Growing up in Birmingham, Ala., in the early 1960s, when racial tensions rose, there were, she said, occasions when the black community had to exercise its right to bear arms in self-defense, becoming, if you will, a well-regulated militia.  (Emphasis in red in original)

I will continue reading and searching…