Month: April 2007

“We can take coal out of the ground and put it in a natural-gas pipeline for less than the cost of new natural-gas drilling and exploration activities.”

Traditional coal-to-methane plants like the 1970s-era Dakota Gasification plant in Beulah, ND, and new plants envisioned by General Electric and ConocoPhillips are costly because they require a series of chemical plants operating at a wide range of conditions. In these plants, cryogenic equipment operating just a few degrees above absolute zero feeds pure oxygen to the gasifier, where coal baked to up to 2,500 ºF breaks down into a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called syngas. From there, the syngas is subsequently catalytically transformed into high-grade methane in a separate reactor.

In contrast, Great Point compresses the process into one single, efficient reactor – lowering the amount of heat required to gasify coal and simultaneously transform the gasified coal into methane.

Plus two extra pics of the good nature of dogs.

Nature’s poise

Dog and Fawn

A blog-of-note, Let’s be friends publishes touching photos of unusual animal friendships from around the world. Extraordinary.

If they can do it, then so can we.

About 70 percent of the 9 billion broiler chickens produced annually in the U.S. are fed an arsenic-based additive used in chicken feed that may pose health risks to humans. [story]

Under certain anaerobic conditions, within live chickens and on farm land, the additive Roxarsone may be altered into toxic arsenic.

In chicken feed, Roxarsone is used to promote growth, kill parasites and improve pigmentation of chicken meat.

Arsenic has been linked to bladder, lung, skin, kidney and colon cancer, while low-level exposures can lead to partial paralysis and diabetes.

No one knows the exact amount of arsenic found in chicken meat or ingested by consumers who frequently eat chicken. “Neither the Food and Drug Administration nor the Department of Agriculture has actually measured the level of arsenic in the poultry meat that most people consume. Tyson Foods, the nation’s largest poultry producer, has stopped using the compound.

So what does the modern consumer want in terms of food? Convenience.
Fully prepared meals, either from the supermarket deli or a foodservice establishment, are the ultimate in convenience. Spending on snacks and meals prepared by foodservice establishments now accounts for about half of total U.S. food spending. (see “The U.S. Broiler Industry”)

USDA report:
Today’s typical poultry meat began in the first third of the 20th century. However, chicken meat came from rather tough-meated older hens and young roosters that were byproducts of raising chickens for egg laying. The widespread practice of allowing birds to range in the barnyard hardened muscle fiber, yielding meat that was dry and strongly flavored.

Red meat rationing during World War II provided the spark needed to propel the industry forward. Poultry was not rationed, and broiler production increased. By the 1970s, companies such as Tyson re-organized the industry to avoid the wide price swings of commodity chicken production and stepped up their production of processed items, now achieving double-digit sales increases in its chicken and pork segments.

Healthy chickens. Healthy people.
A U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis report reveals that the U.S. food and beverage industry is at $497 billion with healthful foods the primary growth market.

The EU has stricter limits for human food and animal feed, removing chemicals and by-products of chemical processes which seem to cause cancer and reproductive and immune system disorders in humans. They also bioaccumulate over time in fatty tissue.

Many syringes can be reused and shared. Syringes are often discarded in public areas building an infection risk, especially to children.

But what if a needle became useless after its first use?

Development of syringes that can only be used once is a high priority worldwide.

The World Health Organization is asking countries to only use syringes that are automatcally disabled to prevent further widespread of AIDS and Hepatitis. Single use needles are becoming compulsory in some parts of the USA since the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act went into effect.

Some healthcare advocates report that the industry hasn’t yet offered a practical solution; that many devices on the market and in development are more accurately described as ‘difficult to reuse’.

Many workers in the drug addiction sector say that for the same investment much greater public health gains could be had by increasing the availability of needles, preventing mis-use and infection complications. This is because the number of syringes distributed to managed drug users is seldom anywhere near the number of injections administered.

Some new products retract the needle back into the body of the syringe and then lock the plunger out. The unit in the pictures uses a plug in the barrel that cannot be removed once the plunger has been retracted.

A nation can endure high costs and sustained suffering if injection sanitation is not a high priority. If adequate supplies of needles aren’t available, people are tempted to ignore safety techniques.

Today’s factory for syringes can be very compact, automated and efficient. The machines used to form the stainless steel needle tubes and to sharpen the needle tip are surprisingly precise and compact. There seems to be about 100 manufactures worldwide although the industry is dominated by only a few players.

When the USSR was beginning to do business with the west in the very late 1980s, I built a formal proposal to the health ministry in Moscow to build regional factories that would supply as many as three billion disposable syringes. At the time, most syringes in the USSR were stainless steel and inefficiently sterilized in costly steam autoclaves between each use, or often not!

Although single-use syringes were only on the horizon, I wanted this feature if it could be located. Argonne Labs had announced a patent of a small polymer disk – similar to the picture of the plugs above – with one small hole in the center to insert into the barrel before packaging. When liquid contacted the polymer, it would slowly expand, blocking the opening in the barrel – a low cost and effective solution. But the Argonne attorney I spoke with was in no mood to license this patent for use in the USSR.

The project was not funded. The health minister was replaced during one of several shake ups after 1990/91 and I could not achieve attention from new managers.

Australia is challenging the world by rebranding people with ADHD as da Vincis, seeking to improve the social perception of ADHD and related conditions such as bipolar.

ADHD can be seen as a different kind of personality type—one that could be considered typical of some great entrepreneurs, artists, adventurers, and leaders, from Leonardo da Vinci to Edmund Hillary – “a set of extraordinary qualities with exhausting side effects”.

“While 50 per cent of prison inmates were ADHD, so were 50 per cent of entrepreneurs.”

Martin Strel, the first person to swim the entire length of the Amazon.

He has been writing a weekly diary for the BBC News website and BBCMundo.com, describing the challenges and dangers he faced as he swam the nearly 5,400km (3,375 miles) from Peru to Brazil.

How did he cope with the piranhas?

“There are thousands of them. Often you find them closer to the shore. Three days ago we anchored our boat and threw meat into the river and immediately they started grabbing the meat. So if you are bleeding or you have an open wound they will catch you right away.

“So I never swim close to the banks. I stay in the middle and I put some gasoline and cream on my wetsuit to stop the piranhas from smelling my body. My team also can throw blood or meat on the other side of the boat to distract them.”

Partners of cancer survivors at risk for depression

A new study shows that partners of cancer survivors are susceptible to the same stresses as cancer survivors themselves over the long term, and in some cases, suffer more quality of life-related effects than survivors.

Research has found that the partners of cancer patients experience as much if not more anxiety, distress, and depression than patients themselves.

Partners also reported less social support, spiritual well-being, marital satisfaction, and more loneliness. [story]

Do you buy the notion, as Cheney has said, that what the Bush administration calls the “war on terror” is a struggle that will be going on all of our lives?

“There is a struggle that certainly will go on for some time. But I do not define the struggle the way he does. He wants to talk about this as war, the war on terror. And this struggle is one that has many layers. One layer is the only one they like to talk about, which is violent, radical Islam. Is this a threat to the security of the world? It absolutely is. But there are many components of that struggle that they never talk about, which are the underlying causes, which is the underlying capability of the terrorists to recruit. It is a multi-causal thing. It is young people not being educated, being educated in madrassas, living lives of poverty and hopelessness; corrupt regimes. There are multiple contributors to the undercurrent that allows terrorism to be a force in the world. Can we stamp it out entirely no matter what we do? Probably not. If we do all the things today that we should be doing, we can weaken it to the point that America and the rest of the civilized world can manage it.”

The Salon interview with John Edwards

Following up on a popular 2005 post American Plutonomy, I’ve found the CitiGroup reports “where a group of strategic analysts looked at segments of the population in the national indices of consumption, economic growth, wage costs, etc., and showed that in certain economies wealth is concentrated in a small percentage of the population. Japan and most of the national economies of Europe showed more uniform distributions of wealth than the United States, Canada or the UK.”

Download CitiGroup Plutonomy 1 pdf
Download CitiGroup Plutonomy 2 pdf

The author Ajay Kapur asserts

“The World is dividing into two blocs – the Plutonomy and the rest. The U.S.,UK, and Canada are the key Plutonomies – economies powered by the wealthy. Continental Europe (ex-Italy) and Japan are in the egalitarian bloc.”

There’s much interest in this imbalance from scholars and citizens around the world. [also see Vertical Secession]

The International Herald Tribune wrote,

Are the rich riding to the rescue?
In this view, the rich are bailing out the rest of the economy. They spend, and they buy imported goods, and no one gets hurt.

I dredged into my notes and located this insight – a summary of the entire matter regarding economic imbalance.

When the rich steal from the rich, it’s Good Business;
When the rich steal from the rich for the poor, it’s Noblesse Oblige;
When the middle steal from the middle, it’s Corruption;
When the rich and the middle steal from the poor, it’s Fiscal Responsibility;
When the poor steal from the rich and the middle, it’s Crime;
When the poor steal from the poor, it’s Tough Luck.

Update:
The “wealth effect” may be sufficient to discourage downward pressure on the dollar.

Luciana Juvenal of the University of Warwick, Professor Lucio Sarno of Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick, and Marcel Fratzscher of the European Central Bank, found that equity market shocks and housing price shocks had by far the greatest effect on reducing the US trade imbalance accounting for up to 35% of the movements of the US trade balance. By contrast, shocks to the real exchange rate of the US dollar explained less than 5% of such movements and exerted only a temporary effect on the US trade balance.

…a sizeable real depreciation of the US dollar may not be an inevitability for an adjustment of today’s large current account imbalances, and that other factors, in particular global asset price changes, could be an equally or even more potent source of adjustment.

These results underline the importance of wealth effects, stemming from asset price developments, as drivers of today’s global current account imbalances.

The rise in asset prices over the past decade has in particular increased expected income of households in the United States and, therefore, raised their consumption. At the same time, investment has been facilitated in response to this higher demand and firms have found it easier to finance investment opportunities, thus overall worsening the US current account position.

Significant falls in US asset prices, and equally stronger increases in asset prices in the rest of the world, will thus have the opposite effect and reduce trade imbalances.

…even a relatively high real depreciation of the US dollar, for instance by 10%, would improve the US trade balance by a modest 0.5%.

The researchers found that both equity shocks and housing price shocks have larger, and more persistent effects on the US trade balance than a real exchange rate shock.

Based on the research report of Emmanuel Saez, Kykos Productions has consolidated the data:

The Trillion Dollar Income Shift, Parts 1 & 2
[There is] a $1-$1.5 trillion shift in relative income occurring annually today, the majority of which is being shifted from the approximately ninety million American working class families to the wealthiest 1%, 1.1 million, households and corporations.

Shifting Income to the Wealthiest 1%
Income inequality in America today is not, as one might assume, about the upper 20% or even 10% wealthiest gaining at the expense of the rest. It is about the very rich, the extremely rich, the mega-rich gaining an ever-increasing relative share of national income while the middle, the working class, and the poor stagnate or decline in terms of their share of that income.

It is about corporations and the wealthiest 1% households (the very rich), and even the top 0.1% (extremely rich) and 0.01% (mega rich), accruing for themselves a greater relative share of income at the expense of the rest and, in particular, at the expense of the lower 80% income groups in which fall virtually all the 90 million working class families and the government’s estimated 108 million non-supervisory workers in the U.S. workforce.

The ‘wealth effect’
The Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe marks the unveiling of the first convertible to be built since BMW Group revived the Rolls-Royce marque in 2003. Sixty people work in three teams on the assembly line, where the cars are pushed forward by hand on big trolleys. Making a Rolls-Royce is a time-consuming process. Only about five cars per day pass along the assembly line.

At least 40% of its customers will be recruited amongst America’s super-rich – who will be paying some $500,000 before tax and extras for the car – though some 20,000 of the world’s 85,400 ultra-high net worth individuals – people with more than $30m (£15m) ready cash at their disposal, as measured by CapGemini Merrill Lynch – are European, 3,700 of them British.

“The wealth factor is an important part of the market growth,” points out Rolls-Royce Motor Cars’ chief executive, Ian Robertson.

“We’re aiming to pick up about 1% of them each year.”

To boost earnings, Rolls-Royce is racing ahead with a forthcoming launch of a smaller, cheaper and sportier “Baby Rolls”, which despite costing up to $410,000 is set to spark a dramatic rise in the number of cars made. [story and pics at the BBC]

Rolls-Royce owners:

• also own three to five properties
• one or two of their properties are outside their own country
• they own seven or eight cars
• 14% of them own a private jet
• 7% of them own a yacht

Ar
istotle on plutocracy and rebellion

Everywhere inequality is a cause of revolution, but an inequality in which there is no proportion — for instance, a perpetual monarchy among equals; and always it is the desire of equality which rises in rebellion.
? ? ?
What share insolence and avarice have in creating revolutions, and how they work, is plain enough.

Wealth concentration and battle

Both the power of the elite and the degree of social inequality have grown hugely in the last two to three decades. It strikes me that the growth in state terror is fundamentally linked to the continuing growth in the concentration of power in the hands of the power elite, and the increase in the social inequality and stratification — the ever widening gap between rich and poor, within countries and between them — which every social observer has noted as one of the main characteristics of the global scene since the rise of the New Right in the West in the 1970s.

There appears to be a direct correlation between the increasing power and wealth of the elite, the steadily increasing gap between rich and poor, and the growth of state terror, perhaps the three most obvious global characteristics of the last quarter of the twentieth century. – The Anthropology of State Terror, Jeffrey A. Sluka

Future Feeder sends this link to the works of Chinese artist Xia Xiaowan who draws on multiple layers of glass to create 3D paintings.

monochrom posts
“He draws his inspiration and method from X-ray photographs, giving two-dimensional painting a three-dimensional effect.”

“Xia Xiaowan surpasses the boundaries of painting and establishes a new way of “looking” at paintings.”

Link to gallery
Xiaowan at Shanghai Art Museum

Grow-your-own Viagra craze hits Britain’s garden centers!

…a plant widely available in garden centres has the same effect on men as Viagra

The latest gardening craze was triggered by a discovery by a 55-year-old furniture restorer, Michael Ford, on his allotment.

He was always experimenting with drinks made from different plants and one day he tried an infusion from his winter-flowering heather.

He said: “The effect was almost immediate. I had to stay in my potting shed for an hour or so before I could decently walk down the street.”

He then contacted the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, famous for their work with the heather family, to see if they could offer an explanation. They could. Botanist Alan Bennell said: “This first surfaced when East European chemists reported finding a Viagra-type chemical in the floral tissues of winter-flowering heaths. They were able to isolate measurable amounts of material that is an analogue of the active principle in Viagra.”

Here’s the calculation that a human body has ten octillion atoms.

Here’s the calculation to help you give a name to each atom in your body.

“Since each cell in your body is in some way unique,”…
shouldn’t each one have its own name…?

Naming Each of the Ten Octillion Atoms in Your Body
along with a note on the math involved, at Rudy Rucker’s blog.

ROME — The Coca Cola Company has taken legal action against producers of a spirituality themed Italian film set in present day Israel in which Jesus drinks a can of Coke in the desert.

In the desert, near the biblical Emmaus, the Italo ad man gives Jesus a ride on his Jeep, hands him a Coke, and, while Jesus is quenching his thirst, says: “My God, what a testimonial!”

Coca Cola in a letter complained to producers Graziano Prota and Angelo Sconda demanding that the scene be cut because it is likely to give Coca Cola a negative image and complaining that use of their brand was unauthorized.

Techdirt sums up the situation and warns of absurd dilution of “fair use”…

As you watch companies and lawyers try to expand the meaning of trademark protection well beyond what it’s supposed to do, you start seeing all sorts of ridiculous actions.

Take the latest example, pointed out by Justin Levine about Coca Cola forcing some movie makers to stop the release of their film, because officials at Coke were upset that a character in the movie drinks a can of Coke.

Why wouldn’t Coke be happy about this bit of product placement?

Perhaps because the character is supposed to be Jesus (though, again, it’s not clear why this is a bad thing). Either way, imagine if movie makers had to license the rights for every product that was used in every movie?

Imagine if any company could block an entire movie because they didn’t like how their product was shown in the movie.

Ford used in a car crash? Banned.
A Boeing 747 crashes into a hillside? Banned.
Bad guys using Dell computers? Banned.
Someone shot by a Colt .45? Banned.
Fat guy sits in an Aeron chair? Banned.

After all, if trademark owners really can dictate how their products are used in movies then perhaps we’ll never see real products used in movies again. Well, except for the product placement slots they pay for. Those will still be allowed.

“Smart building materials designed to clean the air”

The European Union earmarked US$2.27 billion to develop “smart” construction materials that would break down pollution – nitrogen oxides and other toxic substances.

From transstudio

“In addition to mitigating sound and light pollution as present highway barrier systems do, the Superabsorber system also absorbs airborne pollutants. Designed by Douglas Hecker and Martha Skinner of Clemson-based FieldOffice, this innovative system has the potential to significantly reduce airborne pollution in urban areas with the application of photocatalytic cement products that have been demonstrated to reduce air pollution in urban areas by 50% when covering just 15% of urban surfaces.”

“Among other things, we want to construct concrete walls that break down vehicle exhausts in road tunnels,” said Karin Pettersson, a spokeswoman for Swedish construction giant Skanska. “It is also possible to make pavings that clean the air in cities.” [technology review]

Update:
Enrico Borgarello, head of research and development for Italcementi, developed TX Active. It’s an additive for cement that literally eats surrounding smog.

“When light shines on TX, the material becomes active and neutralizes surrounding pollutants like nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide.”

According to tests conducted by Italcementi, which spent more than a decade and $10 million developing the product, TX can reduce local air pollutants from 20% to 70%, depending on sunlight levels and wind. It also adds as much as 20% to the cost of the cement.

Cover 15% of the exposed surfaces of a city like Milan, Borgarello estimates, and you could cut pollution in half. And as a bonus, TX helps buildings stay whiter than white by resisting the pollutants that scar and stain cement over time. [Time Magazine]

A bill before Congress would phase out antibiotics used in animal agriculture.

Keep Antibiotics Working
Feed Biology blog

More than half of the children’s foods that show fruit on their packaging or put the word “fruit” in their name contain no fruit.

Fruit is a big seller for parents who want to feed their children nutritious food. So it’s no surprise that manufacturers prominently display berries, cherries and oranges on boxes of breakfast cereals, drink cans and yogurt containers.

Companies fail to put the fruit where it counts — inside the products.

More than $10 billion a year is spent on marketing food to children. Supermarket products that featured fruit on the packaging is a $3 billion-a-year industry.

“The deception is really intolerable,” said Larry Cohen, executive director of the Prevention Institute. “There is really no excuse for misleading parents in a way that weakens their ability to encourage their children’s health.”

If there is a health claim on the package, people believe it. And people think a picture of a piece of fruit is a health claim.” Study by the Prevention Institute

Update:
Although recent research has established links between the kinds of foods available in a neighborhood and the health of that neighborhood’s residents, this research has rarely addressed the effects of food marketing on children—especially children in low-income neighborhoods.

Improving access to healthier foods is critical to decreasing childhood obesity in the United States—which affects more than 7 million children ages 6 and older and has tripled among adolescents in the last two decades. Population Reference Bureau

Is healthy food difficult to find – particularly in. low-income neighborhoods? The USDA has developed numbers to say, “Not always.”

Are major value-added food suppliers providing added value in the form of fats and sugars?

The USDA presentation [pdf] shows that “Added Fat” and “Added Sugar” have become important ingredients – now a major portion of the American diet similar or equal to the purchase of meats and grains – while fruits and vegetables remain similar to purchases in 1909.

While we languish in argument, dilution and abstraction…

Former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore called for an “electranet” that would allow homeowners to “put up photovoltaic generators and small wind turbines… without any artificial caps.”

Unfortunately, he did not explain that Europe already practices the system he proposes, which has made countries like Denmark, Spain and Germany leaders in wind power.

In fact, it has made cloudy Germany the world’s solar leader, too, and its biomass sector is also booming.

The U.S. could learn a lot from Europe, if we would only look.

Where do you even start?

“Any fool with a roof over his head, a car to drive, a job that pays the bills, food in his cupboard and refrigerator, a sense of responsibility, a feeling of belonging, of having a family or a community or a tribe that depends on him and perhaps even loves him; who has a leg to stand on, shoes on his feet, a warm bed, clean underwear, hot water, a toilet that flushes, books to read, music to listen to, a chair to sit on, hands and feet and arms and legs and eyes and ears that still work, a cracked and compassionate heart, a brain that is still capable of manufacturing sense (even if only occasionally) and cooperates, however gracelessly, with his tongue and dispatches words to his fingers; any fool whose fingers can still grip a pen, who still has access to blank sheets or scraps of paper and who continues to feel compelled to say something; anybody, in other words, who has lived a good, long while on the planet and feels things ever stirring in his head and heart, any such person should spend at least half of whatever time he has left in the world saying nothing but thank you.”

This post offers an interesting twist on the rich vs. poor gap in USA and Europe.

Is the growing difference in equity and wealth an act of the rich leaving society?

India Is Colonising Itself
Arundhati Roy & Shoma Chaudhuri You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing middle class, being reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike industrializing western countries which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed this process, we have to colonize ourselves, our own nether parts. We’ve begun to eat our own limbs. The greed that is being generated (and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism) can only be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in Independent India. The secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country. It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one. They’re fighting for the right to merge with the world’s elite somewhere up there in the stratosphere…. (more)

Here’s an examination of some of our world’s wealth:

Global Ruling Class:
Billionaires and How They ‘Made It’

Even as the world’s billionaires grew in number from 793 in 2006 to 946 this year, major mass uprisings became commonplace in China and India. In India, which has the highest number of billionaires (36) in Asia with total wealth of $191 billion, Prime Minister Singh declared that the greatest single threat to ‘India’s security’ were the Maoist-led guerrilla armies and mass movements in the poorest parts of the country. In China, with 20 billionaires with $29.4 billion net worth, the new rulers, confronting nearly a hundred thousand reported riots and protests, have increased the number of armed special anti-riot militia a hundred fold, and increased spending for the rural poor by $10 billion in the hopes of lessening the monstrous class inequalities and heading off a mass upheaval.

The total wealth of this global ruling class grew 35 per cent year to year topping $3.5 trillion, while income levels for the lower 55 per cent of the world’s 6-billion-strong population declined or stagnated. Put another way, one hundred millionth of the world’s population (1/100,000,000) owns more than over 3 billion people. Over half of the current billionaires (523) came from just 3 countries: the US (415), Germany (55) and Russia (53). The 35 per cent increase in wealth mostly came from speculation on equity markets, real estate and commodity trading, rather than from technical innovations, investments in job-creating industries or social services.

via wood s lot

See StampAndShout.com for a witty collection.

This is witty – “Coexist”

The crescent and star for Islam;
the pentagram for Wicca;
the relativity formula for science;
the star of David for Judaism;
the kharma wheel dotting the i for Buddhism;
the Tao symbol for Taoism;
the cross for Chrisitianity.

stampandshout.com

By 2050, states Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental sciences and microbiology at Columbia University, the planet’s population will require a new farming area the size of Brazil, which couldn’t possibly be provided based on existing farmable areas… thus the need for new areas from where to obtain food.

Inhabitat reports on ‘skyfarming’, urban skyscrapers that are intensive farms.

On its website, the company responsible for supplying contaminated wheat gluten does not mention its food safety protocol for any of its three suppliers in China, although it immediately quarantined its inventory and cooperated with the FDA. A pdf press release distributed by a media management firm is available that refers to Xuzhou Anying as the supplier.

ChemNutra states that the firm “imports quality ingredients from China to the U.S. for the feed, food and pharma industries.

“We are a professionally managed, American owned company experienced in negotiating, securing and delivering ultra-competitive pricing on high-quality chemicals and ingredients from quality-assured manufacturers in China.

“We bridge the business and cultural gaps…including all regulatory, compliance, import and transportation requirements.”

A news clip at Physorg states:

The Las Vegas-based ChemNutra Co. — a supplier to human and pet food manufacturers — said the recalled wheat gluten had been imported in 25 kg. paper bags that were distributed to three pet food manufacturers and one company that supplies wheat gluten to the pet food industry.

ChemNutra said none of the 792 metric tons of the recalled products was shipped to facilities manufacturing food for human consumption.

Nestle Purina, Del Monte, and Menu Foods seem to be the primary feed compounders. After many days, these firms are not yet reporting any offshore follow-through activity or new import policy recommendations.

The Food and Drug Administration last week blocked wheat gluten imports from the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co.

It seems that ChemNutra is capable of installing adequate safety precautions. Its corporate officers seem to be both legally and operationally adept and familiar with regulatory law and international standards.

Update:
The FDA said that in the past three weeks it has received more than 12,000 consumer complaints, more than twice the number of complaints it usually receives in a year for any product.

The Dutch company Lely has developed SOLAR-POWERED ROBOTS that move an electric fence to make sure dairy cows evenly graze their pastures.

Two robots each hold its side of the fence, and move very slowly, which maximizes grass growth and prevents manure contamination. The robots have sensors that monitor the angle and speed of the fence, as well as tautness, and communicate with each other via Bluetooth. The complete system costs $30,000. via the Raw Feed: Latest Job Taken By Robots: Cowpoke

For the effort and drive that business calls for, there is a greater need for depth and understanding. For the hope of reward, there is a greater need for fulfilment.

What is it to be honorable in business?

“To be the kind of person who tries to assure that the hopes of the first meeting are fulfilled by the time of the last meeting.”

Wild birds are wrongly getting the blame for spreading avian flu.

It’s the transport of food & poultry that is the true culprit.

Read the press release from the British Ornithologists’ Union

“Human commercial activities, particularly those associated with poultry, are the major factors that have determined global dispersal.”

The global network of migration routes seemed to hide the real vectors – without strict health controls – of the exchanges of poultry, the more likely mechanism for disease spread. [link to British Ornithologists’ Union]

This 2005 story [and at BBC] about spread of bird flu virus among migrating geese and other birds at a wildlife refuge in China are incorrect.